Chapter XIII
CHAPTER XIII.
"ALCHYMIST. Thou always speakest riddles. Tell me if thou art that fountain of which Bernard Lord Trevigan writ?
"MERCURY. I am not that fountain, but I am the water. The fountain compasseth me about."--SANDIVOGIUS, New Light of Alchymy.
"All that we profess to do is this; to find out the secrets of the human frame, to know why the parts ossify and the blood stagnates, and to apply continual preventatives to the effects of time. This is not magic; it is the art of medicine rightly understood."--BULWER-LYTTON.
"Lo, warrior! now the cross of Red
Points to the grave of the mighty dead;
Within it burns a wondrous light,
To chase the spirits that love the night.
That lamp shall burn unquenchably
Until the eternal doom shall be."
. . . . . . . .
"No earthly flame blazed e'er so bright."--SIR WALTER SCOTT.
T
HERE are persons whose minds would be incapable of appreciating the intellectual grandeur of the ancients, even in physical science, were they to receive the most complete demonstration of their profound learning and achievements. Notwithstanding the lesson of caution which more than one unexpected discovery has taught them, they still pursue their old plan of denying, and, what is still worse, of ridiculing that which they have no means of either proving or disproving. So, for instance, they will pooh-pooh the idea of talismans having any efficacy one way or the other. That the seven spirits of the Apocalypse have direct relation to the seven occult powers in nature, appears incomprehensible and absurd to their feeble intellects; and the bare thought of a magician claiming to work wonders through certain kabalistic rites convulses them with laughter. Perceiving only a geometrical figure traced upon a paper, a bit of metal, or other substance, they cannot imagine how any reasonable being should ascribe to either any occult potency. But those who have taken the pains to inform themselves know that the ancients achieved as great discoveries in psychology as in physics, and that their explorations left few secrets to be discovered.
For our part, when we realize that a pentacle is a synthetic figure which expresses in concrete form a profound truth of nature, we can see nothing more ridiculous in it than in the figures of Euclid, and nothing half so comical as the symbols in a modern work on chemistry. What to the uninitiated reader can appear more absurd than that the symbol
which embraces three things: 1st, The divine hypothesis; 2d, The philosophical synthesis; 3d, The physical synthesis--that is to say, a belief, an idea, and a force. But how perfectly natural that a modern chemist who wishes to indicate to the students in his laboratory the reaction of a sodic-carbonate with cream-of-tartar in solution, should employ the following symbol:
(Na[2]CO[3]+2HKC[4]H[4]O[6]+Aq)=
(2NaKC[4]H[4]O[6],+H[2]O+Aq) +CO[2]
If the uninspired reader may be pardoned for looking aghast at this abracadabra of chemical science, why should not its teachers restrain their mirth until they have learned the philosophical value of the symbolism of the ancients? At least they might spare themselves from being as ridiculous as Monsieur de Mirville, who, confounding the Azoth of the Hermetic philosophers with the azote of the chemists, asserted that the former worshipped nitrogen gas! *
Apply a piece of iron to a magnet, and it becomes imbued with its subtile principle and capable of imparting it to other iron in its turn. It neither weighs more nor appears different from what it was before. And yet, one of the most subtile potencies of nature has entered into its substance. A talisman, in itself perhaps a worthless bit of metal, a scrap of paper, or a shred of any fabric, has nevertheless been imbued by the influence of that greatest of all magnets, the human will, with a potency for good or ill just as recognizable and as real in its effects as the subtile property which the iron acquired by contact with the physical magnet. Let the bloodhound snuff an article of clothing that has been worn by the fugitive, and he will track him through swamp and forest to his hiding-place. Give one of Professor Buchanan's "psychometers" a manuscript, no matter how old, and he will describe to you the character
Upon our word, we cannot see that the modern chemist is any less a magician than the ancient theurgist or Hermetic philosopher, except in this: that the latter, recognizing the duality of nature, had twice as wide a field for experimental research as the chemist. The ancients animated statues, and the Hermetists called into being, out of the elements, the shapes of salamanders, gnomes, undines, and sylphs, which they did not pretend to create, but simply to make visible by holding open the door of nature, so that, under favoring conditions, they might step into view. The chemist brings into contact two elements contained in the atmosphere, and by developing a latent force of affinity, creates a new body--water. In the spheroidal and diaphanous pearls which are born of this union of gases, come the germs of organic life, and in their molecular interstices lurk heat, electricity, and light, just as they do in the human body. Whence comes this life into the drop of water just born of the union of two gases? And what is the water itself? Have the oxygen and hydrogen undergone some transformation which obliterates their qualities simultaneously with the obliteration of their form? Here is the answer of modern science: "Whether the oxygen and hydrogen exist as such, in the water, or whether they are produced by some unknown and unconceived transformation of its substance, is a question about which we may speculate, but in regard to which we have no knowledge." ** Knowing
calm acquiescence in ignorance until light comes"? *
The claims of the friends of esoteric science, that Paracelsus produced, chemically, homunculi from certain combinations as yet unknown to exact science, are, as a matter of course, relegated to the storehouse of exploded humbugs. But why should they? If the homunculi were not made by Paracelsus they were developed by other adepts, and that not a thousand years ago. They were produced, in fact, upon exactly the same principle as that by which the chemist and physicist calls to life his animalcula. A few years ago, an English gentleman, Andrew Crosse, of Somersetshire produced acari in the following manner: "Black flint burned to redness and reduced to powder was mixed with carbonate of potash, and exposed to a strong heat for fifteen minutes; and the mixture was poured into a blacklead crucible in an air furnace. It was reduced to powder while warm, mixed with boiling water; kept boiling for some minutes, and then hydrochloric acid was added to supersaturation. After being exposed to voltaic action for twenty-six days, a perfect insect of the acari tribe made its appearance, and in the course of a few weeks about a hundred more. The experiment was repeated with other chemical fluids with like results." A Mr. Weeks also produced the acari in ferrocyanide of potassium.
This discovery produced a great excitement. Mr. Crosse was now accused of impiety and aiming at creation. He replied, denying the implication and saying he considered "to create was to form a something out of a nothing." **
Another gentleman, considered by several persons as a man of great science, has told us repeatedly that he was on the eve of proving that even unfructified eggs could be hatched by having a negative electric current caused to pass through them.
The mandrakes (dudim or love-fruit) found in the field by Reuben, Jacob's son, which excited the fancy of Rachel, was the kabalistic mandragora, notwithstanding denial; and the verses which refer to it belong to the crudest passages, in their esoteric meaning, of the whole work. The mandrake is a plant having the rudimentary shape of a human creature; with a head, two arms, and two legs forming roots. The superstition that when pulled out of the ground it cries with a human voice, is not utterly baseless. It does produce a kind of squeaking sound, on
The unexplained mysteries of nature are many and of those presumably explained hardly one may be said to have become absolutely intelligible. There is not a plant or mineral which has disclosed the last of its properties to the scientists. What do the naturalists know of the intimate nature of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms? How can they feel confident that for every one of the discovered properties there may not be many powers concealed in the inner nature of the plant or stone? And that they are only waiting to be brought in relation with some other plant, mineral, or force of nature to manifest themselves in what is termed a "supernatural manner." Wherever Pliny, the naturalist, AElian, and even Diodorus, who sought with such a laudable perseverance to extricate historical truth from its medley of exaggerations and fables, have attributed to some plant or mineral an occult property unknown to our modern botanists and physicists, their assertions have been laid aside without further ceremony as absurd, and no more referred to.
It has been the speculation of men of science from time immemorial what this vital force or life-principle is. To our mind the "secret doctrine" alone is able to furnish the clew. Exact science recognizes only five powers in nature--one molar, and four molecular; kabalists, seven; and in these two additional ones is enwrapped the whole mystery of life. One of these is immortal spirit, whose reflection is connected by invisible links even with inorganic matter; the other, we leave to every one to discover for himself. Says Professor Joseph Le Conte: "What is the nature of the difference between the living organism and the dead organism? We can detect none, physical or chemical. All the physical and chemical forces withdrawn from the common fund of nature, and embodied in the living organism, seem to be still embodied
Difficult, nay impossible, as it seems to science to find out the invisible, universal motor of all--Life, to explain its nature, or even to suggest a reasonable hypothesis for the same, the mystery is but half a mystery, not merely for the great adepts and seers, but even for true and firm believers in a spiritual world. To the simple believer, unblessed with a personal organism, the delicate, nervous sensitiveness of which would enable him--as it enables a seer--to perceive the visible universe reflected as in a clear glass in the Invisible one, and, as it were, objectively, there remains divine faith. The latter is firmly rooted in his inner senses; in his unerring intuition, with which cold reason has naught to do, he feels it cannot play him false. Let human-born, erroneous dogmas, and theological sophistry contradict each other; let one crowd off the other, and the subtile casuistry of one creed fell to the ground the crafty reasoning of another one; truth remains one, and there is not a religion, whether Christian or heathen, that is not firmly built upon the rock of ages--God and immortal spirit.
Every animal is more or less endowed with the faculty of perceiving, if not spirits, at least something which remains for the time being invisible to common men, and can only be discerned by a clairvoyant. We have made hundreds of experiments with cats, dogs, monkeys of various kinds, and, once, with a tame tiger. A round black mirror, known as the "magic crystal," was strongly mesmerized by a native Hindu gentleman, formerly an inhabitant of Dindigul, and now residing in a more secluded spot, among the mountains known as the Western Ghauts. He had tamed a young cub, brought to him from the Malabar coast, in which part of India the tigers are proverbially ferocious; and it is with this interesting animal that we made our experiments.
Like the ancient Marsi and Psylli, the renowned serpent-charmers, this gentleman claimed to be possessed of the mysterious power of taming any kind of animal. The tiger was reduced to a chronic mental numbness, so to say; he had become as inoffensive and harmless as a dog. Children could tease and pull him by the ears, and he would only shake himself and howl like a dog. But whenever forced to look into the
human terror; howling in despair, unable to turn away from the mirror to which his gaze seemed riveted as by a magnetic spell, he would writhe and tremble till he convulsed with fear at some vision which to us remained unknown. He would then lie down, feebly groaning but still gazing in the glass. When it was taken away from him, the animal would lie panting and seemingly prostrated for about two hours. What did he see? What spirit-picture from his own invisible, animal-world, could produce such a terrific effect on the wild and naturally ferocious and daring beast? Who can tell? Perhaps he who produced the scene.
The same effect on animals was observed during spiritual seances with some holy mendicants; the same when a Syrian, half-heathen and half-Christian, from Kunankulam (Cochin State), a reputed sorcerer, who was invited to join us for the sake of experimenting.
We were nine persons in all--seven men and two women, one of the latter a native. Besides us, there were in the room, the young tiger, intensely occupied on a bone; a wanderoo, or lion-monkey, which, with its black coat and snow-white goatee and whiskers, and cunning, sparkling eyes, looked the personification of mischief; and a beautiful golden oriole, quietly cleaning its radiant-colored tail on a perch, placed near a large window of the veranda. In India, "spiritual" seances are not held in the dark, as in America; and no conditions, but perfect silence and harmony, are required. It was in the full glare of daylight streaming through the opened doors and windows, with a far-away buzz of life from the neighboring forests, and jungles sending us the echo of myriads of insects, birds, and animals. We sat in the midst of a garden in which the house was built, and instead of breathing the stifling atmosphere of a seance-room, we were amid the fire-colored clusters of the erythrina--the coral tree--inhaling the fragrant aromas of trees and shrubs, and the flowers of the bignonia, whose white blossoms trembled in the soft breeze. In short, we were surrounded with light, harmony, and perfumes. Large nosegays of flowers and shrubs, sacred to the native gods, were gathered for the purpose, and brought into the rooms. We had the sweet basil, the Vishnu-flower, without which no religious ceremony in Bengal will ever take place; and the branches of the Ficus religiosa, the tree dedicated to the same bright deity, intermingling their leaves with the rosy blossoms of the sacred lotos and the Indian tuberose, profusely ornamented the walls.
While the "blessed one"--represented by a very dirty, but, nevertheless, really holy fakir--remained plunged in self-contemplation, and some spiritual wonders were taking place under the direction of his will,
"On one occasion, while I and others were in a cafe with Sir Maswell, he ordered his dobochy to introduce the charmer. In a few moments a lean Hindu, almost naked, with an ascetic face and bronzed color entered. Around his neck, arms, thighs, and body were coiled serpents of different sizes. After saluting us, he said, 'God be with you, I am Chibh-Chondor, son of Chibh-Gontnalh-Mava.'
" 'We desire to see what you can do,' said our host.
" 'I obey the orders of Siva, who has sent me here,' replied the fakir, squatting down on one of the marble slabs.
"The serpents raised their heads and hissed, but without showing any anger. Then taking a small pipe, attached to a wick in his hair, he produced scarcely audible sounds, imitating the tailapaca, a bird that feeds upon bruised cocoanuts. Here the serpents uncoiled themselves, and one after another glided to the floor. As soon as they touched the ground they raised about one-third of their bodies, and began to keep time to their master's music. Suddenly the fakir dropped his instrument and made several passes with his hands over the serpents, of whom there were about ten, all of the most deadly species of Indian cobra. His eye assumed a strange expression. We all felt an undefinable uneasiness, and sought to turn away our gaze from him. At this moment a small shocra * (monkey) whose business was to hand fire in a small brasier for lighting cigars, yielded to his influence, lay down, and fell asleep. Five minutes passed thus, and we felt that if the manipulations were to continue a few seconds more we should all fall asleep. Chondor then rose, and making two more passes over the shocra, said to it: 'Give
"Chibh-Chondor closed his seance by experimenting upon inanimate objects. By mere passes with his hands in the direction of the object to be acted upon, and without leaving his seat, he paled and extinguished lights in the furthest parts of the room, moved the furniture, including the divans upon which we sat, opened and closed doors. Catching sight of a Hindu who was drawing water from a well in the garden, he made a pass in his direction, and the rope suddenly stopped in its descent, resisting all the efforts of the astonished gardener. With another pass the rope again descended.
"I asked Chibh-Chondor: 'Do you employ the same means in acting upon inanimate objects that you do upon living creatures?'
"He replied, 'I have only one means.'
" 'What is it?'
" 'The will. Man, who is the end of all intellectual and material forces, must dominate over all. The Brahmans know nothing besides this.' "
"Sanang Setzen," says Colonel Yule, * "enumerates a variety of the wonderful acts which could be performed through the Dharani (mystic Hindu charms). Such were sticking a peg into solid rock; restoring the dead to life; turning a dead body into gold; penetrating everywhere as air does (in astral form); flying; catching wild beasts with the hand; reading thoughts; making water flow backward; eating tiles; sitting in the air with the legs doubled under, etc." Old legends ascribe to Simon Magus precisely the same powers. "He made statues to walk; leaped into the fire without being burned; flew in the air; made bread of stones; changed his shape; assumed two faces at once; converted himself into a pillar; caused closed doors to fly open spontaneously; made the vessels in a house move of themselves, etc." The Jesuit Delrio laments
without the use of a magnet, or of any attachment." * We believe WILL-POWER the most powerful of magnets. The existence of such magical power in certain persons is proved, but the existence of the Devil is a fiction, which no theology is able to demonstrate.
"There are certain men whom the Tartars honor above all in the world," says Friar Ricold, "viz., the Baxitae, who are a kind of idol-priests. These are men from India, persons of deep wisdom, well-conducted and of the gravest morals. They are usually with magic arts . . . they exhibit many illusions, and predict future events. For instance, one of eminence among them was said to fly; but the truth, however, was as it proved, that he did not fly, but did walk close to the surface of the ground without touching it; and would seem to sit down without having any substance to support him. ** This last performance was witnessed by Ibn Batuta, at Delhi," adds Colonel Yule, who quotes the friar in the Book of Ser Marco Polo, "in the presence of Sultan Mahomet Tughlak; and it was professedly exhibited by a Brahman at Madras in the present century, a descendant doubtless of those Brahmans whom Apollonius saw walking two cubits from the ground. It is also described by the worthy Francis Valentyn, as a performance known and practiced in his own day in India. It is related, he says, that 'a man will first go and sit on three sticks put together so as to form a tripod; after which, first one stick, then a second, then a third shall be removed from under him, and the man shall not fall but shall still remain sitting in the air! Yet I have spoken with two friends who had seen this at one and the same time; and one of them, I may add, mistrusting his own eyes, had taken the trouble to feel about with a long stick if there were nothing on which the body rested; yet, as the gentleman told me, he could neither feel nor see any such thing.' " We have stated elsewhere that the same thing was accomplished last year, before the Prince of Wales and his suite.
Such feats as the above are nothing in comparison to what is done by professed jugglers; "feats," remarks the above-quoted author, "which might be regarded as simply inventions if told by one author only, but which seem to deserve prominent notice from being recounted by a series of authors, certainly independent of one another, and writing at long intervals of time and place. Our first witness is Ibn Batuta, and
hocus-pocus!" ' "
And who doubts but that it is a "hocus-pocus," an illusion, or Maya, as the Hindus express it? But when such an illusion can be forced on, say, ten thousand people at the same time, as we have seen it performed during a public festival, surely the means by which such an astounding hallucination can be produced merits the attention of science! When by such magic a man who stands before you, in a room, the doors of which you have closed and of which the keys are in your hand, suddenly disappears, vanishes like a flash of light, and you see him nowhere but hear his voice from different parts of the room addressing you and laughing at your perplexity, surely such an art is not unworthy either of Mr. Huxley or Dr. Carpenter. Is it not quite as well worth spending time over, as the lesser mystery--why barnyard cocks crow at midnight?
What Ibn Batuta, the Moor, saw in China about the year 1348, Colonel Yule shows Edward Melton, "an Anglo-Dutch traveller," witnessing
In the memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire, the performances of seven jugglers from Bengal, who exhibited before him, are thus described: "Ninth. They produced a man whom they divided limb from limb, actually severing his head from the body. They scattered these mutilated members along the ground, and in this state they lay some time. They then extended a sheet over the spot, and one of the men putting himself under the sheet, in a few minutes came from below, followed by the individual supposed to have been cut into joints, in perfect health and condition. . . . Twenty-third. They produced a chain of fifty cubits in length, and in my presence threw one end of it toward the sky, where it remained as if fastened to something in the air. A dog was then brought forward and being placed at the lower end of the chain, immediately ran up, and reaching the other end, immediately disappeared in the air. In the same manner a hog, a panther, a lion, and a tiger were successively sent up the chain, and all equally disappeared at the upper end of the chain. At last they took down the chain, and put it into the bag, no one ever discovering in what way the different animals were made to vanish into the air in the mysterious manner above described." **
We have in our possession a picture painted from such a Persian conjurer, with a man, or rather the various limbs of what was a minute before a man, scattered before him. We have seen such conjurers, and witnessed such performances more than once and in various places.
If the molecules of the cadaver are imbued with the physical and chemical forces of the living organism, * what is to prevent them from being set again in motion, provided we know the nature of the vital force, and how to command it? The materialist can certainly offer no objection, for with him it is no question of reinfusing a soul. For him the soul has no existence, and the human body may be regarded simply as a vital engine--a locomotive which will start upon the application of heat and force, and stop when they are withdrawn. To the theologian the case offers greater difficulties, for, in his view, death cuts asunder the tie which binds soul and body, and the one can no more be returned into the other without miracle than the born infant can be compelled to resume its foetal life after parturition and the severing of the umbilicus. But the Hermetic philosopher stands between these two irreconcilable antagonists, "master of the situation. He knows the nature of the soul--a form composed of nervous fluid and atmospheric ether--and knows how the vital force can be made active or passive at will, so long as there is no final destruction of some necessary organ. The claims of Gaffarilus--which, by the bye, appeared so preposterous in 1650 **--were later corroborated by science.
And, if the astral form of even a plant when its body is dead still lingers in the ashes, will skeptics persist in saying that the soul of man, the inner ego, is after the death of the grosser form at once dissolved, and is no more? "At death," says the philosopher, "the one body exudes from the other, by osmose and through the brain; it is held near its old garment by a double attraction, physical and spiritual, until the latter decomposes; and if the proper conditions are given the soul can reinhabit it and resume the suspended life. It does it in sleep; it does it more thoroughly in trance; most surprisingly at the command and with the assistance of the Hermetic adept. Iamblichus declared that a person endowed with such resuscitating powers is 'full of God.' All the subordinate spirits of the upper spheres are at his command, for he is no longer a mortal, but himself a god. In his Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul remarks that 'the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.' "
Some persons have the natural and some the acquired power of withdrawing the inner from the outer body, at will, and causing it to perform long journeys, and be seen by those whom it visits. Numerous are the instances recorded by unimpeachable witnesses of the "doubles" of persons having been seen and conversed with, hundreds of miles from the places where the persons themselves were known to be. Hermotimus, if we may credit Pliny and Plutarch, *** could at will fall into a trance and then his second soul proceeded to any distant place he chose.
The Abbe Tritheim, the famous author of Steganographie, who lived in the seventeenth century, could converse with his friends by the mere power of his will. "I can make my thoughts known to the initiated,"
According to Napier, Osborne, Major Lawes, Quenouillet, Nikiforovitch, and many other modern witnesses, fakirs are now proved to be able, by a long course of diet, preparation, and repose, to bring their bodies into a condition which enables them to be buried six feet under ground for an indefinite period. Sir Claude Wade was present at the court of Rundjit Singh, when the fakir, mentioned by the Honorable Captain Osborne, was buried alive for six weeks, in a box placed in a cell three feet below the floor of the room. *** To prevent the chance of deception, a guard comprising two companies of soldiers had been detailed, and four sentries "were furnished and relieved every two hours, night and day, to guard the building from intrusion. . . . On opening it," says Sir Claude, "we saw a figure enclosed in a bag of white linen fastened by a string over the head . . . the servant then began pouring warm water over the figure . . . the legs and arms of the body were shrivelled and stiff, the face full, the head reclining on the shoulder like that of a corpse. I then called to the medical gentleman who was attending me, to come down and inspect the body, which he did, but could discover no pulsation in the heart, the temples, or the arm. There was, however, a heat about the region of the brain, which no other part of the body exhibited."
Regretting that the limits of our space forbid the quotation of the
Then, here is a case, only one of many, substantiated by the testimony of two English noblemen--one of them an army officer--and a Hindu Prince, who was as great a skeptic as themselves. It places science in this embarrassing dilemma: it must either give the lie to many unimpeachable witnesses, or admit that if one fakir can resuscitate after six weeks, any other fakir can also; and if a fakir, why not a Lazarus, a Shunamite boy, or the daughter of Jairus? *
Todd Thomson, above quoted, gives several remarkable cases of such a suspended animation. Among others he mentions a certain Francis Neville, a Norman gentleman, who twice apparently died, and was twice in the act of being buried. But, at the moment when the coffin was being lowered in the grave, he spontaneously revived. In the seventeenth century, Lady Russell, to all appearance died, and was about to be buried, but as the bell was tolling for her funeral, she sat up in her coffin and exclaimed, "It is time to go to church!" Diemerbroeck mentions a peasant who gave no signs of life for three days, but when placed in his coffin, near the grave, revived and lived many years afterward. In 1836, a respectable citizen of Brussels fell into a profound lethargy on a Sunday morning. On Monday, as his attendants were preparing to screw the lid of the coffin, the supposed corpse sat up, rubbed his eyes, and called for his coffee and a newspaper. ****
Such cases of apparent death are not very infrequently reported in the newspaper press. As we write (April, 1877), we find in a London letter to the New York Times, the following paragraph: "Miss Annie Goodale, the actress, died three weeks ago. Up to yesterday she was not buried. The corpse is warm and limp, and the features as soft and mobile as when in life. Several physicians have examined her, and have ordered that the body shall be watched night and day. The poor lady is evidently in a trance, but whether she is destined to come to life it is impossible to say."
The kabalists say that a man is not dead when his body is entombed. Death is never sudden; for, according to Hermes, nothing goes in nature by violent transitions. Everything is gradual, and as it required a long and gradual development to produce the living human being, so time is required to completely withdraw vitality from the carcass. "Death can no more be an absolute end, than birth a real beginning. Birth proves the preexistence of the being, as death proves immortality," says the same French kabalist.
While implicitly believing in the restoration of the daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, and in other Bible-miracles, well-educated Christians, who otherwise would feel indignant at being called superstitious, meet all such cases as that of Apollonius and the girl said by his biographer to have been recalled to life by him, with scornful skepticism. Diogenes Laertius, who mentions a woman restored to life by Empedocles, is treated with no more respect; and the name of Pagan thaumaturgist, in the eyes of Christians, is but a synonym for impostor. Our scientists are at least one degree more rational; they embrace all Bible prophets and apostles, and the heathen miracle-doers in two categories of hallucinated fools and deceitful tricksters.
But Christians and materialists might, with a very little effort on their
She is not dead but sleepeth," the clergy force their god to become a breaker of his own laws and grant unjustly to one what he denies to all others, and with no better object in view than to produce a useless miracle. In the second case, notwithstanding the words of the biographer of Apollonius, so plain and precise that there is not the slightest cause to misunderstand them, they charge Philostratus with deliberate imposture. Who could be fairer than he, who less open to the charge of mystification, when, in describing the resuscitation of the young girl by the Tyanian sage, in the presence of a large concourse of people, the biographer says, "she had seemed to die."
In other words, he very clearly indicates a case of suspended animation; and then adds immediately, "as the rain fell very fast on the young girl," while she was being carried to the pile, "with her face turned upwards, this, also, might have excited her senses." * Does this not show most plainly that Philostratus saw no miracle in that resuscitation? Does it not rather imply, if anything, the great learning and skill of Apollonius, "who like Asclepiades had the merit of distinguishing at a glance between real and apparent death"? **
A resuscitation, after the soul and spirit have entirely separated from the body, and the last electric thread is severed, is as impossible as for a once disembodied spirit to reincarnate itself once more on this earth, except as described in previous chapters. "A leaf, once fallen off, does not reattach itself to the branch," says Eliphas Levi. "The caterpillar becomes a butterfly, but the butterfly does not again return to the grub. Nature closes the door behind all that passes, and pushes life forward. Forms pass, thought remains, and does not recall that which it has once exhausted." ***
Why should it be imagined that Asclepiades and Apollonius enjoyed exceptional powers for the discernment of actual death? Has any modern school of medicine this knowledge to impart to its students? Let their authorities answer for them. These prodigies of Jesus and Apollonius
Is it because the modern physician has not yet found the secret which the theurgists evidently possessed that its possibility is denied?
Neglected as psychology now is, and with the strangely chaotic state in which physiology is confessed to be by its most fair students, certainly it is not very likely that our men of science will soon rediscover the lost knowledge of the ancients. In the days of old, when prophets were not treated as charlatans, nor thaumaturgists as impostors, there were colleges instituted for teaching prophecy and occult sciences in general. Samuel is recorded as the chief of such an institution at Ramah; Elisha, also, at Jericho. The schools of hazim, prophets or seers, were celebrated throughout the country. Hillel had a regular academy, and Socrates is well known to have sent away several of his disciples to study manticism. The study of magic, or wisdom, included every branch of science, the metaphysical as well as the physical, psychology and physiology in their common and occult phases, and the study of alchemy was universal, for it was both a physical and a spiritual science. Therefore why doubt or wonder that the ancients, who studied nature under its double aspect, achieved discoveries which to our modern physicists, who study but its dead letter, are a closed book?
Thus, the question at issue is not whether a dead body can be resuscitated--for, to assert that would be to assume the possibility of a miracle, which is absurd--but, to assure ourselves whether the medical authorities pretend to determine the precise moment of death. The kabalists say that death occurs at the instant when both the astral body, or life-principle, and the spirit part forever with the corporeal body. The scientific physician who denies both astral body and spirit, and admits the existence of nothing more than the life-principle, judges death to occur when life is apparently extinct. When the beating of the heart and the action of the lungs cease, and rigor mortis is manifested, and especially when decomposition begins, they pronounce the patient dead. But the annals of medicine teem with examples of "suspended animation"
somehow he could come to life again."
There occurred in Moscow, a few years since, a remarkable instance of apparent death. The wife of a wealthy merchant lay in the cataleptic state seventeen days, during which the authorities made several attempts to bury her; but, as decomposition had not set in, the family averted the ceremony, and at the end of that time she was restored to life.
The above instances show that the most learned men in the medical profession are unable to be certain when a person is dead. What they call "suspended animation," is that state from which the patient spontaneously recovers, through an effort of his own spirit, which may be provoked by any one of many causes. In these cases, the astral body has not parted from the physical body; its external functions are simply suspended; the subject is in a state of torpor, and the restoration is nothing but a recovery from it.
But, in the case of what physiologists would call "real death," but which is not actually so, the astral body has withdrawn; perhaps local decomposition has set in. How shall the man be brought to life again? The answer is, the interior body must be forced back into the exterior one, and vitality reawakened in the latter. The clock has run down, it must be wound. If death is absolute; if the organs have not only ceased to act, but have lost the susceptibility of renewed action, then the whole universe would have to be thrown into chaos to resuscitate the corpse--a miracle would be demanded. But, as we said before, the man is not dead when he is cold, stiff, pulseless, breathless, and even showing signs of decomposition; he is not dead when buried, nor afterward, until a certain point is reached. That point is, when the vital organs have become so decomposed, that if reanimated, they could not perform their customary functions; when the mainspring and cogs of the machine, so to speak, are so eaten away by rust, that they would snap upon the turning of the key. Until that point is reached, the astral body may be caused, without miracle, to reenter its former tabernacle, either by an effort of its
Science des Esprits, say that, "When a man falls into the last sleep, he is plunged at first into a sort of dream, before gaining consciousness in the other side of life. He sees, then, either in a beautiful vision, or in a terrible nightmare, the paradise or hell, in which he believed during his mortal existence. This is why it often happens, that the affrighted soul breaks violently back into the terrestrial life it has just left, and why some who were really dead, i.e., who, if left alone and quiet, would have peaceably passed away forever in a state of unconscious lethargy, when entombed too soon, reawake to life in the grave."
In this connection, the reader may perhaps recall the well-known case of the old man who had left some generous gifts in his will to his orphaned nieces; which document, just before his death, he had confided to his rich son, with injunctions to carry out his wishes. But, he had not been dead more than a few hours before the son, finding himself alone with the corpse, tore the will and burned it. The sight of this impious deed apparently recalled the hovering spirit, and the old man, rising from his couch of death, uttered a fierce malediction upon the horror-stricken wretch, and then fell back again, and yielded up his spirit--this time forever. Dion Boucicault makes use of an incident of this kind in his powerful
Balfour Stewart is right--scientists "know nothing, or next to nothing, of the ultimate structure and properties of matter, whether organic or inorganic."
We are now on such firm ground, that we will take another step in advance. The same knowledge and control of the occult forces, including the vital force which enabled the fakir temporarily to leave and then reenter his body, and Jesus, Apollonius, and Elisha to recall their several subjects to life, made it possible for the ancient hierophants to animate statues, and cause them to act and speak like living creatures. It is the same knowledge and power which made it possible for Paracelsus to create his homunculi; for Aaron to change his rod into a serpent and a budding branch; Moses to cover Egypt with frogs and other pests; and the Egyptian theurgist of our day to vivify his pigmy Mandragora, which has physical life but no soul. It was no more wonderful that upon presenting the necessary conditions Moses should call into life large reptiles and insects, than that, under like favoring conditions, the physical scientist should call into life the small ones which he names bacteria.
And now, in connection with ancient miracle-doers and prophets, let us bring forward the claims of the modern mediums. Nearly every form of phenomena recorded in the sacred and profane histories of the world
Of Apollonius, who asserted that he could see "the present and the future in a clear mirror," on account of his abstemious mode of life, the professor very beautifully observes: "This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits, all is as one day or state, the past and future comprised in the present." *
Were these God-like men "mediums," as the orthodox spiritualists
The reader must bear in mind the definition of the term, for, unless this is clearly understood, confusion will be inevitable. Mediumship of this kind may be either active or passive, repellent or receptive, positive or negative. Mediumship is measured by the quality of the aura with which the individual is surrounded. This may be dense, cloudy, noisome, mephitic, nauseating to the pure spirit, and attract only those foul beings who delight in it, as the eel does in turbid waters, or, it may be pure, crystalline, limpid, opalescent as the morning dew. All depends upon the moral character of the medium.
About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person's aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one's own immortal demon. It is literally
passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
"ALCHYMIST. Thou always speakest riddles. Tell me if thou art that fountain of which Bernard Lord Trevigan writ?
"MERCURY. I am not that fountain, but I am the water. The fountain compasseth me about."--SANDIVOGIUS, New Light of Alchymy.
"All that we profess to do is this; to find out the secrets of the human frame, to know why the parts ossify and the blood stagnates, and to apply continual preventatives to the effects of time. This is not magic; it is the art of medicine rightly understood."--BULWER-LYTTON.
"Lo, warrior! now the cross of Red
Points to the grave of the mighty dead;
Within it burns a wondrous light,
To chase the spirits that love the night.
That lamp shall burn unquenchably
Until the eternal doom shall be."
. . . . . . . .
"No earthly flame blazed e'er so bright."--SIR WALTER SCOTT.
T
HERE are persons whose minds would be incapable of appreciating the intellectual grandeur of the ancients, even in physical science, were they to receive the most complete demonstration of their profound learning and achievements. Notwithstanding the lesson of caution which more than one unexpected discovery has taught them, they still pursue their old plan of denying, and, what is still worse, of ridiculing that which they have no means of either proving or disproving. So, for instance, they will pooh-pooh the idea of talismans having any efficacy one way or the other. That the seven spirits of the Apocalypse have direct relation to the seven occult powers in nature, appears incomprehensible and absurd to their feeble intellects; and the bare thought of a magician claiming to work wonders through certain kabalistic rites convulses them with laughter. Perceiving only a geometrical figure traced upon a paper, a bit of metal, or other substance, they cannot imagine how any reasonable being should ascribe to either any occult potency. But those who have taken the pains to inform themselves know that the ancients achieved as great discoveries in psychology as in physics, and that their explorations left few secrets to be discovered.For our part, when we realize that a pentacle is a synthetic figure which expresses in concrete form a profound truth of nature, we can see nothing more ridiculous in it than in the figures of Euclid, and nothing half so comical as the symbols in a modern work on chemistry. What to the uninitiated reader can appear more absurd than that the symbol
which embraces three things: 1st, The divine hypothesis; 2d, The philosophical synthesis; 3d, The physical synthesis--that is to say, a belief, an idea, and a force. But how perfectly natural that a modern chemist who wishes to indicate to the students in his laboratory the reaction of a sodic-carbonate with cream-of-tartar in solution, should employ the following symbol:
(Na[2]CO[3]+2HKC[4]H[4]O[6]+Aq)=
(2NaKC[4]H[4]O[6],+H[2]O+Aq) +CO[2]
If the uninspired reader may be pardoned for looking aghast at this abracadabra of chemical science, why should not its teachers restrain their mirth until they have learned the philosophical value of the symbolism of the ancients? At least they might spare themselves from being as ridiculous as Monsieur de Mirville, who, confounding the Azoth of the Hermetic philosophers with the azote of the chemists, asserted that the former worshipped nitrogen gas! *
Apply a piece of iron to a magnet, and it becomes imbued with its subtile principle and capable of imparting it to other iron in its turn. It neither weighs more nor appears different from what it was before. And yet, one of the most subtile potencies of nature has entered into its substance. A talisman, in itself perhaps a worthless bit of metal, a scrap of paper, or a shred of any fabric, has nevertheless been imbued by the influence of that greatest of all magnets, the human will, with a potency for good or ill just as recognizable and as real in its effects as the subtile property which the iron acquired by contact with the physical magnet. Let the bloodhound snuff an article of clothing that has been worn by the fugitive, and he will track him through swamp and forest to his hiding-place. Give one of Professor Buchanan's "psychometers" a manuscript, no matter how old, and he will describe to you the character
Upon our word, we cannot see that the modern chemist is any less a magician than the ancient theurgist or Hermetic philosopher, except in this: that the latter, recognizing the duality of nature, had twice as wide a field for experimental research as the chemist. The ancients animated statues, and the Hermetists called into being, out of the elements, the shapes of salamanders, gnomes, undines, and sylphs, which they did not pretend to create, but simply to make visible by holding open the door of nature, so that, under favoring conditions, they might step into view. The chemist brings into contact two elements contained in the atmosphere, and by developing a latent force of affinity, creates a new body--water. In the spheroidal and diaphanous pearls which are born of this union of gases, come the germs of organic life, and in their molecular interstices lurk heat, electricity, and light, just as they do in the human body. Whence comes this life into the drop of water just born of the union of two gases? And what is the water itself? Have the oxygen and hydrogen undergone some transformation which obliterates their qualities simultaneously with the obliteration of their form? Here is the answer of modern science: "Whether the oxygen and hydrogen exist as such, in the water, or whether they are produced by some unknown and unconceived transformation of its substance, is a question about which we may speculate, but in regard to which we have no knowledge." ** Knowing
calm acquiescence in ignorance until light comes"? *
The claims of the friends of esoteric science, that Paracelsus produced, chemically, homunculi from certain combinations as yet unknown to exact science, are, as a matter of course, relegated to the storehouse of exploded humbugs. But why should they? If the homunculi were not made by Paracelsus they were developed by other adepts, and that not a thousand years ago. They were produced, in fact, upon exactly the same principle as that by which the chemist and physicist calls to life his animalcula. A few years ago, an English gentleman, Andrew Crosse, of Somersetshire produced acari in the following manner: "Black flint burned to redness and reduced to powder was mixed with carbonate of potash, and exposed to a strong heat for fifteen minutes; and the mixture was poured into a blacklead crucible in an air furnace. It was reduced to powder while warm, mixed with boiling water; kept boiling for some minutes, and then hydrochloric acid was added to supersaturation. After being exposed to voltaic action for twenty-six days, a perfect insect of the acari tribe made its appearance, and in the course of a few weeks about a hundred more. The experiment was repeated with other chemical fluids with like results." A Mr. Weeks also produced the acari in ferrocyanide of potassium.
