Theosophy - Nature's Mysteries and how Theosophy Illuminates Them by A.P.Sinnett
NATURE’S
MYSTERIES
And
How Theosophy Illuminates Them
A.P.
Sinnett
With
Illustrations
The
Riddle of Life Series No. V
London,
The Theosophical Publishing Society
161
New Bond Street W.
1913
Preface
The
collection of Essays, published in 1901, under the title, “Nature’s
Mysteries,” has long been out of print, and the cream of that volume
has now been skimmed off for reproduction in the present form. Much has
been omitted, but some additions have been made where recent discoveries
have thrown light on the subjects dealt with. |
CHAPTER
1
Achievements
and Limitations of Science
People
who may not be inclined or able to make a special study of science are apt to
credit those who are recognised as men of science with knowing a great deal
more than they would claim, as knowledge for themselves. The non-scientific
person may entirely underrate the delicacy and minute precision of scientific
work, but he is apt to overrate its grasp and scope. A correct appreciation
of the beauty and magnitude of scientific achievement in one direction, and
of the limitations that confront it in another, is very desirable on the part
of anyone who, in a general way, is disposed to pay attention to the progress
of invention, discovery and research.
To
show plainly what I mean by a definite example, I may point to what is known
and what is not known about electricity. The extent to which students in that
branch of science can now manipulate electricity is wonderful and splendid.
We can make electric currents do almost any kind of work we care to set before
them. We can make them carry messages or passengers; we can employ them to light
houses and streets, or to cook dinners; we can teach them to drive machinery,
or to ring bells, and we can all the while measure their energies and quantities
as accurately as though we were dealing with so much water or coals. Yet no
man of science can tell us the first word of the answer to the question. What
is electricity?
We
can find out the rate at which electric impulses travel, and we know that this
is identical with the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second. We know that currents
differ very greatly among themselves in character, some being sharp and intense,
and some bulky and feeble. We invent names for these attributes, and call the
intensity “volt,” and the volume “ampere,” and then
we go on to invent other names that relate to the different characters of different
substances as conductors of electricity, and talk about “ohms” as
measuring the resistance such substances oppose to the passage of electric currents;
but all the while no one knows whether there is anything at all to be conducted,
whether electricity is a fluid, like a gas, only much finer, or a mere vibration
in that mysterious medium which pervades all space - the ether.
One
might take other illustrations of the idea I want to enforce. We have all known
since Newton’s time a good deal about the way in which gravitation acts.
Many accepted rules guide its invariable behaviour. It is a force that always
bears a definite relation to the “mass” (for practical purposes,
let us say the weight) of the bodies it affects, and to their distance from
one another. But there the knowledge of the most advanced men of science stops
short. No one can say a word then asked, What is gravitation? So again with
the simplest experiences of everyday life. When you burn a lump of coal, what
happens? We know that the various constituents of the coal enter into chemical
combination with the oxygen of the atmosphere, but we do not in the least degree
know why that process should involve the development of light and heat. Combustion
is the commonest, and yet, in some of its aspects, still amongst the most puzzling,
phenomena of Nature.
Certainly,
in saying this, I do not want to decry the achievements of science, nor even
its methods, though these will probably undergo considerable modifications as
time goes on; but it is important, in connection with the study of Nature, to
realize both the range and limitations of science, because we are in presence
of other attempts to investigate Nature besides those of the laboratory and
observatory, and I shall have something to say, from time to time, about these,
as well as about the achievements or ordinary science along the old familiar
road. That which is commonly called science is exclusively “physical”
science. It works with instruments made of metal, glass and so on, and has accomplished
work that may be fairy termed sublime in its examination of what I will venture
to call the outsides of things, but it always stops short in groping after a
comprehension of their innermost essence.
Its
failures are most obvious when we deal with any of the mysteries of Nature that
are associated with life. The extent and minute precision of scientific knowledge
concerning the mechanism of the human body are marvellous and admirable. Physiologists
have found out all about the processes by which the human body is developed,
from the earliest stages of conception to the latest maturity of growth. We
know how the muscles that move the body are themselves controlled by the nerves;
how these are animated by energies proceeding from the brain; and we even know
how some nerves convey orders, so to speak, from the brain to the muscles, and
others report sensations from any part of the body to the brain.
We
even know what parts of the brain are concerned with the movements of each limb,
what parts do business with the interior functions of the body, like digestion
or blood circulation, and so forth; and if a man is afflicted with paralysis
of some particular limb or muscle, we know exactly where to look for the injury
to the brain that may have accounted for the defect. But with all this we have
not got one step nearer comprehending the difference between the dead body and
the living one. We have not even got one step towards comprehending the difference
between the smallest living weed and its dead companion. Or, at all events,
physical science has not accomplished one step in any such direction. Mysteries
of that kind lie outside the domain of physical science. Workers in that field
are no more to be blamed for not penetrating the mysteries of life than a painter
of pictures is to be blamed for not understanding how to make a watch.
Enquiries
concerning life and consciousness belong to the domain of what may be called
super-physical science, and that, as far as the modern world is concerned at
any rate, is a young branch of science still at the stage of observing facts
or phenomena which it does not yet fully appreciate. Its conclusions are, so
far, little better very often than guesses. Its theories are as yet vague and
cloudy in their outlines. Still, it is a progressive branch of science, and
is growing up by degrees.
It
is possible so to influence the body of a person peculiarly organised - specially
sensitive - that the soul-mainspring, is set free from it for a time and can
act independently of it - can be conscious independently of it, which is the
all-important point to be considered. Meanwhile, the body is not conscious.
You can prick it with needles and it does not feel, give it ammonia to smell
and it does not cough - indeed, more reckless experiments have been tried on
persons in the mesmeric state, and their flesh may be burned without their feeling
anything; but such experiments as that are deeply to be condemned, because the
body is thus injured, even though it does not feel pain at the time, so that
when the soul comes back it finds its tenement out of repair.
A
result of huge importance is reached by such experiments - equally well reached
by those which are innocent as by those which are blameworthy - namely, that
the mainspring of the human creature is a separable something which can exist
in full consciousness apart from the body, and, when apart from the body, is
quite indifferent as to what happens to its deserted tenement. In short, the
survival of the soul of a man, after what is commonly called his death, is all
but demonstrable by means of mesmeric experiments - not yet, I must confess,
within the reach of everyone who would like to try them, any more than the Lick
telescope is within the reach of everyone who would like to look through it,
but nevertheless within the reach of special enquirers in that line fortunately
situated in various ways; and their work has been duly recorded for the advantage
of all who are willing to become students of their department of science second-hand.
After all, every student in any department of science has to be content with
second-hand knowledge of about nineteen-twentieths of all the facts he works
with.
In
connection with the whole volume of research that goes by the name of Spiritualism,
it is as certain as the occasional appearance of comets in the sky, that spiritual
séances are sometimes - very often - attended by invisible beings
who are actually the departed souls of people who once lived in the body. Persons
who deny that are as ignorant as they are silly. They are ignorant of the fact
that scores - hundreds, indeed - of highly-cultured people bear testimony to
their experience in that matter, and they are silly in supposing that their
trumpery little prepossessions as to what is probable and what is improbable
are to be set against the positive evidence of others at variance with those
prepossessions. Also they are marvellously silly in supposing that because they
may go to some spiritualistic séance and see reason to think the
proceedings are imposture, therefore the proceedings at all other séances
must be imposture too. There are forged bank-notes in the world, no doubt,
but that does not militate against the fact that there are also others which
are genuine. But, on the other hand, while the rank disbelievers in spiritualism
are foolish to an exasperating degree, the devotees of that pursuit are grievously
unscientific in their methods as a rule. They are on the threshold of a mighty
science, but they too often think themselves in possession of advanced knowledge.
Spiritualism
has certainly shown, what, indeed, could have been ascertained in other ways,
that the human soul survives the death of the body. But it has not explained
the destinies of the human soul after death, because people who pass away only
learn about these by degrees, and while they are in a position to communicate
with friends still in the flesh, they have rarely gone very far on their ultimate
journey, and have not acquired any knowledge concerning its later stages.
A
new impulse has been given to scientific thought within the last few years by
the discovery and examination of that wonderfully interesting substance, Radium.
Formerly it was supposed that an atom of any one of the many substances known
as the chemical elements was a definite, indivisible unity. Now we know that
all such “atoms” (the word is no longer appropriate in its literal
meaning) are a complicated structure built up of far more minute atoms, the
nature of which is still under investigation.
Now,
I want to convey an idea to begin with as to how small the atom of the chemical
elements may probably be. Great mathematicians like Lord Kelvin have worked
at this problem, and they come to fairly similar conclusions. Lord Kelvin somewhere
illustrates the conclusion by saying that if a drop of water were magnified
till it became the size of the earth - all the atoms of which it is composed
being magnified in the same proportion - then the atoms would be probably smaller
than cricket balls, but larger than small shot. Something between those two
sizes!
That
suggestion helps the imagination, but we only dazzle it if we talk of the figures
concerned. The gases that compose the air we breathe consist, of course, of
atoms. In a cubic centimetre of air (a centimetre is a little less than half
an inch) there are thirty trillions of gaseous atoms. A trillion is a million
billion, and billion is a million million. Now a million alone is a number almost
beyond the reach of imagination. If you begin at six o'clock on Monday morning
to count seconds, and kept on day and night without a moment’s intermission
till Saturday evening at six o'clock, you would only have counted half a million
seconds, not quite that. And yet, in a little quantity of air, such as you take
in hundreds at a breath, there are millions of millions of millions of atoms.
Now
about those things which are smaller than chemical atoms. They are radiated
or thrown off from the electrical apparatus which generates the much-talked-of
Röntgen ray.
Synthetic
Matter
Some
of us have recently been interested in current statements concerning a new process
for the preparation of “synthetic milk" - from vegetable materials
- identical in chemical composition with the milk supplied by the cow. A still
more remarkable achievement has since been announced - the production of matter
itself by a synthetic process dealing with the fundamental etheric atom, which,
as occult students have long been aware, though science has but recently caught
them up, is the basis of all physical manifestation. Sir William Ramsay, who
has been conspicuous in advancing scientific knowledge in reference to the possibility
of transmuting one form of physical matter into another, has again been successful
in showing that some simple forms of matter can be produced - one might almost
say created - by the treatment of the ultimate atom itself, hitherto beyond
the range of physical investigation.
This
new development of scientific knowledge may be described as beginning with the
examination of that highly interesting substance, radium. Some time ago Sir
William Ramsay showed that it was possible to obtain helium - a gas previously
regarded as an elementary body - from radium. Occult students were not surprised.
