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vol. title: vol. period: 1874-1876 pages in vol.: 208 |
Those Liberal Club Snuffers
To the Editor of The Tribune.
Sir: Our attention has been called to a long letter from Col. Henry S. Olcott in the Tribune of Aug. 30, in which he goes out of his way to be funny over a member of the Liberal Club, “hailing the idea of annihilation,” and being “seized with rapture at the sight of a tray of snuffers as the fitting emblem of his faith.” This will seem witty only to those who do not know how untrue, unfair, and evasive it is.
1. It is untrue, for, taking the world as a whole, there are, in proportion, more Spiritualists and Christians in the Liberal Club than out of it.
2. It is unfair, for the unspiritual members of the Club have fairly sought for the information and facts that would enable them to become otherwise. The whole subject, including the phase presented by Col. Olcott, was lectured upon and discussed until it was evident that nothing but “tested facts” would bring out the truth. It was then alleged that the “conditions” were such that the “facts” could not be presented to the Club. Thereupon, some years ago the “unspiritual members” suggested that the undersigned, being one physicist, one physician who made a specialty of nervous diseases, and one lawyer, with such assistants as they might find necessary, should act as a committee to investigate “spiritual facts and phenomena” within this city or vicinity. This Committee have been and still are waiting for more business.
3. This offer is not made to gratify an idle curiosity, it has seemed to us that “the phenomena,” even if they are not “facts of Spiritualism,” may have a scientific value. So far as we have been able to discover, however, we find no “spirit hypothesis” needed to account for them. They all fall quite readily under one or more of the following categories:
- 1. Fraud.
- 2. Illusion.
- 3. Delusion.
- 4. Disease.
If any man or woman can produce or knows of “phenomena” that they will assert upon their honor that they believe cannot be so reduced, the undersigned will give such phenomena and their conditions a careful, and, as far as possible, a scientific investigation. Until that is done, they submit that ridicule of the Liberal Club or of any of its members is evasive and singularly out of place in regard to this subject. Very respectfully,
New-York, Sept. 10, 1875.
See Vol. I, Chap. III of Isis Unveiled written against these Soul snuffers.
Spiritualism Rampant
To the Editor of The Tribune.
Sir: The language employed by me in a letter which appeared in the Tribune of Aug. 30 was not so obscure as to warrant the construction which some of the country papers have seen fit to place upon it. I did not say in that communication, nor have I in any other which I have written, that there are no genuine spirit communications, nor that most of the physical phenomena of our modern circles are fraudulent. On the contrary, I distinctly stated that I had seen manifestations, in the course of experiments extending over many years, which satisfied me of both the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. But my letter was intended to convey the impression that a majority of the phenomena attributed to the agency of disembodied human spirits were, in fact, due to another class of beings, beings who do not partake of our future existence, who have intelligence and craft, but not yet that immortal breath of God which we call the soul, and the Occultists the Augöeides (Αὐγô ειδές)—in short, to the “Elementary Spirits.”
What these creatures are may be ascertained by the diligent and intelligent student who chooses to consult the standard works written upon the Hermetic and other Occult philosophies. Suffice it to say that they bear about the same relation to man as he exists upon this and other inhabited planets as the sketch of the artist to the finished painting. They are more than matter and less than human beings. They are the emanations of matter, thrown off in the effort of Mother Nature to pro- duce her noblest offspring—the sentient human being. When the child opens its eyes upon the world, or rather when it first draws breath, she has done all that lies within her power to do, and God completes the work by imparting to the new being an immortal soul.
These “Elementary Spirits” might better be called embryonic or rudimentary men, than what they are, by the Occultists, for they are in truth fœtuses of the future human being, waiting in the womb of our common mother to be born upon this sphere, where their progress towards the perfection of microcosmic development begins.
They are as little the demons the Romanists make them as the grand personages in whose borrowed plumes they strut before our unsuspecting circles. Having no souls, they have no consciences, and, being thus devoid of moral restraint, lend themselves as readily and innocently to frivolous and false manifestations as to what is sober and true. They know only what they see in the minds of the persons interrogating the medium, and so answer fools according to their folly, second every crazy scheme propounded to them, and make themselves for the moment whatsoever historic figure or personal friend the inquirer desires to have speech with. The medium resigning himself as a passive instrument to their caprice, through a mistaken notion that to oppose it would be to show ingratitude to the denizens of the “angel world,” who “bend their bright forms” to enlighten and bless humanity, they play with him, as a monkey might with an accordion which falls in his way, and, like the latter, neither know nor care whether the instrument is ruined or not.