This discovery produced a great excitement. Mr. Crosse was now accused of impiety and aiming at creation. He replied, denying the implication and saying he considered "to create was to form a something out of a nothing." **
Another gentleman, considered by several persons as a man of great science, has told us repeatedly that he was on the eve of proving that even unfructified eggs could be hatched by having a negative electric current caused to pass through them.
The mandrakes (dudim or love-fruit) found in the field by Reuben, Jacob's son, which excited the fancy of Rachel, was the kabalistic mandragora, notwithstanding denial; and the verses which refer to it belong to the crudest passages, in their esoteric meaning, of the whole work. The mandrake is a plant having the rudimentary shape of a human creature; with a head, two arms, and two legs forming roots. The superstition that when pulled out of the ground it cries with a human voice, is not utterly baseless. It does produce a kind of squeaking sound, on
The unexplained mysteries of nature are many and of those presumably explained hardly one may be said to have become absolutely intelligible. There is not a plant or mineral which has disclosed the last of its properties to the scientists. What do the naturalists know of the intimate nature of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms? How can they feel confident that for every one of the discovered properties there may not be many powers concealed in the inner nature of the plant or stone? And that they are only waiting to be brought in relation with some other plant, mineral, or force of nature to manifest themselves in what is termed a "supernatural manner." Wherever Pliny, the naturalist, AElian, and even Diodorus, who sought with such a laudable perseverance to extricate historical truth from its medley of exaggerations and fables, have attributed to some plant or mineral an occult property unknown to our modern botanists and physicists, their assertions have been laid aside without further ceremony as absurd, and no more referred to.
It has been the speculation of men of science from time immemorial what this vital force or life-principle is. To our mind the "secret doctrine" alone is able to furnish the clew. Exact science recognizes only five powers in nature--one molar, and four molecular; kabalists, seven; and in these two additional ones is enwrapped the whole mystery of life. One of these is immortal spirit, whose reflection is connected by invisible links even with inorganic matter; the other, we leave to every one to discover for himself. Says Professor Joseph Le Conte: "What is the nature of the difference between the living organism and the dead organism? We can detect none, physical or chemical. All the physical and chemical forces withdrawn from the common fund of nature, and embodied in the living organism, seem to be still embodied
Difficult, nay impossible, as it seems to science to find out the invisible, universal motor of all--Life, to explain its nature, or even to suggest a reasonable hypothesis for the same, the mystery is but half a mystery, not merely for the great adepts and seers, but even for true and firm believers in a spiritual world. To the simple believer, unblessed with a personal organism, the delicate, nervous sensitiveness of which would enable him--as it enables a seer--to perceive the visible universe reflected as in a clear glass in the Invisible one, and, as it were, objectively, there remains divine faith. The latter is firmly rooted in his inner senses; in his unerring intuition, with which cold reason has naught to do, he feels it cannot play him false. Let human-born, erroneous dogmas, and theological sophistry contradict each other; let one crowd off the other, and the subtile casuistry of one creed fell to the ground the crafty reasoning of another one; truth remains one, and there is not a religion, whether Christian or heathen, that is not firmly built upon the rock of ages--God and immortal spirit.
Every animal is more or less endowed with the faculty of perceiving, if not spirits, at least something which remains for the time being invisible to common men, and can only be discerned by a clairvoyant. We have made hundreds of experiments with cats, dogs, monkeys of various kinds, and, once, with a tame tiger. A round black mirror, known as the "magic crystal," was strongly mesmerized by a native Hindu gentleman, formerly an inhabitant of Dindigul, and now residing in a more secluded spot, among the mountains known as the Western Ghauts. He had tamed a young cub, brought to him from the Malabar coast, in which part of India the tigers are proverbially ferocious; and it is with this interesting animal that we made our experiments.
Like the ancient Marsi and Psylli, the renowned serpent-charmers, this gentleman claimed to be possessed of the mysterious power of taming any kind of animal. The tiger was reduced to a chronic mental numbness, so to say; he had become as inoffensive and harmless as a dog. Children could tease and pull him by the ears, and he would only shake himself and howl like a dog. But whenever forced to look into the
human terror; howling in despair, unable to turn away from the mirror to which his gaze seemed riveted as by a magnetic spell, he would writhe and tremble till he convulsed with fear at some vision which to us remained unknown. He would then lie down, feebly groaning but still gazing in the glass. When it was taken away from him, the animal would lie panting and seemingly prostrated for about two hours. What did he see? What spirit-picture from his own invisible, animal-world, could produce such a terrific effect on the wild and naturally ferocious and daring beast? Who can tell? Perhaps he who produced the scene.
The same effect on animals was observed during spiritual seances with some holy mendicants; the same when a Syrian, half-heathen and half-Christian, from Kunankulam (Cochin State), a reputed sorcerer, who was invited to join us for the sake of experimenting.
We were nine persons in all--seven men and two women, one of the latter a native. Besides us, there were in the room, the young tiger, intensely occupied on a bone; a wanderoo, or lion-monkey, which, with its black coat and snow-white goatee and whiskers, and cunning, sparkling eyes, looked the personification of mischief; and a beautiful golden oriole, quietly cleaning its radiant-colored tail on a perch, placed near a large window of the veranda. In India, "spiritual" seances are not held in the dark, as in America; and no conditions, but perfect silence and harmony, are required. It was in the full glare of daylight streaming through the opened doors and windows, with a far-away buzz of life from the neighboring forests, and jungles sending us the echo of myriads of insects, birds, and animals. We sat in the midst of a garden in which the house was built, and instead of breathing the stifling atmosphere of a seance-room, we were amid the fire-colored clusters of the erythrina--the coral tree--inhaling the fragrant aromas of trees and shrubs, and the flowers of the bignonia, whose white blossoms trembled in the soft breeze. In short, we were surrounded with light, harmony, and perfumes. Large nosegays of flowers and shrubs, sacred to the native gods, were gathered for the purpose, and brought into the rooms. We had the sweet basil, the Vishnu-flower, without which no religious ceremony in Bengal will ever take place; and the branches of the Ficus religiosa, the tree dedicated to the same bright deity, intermingling their leaves with the rosy blossoms of the sacred lotos and the Indian tuberose, profusely ornamented the walls.
While the "blessed one"--represented by a very dirty, but, nevertheless, really holy fakir--remained plunged in self-contemplation, and some spiritual wonders were taking place under the direction of his will,
"On one occasion, while I and others were in a cafe with Sir Maswell, he ordered his dobochy to introduce the charmer. In a few moments a lean Hindu, almost naked, with an ascetic face and bronzed color entered. Around his neck, arms, thighs, and body were coiled serpents of different sizes. After saluting us, he said, 'God be with you, I am Chibh-Chondor, son of Chibh-Gontnalh-Mava.'
" 'We desire to see what you can do,' said our host.
" 'I obey the orders of Siva, who has sent me here,' replied the fakir, squatting down on one of the marble slabs.
"The serpents raised their heads and hissed, but without showing any anger. Then taking a small pipe, attached to a wick in his hair, he produced scarcely audible sounds, imitating the tailapaca, a bird that feeds upon bruised cocoanuts. Here the serpents uncoiled themselves, and one after another glided to the floor. As soon as they touched the ground they raised about one-third of their bodies, and began to keep time to their master's music. Suddenly the fakir dropped his instrument and made several passes with his hands over the serpents, of whom there were about ten, all of the most deadly species of Indian cobra. His eye assumed a strange expression. We all felt an undefinable uneasiness, and sought to turn away our gaze from him. At this moment a small shocra * (monkey) whose business was to hand fire in a small brasier for lighting cigars, yielded to his influence, lay down, and fell asleep. Five minutes passed thus, and we felt that if the manipulations were to continue a few seconds more we should all fall asleep. Chondor then rose, and making two more passes over the shocra, said to it: 'Give
"Chibh-Chondor closed his seance by experimenting upon inanimate objects. By mere passes with his hands in the direction of the object to be acted upon, and without leaving his seat, he paled and extinguished lights in the furthest parts of the room, moved the furniture, including the divans upon which we sat, opened and closed doors. Catching sight of a Hindu who was drawing water from a well in the garden, he made a pass in his direction, and the rope suddenly stopped in its descent, resisting all the efforts of the astonished gardener. With another pass the rope again descended.
"I asked Chibh-Chondor: 'Do you employ the same means in acting upon inanimate objects that you do upon living creatures?'
"He replied, 'I have only one means.'
" 'What is it?'
" 'The will. Man, who is the end of all intellectual and material forces, must dominate over all. The Brahmans know nothing besides this.' "
"Sanang Setzen," says Colonel Yule, * "enumerates a variety of the wonderful acts which could be performed through the Dharani (mystic Hindu charms). Such were sticking a peg into solid rock; restoring the dead to life; turning a dead body into gold; penetrating everywhere as air does (in astral form); flying; catching wild beasts with the hand; reading thoughts; making water flow backward; eating tiles; sitting in the air with the legs doubled under, etc." Old legends ascribe to Simon Magus precisely the same powers. "He made statues to walk; leaped into the fire without being burned; flew in the air; made bread of stones; changed his shape; assumed two faces at once; converted himself into a pillar; caused closed doors to fly open spontaneously; made the vessels in a house move of themselves, etc." The Jesuit Delrio laments
without the use of a magnet, or of any attachment." * We believe WILL-POWER the most powerful of magnets. The existence of such magical power in certain persons is proved, but the existence of the Devil is a fiction, which no theology is able to demonstrate.
"There are certain men whom the Tartars honor above all in the world," says Friar Ricold, "viz., the Baxitae, who are a kind of idol-priests. These are men from India, persons of deep wisdom, well-conducted and of the gravest morals. They are usually with magic arts . . . they exhibit many illusions, and predict future events. For instance, one of eminence among them was said to fly; but the truth, however, was as it proved, that he did not fly, but did walk close to the surface of the ground without touching it; and would seem to sit down without having any substance to support him. ** This last performance was witnessed by Ibn Batuta, at Delhi," adds Colonel Yule, who quotes the friar in the Book of Ser Marco Polo, "in the presence of Sultan Mahomet Tughlak; and it was professedly exhibited by a Brahman at Madras in the present century, a descendant doubtless of those Brahmans whom Apollonius saw walking two cubits from the ground. It is also described by the worthy Francis Valentyn, as a performance known and practiced in his own day in India. It is related, he says, that 'a man will first go and sit on three sticks put together so as to form a tripod; after which, first one stick, then a second, then a third shall be removed from under him, and the man shall not fall but shall still remain sitting in the air! Yet I have spoken with two friends who had seen this at one and the same time; and one of them, I may add, mistrusting his own eyes, had taken the trouble to feel about with a long stick if there were nothing on which the body rested; yet, as the gentleman told me, he could neither feel nor see any such thing.' " We have stated elsewhere that the same thing was accomplished last year, before the Prince of Wales and his suite.
Such feats as the above are nothing in comparison to what is done by professed jugglers; "feats," remarks the above-quoted author, "which might be regarded as simply inventions if told by one author only, but which seem to deserve prominent notice from being recounted by a series of authors, certainly independent of one another, and writing at long intervals of time and place. Our first witness is Ibn Batuta, and
hocus-pocus!" ' "
And who doubts but that it is a "hocus-pocus," an illusion, or Maya, as the Hindus express it? But when such an illusion can be forced on, say, ten thousand people at the same time, as we have seen it performed during a public festival, surely the means by which such an astounding hallucination can be produced merits the attention of science! When by such magic a man who stands before you, in a room, the doors of which you have closed and of which the keys are in your hand, suddenly disappears, vanishes like a flash of light, and you see him nowhere but hear his voice from different parts of the room addressing you and laughing at your perplexity, surely such an art is not unworthy either of Mr. Huxley or Dr. Carpenter. Is it not quite as well worth spending time over, as the lesser mystery--why barnyard cocks crow at midnight?
What Ibn Batuta, the Moor, saw in China about the year 1348, Colonel Yule shows Edward Melton, "an Anglo-Dutch traveller," witnessing
In the memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire, the performances of seven jugglers from Bengal, who exhibited before him, are thus described: "Ninth. They produced a man whom they divided limb from limb, actually severing his head from the body. They scattered these mutilated members along the ground, and in this state they lay some time. They then extended a sheet over the spot, and one of the men putting himself under the sheet, in a few minutes came from below, followed by the individual supposed to have been cut into joints, in perfect health and condition. . . . Twenty-third. They produced a chain of fifty cubits in length, and in my presence threw one end of it toward the sky, where it remained as if fastened to something in the air. A dog was then brought forward and being placed at the lower end of the chain, immediately ran up, and reaching the other end, immediately disappeared in the air. In the same manner a hog, a panther, a lion, and a tiger were successively sent up the chain, and all equally disappeared at the upper end of the chain. At last they took down the chain, and put it into the bag, no one ever discovering in what way the different animals were made to vanish into the air in the mysterious manner above described." **
We have in our possession a picture painted from such a Persian conjurer, with a man, or rather the various limbs of what was a minute before a man, scattered before him. We have seen such conjurers, and witnessed such performances more than once and in various places.
If the molecules of the cadaver are imbued with the physical and chemical forces of the living organism, * what is to prevent them from being set again in motion, provided we know the nature of the vital force, and how to command it? The materialist can certainly offer no objection, for with him it is no question of reinfusing a soul. For him the soul has no existence, and the human body may be regarded simply as a vital engine--a locomotive which will start upon the application of heat and force, and stop when they are withdrawn. To the theologian the case offers greater difficulties, for, in his view, death cuts asunder the tie which binds soul and body, and the one can no more be returned into the other without miracle than the born infant can be compelled to resume its foetal life after parturition and the severing of the umbilicus. But the Hermetic philosopher stands between these two irreconcilable antagonists, "master of the situation. He knows the nature of the soul--a form composed of nervous fluid and atmospheric ether--and knows how the vital force can be made active or passive at will, so long as there is no final destruction of some necessary organ. The claims of Gaffarilus--which, by the bye, appeared so preposterous in 1650 **--were later corroborated by science.
And, if the astral form of even a plant when its body is dead still lingers in the ashes, will skeptics persist in saying that the soul of man, the inner ego, is after the death of the grosser form at once dissolved, and is no more? "At death," says the philosopher, "the one body exudes from the other, by osmose and through the brain; it is held near its old garment by a double attraction, physical and spiritual, until the latter decomposes; and if the proper conditions are given the soul can reinhabit it and resume the suspended life. It does it in sleep; it does it more thoroughly in trance; most surprisingly at the command and with the assistance of the Hermetic adept. Iamblichus declared that a person endowed with such resuscitating powers is 'full of God.' All the subordinate spirits of the upper spheres are at his command, for he is no longer a mortal, but himself a god. In his Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul remarks that 'the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.' "
Some persons have the natural and some the acquired power of withdrawing the inner from the outer body, at will, and causing it to perform long journeys, and be seen by those whom it visits. Numerous are the instances recorded by unimpeachable witnesses of the "doubles" of persons having been seen and conversed with, hundreds of miles from the places where the persons themselves were known to be. Hermotimus, if we may credit Pliny and Plutarch, *** could at will fall into a trance and then his second soul proceeded to any distant place he chose.
The Abbe Tritheim, the famous author of Steganographie, who lived in the seventeenth century, could converse with his friends by the mere power of his will. "I can make my thoughts known to the initiated,"
According to Napier, Osborne, Major Lawes, Quenouillet, Nikiforovitch, and many other modern witnesses, fakirs are now proved to be able, by a long course of diet, preparation, and repose, to bring their bodies into a condition which enables them to be buried six feet under ground for an indefinite period. Sir Claude Wade was present at the court of Rundjit Singh, when the fakir, mentioned by the Honorable Captain Osborne, was buried alive for six weeks, in a box placed in a cell three feet below the floor of the room. *** To prevent the chance of deception, a guard comprising two companies of soldiers had been detailed, and four sentries "were furnished and relieved every two hours, night and day, to guard the building from intrusion. . . . On opening it," says Sir Claude, "we saw a figure enclosed in a bag of white linen fastened by a string over the head . . . the servant then began pouring warm water over the figure . . . the legs and arms of the body were shrivelled and stiff, the face full, the head reclining on the shoulder like that of a corpse. I then called to the medical gentleman who was attending me, to come down and inspect the body, which he did, but could discover no pulsation in the heart, the temples, or the arm. There was, however, a heat about the region of the brain, which no other part of the body exhibited."
Regretting that the limits of our space forbid the quotation of the
Then, here is a case, only one of many, substantiated by the testimony of two English noblemen--one of them an army officer--and a Hindu Prince, who was as great a skeptic as themselves. It places science in this embarrassing dilemma: it must either give the lie to many unimpeachable witnesses, or admit that if one fakir can resuscitate after six weeks, any other fakir can also; and if a fakir, why not a Lazarus, a Shunamite boy, or the daughter of Jairus? *
Todd Thomson, above quoted, gives several remarkable cases of such a suspended animation. Among others he mentions a certain Francis Neville, a Norman gentleman, who twice apparently died, and was twice in the act of being buried. But, at the moment when the coffin was being lowered in the grave, he spontaneously revived. In the seventeenth century, Lady Russell, to all appearance died, and was about to be buried, but as the bell was tolling for her funeral, she sat up in her coffin and exclaimed, "It is time to go to church!" Diemerbroeck mentions a peasant who gave no signs of life for three days, but when placed in his coffin, near the grave, revived and lived many years afterward. In 1836, a respectable citizen of Brussels fell into a profound lethargy on a Sunday morning. On Monday, as his attendants were preparing to screw the lid of the coffin, the supposed corpse sat up, rubbed his eyes, and called for his coffee and a newspaper. ****
Such cases of apparent death are not very infrequently reported in the newspaper press. As we write (April, 1877), we find in a London letter to the New York Times, the following paragraph: "Miss Annie Goodale, the actress, died three weeks ago. Up to yesterday she was not buried. The corpse is warm and limp, and the features as soft and mobile as when in life. Several physicians have examined her, and have ordered that the body shall be watched night and day. The poor lady is evidently in a trance, but whether she is destined to come to life it is impossible to say."
The kabalists say that a man is not dead when his body is entombed. Death is never sudden; for, according to Hermes, nothing goes in nature by violent transitions. Everything is gradual, and as it required a long and gradual development to produce the living human being, so time is required to completely withdraw vitality from the carcass. "Death can no more be an absolute end, than birth a real beginning. Birth proves the preexistence of the being, as death proves immortality," says the same French kabalist.
While implicitly believing in the restoration of the daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, and in other Bible-miracles, well-educated Christians, who otherwise would feel indignant at being called superstitious, meet all such cases as that of Apollonius and the girl said by his biographer to have been recalled to life by him, with scornful skepticism. Diogenes Laertius, who mentions a woman restored to life by Empedocles, is treated with no more respect; and the name of Pagan thaumaturgist, in the eyes of Christians, is but a synonym for impostor. Our scientists are at least one degree more rational; they embrace all Bible prophets and apostles, and the heathen miracle-doers in two categories of hallucinated fools and deceitful tricksters.
But Christians and materialists might, with a very little effort on their
She is not dead but sleepeth," the clergy force their god to become a breaker of his own laws and grant unjustly to one what he denies to all others, and with no better object in view than to produce a useless miracle. In the second case, notwithstanding the words of the biographer of Apollonius, so plain and precise that there is not the slightest cause to misunderstand them, they charge Philostratus with deliberate imposture. Who could be fairer than he, who less open to the charge of mystification, when, in describing the resuscitation of the young girl by the Tyanian sage, in the presence of a large concourse of people, the biographer says, "she had seemed to die."
In other words, he very clearly indicates a case of suspended animation; and then adds immediately, "as the rain fell very fast on the young girl," while she was being carried to the pile, "with her face turned upwards, this, also, might have excited her senses." * Does this not show most plainly that Philostratus saw no miracle in that resuscitation? Does it not rather imply, if anything, the great learning and skill of Apollonius, "who like Asclepiades had the merit of distinguishing at a glance between real and apparent death"? **
A resuscitation, after the soul and spirit have entirely separated from the body, and the last electric thread is severed, is as impossible as for a once disembodied spirit to reincarnate itself once more on this earth, except as described in previous chapters. "A leaf, once fallen off, does not reattach itself to the branch," says Eliphas Levi. "The caterpillar becomes a butterfly, but the butterfly does not again return to the grub. Nature closes the door behind all that passes, and pushes life forward. Forms pass, thought remains, and does not recall that which it has once exhausted." ***
Why should it be imagined that Asclepiades and Apollonius enjoyed exceptional powers for the discernment of actual death? Has any modern school of medicine this knowledge to impart to its students? Let their authorities answer for them. These prodigies of Jesus and Apollonius
Is it because the modern physician has not yet found the secret which the theurgists evidently possessed that its possibility is denied?
Neglected as psychology now is, and with the strangely chaotic state in which physiology is confessed to be by its most fair students, certainly it is not very likely that our men of science will soon rediscover the lost knowledge of the ancients. In the days of old, when prophets were not treated as charlatans, nor thaumaturgists as impostors, there were colleges instituted for teaching prophecy and occult sciences in general. Samuel is recorded as the chief of such an institution at Ramah; Elisha, also, at Jericho. The schools of hazim, prophets or seers, were celebrated throughout the country. Hillel had a regular academy, and Socrates is well known to have sent away several of his disciples to study manticism. The study of magic, or wisdom, included every branch of science, the metaphysical as well as the physical, psychology and physiology in their common and occult phases, and the study of alchemy was universal, for it was both a physical and a spiritual science. Therefore why doubt or wonder that the ancients, who studied nature under its double aspect, achieved discoveries which to our modern physicists, who study but its dead letter, are a closed book?
Thus, the question at issue is not whether a dead body can be resuscitated--for, to assert that would be to assume the possibility of a miracle, which is absurd--but, to assure ourselves whether the medical authorities pretend to determine the precise moment of death. The kabalists say that death occurs at the instant when both the astral body, or life-principle, and the spirit part forever with the corporeal body. The scientific physician who denies both astral body and spirit, and admits the existence of nothing more than the life-principle, judges death to occur when life is apparently extinct. When the beating of the heart and the action of the lungs cease, and rigor mortis is manifested, and especially when decomposition begins, they pronounce the patient dead. But the annals of medicine teem with examples of "suspended animation"
somehow he could come to life again."
There occurred in Moscow, a few years since, a remarkable instance of apparent death. The wife of a wealthy merchant lay in the cataleptic state seventeen days, during which the authorities made several attempts to bury her; but, as decomposition had not set in, the family averted the ceremony, and at the end of that time she was restored to life.
The above instances show that the most learned men in the medical profession are unable to be certain when a person is dead. What they call "suspended animation," is that state from which the patient spontaneously recovers, through an effort of his own spirit, which may be provoked by any one of many causes. In these cases, the astral body has not parted from the physical body; its external functions are simply suspended; the subject is in a state of torpor, and the restoration is nothing but a recovery from it.
But, in the case of what physiologists would call "real death," but which is not actually so, the astral body has withdrawn; perhaps local decomposition has set in. How shall the man be brought to life again? The answer is, the interior body must be forced back into the exterior one, and vitality reawakened in the latter. The clock has run down, it must be wound. If death is absolute; if the organs have not only ceased to act, but have lost the susceptibility of renewed action, then the whole universe would have to be thrown into chaos to resuscitate the corpse--a miracle would be demanded. But, as we said before, the man is not dead when he is cold, stiff, pulseless, breathless, and even showing signs of decomposition; he is not dead when buried, nor afterward, until a certain point is reached. That point is, when the vital organs have become so decomposed, that if reanimated, they could not perform their customary functions; when the mainspring and cogs of the machine, so to speak, are so eaten away by rust, that they would snap upon the turning of the key. Until that point is reached, the astral body may be caused, without miracle, to reenter its former tabernacle, either by an effort of its
Science des Esprits, say that, "When a man falls into the last sleep, he is plunged at first into a sort of dream, before gaining consciousness in the other side of life. He sees, then, either in a beautiful vision, or in a terrible nightmare, the paradise or hell, in which he believed during his mortal existence. This is why it often happens, that the affrighted soul breaks violently back into the terrestrial life it has just left, and why some who were really dead, i.e., who, if left alone and quiet, would have peaceably passed away forever in a state of unconscious lethargy, when entombed too soon, reawake to life in the grave."
In this connection, the reader may perhaps recall the well-known case of the old man who had left some generous gifts in his will to his orphaned nieces; which document, just before his death, he had confided to his rich son, with injunctions to carry out his wishes. But, he had not been dead more than a few hours before the son, finding himself alone with the corpse, tore the will and burned it. The sight of this impious deed apparently recalled the hovering spirit, and the old man, rising from his couch of death, uttered a fierce malediction upon the horror-stricken wretch, and then fell back again, and yielded up his spirit--this time forever. Dion Boucicault makes use of an incident of this kind in his powerful
Balfour Stewart is right--scientists "know nothing, or next to nothing, of the ultimate structure and properties of matter, whether organic or inorganic."
We are now on such firm ground, that we will take another step in advance. The same knowledge and control of the occult forces, including the vital force which enabled the fakir temporarily to leave and then reenter his body, and Jesus, Apollonius, and Elisha to recall their several subjects to life, made it possible for the ancient hierophants to animate statues, and cause them to act and speak like living creatures. It is the same knowledge and power which made it possible for Paracelsus to create his homunculi; for Aaron to change his rod into a serpent and a budding branch; Moses to cover Egypt with frogs and other pests; and the Egyptian theurgist of our day to vivify his pigmy Mandragora, which has physical life but no soul. It was no more wonderful that upon presenting the necessary conditions Moses should call into life large reptiles and insects, than that, under like favoring conditions, the physical scientist should call into life the small ones which he names bacteria.
And now, in connection with ancient miracle-doers and prophets, let us bring forward the claims of the modern mediums. Nearly every form of phenomena recorded in the sacred and profane histories of the world
Of Apollonius, who asserted that he could see "the present and the future in a clear mirror," on account of his abstemious mode of life, the professor very beautifully observes: "This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits, all is as one day or state, the past and future comprised in the present." *
Were these God-like men "mediums," as the orthodox spiritualists
The reader must bear in mind the definition of the term, for, unless this is clearly understood, confusion will be inevitable. Mediumship of this kind may be either active or passive, repellent or receptive, positive or negative. Mediumship is measured by the quality of the aura with which the individual is surrounded. This may be dense, cloudy, noisome, mephitic, nauseating to the pure spirit, and attract only those foul beings who delight in it, as the eel does in turbid waters, or, it may be pure, crystalline, limpid, opalescent as the morning dew. All depends upon the moral character of the medium.
About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person's aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one's own immortal demon. It is literally
passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
The claims of the friends of esoteric science, that Paracelsus produced, chemically, homunculi from certain combinations as yet unknown to exact science, are, as a matter of course, relegated to the storehouse of exploded humbugs. But why should they? If the homunculi were not made by Paracelsus they were developed by other adepts, and that not a thousand years ago. They were produced, in fact, upon exactly the same principle as that by which the chemist and physicist calls to life his animalcula. A few years ago, an English gentleman, Andrew Crosse, of Somersetshire produced acari in the following manner: "Black flint burned to redness and reduced to powder was mixed with carbonate of potash, and exposed to a strong heat for fifteen minutes; and the mixture was poured into a blacklead crucible in an air furnace. It was reduced to powder while warm, mixed with boiling water; kept boiling for some minutes, and then hydrochloric acid was added to supersaturation. After being exposed to voltaic action for twenty-six days, a perfect insect of the acari tribe made its appearance, and in the course of a few weeks about a hundred more. The experiment was repeated with other chemical fluids with like results." A Mr. Weeks also produced the acari in ferrocyanide of potassium.
This discovery produced a great excitement. Mr. Crosse was now accused of impiety and aiming at creation. He replied, denying the implication and saying he considered "to create was to form a something out of a nothing." **
Another gentleman, considered by several persons as a man of great science, has told us repeatedly that he was on the eve of proving that even unfructified eggs could be hatched by having a negative electric current caused to pass through them.
The mandrakes (dudim or love-fruit) found in the field by Reuben, Jacob's son, which excited the fancy of Rachel, was the kabalistic mandragora, notwithstanding denial; and the verses which refer to it belong to the crudest passages, in their esoteric meaning, of the whole work. The mandrake is a plant having the rudimentary shape of a human creature; with a head, two arms, and two legs forming roots. The superstition that when pulled out of the ground it cries with a human voice, is not utterly baseless. It does produce a kind of squeaking sound, on
The unexplained mysteries of nature are many and of those presumably explained hardly one may be said to have become absolutely intelligible. There is not a plant or mineral which has disclosed the last of its properties to the scientists. What do the naturalists know of the intimate nature of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms? How can they feel confident that for every one of the discovered properties there may not be many powers concealed in the inner nature of the plant or stone? And that they are only waiting to be brought in relation with some other plant, mineral, or force of nature to manifest themselves in what is termed a "supernatural manner." Wherever Pliny, the naturalist, AElian, and even Diodorus, who sought with such a laudable perseverance to extricate historical truth from its medley of exaggerations and fables, have attributed to some plant or mineral an occult property unknown to our modern botanists and physicists, their assertions have been laid aside without further ceremony as absurd, and no more referred to.
It has been the speculation of men of science from time immemorial what this vital force or life-principle is. To our mind the "secret doctrine" alone is able to furnish the clew. Exact science recognizes only five powers in nature--one molar, and four molecular; kabalists, seven; and in these two additional ones is enwrapped the whole mystery of life. One of these is immortal spirit, whose reflection is connected by invisible links even with inorganic matter; the other, we leave to every one to discover for himself. Says Professor Joseph Le Conte: "What is the nature of the difference between the living organism and the dead organism? We can detect none, physical or chemical. All the physical and chemical forces withdrawn from the common fund of nature, and embodied in the living organism, seem to be still embodied
Difficult, nay impossible, as it seems to science to find out the invisible, universal motor of all--Life, to explain its nature, or even to suggest a reasonable hypothesis for the same, the mystery is but half a mystery, not merely for the great adepts and seers, but even for true and firm believers in a spiritual world. To the simple believer, unblessed with a personal organism, the delicate, nervous sensitiveness of which would enable him--as it enables a seer--to perceive the visible universe reflected as in a clear glass in the Invisible one, and, as it were, objectively, there remains divine faith. The latter is firmly rooted in his inner senses; in his unerring intuition, with which cold reason has naught to do, he feels it cannot play him false. Let human-born, erroneous dogmas, and theological sophistry contradict each other; let one crowd off the other, and the subtile casuistry of one creed fell to the ground the crafty reasoning of another one; truth remains one, and there is not a religion, whether Christian or heathen, that is not firmly built upon the rock of ages--God and immortal spirit.
Every animal is more or less endowed with the faculty of perceiving, if not spirits, at least something which remains for the time being invisible to common men, and can only be discerned by a clairvoyant. We have made hundreds of experiments with cats, dogs, monkeys of various kinds, and, once, with a tame tiger. A round black mirror, known as the "magic crystal," was strongly mesmerized by a native Hindu gentleman, formerly an inhabitant of Dindigul, and now residing in a more secluded spot, among the mountains known as the Western Ghauts. He had tamed a young cub, brought to him from the Malabar coast, in which part of India the tigers are proverbially ferocious; and it is with this interesting animal that we made our experiments.
Like the ancient Marsi and Psylli, the renowned serpent-charmers, this gentleman claimed to be possessed of the mysterious power of taming any kind of animal. The tiger was reduced to a chronic mental numbness, so to say; he had become as inoffensive and harmless as a dog. Children could tease and pull him by the ears, and he would only shake himself and howl like a dog. But whenever forced to look into the
human terror; howling in despair, unable to turn away from the mirror to which his gaze seemed riveted as by a magnetic spell, he would writhe and tremble till he convulsed with fear at some vision which to us remained unknown. He would then lie down, feebly groaning but still gazing in the glass. When it was taken away from him, the animal would lie panting and seemingly prostrated for about two hours. What did he see? What spirit-picture from his own invisible, animal-world, could produce such a terrific effect on the wild and naturally ferocious and daring beast? Who can tell? Perhaps he who produced the scene.
The same effect on animals was observed during spiritual seances with some holy mendicants; the same when a Syrian, half-heathen and half-Christian, from Kunankulam (Cochin State), a reputed sorcerer, who was invited to join us for the sake of experimenting.
We were nine persons in all--seven men and two women, one of the latter a native. Besides us, there were in the room, the young tiger, intensely occupied on a bone; a wanderoo, or lion-monkey, which, with its black coat and snow-white goatee and whiskers, and cunning, sparkling eyes, looked the personification of mischief; and a beautiful golden oriole, quietly cleaning its radiant-colored tail on a perch, placed near a large window of the veranda. In India, "spiritual" seances are not held in the dark, as in America; and no conditions, but perfect silence and harmony, are required. It was in the full glare of daylight streaming through the opened doors and windows, with a far-away buzz of life from the neighboring forests, and jungles sending us the echo of myriads of insects, birds, and animals. We sat in the midst of a garden in which the house was built, and instead of breathing the stifling atmosphere of a seance-room, we were amid the fire-colored clusters of the erythrina--the coral tree--inhaling the fragrant aromas of trees and shrubs, and the flowers of the bignonia, whose white blossoms trembled in the soft breeze. In short, we were surrounded with light, harmony, and perfumes. Large nosegays of flowers and shrubs, sacred to the native gods, were gathered for the purpose, and brought into the rooms. We had the sweet basil, the Vishnu-flower, without which no religious ceremony in Bengal will ever take place; and the branches of the Ficus religiosa, the tree dedicated to the same bright deity, intermingling their leaves with the rosy blossoms of the sacred lotos and the Indian tuberose, profusely ornamented the walls.