Radium is a substance of very high atomic weight. That is to say, its atom is
composed of a very great number of primary etheric atoms held together in less
stable equilibrium than the corresponding condition of similar bodies. That
which is described as its radio-activity, is really its readiness to break up
into the etheric condition. The Beta particles it throws off in such enormous
volume - called at present “electrons” by the ordinary scientist
- are really the etheric atoms of which it is built up. Ordinary scientists
are for the moment working with an erroneous hypothesis to the effect that these
are actually atoms of electricity. They are in reality etheric atoms carrying
a definite charge of electricity. To a great extent they stream out in individual
atoms (as electrons), but in some cases they break off so to speak in lumps,
and when these represent aggregations of atoms equal in number with the aggregations
forming definite (so called) elementary bodies, they present themselves in that
capacity. That is the way in which Sir William Ramsay obtained his helium, and
established the theoretical possibility of transmutation, thus no longer regarded
as a superstition of the misguided alchemist. Following up his first discovery
Sir William has since maintained that he has been able to obtain lithium from
copper (in other words to transmute copper into lithium), and carbon from silicon.
His scientific contemporaries for the most part remain incredulous as regards
these achievements, but there is no particular reason why the occultist should
distrust the claim.
The
latest work done in this department of investigation approaches the problem
from the other end of the scale. Instead of breaking up a body of high atomic
weight, the attempt now has been to construct bodies of light atomic weight
by combining the fundamental etheric atoms.
To
explain the method adopted we must remember first of all what goes on in a Röntgen
or X-Ray tube. The electrical current projected through such tubes is partially
reflected out in the form of Röntgen rays, but also affects the ether in
the tube generally. That has been going on ever since Röntgen rays have
been studied, but the consequence has only just been realized. That which has
now been discovered is that from the glass of an old Röntgen tube it is
possible to obtain helium. There was no helium there to begin with. It is assumed
that during the flow of the electric current the helium was formed by the aggregation
of the etheric atoms or electrons. I need not attempt to describe the precise
chemical process by which the helium is set free from the glass. That belongs
to the region of technicality, but is not the point in dispute among chemists.
The argument of the incredulous opponents of the new discovery is to the effect
that as helium exists in the atmosphere it may be have been occluded in the
glass to begin with. The answer to this objection is that the quantities obtained
by the process described are far in excess of those which could be accounted
for in that way. The quantities normally in the atmosphere are infinitesimal.
The
present research has been carried on by other distinguished chemists besides
Sir William Ramsay - by Professor Collie and Mr. Patterson - and these investigators
have obtained the rare gas, neon, from tubes that have been filled in the first
instance with hydrogen (of course in a highly rarefied condition).
There
is nothing surprising in the results from the point of view of the occult student,
and they may be looked upon as the thin end of a wedge that will ultimately
be driven much further into old-fashioned conceptions relating to the constitution
of matter. The amusing feature of the present controversy, as it is going on
in the scientific world while we write, is that no attention whatever is paid,
in that world, to the fact that the whole volume of knowledge towards which
these investigations are groping their way, was anticipated by occult investigations
in the year 1895, when in the November number of the magazine then called Lucifer
the atomic constitution of hydrogen, oxygen and some other bodies, was fully
set forth in much greater detail than later scientific investigation has yet
reached. Clairvoyant research showed not merely that these bodies were composed
of etheric atoms, but actually detected their number and arrangement within
the hydrogen, oxygen and other atoms. The hydrogen atom consists of eighteen
etheric atoms and this is a key number, giving us the number of etheric atoms
in any (hitherto called) elementary body of high atomic weight. Disregarding
this discovery with sublime indifference, the modern physicist is speculating
wildly on the question how many “electrons” go to the composition
of hydrogen, and Sir Joseph Thompson in a recent lecture suggested 1,700 as
a probable number, guided apparently by the entirely delusive idea that the
number would be indicated by the ratio of the mass of the hydrogen atom to the
mass of the electron. The atom of any given physical body is a solar system
in miniature, the negative etheric atoms representing the planets, and perhaps
a positively electrified “atom” of some unknown matter, the sun
of the system. Occult knowledge concerning the beautiful phenomena of Nature
dribbles out to us by degrees and we are not yet in a position to say much about
the nature of positive electricity. The scientific world is busy with its investigation,
but does not seem yet to be on anything like the right trail. Meanwhile at all
events Sir William Ramsay’s synthetic helium is a very promising addition
to the armoury of weapons with which the deeper mysteries of matter will be
attacked at a later date.
Thus
it has come to pass that some mysteries of Nature scouted and hooted at fifty
years ago as empty pretences of fraud and imposture, are already recognized
as worthy of serious attention.
Others,
of which the importance has not yet been generally allowed, will establish their
claims in due time. Mesmerism, for example, which was ridiculed in the middle
of the past century as though it were nonsense and superstition, is acknowledged
on all hands now to be a fact in Nature, though few people understand it properly
as yet, except those who have been at work with it for many years. So with what
is called “thought-transference,” the power some people have, if
they are specially gifted in that direction, of becoming aware, without being
told in any ordinary way, of what some other person is thinking.
Mathematics
and indirect experiment may enable us to find out the size of the water molecule,
but we shall never see it with any physical instrument. But such things can
be seen by the “clairvoyant” faculty of persons peculiarly gifted.
As the human race improves, such people will become more numerous than they
are at present, but already they are numerous enough to enable students of “occult’
science to be quite sure of their existence, and to compare their observations
one with another.
That
phrase, by the way, “occult,” merely means something extra-mysterious
for the time being. The few people who possessed some knowledge of electricity
in the days of ancient Egypt would have called that occult science. A few generations
hence there will be nothing occult about thought-transference, or clairvoyance,
but, for the moment, the laws governing those faculties are still hidden from
us to so great an extent, that the study of such matters lies still in the department
of occult science.
The
term “clairvoyance” means, of course, no more than clear seeing
- seeing, that is to say, with the eye of the mind, in some mysterious fashion,
which has nothing to do with optics, but, nevertheless, is a bona-fide
perception of actual things. Clairvoyance is a faculty as old as the world.
There are perfectly well-authenticated stories about it in ancient history,
but no evidence of that sort will make people believe what they do not want
to believe, so I will come to more recent investigations. One of the most patient
and careful investigators who have written on this subject is Dr Gregory, author
of a book called Animal Magnetism, published in the middle of the last
century. He was lucky enough to meet with a good many people who were endowed
with the necessary faculties, and willing to let him experiment with them. In
his day it seems to have been taken for granted that clairvoyance was a faculty
that could only be exercised when people were in the mesmeric state, so all
Dr Gregory’s subjects were first mesmerized, and then employed to look
at things that could not be seen with their physical eyes.
For
example, he would get a bagful of nuts, each made up for children's parties,
with a printed motto inside. Anyone present would take one of these nuts out
of the bag at random. It would be given to the “sensitive,” or clairvoyant,
and he (or she) would read the motto, or, anyhow, tell correctly what it was.
Then, before everyone present, the nut would be cracked, and the clairvoyant
reading verified. These demonstrations were very neat and satisfactory, because
they precluded the possibility that the motto could be read by thought-transference.
Nobody present knew what any particular nut contained.
Many
French experimentalists in the middle of the century entangled their researches
with attempts to foresee the future by help of clairvoyance. It does not follow
that because a peculiarly gifted person may be able to see what is at
a distance in space, he may be able to
see what only may be at a distance in time. All the same, a great deal
of interesting information on the subject of true clairvoyance is to be found
in the French literature of mesmerism; and though we do not understand much
yet about the laws which govern the exercise of this faculty, everyone who has
the patience to become, in even a moderate degree, a student of occult science,
knows that such a faculty exists.
We
shall never see an atom of carbon or oxygen by means of microscopes, but we
shall be able to examine their structure and composition by means of clairvoyant
faculties turned in that direction, for size is no embarrassment to the eyes
of the mind. The smallest things in Nature are as visible to that sense as the
medium-sized things that suit our common eyesight, and the clairvoyant sight
can be no more embarrassed by the magnitude in the other direction. Astronomical
distances are as well within its focus as those which we can measure with our
hands.
CHAPTER
II
Atlantis
“My
friends,” said a simple-minded preacher once in the hearing of one of
my friends, “this world is very old. It is six thousand years old!”
Of course, the good man thought he had Scriptural assurance in support of that
estimate; but the progress of knowledge has induced us, not to treat Scriptural
statements with disrespect, but to read them in a new way, and thus all educated
people in the present age are well aware that the planet on which we live has
been slowly brought to its present degree of perfection during a great many
millions of years, and that the six thousand of our primitive ancestral belief
is rather a phase of the present time than a period that can be treated, in
any comprehensive sense, as the past.
A
fragment of an old Egyptian history, the bulk of which has been lost, gives
us a catalogue of kings and dynasties covering a period that has been variously
estimated at from 3,500 to 5,000 years before Christ; but everyone admits that
remains apparently associated with the earliest part of this period are of a
kind that must have been preceded by long ages of civilization.
Professor
Flinders Petrie, who has done a great deal of patient work in Egypt, helps himself
to another two thousand years. I propose to show the reason we need not submit
to those narrow limits in considering the past civilisation of Egypt, and why
it is desirable to attack the problem in quite a different way from that adopted
by Professor Petrie, if we set out in search of general conclusions concerning
the antiquity of civilised mankind on earth, irrespective of any particular
area within which such civilisation may, at a given period, have fermented.
Whenever
this investigation is seriously undertaken by the scientific world, it must
centre round the great problem of Atlantis. I have said that we have no literary
records concerning the remote past, but that remark may be qualified. We have
none that are as yet universally accepted as trustworthy, but Plato has left
us some account, flavoured, it is true with obviously fabulous details, concerning
the existence, at a period long anterior to the earliest known dynasties of
the Egyptian catalogue, of a great island or continent situated in the middle
of what is now the Atlantic Ocean. He got his information from Egyptian priests.
Till recently the whole story was treated as a fable, but modern research has
gone far, by ordinary methods, to establish the fact that such a continent as
he describes did really exist at one time. Of course there is nothing at variance
with accepted scientific views in that belief.
Geologists
freely admit the broad principle that most of the land which is dry at the present
time was once under sea water, and presumably,
therefore, that a great deal of the present ocean bed was once dry land.
The only reason why the former existence of Atlantis is not universally recognized
is that, as yet, we are not supposed to have sufficient proof of its existence.
So far, only some students of the subject think the proof, along ordinary lines,
sufficient and complete. Some of the scientific men connected with the ocean
surveys of the Challenger are disposed to regard the configuration of
the Atlantic bed as fully establishing the Atlantis theory.
