Isis unveiled, Volume 1 (of 2), Science

Esoteric philosophers held that everything in nature is but a materialization of spirit. The Eternal First Cause is latent spirit, they said, and matter from the beginning. “In the beginning was the word ... and the word was God.” While conceding the idea of such a God to be an unthinkable abstraction to human reason, they claimed that the unerring human instinct grasped it as a reminiscence of something concrete to it though intangible to our physical senses. With the first idea, which emanated from the double-sexed and hitherto-inactive Deity, the first motion was communicated to the whole universe, and the electric thrill was instantaneously felt throughout the boundless space. Spirit begat force, and force matter; and thus the latent deity manifested itself as a creative energy.

When; at what point of the eternity; or how? the question must always remain unanswered, for human reason is unable to grasp the great mystery. But, though spirit-matter was from all eternity, it was in the latent state; the evolution of our visible universe must have had a beginning. To our feeble intellect, this beginning may seem so remote as to appear to us eternity itself—a period inexpressible in figures or language. Aristotle argued that the world was eternal, and that it will always be the same; that one generation of men has always produced another, without ever having had a beginning that could be determined by our intellect. In this, his teaching, in its exoteric sense, clashed with that of Plato, who taught that “there was a time when mankind did not perpetuate itself;” but in spirit both the doctrines agreed, as Plato adds immediately: “This was followed by the earthly human race, in which the primitive history was gradually forgotten and man sank deeper and deeper;” and Aristotle says: “If there has been a first man he must have been born without father or mother—which is repugnant to nature. For there could not have been a first egg to give a beginning to birds, or there should have been a first bird which gave a beginning to eggs; for a bird comes from an egg.” The same he held good for all species, believing, with Plato, that everything before it appeared on earth had first its being in spirit.

This mystery of first creation, which was ever the despair of science, is unfathomable, unless we accept the doctrine of the Hermetists. Though matter is coëternal with spirit, that matter is certainly not our visible, tangible, and divisible matter, but its extreme sublimation. Pure spirit is but one remove higher. Unless we allow man to have been evolved out of this primordial spirit-matter, how can we ever come to any reasonable hypothesis as to the genesis of animate beings? Darwin begins his evolution of species at the lowest point and traces upward. His only mistake may be that he applies his system at the wrong end. Could he remove his quest from the visible universe into the invisible, he might find himself on the right path. But then, he would be following in the footsteps of the Hermetists.

That our philosophers—positivists—even the most learned among them, never understood the spirit of the mystic doctrines taught by the old philosophers—Platonists—is evident from that most eminent modern work, Conflict between Religion and Science. Professor Draper begins his fifth chapter by saying that “the Pagan Greeks and Romans believed that the spirit of man resembles his bodily form, varying its appearance with his variations, and growing with his growth.” What the ignorant masses thought is a matter of little consequence, though even they could never have indulged in such speculations taken à la lettre. As to Greek and Roman philosophers of the Platonic school, they believed no such thing of the spirit of man, but applied the above doctrine to his soul, or psychical nature, which, as we have previously shown, is not the divine spirit.

Aristotle, in his philosophical deduction On Dreams, shows this doctrine of the two-fold soul, or soul and spirit, very plainly. “It is necessary for us to ascertain in what portion of the soul dreams appear,” he says. All the ancient Greeks believed not only a double, but even a triple soul to exist in man. And even Homer we find terming the animal soul, or the astral soul, called by Mr. Draper “spirit,” θύμος, and the divine one νοὺς—the name by which Plato also designated the higher spirit.

The Hindu Jainas conceive the soul, which they call Jiva, to have been united from all eternity to even two sublimated ethereal bodies, one of which is invariable and consists of the divine powers of the higher mind; the other variable and composed of the grosser passions of man, his sensual affections, and terrestrial attributes. When the soul becomes purified after death it joins its Vaycarica, or divine spirit, and becomes a god. The followers of the Vedas, the learned Brahmins, explain the same doctrine in the Vedanta. The soul, according to their teaching, as a portion of the divine universal spirit or immaterial mind, is capable of uniting itself with the essence of its highest Entity. The teaching is explicit; the Vedanta affirms that whoever attains the thorough knowledge of his god becomes a god while yet in his mortal body, and acquires supremacy over all things.