While the "blessed one"--represented by a very dirty, but, nevertheless, really holy fakir--remained plunged in self-contemplation, and some spiritual wonders were taking place under the direction of his will,
"On one occasion, while I and others were in a cafe with Sir Maswell, he ordered his dobochy to introduce the charmer. In a few moments a lean Hindu, almost naked, with an ascetic face and bronzed color entered. Around his neck, arms, thighs, and body were coiled serpents of different sizes. After saluting us, he said, 'God be with you, I am Chibh-Chondor, son of Chibh-Gontnalh-Mava.'
" 'We desire to see what you can do,' said our host.
" 'I obey the orders of Siva, who has sent me here,' replied the fakir, squatting down on one of the marble slabs.
"The serpents raised their heads and hissed, but without showing any anger. Then taking a small pipe, attached to a wick in his hair, he produced scarcely audible sounds, imitating the tailapaca, a bird that feeds upon bruised cocoanuts. Here the serpents uncoiled themselves, and one after another glided to the floor. As soon as they touched the ground they raised about one-third of their bodies, and began to keep time to their master's music. Suddenly the fakir dropped his instrument and made several passes with his hands over the serpents, of whom there were about ten, all of the most deadly species of Indian cobra. His eye assumed a strange expression. We all felt an undefinable uneasiness, and sought to turn away our gaze from him. At this moment a small shocra * (monkey) whose business was to hand fire in a small brasier for lighting cigars, yielded to his influence, lay down, and fell asleep. Five minutes passed thus, and we felt that if the manipulations were to continue a few seconds more we should all fall asleep. Chondor then rose, and making two more passes over the shocra, said to it: 'Give
"Chibh-Chondor closed his seance by experimenting upon inanimate objects. By mere passes with his hands in the direction of the object to be acted upon, and without leaving his seat, he paled and extinguished lights in the furthest parts of the room, moved the furniture, including the divans upon which we sat, opened and closed doors. Catching sight of a Hindu who was drawing water from a well in the garden, he made a pass in his direction, and the rope suddenly stopped in its descent, resisting all the efforts of the astonished gardener. With another pass the rope again descended.
"I asked Chibh-Chondor: 'Do you employ the same means in acting upon inanimate objects that you do upon living creatures?'
"He replied, 'I have only one means.'
" 'What is it?'
" 'The will. Man, who is the end of all intellectual and material forces, must dominate over all. The Brahmans know nothing besides this.' "
"Sanang Setzen," says Colonel Yule, * "enumerates a variety of the wonderful acts which could be performed through the Dharani (mystic Hindu charms). Such were sticking a peg into solid rock; restoring the dead to life; turning a dead body into gold; penetrating everywhere as air does (in astral form); flying; catching wild beasts with the hand; reading thoughts; making water flow backward; eating tiles; sitting in the air with the legs doubled under, etc." Old legends ascribe to Simon Magus precisely the same powers. "He made statues to walk; leaped into the fire without being burned; flew in the air; made bread of stones; changed his shape; assumed two faces at once; converted himself into a pillar; caused closed doors to fly open spontaneously; made the vessels in a house move of themselves, etc." The Jesuit Delrio laments
without the use of a magnet, or of any attachment." * We believe WILL-POWER the most powerful of magnets. The existence of such magical power in certain persons is proved, but the existence of the Devil is a fiction, which no theology is able to demonstrate.
"There are certain men whom the Tartars honor above all in the world," says Friar Ricold, "viz., the Baxitae, who are a kind of idol-priests. These are men from India, persons of deep wisdom, well-conducted and of the gravest morals. They are usually with magic arts . . . they exhibit many illusions, and predict future events. For instance, one of eminence among them was said to fly; but the truth, however, was as it proved, that he did not fly, but did walk close to the surface of the ground without touching it; and would seem to sit down without having any substance to support him. ** This last performance was witnessed by Ibn Batuta, at Delhi," adds Colonel Yule, who quotes the friar in the Book of Ser Marco Polo, "in the presence of Sultan Mahomet Tughlak; and it was professedly exhibited by a Brahman at Madras in the present century, a descendant doubtless of those Brahmans whom Apollonius saw walking two cubits from the ground. It is also described by the worthy Francis Valentyn, as a performance known and practiced in his own day in India. It is related, he says, that 'a man will first go and sit on three sticks put together so as to form a tripod; after which, first one stick, then a second, then a third shall be removed from under him, and the man shall not fall but shall still remain sitting in the air! Yet I have spoken with two friends who had seen this at one and the same time; and one of them, I may add, mistrusting his own eyes, had taken the trouble to feel about with a long stick if there were nothing on which the body rested; yet, as the gentleman told me, he could neither feel nor see any such thing.' " We have stated elsewhere that the same thing was accomplished last year, before the Prince of Wales and his suite.
Such feats as the above are nothing in comparison to what is done by professed jugglers; "feats," remarks the above-quoted author, "which might be regarded as simply inventions if told by one author only, but which seem to deserve prominent notice from being recounted by a series of authors, certainly independent of one another, and writing at long intervals of time and place. Our first witness is Ibn Batuta, and
hocus-pocus!" ' "
And who doubts but that it is a "hocus-pocus," an illusion, or Maya, as the Hindus express it? But when such an illusion can be forced on, say, ten thousand people at the same time, as we have seen it performed during a public festival, surely the means by which such an astounding hallucination can be produced merits the attention of science! When by such magic a man who stands before you, in a room, the doors of which you have closed and of which the keys are in your hand, suddenly disappears, vanishes like a flash of light, and you see him nowhere but hear his voice from different parts of the room addressing you and laughing at your perplexity, surely such an art is not unworthy either of Mr. Huxley or Dr. Carpenter. Is it not quite as well worth spending time over, as the lesser mystery--why barnyard cocks crow at midnight?
What Ibn Batuta, the Moor, saw in China about the year 1348, Colonel Yule shows Edward Melton, "an Anglo-Dutch traveller," witnessing
In the memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire, the performances of seven jugglers from Bengal, who exhibited before him, are thus described: "Ninth. They produced a man whom they divided limb from limb, actually severing his head from the body. They scattered these mutilated members along the ground, and in this state they lay some time. They then extended a sheet over the spot, and one of the men putting himself under the sheet, in a few minutes came from below, followed by the individual supposed to have been cut into joints, in perfect health and condition. . . . Twenty-third. They produced a chain of fifty cubits in length, and in my presence threw one end of it toward the sky, where it remained as if fastened to something in the air. A dog was then brought forward and being placed at the lower end of the chain, immediately ran up, and reaching the other end, immediately disappeared in the air. In the same manner a hog, a panther, a lion, and a tiger were successively sent up the chain, and all equally disappeared at the upper end of the chain. At last they took down the chain, and put it into the bag, no one ever discovering in what way the different animals were made to vanish into the air in the mysterious manner above described." **
We have in our possession a picture painted from such a Persian conjurer, with a man, or rather the various limbs of what was a minute before a man, scattered before him. We have seen such conjurers, and witnessed such performances more than once and in various places.
If the molecules of the cadaver are imbued with the physical and chemical forces of the living organism, * what is to prevent them from being set again in motion, provided we know the nature of the vital force, and how to command it? The materialist can certainly offer no objection, for with him it is no question of reinfusing a soul. For him the soul has no existence, and the human body may be regarded simply as a vital engine--a locomotive which will start upon the application of heat and force, and stop when they are withdrawn. To the theologian the case offers greater difficulties, for, in his view, death cuts asunder the tie which binds soul and body, and the one can no more be returned into the other without miracle than the born infant can be compelled to resume its foetal life after parturition and the severing of the umbilicus. But the Hermetic philosopher stands between these two irreconcilable antagonists, "master of the situation. He knows the nature of the soul--a form composed of nervous fluid and atmospheric ether--and knows how the vital force can be made active or passive at will, so long as there is no final destruction of some necessary organ. The claims of Gaffarilus--which, by the bye, appeared so preposterous in 1650 **--were later corroborated by science.
And, if the astral form of even a plant when its body is dead still lingers in the ashes, will skeptics persist in saying that the soul of man, the inner ego, is after the death of the grosser form at once dissolved, and is no more? "At death," says the philosopher, "the one body exudes from the other, by osmose and through the brain; it is held near its old garment by a double attraction, physical and spiritual, until the latter decomposes; and if the proper conditions are given the soul can reinhabit it and resume the suspended life. It does it in sleep; it does it more thoroughly in trance; most surprisingly at the command and with the assistance of the Hermetic adept. Iamblichus declared that a person endowed with such resuscitating powers is 'full of God.' All the subordinate spirits of the upper spheres are at his command, for he is no longer a mortal, but himself a god. In his Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul remarks that 'the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.' "
Some persons have the natural and some the acquired power of withdrawing the inner from the outer body, at will, and causing it to perform long journeys, and be seen by those whom it visits. Numerous are the instances recorded by unimpeachable witnesses of the "doubles" of persons having been seen and conversed with, hundreds of miles from the places where the persons themselves were known to be. Hermotimus, if we may credit Pliny and Plutarch, *** could at will fall into a trance and then his second soul proceeded to any distant place he chose.
The Abbe Tritheim, the famous author of Steganographie, who lived in the seventeenth century, could converse with his friends by the mere power of his will. "I can make my thoughts known to the initiated,"
According to Napier, Osborne, Major Lawes, Quenouillet, Nikiforovitch, and many other modern witnesses, fakirs are now proved to be able, by a long course of diet, preparation, and repose, to bring their bodies into a condition which enables them to be buried six feet under ground for an indefinite period. Sir Claude Wade was present at the court of Rundjit Singh, when the fakir, mentioned by the Honorable Captain Osborne, was buried alive for six weeks, in a box placed in a cell three feet below the floor of the room. *** To prevent the chance of deception, a guard comprising two companies of soldiers had been detailed, and four sentries "were furnished and relieved every two hours, night and day, to guard the building from intrusion. . . . On opening it," says Sir Claude, "we saw a figure enclosed in a bag of white linen fastened by a string over the head . . . the servant then began pouring warm water over the figure . . . the legs and arms of the body were shrivelled and stiff, the face full, the head reclining on the shoulder like that of a corpse. I then called to the medical gentleman who was attending me, to come down and inspect the body, which he did, but could discover no pulsation in the heart, the temples, or the arm. There was, however, a heat about the region of the brain, which no other part of the body exhibited."
Regretting that the limits of our space forbid the quotation of the
Then, here is a case, only one of many, substantiated by the testimony of two English noblemen--one of them an army officer--and a Hindu Prince, who was as great a skeptic as themselves. It places science in this embarrassing dilemma: it must either give the lie to many unimpeachable witnesses, or admit that if one fakir can resuscitate after six weeks, any other fakir can also; and if a fakir, why not a Lazarus, a Shunamite boy, or the daughter of Jairus? *
Todd Thomson, above quoted, gives several remarkable cases of such a suspended animation. Among others he mentions a certain Francis Neville, a Norman gentleman, who twice apparently died, and was twice in the act of being buried. But, at the moment when the coffin was being lowered in the grave, he spontaneously revived. In the seventeenth century, Lady Russell, to all appearance died, and was about to be buried, but as the bell was tolling for her funeral, she sat up in her coffin and exclaimed, "It is time to go to church!" Diemerbroeck mentions a peasant who gave no signs of life for three days, but when placed in his coffin, near the grave, revived and lived many years afterward. In 1836, a respectable citizen of Brussels fell into a profound lethargy on a Sunday morning. On Monday, as his attendants were preparing to screw the lid of the coffin, the supposed corpse sat up, rubbed his eyes, and called for his coffee and a newspaper. ****
Such cases of apparent death are not very infrequently reported in the newspaper press. As we write (April, 1877), we find in a London letter to the New York Times, the following paragraph: "Miss Annie Goodale, the actress, died three weeks ago. Up to yesterday she was not buried. The corpse is warm and limp, and the features as soft and mobile as when in life. Several physicians have examined her, and have ordered that the body shall be watched night and day. The poor lady is evidently in a trance, but whether she is destined to come to life it is impossible to say."
The kabalists say that a man is not dead when his body is entombed. Death is never sudden; for, according to Hermes, nothing goes in nature by violent transitions. Everything is gradual, and as it required a long and gradual development to produce the living human being, so time is required to completely withdraw vitality from the carcass. "Death can no more be an absolute end, than birth a real beginning. Birth proves the preexistence of the being, as death proves immortality," says the same French kabalist.
While implicitly believing in the restoration of the daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, and in other Bible-miracles, well-educated Christians, who otherwise would feel indignant at being called superstitious, meet all such cases as that of Apollonius and the girl said by his biographer to have been recalled to life by him, with scornful skepticism. Diogenes Laertius, who mentions a woman restored to life by Empedocles, is treated with no more respect; and the name of Pagan thaumaturgist, in the eyes of Christians, is but a synonym for impostor. Our scientists are at least one degree more rational; they embrace all Bible prophets and apostles, and the heathen miracle-doers in two categories of hallucinated fools and deceitful tricksters.
But Christians and materialists might, with a very little effort on their
She is not dead but sleepeth," the clergy force their god to become a breaker of his own laws and grant unjustly to one what he denies to all others, and with no better object in view than to produce a useless miracle. In the second case, notwithstanding the words of the biographer of Apollonius, so plain and precise that there is not the slightest cause to misunderstand them, they charge Philostratus with deliberate imposture. Who could be fairer than he, who less open to the charge of mystification, when, in describing the resuscitation of the young girl by the Tyanian sage, in the presence of a large concourse of people, the biographer says, "she had seemed to die."
In other words, he very clearly indicates a case of suspended animation; and then adds immediately, "as the rain fell very fast on the young girl," while she was being carried to the pile, "with her face turned upwards, this, also, might have excited her senses." * Does this not show most plainly that Philostratus saw no miracle in that resuscitation? Does it not rather imply, if anything, the great learning and skill of Apollonius, "who like Asclepiades had the merit of distinguishing at a glance between real and apparent death"? **
A resuscitation, after the soul and spirit have entirely separated from the body, and the last electric thread is severed, is as impossible as for a once disembodied spirit to reincarnate itself once more on this earth, except as described in previous chapters. "A leaf, once fallen off, does not reattach itself to the branch," says Eliphas Levi. "The caterpillar becomes a butterfly, but the butterfly does not again return to the grub. Nature closes the door behind all that passes, and pushes life forward. Forms pass, thought remains, and does not recall that which it has once exhausted." ***
Why should it be imagined that Asclepiades and Apollonius enjoyed exceptional powers for the discernment of actual death? Has any modern school of medicine this knowledge to impart to its students? Let their authorities answer for them. These prodigies of Jesus and Apollonius
Is it because the modern physician has not yet found the secret which the theurgists evidently possessed that its possibility is denied?
Neglected as psychology now is, and with the strangely chaotic state in which physiology is confessed to be by its most fair students, certainly it is not very likely that our men of science will soon rediscover the lost knowledge of the ancients. In the days of old, when prophets were not treated as charlatans, nor thaumaturgists as impostors, there were colleges instituted for teaching prophecy and occult sciences in general. Samuel is recorded as the chief of such an institution at Ramah; Elisha, also, at Jericho. The schools of hazim, prophets or seers, were celebrated throughout the country. Hillel had a regular academy, and Socrates is well known to have sent away several of his disciples to study manticism. The study of magic, or wisdom, included every branch of science, the metaphysical as well as the physical, psychology and physiology in their common and occult phases, and the study of alchemy was universal, for it was both a physical and a spiritual science. Therefore why doubt or wonder that the ancients, who studied nature under its double aspect, achieved discoveries which to our modern physicists, who study but its dead letter, are a closed book?
Thus, the question at issue is not whether a dead body can be resuscitated--for, to assert that would be to assume the possibility of a miracle, which is absurd--but, to assure ourselves whether the medical authorities pretend to determine the precise moment of death. The kabalists say that death occurs at the instant when both the astral body, or life-principle, and the spirit part forever with the corporeal body. The scientific physician who denies both astral body and spirit, and admits the existence of nothing more than the life-principle, judges death to occur when life is apparently extinct. When the beating of the heart and the action of the lungs cease, and rigor mortis is manifested, and especially when decomposition begins, they pronounce the patient dead. But the annals of medicine teem with examples of "suspended animation"
somehow he could come to life again."
There occurred in Moscow, a few years since, a remarkable instance of apparent death. The wife of a wealthy merchant lay in the cataleptic state seventeen days, during which the authorities made several attempts to bury her; but, as decomposition had not set in, the family averted the ceremony, and at the end of that time she was restored to life.
The above instances show that the most learned men in the medical profession are unable to be certain when a person is dead. What they call "suspended animation," is that state from which the patient spontaneously recovers, through an effort of his own spirit, which may be provoked by any one of many causes. In these cases, the astral body has not parted from the physical body; its external functions are simply suspended; the subject is in a state of torpor, and the restoration is nothing but a recovery from it.
But, in the case of what physiologists would call "real death," but which is not actually so, the astral body has withdrawn; perhaps local decomposition has set in. How shall the man be brought to life again? The answer is, the interior body must be forced back into the exterior one, and vitality reawakened in the latter. The clock has run down, it must be wound. If death is absolute; if the organs have not only ceased to act, but have lost the susceptibility of renewed action, then the whole universe would have to be thrown into chaos to resuscitate the corpse--a miracle would be demanded. But, as we said before, the man is not dead when he is cold, stiff, pulseless, breathless, and even showing signs of decomposition; he is not dead when buried, nor afterward, until a certain point is reached. That point is, when the vital organs have become so decomposed, that if reanimated, they could not perform their customary functions; when the mainspring and cogs of the machine, so to speak, are so eaten away by rust, that they would snap upon the turning of the key. Until that point is reached, the astral body may be caused, without miracle, to reenter its former tabernacle, either by an effort of its
Science des Esprits, say that, "When a man falls into the last sleep, he is plunged at first into a sort of dream, before gaining consciousness in the other side of life. He sees, then, either in a beautiful vision, or in a terrible nightmare, the paradise or hell, in which he believed during his mortal existence. This is why it often happens, that the affrighted soul breaks violently back into the terrestrial life it has just left, and why some who were really dead, i.e., who, if left alone and quiet, would have peaceably passed away forever in a state of unconscious lethargy, when entombed too soon, reawake to life in the grave."
In this connection, the reader may perhaps recall the well-known case of the old man who had left some generous gifts in his will to his orphaned nieces; which document, just before his death, he had confided to his rich son, with injunctions to carry out his wishes. But, he had not been dead more than a few hours before the son, finding himself alone with the corpse, tore the will and burned it. The sight of this impious deed apparently recalled the hovering spirit, and the old man, rising from his couch of death, uttered a fierce malediction upon the horror-stricken wretch, and then fell back again, and yielded up his spirit--this time forever. Dion Boucicault makes use of an incident of this kind in his powerful
Balfour Stewart is right--scientists "know nothing, or next to nothing, of the ultimate structure and properties of matter, whether organic or inorganic."
We are now on such firm ground, that we will take another step in advance. The same knowledge and control of the occult forces, including the vital force which enabled the fakir temporarily to leave and then reenter his body, and Jesus, Apollonius, and Elisha to recall their several subjects to life, made it possible for the ancient hierophants to animate statues, and cause them to act and speak like living creatures. It is the same knowledge and power which made it possible for Paracelsus to create his homunculi; for Aaron to change his rod into a serpent and a budding branch; Moses to cover Egypt with frogs and other pests; and the Egyptian theurgist of our day to vivify his pigmy Mandragora, which has physical life but no soul. It was no more wonderful that upon presenting the necessary conditions Moses should call into life large reptiles and insects, than that, under like favoring conditions, the physical scientist should call into life the small ones which he names bacteria.
And now, in connection with ancient miracle-doers and prophets, let us bring forward the claims of the modern mediums. Nearly every form of phenomena recorded in the sacred and profane histories of the world
Of Apollonius, who asserted that he could see "the present and the future in a clear mirror," on account of his abstemious mode of life, the professor very beautifully observes: "This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits, all is as one day or state, the past and future comprised in the present." *
Were these God-like men "mediums," as the orthodox spiritualists
The reader must bear in mind the definition of the term, for, unless this is clearly understood, confusion will be inevitable. Mediumship of this kind may be either active or passive, repellent or receptive, positive or negative. Mediumship is measured by the quality of the aura with which the individual is surrounded. This may be dense, cloudy, noisome, mephitic, nauseating to the pure spirit, and attract only those foul beings who delight in it, as the eel does in turbid waters, or, it may be pure, crystalline, limpid, opalescent as the morning dew. All depends upon the moral character of the medium.
About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person's aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one's own immortal demon. It is literally
passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
The unexplained mysteries of nature are many and of those presumably explained hardly one may be said to have become absolutely intelligible. There is not a plant or mineral which has disclosed the last of its properties to the scientists. What do the naturalists know of the intimate nature of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms? How can they feel confident that for every one of the discovered properties there may not be many powers concealed in the inner nature of the plant or stone? And that they are only waiting to be brought in relation with some other plant, mineral, or force of nature to manifest themselves in what is termed a "supernatural manner." Wherever Pliny, the naturalist, AElian, and even Diodorus, who sought with such a laudable perseverance to extricate historical truth from its medley of exaggerations and fables, have attributed to some plant or mineral an occult property unknown to our modern botanists and physicists, their assertions have been laid aside without further ceremony as absurd, and no more referred to.
It has been the speculation of men of science from time immemorial what this vital force or life-principle is. To our mind the "secret doctrine" alone is able to furnish the clew. Exact science recognizes only five powers in nature--one molar, and four molecular; kabalists, seven; and in these two additional ones is enwrapped the whole mystery of life. One of these is immortal spirit, whose reflection is connected by invisible links even with inorganic matter; the other, we leave to every one to discover for himself. Says Professor Joseph Le Conte: "What is the nature of the difference between the living organism and the dead organism? We can detect none, physical or chemical. All the physical and chemical forces withdrawn from the common fund of nature, and embodied in the living organism, seem to be still embodied
Difficult, nay impossible, as it seems to science to find out the invisible, universal motor of all--Life, to explain its nature, or even to suggest a reasonable hypothesis for the same, the mystery is but half a mystery, not merely for the great adepts and seers, but even for true and firm believers in a spiritual world. To the simple believer, unblessed with a personal organism, the delicate, nervous sensitiveness of which would enable him--as it enables a seer--to perceive the visible universe reflected as in a clear glass in the Invisible one, and, as it were, objectively, there remains divine faith. The latter is firmly rooted in his inner senses; in his unerring intuition, with which cold reason has naught to do, he feels it cannot play him false. Let human-born, erroneous dogmas, and theological sophistry contradict each other; let one crowd off the other, and the subtile casuistry of one creed fell to the ground the crafty reasoning of another one; truth remains one, and there is not a religion, whether Christian or heathen, that is not firmly built upon the rock of ages--God and immortal spirit.
Every animal is more or less endowed with the faculty of perceiving, if not spirits, at least something which remains for the time being invisible to common men, and can only be discerned by a clairvoyant. We have made hundreds of experiments with cats, dogs, monkeys of various kinds, and, once, with a tame tiger. A round black mirror, known as the "magic crystal," was strongly mesmerized by a native Hindu gentleman, formerly an inhabitant of Dindigul, and now residing in a more secluded spot, among the mountains known as the Western Ghauts. He had tamed a young cub, brought to him from the Malabar coast, in which part of India the tigers are proverbially ferocious; and it is with this interesting animal that we made our experiments.
Like the ancient Marsi and Psylli, the renowned serpent-charmers, this gentleman claimed to be possessed of the mysterious power of taming any kind of animal. The tiger was reduced to a chronic mental numbness, so to say; he had become as inoffensive and harmless as a dog. Children could tease and pull him by the ears, and he would only shake himself and howl like a dog. But whenever forced to look into the
human terror; howling in despair, unable to turn away from the mirror to which his gaze seemed riveted as by a magnetic spell, he would writhe and tremble till he convulsed with fear at some vision which to us remained unknown. He would then lie down, feebly groaning but still gazing in the glass. When it was taken away from him, the animal would lie panting and seemingly prostrated for about two hours. What did he see? What spirit-picture from his own invisible, animal-world, could produce such a terrific effect on the wild and naturally ferocious and daring beast? Who can tell? Perhaps he who produced the scene.
The same effect on animals was observed during spiritual seances with some holy mendicants; the same when a Syrian, half-heathen and half-Christian, from Kunankulam (Cochin State), a reputed sorcerer, who was invited to join us for the sake of experimenting.
We were nine persons in all--seven men and two women, one of the latter a native. Besides us, there were in the room, the young tiger, intensely occupied on a bone; a wanderoo, or lion-monkey, which, with its black coat and snow-white goatee and whiskers, and cunning, sparkling eyes, looked the personification of mischief; and a beautiful golden oriole, quietly cleaning its radiant-colored tail on a perch, placed near a large window of the veranda. In India, "spiritual" seances are not held in the dark, as in America; and no conditions, but perfect silence and harmony, are required. It was in the full glare of daylight streaming through the opened doors and windows, with a far-away buzz of life from the neighboring forests, and jungles sending us the echo of myriads of insects, birds, and animals. We sat in the midst of a garden in which the house was built, and instead of breathing the stifling atmosphere of a seance-room, we were amid the fire-colored clusters of the erythrina--the coral tree--inhaling the fragrant aromas of trees and shrubs, and the flowers of the bignonia, whose white blossoms trembled in the soft breeze. In short, we were surrounded with light, harmony, and perfumes. Large nosegays of flowers and shrubs, sacred to the native gods, were gathered for the purpose, and brought into the rooms. We had the sweet basil, the Vishnu-flower, without which no religious ceremony in Bengal will ever take place; and the branches of the Ficus religiosa, the tree dedicated to the same bright deity, intermingling their leaves with the rosy blossoms of the sacred lotos and the Indian tuberose, profusely ornamented the walls.
While the "blessed one"--represented by a very dirty, but, nevertheless, really holy fakir--remained plunged in self-contemplation, and some spiritual wonders were taking place under the direction of his will,
"On one occasion, while I and others were in a cafe with Sir Maswell, he ordered his dobochy to introduce the charmer. In a few moments a lean Hindu, almost naked, with an ascetic face and bronzed color entered. Around his neck, arms, thighs, and body were coiled serpents of different sizes. After saluting us, he said, 'God be with you, I am Chibh-Chondor, son of Chibh-Gontnalh-Mava.'
" 'We desire to see what you can do,' said our host.
" 'I obey the orders of Siva, who has sent me here,' replied the fakir, squatting down on one of the marble slabs.
"The serpents raised their heads and hissed, but without showing any anger. Then taking a small pipe, attached to a wick in his hair, he produced scarcely audible sounds, imitating the tailapaca, a bird that feeds upon bruised cocoanuts. Here the serpents uncoiled themselves, and one after another glided to the floor. As soon as they touched the ground they raised about one-third of their bodies, and began to keep time to their master's music. Suddenly the fakir dropped his instrument and made several passes with his hands over the serpents, of whom there were about ten, all of the most deadly species of Indian cobra. His eye assumed a strange expression. We all felt an undefinable uneasiness, and sought to turn away our gaze from him. At this moment a small shocra * (monkey) whose business was to hand fire in a small brasier for lighting cigars, yielded to his influence, lay down, and fell asleep. Five minutes passed thus, and we felt that if the manipulations were to continue a few seconds more we should all fall asleep. Chondor then rose, and making two more passes over the shocra, said to it: 'Give
"Chibh-Chondor closed his seance by experimenting upon inanimate objects. By mere passes with his hands in the direction of the object to be acted upon, and without leaving his seat, he paled and extinguished lights in the furthest parts of the room, moved the furniture, including the divans upon which we sat, opened and closed doors. Catching sight of a Hindu who was drawing water from a well in the garden, he made a pass in his direction, and the rope suddenly stopped in its descent, resisting all the efforts of the astonished gardener. With another pass the rope again descended.
"I asked Chibh-Chondor: 'Do you employ the same means in acting upon inanimate objects that you do upon living creatures?'
"He replied, 'I have only one means.'
" 'What is it?'
" 'The will. Man, who is the end of all intellectual and material forces, must dominate over all. The Brahmans know nothing besides this.' "
"Sanang Setzen," says Colonel Yule, * "enumerates a variety of the wonderful acts which could be performed through the Dharani (mystic Hindu charms). Such were sticking a peg into solid rock; restoring the dead to life; turning a dead body into gold; penetrating everywhere as air does (in astral form); flying; catching wild beasts with the hand; reading thoughts; making water flow backward; eating tiles; sitting in the air with the legs doubled under, etc." Old legends ascribe to Simon Magus precisely the same powers. "He made statues to walk; leaped into the fire without being burned; flew in the air; made bread of stones; changed his shape; assumed two faces at once; converted himself into a pillar; caused closed doors to fly open spontaneously; made the vessels in a house move of themselves, etc." The Jesuit Delrio laments
without the use of a magnet, or of any attachment." * We believe WILL-POWER the most powerful of magnets. The existence of such magical power in certain persons is proved, but the existence of the Devil is a fiction, which no theology is able to demonstrate.
"There are certain men whom the Tartars honor above all in the world," says Friar Ricold, "viz., the Baxitae, who are a kind of idol-priests. These are men from India, persons of deep wisdom, well-conducted and of the gravest morals. They are usually with magic arts . . . they exhibit many illusions, and predict future events. For instance, one of eminence among them was said to fly; but the truth, however, was as it proved, that he did not fly, but did walk close to the surface of the ground without touching it; and would seem to sit down without having any substance to support him. ** This last performance was witnessed by Ibn Batuta, at Delhi," adds Colonel Yule, who quotes the friar in the Book of Ser Marco Polo, "in the presence of Sultan Mahomet Tughlak; and it was professedly exhibited by a Brahman at Madras in the present century, a descendant doubtless of those Brahmans whom Apollonius saw walking two cubits from the ground. It is also described by the worthy Francis Valentyn, as a performance known and practiced in his own day in India. It is related, he says, that 'a man will first go and sit on three sticks put together so as to form a tripod; after which, first one stick, then a second, then a third shall be removed from under him, and the man shall not fall but shall still remain sitting in the air! Yet I have spoken with two friends who had seen this at one and the same time; and one of them, I may add, mistrusting his own eyes, had taken the trouble to feel about with a long stick if there were nothing on which the body rested; yet, as the gentleman told me, he could neither feel nor see any such thing.' " We have stated elsewhere that the same thing was accomplished last year, before the Prince of Wales and his suite.
Such feats as the above are nothing in comparison to what is done by professed jugglers; "feats," remarks the above-quoted author, "which might be regarded as simply inventions if told by one author only, but which seem to deserve prominent notice from being recounted by a series of authors, certainly independent of one another, and writing at long intervals of time and place. Our first witness is Ibn Batuta, and
hocus-pocus!" ' "
And who doubts but that it is a "hocus-pocus," an illusion, or Maya, as the Hindus express it? But when such an illusion can be forced on, say, ten thousand people at the same time, as we have seen it performed during a public festival, surely the means by which such an astounding hallucination can be produced merits the attention of science! When by such magic a man who stands before you, in a room, the doors of which you have closed and of which the keys are in your hand, suddenly disappears, vanishes like a flash of light, and you see him nowhere but hear his voice from different parts of the room addressing you and laughing at your perplexity, surely such an art is not unworthy either of Mr. Huxley or Dr. Carpenter. Is it not quite as well worth spending time over, as the lesser mystery--why barnyard cocks crow at midnight?
What Ibn Batuta, the Moor, saw in China about the year 1348, Colonel Yule shows Edward Melton, "an Anglo-Dutch traveller," witnessing
In the memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire, the performances of seven jugglers from Bengal, who exhibited before him, are thus described: "Ninth. They produced a man whom they divided limb from limb, actually severing his head from the body. They scattered these mutilated members along the ground, and in this state they lay some time. They then extended a sheet over the spot, and one of the men putting himself under the sheet, in a few minutes came from below, followed by the individual supposed to have been cut into joints, in perfect health and condition. . . . Twenty-third. They produced a chain of fifty cubits in length, and in my presence threw one end of it toward the sky, where it remained as if fastened to something in the air. A dog was then brought forward and being placed at the lower end of the chain, immediately ran up, and reaching the other end, immediately disappeared in the air. In the same manner a hog, a panther, a lion, and a tiger were successively sent up the chain, and all equally disappeared at the upper end of the chain. At last they took down the chain, and put it into the bag, no one ever discovering in what way the different animals were made to vanish into the air in the mysterious manner above described." **
We have in our possession a picture painted from such a Persian conjurer, with a man, or rather the various limbs of what was a minute before a man, scattered before him. We have seen such conjurers, and witnessed such performances more than once and in various places.
If the molecules of the cadaver are imbued with the physical and chemical forces of the living organism, * what is to prevent them from being set again in motion, provided we know the nature of the vital force, and how to command it? The materialist can certainly offer no objection, for with him it is no question of reinfusing a soul. For him the soul has no existence, and the human body may be regarded simply as a vital engine--a locomotive which will start upon the application of heat and force, and stop when they are withdrawn. To the theologian the case offers greater difficulties, for, in his view, death cuts asunder the tie which binds soul and body, and the one can no more be returned into the other without miracle than the born infant can be compelled to resume its foetal life after parturition and the severing of the umbilicus. But the Hermetic philosopher stands between these two irreconcilable antagonists, "master of the situation. He knows the nature of the soul--a form composed of nervous fluid and atmospheric ether--and knows how the vital force can be made active or passive at will, so long as there is no final destruction of some necessary organ. The claims of Gaffarilus--which, by the bye, appeared so preposterous in 1650 **--were later corroborated by science.
And, if the astral form of even a plant when its body is dead still lingers in the ashes, will skeptics persist in saying that the soul of man, the inner ego, is after the death of the grosser form at once dissolved, and is no more? "At death," says the philosopher, "the one body exudes from the other, by osmose and through the brain; it is held near its old garment by a double attraction, physical and spiritual, until the latter decomposes; and if the proper conditions are given the soul can reinhabit it and resume the suspended life. It does it in sleep; it does it more thoroughly in trance; most surprisingly at the command and with the assistance of the Hermetic adept. Iamblichus declared that a person endowed with such resuscitating powers is 'full of God.' All the subordinate spirits of the upper spheres are at his command, for he is no longer a mortal, but himself a god. In his Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul remarks that 'the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.' "
Some persons have the natural and some the acquired power of withdrawing the inner from the outer body, at will, and causing it to perform long journeys, and be seen by those whom it visits. Numerous are the instances recorded by unimpeachable witnesses of the "doubles" of persons having been seen and conversed with, hundreds of miles from the places where the persons themselves were known to be. Hermotimus, if we may credit Pliny and Plutarch, *** could at will fall into a trance and then his second soul proceeded to any distant place he chose.