Donnelly,
the American writer, brings forward a mass of testimony to show that the ancient
beliefs, the artistic work and the natural phenomena - the plants and animals
- of Mexico and the Mediterranean basin had a common origin, which could only
have been possible if at one time those parts of the world were in touch with
each other along land communications, instead of being separated by great expanses
of ocean as they are now. And since Donnelly wrote his book, some overwhelming
testimony has been forthcoming to confirm the Atlantean story. But before I
come to that, it will be convenient to describe how it comes to pass that students
of occult science have rushed on enormously in advance of investigation along
commonplace channels of research, in reference to the conditions of the world’s
civilisation at the time when Atlantis was in full life and vigour.
The
faculty of clairvoyance, of which I have already spoken in reference to the
power it gives to some of its most gifted exponents of examining the structure
of atoms far too small for any microscopic investigation, is equally applicable
to the investigation of the world’s history in long past ages. A time
will most certainly come when this wonderful power will be recognised as the
most potent instrument of research which science can employ. As yet it is exercised
in perfection by only a few persons known to me, but within the Theosophical
connection there are several sufficiently endowed and developed - for the faculty
requires not merely a natural gift, but great perseverance and devotion to the
task, for its effective culture - to provide for the comparison of observations
one with another, to eliminate occasional errors, and to fill up detail when
the problem in hand has to do with the investigation of some long past period.
In
that way the modern devotees of occult science have at last put together such
a mass of information relating to the Atlantean period, that we really know
much more about it than, for instance, about the so called historical period
of Egyptian civilisation. And we have been made actually acquainted, in connection
with this research, with dates at which great changes in the configuration of
the earth’s geography have taken place.
1.
The World as it was 800,000 years ago.
Ordinary
geology, as I have said, makes it certain that such changes have taken place,
but it does not tell us when they happened. Clairvoyant research does tell us
when the changes occurred, and more than this, gives us actual maps of the earlier
configurations.
“The
Story of Atlantis,” the results of clairvoyant investigation into that
most interesting period of the world’s history, has been published in
a book bearing that title. [“The Story of Atlantis” by W Scott-Elliot,
Theosophical Publishing Society. See also “The Child's Story of Atlantis”
issued by the same firm.] The whole narrative is too elaborate and fascinating
in its interest to be dealt with in detail in this article, which has necessarily
been concerned with collateral matters, but I want especially to explain how
the knowledge we occult students possess concerning Atlantis clears up questions
connected with the early history of Egypt that would be quite unmanageable in
any other way. Knowing how the geographical changes have been going on, we can
reconcile the 9000-year limit (reckoning back from the present time), which
Professor Petrie assigns to the whole history of
Egypt, with the fact, of which in other ways we are quite equally sure, that
the grandest civilisation of Egypt was flourishing many tens of thousands of
years before the country entered upon that 9000-year period. That period did
not, in real truth, represent its growth and development, but merely its gradual
decay.
Once
upon a time - I will go into more exact detail later - land stretched almost
uninterruptedly right across the region which is now the Atlantic Ocean, from
the land we now call Mexico - the extreme westerly limit - to the northern shores
of what is now Africa (the southern part of Africa had not then as yet come
into existence), and so on right across what is now Egypt (there was no Red
Sea then) to what is now Asia. The land, in fact, at the time I am speaking
of made a huge belt round the earth. There was no North or South America, no
Europe, no South Africa. Much later on, through successive changes that I will
not stop now to describe, some approximation to the present condition of affairs
was reached, but still there existed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean an
island - the remnant of the original vast continent of Atlantis -and this
island was about as big in area as all modern Europe, without Russia. The Red
Sea had been invented by that time (it was the result of changes that took place
about 80,000 years ago), and so matters remained without any great further alteration
until about 11,500 years ago. [The reader should refer to the two maps. No 1
illustrates the conditions first described; No 2 shows the enormous changes
which had taken place up to 11,500 years ago.]
That
was the period during which the grand civilisation of Egypt was actually in
progress. Why have its traces not been more definitely identified? Because at
the date last mentioned, 11,500 years ago, the latest of the great cataclysmic
convulsions that have from time to time altered the configuration of the earth
took place. The vast island constituting the remains of Atlantis subsided with
terrific suddenness, and the sea, which then covered what is now the desert
of Sahara, was driven eastward so as to completely deluge the land of Egypt.
The great pyramid, already in existence (modern archaeology is utterly mistaken
as to the date of its construction), was for a time under water. Lower Egypt
was obliterated as a region of land, and spent a good many years as so much
sea-bed. All traces of the old civilisation disappeared except as regards some
of the temples, which, like the great pyramid, are really prediluvian, and when
the next change took place, which elevated, to some extent, the whole of Northern
Africa and shouldered off the waters of the Sahara Sea, leaving that region
to dry up and become a desert, then the Nile resumed business as a river channel,
and set to work to make a new Egypt by the deposition of fresh mud. It is this,
its latter-day task, that the modern archeologist treats as though it had occupied
the whole past time.
II
The World as it was 11,500 years ago
And
now, having stated what did occur -as occult students ascertain by surer
methods than the guesses of archaeology -let me, in conclusion for the present,
show how some commonplace testimony of the ordinary kind has lately cropped
up to vindicate occult research in reference to the latest period of Atlantean
history and the final disappearance of the last remaining island. Mexico, as
I have said, has from immense antiquity been habitable land. A French archeologist,
Dr Le Plongeon, has been at work there for many years. He has written books
about his discoveries, and he has been the first person to decipher the Mexican
hieroglyphics (which differ from those of Egypt). In 1803, Mr E J. Howell, in
the course of a lecture before the Society of Arts, recounted the contents of
letters he had received from Dr Le Plongeon concerning his then recent work.
He had succeeded in translating a certain manuscript known to archaeologists
as the Troano MS. It had never before been deciphered, but Le Plongeon found
it to contain a straightforward narrative of the submergence of Atlantis. It
is in itself an ancient Mexican manuscript of immense antiquity, and it says
that the catastrophe took place “8060 years before the writing of this
book.” Ten countries, it says, were torn asunder in the convulsion, and
sank with their 64,000,000 inhabitants. The date given, it will be seen, fairly
well corresponds with that obtained by clairvoyant research, and it is not creditable
to the ordinary non-occult students of the bygone history and past evolution
of our race, that Le Plongeon’s great discovery should, so far, have excited
so little attention.
The
real, grand, early civilisation of Egypt was introduced by migrations of enterprising
colonists from the great Atlantean continent long before the contraction of
that continent to the dimensions of the island which lasted till 11,500 years
ago. Everything, in fact, in any part of the ancient world had an Atlantean
origin, just as a few thousand years hence everything then existing about the
world in the shape of civilisation will necessarily be recognized as having
had a European origin. Nobody can begin to understand the old world, or the
beginnings of the civilisation in the midst of which we live, until he has obtained
a comprehensive grasp of the state of mankind in the Atlantean period. Atlantis
is the key to all knowledge concerning the past history and evolutionary progress
of our race.
CHAPTER
III
Astronomy
Ancient and Modern
People
who do not make a special study of astronomy credit modern astronomers with
too much knowledge in one direction and with too little in another. I am going
to try and show first what kind of knowledge they do possess in perfection,
and then, where and why their limitations come in. If we wanted to select one
word which should be the key-word, as it were, of modern science, a single word
to be its motto, that word would be “measurement.” It is by accurately
measuring distances, magnitudes, temperatures, weights, and so on, that the
grand results of chemistry, physics, electricity, as well as those of astronomy,
have been reached. Modern scientists are fanatical about the importance of measurement.
A chemical analysis must be quantitative to have any value. The energies of
an electric current must be expressed in terms which measure its volume, its
intensity, its power of overcoming the resistance of various kinds of conductors,
with the minutest conceivable accuracy. In dealing with the characteristics
of light, we must use the ten-millionth of an inch as the unit of measurement
when we are talking about wave lengths. And in astronomy, instruments are used
that will measure distances in the sky that are no greater than would be covered
by a human hair held 36 feet from the eye.
We
reach, in astronomy, a series of conclusions about the distances from us of
some of the fixed stars. These conclusions rest upon observations of apparent
movements of such stars against the background of the sky, as they are observed
at intervals of six months when the earth has completely crossed over to the
other side of its orbit. But
though that crossing means that the earth is 180 millions of miles away from
its previous position, the apparent movement of the star is not greater than
the diameter of a penny looked at from a distance of two miles. None the less
are the instruments used of such exquisite mechanical perfection that they can
deal quite successfully with these minute measurements, and bring out results
which we feel sure are approximately right, though the figures used to express
them are beyond the grasp of the imagination.
The
distances we have to talk about in reference to our solar system alone are terribly
stupendous. The earth swings round in space at a distance of more than ninety
millions of miles from the sun, but we are quite near compared with some of
the other planets of our family. Jupiter is five times as far from the sun as
we are, and the outermost planet as yet discovered, Neptune, is thirty times
as far, or over 2,700 millions of miles away. The light by which we see Neptune
has to radiate out from the sun to that planet, and then come back to us, and
though light travels at the rate of 186,000 miles per second, it takes
over four hours on the voyage out and home when it illuminates Neptune for our
benefit. These figures give one some sort of idea concerning the magnitude of
the solar system as a whole. And yet the orbit of Neptune, which may be thought
of, for the present, as including the whole solar system, bears a surprising
relation to the region in space that is, so to speak, allotted to the solar
system.
If
you imagine that region a spherical space extending to the nearest of the fixed
stars, how big would that space be compared to the diameter of the system itself,
the orbit of Neptune? The answer is, that if we had a flat map of that spherical
region, and drew it so that the circle was about equal in area to Lincoln’s
Inn-fields, then the whole solar system would have to be represented by a shilling
in the middle. Thousands of millions of miles are as nothing compared with the
distances of the fixed stars. The nearest of them is twenty or thirty billions
of miles away from us, and a billion is a million million.
Facts
of this kind can be served out to us by modern astronomers to any extent we
desire. And besides the measurements they are enabled to undertake, astronomers
can now reach conclusions that are more interesting even than their figures.
Other sciences have lent their aid to astronomy, and, above all, that which
enables us to discover, from the examination of light, the chemical constitution
of the body which emits it. The light to the eye may look just the same whether
it comes from highly-heated carbon or from highly-heated iron. But to the spectroscope
these two kinds of light look different indeed. The trained observer can recognise
one from the other at a glance. And so every kind of substance known to chemistry,
when heated sufficiently to be luminous, gives out its own kind of light, and
no other. In this previously unexpected way astronomers were suddenly put in
possession of a resource, an instrument, by means of which they were enabled
to ascertain first what the sun was made of, and eventually what each star that
shines with its own light is made of.