Quoting from the Vedaic theology the verse which says: “There is in truth but one Deity, the Supreme Spirit; he is of the same nature as the soul of man,” Mr. Draper shows the Buddhistic doctrines as reaching Eastern Europe through Aristotle. We believe the assertion unwarranted, for Pythagoras, and after him Plato, taught them long before Aristotle. If subsequently the later Platonists accepted in their dialectics the Aristotelean arguments on emanation, it was merely because his views coincided in some respect with those of the Oriental philosophers. The Pythagorean number of harmony and Plato’s esoteric doctrines on creation are inseparable from the Buddhistic doctrine of emanation; and the great aim of the Pythagorean philosophy, namely, to free the astral soul from the fetters of matter and sense, and make it thereby fit for an eternal contemplation of spiritual things, is a theory identical with the Buddhistic doctrine of final absorption. It is the Nirvana, interpreted in its right sense; a metaphysical tenet that just begins to be suspected now by our latest Sanscrit scholars.

If the doctrines of Aristotle have exercised on the later Neo-platonists such a “dominating influence,” how is it that neither Plotinus, nor Porphyry, nor Proclus ever accepted his theories on dreams and prophetic soul-visions? While Aristotle held that most of those who prophesy have “diseases of madness”[669]—thus furnishing some American plagiarists and specialists with a few reasonable ideas to disfigure—the views of Porphyry, hence those of Plotinus, were quite the reverse. In the most vital questions of metaphysical speculations Aristotle is constantly contradicted by the Neo-platonists. Furthermore, either the Buddhistic Nirvana is not the nihilistic doctrine, as it is now represented to be, or the Neo-platonists did not accept it in this sense. Surely Mr. Draper will not take upon himself to affirm that either Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, or any other philosopher of their mystic school, did not believe in the soul’s immortality? To say that either of them sought ecstasy as a “foretaste of absorption into the universal mundane soul,” in the sense in which the Buddhist Nirvana is understood by every Sanscrit scholar, is to wrong these philosophers. Nirvana is not, as Mr.

Draper has it, a “reäbsorption in the Universal Force, eternal rest, and bliss;” but, when taken literally by the said scholars, means the blowing out, the extinction, complete annihilation, and not absorption.[670] No one, so far as we know, has ever taken upon himself to ascertain the true metaphysical meaning of this word, which is not to be found, even in the Lankâvatâra,[671] which gives the different interpretations of the Nirvana by the Brahmans—Tîrthakas. Therefore, for one who reads this passage in Mr. Draper’s work, and bears in mind but the usually-accepted meaning of the Nirvana, will naturally suppose that Plotinus and Porphyry were nihilists. Such a page in the Conflict gives us a certain right to suppose that either 1, the learned author desired to place Plotinus and Porphyry on the same plane with Giordano Bruno, of whom he makes, very erroneously, an atheist; or, 2, that he never took the trouble of studying the lives of these philosophers and their views.

Now, for one who knows Professor Draper, even by reputation, the latter supposition is simply absurd. Therefore, we must think, with deep regret, that his desire was to misrepresent their religious aspirations. It is decidedly an awkward thing for modern philosophers, whose sole aim seems to be the elimination of the ideas of God and the immortal spirit from the mind of humanity, to have to treat with historical impartiality the most celebrated of the Pagan Platonists. To have to admit, on the one hand, their profound learning, their genius, their achievements in the most abstruse philosophical questions, and therefore their sagacity; and, on the other, their unreserved adhesion to the doctrine of immortality, of the final triumph of spirit over matter, and their implicit faith in God and the gods, or spirits; in the return of the dead, apparitions, and other “spiritual” matters, is a dilemma from which academical human nature could not reasonably be expected to extricate itself so easily.