The Abbe Tritheim, the famous author of Steganographie, who lived in the seventeenth century, could converse with his friends by the mere power of his will. "I can make my thoughts known to the initiated,"
According to Napier, Osborne, Major Lawes, Quenouillet, Nikiforovitch, and many other modern witnesses, fakirs are now proved to be able, by a long course of diet, preparation, and repose, to bring their bodies into a condition which enables them to be buried six feet under ground for an indefinite period. Sir Claude Wade was present at the court of Rundjit Singh, when the fakir, mentioned by the Honorable Captain Osborne, was buried alive for six weeks, in a box placed in a cell three feet below the floor of the room. *** To prevent the chance of deception, a guard comprising two companies of soldiers had been detailed, and four sentries "were furnished and relieved every two hours, night and day, to guard the building from intrusion. . . . On opening it," says Sir Claude, "we saw a figure enclosed in a bag of white linen fastened by a string over the head . . . the servant then began pouring warm water over the figure . . . the legs and arms of the body were shrivelled and stiff, the face full, the head reclining on the shoulder like that of a corpse. I then called to the medical gentleman who was attending me, to come down and inspect the body, which he did, but could discover no pulsation in the heart, the temples, or the arm. There was, however, a heat about the region of the brain, which no other part of the body exhibited."
Regretting that the limits of our space forbid the quotation of the
Then, here is a case, only one of many, substantiated by the testimony of two English noblemen--one of them an army officer--and a Hindu Prince, who was as great a skeptic as themselves. It places science in this embarrassing dilemma: it must either give the lie to many unimpeachable witnesses, or admit that if one fakir can resuscitate after six weeks, any other fakir can also; and if a fakir, why not a Lazarus, a Shunamite boy, or the daughter of Jairus? *
Todd Thomson, above quoted, gives several remarkable cases of such a suspended animation. Among others he mentions a certain Francis Neville, a Norman gentleman, who twice apparently died, and was twice in the act of being buried. But, at the moment when the coffin was being lowered in the grave, he spontaneously revived. In the seventeenth century, Lady Russell, to all appearance died, and was about to be buried, but as the bell was tolling for her funeral, she sat up in her coffin and exclaimed, "It is time to go to church!" Diemerbroeck mentions a peasant who gave no signs of life for three days, but when placed in his coffin, near the grave, revived and lived many years afterward. In 1836, a respectable citizen of Brussels fell into a profound lethargy on a Sunday morning. On Monday, as his attendants were preparing to screw the lid of the coffin, the supposed corpse sat up, rubbed his eyes, and called for his coffee and a newspaper. ****
Such cases of apparent death are not very infrequently reported in the newspaper press. As we write (April, 1877), we find in a London letter to the New York Times, the following paragraph: "Miss Annie Goodale, the actress, died three weeks ago. Up to yesterday she was not buried. The corpse is warm and limp, and the features as soft and mobile as when in life. Several physicians have examined her, and have ordered that the body shall be watched night and day. The poor lady is evidently in a trance, but whether she is destined to come to life it is impossible to say."
The kabalists say that a man is not dead when his body is entombed. Death is never sudden; for, according to Hermes, nothing goes in nature by violent transitions. Everything is gradual, and as it required a long and gradual development to produce the living human being, so time is required to completely withdraw vitality from the carcass. "Death can no more be an absolute end, than birth a real beginning. Birth proves the preexistence of the being, as death proves immortality," says the same French kabalist.
While implicitly believing in the restoration of the daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, and in other Bible-miracles, well-educated Christians, who otherwise would feel indignant at being called superstitious, meet all such cases as that of Apollonius and the girl said by his biographer to have been recalled to life by him, with scornful skepticism. Diogenes Laertius, who mentions a woman restored to life by Empedocles, is treated with no more respect; and the name of Pagan thaumaturgist, in the eyes of Christians, is but a synonym for impostor. Our scientists are at least one degree more rational; they embrace all Bible prophets and apostles, and the heathen miracle-doers in two categories of hallucinated fools and deceitful tricksters.
But Christians and materialists might, with a very little effort on their
She is not dead but sleepeth," the clergy force their god to become a breaker of his own laws and grant unjustly to one what he denies to all others, and with no better object in view than to produce a useless miracle. In the second case, notwithstanding the words of the biographer of Apollonius, so plain and precise that there is not the slightest cause to misunderstand them, they charge Philostratus with deliberate imposture. Who could be fairer than he, who less open to the charge of mystification, when, in describing the resuscitation of the young girl by the Tyanian sage, in the presence of a large concourse of people, the biographer says, "she had seemed to die."
In other words, he very clearly indicates a case of suspended animation; and then adds immediately, "as the rain fell very fast on the young girl," while she was being carried to the pile, "with her face turned upwards, this, also, might have excited her senses." * Does this not show most plainly that Philostratus saw no miracle in that resuscitation? Does it not rather imply, if anything, the great learning and skill of Apollonius, "who like Asclepiades had the merit of distinguishing at a glance between real and apparent death"? **
A resuscitation, after the soul and spirit have entirely separated from the body, and the last electric thread is severed, is as impossible as for a once disembodied spirit to reincarnate itself once more on this earth, except as described in previous chapters. "A leaf, once fallen off, does not reattach itself to the branch," says Eliphas Levi. "The caterpillar becomes a butterfly, but the butterfly does not again return to the grub. Nature closes the door behind all that passes, and pushes life forward. Forms pass, thought remains, and does not recall that which it has once exhausted." ***
Why should it be imagined that Asclepiades and Apollonius enjoyed exceptional powers for the discernment of actual death? Has any modern school of medicine this knowledge to impart to its students? Let their authorities answer for them. These prodigies of Jesus and Apollonius
Is it because the modern physician has not yet found the secret which the theurgists evidently possessed that its possibility is denied?
Neglected as psychology now is, and with the strangely chaotic state in which physiology is confessed to be by its most fair students, certainly it is not very likely that our men of science will soon rediscover the lost knowledge of the ancients. In the days of old, when prophets were not treated as charlatans, nor thaumaturgists as impostors, there were colleges instituted for teaching prophecy and occult sciences in general. Samuel is recorded as the chief of such an institution at Ramah; Elisha, also, at Jericho. The schools of hazim, prophets or seers, were celebrated throughout the country. Hillel had a regular academy, and Socrates is well known to have sent away several of his disciples to study manticism. The study of magic, or wisdom, included every branch of science, the metaphysical as well as the physical, psychology and physiology in their common and occult phases, and the study of alchemy was universal, for it was both a physical and a spiritual science. Therefore why doubt or wonder that the ancients, who studied nature under its double aspect, achieved discoveries which to our modern physicists, who study but its dead letter, are a closed book?
Thus, the question at issue is not whether a dead body can be resuscitated--for, to assert that would be to assume the possibility of a miracle, which is absurd--but, to assure ourselves whether the medical authorities pretend to determine the precise moment of death. The kabalists say that death occurs at the instant when both the astral body, or life-principle, and the spirit part forever with the corporeal body. The scientific physician who denies both astral body and spirit, and admits the existence of nothing more than the life-principle, judges death to occur when life is apparently extinct. When the beating of the heart and the action of the lungs cease, and rigor mortis is manifested, and especially when decomposition begins, they pronounce the patient dead. But the annals of medicine teem with examples of "suspended animation"
somehow he could come to life again."
There occurred in Moscow, a few years since, a remarkable instance of apparent death. The wife of a wealthy merchant lay in the cataleptic state seventeen days, during which the authorities made several attempts to bury her; but, as decomposition had not set in, the family averted the ceremony, and at the end of that time she was restored to life.
The above instances show that the most learned men in the medical profession are unable to be certain when a person is dead. What they call "suspended animation," is that state from which the patient spontaneously recovers, through an effort of his own spirit, which may be provoked by any one of many causes. In these cases, the astral body has not parted from the physical body; its external functions are simply suspended; the subject is in a state of torpor, and the restoration is nothing but a recovery from it.
But, in the case of what physiologists would call "real death," but which is not actually so, the astral body has withdrawn; perhaps local decomposition has set in. How shall the man be brought to life again? The answer is, the interior body must be forced back into the exterior one, and vitality reawakened in the latter. The clock has run down, it must be wound. If death is absolute; if the organs have not only ceased to act, but have lost the susceptibility of renewed action, then the whole universe would have to be thrown into chaos to resuscitate the corpse--a miracle would be demanded. But, as we said before, the man is not dead when he is cold, stiff, pulseless, breathless, and even showing signs of decomposition; he is not dead when buried, nor afterward, until a certain point is reached. That point is, when the vital organs have become so decomposed, that if reanimated, they could not perform their customary functions; when the mainspring and cogs of the machine, so to speak, are so eaten away by rust, that they would snap upon the turning of the key. Until that point is reached, the astral body may be caused, without miracle, to reenter its former tabernacle, either by an effort of its
Science des Esprits, say that, "When a man falls into the last sleep, he is plunged at first into a sort of dream, before gaining consciousness in the other side of life. He sees, then, either in a beautiful vision, or in a terrible nightmare, the paradise or hell, in which he believed during his mortal existence. This is why it often happens, that the affrighted soul breaks violently back into the terrestrial life it has just left, and why some who were really dead, i.e., who, if left alone and quiet, would have peaceably passed away forever in a state of unconscious lethargy, when entombed too soon, reawake to life in the grave."
In this connection, the reader may perhaps recall the well-known case of the old man who had left some generous gifts in his will to his orphaned nieces; which document, just before his death, he had confided to his rich son, with injunctions to carry out his wishes. But, he had not been dead more than a few hours before the son, finding himself alone with the corpse, tore the will and burned it. The sight of this impious deed apparently recalled the hovering spirit, and the old man, rising from his couch of death, uttered a fierce malediction upon the horror-stricken wretch, and then fell back again, and yielded up his spirit--this time forever. Dion Boucicault makes use of an incident of this kind in his powerful
Balfour Stewart is right--scientists "know nothing, or next to nothing, of the ultimate structure and properties of matter, whether organic or inorganic."
We are now on such firm ground, that we will take another step in advance. The same knowledge and control of the occult forces, including the vital force which enabled the fakir temporarily to leave and then reenter his body, and Jesus, Apollonius, and Elisha to recall their several subjects to life, made it possible for the ancient hierophants to animate statues, and cause them to act and speak like living creatures. It is the same knowledge and power which made it possible for Paracelsus to create his homunculi; for Aaron to change his rod into a serpent and a budding branch; Moses to cover Egypt with frogs and other pests; and the Egyptian theurgist of our day to vivify his pigmy Mandragora, which has physical life but no soul. It was no more wonderful that upon presenting the necessary conditions Moses should call into life large reptiles and insects, than that, under like favoring conditions, the physical scientist should call into life the small ones which he names bacteria.
And now, in connection with ancient miracle-doers and prophets, let us bring forward the claims of the modern mediums. Nearly every form of phenomena recorded in the sacred and profane histories of the world
Of Apollonius, who asserted that he could see "the present and the future in a clear mirror," on account of his abstemious mode of life, the professor very beautifully observes: "This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits, all is as one day or state, the past and future comprised in the present." *
Were these God-like men "mediums," as the orthodox spiritualists
The reader must bear in mind the definition of the term, for, unless this is clearly understood, confusion will be inevitable. Mediumship of this kind may be either active or passive, repellent or receptive, positive or negative. Mediumship is measured by the quality of the aura with which the individual is surrounded. This may be dense, cloudy, noisome, mephitic, nauseating to the pure spirit, and attract only those foul beings who delight in it, as the eel does in turbid waters, or, it may be pure, crystalline, limpid, opalescent as the morning dew. All depends upon the moral character of the medium.
About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person's aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one's own immortal demon. It is literally
passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
The same effect on animals was observed during spiritual seances with some holy mendicants; the same when a Syrian, half-heathen and half-Christian, from Kunankulam (Cochin State), a reputed sorcerer, who was invited to join us for the sake of experimenting.
We were nine persons in all--seven men and two women, one of the latter a native. Besides us, there were in the room, the young tiger, intensely occupied on a bone; a wanderoo, or lion-monkey, which, with its black coat and snow-white goatee and whiskers, and cunning, sparkling eyes, looked the personification of mischief; and a beautiful golden oriole, quietly cleaning its radiant-colored tail on a perch, placed near a large window of the veranda. In India, "spiritual" seances are not held in the dark, as in America; and no conditions, but perfect silence and harmony, are required. It was in the full glare of daylight streaming through the opened doors and windows, with a far-away buzz of life from the neighboring forests, and jungles sending us the echo of myriads of insects, birds, and animals. We sat in the midst of a garden in which the house was built, and instead of breathing the stifling atmosphere of a seance-room, we were amid the fire-colored clusters of the erythrina--the coral tree--inhaling the fragrant aromas of trees and shrubs, and the flowers of the bignonia, whose white blossoms trembled in the soft breeze. In short, we were surrounded with light, harmony, and perfumes. Large nosegays of flowers and shrubs, sacred to the native gods, were gathered for the purpose, and brought into the rooms. We had the sweet basil, the Vishnu-flower, without which no religious ceremony in Bengal will ever take place; and the branches of the Ficus religiosa, the tree dedicated to the same bright deity, intermingling their leaves with the rosy blossoms of the sacred lotos and the Indian tuberose, profusely ornamented the walls.
While the "blessed one"--represented by a very dirty, but, nevertheless, really holy fakir--remained plunged in self-contemplation, and some spiritual wonders were taking place under the direction of his will,
"On one occasion, while I and others were in a cafe with Sir Maswell, he ordered his dobochy to introduce the charmer. In a few moments a lean Hindu, almost naked, with an ascetic face and bronzed color entered. Around his neck, arms, thighs, and body were coiled serpents of different sizes. After saluting us, he said, 'God be with you, I am Chibh-Chondor, son of Chibh-Gontnalh-Mava.'
" 'We desire to see what you can do,' said our host.
" 'I obey the orders of Siva, who has sent me here,' replied the fakir, squatting down on one of the marble slabs.
"The serpents raised their heads and hissed, but without showing any anger. Then taking a small pipe, attached to a wick in his hair, he produced scarcely audible sounds, imitating the tailapaca, a bird that feeds upon bruised cocoanuts. Here the serpents uncoiled themselves, and one after another glided to the floor. As soon as they touched the ground they raised about one-third of their bodies, and began to keep time to their master's music. Suddenly the fakir dropped his instrument and made several passes with his hands over the serpents, of whom there were about ten, all of the most deadly species of Indian cobra. His eye assumed a strange expression. We all felt an undefinable uneasiness, and sought to turn away our gaze from him. At this moment a small shocra * (monkey) whose business was to hand fire in a small brasier for lighting cigars, yielded to his influence, lay down, and fell asleep. Five minutes passed thus, and we felt that if the manipulations were to continue a few seconds more we should all fall asleep. Chondor then rose, and making two more passes over the shocra, said to it: 'Give
"Chibh-Chondor closed his seance by experimenting upon inanimate objects. By mere passes with his hands in the direction of the object to be acted upon, and without leaving his seat, he paled and extinguished lights in the furthest parts of the room, moved the furniture, including the divans upon which we sat, opened and closed doors. Catching sight of a Hindu who was drawing water from a well in the garden, he made a pass in his direction, and the rope suddenly stopped in its descent, resisting all the efforts of the astonished gardener. With another pass the rope again descended.
"I asked Chibh-Chondor: 'Do you employ the same means in acting upon inanimate objects that you do upon living creatures?'
"He replied, 'I have only one means.'
" 'What is it?'
" 'The will. Man, who is the end of all intellectual and material forces, must dominate over all. The Brahmans know nothing besides this.' "
"Sanang Setzen," says Colonel Yule, * "enumerates a variety of the wonderful acts which could be performed through the Dharani (mystic Hindu charms). Such were sticking a peg into solid rock; restoring the dead to life; turning a dead body into gold; penetrating everywhere as air does (in astral form); flying; catching wild beasts with the hand; reading thoughts; making water flow backward; eating tiles; sitting in the air with the legs doubled under, etc." Old legends ascribe to Simon Magus precisely the same powers. "He made statues to walk; leaped into the fire without being burned; flew in the air; made bread of stones; changed his shape; assumed two faces at once; converted himself into a pillar; caused closed doors to fly open spontaneously; made the vessels in a house move of themselves, etc." The Jesuit Delrio laments
without the use of a magnet, or of any attachment." * We believe WILL-POWER the most powerful of magnets. The existence of such magical power in certain persons is proved, but the existence of the Devil is a fiction, which no theology is able to demonstrate.
"There are certain men whom the Tartars honor above all in the world," says Friar Ricold, "viz., the Baxitae, who are a kind of idol-priests. These are men from India, persons of deep wisdom, well-conducted and of the gravest morals. They are usually with magic arts . . . they exhibit many illusions, and predict future events. For instance, one of eminence among them was said to fly; but the truth, however, was as it proved, that he did not fly, but did walk close to the surface of the ground without touching it; and would seem to sit down without having any substance to support him. ** This last performance was witnessed by Ibn Batuta, at Delhi," adds Colonel Yule, who quotes the friar in the Book of Ser Marco Polo, "in the presence of Sultan Mahomet Tughlak; and it was professedly exhibited by a Brahman at Madras in the present century, a descendant doubtless of those Brahmans whom Apollonius saw walking two cubits from the ground. It is also described by the worthy Francis Valentyn, as a performance known and practiced in his own day in India. It is related, he says, that 'a man will first go and sit on three sticks put together so as to form a tripod; after which, first one stick, then a second, then a third shall be removed from under him, and the man shall not fall but shall still remain sitting in the air! Yet I have spoken with two friends who had seen this at one and the same time; and one of them, I may add, mistrusting his own eyes, had taken the trouble to feel about with a long stick if there were nothing on which the body rested; yet, as the gentleman told me, he could neither feel nor see any such thing.' " We have stated elsewhere that the same thing was accomplished last year, before the Prince of Wales and his suite.
Such feats as the above are nothing in comparison to what is done by professed jugglers; "feats," remarks the above-quoted author, "which might be regarded as simply inventions if told by one author only, but which seem to deserve prominent notice from being recounted by a series of authors, certainly independent of one another, and writing at long intervals of time and place. Our first witness is Ibn Batuta, and
hocus-pocus!" ' "
And who doubts but that it is a "hocus-pocus," an illusion, or Maya, as the Hindus express it? But when such an illusion can be forced on, say, ten thousand people at the same time, as we have seen it performed during a public festival, surely the means by which such an astounding hallucination can be produced merits the attention of science! When by such magic a man who stands before you, in a room, the doors of which you have closed and of which the keys are in your hand, suddenly disappears, vanishes like a flash of light, and you see him nowhere but hear his voice from different parts of the room addressing you and laughing at your perplexity, surely such an art is not unworthy either of Mr. Huxley or Dr. Carpenter. Is it not quite as well worth spending time over, as the lesser mystery--why barnyard cocks crow at midnight?
What Ibn Batuta, the Moor, saw in China about the year 1348, Colonel Yule shows Edward Melton, "an Anglo-Dutch traveller," witnessing
In the memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire, the performances of seven jugglers from Bengal, who exhibited before him, are thus described: "Ninth. They produced a man whom they divided limb from limb, actually severing his head from the body. They scattered these mutilated members along the ground, and in this state they lay some time. They then extended a sheet over the spot, and one of the men putting himself under the sheet, in a few minutes came from below, followed by the individual supposed to have been cut into joints, in perfect health and condition. . . . Twenty-third. They produced a chain of fifty cubits in length, and in my presence threw one end of it toward the sky, where it remained as if fastened to something in the air. A dog was then brought forward and being placed at the lower end of the chain, immediately ran up, and reaching the other end, immediately disappeared in the air. In the same manner a hog, a panther, a lion, and a tiger were successively sent up the chain, and all equally disappeared at the upper end of the chain. At last they took down the chain, and put it into the bag, no one ever discovering in what way the different animals were made to vanish into the air in the mysterious manner above described." **
We have in our possession a picture painted from such a Persian conjurer, with a man, or rather the various limbs of what was a minute before a man, scattered before him. We have seen such conjurers, and witnessed such performances more than once and in various places.
If the molecules of the cadaver are imbued with the physical and chemical forces of the living organism, * what is to prevent them from being set again in motion, provided we know the nature of the vital force, and how to command it? The materialist can certainly offer no objection, for with him it is no question of reinfusing a soul. For him the soul has no existence, and the human body may be regarded simply as a vital engine--a locomotive which will start upon the application of heat and force, and stop when they are withdrawn. To the theologian the case offers greater difficulties, for, in his view, death cuts asunder the tie which binds soul and body, and the one can no more be returned into the other without miracle than the born infant can be compelled to resume its foetal life after parturition and the severing of the umbilicus. But the Hermetic philosopher stands between these two irreconcilable antagonists, "master of the situation. He knows the nature of the soul--a form composed of nervous fluid and atmospheric ether--and knows how the vital force can be made active or passive at will, so long as there is no final destruction of some necessary organ. The claims of Gaffarilus--which, by the bye, appeared so preposterous in 1650 **--were later corroborated by science.
And, if the astral form of even a plant when its body is dead still lingers in the ashes, will skeptics persist in saying that the soul of man, the inner ego, is after the death of the grosser form at once dissolved, and is no more? "At death," says the philosopher, "the one body exudes from the other, by osmose and through the brain; it is held near its old garment by a double attraction, physical and spiritual, until the latter decomposes; and if the proper conditions are given the soul can reinhabit it and resume the suspended life. It does it in sleep; it does it more thoroughly in trance; most surprisingly at the command and with the assistance of the Hermetic adept. Iamblichus declared that a person endowed with such resuscitating powers is 'full of God.' All the subordinate spirits of the upper spheres are at his command, for he is no longer a mortal, but himself a god. In his Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul remarks that 'the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.' "
Some persons have the natural and some the acquired power of withdrawing the inner from the outer body, at will, and causing it to perform long journeys, and be seen by those whom it visits. Numerous are the instances recorded by unimpeachable witnesses of the "doubles" of persons having been seen and conversed with, hundreds of miles from the places where the persons themselves were known to be. Hermotimus, if we may credit Pliny and Plutarch, *** could at will fall into a trance and then his second soul proceeded to any distant place he chose.
The Abbe Tritheim, the famous author of Steganographie, who lived in the seventeenth century, could converse with his friends by the mere power of his will. "I can make my thoughts known to the initiated,"
According to Napier, Osborne, Major Lawes, Quenouillet, Nikiforovitch, and many other modern witnesses, fakirs are now proved to be able, by a long course of diet, preparation, and repose, to bring their bodies into a condition which enables them to be buried six feet under ground for an indefinite period. Sir Claude Wade was present at the court of Rundjit Singh, when the fakir, mentioned by the Honorable Captain Osborne, was buried alive for six weeks, in a box placed in a cell three feet below the floor of the room. *** To prevent the chance of deception, a guard comprising two companies of soldiers had been detailed, and four sentries "were furnished and relieved every two hours, night and day, to guard the building from intrusion. . . . On opening it," says Sir Claude, "we saw a figure enclosed in a bag of white linen fastened by a string over the head . . . the servant then began pouring warm water over the figure . . . the legs and arms of the body were shrivelled and stiff, the face full, the head reclining on the shoulder like that of a corpse. I then called to the medical gentleman who was attending me, to come down and inspect the body, which he did, but could discover no pulsation in the heart, the temples, or the arm. There was, however, a heat about the region of the brain, which no other part of the body exhibited."
Regretting that the limits of our space forbid the quotation of the
Then, here is a case, only one of many, substantiated by the testimony of two English noblemen--one of them an army officer--and a Hindu Prince, who was as great a skeptic as themselves. It places science in this embarrassing dilemma: it must either give the lie to many unimpeachable witnesses, or admit that if one fakir can resuscitate after six weeks, any other fakir can also; and if a fakir, why not a Lazarus, a Shunamite boy, or the daughter of Jairus? *
Todd Thomson, above quoted, gives several remarkable cases of such a suspended animation. Among others he mentions a certain Francis Neville, a Norman gentleman, who twice apparently died, and was twice in the act of being buried. But, at the moment when the coffin was being lowered in the grave, he spontaneously revived. In the seventeenth century, Lady Russell, to all appearance died, and was about to be buried, but as the bell was tolling for her funeral, she sat up in her coffin and exclaimed, "It is time to go to church!" Diemerbroeck mentions a peasant who gave no signs of life for three days, but when placed in his coffin, near the grave, revived and lived many years afterward. In 1836, a respectable citizen of Brussels fell into a profound lethargy on a Sunday morning. On Monday, as his attendants were preparing to screw the lid of the coffin, the supposed corpse sat up, rubbed his eyes, and called for his coffee and a newspaper. ****
Such cases of apparent death are not very infrequently reported in the newspaper press. As we write (April, 1877), we find in a London letter to the New York Times, the following paragraph: "Miss Annie Goodale, the actress, died three weeks ago. Up to yesterday she was not buried. The corpse is warm and limp, and the features as soft and mobile as when in life. Several physicians have examined her, and have ordered that the body shall be watched night and day. The poor lady is evidently in a trance, but whether she is destined to come to life it is impossible to say."
The kabalists say that a man is not dead when his body is entombed. Death is never sudden; for, according to Hermes, nothing goes in nature by violent transitions. Everything is gradual, and as it required a long and gradual development to produce the living human being, so time is required to completely withdraw vitality from the carcass. "Death can no more be an absolute end, than birth a real beginning. Birth proves the preexistence of the being, as death proves immortality," says the same French kabalist.
While implicitly believing in the restoration of the daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, and in other Bible-miracles, well-educated Christians, who otherwise would feel indignant at being called superstitious, meet all such cases as that of Apollonius and the girl said by his biographer to have been recalled to life by him, with scornful skepticism. Diogenes Laertius, who mentions a woman restored to life by Empedocles, is treated with no more respect; and the name of Pagan thaumaturgist, in the eyes of Christians, is but a synonym for impostor. Our scientists are at least one degree more rational; they embrace all Bible prophets and apostles, and the heathen miracle-doers in two categories of hallucinated fools and deceitful tricksters.
But Christians and materialists might, with a very little effort on their
She is not dead but sleepeth," the clergy force their god to become a breaker of his own laws and grant unjustly to one what he denies to all others, and with no better object in view than to produce a useless miracle. In the second case, notwithstanding the words of the biographer of Apollonius, so plain and precise that there is not the slightest cause to misunderstand them, they charge Philostratus with deliberate imposture. Who could be fairer than he, who less open to the charge of mystification, when, in describing the resuscitation of the young girl by the Tyanian sage, in the presence of a large concourse of people, the biographer says, "she had seemed to die."
In other words, he very clearly indicates a case of suspended animation; and then adds immediately, "as the rain fell very fast on the young girl," while she was being carried to the pile, "with her face turned upwards, this, also, might have excited her senses." * Does this not show most plainly that Philostratus saw no miracle in that resuscitation? Does it not rather imply, if anything, the great learning and skill of Apollonius, "who like Asclepiades had the merit of distinguishing at a glance between real and apparent death"? **
A resuscitation, after the soul and spirit have entirely separated from the body, and the last electric thread is severed, is as impossible as for a once disembodied spirit to reincarnate itself once more on this earth, except as described in previous chapters. "A leaf, once fallen off, does not reattach itself to the branch," says Eliphas Levi. "The caterpillar becomes a butterfly, but the butterfly does not again return to the grub. Nature closes the door behind all that passes, and pushes life forward. Forms pass, thought remains, and does not recall that which it has once exhausted." ***
Why should it be imagined that Asclepiades and Apollonius enjoyed exceptional powers for the discernment of actual death? Has any modern school of medicine this knowledge to impart to its students? Let their authorities answer for them. These prodigies of Jesus and Apollonius
Is it because the modern physician has not yet found the secret which the theurgists evidently possessed that its possibility is denied?
Neglected as psychology now is, and with the strangely chaotic state in which physiology is confessed to be by its most fair students, certainly it is not very likely that our men of science will soon rediscover the lost knowledge of the ancients. In the days of old, when prophets were not treated as charlatans, nor thaumaturgists as impostors, there were colleges instituted for teaching prophecy and occult sciences in general. Samuel is recorded as the chief of such an institution at Ramah; Elisha, also, at Jericho. The schools of hazim, prophets or seers, were celebrated throughout the country. Hillel had a regular academy, and Socrates is well known to have sent away several of his disciples to study manticism. The study of magic, or wisdom, included every branch of science, the metaphysical as well as the physical, psychology and physiology in their common and occult phases, and the study of alchemy was universal, for it was both a physical and a spiritual science. Therefore why doubt or wonder that the ancients, who studied nature under its double aspect, achieved discoveries which to our modern physicists, who study but its dead letter, are a closed book?
Thus, the question at issue is not whether a dead body can be resuscitated--for, to assert that would be to assume the possibility of a miracle, which is absurd--but, to assure ourselves whether the medical authorities pretend to determine the precise moment of death. The kabalists say that death occurs at the instant when both the astral body, or life-principle, and the spirit part forever with the corporeal body. The scientific physician who denies both astral body and spirit, and admits the existence of nothing more than the life-principle, judges death to occur when life is apparently extinct. When the beating of the heart and the action of the lungs cease, and rigor mortis is manifested, and especially when decomposition begins, they pronounce the patient dead. But the annals of medicine teem with examples of "suspended animation"
somehow he could come to life again."
There occurred in Moscow, a few years since, a remarkable instance of apparent death. The wife of a wealthy merchant lay in the cataleptic state seventeen days, during which the authorities made several attempts to bury her; but, as decomposition had not set in, the family averted the ceremony, and at the end of that time she was restored to life.
The above instances show that the most learned men in the medical profession are unable to be certain when a person is dead. What they call "suspended animation," is that state from which the patient spontaneously recovers, through an effort of his own spirit, which may be provoked by any one of many causes. In these cases, the astral body has not parted from the physical body; its external functions are simply suspended; the subject is in a state of torpor, and the restoration is nothing but a recovery from it.
But, in the case of what physiologists would call "real death," but which is not actually so, the astral body has withdrawn; perhaps local decomposition has set in. How shall the man be brought to life again? The answer is, the interior body must be forced back into the exterior one, and vitality reawakened in the latter. The clock has run down, it must be wound. If death is absolute; if the organs have not only ceased to act, but have lost the susceptibility of renewed action, then the whole universe would have to be thrown into chaos to resuscitate the corpse--a miracle would be demanded. But, as we said before, the man is not dead when he is cold, stiff, pulseless, breathless, and even showing signs of decomposition; he is not dead when buried, nor afterward, until a certain point is reached. That point is, when the vital organs have become so decomposed, that if reanimated, they could not perform their customary functions; when the mainspring and cogs of the machine, so to speak, are so eaten away by rust, that they would snap upon the turning of the key. Until that point is reached, the astral body may be caused, without miracle, to reenter its former tabernacle, either by an effort of its
Science des Esprits, say that, "When a man falls into the last sleep, he is plunged at first into a sort of dream, before gaining consciousness in the other side of life. He sees, then, either in a beautiful vision, or in a terrible nightmare, the paradise or hell, in which he believed during his mortal existence. This is why it often happens, that the affrighted soul breaks violently back into the terrestrial life it has just left, and why some who were really dead, i.e., who, if left alone and quiet, would have peaceably passed away forever in a state of unconscious lethargy, when entombed too soon, reawake to life in the grave."
In this connection, the reader may perhaps recall the well-known case of the old man who had left some generous gifts in his will to his orphaned nieces; which document, just before his death, he had confided to his rich son, with injunctions to carry out his wishes. But, he had not been dead more than a few hours before the son, finding himself alone with the corpse, tore the will and burned it. The sight of this impious deed apparently recalled the hovering spirit, and the old man, rising from his couch of death, uttered a fierce malediction upon the horror-stricken wretch, and then fell back again, and yielded up his spirit--this time forever. Dion Boucicault makes use of an incident of this kind in his powerful
Balfour Stewart is right--scientists "know nothing, or next to nothing, of the ultimate structure and properties of matter, whether organic or inorganic."
We are now on such firm ground, that we will take another step in advance. The same knowledge and control of the occult forces, including the vital force which enabled the fakir temporarily to leave and then reenter his body, and Jesus, Apollonius, and Elisha to recall their several subjects to life, made it possible for the ancient hierophants to animate statues, and cause them to act and speak like living creatures. It is the same knowledge and power which made it possible for Paracelsus to create his homunculi; for Aaron to change his rod into a serpent and a budding branch; Moses to cover Egypt with frogs and other pests; and the Egyptian theurgist of our day to vivify his pigmy Mandragora, which has physical life but no soul. It was no more wonderful that upon presenting the necessary conditions Moses should call into life large reptiles and insects, than that, under like favoring conditions, the physical scientist should call into life the small ones which he names bacteria.
And now, in connection with ancient miracle-doers and prophets, let us bring forward the claims of the modern mediums. Nearly every form of phenomena recorded in the sacred and profane histories of the world
Of Apollonius, who asserted that he could see "the present and the future in a clear mirror," on account of his abstemious mode of life, the professor very beautifully observes: "This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits, all is as one day or state, the past and future comprised in the present." *
Were these God-like men "mediums," as the orthodox spiritualists
The reader must bear in mind the definition of the term, for, unless this is clearly understood, confusion will be inevitable. Mediumship of this kind may be either active or passive, repellent or receptive, positive or negative. Mediumship is measured by the quality of the aura with which the individual is surrounded. This may be dense, cloudy, noisome, mephitic, nauseating to the pure spirit, and attract only those foul beings who delight in it, as the eel does in turbid waters, or, it may be pure, crystalline, limpid, opalescent as the morning dew. All depends upon the moral character of the medium.
About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person's aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one's own immortal demon. It is literally
passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
"On one occasion, while I and others were in a cafe with Sir Maswell, he ordered his dobochy to introduce the charmer. In a few moments a lean Hindu, almost naked, with an ascetic face and bronzed color entered. Around his neck, arms, thighs, and body were coiled serpents of different sizes. After saluting us, he said, 'God be with you, I am Chibh-Chondor, son of Chibh-Gontnalh-Mava.'
" 'We desire to see what you can do,' said our host.
" 'I obey the orders of Siva, who has sent me here,' replied the fakir, squatting down on one of the marble slabs.
"The serpents raised their heads and hissed, but without showing any anger. Then taking a small pipe, attached to a wick in his hair, he produced scarcely audible sounds, imitating the tailapaca, a bird that feeds upon bruised cocoanuts. Here the serpents uncoiled themselves, and one after another glided to the floor. As soon as they touched the ground they raised about one-third of their bodies, and began to keep time to their master's music. Suddenly the fakir dropped his instrument and made several passes with his hands over the serpents, of whom there were about ten, all of the most deadly species of Indian cobra. His eye assumed a strange expression. We all felt an undefinable uneasiness, and sought to turn away our gaze from him. At this moment a small shocra * (monkey) whose business was to hand fire in a small brasier for lighting cigars, yielded to his influence, lay down, and fell asleep. Five minutes passed thus, and we felt that if the manipulations were to continue a few seconds more we should all fall asleep. Chondor then rose, and making two more passes over the shocra, said to it: 'Give
"Chibh-Chondor closed his seance by experimenting upon inanimate objects. By mere passes with his hands in the direction of the object to be acted upon, and without leaving his seat, he paled and extinguished lights in the furthest parts of the room, moved the furniture, including the divans upon which we sat, opened and closed doors. Catching sight of a Hindu who was drawing water from a well in the garden, he made a pass in his direction, and the rope suddenly stopped in its descent, resisting all the efforts of the astonished gardener. With another pass the rope again descended.
"I asked Chibh-Chondor: 'Do you employ the same means in acting upon inanimate objects that you do upon living creatures?'
"He replied, 'I have only one means.'
" 'What is it?'