So,
creeping on from one step to another, modern astronomy has come to include a
great volume of knowledge concerning what I have called the outsides of the
heavenly bodies. But the temper of mind in which scientific men of the nineteenth
century have, for the most part, regarded Nature, has led them to neglect all
those aspects of astronomy which do not come within the range of measurement.
And the prevailing mental fault of the nineteenth century has been conceit with
itself and its own achievements, giving rise to contempt for everything that
it did not understand. Traditions handed down from earlier periods of the world’s
civilisation have been thrown aside as superstition if they did not fit in with
knowledge the nineteenth century had acquired for itself. Our tendency to do
this has been aggravated by the objectionable shape in which, for the most part,
such traditions have come down to modern times. But none the less has this hasty,
careless policy betrayed the modern scientific world into taking up an attitude
in reference to a multitude of Nature’s most interesting mysteries, for
which we shall be laughed at by the scientists of the future much more contemptuously
even than we have been laughing at the folly of our ancestors.
The
study of the heavens in past ages bore fruit of a wholly different kind from
that which has rewarded the observations of telescopic astronomers. The prevailing
belief was that the stars and planets, the sun and the moon, exercise some mysterious
influence on human affairs, and, generally, on the world in which we live. The
further back we go in clairvoyant investigation, the more persistent and minute
we find this belief to have been, and it survived up to a very recent period.
It survives, for that matter, with some modifications, amongst those who know,
up to the present time, and will revive with great effect at some period in
the future, when, perhaps, the mysteries concerned will be better understood
than in the past. But the point I want to make first, before going into speculations
concerning the future, is that ancient astronomy -or “astrology,”
as it used to be called -represented an enormous volume of conviction amongst
millions of people far advanced in other branches of knowledge and culture,
to an extent that ought to make modern thinkers pause before scoffing at their
beliefs.
Our
principal difficulty in handling the subject is that we have no authentic record
of the theories that prevailed among ancient astrologers in reference to the
influence of the stars on human affairs. We only know that they gave an amount
of attention to the whole subject, which makes it certain that experience had
shown them to be on the right track. They probably had no theory to account
for the facts they observed, but they had not fallen into the peculiar vice
of our age -that of denying that a fact is a fact if we cannot understand
it.
The
supremely great mind of Francis Bacon found room for a belief in astrology.
Kepler, one of the founders of modern astronomy, avows that a study of the facts
has “instructed and compelled my unwilling belief” in the inexplicable
relationship of planetary aspects and conjunctions with human affairs; and Flamstead,
the first Astronomer-Royal of Greenwich Observatory, was not only a believer
in astrology, but a practical astrologer himself, and he cast an astrological
figure to determine the probable future of the Observatory itself. Nor has the
study been altogether neglected even in our own time. Plenty of text-books are
in print, and new ones are often appearing, which teach inquirers the rules
of the astrological art as far as it is understood now; and other books on the
subject have accumulated great masses of evidence to show that though we cannot
see the sense of it, astrological forecasts of the future do continually turn
out right. My limits will not allow me to tell stories in detail. I know of
one case in which a man’s death, by an unusual kind of accident, at something
over sixty, was foretold at his birth by an astrologer (long since deceased),
together with the leading events of his lifetime.
The
books record such cases to an extent that makes the theory of accidental coincidence
altogether ridiculous. And in a manner that is profoundly mysterious, but almost
invariable, the “horoscope,” or map of the heavens, at the time
of anybody’s birth, will be found to correspond, in certain ways, with
his physical appearance. I am not going to guess why certain configurations
of the planets and stars at the moment of birth should correspond with the physical
characteristics of the child. The idea is so difficult to understand that it
looks absurd, and all one can say is that it is so, and every student
who has the sense to examine the facts before coming to conclusions about them,
will bear testimony that it is so.
Unfortunately
we have lost touch with the finer details of the astrological art as practised
by the scientists of the ancient world, and, so far, the scientists of our world
have not taken the trouble to work up the lost knowledge afresh. All that we
know of astrology practically in the present day is derived from the writings
of the Egyptian philosopher, Ptolemy. The situation is all the more tantalizing
because, if we go back far enough, we find that in old Chaldea -the country
lying along the valley of the Euphrates -the learned men of the time not
only made great use of astrology, but possessed so complete a comprehension
of the solar system, that they had anticipated our exact knowledge of the distances
and masses of the planets. They seem to have been astronomers, in our sense,
as well as astrologers, though in those days measurements were apparently held
to be of little importance beside what may be called the human interest of the
heavens.
In
speaking of Chaldean knowledge, I am, of course, drawing upon the results of
the clairvoyant investigation for my facts. This investigation has not yet recovered
touch with Chaldean methods of astrological calculation, but it shows that,
at a period about twenty thousand years ago, the Chaldean priests constructed
their temples on astronomical principles. A series of temples in that country
constituted a kind of orrery, or model of the solar system. The great temple
in the middle stood for the sun. At distances that corresponded in their proportions
with the real distances, other temples represented the various planets, and
the sizes were all to scale, though, as we find necessary in drawing a map of
the solar system, the Chaldeans had to adopt one scale for sizes and another
for distances. Anyhow, the arrangement of the temples showed that they already,
at that remote date, knew about the existence of Uranus and Neptune, and apparently
they were acquainted with one planet that has long been suspected to exist,
but has never yet been seen by modern eyes -the interior little world,
provisionally called Vulcan, revolving so close to the sun that it is inside
the orbit of Mercury.
Already
a fairly widespread appreciation of the situation, as I have described it, is
leading a good many people to pay attention to astrology, and some of them get
too enthusiastic, fancying that the “science,” as they regard it,
can tell us a great deal more than is really possible. It is not a science at
all in its present condition, but a confused mass of rules imperfectly understood,
by which calculations can be made, but for no one of which have we any foundation
in reason. All we know is that calculations made along those lines come out
right in a proportion of cases that makes all talk of coincidence absurd. But
the art -regarding it in that light rather than as a science -is fraught with
embarrassments. In its first board application it has to do with “nativities,”
with figures, or maps, representing the positions of the stars and planets in
the heavens at the moment of a child's birth but, first of all, how often is
the real, exact moment of a child's birth accurately recorded? An error of five
minutes will alter the significance of the figure. And what is the exact
moment of birth? It is needless for me here to go into physiological details
on that point. Enough to say that the child's first cry is the orthodox moment
in question, according to most modern astrologers.
Given
any moment, it is very easy to “put up the figure,” as the phrase
goes. All the necessary almanacs and tables are regularly published, and anyone
can learn the rules for “casting the horoscope.” But to read its
meaning is quite another business. For that, an astrologer has to be saturated
with a knowledge of all the significance attributed by Ptolemy to the various -almost
infinitely various -conjunctions, aspects, relative angular distances,
and so forth, of the heavenly bodies concerned. And in order to predict future
events, according to the rule-of-thumb methods handed down to us, intricate
calculations have to be made as to the places that will be occupied by the planets
at future periods. Finally, in regard to nativities, no modern astrologer of
intelligence would claim to be able to do more than forecast probabilities.
The calculations, as we have to make them now, are either too slovenly to be
trustworthy, or too intricate to be accomplished by anybody with exactitude.
But there is another branch of astrology called “horary astrology,”
which does not aim at doing so much as that kind which deals with nativities,
but is more easily worked. For choice, it seems more absurd -more hopelessly
opposed to reason -than the kind I have been describing.
But
experience again floors incredulity. If some really important, momentous question
concerning your life, health, fortunes, or happiness is preying on your mind,
and it suddenly occurs to you, Could astrology answer this question for me? -ridiculous
and preposterous though it may seem, astrology most likely could! You yourself,
if you are an astrologer, or somebody else for you -the rules to be followed
being a little different in the two cases -must put up a figure, draw a
map of the heavens, for the moment at which the idea of doing the thing occurred
to you. If you have accurately observed that moment, the work can be done at
any convenient time afterwards. Then the map is read according to certain rules
(which do not involve any intricate calculations), and the answer stares you
in the face!
Perhaps,
indeed, the figure will not, so to speak, make sense. It will not be coherent.
It will, perhaps, resemble a mass of letters jumbled together at random, as
compared with intelligible words. But if it does make sense, it will very generally
turn out to tell the truth. That is the wonderful part of the story. You cannot
begin to explain why. The whole business is utterly unintelligible, but the
facts of experience are stubborn things. When they come within our own experience,
we all submit to their force, but when they are gathered up by other people,
then there are two ways of looking at them. We may say: That sounds all nonsense,
so the people who relate their experience must be telling lies. Or we may say:
Our knowledge concerning the mysteries of Nature is, so far, the merest smattering.
For anything which really happens there must be an explanation to be got at
sooner or later. Since the unintelligible experience is there to guide us, let
us examine, investigate, try new experiments, gather together such a volume
of facts that the actuality of the occurrence shall be beyond dispute, and then
let us set out in all directions to hunt for the clue to the infinite marvel
with which we have to deal. For, remember that there is no problem with which
scientific investigation could concern itself that is of deeper significance
to the human race than this which lies at the root of the astrological mystery.
To what extent is the future mapped out beforehand by powers above us? How is
this globe on which we live concatenated in its destinies with the other globes
wandering in space? What, in the name of all that is bewildering, can be the
nature of the unseen influences pouring down on this earth across the awful
distances that separate us from the planets and the stars? And how, as they
intermingle, do they qualify, modify, or accentuate each other?
The
leaders of orthodox thought in the present age of the world, and by that phrase
I mean, of course, the leading scientists of the time -for no flattery
could now assign that title to the theologians -represent a woeful mixture
of good qualities and bad. They are so careful, so accurate, so beautifully
painstaking within the limits of their activity, that from one point of view
they command enthusiastic admiration. And yet they have so ,many characteristics
in common with the Man of Muck Rake in The Pilgrim’s Progress.
They will not interest themselves in anything except the physical plane of Nature.
A problem must come within the range of laboratory experiment to be a
problem for modern science. That is a glorious foundation most assuredly, but
it is only a foundation, and the time cannot now be far off when the architects
of science will begin to dream of the mighty structure that must ultimately
rest upon it, and set themselves to work to gather the new kind of material
with which alone that structure can be raised.