The plan resorted to by Lemprière,[672] in such an emergency as the above, is coarser than Professor Draper’s, but equally effective. He charges the ancient philosophers with deliberate falsehood, trickery, and credulity. After painting to his readers Pythagoras, Plotinus, and Porphyry as marvels of learning, morality, and accomplishments; as men eminent for personal dignity, purity of lives, and self-abnegation in the pursuit of divine truths, he does not hesitate to rank “this celebrated philosopher” (Pythagoras) among impostors; while to Porphyry he attributes “credulity, lack of judgment, and dishonesty.” Forced by the facts of history to give them their just due in the course of his narrative, he displays his bigoted prejudice in the parenthetical comments which he allows himself. From this antiquated writer of the last century we learn that a man may be honest, and at the same time an impostor; pure, virtuous, and a great philosopher, and yet dishonest, a liar, and a fool!

We have shown elsewhere that the “secret doctrine” does not concede immortality to all men alike. “The eye would never see the sun, if it were not of the nature of the sun,” said Plotinus. Only “through the highest purity and chastity we shall approach nearer to God, and receive in the contemplation of Him, the true knowledge and insight,” writes Porphyry. If the human soul has neglected during its lifetime to receive its illumination from its Divine Spirit, our personal God, then it becomes difficult for the gross and sensual man to survive for a great length of time his physical death. No more than the misshapen monster can live long after its physical birth, can the soul, once that it has become too material, exist after its birth into the spiritual world. The viability of the astral form is so feeble, that the particles cannot cohere firmly when once it is slipped out of the unyielding capsule of the external body. Its particles, gradually obeying the disorganizing attraction of universal space, finally fly asunder beyond the possibility of reaggregation. Upon the occurrence of such a catastrophe, the individual ceases to exist; his glorious Augoeides has left him. During the intermediary period between his bodily death and the disintegration of the astral form, the latter, bound by magnetic attraction to its ghastly corpse, prowls about, and sucks vitality from susceptible victims. The man having shut out of himself every ray of the divine light, is lost in darkness, and, therefore, clings to the earth and the earthy.

No astral soul, even that of a pure, good, and virtuous man, is immortal in the strictest sense; “from elements it was formed—to elements it must return.” Only, while the soul of the wicked vanishes, and is absorbed without redemption, that of every other person, even moderately pure, simply changes its ethereal particles for still more ethereal ones; and, while there remains in it a spark of the Divine, the individual man, or rather, his personal ego, cannot die. “After death,” says Proclus, “the soul (the spirit) continueth to linger in the aërial body (astral form), till it is entirely purified from all angry and voluptuous passions ... then doth it put off by a second dying the aërial body as it did the earthly one. Whereupon, the ancients say that there is a celestial body always joined with the soul, and which is immortal, luminous, and star-like.”

But, we will now turn from our digression to further consider the question of reason and instinct. The latter, according to the ancients, proceeded from the divine, the former from the purely human. One (the instinct) is the product of the senses, a sagaciousness shared by the lowest animals, even those who have no reason—it is the αισθητικον; the other is the product of the reflective faculties—νοητικόν, denoting judiciousness and human intellectuality. Therefore, an animal devoid of reasoning powers has in its inherent instinct an unerring faculty which is but that spark of the divine which lurks in every particle of inorganic matter—itself materialized spirit. In the Jewish Kabala, the second and third chapters of Genesis are explained thus: When the second Adam is created “out of the dust,” matter has become so gross that it reigns supreme. Out of its lusts evolves woman, and Lilith has the best of spirit. The Lord God, “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (the sunset of spirit, or divine light obscured by the shadows of matter) curses not only them who have committed the sin, but even the ground itself, and all living things—the tempting serpent-matter above all.

