Isis unveiled, Volume 1 (of 2), Science

Our scholars of the nineteenth century might certainly profit well by Aristotle’s example, were they as anxious to imitate him practically as they are to throw his inductive method and materialistic theories at the head of the Platonists. We invite them to collect facts as carefully as he did, instead of denying those they know nothing about.

What we have said in the introductory chapter and elsewhere, of mediums and the tendency of their mediumship, is not based upon conjecture, but upon actual experience and observation. There is scarcely one phase of mediumship, of either kind, that we have not seen exemplified during the past twenty-five years, in various countries. India, Thibet, Borneo, Siam, Egypt, Asia Minor, America (North and South), and other parts of the world, have each displayed to us its peculiar phase of mediumistic phenomena and magical power. Our varied experience has taught us two important truths, viz.: that for the exercise of the latter personal purity and the exercise of a trained and indomitable will-power are indispensable; and that spiritualists can never assure themselves of the genuineness of mediumistic manifestations, unless they occur in the light and under such reasonable test conditions as would make an attempted fraud instantly noticed.

For fear of being misunderstood, we would remark that while, as a rule, physical phenomena are produced by the nature-spirits, of their own motion and to please their own fancy, still good disembodied human spirits, under exceptional circumstances, such as the aspiration of a pure heart or the occurrence of some favoring emergency, can manifest their presence by any of the phenomena except personal materialization. But it must be a mighty attraction indeed to draw a pure, disembodied spirit from its radiant home into the foul atmosphere from which it escaped upon leaving its earthly body.

They objected to it for several good reasons. 1. “It is extremely difficult to distinguish a good dæmon from a bad one,” says Iamblichus. 2. If a human soul succeeds in penetrating the density of the earth’s atmosphere—always oppressive to her, often hateful—still there is a danger the soul is unable to come into proximity with the material world without that she cannot avoid; “departing, she retains something,” that is to say, contaminating her purity, for which she has to suffer more or less after her departure. Therefore, the true theurgist will avoid causing any more suffering to this pure denizen of the higher sphere than is absolutely required by the interests of humanity. It is only the practitioner of black magic who compels the presence, by the powerful incantations of necromancy, of the tainted souls of such as have lived bad lives, and are ready to aid his selfish designs. Of intercourse with the Augoeides, through the mediumistic powers of subjective mediums, we elsewhere speak. The theurgists employed chemicals and mineral substances to chase away evil spirits. Of the latter, a stone called Μνίζουριν was one of the most powerful agents.

“Believe me, sir,” wrote the anonymous correspondent, “that there are no spirits, no ghosts, no angels, no demons enclosed in a table; but, all of these can be found there, nevertheless, for that depends on our own wills and our imaginations.... This MENSAbulism[524] is an ancient phenomenon ... misunderstood by us moderns, but natural, for all that, and which pertains to physics and psychology; unfortunately, it had to remain incomprehensible until the discovery of electricity and heliography, as, to explain a fact of spiritual nature, we are obliged to base ourselves on a corresponding fact of a material order....

“As we all know, the daguerreotype-plate may be impressed, not only by objects, but also by their reflections. Well, the phenomenon in question, which ought to be named mental photography, produces, besides realities, the dreams of our imagination, with such a fidelity that very often we become unable to distinguish a copy taken from one present, from a negative obtained of an image....

Nothing can give a better or a more just idea of it than the electric battery gathering the fluid on its conductor, to obtain thereof a brute force which manifests itself in sparks of light, etc. Thus, the electricity accumulated on an isolated body acquires a power of reaction equal to the action, either for charging, magnetizing, decomposing, inflaming, or for discharging its vibrations far away. These are the visible effects of the blind, or crude electricity produced by blind elements—the word blind being used by the table itself in contradistinction to the intelligent electricity. But there evidently exists a corresponding electricity produced by the cerebral pile of man; this soul-electricity, this spiritual and universal ether, which is the ambient, middle nature of the metaphysical universe, or rather of the incorporeal universe, has to be studied before it is admitted by science, which, having no idea of it, will never know anything of the great phenomenon of life until she does.

“It appears that to manifest itself the cerebral electricity requires the help of the ordinary statical electricity; when the latter is lacking in the atmosphere—when the air is very damp, for instance—you can get little or nothing of either tables or mediums....

“There is no need for the ideas to be formulated very precisely in the brains of the persons present; the table discovers and formulates them itself, in either prose or verse, but always correctly; the table requires time to compose a verse; it begins, then it erases a word, corrects it, and sometimes sends back the epigram to our address ... if the persons present are in sympathy with each other, it jokes and laughs with us as any living person could. As to the things of the exterior world, it has to content itself with conjectures, as well as ourselves; it (the table) composes little philosophical systems, discusses and maintains them as the most cunning rhetorician might. In short, it creates itself a conscience and a reason properly belonging to itself, but with the materials it finds in us....