CHAPTER
IV
Foretelling
the Future
When
people blunder by accident, so to speak, into the paths of occult research,
and first become aware, in their own experience, that things may happen which
their previous training made them think impossible, it often seems to upset
the balance of their judgment. The boundary between the possible and that which
they have always been accustomed to regard as the impossible, has been broken
down. They do not know where to set it up again. So it arises that I often see
half-joking, half-credulous conjectures as to wonders that may be perhaps brought
about, or as to stories told of something wonderful that is said to have occurred,
which no experienced occultist would treat seriously for a moment. In reality,
the regions of Nature in which super-physical events take place are just as
much under the reign of law as those which have to do with chemistry or electricity.
As I grant that these regions are imperfectly explored at present, it may be
that they hold many surprises in store for even the most advanced students.
But that may be said of any science. Chemistry itself may have surprises in
store for us, but, nevertheless, if we are told that some chemist has accomplished
some new result, we know, from previous experience, whether such a result lies
within the domain of regions not yet fully explored, or whether it is in flagrant
contradiction with existing knowledge. So with tales of occult achievement,
I could illustrate what I mean in a dozen different ways, but to begin with,
I will deal with theories that are reasonable, and theories which are absurd,
in connection with a matter which interests everybody and hinges on to what
I was writing about in the last chapter -the problem of foretelling the
future.
Palmistry
and astrology are only two of the methods that from time to time in the history
of the world have been employed with this end in view. Most of my readers will
be surprised at the length of the list if I give them a mere imperfect glance
at some of the systems adopted in the ancient and mediaeval world for getting
forecasts of future events. We may read about geomancy, capnomancy, coscinomancy,
bibliomancy, belomancy, hydromancy, pyromancy, rabdomancy, and many others,
not to speak of our more recent cartomancy and cheiromancy. These were all systems
of divination which the prigs of the nineteenth century classed together as
so much fraud and imposture, in total disregard of facts as well authenticated
in many cases as any of history or geography. The more intelligent view is that,
if events are well authenticated as having occurred, and if they seem at variance
with some law we think we understand, there must be some hidden factor in the
body of circumstances concerned which altered their significance. I will take
an example from the testimony of the first Lord Bulwer Lytton, who, as everybody
who knows anything at all about the history of modern occultism will be aware,
was a very earnest student of Nature’s mysteries.
The
system of divination which Lord Lytton chiefly made use of was the first on
the above list, Geomancy. It would take too long to describe the practical rules
of the art, which, as the name implies, has some supposed connection with movements
of the earth, but the “figure” set up to solve any question presented
to a geomancist (never mind for a moment the rules by which he sets it up) consists
simply of dots or marks irregularly grouped on paper. He reads the significance
of these markings according to other rules. In 1860 Lord Lytton put up such
a figure to see what would be the future of “Mr Disraeli,” as he
was then -and, remember, the period was one at which it was still the fashion
among Liberals, then predominant in Parliament, to ridicule and despise Disraeli -and
long before he had ever been Prime Minister. Lord Lytton was astonished at the
significance of the figure. He recorded it as quite out of keeping with any
reasonable expectations. It betokened important advantages from marriage, a
peaceful hearth, public honours far beyond anticipation, death ultimately in
an exceptionally high position, in the midst of general affection and regret.
The subject of the inquiry would bequeath a reputation “quite out of proportion
to the opinion now (in 1860) entertained of his intellect even by those who
think most highly of it. His enemies, though active, will not be persevering;
his official friends, though not ardent, will yet minister to his success.”
The details of this prophecy will be found in the second volume of the second
Lord Lytton’s life of his father. What is the meaning of such cases, which
could be multiplied almost indefinitely? I will give some others from my own
experience a little further on, but first I want to suggest some general ideas
on all such subjects.
To
call such a triumph of divination as that just quoted “coincidence”
is the common refuge of stupidity. But it is hopelessly unsatisfactory to attribute
a correct divination to the arbitrary markings on paper, which seem all there
is to go by. The missing factor in the whole transaction is to be found in the
all but invariable circumstance that the successful diviners, whatever method
they become attached to, are “psychics” in a greater or less degree -people
who have to some extent, however unconsciously, developed the faculty of clairvoyance,
the faculty of taking in perceptions by means of a certain sensibility which
we may, for convenience, call a sense not yet generally developed. The external
rules of the system employed would be of very little use in the hands of a person
who was not in any measure a psychic, and in the hands of a person really so
endowed almost any mode of divination will sometimes prove successful. The use
of the favourite method, whatever that may be, has the effect of concentrating
the attention, of stirring up the activity of the sense in question, so that
the tangible things observed become, as it were, fraught with a meaning.
This
explains the nasty old habit of the Roman augurs, who got into the habit of
inspecting the entrails of birds or animals. Modern wiseacres laugh at the idea
that such indications of the future could be found in such casual and dirty
combinations. They fail to realize how stupid it is to suppose mankind for a
long period going on believing in predictions that never come true. Of course,
they sometimes came true -the predictions of the old oracles and diviners -because,
however dirty and meaningless in themselves were the method of divination employed,
the more or less effective clairvoyance of the augurs or diviners put them in
touch with the foresight which is possible for people whose consciousness can
reach that region of Nature which occultists call “the Astral Plane.”
I have known really accomplished clairvoyants who thoroughly understood all
that I am saying now, and a great deal more, who, nevertheless, would cling
to some favourite trick, quite meaningless in itself, as a way of starting the
activity of the astral senses. Looking in a crystal ball is one such method.
The ordinary man might look for a month and see nothing, but I know several
persons (quite unknown to fame, and not “professional”) who never
look in a crystal for a minute without beginning to see visions of one sort
or other. One most genuine clairvoyant of my acquaintance had a trick of gazing
intently at the bits of tea leaf at the bottom of a cup as a means of stimulating
the astral sense. Arabs of old who watched the flight of arrows (Belomancy),
and the modern water-finders who use a hazel twig, and seem to feel it turn
in their hands when they come over a hidden spring, are in the same way stimulating
clairvoyance.
The
human goose who thinks they must be “humbugging” because he cannot
see the connection between a hazel twig and an underground spring, is doubly
stupid. First, there is no contradiction to any really known law in the theory
that there may be some such connection (though I do not say there is),
but, secondly, the fact that water finders do succeed in locating hidden springs
is perfectly well authenticated, while the idea that this can be done by persons
gifted with the necessary amount of clairvoyance is no more unreasonable than
to suppose that a person with a sufficiently good ear can play a tune he has
heard on the piano.
The
painful embarrassment we have to face in dealing with this matter arises from
the apparent necessity of admitting -if we admit that the future can be
foretold -the horrible idea that we are under the dominion of some terrible
fate that makes every misfortune or sorrow that befalls us inevitable! To believe
that the future can ever be foretold seems equivalent to saying that all future
events must be determined by some appalling destiny beforehand; that if we do
foolish things, we commit crimes even, those acts were inevitable! We seem drifted
in this way into the worst horrors of Mohammedan fatalism. No such grievous
conclusions need be drawn from the fullest possible recognition of that which
to me, and to all who have made the matter a study, is a certain fact, that
very often future events are foreseen; that not infrequently prophetic dreams
“come true,” and that often the crystal, or even the tea-cup, in
competent hands will give warning of trouble, or sometimes promise joys that
in progress of time actually come to pass.
The
apparent contradiction is explained in this way. In that state of consciousness
which we call in occult terminology “being on the Astral Plane,”
or “reading in the Astral Light,” the inevitable result of any body
of causes then in operation -that is to say, the effect they would have
if nothing happens to disturb them -can be perceived in a way impossible
down here. A humble analogy may be derived from the position of the man on a
ladder looking over a maze in which holiday-makers are wandering about and trying
to find their way. In the midst of the twists and obstacles they cannot tell
at any given moment whether they are pursuing a path that will enable them to
get out, or running up a cul-de-sac. But the man on the ladder can see quite
plainly. He can see the obstacle or clear path, as the case may be, which is
veiled from their sight; therefore he can foretell whether they will go on or
very soon be turned back. In the same way, though the complication of the process
is greater, the clairvoyant, seeking to follow out the progress of events, sees
what must happen, if things are left to themselves, from the operation of the
body of causes in existence at any given moment.
But
here we are not in presence of an unalterable set of facts like the obstacles
in a maze, but are dealing with alterable conditions affected by the human will.
Most generally it will happen that, by reason of their blindness to the tendency
of subtle causes affecting human affairs, people do nothing to alter the course
of events in such cases as I am imagining, and then the prophetic vision, the
forecast of the clairvoyant, or the dream, as it may sometimes be, is justified
by the event, and “comes true,” as the phrase goes. Where the person
concerned is himself sufficiently alive to the true meaning of a prophecy as
to avail himself of the warning it may convey, he very likely does do
something to import a new factor into the transaction, and then the event does
not come off. That does not invalidate the accuracy of the prophecy. It merely
puts the person concerned to that extent in the position of one who has soared
above the commonplace conditions of life, and has become, in a certain small
degree, a power in the world, not merely a straw borne on the waves of circumstance.
The
life of a very remarkable clairvoyant, the late Mrs Anna
Kingsford, whose most interesting memoirs have been written by her friend
and collaborator, Mr Edward Maitland, will furnish us with examples of both
kinds of prevision. In dreams chiefly, but in other ways as well, Mrs Kingsford
was continually getting forecasts of future events in which she herself was
involved. Many of them would be quite trivial, for it is not the importance
of an event that will lead to its prevision, rather the condition of the clairvoyant
at the time. In one such case within my own knowledge at the time, as I had
the pleasure of her acquaintance, she told friends with whom she was staying
just then that she had seen herself in vision, in a hansom cab surrounded by
soldiers, and apparently in the midst of some scene of fighting or disorder.
No sense could be made of the forecast, but it chanced that the very next day,
being in a hansom cab, after calling at a club in Pall Mall to leave a message
for one of its members, she was driven rapidly round the corner of Marlborough
House and full tilt into the midst of the Guards just marching off the scene
of the usual ceremony in the courtyard of St James’s Palace. Her unintentional
charge threw the column for a moment into disorder. Bayonets were flashing in
the sun, the cab horse was on his haunches, and the insignificant scene of the
vision was thus realized. Nothing serious happened. The whole transition was
of no importance; but she chanced to have sensed the causes leading up to it
on the astral plane, and nothing was done to interfere with the results.
In
another case, when in Paris, she had caught out a maid-servant in some serious
delinquencies. She was very angry, and resolved to prosecute the girl. With
this fixed intention in her mind, she slept that night, and dreamed that she
saw herself turning the corner of a street in Paris and meeting a woman who
threw vitriol in her face. She woke with a sting of the acid, as it were, burning
her cheeks. She took the warning, and did not prosecute the girl, and
the alarming vision never was fulfilled. These are merely two examples out of
many that might be quoted from the experiences of the remarkable woman I have
named, and from the experience of others less known to fame I could quote other
similar cases.