Who but the kabalists are able to explain this seeming act of injustice? How are we to understand this cursing of all created things, innocent of any crime? The allegory is evident. The curse inheres in matter itself. Henceforth, it is doomed to struggle against its own grossness for purification; the latent spark of divine spirit, though smothered, is still there; and its invincible attraction upward compels it to struggle in pain and labor to free itself. Logic shows us that as all matter had a common origin, it must have attributes in common, and as the vital and divine spark is in man’s material body, so it must lurk in every subordinate species. The latent mentality which, in the lower kingdoms is recognized as semi-consciousness, consciousness, and instinct, is largely subdued in man. Reason, the outgrowth of the physical brain, develops at the expense of instinct—the flickering reminiscence of a once divine omniscience—spirit. Reason, the badge of the sovereignty of physical man over all other physical organisms, is often put to shame by the instinct of an animal. As his brain is more perfect than that of any other creature, its emanations must naturally produce the highest results of mental action; but reason avails only for the consideration of material things; it is incapable of helping its possessor to a knowledge of spirit. In losing instinct, man loses his intuitional powers, which are the crown and ultimatum of instinct. Reason is the clumsy weapon of the scientists—intuition the unerring guide of the seer.

Instinct teaches plant and animal their seasons for the procreation of their species, and guides the dumb brute to find his appropriate remedy in the hour of sickness. Reason—the pride of man—fails to check the propensities of his matter, and brooks no restraint upon the unlimited gratification of his senses. Far from leading him to be his own physician, its subtile sophistries lead him too often to his own destruction.

Nothing is more demonstrable than the proposition that the perfection of matter is reached at the expense of instinct. The zoöphyte attached to the submarine rock, opening its mouth to attract the food that floats by, shows, proportionately with its physical structure, more instinct than the whale. The ant, with its wonderful architectural, social, and political abilities, is inexpressibly higher in the scale than the subtile royal tiger watching its prey. “With awe and wonder,” exclaims du Bois-Raymond, “must the student of nature regard that microscopic molecule of nervous substance which is the seat of the laborious, constructive, orderly, loyal, dauntless soul of the ant!”

Like everything else which has its origin in psychological mysteries, instinct has been too long neglected in the domain of science. “We see what indicated the way to man to find relief for all his physical ailings,” says Hippocrates. “It is the instinct of the earlier races, when cold reason had not as yet obscured man’s inner vision.... Its indication must never be disdained, for it is to instinct alone that we owe our first remedies.”[673] Instantaneous and unerring cognition of an omniscient mind, instinct is in everything unlike the finite reason; and in the tentative progress of the latter, the godlike nature of man is often utterly engulfed, whenever he shuts out from himself the divine light of intuition. The one crawls, the other flies; reason is the power of the man, intuition the prescience of the woman!

Plotinus, the pupil of the great Ammonius Saccas, the chief founder of the Neo-platonic school, taught that human knowledge had three ascending steps: opinion, science, and illumination. He explained it by saying that “the means or instrument of opinion is sense, or perception; of science, dialectics; of illumination, intuition (or divine instinct). To the last, reason is subordinate; it is absolute knowledge founded on the identification of the mind with the object known.”

Prayer opens the spiritual sight of man, for prayer is desire, and desire develops WILL; the magnetic emanations proceeding from the body at every effort—whether mental or physical—produce self-magnetization and ecstasy. Plotinus recommended solitude for prayer, as the most efficient means of obtaining what is asked; and Plato advised those who prayed to “remain silent in the presence of the divine ones, till they remove the cloud from thy eyes, and enable thee to see by the light which issues from themselves.” Apollonius always isolated himself from men during the “conversation” he held with God, and whenever he felt the necessity for divine contemplation and prayer, he wrapped himself, head and all, in the drapery of his white woolen mantle. “When thou prayest enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father in secret,” says the Nazarene, the pupil of the Essenes.

Every human being is born with the rudiment of the inner sense called intuition, which may be developed into what the Scotch know as “second sight.” All the great philosophers, who, like Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus employed this faculty, taught the doctrine. “There is a faculty of the human mind,” writes Iamblichus, “which is superior to all which is born or begotten. Through it we are enabled to attain union with the superior intelligences, to being transported beyond the scenes of this world, and to partaking the higher life and peculiar powers of the heavenly ones.”