" 'The will. Man, who is the end of all intellectual and material forces, must dominate over all. The Brahmans know nothing besides this.' "
"Sanang Setzen," says Colonel Yule, * "enumerates a variety of the wonderful acts which could be performed through the Dharani (mystic Hindu charms). Such were sticking a peg into solid rock; restoring the dead to life; turning a dead body into gold; penetrating everywhere as air does (in astral form); flying; catching wild beasts with the hand; reading thoughts; making water flow backward; eating tiles; sitting in the air with the legs doubled under, etc." Old legends ascribe to Simon Magus precisely the same powers. "He made statues to walk; leaped into the fire without being burned; flew in the air; made bread of stones; changed his shape; assumed two faces at once; converted himself into a pillar; caused closed doors to fly open spontaneously; made the vessels in a house move of themselves, etc." The Jesuit Delrio laments
without the use of a magnet, or of any attachment." * We believe WILL-POWER the most powerful of magnets. The existence of such magical power in certain persons is proved, but the existence of the Devil is a fiction, which no theology is able to demonstrate.
"There are certain men whom the Tartars honor above all in the world," says Friar Ricold, "viz., the Baxitae, who are a kind of idol-priests. These are men from India, persons of deep wisdom, well-conducted and of the gravest morals. They are usually with magic arts . . . they exhibit many illusions, and predict future events. For instance, one of eminence among them was said to fly; but the truth, however, was as it proved, that he did not fly, but did walk close to the surface of the ground without touching it; and would seem to sit down without having any substance to support him. ** This last performance was witnessed by Ibn Batuta, at Delhi," adds Colonel Yule, who quotes the friar in the Book of Ser Marco Polo, "in the presence of Sultan Mahomet Tughlak; and it was professedly exhibited by a Brahman at Madras in the present century, a descendant doubtless of those Brahmans whom Apollonius saw walking two cubits from the ground. It is also described by the worthy Francis Valentyn, as a performance known and practiced in his own day in India. It is related, he says, that 'a man will first go and sit on three sticks put together so as to form a tripod; after which, first one stick, then a second, then a third shall be removed from under him, and the man shall not fall but shall still remain sitting in the air! Yet I have spoken with two friends who had seen this at one and the same time; and one of them, I may add, mistrusting his own eyes, had taken the trouble to feel about with a long stick if there were nothing on which the body rested; yet, as the gentleman told me, he could neither feel nor see any such thing.' " We have stated elsewhere that the same thing was accomplished last year, before the Prince of Wales and his suite.
Such feats as the above are nothing in comparison to what is done by professed jugglers; "feats," remarks the above-quoted author, "which might be regarded as simply inventions if told by one author only, but which seem to deserve prominent notice from being recounted by a series of authors, certainly independent of one another, and writing at long intervals of time and place. Our first witness is Ibn Batuta, and
hocus-pocus!" ' "
And who doubts but that it is a "hocus-pocus," an illusion, or Maya, as the Hindus express it? But when such an illusion can be forced on, say, ten thousand people at the same time, as we have seen it performed during a public festival, surely the means by which such an astounding hallucination can be produced merits the attention of science! When by such magic a man who stands before you, in a room, the doors of which you have closed and of which the keys are in your hand, suddenly disappears, vanishes like a flash of light, and you see him nowhere but hear his voice from different parts of the room addressing you and laughing at your perplexity, surely such an art is not unworthy either of Mr. Huxley or Dr. Carpenter. Is it not quite as well worth spending time over, as the lesser mystery--why barnyard cocks crow at midnight?
What Ibn Batuta, the Moor, saw in China about the year 1348, Colonel Yule shows Edward Melton, "an Anglo-Dutch traveller," witnessing
In the memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire, the performances of seven jugglers from Bengal, who exhibited before him, are thus described: "Ninth. They produced a man whom they divided limb from limb, actually severing his head from the body. They scattered these mutilated members along the ground, and in this state they lay some time. They then extended a sheet over the spot, and one of the men putting himself under the sheet, in a few minutes came from below, followed by the individual supposed to have been cut into joints, in perfect health and condition. . . . Twenty-third. They produced a chain of fifty cubits in length, and in my presence threw one end of it toward the sky, where it remained as if fastened to something in the air. A dog was then brought forward and being placed at the lower end of the chain, immediately ran up, and reaching the other end, immediately disappeared in the air. In the same manner a hog, a panther, a lion, and a tiger were successively sent up the chain, and all equally disappeared at the upper end of the chain. At last they took down the chain, and put it into the bag, no one ever discovering in what way the different animals were made to vanish into the air in the mysterious manner above described." **
We have in our possession a picture painted from such a Persian conjurer, with a man, or rather the various limbs of what was a minute before a man, scattered before him. We have seen such conjurers, and witnessed such performances more than once and in various places.
If the molecules of the cadaver are imbued with the physical and chemical forces of the living organism, * what is to prevent them from being set again in motion, provided we know the nature of the vital force, and how to command it? The materialist can certainly offer no objection, for with him it is no question of reinfusing a soul. For him the soul has no existence, and the human body may be regarded simply as a vital engine--a locomotive which will start upon the application of heat and force, and stop when they are withdrawn. To the theologian the case offers greater difficulties, for, in his view, death cuts asunder the tie which binds soul and body, and the one can no more be returned into the other without miracle than the born infant can be compelled to resume its foetal life after parturition and the severing of the umbilicus. But the Hermetic philosopher stands between these two irreconcilable antagonists, "master of the situation. He knows the nature of the soul--a form composed of nervous fluid and atmospheric ether--and knows how the vital force can be made active or passive at will, so long as there is no final destruction of some necessary organ. The claims of Gaffarilus--which, by the bye, appeared so preposterous in 1650 **--were later corroborated by science.
And, if the astral form of even a plant when its body is dead still lingers in the ashes, will skeptics persist in saying that the soul of man, the inner ego, is after the death of the grosser form at once dissolved, and is no more? "At death," says the philosopher, "the one body exudes from the other, by osmose and through the brain; it is held near its old garment by a double attraction, physical and spiritual, until the latter decomposes; and if the proper conditions are given the soul can reinhabit it and resume the suspended life. It does it in sleep; it does it more thoroughly in trance; most surprisingly at the command and with the assistance of the Hermetic adept. Iamblichus declared that a person endowed with such resuscitating powers is 'full of God.' All the subordinate spirits of the upper spheres are at his command, for he is no longer a mortal, but himself a god. In his Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul remarks that 'the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.' "
Some persons have the natural and some the acquired power of withdrawing the inner from the outer body, at will, and causing it to perform long journeys, and be seen by those whom it visits. Numerous are the instances recorded by unimpeachable witnesses of the "doubles" of persons having been seen and conversed with, hundreds of miles from the places where the persons themselves were known to be. Hermotimus, if we may credit Pliny and Plutarch, *** could at will fall into a trance and then his second soul proceeded to any distant place he chose.
The Abbe Tritheim, the famous author of Steganographie, who lived in the seventeenth century, could converse with his friends by the mere power of his will. "I can make my thoughts known to the initiated,"
According to Napier, Osborne, Major Lawes, Quenouillet, Nikiforovitch, and many other modern witnesses, fakirs are now proved to be able, by a long course of diet, preparation, and repose, to bring their bodies into a condition which enables them to be buried six feet under ground for an indefinite period. Sir Claude Wade was present at the court of Rundjit Singh, when the fakir, mentioned by the Honorable Captain Osborne, was buried alive for six weeks, in a box placed in a cell three feet below the floor of the room. *** To prevent the chance of deception, a guard comprising two companies of soldiers had been detailed, and four sentries "were furnished and relieved every two hours, night and day, to guard the building from intrusion. . . . On opening it," says Sir Claude, "we saw a figure enclosed in a bag of white linen fastened by a string over the head . . . the servant then began pouring warm water over the figure . . . the legs and arms of the body were shrivelled and stiff, the face full, the head reclining on the shoulder like that of a corpse. I then called to the medical gentleman who was attending me, to come down and inspect the body, which he did, but could discover no pulsation in the heart, the temples, or the arm. There was, however, a heat about the region of the brain, which no other part of the body exhibited."
Regretting that the limits of our space forbid the quotation of the
Then, here is a case, only one of many, substantiated by the testimony of two English noblemen--one of them an army officer--and a Hindu Prince, who was as great a skeptic as themselves. It places science in this embarrassing dilemma: it must either give the lie to many unimpeachable witnesses, or admit that if one fakir can resuscitate after six weeks, any other fakir can also; and if a fakir, why not a Lazarus, a Shunamite boy, or the daughter of Jairus? *
Todd Thomson, above quoted, gives several remarkable cases of such a suspended animation. Among others he mentions a certain Francis Neville, a Norman gentleman, who twice apparently died, and was twice in the act of being buried. But, at the moment when the coffin was being lowered in the grave, he spontaneously revived. In the seventeenth century, Lady Russell, to all appearance died, and was about to be buried, but as the bell was tolling for her funeral, she sat up in her coffin and exclaimed, "It is time to go to church!" Diemerbroeck mentions a peasant who gave no signs of life for three days, but when placed in his coffin, near the grave, revived and lived many years afterward. In 1836, a respectable citizen of Brussels fell into a profound lethargy on a Sunday morning. On Monday, as his attendants were preparing to screw the lid of the coffin, the supposed corpse sat up, rubbed his eyes, and called for his coffee and a newspaper. ****
Such cases of apparent death are not very infrequently reported in the newspaper press. As we write (April, 1877), we find in a London letter to the New York Times, the following paragraph: "Miss Annie Goodale, the actress, died three weeks ago. Up to yesterday she was not buried. The corpse is warm and limp, and the features as soft and mobile as when in life. Several physicians have examined her, and have ordered that the body shall be watched night and day. The poor lady is evidently in a trance, but whether she is destined to come to life it is impossible to say."
The kabalists say that a man is not dead when his body is entombed. Death is never sudden; for, according to Hermes, nothing goes in nature by violent transitions. Everything is gradual, and as it required a long and gradual development to produce the living human being, so time is required to completely withdraw vitality from the carcass. "Death can no more be an absolute end, than birth a real beginning. Birth proves the preexistence of the being, as death proves immortality," says the same French kabalist.
While implicitly believing in the restoration of the daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, and in other Bible-miracles, well-educated Christians, who otherwise would feel indignant at being called superstitious, meet all such cases as that of Apollonius and the girl said by his biographer to have been recalled to life by him, with scornful skepticism. Diogenes Laertius, who mentions a woman restored to life by Empedocles, is treated with no more respect; and the name of Pagan thaumaturgist, in the eyes of Christians, is but a synonym for impostor. Our scientists are at least one degree more rational; they embrace all Bible prophets and apostles, and the heathen miracle-doers in two categories of hallucinated fools and deceitful tricksters.
But Christians and materialists might, with a very little effort on their
She is not dead but sleepeth," the clergy force their god to become a breaker of his own laws and grant unjustly to one what he denies to all others, and with no better object in view than to produce a useless miracle. In the second case, notwithstanding the words of the biographer of Apollonius, so plain and precise that there is not the slightest cause to misunderstand them, they charge Philostratus with deliberate imposture. Who could be fairer than he, who less open to the charge of mystification, when, in describing the resuscitation of the young girl by the Tyanian sage, in the presence of a large concourse of people, the biographer says, "she had seemed to die."
In other words, he very clearly indicates a case of suspended animation; and then adds immediately, "as the rain fell very fast on the young girl," while she was being carried to the pile, "with her face turned upwards, this, also, might have excited her senses." * Does this not show most plainly that Philostratus saw no miracle in that resuscitation? Does it not rather imply, if anything, the great learning and skill of Apollonius, "who like Asclepiades had the merit of distinguishing at a glance between real and apparent death"? **
A resuscitation, after the soul and spirit have entirely separated from the body, and the last electric thread is severed, is as impossible as for a once disembodied spirit to reincarnate itself once more on this earth, except as described in previous chapters. "A leaf, once fallen off, does not reattach itself to the branch," says Eliphas Levi. "The caterpillar becomes a butterfly, but the butterfly does not again return to the grub. Nature closes the door behind all that passes, and pushes life forward. Forms pass, thought remains, and does not recall that which it has once exhausted." ***
Why should it be imagined that Asclepiades and Apollonius enjoyed exceptional powers for the discernment of actual death? Has any modern school of medicine this knowledge to impart to its students? Let their authorities answer for them. These prodigies of Jesus and Apollonius
Is it because the modern physician has not yet found the secret which the theurgists evidently possessed that its possibility is denied?
Neglected as psychology now is, and with the strangely chaotic state in which physiology is confessed to be by its most fair students, certainly it is not very likely that our men of science will soon rediscover the lost knowledge of the ancients. In the days of old, when prophets were not treated as charlatans, nor thaumaturgists as impostors, there were colleges instituted for teaching prophecy and occult sciences in general. Samuel is recorded as the chief of such an institution at Ramah; Elisha, also, at Jericho. The schools of hazim, prophets or seers, were celebrated throughout the country. Hillel had a regular academy, and Socrates is well known to have sent away several of his disciples to study manticism. The study of magic, or wisdom, included every branch of science, the metaphysical as well as the physical, psychology and physiology in their common and occult phases, and the study of alchemy was universal, for it was both a physical and a spiritual science. Therefore why doubt or wonder that the ancients, who studied nature under its double aspect, achieved discoveries which to our modern physicists, who study but its dead letter, are a closed book?
Thus, the question at issue is not whether a dead body can be resuscitated--for, to assert that would be to assume the possibility of a miracle, which is absurd--but, to assure ourselves whether the medical authorities pretend to determine the precise moment of death. The kabalists say that death occurs at the instant when both the astral body, or life-principle, and the spirit part forever with the corporeal body. The scientific physician who denies both astral body and spirit, and admits the existence of nothing more than the life-principle, judges death to occur when life is apparently extinct. When the beating of the heart and the action of the lungs cease, and rigor mortis is manifested, and especially when decomposition begins, they pronounce the patient dead. But the annals of medicine teem with examples of "suspended animation"
somehow he could come to life again."
There occurred in Moscow, a few years since, a remarkable instance of apparent death. The wife of a wealthy merchant lay in the cataleptic state seventeen days, during which the authorities made several attempts to bury her; but, as decomposition had not set in, the family averted the ceremony, and at the end of that time she was restored to life.
The above instances show that the most learned men in the medical profession are unable to be certain when a person is dead. What they call "suspended animation," is that state from which the patient spontaneously recovers, through an effort of his own spirit, which may be provoked by any one of many causes. In these cases, the astral body has not parted from the physical body; its external functions are simply suspended; the subject is in a state of torpor, and the restoration is nothing but a recovery from it.
But, in the case of what physiologists would call "real death," but which is not actually so, the astral body has withdrawn; perhaps local decomposition has set in. How shall the man be brought to life again? The answer is, the interior body must be forced back into the exterior one, and vitality reawakened in the latter. The clock has run down, it must be wound. If death is absolute; if the organs have not only ceased to act, but have lost the susceptibility of renewed action, then the whole universe would have to be thrown into chaos to resuscitate the corpse--a miracle would be demanded. But, as we said before, the man is not dead when he is cold, stiff, pulseless, breathless, and even showing signs of decomposition; he is not dead when buried, nor afterward, until a certain point is reached. That point is, when the vital organs have become so decomposed, that if reanimated, they could not perform their customary functions; when the mainspring and cogs of the machine, so to speak, are so eaten away by rust, that they would snap upon the turning of the key. Until that point is reached, the astral body may be caused, without miracle, to reenter its former tabernacle, either by an effort of its
Science des Esprits, say that, "When a man falls into the last sleep, he is plunged at first into a sort of dream, before gaining consciousness in the other side of life. He sees, then, either in a beautiful vision, or in a terrible nightmare, the paradise or hell, in which he believed during his mortal existence. This is why it often happens, that the affrighted soul breaks violently back into the terrestrial life it has just left, and why some who were really dead, i.e., who, if left alone and quiet, would have peaceably passed away forever in a state of unconscious lethargy, when entombed too soon, reawake to life in the grave."
In this connection, the reader may perhaps recall the well-known case of the old man who had left some generous gifts in his will to his orphaned nieces; which document, just before his death, he had confided to his rich son, with injunctions to carry out his wishes. But, he had not been dead more than a few hours before the son, finding himself alone with the corpse, tore the will and burned it. The sight of this impious deed apparently recalled the hovering spirit, and the old man, rising from his couch of death, uttered a fierce malediction upon the horror-stricken wretch, and then fell back again, and yielded up his spirit--this time forever. Dion Boucicault makes use of an incident of this kind in his powerful
Balfour Stewart is right--scientists "know nothing, or next to nothing, of the ultimate structure and properties of matter, whether organic or inorganic."
We are now on such firm ground, that we will take another step in advance. The same knowledge and control of the occult forces, including the vital force which enabled the fakir temporarily to leave and then reenter his body, and Jesus, Apollonius, and Elisha to recall their several subjects to life, made it possible for the ancient hierophants to animate statues, and cause them to act and speak like living creatures. It is the same knowledge and power which made it possible for Paracelsus to create his homunculi; for Aaron to change his rod into a serpent and a budding branch; Moses to cover Egypt with frogs and other pests; and the Egyptian theurgist of our day to vivify his pigmy Mandragora, which has physical life but no soul. It was no more wonderful that upon presenting the necessary conditions Moses should call into life large reptiles and insects, than that, under like favoring conditions, the physical scientist should call into life the small ones which he names bacteria.
And now, in connection with ancient miracle-doers and prophets, let us bring forward the claims of the modern mediums. Nearly every form of phenomena recorded in the sacred and profane histories of the world
Of Apollonius, who asserted that he could see "the present and the future in a clear mirror," on account of his abstemious mode of life, the professor very beautifully observes: "This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits, all is as one day or state, the past and future comprised in the present." *
Were these God-like men "mediums," as the orthodox spiritualists
The reader must bear in mind the definition of the term, for, unless this is clearly understood, confusion will be inevitable. Mediumship of this kind may be either active or passive, repellent or receptive, positive or negative. Mediumship is measured by the quality of the aura with which the individual is surrounded. This may be dense, cloudy, noisome, mephitic, nauseating to the pure spirit, and attract only those foul beings who delight in it, as the eel does in turbid waters, or, it may be pure, crystalline, limpid, opalescent as the morning dew. All depends upon the moral character of the medium.
About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person's aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one's own immortal demon. It is literally
passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
"Chibh-Chondor closed his seance by experimenting upon inanimate objects. By mere passes with his hands in the direction of the object to be acted upon, and without leaving his seat, he paled and extinguished lights in the furthest parts of the room, moved the furniture, including the divans upon which we sat, opened and closed doors. Catching sight of a Hindu who was drawing water from a well in the garden, he made a pass in his direction, and the rope suddenly stopped in its descent, resisting all the efforts of the astonished gardener. With another pass the rope again descended.
"I asked Chibh-Chondor: 'Do you employ the same means in acting upon inanimate objects that you do upon living creatures?'
"He replied, 'I have only one means.'
" 'What is it?'
" 'The will. Man, who is the end of all intellectual and material forces, must dominate over all. The Brahmans know nothing besides this.' "
"Sanang Setzen," says Colonel Yule, * "enumerates a variety of the wonderful acts which could be performed through the Dharani (mystic Hindu charms). Such were sticking a peg into solid rock; restoring the dead to life; turning a dead body into gold; penetrating everywhere as air does (in astral form); flying; catching wild beasts with the hand; reading thoughts; making water flow backward; eating tiles; sitting in the air with the legs doubled under, etc." Old legends ascribe to Simon Magus precisely the same powers. "He made statues to walk; leaped into the fire without being burned; flew in the air; made bread of stones; changed his shape; assumed two faces at once; converted himself into a pillar; caused closed doors to fly open spontaneously; made the vessels in a house move of themselves, etc." The Jesuit Delrio laments
without the use of a magnet, or of any attachment." * We believe WILL-POWER the most powerful of magnets. The existence of such magical power in certain persons is proved, but the existence of the Devil is a fiction, which no theology is able to demonstrate.
"There are certain men whom the Tartars honor above all in the world," says Friar Ricold, "viz., the Baxitae, who are a kind of idol-priests. These are men from India, persons of deep wisdom, well-conducted and of the gravest morals. They are usually with magic arts . . . they exhibit many illusions, and predict future events. For instance, one of eminence among them was said to fly; but the truth, however, was as it proved, that he did not fly, but did walk close to the surface of the ground without touching it; and would seem to sit down without having any substance to support him. ** This last performance was witnessed by Ibn Batuta, at Delhi," adds Colonel Yule, who quotes the friar in the Book of Ser Marco Polo, "in the presence of Sultan Mahomet Tughlak; and it was professedly exhibited by a Brahman at Madras in the present century, a descendant doubtless of those Brahmans whom Apollonius saw walking two cubits from the ground. It is also described by the worthy Francis Valentyn, as a performance known and practiced in his own day in India. It is related, he says, that 'a man will first go and sit on three sticks put together so as to form a tripod; after which, first one stick, then a second, then a third shall be removed from under him, and the man shall not fall but shall still remain sitting in the air! Yet I have spoken with two friends who had seen this at one and the same time; and one of them, I may add, mistrusting his own eyes, had taken the trouble to feel about with a long stick if there were nothing on which the body rested; yet, as the gentleman told me, he could neither feel nor see any such thing.' " We have stated elsewhere that the same thing was accomplished last year, before the Prince of Wales and his suite.
Such feats as the above are nothing in comparison to what is done by professed jugglers; "feats," remarks the above-quoted author, "which might be regarded as simply inventions if told by one author only, but which seem to deserve prominent notice from being recounted by a series of authors, certainly independent of one another, and writing at long intervals of time and place. Our first witness is Ibn Batuta, and
hocus-pocus!" ' "
And who doubts but that it is a "hocus-pocus," an illusion, or Maya, as the Hindus express it? But when such an illusion can be forced on, say, ten thousand people at the same time, as we have seen it performed during a public festival, surely the means by which such an astounding hallucination can be produced merits the attention of science! When by such magic a man who stands before you, in a room, the doors of which you have closed and of which the keys are in your hand, suddenly disappears, vanishes like a flash of light, and you see him nowhere but hear his voice from different parts of the room addressing you and laughing at your perplexity, surely such an art is not unworthy either of Mr. Huxley or Dr. Carpenter. Is it not quite as well worth spending time over, as the lesser mystery--why barnyard cocks crow at midnight?
What Ibn Batuta, the Moor, saw in China about the year 1348, Colonel Yule shows Edward Melton, "an Anglo-Dutch traveller," witnessing
In the memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire, the performances of seven jugglers from Bengal, who exhibited before him, are thus described: "Ninth. They produced a man whom they divided limb from limb, actually severing his head from the body. They scattered these mutilated members along the ground, and in this state they lay some time. They then extended a sheet over the spot, and one of the men putting himself under the sheet, in a few minutes came from below, followed by the individual supposed to have been cut into joints, in perfect health and condition. . . . Twenty-third. They produced a chain of fifty cubits in length, and in my presence threw one end of it toward the sky, where it remained as if fastened to something in the air. A dog was then brought forward and being placed at the lower end of the chain, immediately ran up, and reaching the other end, immediately disappeared in the air. In the same manner a hog, a panther, a lion, and a tiger were successively sent up the chain, and all equally disappeared at the upper end of the chain. At last they took down the chain, and put it into the bag, no one ever discovering in what way the different animals were made to vanish into the air in the mysterious manner above described." **
We have in our possession a picture painted from such a Persian conjurer, with a man, or rather the various limbs of what was a minute before a man, scattered before him. We have seen such conjurers, and witnessed such performances more than once and in various places.
If the molecules of the cadaver are imbued with the physical and chemical forces of the living organism, * what is to prevent them from being set again in motion, provided we know the nature of the vital force, and how to command it? The materialist can certainly offer no objection, for with him it is no question of reinfusing a soul. For him the soul has no existence, and the human body may be regarded simply as a vital engine--a locomotive which will start upon the application of heat and force, and stop when they are withdrawn. To the theologian the case offers greater difficulties, for, in his view, death cuts asunder the tie which binds soul and body, and the one can no more be returned into the other without miracle than the born infant can be compelled to resume its foetal life after parturition and the severing of the umbilicus. But the Hermetic philosopher stands between these two irreconcilable antagonists, "master of the situation. He knows the nature of the soul--a form composed of nervous fluid and atmospheric ether--and knows how the vital force can be made active or passive at will, so long as there is no final destruction of some necessary organ. The claims of Gaffarilus--which, by the bye, appeared so preposterous in 1650 **--were later corroborated by science.
And, if the astral form of even a plant when its body is dead still lingers in the ashes, will skeptics persist in saying that the soul of man, the inner ego, is after the death of the grosser form at once dissolved, and is no more? "At death," says the philosopher, "the one body exudes from the other, by osmose and through the brain; it is held near its old garment by a double attraction, physical and spiritual, until the latter decomposes; and if the proper conditions are given the soul can reinhabit it and resume the suspended life. It does it in sleep; it does it more thoroughly in trance; most surprisingly at the command and with the assistance of the Hermetic adept. Iamblichus declared that a person endowed with such resuscitating powers is 'full of God.' All the subordinate spirits of the upper spheres are at his command, for he is no longer a mortal, but himself a god. In his Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul remarks that 'the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.' "
Some persons have the natural and some the acquired power of withdrawing the inner from the outer body, at will, and causing it to perform long journeys, and be seen by those whom it visits. Numerous are the instances recorded by unimpeachable witnesses of the "doubles" of persons having been seen and conversed with, hundreds of miles from the places where the persons themselves were known to be. Hermotimus, if we may credit Pliny and Plutarch, *** could at will fall into a trance and then his second soul proceeded to any distant place he chose.
The Abbe Tritheim, the famous author of Steganographie, who lived in the seventeenth century, could converse with his friends by the mere power of his will. "I can make my thoughts known to the initiated,"
According to Napier, Osborne, Major Lawes, Quenouillet, Nikiforovitch, and many other modern witnesses, fakirs are now proved to be able, by a long course of diet, preparation, and repose, to bring their bodies into a condition which enables them to be buried six feet under ground for an indefinite period. Sir Claude Wade was present at the court of Rundjit Singh, when the fakir, mentioned by the Honorable Captain Osborne, was buried alive for six weeks, in a box placed in a cell three feet below the floor of the room. *** To prevent the chance of deception, a guard comprising two companies of soldiers had been detailed, and four sentries "were furnished and relieved every two hours, night and day, to guard the building from intrusion. . . . On opening it," says Sir Claude, "we saw a figure enclosed in a bag of white linen fastened by a string over the head . . . the servant then began pouring warm water over the figure . . . the legs and arms of the body were shrivelled and stiff, the face full, the head reclining on the shoulder like that of a corpse. I then called to the medical gentleman who was attending me, to come down and inspect the body, which he did, but could discover no pulsation in the heart, the temples, or the arm. There was, however, a heat about the region of the brain, which no other part of the body exhibited."
Regretting that the limits of our space forbid the quotation of the
Then, here is a case, only one of many, substantiated by the testimony of two English noblemen--one of them an army officer--and a Hindu Prince, who was as great a skeptic as themselves. It places science in this embarrassing dilemma: it must either give the lie to many unimpeachable witnesses, or admit that if one fakir can resuscitate after six weeks, any other fakir can also; and if a fakir, why not a Lazarus, a Shunamite boy, or the daughter of Jairus? *
Todd Thomson, above quoted, gives several remarkable cases of such a suspended animation. Among others he mentions a certain Francis Neville, a Norman gentleman, who twice apparently died, and was twice in the act of being buried. But, at the moment when the coffin was being lowered in the grave, he spontaneously revived. In the seventeenth century, Lady Russell, to all appearance died, and was about to be buried, but as the bell was tolling for her funeral, she sat up in her coffin and exclaimed, "It is time to go to church!" Diemerbroeck mentions a peasant who gave no signs of life for three days, but when placed in his coffin, near the grave, revived and lived many years afterward. In 1836, a respectable citizen of Brussels fell into a profound lethargy on a Sunday morning. On Monday, as his attendants were preparing to screw the lid of the coffin, the supposed corpse sat up, rubbed his eyes, and called for his coffee and a newspaper. ****
Such cases of apparent death are not very infrequently reported in the newspaper press. As we write (April, 1877), we find in a London letter to the New York Times, the following paragraph: "Miss Annie Goodale, the actress, died three weeks ago. Up to yesterday she was not buried. The corpse is warm and limp, and the features as soft and mobile as when in life. Several physicians have examined her, and have ordered that the body shall be watched night and day. The poor lady is evidently in a trance, but whether she is destined to come to life it is impossible to say."
The kabalists say that a man is not dead when his body is entombed. Death is never sudden; for, according to Hermes, nothing goes in nature by violent transitions. Everything is gradual, and as it required a long and gradual development to produce the living human being, so time is required to completely withdraw vitality from the carcass. "Death can no more be an absolute end, than birth a real beginning. Birth proves the preexistence of the being, as death proves immortality," says the same French kabalist.
While implicitly believing in the restoration of the daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, and in other Bible-miracles, well-educated Christians, who otherwise would feel indignant at being called superstitious, meet all such cases as that of Apollonius and the girl said by his biographer to have been recalled to life by him, with scornful skepticism. Diogenes Laertius, who mentions a woman restored to life by Empedocles, is treated with no more respect; and the name of Pagan thaumaturgist, in the eyes of Christians, is but a synonym for impostor. Our scientists are at least one degree more rational; they embrace all Bible prophets and apostles, and the heathen miracle-doers in two categories of hallucinated fools and deceitful tricksters.
But Christians and materialists might, with a very little effort on their
She is not dead but sleepeth," the clergy force their god to become a breaker of his own laws and grant unjustly to one what he denies to all others, and with no better object in view than to produce a useless miracle. In the second case, notwithstanding the words of the biographer of Apollonius, so plain and precise that there is not the slightest cause to misunderstand them, they charge Philostratus with deliberate imposture. Who could be fairer than he, who less open to the charge of mystification, when, in describing the resuscitation of the young girl by the Tyanian sage, in the presence of a large concourse of people, the biographer says, "she had seemed to die."
In other words, he very clearly indicates a case of suspended animation; and then adds immediately, "as the rain fell very fast on the young girl," while she was being carried to the pile, "with her face turned upwards, this, also, might have excited her senses." * Does this not show most plainly that Philostratus saw no miracle in that resuscitation? Does it not rather imply, if anything, the great learning and skill of Apollonius, "who like Asclepiades had the merit of distinguishing at a glance between real and apparent death"? **
A resuscitation, after the soul and spirit have entirely separated from the body, and the last electric thread is severed, is as impossible as for a once disembodied spirit to reincarnate itself once more on this earth, except as described in previous chapters. "A leaf, once fallen off, does not reattach itself to the branch," says Eliphas Levi. "The caterpillar becomes a butterfly, but the butterfly does not again return to the grub. Nature closes the door behind all that passes, and pushes life forward. Forms pass, thought remains, and does not recall that which it has once exhausted." ***
Why should it be imagined that Asclepiades and Apollonius enjoyed exceptional powers for the discernment of actual death? Has any modern school of medicine this knowledge to impart to its students? Let their authorities answer for them. These prodigies of Jesus and Apollonius
Is it because the modern physician has not yet found the secret which the theurgists evidently possessed that its possibility is denied?
Neglected as psychology now is, and with the strangely chaotic state in which physiology is confessed to be by its most fair students, certainly it is not very likely that our men of science will soon rediscover the lost knowledge of the ancients. In the days of old, when prophets were not treated as charlatans, nor thaumaturgists as impostors, there were colleges instituted for teaching prophecy and occult sciences in general. Samuel is recorded as the chief of such an institution at Ramah; Elisha, also, at Jericho. The schools of hazim, prophets or seers, were celebrated throughout the country. Hillel had a regular academy, and Socrates is well known to have sent away several of his disciples to study manticism. The study of magic, or wisdom, included every branch of science, the metaphysical as well as the physical, psychology and physiology in their common and occult phases, and the study of alchemy was universal, for it was both a physical and a spiritual science. Therefore why doubt or wonder that the ancients, who studied nature under its double aspect, achieved discoveries which to our modern physicists, who study but its dead letter, are a closed book?
Thus, the question at issue is not whether a dead body can be resuscitated--for, to assert that would be to assume the possibility of a miracle, which is absurd--but, to assure ourselves whether the medical authorities pretend to determine the precise moment of death. The kabalists say that death occurs at the instant when both the astral body, or life-principle, and the spirit part forever with the corporeal body. The scientific physician who denies both astral body and spirit, and admits the existence of nothing more than the life-principle, judges death to occur when life is apparently extinct. When the beating of the heart and the action of the lungs cease, and rigor mortis is manifested, and especially when decomposition begins, they pronounce the patient dead. But the annals of medicine teem with examples of "suspended animation"
somehow he could come to life again."
There occurred in Moscow, a few years since, a remarkable instance of apparent death. The wife of a wealthy merchant lay in the cataleptic state seventeen days, during which the authorities made several attempts to bury her; but, as decomposition had not set in, the family averted the ceremony, and at the end of that time she was restored to life.
The above instances show that the most learned men in the medical profession are unable to be certain when a person is dead. What they call "suspended animation," is that state from which the patient spontaneously recovers, through an effort of his own spirit, which may be provoked by any one of many causes. In these cases, the astral body has not parted from the physical body; its external functions are simply suspended; the subject is in a state of torpor, and the restoration is nothing but a recovery from it.
But, in the case of what physiologists would call "real death," but which is not actually so, the astral body has withdrawn; perhaps local decomposition has set in. How shall the man be brought to life again? The answer is, the interior body must be forced back into the exterior one, and vitality reawakened in the latter. The clock has run down, it must be wound. If death is absolute; if the organs have not only ceased to act, but have lost the susceptibility of renewed action, then the whole universe would have to be thrown into chaos to resuscitate the corpse--a miracle would be demanded. But, as we said before, the man is not dead when he is cold, stiff, pulseless, breathless, and even showing signs of decomposition; he is not dead when buried, nor afterward, until a certain point is reached. That point is, when the vital organs have become so decomposed, that if reanimated, they could not perform their customary functions; when the mainspring and cogs of the machine, so to speak, are so eaten away by rust, that they would snap upon the turning of the key. Until that point is reached, the astral body may be caused, without miracle, to reenter its former tabernacle, either by an effort of its
Science des Esprits, say that, "When a man falls into the last sleep, he is plunged at first into a sort of dream, before gaining consciousness in the other side of life. He sees, then, either in a beautiful vision, or in a terrible nightmare, the paradise or hell, in which he believed during his mortal existence. This is why it often happens, that the affrighted soul breaks violently back into the terrestrial life it has just left, and why some who were really dead, i.e., who, if left alone and quiet, would have peaceably passed away forever in a state of unconscious lethargy, when entombed too soon, reawake to life in the grave."
In this connection, the reader may perhaps recall the well-known case of the old man who had left some generous gifts in his will to his orphaned nieces; which document, just before his death, he had confided to his rich son, with injunctions to carry out his wishes. But, he had not been dead more than a few hours before the son, finding himself alone with the corpse, tore the will and burned it. The sight of this impious deed apparently recalled the hovering spirit, and the old man, rising from his couch of death, uttered a fierce malediction upon the horror-stricken wretch, and then fell back again, and yielded up his spirit--this time forever. Dion Boucicault makes use of an incident of this kind in his powerful
Balfour Stewart is right--scientists "know nothing, or next to nothing, of the ultimate structure and properties of matter, whether organic or inorganic."
We are now on such firm ground, that we will take another step in advance. The same knowledge and control of the occult forces, including the vital force which enabled the fakir temporarily to leave and then reenter his body, and Jesus, Apollonius, and Elisha to recall their several subjects to life, made it possible for the ancient hierophants to animate statues, and cause them to act and speak like living creatures. It is the same knowledge and power which made it possible for Paracelsus to create his homunculi; for Aaron to change his rod into a serpent and a budding branch; Moses to cover Egypt with frogs and other pests; and the Egyptian theurgist of our day to vivify his pigmy Mandragora, which has physical life but no soul. It was no more wonderful that upon presenting the necessary conditions Moses should call into life large reptiles and insects, than that, under like favoring conditions, the physical scientist should call into life the small ones which he names bacteria.