Before
dropping the subject, I may as well say a few words on the deplorable manner
in which some people sometimes aim at utilizing the possibility that the future
may be foretold. There are people who would not hesitate, if they thought it
possible, to get occult information as to what horse is going to win the Derby,
or what stocks are going to rise or fall. Like every other contingency depending
on causes in operation, such events are, in a certain sense, foretellable, because
there are few persons concerned with their realization who will be likely to
have such knowledge as would enable them to import fresh causes into the combination.
But there are two difficulties in the way of degrading the arts of divination
to the service of such purposes as those I have indicated. First of all, some
of the persons whose apparent free-will is engaged in the business may accidentally
swerve from the line of action along which they are being projected by the pressure
of circumstances. To discuss that point fully would lead me into the depths
of metaphysics, but it is enough to say that such events, as foreseen from the
height of astral vision, are liable to disturbance -like all others, indeed.
But, secondly -and this is a consideration of greater practical importance -no
clairvoyant of the higher order would consent to be engaged in the investigation
of such problems. That would involve a degradation of exalted faculties from
which every high-minded occultist would shrink, while anyone who might be described
as a low-minded occultist would probably not be sufficiently advanced to be
guarded against the infinite variety of confusing and erroneous visions with
which the astral plane is necessarily saturated.
CHAPTER
V
Behind
the Scenes of Nature
In
a rude and humble sort of fashion the arrangements of a theatre are designed
in unconscious imitation of nature’s operations in this living world around
us. Effects on the stage are presented to the audience, but the machinery by
which they are brought about is carefully concealed from view. The visible stage
may seem roomy and profound, and the artful devices of the painter may suggest
an infinite perspective; but much nearer, really, than the distant hills of
the stage picture are the pulleys and ropes that control the shifting scenes.
Unsuspected mechanism lurks above and below, and, besides the actors in front
of the footlights, many other players of unrecorded parts must be actively at
work all the time, or the dawn which has to break over the landscape would not
appear at the right moment; the thunder shower, necessary to the progress of
the piece, would fail to keep its appointment, and the best sensations of the
melodrama might culminate in the shame of the managers. So with the vast proscenium
on which the drama of human destiny is worked out; the play could not go on
for a day -not for a minute -unless there were countless unseen agencies,
many of them quite as intelligent as, or much more so than, those who “strut
and fret their hour upon the stage,” busily engaged all the time in working
the machinery.
A
deeper truth than even he intended is involved in the words Lord Bacon used
(playing a part himself, and disguised as Shakespeare) when he said, “All
the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
There are many aspects of the infinite subject I am handling that cannot even
be referred to without constant allusion to the unseen agencies so busily at
work, and I propose now to give some account of the all-important functions
they discharge in Nature, and of the unseen realms in which they carry on their
activity. I say “realms” in the plural advisedly, because it would
be a fatal mistake to imagine that all “behind the scenes of Nature”
is merely one region stocked with the whole mass of machinery which produces
the visible effect. There is really region behind region, stretching up to infinity,
for that matter, and fading away into the incomprehensible, into that which
for ages to come must be the “Unknowable” for most of us; but the
fundamental blunder of primitive thinking in connection with these profound
mysteries is that which divides Nature into the plainly visible phenomena of
everyday life, and a veiled unfathomable region of causation into which it is
supposed the consciousness of embodied humanity can never hope to penetrate.
Occult
students have penetrated so far into this region that they, in turn, are liable
to fall into the mistake of thinking that the whole machinery of the Cosmos
is accessible to their investigation. This is far from being the actual state
of the case, but none the less is the knowledge we are in a position to obtain
so greatly more abundant than that which lies open to mere physical research,
that we are at least able to feel quite at home in realms that are, at all events,
well behind the scenes of familiar visible manifestation, and can account for
a great deal that seems at the first glance utterly beyond the range of the
human understanding.
For
the present I shall merely attempt to speak of the region which lies immediately
behind the visible world -just as much belonging to the world as its atmosphere.
That region is spoken of in occult language as “the Astral Plane.”
The term is not a good one, because it seems to suggest some association with
the stars, though no such meaning is really involved. The phrase, however has
been used for hundreds of years by writers on occult subjects all through the
middle ages, and we cannot throw it aside now. Again, the word “plane”
is not a very happy one, because it seems to suggest a flat surface, and that
idea must be utterly cleaned out of the mind before we can begin to think of
the astral plane correctly. If we who study occultism, my readers may ask, do
not like our own phrases, why do we use them? The trouble is that the language
does not supply words that precisely fit occult emergencies.
How,
for instance, shall we call this region of Nature, of which I want now to speak,
by any really appropriate name? It is a condition of things that in some aspects
suggests the idea of an envelope surrounding the earth, but then it interpenetrates
the earth as well as surrounding it, just as (or much more thoroughly than)
water penetrates the pores of a wet sponge. It is infused in all matter as a
salt dissolved in water exists in association with all its molecules. An accepted
dictum of occult science tells us that every particle of physical matter has
its “astral counterpart.” It is through that astral counterpart
that all the natural forces controlling its growth or development, whatever
that may be, are exerted.
For
the most part, ordinary people have no direct consciousness of the astral plane,
but dreams often bring them into some relation with it. Dreams have, indeed,
a very mixed constitution. When a body is asleep, the consciousness of the person
concerned is really, in most cases, in touch with the astral plane, though,
unless he is gifted with ‘psychic’ attributes, he perceives its
phenomena very imperfectly. We all have organisms adapted to consciousness on,
or with reference to, all the planes of Nature; but most of us at this
stage of human evolution have got no more than an astral body in an undeveloped
state, not much better ready to work with than the body of a blind kitten a
few days old is ready to catch mice. The race will greatly improve in this respect
by degrees, but, so far, the people who can exercise consciousness on the astral
plane quite completely are few, and that is how the many (when, besides being
backward in evolution, they are conceited enough to think they are in its van)
are so comically contemptuous about the knowledge that the (relatively) few
possess.
Imagine
a country isolated from the rest of the world, in which all the people from
time immemorial had been born deaf. Life would have adapted itself to that condition
of things. People would communicate by signs, and would have become so skilful
at that as to be under no sense of restriction. Then suppose, one by one, a
few of them began to hear. The early possessors of the incomprehensible faculty
would not have a very good time of it among their friends. If they pretended
to be able to communicate with one another through an opaque screen, the sober,
common-sense majority would know quite well that they were cheating, though
it might be difficult to detect the fraud. If they pretended to “hear”
a gun fired at a distance, the one thing certain would be -if it turned
out on inquiry, that gun really had been fired -that they had bribed the
man who fired it to shoot at a pre-arranged moment. The “hearers”
would be unanimously voted liars or victims of hallucination, and they would
be apt to give up talking about the new discoveries they had made, until, indeed,
they became numerous enough to laugh, in their turn, at the old-fashioned deaf
mutes, or perhaps, to do their best to share with the more intelligent of those
same deaf mutes the advantages of their acquired sense.
That
idea would really parallel the present condition of modern society in regard
to the phenomena of the astral plane, and the time has happily come when those
who have astral faculties are numerous enough to support one another in amused
indifference to the jeers of the ignorant “deaf mutes,” and sufficiently
impressed with a sense of duty to their contemporaries to describe their discoveries
openly for the benefit of all who want to grow. For, in truth, the faculties
of astral perception will not grow, as the blind kitten’s eyes eventually
open, quite of their own accord. The appreciative and aspiring mind must bring
certain influences to bear on the process -but that is, indeed, another
story -as long as we are still standing on the threshold of the astral
plane, realizing for the first time, as we look at the tableau on the stage,
that there is a wealth of machinery behind the scenes by which it is
all brought about.
The
first most glaring fact about the astral plane for those who become endowed
with the faculty of perception with reference to it, is that there we come into
relation again with a large majority of people who have recently died. For them,
it is true, it is but an ante-chamber to higher conditions of existence, but
it is an ante-chamber in which they will sometime be kept waiting a long time.
The astral bodies in which they find themselves functioning will be just the
same in substance as those which they possessed, without knowing anything about
it, during physical life; and at first, truth to tell, for undeveloped people
it is a very imperfect vehicle of consciousness. But for everyone it soon wakes
up more or less, and in proportion to the extent that this happens (under the
mental and moral influences engendered during life), the enjoyment of the astral
period of existence is very significantly affected. But I must not be tempted
to go into that matter fully just now, because the main point I have in view
is the justification of the broad idea concerning the astral plane, with which
I started.
It
is the region that may be described as behind the scenes of Nature, not merely
because the actors who have just left the stage are to be found there, but because
there are other -“people” shall I say? -entities, at all
events, who have never been on the stage at all, but are entirely concerned
with controlling the machinery, and these are known to occultists as “elemental
spirits” or “elementals.” They are countless as the sands
of the seashore; they vary in efficiency, in degrees of growth, in individuality,
as widely as the whole animal kingdom on the physical earth varies. The elementals
are the agencies through whose intermediation much of the work of Nature on
the physical plane is carried out. In some of their aspects they may be thought
of as forces, operative, with scarcely any individual initiative, modifying
(rather than giving rise to) the growth of plants and the activities of the
inorganic world. In the higher departments of their work they participate in
the guidance of even human affairs; and in some cases the human will, developed
to the higher degrees of its potentiality, controls them in turn, and so brings
about the otherwise unexplainable phenomena concerned with material objects
that so perplex the reason at some spiritual séances.
Spiritualists
generally are apt to attribute such phenomena to the direct agency of their
departed friends, but this is a mistake that the more scientific occultist does
not fall into. The departed friend, during his sojourn on the astral plane,
may acquire knowledge, by means of which he can, within certain limits, induce
or control elemental beings to subserve his wishes as regards working wonderful
phenomena for the instruction or delectation of his late companions still in
the earth life; but, more commonly, startling physical phenomena are produced -through
elemental agency -by entities, who, for that matter, may have been at no
very remote period in the past in earth life themselves, but have been regularly
instructed by higher entities, of whom it would be premature to speak more definitely
just yet, to play the part of “spirit guides.” The complications
of the subject lead me continually to brush the surface of fresh mysteries,
which readers who follow these expositions systematically will come to know
a good deal more about in time.
We
must not think of the elementals, however, as being only concerned with working
wonders. They are able to do this because it is their function in Nature to
work out the ordinary processes of growth, development, and decay, of meteorological
phenomena, of combustion, of earthquake disturbances, of everything that happens
in the natural world. Do not let anyone imagine for a moment that these results
and processes are due to their volition. The elemental, as a rule, has no volition.