Were there no inner sight or intuition, the Jews would never have had their Bible, nor the Christians Jesus. What both Moses and Jesus gave to the world was the fruit of their intuition or illumination. What their subsequent elders and teachers allowed the world to understand was—dogmatic misrepresentations, too often blasphemy.

To accept the Bible as a “revelation” and nail belief to a literal translation, is worse than absurdity—it is a blasphemy against the Divine majesty of the “Unseen.” If we had to judge of the Deity, and the world of spirits, by its human interpreters, now that philology proceeds with giant-strides on the fields of comparative religions, belief in God and the soul’s immortality could not withstand the attacks of reason for one century more. That which supports the faith of man in God and a spiritual life to come is intuition; that divine outcome of our inner-self, which defies the mummeries of the Roman Catholic priest, and his ridiculous idols; the thousand and one ceremonies of the Brahman and his idols; and the Jeremiads of the Protestant preacher, and his desolate and arid creed, with no idols, but a boundless hell and damnation hooked on at the end. Were it not for this intuition, undying though often wavering because so clogged with matter, human life would be a parody and humanity a fraud. This ineradicable feeling of the presence of some one outside and inside ourselves is one that no dogmatic contradictions, nor external form of worship can destroy in humanity, let scientists and clergy do what they may. Moved by such thoughts of the boundlessness and impersonality of the Deity, Gautama-Buddha, the Hindu Christ, exclaimed: “As the four rivers which fall in the Ganges lose their names as soon as they mingle their waters with the holy river, so all who believe in Buddha cease to be Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, and Sûdras!”

The Old Testament was compiled and arranged from oral tradition; the masses never knew its real meaning, for Moses was ordered to impart the “hidden truths” but to his seventy elders on whom the “Lord” put of the spirit which was upon the legislator. Maimonides, whose authority and whose knowledge of the sacred history can hardly be rejected, says: “Whoever shall find out the true sense of the book of Genesis ought to take care not to divulge it.... If a person should discover the true meaning of it by himself, or by the aid of another, then he ought to be silent; or, if he speaks of it, he ought to speak of it but obscurely and in an enigmatical manner.”

This confession, that what is written in the Holy Writ is but an allegory, was made by other Jewish authorities besides Maimonides; for we find Josephus stating that Moses “philosophized” (spoke riddles in figurative allegory), when writing the book of Genesis. Therefore modern science, by neglecting to unriddle the true sense of the Bible, and by allowing the whole of Christendom to go on believing in the dead letter of the Jewish theology, tacitly constitutes herself the confederate of the fanatical clergy. She has no right to ridicule the records of a people who never wrote them with the idea that they would receive such a strange interpretation at the hands of an inimical religion. That their holiest texts should be turned against them and that the dead men’s bones could have smothered the spirit of truth, is the saddest feature of Christianity!

But neither the great First Cause nor its emanation—human, immortal spirit—have left themselves “without a witness.” Mesmerism and modern spiritualism are there to attest the great truths. For over fifteen centuries, thanks to the blindly-brutal persecutions of those great vandals of early Christian history, Constantine and Justinian, ancient wisdom slowly degenerated until it gradually sank into the deepest mire of monkish superstition and ignorance. The Pythagorean “knowledge of things that are;” the profound erudition of the Gnostics; the world and time-honored teachings of the great philosophers; all were rejected as doctrines of Antichrist and Paganism, and committed to the flames. With the last seven wise men of the Orient, the remnant group of the Neo-platonists, Hermias, Priscianus, Diogenes, Eulalius, Damaskius, Simplicius and Isidorus, who fled from the fanatical persecutions of Justinian, to Persia, the reign of wisdom closed. The books of Thoth, or (Hermes Trismegistus), which contain within their sacred pages the spiritual and physical history of the creation and progress of our world, were left to mould in oblivion and contempt for ages. They found no interpreters in Christian Europe; the Philaletheians, or wise “lovers of the truth,” were no more; they were replaced by the light-fleers, the tonsured and hooded monks of Papal Rome, who dread truth, in whatever shape and from whatever quarter it appears, if it but clashes in the least with their dogmas.