And now, in connection with ancient miracle-doers and prophets, let us bring forward the claims of the modern mediums. Nearly every form of phenomena recorded in the sacred and profane histories of the world
Of Apollonius, who asserted that he could see "the present and the future in a clear mirror," on account of his abstemious mode of life, the professor very beautifully observes: "This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits, all is as one day or state, the past and future comprised in the present." *
Were these God-like men "mediums," as the orthodox spiritualists
The reader must bear in mind the definition of the term, for, unless this is clearly understood, confusion will be inevitable. Mediumship of this kind may be either active or passive, repellent or receptive, positive or negative. Mediumship is measured by the quality of the aura with which the individual is surrounded. This may be dense, cloudy, noisome, mephitic, nauseating to the pure spirit, and attract only those foul beings who delight in it, as the eel does in turbid waters, or, it may be pure, crystalline, limpid, opalescent as the morning dew. All depends upon the moral character of the medium.
About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person's aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one's own immortal demon. It is literally
passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
"There are certain men whom the Tartars honor above all in the world," says Friar Ricold, "viz., the Baxitae, who are a kind of idol-priests. These are men from India, persons of deep wisdom, well-conducted and of the gravest morals. They are usually with magic arts . . . they exhibit many illusions, and predict future events. For instance, one of eminence among them was said to fly; but the truth, however, was as it proved, that he did not fly, but did walk close to the surface of the ground without touching it; and would seem to sit down without having any substance to support him. ** This last performance was witnessed by Ibn Batuta, at Delhi," adds Colonel Yule, who quotes the friar in the Book of Ser Marco Polo, "in the presence of Sultan Mahomet Tughlak; and it was professedly exhibited by a Brahman at Madras in the present century, a descendant doubtless of those Brahmans whom Apollonius saw walking two cubits from the ground. It is also described by the worthy Francis Valentyn, as a performance known and practiced in his own day in India. It is related, he says, that 'a man will first go and sit on three sticks put together so as to form a tripod; after which, first one stick, then a second, then a third shall be removed from under him, and the man shall not fall but shall still remain sitting in the air! Yet I have spoken with two friends who had seen this at one and the same time; and one of them, I may add, mistrusting his own eyes, had taken the trouble to feel about with a long stick if there were nothing on which the body rested; yet, as the gentleman told me, he could neither feel nor see any such thing.' " We have stated elsewhere that the same thing was accomplished last year, before the Prince of Wales and his suite.
Such feats as the above are nothing in comparison to what is done by professed jugglers; "feats," remarks the above-quoted author, "which might be regarded as simply inventions if told by one author only, but which seem to deserve prominent notice from being recounted by a series of authors, certainly independent of one another, and writing at long intervals of time and place. Our first witness is Ibn Batuta, and
hocus-pocus!" ' "
And who doubts but that it is a "hocus-pocus," an illusion, or Maya, as the Hindus express it? But when such an illusion can be forced on, say, ten thousand people at the same time, as we have seen it performed during a public festival, surely the means by which such an astounding hallucination can be produced merits the attention of science! When by such magic a man who stands before you, in a room, the doors of which you have closed and of which the keys are in your hand, suddenly disappears, vanishes like a flash of light, and you see him nowhere but hear his voice from different parts of the room addressing you and laughing at your perplexity, surely such an art is not unworthy either of Mr. Huxley or Dr. Carpenter. Is it not quite as well worth spending time over, as the lesser mystery--why barnyard cocks crow at midnight?
What Ibn Batuta, the Moor, saw in China about the year 1348, Colonel Yule shows Edward Melton, "an Anglo-Dutch traveller," witnessing
In the memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire, the performances of seven jugglers from Bengal, who exhibited before him, are thus described: "Ninth. They produced a man whom they divided limb from limb, actually severing his head from the body. They scattered these mutilated members along the ground, and in this state they lay some time. They then extended a sheet over the spot, and one of the men putting himself under the sheet, in a few minutes came from below, followed by the individual supposed to have been cut into joints, in perfect health and condition. . . . Twenty-third. They produced a chain of fifty cubits in length, and in my presence threw one end of it toward the sky, where it remained as if fastened to something in the air. A dog was then brought forward and being placed at the lower end of the chain, immediately ran up, and reaching the other end, immediately disappeared in the air. In the same manner a hog, a panther, a lion, and a tiger were successively sent up the chain, and all equally disappeared at the upper end of the chain. At last they took down the chain, and put it into the bag, no one ever discovering in what way the different animals were made to vanish into the air in the mysterious manner above described." **
We have in our possession a picture painted from such a Persian conjurer, with a man, or rather the various limbs of what was a minute before a man, scattered before him. We have seen such conjurers, and witnessed such performances more than once and in various places.
If the molecules of the cadaver are imbued with the physical and chemical forces of the living organism, * what is to prevent them from being set again in motion, provided we know the nature of the vital force, and how to command it? The materialist can certainly offer no objection, for with him it is no question of reinfusing a soul. For him the soul has no existence, and the human body may be regarded simply as a vital engine--a locomotive which will start upon the application of heat and force, and stop when they are withdrawn. To the theologian the case offers greater difficulties, for, in his view, death cuts asunder the tie which binds soul and body, and the one can no more be returned into the other without miracle than the born infant can be compelled to resume its foetal life after parturition and the severing of the umbilicus. But the Hermetic philosopher stands between these two irreconcilable antagonists, "master of the situation. He knows the nature of the soul--a form composed of nervous fluid and atmospheric ether--and knows how the vital force can be made active or passive at will, so long as there is no final destruction of some necessary organ. The claims of Gaffarilus--which, by the bye, appeared so preposterous in 1650 **--were later corroborated by science.
And, if the astral form of even a plant when its body is dead still lingers in the ashes, will skeptics persist in saying that the soul of man, the inner ego, is after the death of the grosser form at once dissolved, and is no more? "At death," says the philosopher, "the one body exudes from the other, by osmose and through the brain; it is held near its old garment by a double attraction, physical and spiritual, until the latter decomposes; and if the proper conditions are given the soul can reinhabit it and resume the suspended life. It does it in sleep; it does it more thoroughly in trance; most surprisingly at the command and with the assistance of the Hermetic adept. Iamblichus declared that a person endowed with such resuscitating powers is 'full of God.' All the subordinate spirits of the upper spheres are at his command, for he is no longer a mortal, but himself a god. In his Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul remarks that 'the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.' "
Some persons have the natural and some the acquired power of withdrawing the inner from the outer body, at will, and causing it to perform long journeys, and be seen by those whom it visits. Numerous are the instances recorded by unimpeachable witnesses of the "doubles" of persons having been seen and conversed with, hundreds of miles from the places where the persons themselves were known to be. Hermotimus, if we may credit Pliny and Plutarch, *** could at will fall into a trance and then his second soul proceeded to any distant place he chose.
The Abbe Tritheim, the famous author of Steganographie, who lived in the seventeenth century, could converse with his friends by the mere power of his will. "I can make my thoughts known to the initiated,"
According to Napier, Osborne, Major Lawes, Quenouillet, Nikiforovitch, and many other modern witnesses, fakirs are now proved to be able, by a long course of diet, preparation, and repose, to bring their bodies into a condition which enables them to be buried six feet under ground for an indefinite period. Sir Claude Wade was present at the court of Rundjit Singh, when the fakir, mentioned by the Honorable Captain Osborne, was buried alive for six weeks, in a box placed in a cell three feet below the floor of the room. *** To prevent the chance of deception, a guard comprising two companies of soldiers had been detailed, and four sentries "were furnished and relieved every two hours, night and day, to guard the building from intrusion. . . . On opening it," says Sir Claude, "we saw a figure enclosed in a bag of white linen fastened by a string over the head . . . the servant then began pouring warm water over the figure . . . the legs and arms of the body were shrivelled and stiff, the face full, the head reclining on the shoulder like that of a corpse. I then called to the medical gentleman who was attending me, to come down and inspect the body, which he did, but could discover no pulsation in the heart, the temples, or the arm. There was, however, a heat about the region of the brain, which no other part of the body exhibited."
Regretting that the limits of our space forbid the quotation of the
Then, here is a case, only one of many, substantiated by the testimony of two English noblemen--one of them an army officer--and a Hindu Prince, who was as great a skeptic as themselves. It places science in this embarrassing dilemma: it must either give the lie to many unimpeachable witnesses, or admit that if one fakir can resuscitate after six weeks, any other fakir can also; and if a fakir, why not a Lazarus, a Shunamite boy, or the daughter of Jairus? *
Todd Thomson, above quoted, gives several remarkable cases of such a suspended animation. Among others he mentions a certain Francis Neville, a Norman gentleman, who twice apparently died, and was twice in the act of being buried. But, at the moment when the coffin was being lowered in the grave, he spontaneously revived. In the seventeenth century, Lady Russell, to all appearance died, and was about to be buried, but as the bell was tolling for her funeral, she sat up in her coffin and exclaimed, "It is time to go to church!" Diemerbroeck mentions a peasant who gave no signs of life for three days, but when placed in his coffin, near the grave, revived and lived many years afterward. In 1836, a respectable citizen of Brussels fell into a profound lethargy on a Sunday morning. On Monday, as his attendants were preparing to screw the lid of the coffin, the supposed corpse sat up, rubbed his eyes, and called for his coffee and a newspaper. ****
Such cases of apparent death are not very infrequently reported in the newspaper press. As we write (April, 1877), we find in a London letter to the New York Times, the following paragraph: "Miss Annie Goodale, the actress, died three weeks ago. Up to yesterday she was not buried. The corpse is warm and limp, and the features as soft and mobile as when in life. Several physicians have examined her, and have ordered that the body shall be watched night and day. The poor lady is evidently in a trance, but whether she is destined to come to life it is impossible to say."
The kabalists say that a man is not dead when his body is entombed. Death is never sudden; for, according to Hermes, nothing goes in nature by violent transitions. Everything is gradual, and as it required a long and gradual development to produce the living human being, so time is required to completely withdraw vitality from the carcass. "Death can no more be an absolute end, than birth a real beginning. Birth proves the preexistence of the being, as death proves immortality," says the same French kabalist.
While implicitly believing in the restoration of the daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, and in other Bible-miracles, well-educated Christians, who otherwise would feel indignant at being called superstitious, meet all such cases as that of Apollonius and the girl said by his biographer to have been recalled to life by him, with scornful skepticism. Diogenes Laertius, who mentions a woman restored to life by Empedocles, is treated with no more respect; and the name of Pagan thaumaturgist, in the eyes of Christians, is but a synonym for impostor. Our scientists are at least one degree more rational; they embrace all Bible prophets and apostles, and the heathen miracle-doers in two categories of hallucinated fools and deceitful tricksters.
But Christians and materialists might, with a very little effort on their
She is not dead but sleepeth," the clergy force their god to become a breaker of his own laws and grant unjustly to one what he denies to all others, and with no better object in view than to produce a useless miracle. In the second case, notwithstanding the words of the biographer of Apollonius, so plain and precise that there is not the slightest cause to misunderstand them, they charge Philostratus with deliberate imposture. Who could be fairer than he, who less open to the charge of mystification, when, in describing the resuscitation of the young girl by the Tyanian sage, in the presence of a large concourse of people, the biographer says, "she had seemed to die."
In other words, he very clearly indicates a case of suspended animation; and then adds immediately, "as the rain fell very fast on the young girl," while she was being carried to the pile, "with her face turned upwards, this, also, might have excited her senses." * Does this not show most plainly that Philostratus saw no miracle in that resuscitation? Does it not rather imply, if anything, the great learning and skill of Apollonius, "who like Asclepiades had the merit of distinguishing at a glance between real and apparent death"? **
A resuscitation, after the soul and spirit have entirely separated from the body, and the last electric thread is severed, is as impossible as for a once disembodied spirit to reincarnate itself once more on this earth, except as described in previous chapters. "A leaf, once fallen off, does not reattach itself to the branch," says Eliphas Levi. "The caterpillar becomes a butterfly, but the butterfly does not again return to the grub. Nature closes the door behind all that passes, and pushes life forward. Forms pass, thought remains, and does not recall that which it has once exhausted." ***
Why should it be imagined that Asclepiades and Apollonius enjoyed exceptional powers for the discernment of actual death? Has any modern school of medicine this knowledge to impart to its students? Let their authorities answer for them. These prodigies of Jesus and Apollonius
Is it because the modern physician has not yet found the secret which the theurgists evidently possessed that its possibility is denied?
Neglected as psychology now is, and with the strangely chaotic state in which physiology is confessed to be by its most fair students, certainly it is not very likely that our men of science will soon rediscover the lost knowledge of the ancients. In the days of old, when prophets were not treated as charlatans, nor thaumaturgists as impostors, there were colleges instituted for teaching prophecy and occult sciences in general. Samuel is recorded as the chief of such an institution at Ramah; Elisha, also, at Jericho. The schools of hazim, prophets or seers, were celebrated throughout the country. Hillel had a regular academy, and Socrates is well known to have sent away several of his disciples to study manticism. The study of magic, or wisdom, included every branch of science, the metaphysical as well as the physical, psychology and physiology in their common and occult phases, and the study of alchemy was universal, for it was both a physical and a spiritual science. Therefore why doubt or wonder that the ancients, who studied nature under its double aspect, achieved discoveries which to our modern physicists, who study but its dead letter, are a closed book?
Thus, the question at issue is not whether a dead body can be resuscitated--for, to assert that would be to assume the possibility of a miracle, which is absurd--but, to assure ourselves whether the medical authorities pretend to determine the precise moment of death. The kabalists say that death occurs at the instant when both the astral body, or life-principle, and the spirit part forever with the corporeal body. The scientific physician who denies both astral body and spirit, and admits the existence of nothing more than the life-principle, judges death to occur when life is apparently extinct. When the beating of the heart and the action of the lungs cease, and rigor mortis is manifested, and especially when decomposition begins, they pronounce the patient dead. But the annals of medicine teem with examples of "suspended animation"
somehow he could come to life again."
There occurred in Moscow, a few years since, a remarkable instance of apparent death. The wife of a wealthy merchant lay in the cataleptic state seventeen days, during which the authorities made several attempts to bury her; but, as decomposition had not set in, the family averted the ceremony, and at the end of that time she was restored to life.
The above instances show that the most learned men in the medical profession are unable to be certain when a person is dead. What they call "suspended animation," is that state from which the patient spontaneously recovers, through an effort of his own spirit, which may be provoked by any one of many causes. In these cases, the astral body has not parted from the physical body; its external functions are simply suspended; the subject is in a state of torpor, and the restoration is nothing but a recovery from it.
But, in the case of what physiologists would call "real death," but which is not actually so, the astral body has withdrawn; perhaps local decomposition has set in. How shall the man be brought to life again? The answer is, the interior body must be forced back into the exterior one, and vitality reawakened in the latter. The clock has run down, it must be wound. If death is absolute; if the organs have not only ceased to act, but have lost the susceptibility of renewed action, then the whole universe would have to be thrown into chaos to resuscitate the corpse--a miracle would be demanded. But, as we said before, the man is not dead when he is cold, stiff, pulseless, breathless, and even showing signs of decomposition; he is not dead when buried, nor afterward, until a certain point is reached. That point is, when the vital organs have become so decomposed, that if reanimated, they could not perform their customary functions; when the mainspring and cogs of the machine, so to speak, are so eaten away by rust, that they would snap upon the turning of the key. Until that point is reached, the astral body may be caused, without miracle, to reenter its former tabernacle, either by an effort of its
Science des Esprits, say that, "When a man falls into the last sleep, he is plunged at first into a sort of dream, before gaining consciousness in the other side of life. He sees, then, either in a beautiful vision, or in a terrible nightmare, the paradise or hell, in which he believed during his mortal existence. This is why it often happens, that the affrighted soul breaks violently back into the terrestrial life it has just left, and why some who were really dead, i.e., who, if left alone and quiet, would have peaceably passed away forever in a state of unconscious lethargy, when entombed too soon, reawake to life in the grave."
In this connection, the reader may perhaps recall the well-known case of the old man who had left some generous gifts in his will to his orphaned nieces; which document, just before his death, he had confided to his rich son, with injunctions to carry out his wishes. But, he had not been dead more than a few hours before the son, finding himself alone with the corpse, tore the will and burned it. The sight of this impious deed apparently recalled the hovering spirit, and the old man, rising from his couch of death, uttered a fierce malediction upon the horror-stricken wretch, and then fell back again, and yielded up his spirit--this time forever. Dion Boucicault makes use of an incident of this kind in his powerful
Balfour Stewart is right--scientists "know nothing, or next to nothing, of the ultimate structure and properties of matter, whether organic or inorganic."
We are now on such firm ground, that we will take another step in advance. The same knowledge and control of the occult forces, including the vital force which enabled the fakir temporarily to leave and then reenter his body, and Jesus, Apollonius, and Elisha to recall their several subjects to life, made it possible for the ancient hierophants to animate statues, and cause them to act and speak like living creatures. It is the same knowledge and power which made it possible for Paracelsus to create his homunculi; for Aaron to change his rod into a serpent and a budding branch; Moses to cover Egypt with frogs and other pests; and the Egyptian theurgist of our day to vivify his pigmy Mandragora, which has physical life but no soul. It was no more wonderful that upon presenting the necessary conditions Moses should call into life large reptiles and insects, than that, under like favoring conditions, the physical scientist should call into life the small ones which he names bacteria.
And now, in connection with ancient miracle-doers and prophets, let us bring forward the claims of the modern mediums. Nearly every form of phenomena recorded in the sacred and profane histories of the world
Of Apollonius, who asserted that he could see "the present and the future in a clear mirror," on account of his abstemious mode of life, the professor very beautifully observes: "This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits, all is as one day or state, the past and future comprised in the present." *
Were these God-like men "mediums," as the orthodox spiritualists
The reader must bear in mind the definition of the term, for, unless this is clearly understood, confusion will be inevitable. Mediumship of this kind may be either active or passive, repellent or receptive, positive or negative. Mediumship is measured by the quality of the aura with which the individual is surrounded. This may be dense, cloudy, noisome, mephitic, nauseating to the pure spirit, and attract only those foul beings who delight in it, as the eel does in turbid waters, or, it may be pure, crystalline, limpid, opalescent as the morning dew. All depends upon the moral character of the medium.
About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person's aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one's own immortal demon. It is literally
passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
And who doubts but that it is a "hocus-pocus," an illusion, or Maya, as the Hindus express it? But when such an illusion can be forced on, say, ten thousand people at the same time, as we have seen it performed during a public festival, surely the means by which such an astounding hallucination can be produced merits the attention of science! When by such magic a man who stands before you, in a room, the doors of which you have closed and of which the keys are in your hand, suddenly disappears, vanishes like a flash of light, and you see him nowhere but hear his voice from different parts of the room addressing you and laughing at your perplexity, surely such an art is not unworthy either of Mr. Huxley or Dr. Carpenter. Is it not quite as well worth spending time over, as the lesser mystery--why barnyard cocks crow at midnight?
What Ibn Batuta, the Moor, saw in China about the year 1348, Colonel Yule shows Edward Melton, "an Anglo-Dutch traveller," witnessing
In the memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire, the performances of seven jugglers from Bengal, who exhibited before him, are thus described: "Ninth. They produced a man whom they divided limb from limb, actually severing his head from the body. They scattered these mutilated members along the ground, and in this state they lay some time. They then extended a sheet over the spot, and one of the men putting himself under the sheet, in a few minutes came from below, followed by the individual supposed to have been cut into joints, in perfect health and condition. . . . Twenty-third. They produced a chain of fifty cubits in length, and in my presence threw one end of it toward the sky, where it remained as if fastened to something in the air. A dog was then brought forward and being placed at the lower end of the chain, immediately ran up, and reaching the other end, immediately disappeared in the air. In the same manner a hog, a panther, a lion, and a tiger were successively sent up the chain, and all equally disappeared at the upper end of the chain. At last they took down the chain, and put it into the bag, no one ever discovering in what way the different animals were made to vanish into the air in the mysterious manner above described." **
We have in our possession a picture painted from such a Persian conjurer, with a man, or rather the various limbs of what was a minute before a man, scattered before him. We have seen such conjurers, and witnessed such performances more than once and in various places.
If the molecules of the cadaver are imbued with the physical and chemical forces of the living organism, * what is to prevent them from being set again in motion, provided we know the nature of the vital force, and how to command it? The materialist can certainly offer no objection, for with him it is no question of reinfusing a soul. For him the soul has no existence, and the human body may be regarded simply as a vital engine--a locomotive which will start upon the application of heat and force, and stop when they are withdrawn. To the theologian the case offers greater difficulties, for, in his view, death cuts asunder the tie which binds soul and body, and the one can no more be returned into the other without miracle than the born infant can be compelled to resume its foetal life after parturition and the severing of the umbilicus. But the Hermetic philosopher stands between these two irreconcilable antagonists, "master of the situation. He knows the nature of the soul--a form composed of nervous fluid and atmospheric ether--and knows how the vital force can be made active or passive at will, so long as there is no final destruction of some necessary organ. The claims of Gaffarilus--which, by the bye, appeared so preposterous in 1650 **--were later corroborated by science.
And, if the astral form of even a plant when its body is dead still lingers in the ashes, will skeptics persist in saying that the soul of man, the inner ego, is after the death of the grosser form at once dissolved, and is no more? "At death," says the philosopher, "the one body exudes from the other, by osmose and through the brain; it is held near its old garment by a double attraction, physical and spiritual, until the latter decomposes; and if the proper conditions are given the soul can reinhabit it and resume the suspended life. It does it in sleep; it does it more thoroughly in trance; most surprisingly at the command and with the assistance of the Hermetic adept. Iamblichus declared that a person endowed with such resuscitating powers is 'full of God.' All the subordinate spirits of the upper spheres are at his command, for he is no longer a mortal, but himself a god. In his Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul remarks that 'the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.' "
Some persons have the natural and some the acquired power of withdrawing the inner from the outer body, at will, and causing it to perform long journeys, and be seen by those whom it visits. Numerous are the instances recorded by unimpeachable witnesses of the "doubles" of persons having been seen and conversed with, hundreds of miles from the places where the persons themselves were known to be. Hermotimus, if we may credit Pliny and Plutarch, *** could at will fall into a trance and then his second soul proceeded to any distant place he chose.
The Abbe Tritheim, the famous author of Steganographie, who lived in the seventeenth century, could converse with his friends by the mere power of his will. "I can make my thoughts known to the initiated,"
According to Napier, Osborne, Major Lawes, Quenouillet, Nikiforovitch, and many other modern witnesses, fakirs are now proved to be able, by a long course of diet, preparation, and repose, to bring their bodies into a condition which enables them to be buried six feet under ground for an indefinite period. Sir Claude Wade was present at the court of Rundjit Singh, when the fakir, mentioned by the Honorable Captain Osborne, was buried alive for six weeks, in a box placed in a cell three feet below the floor of the room. *** To prevent the chance of deception, a guard comprising two companies of soldiers had been detailed, and four sentries "were furnished and relieved every two hours, night and day, to guard the building from intrusion. . . . On opening it," says Sir Claude, "we saw a figure enclosed in a bag of white linen fastened by a string over the head . . . the servant then began pouring warm water over the figure . . . the legs and arms of the body were shrivelled and stiff, the face full, the head reclining on the shoulder like that of a corpse. I then called to the medical gentleman who was attending me, to come down and inspect the body, which he did, but could discover no pulsation in the heart, the temples, or the arm. There was, however, a heat about the region of the brain, which no other part of the body exhibited."
Regretting that the limits of our space forbid the quotation of the
Then, here is a case, only one of many, substantiated by the testimony of two English noblemen--one of them an army officer--and a Hindu Prince, who was as great a skeptic as themselves. It places science in this embarrassing dilemma: it must either give the lie to many unimpeachable witnesses, or admit that if one fakir can resuscitate after six weeks, any other fakir can also; and if a fakir, why not a Lazarus, a Shunamite boy, or the daughter of Jairus? *
Todd Thomson, above quoted, gives several remarkable cases of such a suspended animation. Among others he mentions a certain Francis Neville, a Norman gentleman, who twice apparently died, and was twice in the act of being buried. But, at the moment when the coffin was being lowered in the grave, he spontaneously revived. In the seventeenth century, Lady Russell, to all appearance died, and was about to be buried, but as the bell was tolling for her funeral, she sat up in her coffin and exclaimed, "It is time to go to church!" Diemerbroeck mentions a peasant who gave no signs of life for three days, but when placed in his coffin, near the grave, revived and lived many years afterward. In 1836, a respectable citizen of Brussels fell into a profound lethargy on a Sunday morning. On Monday, as his attendants were preparing to screw the lid of the coffin, the supposed corpse sat up, rubbed his eyes, and called for his coffee and a newspaper. ****
Such cases of apparent death are not very infrequently reported in the newspaper press. As we write (April, 1877), we find in a London letter to the New York Times, the following paragraph: "Miss Annie Goodale, the actress, died three weeks ago. Up to yesterday she was not buried. The corpse is warm and limp, and the features as soft and mobile as when in life. Several physicians have examined her, and have ordered that the body shall be watched night and day. The poor lady is evidently in a trance, but whether she is destined to come to life it is impossible to say."
The kabalists say that a man is not dead when his body is entombed. Death is never sudden; for, according to Hermes, nothing goes in nature by violent transitions. Everything is gradual, and as it required a long and gradual development to produce the living human being, so time is required to completely withdraw vitality from the carcass. "Death can no more be an absolute end, than birth a real beginning. Birth proves the preexistence of the being, as death proves immortality," says the same French kabalist.
While implicitly believing in the restoration of the daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, and in other Bible-miracles, well-educated Christians, who otherwise would feel indignant at being called superstitious, meet all such cases as that of Apollonius and the girl said by his biographer to have been recalled to life by him, with scornful skepticism. Diogenes Laertius, who mentions a woman restored to life by Empedocles, is treated with no more respect; and the name of Pagan thaumaturgist, in the eyes of Christians, is but a synonym for impostor. Our scientists are at least one degree more rational; they embrace all Bible prophets and apostles, and the heathen miracle-doers in two categories of hallucinated fools and deceitful tricksters.
But Christians and materialists might, with a very little effort on their
She is not dead but sleepeth," the clergy force their god to become a breaker of his own laws and grant unjustly to one what he denies to all others, and with no better object in view than to produce a useless miracle. In the second case, notwithstanding the words of the biographer of Apollonius, so plain and precise that there is not the slightest cause to misunderstand them, they charge Philostratus with deliberate imposture. Who could be fairer than he, who less open to the charge of mystification, when, in describing the resuscitation of the young girl by the Tyanian sage, in the presence of a large concourse of people, the biographer says, "she had seemed to die."
In other words, he very clearly indicates a case of suspended animation; and then adds immediately, "as the rain fell very fast on the young girl," while she was being carried to the pile, "with her face turned upwards, this, also, might have excited her senses." * Does this not show most plainly that Philostratus saw no miracle in that resuscitation? Does it not rather imply, if anything, the great learning and skill of Apollonius, "who like Asclepiades had the merit of distinguishing at a glance between real and apparent death"? **
A resuscitation, after the soul and spirit have entirely separated from the body, and the last electric thread is severed, is as impossible as for a once disembodied spirit to reincarnate itself once more on this earth, except as described in previous chapters. "A leaf, once fallen off, does not reattach itself to the branch," says Eliphas Levi. "The caterpillar becomes a butterfly, but the butterfly does not again return to the grub. Nature closes the door behind all that passes, and pushes life forward. Forms pass, thought remains, and does not recall that which it has once exhausted." ***
Why should it be imagined that Asclepiades and Apollonius enjoyed exceptional powers for the discernment of actual death? Has any modern school of medicine this knowledge to impart to its students? Let their authorities answer for them. These prodigies of Jesus and Apollonius
Is it because the modern physician has not yet found the secret which the theurgists evidently possessed that its possibility is denied?
Neglected as psychology now is, and with the strangely chaotic state in which physiology is confessed to be by its most fair students, certainly it is not very likely that our men of science will soon rediscover the lost knowledge of the ancients. In the days of old, when prophets were not treated as charlatans, nor thaumaturgists as impostors, there were colleges instituted for teaching prophecy and occult sciences in general. Samuel is recorded as the chief of such an institution at Ramah; Elisha, also, at Jericho. The schools of hazim, prophets or seers, were celebrated throughout the country. Hillel had a regular academy, and Socrates is well known to have sent away several of his disciples to study manticism. The study of magic, or wisdom, included every branch of science, the metaphysical as well as the physical, psychology and physiology in their common and occult phases, and the study of alchemy was universal, for it was both a physical and a spiritual science. Therefore why doubt or wonder that the ancients, who studied nature under its double aspect, achieved discoveries which to our modern physicists, who study but its dead letter, are a closed book?
Thus, the question at issue is not whether a dead body can be resuscitated--for, to assert that would be to assume the possibility of a miracle, which is absurd--but, to assure ourselves whether the medical authorities pretend to determine the precise moment of death. The kabalists say that death occurs at the instant when both the astral body, or life-principle, and the spirit part forever with the corporeal body. The scientific physician who denies both astral body and spirit, and admits the existence of nothing more than the life-principle, judges death to occur when life is apparently extinct. When the beating of the heart and the action of the lungs cease, and rigor mortis is manifested, and especially when decomposition begins, they pronounce the patient dead. But the annals of medicine teem with examples of "suspended animation"
somehow he could come to life again."
There occurred in Moscow, a few years since, a remarkable instance of apparent death. The wife of a wealthy merchant lay in the cataleptic state seventeen days, during which the authorities made several attempts to bury her; but, as decomposition had not set in, the family averted the ceremony, and at the end of that time she was restored to life.
The above instances show that the most learned men in the medical profession are unable to be certain when a person is dead. What they call "suspended animation," is that state from which the patient spontaneously recovers, through an effort of his own spirit, which may be provoked by any one of many causes. In these cases, the astral body has not parted from the physical body; its external functions are simply suspended; the subject is in a state of torpor, and the restoration is nothing but a recovery from it.
But, in the case of what physiologists would call "real death," but which is not actually so, the astral body has withdrawn; perhaps local decomposition has set in. How shall the man be brought to life again? The answer is, the interior body must be forced back into the exterior one, and vitality reawakened in the latter. The clock has run down, it must be wound. If death is absolute; if the organs have not only ceased to act, but have lost the susceptibility of renewed action, then the whole universe would have to be thrown into chaos to resuscitate the corpse--a miracle would be demanded. But, as we said before, the man is not dead when he is cold, stiff, pulseless, breathless, and even showing signs of decomposition; he is not dead when buried, nor afterward, until a certain point is reached. That point is, when the vital organs have become so decomposed, that if reanimated, they could not perform their customary functions; when the mainspring and cogs of the machine, so to speak, are so eaten away by rust, that they would snap upon the turning of the key. Until that point is reached, the astral body may be caused, without miracle, to reenter its former tabernacle, either by an effort of its
Science des Esprits, say that, "When a man falls into the last sleep, he is plunged at first into a sort of dream, before gaining consciousness in the other side of life. He sees, then, either in a beautiful vision, or in a terrible nightmare, the paradise or hell, in which he believed during his mortal existence. This is why it often happens, that the affrighted soul breaks violently back into the terrestrial life it has just left, and why some who were really dead, i.e., who, if left alone and quiet, would have peaceably passed away forever in a state of unconscious lethargy, when entombed too soon, reawake to life in the grave."
In this connection, the reader may perhaps recall the well-known case of the old man who had left some generous gifts in his will to his orphaned nieces; which document, just before his death, he had confided to his rich son, with injunctions to carry out his wishes. But, he had not been dead more than a few hours before the son, finding himself alone with the corpse, tore the will and burned it. The sight of this impious deed apparently recalled the hovering spirit, and the old man, rising from his couch of death, uttered a fierce malediction upon the horror-stricken wretch, and then fell back again, and yielded up his spirit--this time forever. Dion Boucicault makes use of an incident of this kind in his powerful
Balfour Stewart is right--scientists "know nothing, or next to nothing, of the ultimate structure and properties of matter, whether organic or inorganic."
We are now on such firm ground, that we will take another step in advance. The same knowledge and control of the occult forces, including the vital force which enabled the fakir temporarily to leave and then reenter his body, and Jesus, Apollonius, and Elisha to recall their several subjects to life, made it possible for the ancient hierophants to animate statues, and cause them to act and speak like living creatures. It is the same knowledge and power which made it possible for Paracelsus to create his homunculi; for Aaron to change his rod into a serpent and a budding branch; Moses to cover Egypt with frogs and other pests; and the Egyptian theurgist of our day to vivify his pigmy Mandragora, which has physical life but no soul. It was no more wonderful that upon presenting the necessary conditions Moses should call into life large reptiles and insects, than that, under like favoring conditions, the physical scientist should call into life the small ones which he names bacteria.
And now, in connection with ancient miracle-doers and prophets, let us bring forward the claims of the modern mediums. Nearly every form of phenomena recorded in the sacred and profane histories of the world
Of Apollonius, who asserted that he could see "the present and the future in a clear mirror," on account of his abstemious mode of life, the professor very beautifully observes: "This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits, all is as one day or state, the past and future comprised in the present." *
Were these God-like men "mediums," as the orthodox spiritualists
The reader must bear in mind the definition of the term, for, unless this is clearly understood, confusion will be inevitable. Mediumship of this kind may be either active or passive, repellent or receptive, positive or negative. Mediumship is measured by the quality of the aura with which the individual is surrounded. This may be dense, cloudy, noisome, mephitic, nauseating to the pure spirit, and attract only those foul beings who delight in it, as the eel does in turbid waters, or, it may be pure, crystalline, limpid, opalescent as the morning dew. All depends upon the moral character of the medium.
About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person's aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one's own immortal demon. It is literally
passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
If the molecules of the cadaver are imbued with the physical and chemical forces of the living organism, * what is to prevent them from being set again in motion, provided we know the nature of the vital force, and how to command it? The materialist can certainly offer no objection, for with him it is no question of reinfusing a soul. For him the soul has no existence, and the human body may be regarded simply as a vital engine--a locomotive which will start upon the application of heat and force, and stop when they are withdrawn. To the theologian the case offers greater difficulties, for, in his view, death cuts asunder the tie which binds soul and body, and the one can no more be returned into the other without miracle than the born infant can be compelled to resume its foetal life after parturition and the severing of the umbilicus. But the Hermetic philosopher stands between these two irreconcilable antagonists, "master of the situation. He knows the nature of the soul--a form composed of nervous fluid and atmospheric ether--and knows how the vital force can be made active or passive at will, so long as there is no final destruction of some necessary organ. The claims of Gaffarilus--which, by the bye, appeared so preposterous in 1650 **--were later corroborated by science.
And, if the astral form of even a plant when its body is dead still lingers in the ashes, will skeptics persist in saying that the soul of man, the inner ego, is after the death of the grosser form at once dissolved, and is no more? "At death," says the philosopher, "the one body exudes from the other, by osmose and through the brain; it is held near its old garment by a double attraction, physical and spiritual, until the latter decomposes; and if the proper conditions are given the soul can reinhabit it and resume the suspended life. It does it in sleep; it does it more thoroughly in trance; most surprisingly at the command and with the assistance of the Hermetic adept. Iamblichus declared that a person endowed with such resuscitating powers is 'full of God.' All the subordinate spirits of the upper spheres are at his command, for he is no longer a mortal, but himself a god. In his Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul remarks that 'the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.' "
Some persons have the natural and some the acquired power of withdrawing the inner from the outer body, at will, and causing it to perform long journeys, and be seen by those whom it visits. Numerous are the instances recorded by unimpeachable witnesses of the "doubles" of persons having been seen and conversed with, hundreds of miles from the places where the persons themselves were known to be. Hermotimus, if we may credit Pliny and Plutarch, *** could at will fall into a trance and then his second soul proceeded to any distant place he chose.