He? It? They? -one does not know what pronoun to employ in dealing with
such unfamiliar activities -are the means by which, in obedience to sublimely
exalted volition, the business of Nature is carried on. Occultism does not dethrone
the Deity, be it always remembered; quite the contrary. But suppose some reverent
savage were to be content to say, with reference to a locomotive engine, for
instance, it is the will of the driver that makes it go! A more intelligent
inquirer would want to understand how his will was transmitted to the wheels,
and he would find the intermediate “elementals” in the boiler and
the fire-box. That is the principle on which the occultist studies Nature, and
the boiler is to the engine what the astral plane and its marvellous populations
of elementals is to the world in which we live.
CHAPTER
VI
The
Sensitive and the “O.P’
What
is the difference between persons who can take up the mesmeric influences and
those on whom it has no effect whatever? The fact that this difference exists
is one of the reasons why so many people remain incredulous about the reality
of the effects that seem to be produced on others. They declare, scornfully,
“You can’t mesmerise me!” and vaguely feel that, in saying
this, they have cast grave doubt on the question whether there is really anything
in mesmerism at all. It is as though some person, with no more ear for music
than a cabbage, should go away from a concert, declaring, “You can’t
make me distinguish any difference between God Save the Queen and Pop
Goes the Weasel.” If such persons as he were in the majority, then
the possession by some of a musical ear would be laughed at and disbelieved
just as, in the present state of common knowledge, the condition of “sensitiveness”
to mesmeric and other influences of a similarly subtle character is laughed
at by the Ordinary Person of today -the “O.P., as we, who to compare
him very often with others more highly gifted, have fallen into the way of describing
him.
I
suppose few people are so little acquainted with the elementary facts of chemistry
that they would be surprised to see nitric acid seriously affecting a silver
plate, while it produced little or no immediate effect on a plate of lead. The
silver is sensitive to nitric acid, and the lead is much less so. With all the
science of the Royal Chemical Society to help you, you could not come much nearer
an explanation of that state of things than the phrase just used embodies. So,
in reference to the more intricate problem why some persons can take up and
be seriously affected by an unseen influence like that emanating from the hands
of a genuine mesmerist, it would hardly be reasonable to expect that a fully
satisfactory explanation could be provided. In truth, we can come rather nearer
explaining why some persons are sensitive to psychic impressions -including
those on the borderland of the physical and psychic planes - than we can account
for the mysterious affinities of the chemical elements; but to content ourselves,
in the absence of any perfect explanation, with analogies, I would point to
the familiar fact that a sheet of aluminium is almost absolutely transparent
to Röntgen rays, while a sheet of platinum is almost absolutely opaque.
Both metals, to the eye or touch, seem equally solid and impervious to anything
we put upon them. Or again, why should glass be quite transparent to ordinary
light, and wood, a more porous substance, quite opaque to it? There need be
nothing surprising, though there may not be any conditions quite explicable,
in the fact that some human bodies are pervious to the mesmeric fluid, and some
impervious to it.
As
to whether there is or is not a fluid in the case at all, that can only remain
in doubt, with the O.P., by reason of his unfamiliarity with the evidence on
the subject. Great numbers of people -far more than those who can bear
visual testimony to the reality of astral plane phenomena -can see
the mesmeric fluid as it streams from the hands of a competent performer, and
floats around the subject on whom he is operating. In the middle of the century
just past, Baron Reichenbach devoted himself to that particular research, and
records experiments with over sixty people whom he found able to see the emanations
in question, and a somewhat similar emanation that actually proceeds from physical
magnets. People who deny the fluid “theory” of mesmerism might as
well deny the north-seeking tendency of the compass needle. There is more evidence
for that, certainly, than for the other fact, but there is adequate evidence
for both.
How
many per cent, of the present generation, it may be asked, are to be regarded
as sensitive and how many as O.P.’s? The embarrassment here arises from
the wide varieties that are to be observed as regards the degree of sensitiveness
of those who are not absolutely impervious to all such influences. In its higher
forms of perfection, sensitiveness means a great deal more than the mere susceptibility
of being benefited by mesmerism in ill-health. I am coming on to these wonderful
conditions later, but keeping just for the moment to the subject of cures, these
have to do with the lowest or slightest kinds of sensitiveness. People may be
cured of serious diseases by mesmeric methods who would not be capable of going
off into a trance, or of becoming insensible to pain under mesmerism. For always
remember that sensitiveness is not a weakness, but a faculty. Not to be in any
way susceptible of the influence is to have a relatively dull, leaden, or clod-like
constitution. Unhappily, that is the condition of most of us at present, but
I will show directly how very far it is from being the condition of some.
Before
coming to that, however, it may be well to speak of the curious development
in certain cases of a peculiar kind of sensitiveness that renders people able
to benefit in ill-health by pilgrimages to special places. At first sight there
appears to be no connection between ordinary mesmeric sensitiveness and that
aptitude for benefiting by the strange influences brought to bear on persons
visiting such shrines as those of Lourdes in France, where it is undeniable
that cures, thought to be miraculous, have sometimes taken place. In such cases
there is no apparent mesmerism to operate. The patient goes to a place where
it is popularly believed that some supernatural manifestation has promised a
healing influence to those who shall seek it in a devout spirit. In Roman Catholic
countries it is generally the Virgin Mary who is supposed to be the author of
such promises. Anyhow, people go in full faith, and are in some cases cured
of their afflictions, but not in all. What is the meaning of it? The explanation
has to be sought partly in the sensitiveness of those who are benefited, and
partly in the agencies behind the scenes, which then take the place of the mesmerist.
The
problem brings us into relation with the benevolent side of what I have been
talking of so much lately -elemental influence. Never mind what may be
the real originating force animating the benevolent elementals concerned, the
force has been actuated somehow, and then the result follows for any
persons who are in any degree sensitive. They may think the result due to a
direct interposition of Providence. The restoration to health is really as much
due to the operation of natural causes as though they had been mesmerised back
to health, or had been successfully treated by purely physical means. And, difficult
though it may be to follow the train of causation, the same thing, with modifications,
has to be said of those cases in which cures are effected by the people who
call themselves by the doubly-inappropriate name, “Christian Scientists.”
It
is utterly foolish to ignore the dazzling results these people sometimes obtain,
however little their proceedings may seem to fall within any definite category
of intelligible mesmeric method. I know of half-a-dozen cases in which serious
internal troubles, for which ordinary doctors could describe nothing short of
formidable operations, have been decisively cured by the Christian Scientists.
Because such people often fail and take money for trying their best, the suspicious
O.P., regards them as conscious imposters, to whom criminal penalties ought
to be awarded. They seem to be working in the dark, and without any clear understanding
of the conditions of sensitiveness, and so they do not know in any given case
whether they will succeed or fail. But however tainted all proceedings of this
kind become when mixed up with pecuniary interests, the rough and brutal behaviour
of the Christian Scientists are apt to encounter in cases of failure, are more
discreditable to the intelligence of the period than their own highly unscientific
methods are discreditable to them.
But
now let us turn from the purely medical aspects of mesmeric practice to those
of far greater interest for the student of Nature’s mysteries, which link
the phenomena of mesmerism with the inquiry into the loftier possibilities of
human consciousness. Mesmerism is what one of the early mediaeval writers on
occult subjects has called “the Open Door to the closed palace of the
King -in other words, the easiest method at our disposal for investigating the
natural laws governing the superphysical world. As soon as we find a subject
of really fine sensitiveness, we are introduced to psychic phenomena of the
most enchanting order. I will begin by describing a few of these that have come
within my own experience. The possibility of rendering a mesmeric subject, once
put into the state of trance, insensible to pain, leads us on to a very pretty
and highly instructive phenomenon. Having put my subject into a trance, and
having shown her friends that she was entirely insensible to pain by running
a needle into her arm without causing her to move a muscle or an eyelash, I
have given the needle to one of her friends and I have said: “Now, at
your own discretion, prick me anywhere, and you will see her give
the start.” The result has come off precisely in that way.
By-the-bye,
having used the pronouns “her” and “she” in the above
statement, let me explain that the finer kinds of sensitiveness are more often
found in women than in men, not, as the mistaken idea sometimes has it, because
the woman is the weaker vessel, more easily dominated by another will, but because
women, other things being equal, are the superiors of men in respect to the
delicate faculties that are required for sensitiveness. It is a great mistake
to suppose that the person who, in the ordinary affairs of life, may be domineering
and obstinate, has a “strong will” for mesmeric purposes. He may
be as feeble as a child that way, and a meek, submissive woman might have fifty
times the mesmeric force. But again, it is not in the mesmerist that the conditions
exist that are important in producing striking results. These depend, in a far
greater degree, on the characteristics of the subject.
Well,
in the absence of occult knowledge, I think it would be safe to defy anyone
to give any plausible explanation of the needle experiment I have just described.
But it falls into place quite naturally when we have the advantage of considering
it in the light of occult knowledge concerning the superphysical principles
of the human constitution. The mesmeric fluid, spoken of above as emanating
from the mesmerist and floating round the subject, is identical in its nature
with the subtle essence that permeates the nervous system, and is, in point
of fact, the medium of communication between different parts of the body and
the brain. The O.P., physiologist thinks the nerves themselves, that he can
dissect out with instruments, are the telegraphic wires that perform this function.
So, originally it used to be thought that the copper wire of an ordinary telegraph
was the conductor of the electricity; but Modern Views of Electricity
(Sir Oliver Lodge’s book on that subject) holds, rather, that the real
channel of communication is the ether surrounding and interpenetrating the copper.
I am inclined to think that the right view in regard to physical electric circuits,
but assuredly the corresponding view is the right one in regard to the nervous
system and the brain. Occult students call the subtle fluid in question (when
considered in reference to this function) the “nerve aura.”
Now,
this nerve aura in a sensitive is very mobile. The mesmeric process drives it
out and replaces it with the nerve aura of the mesmerist. The two auras are
for a time blended together especially linking the two brain systems. Moreover,
by reason of the condition of perfect trance established, the soul of the sensitive
has drifted away from the body, and exists outside that body -perhaps close
by, perhaps a long way off; but that is another story -in the astral vehicle,
or sheath, or body, whatever you like to call it. Now, the alien nerve aura
in the subject’s system forms a very imperfect medium of communication
between her limbs and brain, and this is why she does not feel pain when herself
pricked, but there is a very good conductivity in the mass of nerve aura connecting
her brain with that of the mesmerist. So, when he feels a prick -in the
hand, let us say -his own nervous system conveys news of that occurrence
to his brain, and a simultaneous impression is instantly conveyed to hers. Her
brain is affected exactly as it would be in ordinary life if her hand were pricked,
and so she gives the start, and, as I have seen in such cases, will make an
automatic movement of the hand itself.