“The Americans are persuaded that they talk with their dead; some think (more truly) that these are spirits; others take them for angels; others again for devils ... (the intelligence) assuming the shape which fits the conviction and preconceived opinion of every one; so did the initiates of the temples of Serapis, of Delphi, and other theurgico-medical establishments of the same kind. They were convinced beforehand that they would communicate with their gods; and they never failed.

“We, who well know the value of the phenomenon ... are perfectly sure that after having charged the table with our magnetic efflux, we have called to life, or created an intelligence analogous to our own, which like ourselves is endowed with a free will, can talk and discuss with us, with a degree of superior lucidity, considering that the resultant is stronger than the individual, or rather the whole is larger than a part of it.... We must not accuse Herodotus of telling us fibs when he records the most extraordinary circumstances, for we must hold them to be as true and correct as the rest of historical facts which are to be found in all the Pagan writers of antiquity....

“The phenomenon is as old as the world.... The priests of India and China practiced it before the Egyptians and the Greeks. The savages and the Esquimaux know it well. It is the phenomenon of Faith, sole source of every prodigy,” and it will be done to you according to your faith. The one who enunciated this profound doctrine was verily the incarnated word of Truth; he neither deceived himself, nor wanted to deceive others; he expounded an axiom which we now repeat, without much hope of seeing it accepted.

“Man is a microcosm, or a little world; he carries in him a fragment of the great All, in a chaotic state. The task of our half-gods is to disentangle from it the share belonging to them by an incessant mental and material labor. They have their task to do, the perpetual invention of new products, of new moralities, and the proper arrangement of the crude and formless material furnished them by the Creator, who created them in His own image, that they should create in their turn and so complete here the work of the Creation; an immense labor which can be achieved only when the whole will become so perfect, that it will be like unto God Himself, and thus able to survive to itself. We are very far yet from that final moment, for we can say that everything is to be done, to be undone, and outdone as yet on our globe, institutions, machinery, and products.

“We live in this life, in an ambient, intellectual centre, which entertains between human beings and things a necessary and perpetual solidarity; every brain is a ganglion, a station of a universal neurological telegraphy in constant rapport with the central and other stations by the vibrations of thought.

“The spiritual sun shines for souls as the material sun shines for bodies, for the universe is double and follows the law of couples. The ignorant operator interprets erroneously the divine dispatches, and often delivers them in a false and ridiculous manner. Thus study and true science alone can destroy the superstitions and nonsense spread by the ignorant interpreters placed at the stations of teaching among every people in this world. These blind interpreters of the Verbum, the WORD, have always tried to impose on their pupils the obligation to swear to everything without examination in verba magistri.

“Alas! we could wish for nothing better were they to translate correctly the inner voices, which voices never deceive but those who have false spirits in them. ‘It is our duty,’ they say, ‘to interpret oracles; it is we who have received the exclusive mission for it from heaven, spiritus flat ubi vult, and it blows on us alone....’

The letter shows, moreover, that the writer has well and carefully studied the chameleon-like nature of the intelligences presiding over spiritual circles. That they are of the same kind and race as those so frequently mentioned in antiquity, admits of as little doubt as that the present generation of men are of the same nature as were human beings in the days of Moses. Subjective manifestations proceed, under harmonious conditions, from those beings which were known as the “good demons” in days of old. Sometimes, but rarely, the planetary spirits—beings of another race than our own—produce them; sometimes the spirits of our translated and beloved friends; sometimes nature-spirits of one or more of the countless tribes; but most frequently of all terrestrial elementary spirits, disembodied evil men, the Diakka of A. Jackson Davis.

We do not forget what we have elsewhere written about subjective and objective mediumistic phenomena. We keep the distinction always in mind. There are good and bad of both classes. An impure medium will attract to his impure inner self, the vicious, depraved, malignant influences as inevitably as one that is pure draws only those that are good and pure. Of the latter kind of medium where can a nobler example be found than the gentle Baroness Adelma von Vay, of Austria (born Countess Wurmbrandt), who is described to us by a correspondent as “the Providence of her neighborhood?” She uses her mediumistic power to heal the sick and comfort the afflicted. To the rich she is a phenomenon; but to the poor a ministering angel. For many years she has seen and recognized the nature-spirits or cosmic elementaries, and found them always friendly. But this was because she was a pure, good woman. Other correspondents of the Theosophical Society have not fared so well at the hands of these apish and impish beings. The Havanna case, elsewhere described, is an example.