The Abbe Tritheim, the famous author of Steganographie, who lived in the seventeenth century, could converse with his friends by the mere power of his will. "I can make my thoughts known to the initiated,"
According to Napier, Osborne, Major Lawes, Quenouillet, Nikiforovitch, and many other modern witnesses, fakirs are now proved to be able, by a long course of diet, preparation, and repose, to bring their bodies into a condition which enables them to be buried six feet under ground for an indefinite period. Sir Claude Wade was present at the court of Rundjit Singh, when the fakir, mentioned by the Honorable Captain Osborne, was buried alive for six weeks, in a box placed in a cell three feet below the floor of the room. *** To prevent the chance of deception, a guard comprising two companies of soldiers had been detailed, and four sentries "were furnished and relieved every two hours, night and day, to guard the building from intrusion. . . . On opening it," says Sir Claude, "we saw a figure enclosed in a bag of white linen fastened by a string over the head . . . the servant then began pouring warm water over the figure . . . the legs and arms of the body were shrivelled and stiff, the face full, the head reclining on the shoulder like that of a corpse. I then called to the medical gentleman who was attending me, to come down and inspect the body, which he did, but could discover no pulsation in the heart, the temples, or the arm. There was, however, a heat about the region of the brain, which no other part of the body exhibited."
Regretting that the limits of our space forbid the quotation of the
Then, here is a case, only one of many, substantiated by the testimony of two English noblemen--one of them an army officer--and a Hindu Prince, who was as great a skeptic as themselves. It places science in this embarrassing dilemma: it must either give the lie to many unimpeachable witnesses, or admit that if one fakir can resuscitate after six weeks, any other fakir can also; and if a fakir, why not a Lazarus, a Shunamite boy, or the daughter of Jairus? *
Todd Thomson, above quoted, gives several remarkable cases of such a suspended animation. Among others he mentions a certain Francis Neville, a Norman gentleman, who twice apparently died, and was twice in the act of being buried. But, at the moment when the coffin was being lowered in the grave, he spontaneously revived. In the seventeenth century, Lady Russell, to all appearance died, and was about to be buried, but as the bell was tolling for her funeral, she sat up in her coffin and exclaimed, "It is time to go to church!" Diemerbroeck mentions a peasant who gave no signs of life for three days, but when placed in his coffin, near the grave, revived and lived many years afterward. In 1836, a respectable citizen of Brussels fell into a profound lethargy on a Sunday morning. On Monday, as his attendants were preparing to screw the lid of the coffin, the supposed corpse sat up, rubbed his eyes, and called for his coffee and a newspaper. ****
Such cases of apparent death are not very infrequently reported in the newspaper press. As we write (April, 1877), we find in a London letter to the New York Times, the following paragraph: "Miss Annie Goodale, the actress, died three weeks ago. Up to yesterday she was not buried. The corpse is warm and limp, and the features as soft and mobile as when in life. Several physicians have examined her, and have ordered that the body shall be watched night and day. The poor lady is evidently in a trance, but whether she is destined to come to life it is impossible to say."
The kabalists say that a man is not dead when his body is entombed. Death is never sudden; for, according to Hermes, nothing goes in nature by violent transitions. Everything is gradual, and as it required a long and gradual development to produce the living human being, so time is required to completely withdraw vitality from the carcass. "Death can no more be an absolute end, than birth a real beginning. Birth proves the preexistence of the being, as death proves immortality," says the same French kabalist.
While implicitly believing in the restoration of the daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, and in other Bible-miracles, well-educated Christians, who otherwise would feel indignant at being called superstitious, meet all such cases as that of Apollonius and the girl said by his biographer to have been recalled to life by him, with scornful skepticism. Diogenes Laertius, who mentions a woman restored to life by Empedocles, is treated with no more respect; and the name of Pagan thaumaturgist, in the eyes of Christians, is but a synonym for impostor. Our scientists are at least one degree more rational; they embrace all Bible prophets and apostles, and the heathen miracle-doers in two categories of hallucinated fools and deceitful tricksters.
But Christians and materialists might, with a very little effort on their
She is not dead but sleepeth," the clergy force their god to become a breaker of his own laws and grant unjustly to one what he denies to all others, and with no better object in view than to produce a useless miracle. In the second case, notwithstanding the words of the biographer of Apollonius, so plain and precise that there is not the slightest cause to misunderstand them, they charge Philostratus with deliberate imposture. Who could be fairer than he, who less open to the charge of mystification, when, in describing the resuscitation of the young girl by the Tyanian sage, in the presence of a large concourse of people, the biographer says, "she had seemed to die."
In other words, he very clearly indicates a case of suspended animation; and then adds immediately, "as the rain fell very fast on the young girl," while she was being carried to the pile, "with her face turned upwards, this, also, might have excited her senses." * Does this not show most plainly that Philostratus saw no miracle in that resuscitation? Does it not rather imply, if anything, the great learning and skill of Apollonius, "who like Asclepiades had the merit of distinguishing at a glance between real and apparent death"? **
A resuscitation, after the soul and spirit have entirely separated from the body, and the last electric thread is severed, is as impossible as for a once disembodied spirit to reincarnate itself once more on this earth, except as described in previous chapters. "A leaf, once fallen off, does not reattach itself to the branch," says Eliphas Levi. "The caterpillar becomes a butterfly, but the butterfly does not again return to the grub. Nature closes the door behind all that passes, and pushes life forward. Forms pass, thought remains, and does not recall that which it has once exhausted." ***
Why should it be imagined that Asclepiades and Apollonius enjoyed exceptional powers for the discernment of actual death? Has any modern school of medicine this knowledge to impart to its students? Let their authorities answer for them. These prodigies of Jesus and Apollonius
Is it because the modern physician has not yet found the secret which the theurgists evidently possessed that its possibility is denied?
Neglected as psychology now is, and with the strangely chaotic state in which physiology is confessed to be by its most fair students, certainly it is not very likely that our men of science will soon rediscover the lost knowledge of the ancients. In the days of old, when prophets were not treated as charlatans, nor thaumaturgists as impostors, there were colleges instituted for teaching prophecy and occult sciences in general. Samuel is recorded as the chief of such an institution at Ramah; Elisha, also, at Jericho. The schools of hazim, prophets or seers, were celebrated throughout the country. Hillel had a regular academy, and Socrates is well known to have sent away several of his disciples to study manticism. The study of magic, or wisdom, included every branch of science, the metaphysical as well as the physical, psychology and physiology in their common and occult phases, and the study of alchemy was universal, for it was both a physical and a spiritual science. Therefore why doubt or wonder that the ancients, who studied nature under its double aspect, achieved discoveries which to our modern physicists, who study but its dead letter, are a closed book?
Thus, the question at issue is not whether a dead body can be resuscitated--for, to assert that would be to assume the possibility of a miracle, which is absurd--but, to assure ourselves whether the medical authorities pretend to determine the precise moment of death. The kabalists say that death occurs at the instant when both the astral body, or life-principle, and the spirit part forever with the corporeal body. The scientific physician who denies both astral body and spirit, and admits the existence of nothing more than the life-principle, judges death to occur when life is apparently extinct. When the beating of the heart and the action of the lungs cease, and rigor mortis is manifested, and especially when decomposition begins, they pronounce the patient dead. But the annals of medicine teem with examples of "suspended animation"
somehow he could come to life again."
There occurred in Moscow, a few years since, a remarkable instance of apparent death. The wife of a wealthy merchant lay in the cataleptic state seventeen days, during which the authorities made several attempts to bury her; but, as decomposition had not set in, the family averted the ceremony, and at the end of that time she was restored to life.
The above instances show that the most learned men in the medical profession are unable to be certain when a person is dead. What they call "suspended animation," is that state from which the patient spontaneously recovers, through an effort of his own spirit, which may be provoked by any one of many causes. In these cases, the astral body has not parted from the physical body; its external functions are simply suspended; the subject is in a state of torpor, and the restoration is nothing but a recovery from it.
But, in the case of what physiologists would call "real death," but which is not actually so, the astral body has withdrawn; perhaps local decomposition has set in. How shall the man be brought to life again? The answer is, the interior body must be forced back into the exterior one, and vitality reawakened in the latter. The clock has run down, it must be wound. If death is absolute; if the organs have not only ceased to act, but have lost the susceptibility of renewed action, then the whole universe would have to be thrown into chaos to resuscitate the corpse--a miracle would be demanded. But, as we said before, the man is not dead when he is cold, stiff, pulseless, breathless, and even showing signs of decomposition; he is not dead when buried, nor afterward, until a certain point is reached. That point is, when the vital organs have become so decomposed, that if reanimated, they could not perform their customary functions; when the mainspring and cogs of the machine, so to speak, are so eaten away by rust, that they would snap upon the turning of the key. Until that point is reached, the astral body may be caused, without miracle, to reenter its former tabernacle, either by an effort of its
Science des Esprits, say that, "When a man falls into the last sleep, he is plunged at first into a sort of dream, before gaining consciousness in the other side of life. He sees, then, either in a beautiful vision, or in a terrible nightmare, the paradise or hell, in which he believed during his mortal existence. This is why it often happens, that the affrighted soul breaks violently back into the terrestrial life it has just left, and why some who were really dead, i.e., who, if left alone and quiet, would have peaceably passed away forever in a state of unconscious lethargy, when entombed too soon, reawake to life in the grave."
In this connection, the reader may perhaps recall the well-known case of the old man who had left some generous gifts in his will to his orphaned nieces; which document, just before his death, he had confided to his rich son, with injunctions to carry out his wishes. But, he had not been dead more than a few hours before the son, finding himself alone with the corpse, tore the will and burned it. The sight of this impious deed apparently recalled the hovering spirit, and the old man, rising from his couch of death, uttered a fierce malediction upon the horror-stricken wretch, and then fell back again, and yielded up his spirit--this time forever. Dion Boucicault makes use of an incident of this kind in his powerful
Balfour Stewart is right--scientists "know nothing, or next to nothing, of the ultimate structure and properties of matter, whether organic or inorganic."
We are now on such firm ground, that we will take another step in advance. The same knowledge and control of the occult forces, including the vital force which enabled the fakir temporarily to leave and then reenter his body, and Jesus, Apollonius, and Elisha to recall their several subjects to life, made it possible for the ancient hierophants to animate statues, and cause them to act and speak like living creatures. It is the same knowledge and power which made it possible for Paracelsus to create his homunculi; for Aaron to change his rod into a serpent and a budding branch; Moses to cover Egypt with frogs and other pests; and the Egyptian theurgist of our day to vivify his pigmy Mandragora, which has physical life but no soul. It was no more wonderful that upon presenting the necessary conditions Moses should call into life large reptiles and insects, than that, under like favoring conditions, the physical scientist should call into life the small ones which he names bacteria.
And now, in connection with ancient miracle-doers and prophets, let us bring forward the claims of the modern mediums. Nearly every form of phenomena recorded in the sacred and profane histories of the world
Of Apollonius, who asserted that he could see "the present and the future in a clear mirror," on account of his abstemious mode of life, the professor very beautifully observes: "This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits, all is as one day or state, the past and future comprised in the present." *
Were these God-like men "mediums," as the orthodox spiritualists
The reader must bear in mind the definition of the term, for, unless this is clearly understood, confusion will be inevitable. Mediumship of this kind may be either active or passive, repellent or receptive, positive or negative. Mediumship is measured by the quality of the aura with which the individual is surrounded. This may be dense, cloudy, noisome, mephitic, nauseating to the pure spirit, and attract only those foul beings who delight in it, as the eel does in turbid waters, or, it may be pure, crystalline, limpid, opalescent as the morning dew. All depends upon the moral character of the medium.
About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person's aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one's own immortal demon. It is literally
passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
Then, here is a case, only one of many, substantiated by the testimony of two English noblemen--one of them an army officer--and a Hindu Prince, who was as great a skeptic as themselves. It places science in this embarrassing dilemma: it must either give the lie to many unimpeachable witnesses, or admit that if one fakir can resuscitate after six weeks, any other fakir can also; and if a fakir, why not a Lazarus, a Shunamite boy, or the daughter of Jairus? *
Todd Thomson, above quoted, gives several remarkable cases of such a suspended animation. Among others he mentions a certain Francis Neville, a Norman gentleman, who twice apparently died, and was twice in the act of being buried. But, at the moment when the coffin was being lowered in the grave, he spontaneously revived. In the seventeenth century, Lady Russell, to all appearance died, and was about to be buried, but as the bell was tolling for her funeral, she sat up in her coffin and exclaimed, "It is time to go to church!" Diemerbroeck mentions a peasant who gave no signs of life for three days, but when placed in his coffin, near the grave, revived and lived many years afterward. In 1836, a respectable citizen of Brussels fell into a profound lethargy on a Sunday morning. On Monday, as his attendants were preparing to screw the lid of the coffin, the supposed corpse sat up, rubbed his eyes, and called for his coffee and a newspaper. ****
Such cases of apparent death are not very infrequently reported in the newspaper press. As we write (April, 1877), we find in a London letter to the New York Times, the following paragraph: "Miss Annie Goodale, the actress, died three weeks ago. Up to yesterday she was not buried. The corpse is warm and limp, and the features as soft and mobile as when in life. Several physicians have examined her, and have ordered that the body shall be watched night and day. The poor lady is evidently in a trance, but whether she is destined to come to life it is impossible to say."
The kabalists say that a man is not dead when his body is entombed. Death is never sudden; for, according to Hermes, nothing goes in nature by violent transitions. Everything is gradual, and as it required a long and gradual development to produce the living human being, so time is required to completely withdraw vitality from the carcass. "Death can no more be an absolute end, than birth a real beginning. Birth proves the preexistence of the being, as death proves immortality," says the same French kabalist.
While implicitly believing in the restoration of the daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, and in other Bible-miracles, well-educated Christians, who otherwise would feel indignant at being called superstitious, meet all such cases as that of Apollonius and the girl said by his biographer to have been recalled to life by him, with scornful skepticism. Diogenes Laertius, who mentions a woman restored to life by Empedocles, is treated with no more respect; and the name of Pagan thaumaturgist, in the eyes of Christians, is but a synonym for impostor. Our scientists are at least one degree more rational; they embrace all Bible prophets and apostles, and the heathen miracle-doers in two categories of hallucinated fools and deceitful tricksters.
But Christians and materialists might, with a very little effort on their
She is not dead but sleepeth," the clergy force their god to become a breaker of his own laws and grant unjustly to one what he denies to all others, and with no better object in view than to produce a useless miracle. In the second case, notwithstanding the words of the biographer of Apollonius, so plain and precise that there is not the slightest cause to misunderstand them, they charge Philostratus with deliberate imposture. Who could be fairer than he, who less open to the charge of mystification, when, in describing the resuscitation of the young girl by the Tyanian sage, in the presence of a large concourse of people, the biographer says, "she had seemed to die."
In other words, he very clearly indicates a case of suspended animation; and then adds immediately, "as the rain fell very fast on the young girl," while she was being carried to the pile, "with her face turned upwards, this, also, might have excited her senses." * Does this not show most plainly that Philostratus saw no miracle in that resuscitation? Does it not rather imply, if anything, the great learning and skill of Apollonius, "who like Asclepiades had the merit of distinguishing at a glance between real and apparent death"? **
A resuscitation, after the soul and spirit have entirely separated from the body, and the last electric thread is severed, is as impossible as for a once disembodied spirit to reincarnate itself once more on this earth, except as described in previous chapters. "A leaf, once fallen off, does not reattach itself to the branch," says Eliphas Levi. "The caterpillar becomes a butterfly, but the butterfly does not again return to the grub. Nature closes the door behind all that passes, and pushes life forward. Forms pass, thought remains, and does not recall that which it has once exhausted." ***
Why should it be imagined that Asclepiades and Apollonius enjoyed exceptional powers for the discernment of actual death? Has any modern school of medicine this knowledge to impart to its students? Let their authorities answer for them. These prodigies of Jesus and Apollonius
Is it because the modern physician has not yet found the secret which the theurgists evidently possessed that its possibility is denied?
Neglected as psychology now is, and with the strangely chaotic state in which physiology is confessed to be by its most fair students, certainly it is not very likely that our men of science will soon rediscover the lost knowledge of the ancients. In the days of old, when prophets were not treated as charlatans, nor thaumaturgists as impostors, there were colleges instituted for teaching prophecy and occult sciences in general. Samuel is recorded as the chief of such an institution at Ramah; Elisha, also, at Jericho. The schools of hazim, prophets or seers, were celebrated throughout the country. Hillel had a regular academy, and Socrates is well known to have sent away several of his disciples to study manticism. The study of magic, or wisdom, included every branch of science, the metaphysical as well as the physical, psychology and physiology in their common and occult phases, and the study of alchemy was universal, for it was both a physical and a spiritual science. Therefore why doubt or wonder that the ancients, who studied nature under its double aspect, achieved discoveries which to our modern physicists, who study but its dead letter, are a closed book?
Thus, the question at issue is not whether a dead body can be resuscitated--for, to assert that would be to assume the possibility of a miracle, which is absurd--but, to assure ourselves whether the medical authorities pretend to determine the precise moment of death. The kabalists say that death occurs at the instant when both the astral body, or life-principle, and the spirit part forever with the corporeal body. The scientific physician who denies both astral body and spirit, and admits the existence of nothing more than the life-principle, judges death to occur when life is apparently extinct. When the beating of the heart and the action of the lungs cease, and rigor mortis is manifested, and especially when decomposition begins, they pronounce the patient dead. But the annals of medicine teem with examples of "suspended animation"
somehow he could come to life again."
There occurred in Moscow, a few years since, a remarkable instance of apparent death. The wife of a wealthy merchant lay in the cataleptic state seventeen days, during which the authorities made several attempts to bury her; but, as decomposition had not set in, the family averted the ceremony, and at the end of that time she was restored to life.
The above instances show that the most learned men in the medical profession are unable to be certain when a person is dead. What they call "suspended animation," is that state from which the patient spontaneously recovers, through an effort of his own spirit, which may be provoked by any one of many causes. In these cases, the astral body has not parted from the physical body; its external functions are simply suspended; the subject is in a state of torpor, and the restoration is nothing but a recovery from it.
But, in the case of what physiologists would call "real death," but which is not actually so, the astral body has withdrawn; perhaps local decomposition has set in. How shall the man be brought to life again? The answer is, the interior body must be forced back into the exterior one, and vitality reawakened in the latter. The clock has run down, it must be wound. If death is absolute; if the organs have not only ceased to act, but have lost the susceptibility of renewed action, then the whole universe would have to be thrown into chaos to resuscitate the corpse--a miracle would be demanded. But, as we said before, the man is not dead when he is cold, stiff, pulseless, breathless, and even showing signs of decomposition; he is not dead when buried, nor afterward, until a certain point is reached. That point is, when the vital organs have become so decomposed, that if reanimated, they could not perform their customary functions; when the mainspring and cogs of the machine, so to speak, are so eaten away by rust, that they would snap upon the turning of the key. Until that point is reached, the astral body may be caused, without miracle, to reenter its former tabernacle, either by an effort of its
Science des Esprits, say that, "When a man falls into the last sleep, he is plunged at first into a sort of dream, before gaining consciousness in the other side of life. He sees, then, either in a beautiful vision, or in a terrible nightmare, the paradise or hell, in which he believed during his mortal existence. This is why it often happens, that the affrighted soul breaks violently back into the terrestrial life it has just left, and why some who were really dead, i.e., who, if left alone and quiet, would have peaceably passed away forever in a state of unconscious lethargy, when entombed too soon, reawake to life in the grave."
In this connection, the reader may perhaps recall the well-known case of the old man who had left some generous gifts in his will to his orphaned nieces; which document, just before his death, he had confided to his rich son, with injunctions to carry out his wishes. But, he had not been dead more than a few hours before the son, finding himself alone with the corpse, tore the will and burned it. The sight of this impious deed apparently recalled the hovering spirit, and the old man, rising from his couch of death, uttered a fierce malediction upon the horror-stricken wretch, and then fell back again, and yielded up his spirit--this time forever. Dion Boucicault makes use of an incident of this kind in his powerful
Balfour Stewart is right--scientists "know nothing, or next to nothing, of the ultimate structure and properties of matter, whether organic or inorganic."
We are now on such firm ground, that we will take another step in advance. The same knowledge and control of the occult forces, including the vital force which enabled the fakir temporarily to leave and then reenter his body, and Jesus, Apollonius, and Elisha to recall their several subjects to life, made it possible for the ancient hierophants to animate statues, and cause them to act and speak like living creatures. It is the same knowledge and power which made it possible for Paracelsus to create his homunculi; for Aaron to change his rod into a serpent and a budding branch; Moses to cover Egypt with frogs and other pests; and the Egyptian theurgist of our day to vivify his pigmy Mandragora, which has physical life but no soul. It was no more wonderful that upon presenting the necessary conditions Moses should call into life large reptiles and insects, than that, under like favoring conditions, the physical scientist should call into life the small ones which he names bacteria.
And now, in connection with ancient miracle-doers and prophets, let us bring forward the claims of the modern mediums. Nearly every form of phenomena recorded in the sacred and profane histories of the world
Of Apollonius, who asserted that he could see "the present and the future in a clear mirror," on account of his abstemious mode of life, the professor very beautifully observes: "This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits, all is as one day or state, the past and future comprised in the present." *
Were these God-like men "mediums," as the orthodox spiritualists
The reader must bear in mind the definition of the term, for, unless this is clearly understood, confusion will be inevitable. Mediumship of this kind may be either active or passive, repellent or receptive, positive or negative. Mediumship is measured by the quality of the aura with which the individual is surrounded. This may be dense, cloudy, noisome, mephitic, nauseating to the pure spirit, and attract only those foul beings who delight in it, as the eel does in turbid waters, or, it may be pure, crystalline, limpid, opalescent as the morning dew. All depends upon the moral character of the medium.
About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person's aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one's own immortal demon. It is literally
passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
In other words, he very clearly indicates a case of suspended animation; and then adds immediately, "as the rain fell very fast on the young girl," while she was being carried to the pile, "with her face turned upwards, this, also, might have excited her senses." * Does this not show most plainly that Philostratus saw no miracle in that resuscitation? Does it not rather imply, if anything, the great learning and skill of Apollonius, "who like Asclepiades had the merit of distinguishing at a glance between real and apparent death"? **
A resuscitation, after the soul and spirit have entirely separated from the body, and the last electric thread is severed, is as impossible as for a once disembodied spirit to reincarnate itself once more on this earth, except as described in previous chapters. "A leaf, once fallen off, does not reattach itself to the branch," says Eliphas Levi. "The caterpillar becomes a butterfly, but the butterfly does not again return to the grub. Nature closes the door behind all that passes, and pushes life forward. Forms pass, thought remains, and does not recall that which it has once exhausted." ***
Why should it be imagined that Asclepiades and Apollonius enjoyed exceptional powers for the discernment of actual death? Has any modern school of medicine this knowledge to impart to its students? Let their authorities answer for them. These prodigies of Jesus and Apollonius
Is it because the modern physician has not yet found the secret which the theurgists evidently possessed that its possibility is denied?
Neglected as psychology now is, and with the strangely chaotic state in which physiology is confessed to be by its most fair students, certainly it is not very likely that our men of science will soon rediscover the lost knowledge of the ancients. In the days of old, when prophets were not treated as charlatans, nor thaumaturgists as impostors, there were colleges instituted for teaching prophecy and occult sciences in general. Samuel is recorded as the chief of such an institution at Ramah; Elisha, also, at Jericho. The schools of hazim, prophets or seers, were celebrated throughout the country. Hillel had a regular academy, and Socrates is well known to have sent away several of his disciples to study manticism. The study of magic, or wisdom, included every branch of science, the metaphysical as well as the physical, psychology and physiology in their common and occult phases, and the study of alchemy was universal, for it was both a physical and a spiritual science. Therefore why doubt or wonder that the ancients, who studied nature under its double aspect, achieved discoveries which to our modern physicists, who study but its dead letter, are a closed book?
Thus, the question at issue is not whether a dead body can be resuscitated--for, to assert that would be to assume the possibility of a miracle, which is absurd--but, to assure ourselves whether the medical authorities pretend to determine the precise moment of death. The kabalists say that death occurs at the instant when both the astral body, or life-principle, and the spirit part forever with the corporeal body. The scientific physician who denies both astral body and spirit, and admits the existence of nothing more than the life-principle, judges death to occur when life is apparently extinct. When the beating of the heart and the action of the lungs cease, and rigor mortis is manifested, and especially when decomposition begins, they pronounce the patient dead. But the annals of medicine teem with examples of "suspended animation"
somehow he could come to life again."
There occurred in Moscow, a few years since, a remarkable instance of apparent death. The wife of a wealthy merchant lay in the cataleptic state seventeen days, during which the authorities made several attempts to bury her; but, as decomposition had not set in, the family averted the ceremony, and at the end of that time she was restored to life.
The above instances show that the most learned men in the medical profession are unable to be certain when a person is dead. What they call "suspended animation," is that state from which the patient spontaneously recovers, through an effort of his own spirit, which may be provoked by any one of many causes. In these cases, the astral body has not parted from the physical body; its external functions are simply suspended; the subject is in a state of torpor, and the restoration is nothing but a recovery from it.
But, in the case of what physiologists would call "real death," but which is not actually so, the astral body has withdrawn; perhaps local decomposition has set in. How shall the man be brought to life again? The answer is, the interior body must be forced back into the exterior one, and vitality reawakened in the latter. The clock has run down, it must be wound. If death is absolute; if the organs have not only ceased to act, but have lost the susceptibility of renewed action, then the whole universe would have to be thrown into chaos to resuscitate the corpse--a miracle would be demanded. But, as we said before, the man is not dead when he is cold, stiff, pulseless, breathless, and even showing signs of decomposition; he is not dead when buried, nor afterward, until a certain point is reached. That point is, when the vital organs have become so decomposed, that if reanimated, they could not perform their customary functions; when the mainspring and cogs of the machine, so to speak, are so eaten away by rust, that they would snap upon the turning of the key. Until that point is reached, the astral body may be caused, without miracle, to reenter its former tabernacle, either by an effort of its
Science des Esprits, say that, "When a man falls into the last sleep, he is plunged at first into a sort of dream, before gaining consciousness in the other side of life. He sees, then, either in a beautiful vision, or in a terrible nightmare, the paradise or hell, in which he believed during his mortal existence. This is why it often happens, that the affrighted soul breaks violently back into the terrestrial life it has just left, and why some who were really dead, i.e., who, if left alone and quiet, would have peaceably passed away forever in a state of unconscious lethargy, when entombed too soon, reawake to life in the grave."
In this connection, the reader may perhaps recall the well-known case of the old man who had left some generous gifts in his will to his orphaned nieces; which document, just before his death, he had confided to his rich son, with injunctions to carry out his wishes. But, he had not been dead more than a few hours before the son, finding himself alone with the corpse, tore the will and burned it. The sight of this impious deed apparently recalled the hovering spirit, and the old man, rising from his couch of death, uttered a fierce malediction upon the horror-stricken wretch, and then fell back again, and yielded up his spirit--this time forever. Dion Boucicault makes use of an incident of this kind in his powerful
Balfour Stewart is right--scientists "know nothing, or next to nothing, of the ultimate structure and properties of matter, whether organic or inorganic."
We are now on such firm ground, that we will take another step in advance. The same knowledge and control of the occult forces, including the vital force which enabled the fakir temporarily to leave and then reenter his body, and Jesus, Apollonius, and Elisha to recall their several subjects to life, made it possible for the ancient hierophants to animate statues, and cause them to act and speak like living creatures. It is the same knowledge and power which made it possible for Paracelsus to create his homunculi; for Aaron to change his rod into a serpent and a budding branch; Moses to cover Egypt with frogs and other pests; and the Egyptian theurgist of our day to vivify his pigmy Mandragora, which has physical life but no soul. It was no more wonderful that upon presenting the necessary conditions Moses should call into life large reptiles and insects, than that, under like favoring conditions, the physical scientist should call into life the small ones which he names bacteria.
And now, in connection with ancient miracle-doers and prophets, let us bring forward the claims of the modern mediums. Nearly every form of phenomena recorded in the sacred and profane histories of the world
Of Apollonius, who asserted that he could see "the present and the future in a clear mirror," on account of his abstemious mode of life, the professor very beautifully observes: "This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits, all is as one day or state, the past and future comprised in the present." *
Were these God-like men "mediums," as the orthodox spiritualists
The reader must bear in mind the definition of the term, for, unless this is clearly understood, confusion will be inevitable. Mediumship of this kind may be either active or passive, repellent or receptive, positive or negative. Mediumship is measured by the quality of the aura with which the individual is surrounded. This may be dense, cloudy, noisome, mephitic, nauseating to the pure spirit, and attract only those foul beings who delight in it, as the eel does in turbid waters, or, it may be pure, crystalline, limpid, opalescent as the morning dew. All depends upon the moral character of the medium.
About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person's aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one's own immortal demon. It is literally
passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
There occurred in Moscow, a few years since, a remarkable instance of apparent death. The wife of a wealthy merchant lay in the cataleptic state seventeen days, during which the authorities made several attempts to bury her; but, as decomposition had not set in, the family averted the ceremony, and at the end of that time she was restored to life.
The above instances show that the most learned men in the medical profession are unable to be certain when a person is dead. What they call "suspended animation," is that state from which the patient spontaneously recovers, through an effort of his own spirit, which may be provoked by any one of many causes. In these cases, the astral body has not parted from the physical body; its external functions are simply suspended; the subject is in a state of torpor, and the restoration is nothing but a recovery from it.
But, in the case of what physiologists would call "real death," but which is not actually so, the astral body has withdrawn; perhaps local decomposition has set in. How shall the man be brought to life again? The answer is, the interior body must be forced back into the exterior one, and vitality reawakened in the latter. The clock has run down, it must be wound. If death is absolute; if the organs have not only ceased to act, but have lost the susceptibility of renewed action, then the whole universe would have to be thrown into chaos to resuscitate the corpse--a miracle would be demanded. But, as we said before, the man is not dead when he is cold, stiff, pulseless, breathless, and even showing signs of decomposition; he is not dead when buried, nor afterward, until a certain point is reached. That point is, when the vital organs have become so decomposed, that if reanimated, they could not perform their customary functions; when the mainspring and cogs of the machine, so to speak, are so eaten away by rust, that they would snap upon the turning of the key. Until that point is reached, the astral body may be caused, without miracle, to reenter its former tabernacle, either by an effort of its
Science des Esprits, say that, "When a man falls into the last sleep, he is plunged at first into a sort of dream, before gaining consciousness in the other side of life. He sees, then, either in a beautiful vision, or in a terrible nightmare, the paradise or hell, in which he believed during his mortal existence. This is why it often happens, that the affrighted soul breaks violently back into the terrestrial life it has just left, and why some who were really dead, i.e., who, if left alone and quiet, would have peaceably passed away forever in a state of unconscious lethargy, when entombed too soon, reawake to life in the grave."
In this connection, the reader may perhaps recall the well-known case of the old man who had left some generous gifts in his will to his orphaned nieces; which document, just before his death, he had confided to his rich son, with injunctions to carry out his wishes. But, he had not been dead more than a few hours before the son, finding himself alone with the corpse, tore the will and burned it. The sight of this impious deed apparently recalled the hovering spirit, and the old man, rising from his couch of death, uttered a fierce malediction upon the horror-stricken wretch, and then fell back again, and yielded up his spirit--this time forever. Dion Boucicault makes use of an incident of this kind in his powerful
Balfour Stewart is right--scientists "know nothing, or next to nothing, of the ultimate structure and properties of matter, whether organic or inorganic."
We are now on such firm ground, that we will take another step in advance. The same knowledge and control of the occult forces, including the vital force which enabled the fakir temporarily to leave and then reenter his body, and Jesus, Apollonius, and Elisha to recall their several subjects to life, made it possible for the ancient hierophants to animate statues, and cause them to act and speak like living creatures. It is the same knowledge and power which made it possible for Paracelsus to create his homunculi; for Aaron to change his rod into a serpent and a budding branch; Moses to cover Egypt with frogs and other pests; and the Egyptian theurgist of our day to vivify his pigmy Mandragora, which has physical life but no soul. It was no more wonderful that upon presenting the necessary conditions Moses should call into life large reptiles and insects, than that, under like favoring conditions, the physical scientist should call into life the small ones which he names bacteria.
And now, in connection with ancient miracle-doers and prophets, let us bring forward the claims of the modern mediums. Nearly every form of phenomena recorded in the sacred and profane histories of the world
Of Apollonius, who asserted that he could see "the present and the future in a clear mirror," on account of his abstemious mode of life, the professor very beautifully observes: "This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits, all is as one day or state, the past and future comprised in the present." *
Were these God-like men "mediums," as the orthodox spiritualists
The reader must bear in mind the definition of the term, for, unless this is clearly understood, confusion will be inevitable. Mediumship of this kind may be either active or passive, repellent or receptive, positive or negative. Mediumship is measured by the quality of the aura with which the individual is surrounded. This may be dense, cloudy, noisome, mephitic, nauseating to the pure spirit, and attract only those foul beings who delight in it, as the eel does in turbid waters, or, it may be pure, crystalline, limpid, opalescent as the morning dew. All depends upon the moral character of the medium.
About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person's aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one's own immortal demon. It is literally
passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
In this connection, the reader may perhaps recall the well-known case of the old man who had left some generous gifts in his will to his orphaned nieces; which document, just before his death, he had confided to his rich son, with injunctions to carry out his wishes. But, he had not been dead more than a few hours before the son, finding himself alone with the corpse, tore the will and burned it. The sight of this impious deed apparently recalled the hovering spirit, and the old man, rising from his couch of death, uttered a fierce malediction upon the horror-stricken wretch, and then fell back again, and yielded up his spirit--this time forever. Dion Boucicault makes use of an incident of this kind in his powerful
Balfour Stewart is right--scientists "know nothing, or next to nothing, of the ultimate structure and properties of matter, whether organic or inorganic."
We are now on such firm ground, that we will take another step in advance. The same knowledge and control of the occult forces, including the vital force which enabled the fakir temporarily to leave and then reenter his body, and Jesus, Apollonius, and Elisha to recall their several subjects to life, made it possible for the ancient hierophants to animate statues, and cause them to act and speak like living creatures. It is the same knowledge and power which made it possible for Paracelsus to create his homunculi; for Aaron to change his rod into a serpent and a budding branch; Moses to cover Egypt with frogs and other pests; and the Egyptian theurgist of our day to vivify his pigmy Mandragora, which has physical life but no soul. It was no more wonderful that upon presenting the necessary conditions Moses should call into life large reptiles and insects, than that, under like favoring conditions, the physical scientist should call into life the small ones which he names bacteria.
And now, in connection with ancient miracle-doers and prophets, let us bring forward the claims of the modern mediums. Nearly every form of phenomena recorded in the sacred and profane histories of the world
Of Apollonius, who asserted that he could see "the present and the future in a clear mirror," on account of his abstemious mode of life, the professor very beautifully observes: "This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits, all is as one day or state, the past and future comprised in the present." *
Were these God-like men "mediums," as the orthodox spiritualists
The reader must bear in mind the definition of the term, for, unless this is clearly understood, confusion will be inevitable. Mediumship of this kind may be either active or passive, repellent or receptive, positive or negative. Mediumship is measured by the quality of the aura with which the individual is surrounded. This may be dense, cloudy, noisome, mephitic, nauseating to the pure spirit, and attract only those foul beings who delight in it, as the eel does in turbid waters, or, it may be pure, crystalline, limpid, opalescent as the morning dew. All depends upon the moral character of the medium.