As to skeptics—this is what Professor Alexander Wilder remarks of them and their followers, in his sketches on Neo-platonism and Alchemy: “A century has passed since the compilers of the French Encyclopædia infused skepticism into the blood of the civilized world, and made it disreputable to believe in the actual existence of anything that cannot be tested in crucibles or demonstrated by critical reasoning. Even now, it requires candor as well as courage to venture to treat upon a subject which has been for many years discarded and contemned, because it has not been well or correctly understood. The person must be bold who accounts the Hermetic philosophy to be other than a pretense of science, and so believing, demands for its enunciation a patient hearing. Yet its professors were once the princes of learned investigation, and heroes among common men. Besides, nothing is to be despised which men have reverently believed; and disdain for the earnest convictions of others is itself the token of ignorance, and of an ungenerous mind.”

And now, encouraged by these words from a scholar who is neither a fanatic nor a conservative, we will recall a few things reported by travellers as having been seen by them in Thibet and India, and which are treasured by the natives as practical proofs of the truth of the philosophy and science handed down by their forefathers.

First we may consider that most remarkable phenomenon as seen in the temples of Thibet and the accounts of which have reached Europe from eye-witnesses other than Catholic missionaries—whose testimony we will exclude for obvious reasons. Early in the present century a Florentine scientist, a skeptic and a correspondent of the French Institute, having been permitted to penetrate in disguise to the hallowed precincts of a Buddhist temple, where the most solemn of all ceremonies was taking place, relates the following as having been seen by himself. An altar is ready in the temple to receive the resuscitated Buddha, found by the initiated priesthood, and recognized by certain secret signs to have reïncarnated himself in a new born infant. The baby, but a few days old, is brought into the presence of the people and reverentially placed upon the altar. Suddenly rising into a sitting posture, the child begins to utter in a loud, manly voice, the following sentences: “I am Buddha, I am his spirit; and I, Buddha, your Dalai-Lama, have left my old, decrepit body, at the temple of ... and selected the body of this young babe as my next earthly dwelling.” Our scientist, being finally permitted by the priests to take, with due reverence, the baby in his arms, and carry it away to such a distance from them as to satisfy him that no ventriloquial deception is being practiced, the infant looks at the grave academician with eyes that “make his flesh creep,” as he expresses it, and repeats the words he had previously uttered.

A detailed account of this adventure, attested with the signature of this eye-witness, was forwarded to Paris, but the members of the Institute, instead of accepting the testimony of a scientific observer of acknowledged credibility, concluded that the Florentine was either suffering under an attack of sunstroke, or had been deceived by a clever trick of acoustics.

Although, according to Mr. Stanislas Julien, the French translator of the sacred Chinese texts, there is a verse in the Lotus[674] which says that “A Buddha is as difficult to be found as the flowers of Udumbara and Palâça,” if we are to believe several eye-witnesses, such a phenomenon does happen. Of course its occurrence is rare, for it happens but on the death of every great Dalai-Lama; and these venerable old gentlemen live proverbially long lives.

The poor Abbé Huc, whose works of travel in Thibet and China are so well-known, relates the same fact of the resuscitation of Buddha. He adds, furthermore, the curious circumstance that the baby-oracle makes good his claim to being an old mind in a young body by giving to those who ask him, “and who knew him in his past life, the most exact details of his anterior earthly existence.”

It is worthy of notice, that des Mousseaux, who expatiates at length on the phenomenon, attributing it as a matter of course to the Devil, gravely remarks of the Abbé himself, that the fact that he had been unfrocked (defroqué) “is an accident which I (he) confess scarcely tends to strengthen our confidence.” In our humble opinion this little circumstance strengthens it all the more.