Though spiritualists discredit them ever so much, these nature-spirits are realities. If the gnomes, sylphs, salamanders, and undines of the Rosicrucians existed in their days, they must exist now. Bulwer-Lytton’s Dweller of the Threshold, is a modern conception, modelled on the ancient type of the Sulanuth[525] of the Hebrews and Egyptians, which is mentioned in the Book of Jasher.[526]

The Christians call them “devils,” “imps of Satan,” and like characteristic names. They are nothing of the kind, but simply creatures of ethereal matter, irresponsible, and neither good nor bad, unless influenced by a superior intelligence. It is very extraordinary to hear devout Catholics abuse and misrepresent the nature-spirits, when one of their greatest authorities, Clement the Alexandrinian, disposed of them, by describing these creatures as they really are. Clement, who perhaps had been a theurgist as well as a Neo-platonist, thus arguing upon good authority, remarks, that it is absurd to call them devils,[527] for they are only inferior angels, “the powers which inhabit elements, move the winds and distribute showers, and as such are agents and subject to God.”[528] Origen, who before he became a Christian also belonged to the Platonic school, is of the same opinion. Porphyry describes these dæmons more carefully than any one else.

When the possible nature of the manifesting intelligences, which science believes to be a “psychic force,” and spiritualists the identical spirits of the dead, is better known, then will academicians and believers turn to the old philosophers for information.

Let us for a moment imagine an intelligent orang-outang or some African anthropoid ape disembodied, i. e., deprived of its physical and in possession of an astral, if not an immortal body. We have found in spiritual journals many instances where apparitions of departed pet dogs and other animals have been seen. Therefore, upon spiritualistic testimony, we must think that such animal “spirits” do appear although we reserve the right of concurring with the ancients that the forms are but tricks of the elementals. Once open the door of communication between the terrestrial and the spiritual world, what prevents the ape from producing physical phenomena such as he sees human spirits produce. And why may not these excel in cleverness of ingenuity many of those which have been witnessed in spiritual circles? Let spiritualists answer. The orang-outang of Borneo is little, if any, inferior to the savage man in intelligence. Mr. Wallace and other great naturalists give instances of its wonderful acuteness, although its brains are inferior in cubic capacity to the most undeveloped of savages. These apes lack but speech to be men of low grade. The sentinels placed by monkeys; the sleeping chambers selected and built by orang-outangs; their prevision of danger and calculations, which show more than instinct; their choice of leaders whom they obey; and the exercise of many of their faculties, certainly entitle them to a place at least on a level with many a flat-headed Australian. Says Mr.

Now, people assume that there can be no apes in the other world, because apes have no “souls.” But apes have as much intelligence, it appears, as some men; why, then, should these men, in no way superior to the apes, have immortal spirits, and the apes none? The materialists will answer that neither the one nor the other has a spirit, but that annihilation overtakes each at physical death. But the spiritual philosophers of all times have agreed that man occupies a step one degree higher than the animal, and is possessed of that something which it lacks, be he the most untutored of savages or the wisest of philosophers. The ancients, as we have seen, taught that while man is a trinity of body, astral spirit, and immortal soul, the animal is but a duality—a being having a physical body and an astral spirit animating it. Scientists can distinguish no difference in the elements composing the bodies of men and brutes; and the kabalists agree with them so far as to say that the astral bodies (or, as the physicists would call it, “the life-principle”) of animals and men are identical in essence. Physical man is but the highest development of animal life.

If, as the scientists tell us, even thought is matter, and every sensation of pain or pleasure, every transient desire is accompanied by a disturbance of ether; and those bold speculators, the authors of the Unseen Universe believe that thought is conceived “to affect the matter of another universe simultaneously with this;” why, then, should not the gross, brutish thought of an orang-outang, or a dog, impressing itself on the ethereal waves of the astral light, as well as that of man, assure the animal a continuity of life after death, or “a future state?”

The kabalists held, and now hold, that it is unphilosophical to admit that the astral body of man can survive corporeal death, and at the same time assert that the astral body of the ape is resolved into independent molecules. That which survives as an individuality after the death of the body is the astral soul, which Plato, in the Timæus and Gorgias, calls the mortal soul, for, according to the Hermetic doctrine, it throws off its more material particles at every progressive change into a higher sphere. Socrates narrates to Callicles[529] that this mortal soul retains all the characteristics of the body after the death of the latter; so much so, indeed, that a man marked with the whip will have his astral body “full of the prints and scars.” The astral spirit is a faithful duplicate of the body, both in a physical and spiritual sense. The Divine, the highest and immortal spirit, can be neither punished nor rewarded. To maintain such a doctrine would be at the same time absurd and blasphemous, for it is not merely a flame lit at the central and inexhaustible fountain of light, but actually a portion of it, and of identical essence. It assures immortality to the individual astral being in proportion to the willingness of the latter to receive it. So long as the double man, i. e., the man of flesh and spirit, keeps within the limits of the law of spiritual continuity; so long as the divine spark lingers in him, however faintly, he is on the road to an immortality in the future state.

But those who resign themselves to a materialistic existence, shutting out the divine radiance shed by their spirit, at the beginning of the earthly pilgrimage, and stifling the warning voice of that faithful sentry, the conscience, which serves as a focus for the light in the soul—such beings as these, having left behind conscience and spirit, and crossed the boundaries of matter, will of necessity have to follow its laws.