About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person's aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one's own immortal demon. It is literally
passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
Balfour Stewart is right--scientists "know nothing, or next to nothing, of the ultimate structure and properties of matter, whether organic or inorganic."
We are now on such firm ground, that we will take another step in advance. The same knowledge and control of the occult forces, including the vital force which enabled the fakir temporarily to leave and then reenter his body, and Jesus, Apollonius, and Elisha to recall their several subjects to life, made it possible for the ancient hierophants to animate statues, and cause them to act and speak like living creatures. It is the same knowledge and power which made it possible for Paracelsus to create his homunculi; for Aaron to change his rod into a serpent and a budding branch; Moses to cover Egypt with frogs and other pests; and the Egyptian theurgist of our day to vivify his pigmy Mandragora, which has physical life but no soul. It was no more wonderful that upon presenting the necessary conditions Moses should call into life large reptiles and insects, than that, under like favoring conditions, the physical scientist should call into life the small ones which he names bacteria.
And now, in connection with ancient miracle-doers and prophets, let us bring forward the claims of the modern mediums. Nearly every form of phenomena recorded in the sacred and profane histories of the world
Of Apollonius, who asserted that he could see "the present and the future in a clear mirror," on account of his abstemious mode of life, the professor very beautifully observes: "This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits, all is as one day or state, the past and future comprised in the present." *
Were these God-like men "mediums," as the orthodox spiritualists
The reader must bear in mind the definition of the term, for, unless this is clearly understood, confusion will be inevitable. Mediumship of this kind may be either active or passive, repellent or receptive, positive or negative. Mediumship is measured by the quality of the aura with which the individual is surrounded. This may be dense, cloudy, noisome, mephitic, nauseating to the pure spirit, and attract only those foul beings who delight in it, as the eel does in turbid waters, or, it may be pure, crystalline, limpid, opalescent as the morning dew. All depends upon the moral character of the medium.
About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person's aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one's own immortal demon. It is literally
passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
Of Apollonius, who asserted that he could see "the present and the future in a clear mirror," on account of his abstemious mode of life, the professor very beautifully observes: "This is what may be termed spiritual photography. The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits, all is as one day or state, the past and future comprised in the present." *
Were these God-like men "mediums," as the orthodox spiritualists
The reader must bear in mind the definition of the term, for, unless this is clearly understood, confusion will be inevitable. Mediumship of this kind may be either active or passive, repellent or receptive, positive or negative. Mediumship is measured by the quality of the aura with which the individual is surrounded. This may be dense, cloudy, noisome, mephitic, nauseating to the pure spirit, and attract only those foul beings who delight in it, as the eel does in turbid waters, or, it may be pure, crystalline, limpid, opalescent as the morning dew. All depends upon the moral character of the medium.
About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person's aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one's own immortal demon. It is literally
passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person's aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one's own immortal demon. It is literally
passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
"The tree is known by its fruits." Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world's history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a "familiar spirit," generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father's throne. The "Son of Man had not where to lay his head"; the chosen apostles provided "neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutae believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering
true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: "It is for them (the spirits) to come to me." Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with "natures loftier than itself," and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies * every inferior spirit, or bad daemon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who "elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system," ** according to Professor Wilder, "believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity." He even taught that there was a "mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine." Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and "common soothsayers," and declared that it was his "peculiar abstemious mode of life" which "produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place." Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes' experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium's moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully "developed"--perfectly passive--his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing "guides," who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated--the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits--whoever or whatever they may be--the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?
But nevertheless we may be answered that the same phenomena are produced in the presence of a modern medium as of an ancient saint. Undoubtedly; and so it was in the days of Moses; for we believe that the triumph claimed for him in Exodus over Pharaoh's magicians is simply a national boast on the part of the "chosen people." That the power which produced his phenomena produced that of the magicians also, who were moreover the first tutors of Moses and instructed him in their "wisdom," is most probable. But even in those days they seemed to have well appreciated the difference between phenomena apparently identical. The tutelar national deity of the Hebrews (who is not the Highest Father) ** forbids expressly, in Deuteronomy, *** his people "to learn to do after the abominations of other nations. . . . To pass through the fire, or use divination, or be an observer of times or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer."
What difference was there then between all the above-enumerated phenomena as performed by the "other nations" and when enacted by the prophets? Evidently, there was some good reason for it; and we find it in John's First Epistle, iv., which says: "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
disembodied" spirit, or can excuse any one for disturbing the dead. Saul was on the eve of destruction, himself and his sons, yet Samuel inquired of him: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?" * But the "intelligences" that visit the circle-rooms, come at the beck of every trifler who would while away a tedious hour.
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
In the number of the London Spiritualist for July 14th, we find a long article, in which the author seeks to prove that "the marvelous wonders of the present day, which belong to so-called modern spiritualism, are identical in character with the experiences of the patriarchs and apostles of old."
We are forced to contradict, point-blank, such an assertion. They are identical only so far that the same forces and occult powers of nature produce them. But though these powers and forces may be, and most assuredly are, all directed by unseen intelligences, the latter differ more in essence, character, and purposes than mankind itself, composed, as it now stands, of white, black, brown, red, and yellow men, and numbering saints and criminals, geniuses and idiots. The writer may avail himself of the services of a tame orang-outang or a South Sea islander; but the fact alone that he has a servant makes neither the latter nor himself identical with Aristotle and Alexander. The writer compares Ezekiel "lifted up" and taken into the "east gate of the Lord's house," ** with the levitations of certain mediums, and the three Hebrew youths in the "burning fiery furnace," with other fire-proof mediums; the John King "spirit-light" is assimilated with the "burning lamp" of Abraham; and finally, after many such comparisons, the case of the Davenport Brothers, released from the jail of Oswego, is confronted with that of Peter delivered from prison by the "angel of the Lord"!
Now, except the story of Saul and Samuel, there is not a case instanced in the Bible of the "evocation of the dead." As to being lawful, the assertion is contradicted by every prophet. Moses issues a decree of death against those who raise the spirits of the dead, the "necromancers." Nowhere throughout the Old Testament, nor in Homer, nor Virgil is communion with the dead termed otherwise than necromancy.
evoked. It sent its portentous message either by an evanescent simulacrum of itself, or through messengers, who could appear in material form, and personate faithfully the departed. The souls that could so easily be evoked were deemed neither safe nor useful to commune with. They were the souls, or larvae rather, from the infernal region of the limbo--the sheol, the region known by the kabalists as the eighth sphere, but far different from the orthodox Hell or Hades of the ancient mythologists. Horace describes this evocation and the ceremonial accompanying it, and Maimonides gives us particulars of the Jewish rite. Every necromantic ceremony was performed on high places and hills, and blood was used for the purpose of placating these human ghouls. *
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
"I cannot prevent the witches from picking up their bones," says the poet. "See the blood they pour in the ditch to allure the souls that will utter their oracles!" ** "Cruor in fossam confusus, ut inde manes elicirent, animas responsa daturas."
"The souls," says Porphyry, "prefer, to everything else, freshly-spilt blood, which seems for a short time to restore to them some of the faculties of life." ***
As for materializations, they are many and various in the sacred records. But, were they effected under the same conditions as at modern seances? Darkness, it appears, was not required in those days of patriarchs and magic powers. The three angels who appeared to Abraham drank in the full blaze of the sun, for "he sat in the tent-door in the heat of the day," **** says the book of Genesis. The spirits of Elias and Moses appeared equally in daytime, as it is not probable that Christ and the Apostles would be climbing a high mountain during the night. Jesus is represented as having appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden in the early morning; to the Apostles, at three distinct times, and generally by day; once "when the morning was come" (John xxi. 4). Even when the ass of Balaam saw the "materialized" angel, it was in the full light of noon.
We are fully prepared to agree with the writer in question, that we find in the life of Christ--and we may add in the Old Testament, too--
mediumistic, of a physical character though, if we except the visit of Saul to Sedecla, the Obeah woman of En-Dor. This is a distinction of vital importance.
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
True, the promise of the Master was clearly stated: "Aye, and greater works than these shall ye do"--works of mediatorship. According to Joel, the time would come when there would be an outpouring of the divine spirit: "Your sons and your daughters," says he, "shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." The time has come and they do all these things now; Spiritualism has its seers and martyrs, its prophets and healers. Like Moses, and David, and Jehoram, there are mediums who have direct writings from genuine planetary and human spirits; and the best of it brings the mediums no pecuniary recompense. The greatest friend of the cause in France, Leymarie, now languishes in a prison-cell, and, as he says with touching pathos, is "no longer a man, but a number" on the prison register.
There are a few, a very few, orators on the spiritualistic platform who speak by inspiration, and if they know what is said at all they are in the condition described by Daniel: "And I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep." * And there are mediums, these whom we have spoken of, for whom the prophecy in Samuel might have been written: "The spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." ** But where, in the long line of Bible-wonders, do we read of flying guitars, and tinkling tambourines, and jangling bells being offered in pitch-dark rooms as evidences of immortality?
When Christ was accused of casting out devils by the power of Beelzebub, he denied it, and sharply retorted by asking, "By whom do your sons or disciples cast them out?" Again, spiritualists affirm that Jesus was a medium, that he was controlled by one or many spirits; but when the charge was made to him direct he said that he was nothing of the kind. "Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?" daimonion, an Obeah, or familiar spirit in the Hebrew text. Jesus answered, "I have not a devil." ***
The writer from whom we have above quoted, attempts also a parallel between the aerial flights of Philip and Ezekiel and of Mrs. Guppy and other modern mediums. He is ignorant or oblivious of the fact that
Such phenomena, when occurring apart from religious rites, in India, Japan, Thibet, Siam, and other "heathen" countries, phenomena a hundred times more various and astounding than ever seen in civilized Europe or America, are never attributed to the spirits of the departed. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions. And we have but to consult the list of the principal demons or elemental spirits to find that their very names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks to which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Madan, a generic name indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Madan signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking men and cattle with sudden illness and death.
The Shudala-Madan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire-phenomena as well as Kutti Shattan, the little juggling imps. Shudala, they say, is a half-fire, half-water demon, for he received from Siva permission to assume any shape he chose, transform one thing into another; and when
they do not see." Shula Madan, is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but woe to him who incurs his wrath. Shula likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally keeps underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit.
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.
Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.
Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
Kumil-Madan,
is the undine proper. He is an elemental spirit of the water, and his name means blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp; and will help a friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or divination by water.Poruthu Madan,
is the "wrestling" demon; he is the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help the performer by keeping him above the soil or will overpower a wild beast before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical manifestation" has its own class of elemental spirits to superintend them.Returning now to levitations of human bodies and inanimate bodies, in modern circle-rooms, we must refer the reader to the Introductory chapter of this work. (See "AEthrobasy.") In connection with the story of Simon the Magician, we have shown the explanation of the ancients as to how the levitation and transport of heavy bodies could be produced. We will now try and suggest a hypothesis for the same in relation to mediums, i.e., persons supposed to be unconscious at the moment of the phenomena, which the believers claim to be produced by disembodied "spirits." We need not repeat that which has been sufficiently explained before. Conscious aethrobasy under magneto-electrical conditions is possible only to adepts who can never be overpowered by an influence foreign to themselves, but remain sole masters of their WILL.
Thus levitation, we will say, must always occur in obedience to law--a law as inexorable as that which makes a body unaffected by it remain upon the ground. And where should we seek for that law outside of the theory of molecular attraction? It is a scientific hypothesis that the form of force which first brings nebulous or star matter together into a whirling vortex is electricity; and modern chemistry is being totally reconstructed upon the theory of electric polarities of atoms. The waterspout, the tornado, the whirlwind, the cyclone, and the hurricane, are all doubtless the result of electrical action. This phenomenon has been studied from above as well as from below, observations having been made both upon the ground and from a balloon floating above the vortex of a thunder-storm.
perhaps the electricity of the investigators sitting in the circle, must concentrate itself in the table and gradually develop into motions. At the same time, or a little afterward, the psychical force unites to assist the two other powers. By psychical force, I mean that which evolves itself out of all the other forces of our organism. The combination into one general something of several separate forces, and capable, when combined, of manifesting itself in degree, according to the individuality." The progress of the phenomena he considers to be affected by the cold or the dryness of the atmosphere. Now, remembering what has been said as to the subtler forms of energy which the Hermetists have proved to exist in nature, and accepting the hypothesis enunciated by Mr. Wagner that "the power which calls out these manifestations is centred in the mediums," may not the medium, by furnishing in himself a nucleus as perfect in its way as the system of permanent steel magnets in Wild's battery, produce astral currents sufficiently strong to lift in their vortex a body even as ponderable as a human form? It is not necessary that the object lifted should assume a gyratory motion, for the phenomenon we are observing, unlike the whirlwind, is directed by an intelligence, which is capable of keeping the body to be raised within the ascending current and preventing its rotation.
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
Levitation in this case would be a purely mechanical phenomenon. The inert body of the passive medium is lifted by a vortex created either by the elemental spirits--possibly, in some cases, by human ones, and sometimes through purely morbific causes, as in the cases of Professor Perty's sick somnambules. The levitation of the adept is, on the contrary, a magneto-electric effect, as we have just stated. He has made
But there is still another point to be considered. If the medium is a nucleus of magnetism and a conductor of that force, he would be subject to the same laws as a metallic conductor, and be attracted to his magnet. If, therefore, a magnetic centre of the requisite power was formed directly over him by the unseen powers presiding over the manifestations, why should not his body be lifted toward it, despite terrestrial gravity? We know that, in the case of a medium who is unconscious of the progress of the operation, it is necessary to first admit the fact of such an intelligence, and next, the possibility of the experiment being conducted as described; but, in view of the multifarious evidences offered, not only in
of facts."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
Such is precisely the conclusion to which Professor Wagner, of St. Petersburg, was finally driven. In the second pamphlet on Mediumistic Phenomena, issued by him in December, 1875, he administers the following rebuke to Mr. Shkliarevsky, one of his materialistic critics: "So long as the spiritual manifestations were weak and sporadic, we men of science could afford to deceive ourselves with theories of unconscious muscular action, or unconscious cerebrations of our brains, and tumble the rest into one heap as juggleries. . . . But now these wonders have grown too striking; the spirits show themselves in the shape of tangible, materialized forms, which can be touched and handled at will by any learned skeptic like yourself, and even be weighed and measured. We can struggle no longer, for every resistance becomes absurd--it threatens lunacy. Try then to realize this, and to humble yourself before the possibility of impossible facts."
Iron is only magnetized temporarily, but steel permanently, by contact with the lodestone. Now steel is but iron which has passed through a carbonizing process, and yet that process has quite changed the nature of the metal, so far as its relations to the lodestone are concerned. In like manner, it may be said that the medium is but an ordinary person who is magnetized by influx from the astral light; and as the permanence
Balfour Stewart says that while the man of science cannot assert that "he is intimately acquainted with all the forces of nature, and cannot prove that perpetual motion is impossible; for, in truth, he knows very little of these forces . . . he does think that he has entered into the spirit and design of nature, and therefore he denies at once the possibility of such a machine." ** If he has discovered the design of nature, he certainly has not the spirit, for he denies its existence in one sense; and denying spirit he prevents that perfect understanding of universal law which would redeem modern philosophy from its thousand mortifying dilemmas and mistakes. If Professor B. Stewart's negation is founded
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
We may say the same of the elixir of life, by which is understood physical life, the soul being of course deathless only by reason of its divine immortal union with spirit. But continual or perpetual does not mean endless. The kabalists have never claimed that either an endless physical life or unending motion is possible. The Hermetic axiom maintains that only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed by it at the end of time) are incorruptible and eternal. But, in possession of a knowledge of occult natural forces, yet undiscovered by the materialists, they asserted that both physical life and mechanical motion could be prolonged indefinitely. The philosophers' stone had more than one meaning attached to its mysterious origin. Says Professor Wilder: "The study of alchemy was even more universal than the several writers upon it appear to have known, and was always the auxiliary of, if not identical with, the occult sciences of magic, necromancy, and astrology; probably from the same fact that they were originally but forms of a spiritualism which was generally extant in all ages of human history."
Our greatest wonder is, that the very men who view the human body simply as a "digesting machine," should object to the idea that if some equivalent for metalline could be applied between its molecules, it
fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
And this question of transmutation--this alkahest or universal solvent, which comes next after the elixir vitae in the order of the three alchemical agents? Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery? How shall we dispose of the historical anecdotes of men who actually made gold and gave it away, and of those who testify to having seen them do it? Libavius,
Marco Polo tells us that in some mountains of Thibet, which he calls Chingintalas, there are veins of the substance from which Salamander is made: "For the real truth is, that the salamander is no beast, as they allege in our parts of the world, but is a substance found in the earth." ** Then he adds that a Turk of the name of Zurficar, told him that he had been procuring salamanders for the Great Khan, in those regions, for the space of three years. "He said that the way they got them was by digging in that mountain till they found a certain vein. The substance of this vein was then taken and crushed, and, when so treated, it divides, as it were, into fibres of wool, which they set forth to dry. When dry, these fibres were pounded and washed, so as to leave only the fibres, like fibres of wool. These were then spun. . . . When first made, these napkins are not very white, but, by putting them into the fire for a while, they come out as white as snow."
Therefore, as several authorities testify, this mineral substance is the famous Asbestos, *** which the Rev. A. Williamson says is found in Shantung. But, it is not only incombustible thread which is made from it. An oil, having several most extraordinary properties, is extracted from it, and the secret of its virtues remains with certain lamas and Hindu adepts. When rubbed into the body, it leaves no external stain or mark, but, nevertheless, after having been so rubbed, the part can be scrubbed with soap and hot or cold water, without the virtue of the ointment being affected in the least. The person so rubbed may boldly step into the hottest fire; unless suffocated, he will remain uninjured. Another property of the oil is that, when combined with another substance, that we are
cunning, secret arts, skill in exorcisms and magic." *
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
But, all modern chemists are not equally dogmatic in their negation of the possibility of such a transmutation. Dr. Peisse, Desprez, and even the all-denying Louis Figuier, of Paris, seem to be far from rejecting the idea. Dr. Wilder says: "The possibility of reducing the elements to their primal form, as they are supposed to have existed in the igneous mass from which the earth-crust is believed to have been formed, is not considered by physicists to be so absurd an idea as has been intimated. There is a relationship between metals, often so close as to indicate an original identity. Persons called alchemists may, therefore, have devoted their energies to investigations into these matters, as Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday, and others of our day have explained the mysteries of chemistry." ** A learned Theosophist, a practicing physician of this country, one who has studied the occult sciences and alchemy for over thirty years, has succeeded in reducing the elements to their primal form, and made what is termed "the pre-Adamite earth." It appears in the form of an earthy precipitate from pure water, which, on being disturbed, presents the most opalescent and vivid colors.
"The secret," say the alchemists, as if enjoying the ignorance of the uninitiated, "is an amalgamation of the salt, sulphur, and mercury combined three times in Azoth, by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation."
"How ridiculously absurd!" will exclaim a learned modern chemist. Well, the disciples of the great Hermes understand the above as well as a graduate of Harvard University comprehends the meaning of his Professor of Chemistry, when the latter says: "With one hydroxyl group we can only produce monatomic compounds; use two hydroxyl groups, and we can form around the same skeleton a number of diatomic compounds.
Glycerine
."
"Attach thyself," says the alchemist, "to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the following manner:
The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum by the masters." The arcanum--the fourth emanation of the Akasa, the principle of LIFE, which is represented in its third transmutation by the fiery sun, the eye of the world, or of Osiris, as the Egyptians termed it. An eye tenderly watching its youngest daughter, wife, and sister--Isis, our mother earth. See what Hermes, the thrice-great master, says of her: "Her father is the sun, her mother is the moon." It attracts and caresses, and then repulses her by a projectile power. It is for the Hermetic student to watch its motions, to catch its subtile currents, to guide and direct them with the help of the athanor, the Archimedean lever of the alchemist. What is this mysterious athanor? Can the physicist tell us--he who sees and examines it daily? Aye, he sees; but does he comprehend the secret-ciphered characters traced by the divine finger on every sea-shell in the ocean's deep; on every leaf that trembles in the breeze; in the bright star, whose stellar lines are in his sight but so many more or less luminous lines of hydrogen?
"God geometrizes," said Plato. * "The laws of nature are the thoughts
tetractys--absorbed and resolved by the one eternal NO-BEING.
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
Tradition declares that on the dead body of Hermes, at Hebron, was found by an Isarim, an initiate, the tablet known as the Smaragdine. It contains, in a few sentences, the essence of the Hermetic wisdom. To those who read but with their bodily eyes, the precepts will suggest nothing new or extraordinary, for it merely begins by saying that it speaks not fictitious things, but that which is true and most certain.
"What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of one thing.
"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one by adaptation.
"Its father is the sun, its mother is the moon.
"It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole earth.
"Its power is perfect if it is changed into earth.
"Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
"Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then descend again to earth, and unite together the power of things inferior and superior; thus you will possess the light of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly away from you.
"This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself, because it will overcome every subtile thing and penetrate every solid thing.
"By it the world was formed."
This mysterious thing is the universal, magical agent, the astral light, which in the correlations of its forces furnishes the alkahest, the philosopher's
The philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circumscribes the four points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and IMMORTALITY. Everything in this world is a trinity completed by the quaternary, ** and every element is divisible on this same principle. Physiology can divide man ad infinitum, as physical science has divided the four primal and principal elements in several dozens of others; she will not succeed in changing either. Birth, life, and death will ever be a trinity completed only at the cyclic end. Even were science to change the longed-for immortality into annihilation, it still will ever be a quaternary; for God "geometrizes!"
Therefore, perhaps alchemy will one day be allowed to talk of her salt, mercury, sulphur, and azoth, her symbols and mirific letters, and repeat, with the exponent of the Synthesis of Organic Compounds, that "it must be remembered that the grouping is no play of fancy, and that a good reason can be given for the position of every letter." ***
Dr. Peisse, of Paris, wrote in 1863, the following:
"One word, a propos, of alchemy. What must we think of the Hermetic
How many great minds--unbelievers from the start--after having studied the "secret doctrine," have changed their opinions and found out how mistaken they were. And how contradictory it seems to find one moment Balfour Stewart quoting some philosophical morals of Bacon--whom he terms the father of experimental science--and saying " . . . surely we ought to learn a lesson from these remarks . . . and be very cautious before we dismiss any branch of knowledge or train of thought as essentially unprofitable," and then dismissing the next moment, as utterly impossible, the claims of the alchemists! He shows Aristotle as "entertaining the idea that light is not any body, or the emanation of any body, and that therefore light is an energy or act"; and yet, although the ancients were the first to show, through Demokritus, to John Dalton the doctrine of atoms, and through Pythagoras and even the oldest of the Chaldean oracles, that of ether as a universal agent, their ideas, says Stewart, "were not prolific." He admits that they "possessed great genius and intellectual power," but adds that "they were deficient in physical conceptions, and, in consequence, their ideas were not prolific." **
The whole of the present work is a protest against such a loose way of judging the ancients. To be thoroughly competent to criticise their ideas, and assure one's self whether their ideas were distinct and "appropriate to the facts," one must have sifted these ideas to the very bottom. It is idle to repeat that which we have frequently said, and that which every scholar ought to know; namely, that the quintessence of their knowledge was in the hands of the priests, who never wrote them, and in those of the "initiates" who, like Plato, did not dare write them.
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
Who then, of those who turn away from the "secret doctrine" as being "unphilosophical" and, therefore, unworthy of a scientific thought, has a right to say that he studied the ancients; that he is aware of all that they knew, and knowing now far more, knows also that they knew little, if anything. This "secret doctrine" contains the alpha and the omega of universal science; therein lies the corner and the keystone of all the ancient and modern knowledge; and alone in this "unphilosophical" doctrine remains buried the absolute in the philosophy of the dark problems of life and death.
"The great energies of Nature are known to us only by their effects," said Paley. Paraphrasing the sentence, we will say that the great achievements of the days of old are known to posterity only by their effects. If one takes a book on alchemy, and sees in it the speculations on gold and light by the brothers of the Rosie Cross, he will find himself certainly startled, for the simple reason that he will not understand them at all. "The Hermetic gold," he may read, "is the outflow of the sunbeam, or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of light, which of itself generates. Light in the celestial world is subtile, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or 'spirit of flame.' Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." *
Nevertheless, facts are facts; and, as Billot says of spiritualism, we will remark of occultism generally and of alchemy in particular--it is not a matter of opinion but of facts, men of science call an inextinguishable lamp an impossibility, but nevertheless persons in our own age as well as in the days of ignorance and superstition have found them burning bright in old vaults shut up for centuries; and other persons there are who
Now, the opinion of the "laughing philosopher" is of the greatest importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a considerably long time with the Egyptian priests. ** For nearly ninety years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book, which, according to Petronius, *** treated of nature--facts that he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of those that were authenticated by eye-witnesses, had, and could have taken place; for all, even the most incredible, was produced according to the "hidden laws of nature." ****
"The day will never come, when any one of the propositions of Euclid will be denied," ***** says Professor Draper, exalting the Aristoteleans at the expense of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. Shall we, in such a case, disbelieve a number of well-informed authorities (Lempriere among others), who assert that the fifteen books of the Elements are not to be wholly attributed to Euclid; and that many of the most valuable truths and demonstrations contained in them owe their existence to Pythagoras, Thales, and Eudoxus? That Euclid, notwithstanding his genius, was the first who reduced them to order, and only interwove theories of his own to render the whole a complete and connected system of geometry? And if these authorities are right, then it is again to that central sun of metaphysical science--Pythagoras and his school, that the moderns are indebted directly for such men as Eratosthenes, the world-famous geometer and cosmographer, Archimedes, and even Ptolemy, notwithstanding his obstinate errors. Were it not for the exact science of such men, and for fragments of their works that they left us to base Galilean speculations upon, the great priests of the nineteenth century
Panfilo Castaldi, the illustrious inventor of movable printing types," and adds in its inscription the generous confession that Italy renders to him "this tribute of honor too long deferred." But no sooner is the statue placed, than the Feltreians are advised by Colonel Yule to "burn it in honest lime." He proves that many a traveller besides Marco Polo had brought home from China movable wooden types and specimens of Chinese books, the entire text of which was printed with such wooden blocks. * We have seen in several Thibetan lamaseries, where they have printing-offices, such blocks preserved as curiosities. They are known to be of the greatest antiquity, inasmuch as types were perfected, and the old ones abandoned contemporaneously with the earliest records of Buddhistic lamaism. Therefore, they must have existed in China before the Christian era.
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
Let every one ponder over the wise words of Professor Roscoe, in his lecture on Spectrum Analysis. "The infant truths must be made useful. Neither you nor I, perhaps, can see the how or the when, but that the time may come at any moment, when the most obscure of nature's secrets shall at once be employed for the benefit of mankind, no one who knows anything of science, can for one instant doubt. Who could have foretold that the discovery that a dead frog's legs jump when they are touched by two different metals, should have led in a few short years to the discovery of the electric telegraph?"
Professor Roscoe, visiting Kirchhoff and Bunsen when they were making their great discoveries of the nature of the Fraunhoffer lines, says that it flashed upon his mind at once that there is iron in the sun; therein presenting one more evidence to add to a million predecessors, that great discoveries usually come with a flash, and not by induction. There are many more flashes in store for us. It may be found, perhaps, that one of the last sparkles of modern science--the beautiful green spectrum of silver--is nothing new, but was, notwithstanding the paucity "and great inferiority of their optical instruments," well known to the ancient chemists and physicists. Silver and green were associated together as far back as the days of Hermes. Luna, or Astarte (the Hermetic silver), is one of the two chief symbols of the Rosicrucians. It is a Hermetic
seven vowels as a hymn addressed to Serapis; * and at the sound of the seventh vowel, as at the "seventh ray" of the rising sun, the statue of Memnon responded. Recent discoveries have proved the wonderful properties of the blue-violet light--the seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum, the most powerfully chemical of all, which corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, is the Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres. Sounds and colors are all spiritual numerals; as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of nature, each of them a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the central, spiritual SUN.
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all
479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i.
479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi.
479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii.
479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836.
480:* "La Science des Esprits."
481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi.
481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii.
481:*** "La Science des Esprits."
482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face.
486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy."
489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy.
489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School."
491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428.
491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27).
491:*** Chapter xviii.
492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points.
492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14.
493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i.
493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8.
493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices."
493:**** Genesis xviii., i.
494:* Daniel x. 8.
494:** I Samuel, x. 6.
494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20.
495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken.
498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.")
501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858.
501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140.
504:* Eugenius Philalethes.
504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215.
504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12.
505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230.
505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25.
506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be
508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry."
508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God.
508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry."
509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right?
509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283.
510:* "The Conservation of Energy."
510:** Ibid., p. 136.
511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians."
512:* "Philopseud."
512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae."
512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii.
512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat."
512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science."
513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135.
514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."
"Happy is he who comprehends the spiritual numerals, and perceives their mighty influence!" exclaims Plato. And happy, we may add, is he who, treading the maze of force-correlations, does not neglect to trace them to this invisible Sun!
Future experimenters will reap the honor of demonstrating that musical tones have a wonderful effect upon the growth of vegetation. And with the enunciation of this unscientific fallacy, we will close the chapter, and proceed to remind the patient reader of certain things that the ancients knew, and the moderns think they know.
Footnotes
462:* See Eliphas Levi: "La Science des Esprits."
464:* Henry Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
464:** Josiah Cooke, Jr.: "The New Chemistry."
465:* Henry Maudsley: "The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry," p. 266.
465:** "Scientific American," August 12, 1868.
467:* Le Conte: "Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces."
469:* The wood-apple.
470:* Incorrect; the Hindustani word for monkey is rukh-charha. Probably chokra, a little native servant is meant.
471:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 306, 307.
472:* Delrio: "Disquis. Magic," pp. 34, 100.
472:** Col. H. Yule: "The Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 308.
474:* Edward Melton: "Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc.," p. 468. Amsterdam, 1702.
474:** "Memoirs of the Emperor Jahangire," pp. 99, 102.
475:* J. Hughes Bennett: "Text Book of Physiology," Lippincott's American Edition, pp. 37-50.
475:** "Curiosites Inouies."
476:* "Thoughts on the Birth and Generation of Things."
476:** C. Crowe: "Night-Side of Nature," p. 111.
476:*** Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," vii., c. 52; and Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:* "De Res. Var.," v. iii., i., viii., c. 43. Plutarch: "Discourse concerning Socrates' Daemon," 22.
477:** Nasse: "Zeitschrift fur Psychische Aerzte," 1820.
477:*** Osborne: "Camp and Court of Rundjit Singh"; Braid: "On Trance."
478:* Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in her "Night-Side of Nature," p. 118, gives us the particulars of a similar burial of a fakir, in the presence of General Ventura, together with the Maharajah, and many of his Sirdars. The political agent at Loodhiana was "present when he was disinterred, ten months after he had been buried." The coffin, or box, containing the fakir "being buried in a vault, the earth was thrown over it and trod down, after which a crop of barley was sown on the spot, and sentries placed to watch it. "The Maharajah, however, was so skeptical that in spite of all 479:* Todd: Appendix to "Occult Science," vol. i. 479:** "A Cornel. Cels.," lib. ii., cap. vi. 479:*** "Hist. Nat.," lib. vii., cap. lii. 479:**** "Morning Herald," July 21, 1836. 480:* "La Science des Esprits." 481:* "Vit. Apollon. Tyan.," lib. iv., ch. xvi. 481:** Salverte: "Sciences Occultes," vol. ii. 481:*** "La Science des Esprits." 482:* It would be beneficial to humanity were our modern physicians possessed of the same inestimable faculty; for then we would have on record less horrid deaths after inhumation. Mrs. Catherine Crowe, in the "Night-Side of Nature," records in the chapter on "Cases of Trances" five such cases, in England alone, and during the present century. Among them is Dr. Walker of Dublin and a Mr. S----, whose stepmother was accused of poisoning him, and who, upon being disinterred, was found lying on his face. 486:* A. Wilder: "Neo-platonism and Alchemy." 489:* Iamblichus was the founder of the Neo-platonic theurgy. 489:** See the "Sketch of the Eclectic Philosophy of the Alexandrian School." 491:* See "Medium and Daybreak," July 7, 1876, p. 428. 491:** In Volume II., we will distinctly prove that the Old Testament mentions the worship of more than one god by the Israelites. The El-Shadi of Abraham and Jacob was not the Jehovah of Moses, or the Lord God worshipped by them for forty years in the wilderness. And the God of Hosts of Amos is not, if we are to believe his own words, the Mosaic God, the Sinaitic deity, for this is what we read: "I hate, I despise your feast-days . . . your meat-offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? . . . No, but ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun (Saturn), your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. . . . Therefore, will I cause you to go into captivity . . . saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts" (Amos v. 21-27). 491:*** Chapter xviii. 492:* This word "up" from the spirit of a prophet whose abode ought certainly to be in heaven and who therefore ought to have said "to bring me down," is very suggestive in itself to a Christian who locates paradise and hell at two opposite points. 492:** Ezekiel iii. 12-14. 493:* William Howitt: "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii., ch. i. 493:** Lib. i., Sat. 8. 493:*** Porphyry: "Of Sacrifices." 493:**** Genesis xviii., i. 494:* Daniel x. 8. 494:** I Samuel, x. 6. 494:*** Gospel according to John vii. 20. 495:* Our informant, who was an eye-witness, is Mr. N----ff of St. Petersburg, who was attached to the flag-ship Almaz, if we are not mistaken. 498:* "What forces were in operation to cause this oscillation of the newspaper?" asks J. W. Phelps, who quotes the case--"These were the rapid upward motion of heated air, the downward motion of cold air, the translatory motion of the surface breeze, and the circular motion of the whirlwind. But how could these combine so as to produce the oscillation?" (Lecture on "Force Electrically Explained.") 501:* "Revue des Deux Mondes," p. 414, 1858. 501:** "Conservation of Energy," p. 140. 504:* Eugenius Philalethes. 504:** "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 215. 504:*** See Sage's "Dictionnaire des Tissus," vol. ii., pp. 1-12. 505:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., p. 230. 505:** "Alchemy, or the Hermetic Philosophy," p. 25. 506:* See Plutarch: "Symposiacs," viii. 2. "Diogenianas began and said: 'Let us admit Plato to the conference and inquire upon what account he says--supposing it to be 508:* Prof. Ed. L. Youmans: "Descriptive Chemistry." 508:** In ancient nations the Deity was a trine supplemented by a goddess--the arba-il, or fourfold God. 508:*** Josiah Cooke: "The New Chemistry." 509:* Prof. Sterry Hunt's theory of metalliferous deposits contradicts this; but is it right? 509:** Peisse: "La Medecine et les Medecins," vol. i., pp. 59, 283. 510:* "The Conservation of Energy." 510:** Ibid., p. 136. 511:* Extracts from Robertus di Fluctibus in "The Rosicrucians." 512:* "Philopseud." 512:** Diog. Laert. in "Demokrit. Vitae." 512:*** "Satyric. Vitrus D. Architect," lib. ix., cap. iii. 512:**** Pliny: "Hist. Nat." 512:***** "Conflict between Religion and Science." 513:* "Book of Ser Marco Polo," vol. i., pp. 133-135. 514:* "Dionysius of Halicarnassus."