CHAPTER
VII
Photographing
the Unseen
Probably
almost everybody who may read these lines will have heard, one time or another,
of what are called “spirit photographs.” These represent, in a more
or less shadowy fashion, beings, spirits, ghosts, or astral entities -call
them what you like -that are perfectly invisible to ordinary eyesight.
The simple reason why such appearances on a photographic plate are not overwhelming
in their effect on popular incredulity is that such photographs can be very
easily “faked,” or fraudulently imitated. Nothing is easier than
to dress up a living person in floating drapery, to give a momentary exposure
of the plate with this imitation spirit focussed upon it; afterwards to use
the same plate for an ordinary sitter, and so obtain the semblance of a ghostly
form standing by his side. The value of a spirit photograph depends entirely
upon the perfect bona fides of the whole operation. And innumerable private
photographers, also spiritualists, have taken such photographs themselves, and,
knowing that no improper trickery had been concerned with the results, have
obtained photographs of spirit faces on their plates.
I
suppose there are few professional photographers who, if they told the truth,
would not have to confess that sometimes strange effects come out on their plates
that seem to represent something “supernatural.” But it would not
be good, in the present age of the world, for an ordinary photographers's business
that he should be supposed to dabble in such “uncanny” achievement,
so, when the strange results come out, the ghost is treated as a defect of the
plate, and is suppressed accordingly. However, unless the sitters or the photographer,
or both, are mediums, such results are unusual. On the other hand, when the
photographer is a medium, and lays himself out for the unusual effects, they
are exceedingly common. I have seen an immense number of such spirit photographs
taken under conditions that have made me quite sure they were genuine, and very
recently I have obtained a series under conditions that make any question as
to their authenticity altogether absurd for me, and equally so for any other
persons who are capable of understanding that I am telling the truth.
I
went to a photographer who had been successful in obtaining several such photographs
for friends, and, with his cordial concurrence, took precautions which put all
possibilities of fraud, on his part, out of the question. I should like to remark
that these precautions would have been unnecessary for my own satisfaction,
first, because the honesty of the man and his sincere interest in the whole
matter make his bona fides perfectly obvious to any rational person having
to do with him, and, secondly, because I was accompanied by a lady of my own
acquaintance, gifted with clairvoyant sight, who could see the spirits
being photographed. But in order that I might have an answer for people to whom
I might be inclined to show the results, and who might not be able to attach
importance to the ideas I have just expressed, I took my own packet of plates
-purchased the day before at Whitelay’s -went myself into the photographer’s
dark room, put my initials on the corners of the plates, and arranged them ready
for use, saw the first put into the dark slide, and came out with it into the
studio, sat, and afterwards saw the plate developed under my own eyes. It bore
a spirit form, as did all the others used that morning, more or less completely.
[The annexed illustration reproduces this photograph quite correctly, though
with less delicacy than the original prints from the negative still in our possession.]
In two cases the faces of the astral entities are as clearly defined as if they
had been physical sitters. In some the plates are marked with blurs of light,
representing an unsuccessful attempt, on the part of some astral person, to
materialise sufficiently for the purpose in view. The failures are as interesting
as the successes, almost, for the student of these problems, as they help us
to check our theories as to the way the effect is brought about -but of
that, more directly. Before going into theory I want to record a few more facts.
A
lady of my acquaintance, wishing to obtain spirit photographs, arranged a series
of private sittings with a few congenial friends; used her own camera, and,
after a few failures, obtained some of the desired effects. But then a very
wonderful development ensued. The spirit friends present said (for be it understood
that in this case the sitters included some who were clairvoyant and “clair-audient,”
so that they could converse with the visitors from the astral plane): “Do
not bring your camera any more. Merely sit in the dark with a photographic plate
in your hand, and we will do the rest.” Following these instructions,
the lady used to take her plates to the séance, unfasten them
in the dark, hold them by the corner for a minute, wrap them up again, take
them home, and develop them in the ordinary way. Under these circumstances faces
used to appear on the plates, together with a quantity of curious and unintelligible
markings that covered the rest of each plate; but the faces are in all cases
quite distinctly recognisable -in some cases as those of departed friends.
I have a collection of prints from these extraordinary negatives by me as I
write, and they are a defiance of what ignorant materialistic people call “the
known laws of Nature.” But, at the same time, they are facts, like Nelson’s
Column at Charing Cross, and human beings capable of reason have got to revise
their views of Nature’s laws accordingly.
Now
the spirit photographs obtained with a camera like those of my recent series
are produced in one way, and the photographs without the camera in another which
is less easily explicable; but still I hope to give the reader a clue to the
comprehension even of that process. There is really very little that is truly
mysterious in the camera spirit photograph. But it has nothing whatever to do
with the method by which the unseen in astronomy is photographed. That process
is one which should be understood by anyone wanting to understand the spirit
photograph, only that it may be put aside as inapplicable. It is interesting
enough in itself, and has given us knowledge concerning some phenomena of the
heavens that could not have been obtained in any other way.
If
you look with the eye of the constellation called the Pleiades, for example,
you see a certain number of stars. If you look with a telescope, you see more;
but, however many you see in either case, you do not see more by continuing
to look. Now, take a photograph of the Pleiades with a short exposure, and the
plate will show you much the same effect as the telescope, but the longer you
let the camera look at the constellation, the more it will see. That is to say,
the very faint light from small stars, or nebulous matter surrounding the stars
that are not bright enough to be seen with the eye, produces an effect on the
plate by degrees. The effect of the light on the sensitive plate is cumulative,
and in this way we have come to know that the whole constellation called the
Pleiades is surrounded by a wonderful nebula of colossal magnitude quite too
faint to be seen by any telescope.
Again,
there is another variety of the unseen that can be photographed on different
principles. The peculiar kind of light called the Röntgen ray is not perceptible
to the eye, because the vibrations of the ether which constitute that variety
of light are too rapid and minute to suite the mechanism of the eye, delicate
as that is. Everyone knows that there are sounds too shrill to be heard, and
just in the same way -to put the idea paradoxically -there is light
too bright to be seen. But the camera can see that sort of light. In other words,
the sensitive plate can be impressed by it; hence we get our radiographs of
people’s bones and all the other phenomena of X-ray photography. And hence
also, for the matter is not more complicated than that, do we get our spirit
photographs of the ordinary kind -those which are taken with the camera.
The spirit may be in a vehicle of consciousness that is not of a kind to impress
ordinary vision, and yet it may impress the photographic plate.
How,
then, does it happen, an intelligent inquirer may ask, that we do not get superphysical
effects on every photograph taken, since we are told that the astral plane is
all around us, and the whole of another world always in sight if we could only
see it? Just so, but the light emitted from, or reflected by, astral
matter does not affect the plate. The spirit or astral entity who wants to get
himself photographed -and nobody ever yet photographed a spirit who did not
want to have his portrait taken -has to suffuse his astral body with matter
of somewhat different kind, in order that its shape and appearance may become
visible to the plate. The matter in question is spoken of by students of occultism
as “Etheric,” and it exists, though unseen by the eye, in the constitution
of every human being. From the constitution of some it is very easily withdrawn
by astral spirits who want to borrow it, and susceptibility to that sort of
treatment is one of the attributes that go to constitute a medium. Such withdrawal
is a weakening, enfeebling process, and that is why mediums often feel very
much depleted and exhausted after séances at which materialising
phenomena have taken place. The materialisation of the spirit sufficiently for
the purposes of the photographer need not be carried nearly so far as that which
aims at making the spirit actually visible to ordinary eyesight; all the same,
it is still more or less of a strain, and spiritualists, generally, who do not
study the science of their own experiences, are often foolishly reckless about
strains of that sort themselves -indeed, only one kind among many perils that
beset the practice of mediumship.
I
said the method of X-ray photography was the same as that by which we get the
portraits of spirits. That is because of the X-ray is really an emanation, from
the “cathode” or negative pole of the electric circuit in a vacuum
tube, of etheric matter. Ordinary science has not yet realized this fact, for
in many ways it lags behind the knowledge gained by occult research; but such
is the fact, and many other interesting possibilities of the future hang on
to that fact. To see astral matter, a person in the physical body must have
an altogether new sense developed; but to see etheric matter, it is only necessary
for the present eyesight to be improved, as already it is improved for some
few persons. The eye is an instrument of very varying capacity. This may be
illustrated by an interesting experiment with the spectrum.
If
we arrange things so that a solar spectrum -the rainbow-coloured band of
light -is thrown on a sheet of paper or a screen, it will be found that
some people can see colour beyond the violet tint visible to all. That is because
the eyes of such persons are enabled to cognise vibrations of a higher order
than those which are perceptible to the rest of us. Persons who can see a good
deal further in the spectrum than others will probably be able also to see the
Röntgen ray. That is to say, such persons have, in a greater or less degree,
the etheric sight. When this is perfectly developed, the possessor of such a
faculty can see through opaque matter of some kinds -of those kinds which
the Röntgen ray penetrates -and are thus endowed with a species of
clairvoyance, not of that kind which is the true clairvoyance of astral sight,
but of a sort that seems very wonderful, nevertheless.
Now,
as to the rational of the spirit photograph taken without the aid of the camera.
To explain that, I must refer to a phenomenon almost as wonderful, but of which
I have had abundant experience. It is possible for the few who not alone can
see with the astral sense, but can make use of some of the elemental
forces belonging to the astral plane, to produce writing on paper without the
aid of pen or pencil. This is done sometimes at spiritual séances
even, and it is not understood in the least by the ordinary spiritualist,
but it is done by a process called in occultism “precipitation.”
On the astral plane thought is a creative power. Your thoughts, if they are
sufficiently intense and clear, form images there which are perceptible to others.
If you form a thought image of the words you wish to write, and know how to
materialise the image by means of etheric matter, you can condense it on paper.
Nothing I can say here will enable anyone to do the thing, but many
things we cannot do ourselves may, nevertheless, be intelligible as do-able
by persons adequately gifted. Now, that which seems to take place when a photographic
image is produced on a sensitive plate without the aid of a camera is analogous
to the precipitation of writing, only the thing precipitated is not visible
matter, but a chemical influence. The whole idea is extremely subtle, but there
is the accomplished result lying before me, and the solution I have suggested
seems the only one available if we want to do something more than gape at it
as an inexplicable wonder.
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