If this example of infant prodigy stood alone, we might reasonably indulge in some hesitation as to accepting it; but, to say nothing of the Camisard prophets of 1707, among whom was the boy of fifteen months described by Jacques Dubois, who spoke in good French “as though God were speaking through his mouth;” and of the Cevennes babies, whose speaking and prophesying were witnessed by the first savants of France—we have instances in modern times of quite as remarkable a character. Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, for March, 1875, contained an account of the following phenomenon: “At Saar-Louis, France, a child was born. The mother had just been confined, the midwife was holding forth garrulously ‘on the blessed little creature,’ and the friends were congratulating the father on his luck, when somebody asked what time it was. Judge of the surprise of all, on hearing the new-born babe reply distinctly ‘Two o’clock!’ But this was nothing to what followed. The company were looking on the infant, with speechless wonder and dismay, when it opened its eyes, and said: ‘I have been sent into the world to tell you that 1875 will be a good year, but that 1876 will be a year of blood.’ Having uttered this prophecy it turned on its side and expired, aged half-an-hour.”

We are not aware that this prodigy has received official authentication by the civil authority—of course we should look for none from the clergy, since no profit or honor was to be derived from it—but even if a respectable British commercial journal was not responsible for the story, the result has given it special interest. The year 1876, just passed (we write in February, 1877) was emphatically, and, from the standpoint of March, 1875, unexpectedly—a year of blood. In the Danubian principalities was written one of the bloodiest chapters of the history of war and rapine—a chapter of outrages of Moslem upon Christian that has scarcely been paralleled since Catholic soldiers butchered the simple natives of North and South America by tens of thousands, and Protestant Englishmen waded to the Imperial throne of Delhi, step by step, through rivers of blood. If the Saar-Louis prophecy was but a mere newspaper sensation, still the turn of events elevated it into the rank of a fulfilled prediction; 1875 was a year of great plenty, and 1876, to the surprise of everybody, a year of carnage.

But even if it should be found that the baby-prophet never opened its lips, the instance of the Jencken infant still remains to puzzle the investigator. This is one of the most surprising cases of mediumship. The child’s mother is the famous Kate Fox, its father H. D. Jencken, M.R.I., Barrister-at-law, in London. He was born in London, in 1873, and before he was three months old showed evidences of spirit-mediumship. Rappings occurred on his pillow and cradle, and also on his father’s person, when he held the child in his lap and Mrs. Jencken was absent from home. Two months later, a communication of twenty words, exclusive of signature, was written through his hand. A gentleman, a Liverpool solicitor, named J. Wason, was present at the time, and united with the mother and nurse in a certificate which was published in the London Medium and Daybreak of May 8th, 1874. The professional and scientific rank of Mr. Jencken make it in the highest degree improbable that he would lend himself to a deception. Moreover, the child was within such easy reach of the Royal Institution, of which his father is a member, that Professor Tyndall and his associates had no excuse for neglecting to examine and inform the world about this psychological phenomenon.

The sacred baby of Thibet being so far away, they find their most convenient plan to be a flat denial, with hints of sunstroke and acoustical machinery. As for the London baby, the affair is still easier; let them wait until the child has grown up and learned to write, and then deny the story point-blank!

In addition to other travellers, the Abbé Huc gives us an account of that wonderful tree of Thibet called the Kounboum; that is to say, the tree of the 10,000 images and characters. It will grow in no other latitude, although the experiment has sometimes been tried; and it cannot even be multiplied from cuttings. The tradition is that it sprang from the hair of one of the Avatars (the Lama Son—Ka-pa) one of the incarnations of Buddha. But we will let the Abbé Huc tell the rest of the story: “Each of its leaves, in opening, bears either a letter or a religious sentence, written in sacred characters, and these letters are, of their kind, of such a perfection that the type-foundries of Didot contain nothing to excel them. Open the leaves, which vegetation is about to unroll, and you will there discover, on the point of appearing, the letters or the distinct words which are the marvel of this unique tree! Turn your attention from the leaves of the plant to the bark of its branches, and new characters will meet your eyes! Do not allow your interest to flag; raise the layers of this bark, and still OTHER CHARACTERS will show themselves below those whose beauty had surprised you. For, do not fancy that these superposed layers repeat the same printing. No, quite the contrary; for each lamina you lift presents to view its distinct type. How, then, can we suspect jugglery? I have done my best in that direction to discover the slightest trace of human trick, and my baffled mind could not retain the slightest suspicion.”