But, bear in mind, please, that after making allowance for all that these elementary spirits do, there appears to be a large residuum of real apparitions, who give genuine messages through mediums. So far as my present observation goes, they appear to be persons of two or three very different classes; as for instance: 1. The depraved, criminal, or grossly materialistic spirits, whose attractions are all for the earth, its coarse atmosphere, its turmoil, riches, pleasures, hatreds, strife, ambitions—in which their fancy revels and wallows as that of the living ... over a lascivious picture or scene, or the glutton over a rich feast; 2. Less frequently, the pure and good, who are drawn to those they left behind by the irresistible magnet of love; 3. Rarest of all, the states- men and other grand souls, who may be sent or attracted to operate through authoritative agencies, for the good of society and the amelioration of the race.
I submit to the candid and unprejudiced (making no account of the opinions of materialists, who are too dishonest to waste time over) whether these Occultist philosophers do not present us the only satisfying explanation of this spiritualistic problem. Does not their philosophy strip the movement of its disgusting features, and explain its incongruities, contradictions, and puerile characteristics? Who that has seen as much as I during the past twenty years could take any other ground than that assumed in my August letter, to wit, that I repudiate all connection with American spiritualism in its present form, and refuse to be classified by my critics among the free-lovers, pantarchists, socialists, and other theorists who have fastened upon a sublime and pure faith as barnacles upon a ship’s bottom.
Besides vexing numerous editors of Boston and other cities, my Tribune letter was an unexpected blow, I am told, to certain Positivist disputants who had primed themselves for an onslaught upon me as a “Spiritualist author” whom it was necessary to demolish; and it was equally unwelcome to sundry Spiritualist writers of the gushing sort, who fill their mental stomachs with the sweet nothings poured forth by the elementaries, and rehash them for their audiences, as some birds force up from the crop their half-digested food to give it to their young. A belief that the spirits of the dead sometimes return and communicate with us, no more makes me a Spiritualist, in the common acceptation of the term, than it does the Catholic or Buddhist, who both believe the same. As Prof. ———— of the London University recently wrote me, I begin to realize that “Spiritualism is only a small portion of a vast subject;” “so vast, indeed, as to comprise within its majestic scope all science and philo- sophies that concern the human race and ... the nature and attributes of the Chaldean Ain-Soph—the Boundless and Endless.”
New-York, Sept. 7, 1875.
Oriental Spiritualism
One of the most talented writers, now contributing to Spiritual literature, is Dr. G. L. Ditson, an able scholar, a calm and clear thinker. It gives us pleasure to find him in the ranks of those who are willing to seize upon “truth wherever found, on heathen or on Christian ground;” and his testimony to the possibility of there being a residuum of force, in spiritual manifestations not satisfactorily accounted for on the theory of spirit-communication, is worthy of consideration. He has no fear that a study of the hidden forces in Nature will undermine his Spiritualism; and that there are these forces he evidently has no doubt; for he says: —
“When in Egypt and India I saw such feats performed by jugglers (so-called), that trenched so largely upon the boundaries of the impossible—seemingly so to us—that I, for one, am anxious to look into any and every work, whatever title it may bear and under whatever mysterious aspect it may be put forth, in which there may possibly lie a clue to those unfathomed secrets (unfathomed in our day—exceptions allowed), that in ancient times, hidden under cabalistic signs and figures, master-spirits in the flesh knew how to utilize. To be sure the things here hinted at receive their share of ridicule, as does Spiritualism and mesmerism, and as the Copernican system did at a more remote period; but this, certainly, with intelligent Spiritualists should not have a feather’s weight. If “pooh-pooh,” and “nonsense,” and “humbug,” and “crazy fool,” had been material substances, we should have had a wall built around us so high we should never have seen its capstone. Let us, then, beware how we use such terms concerning that of which we are ignorant, though in our conceit we may fancy that we have the key rationale to <... continues on page 1-58 >
The present generation of men gradually evolving from—plants, vegetables, fish and becoming finally Whiskey bottles,—the “Embryonic man” or ancestor of the present race.
Editor's notes
- ↑ Those Liberal Club Snuffers by unknown author, Tribune, The
- ↑ Spiritualism Rampant by Olcott, H. S.
- ↑ Oriental Spiritualism by unknown author, Spiritual Scientist, v. 3, No. 11, November 18, 1875, p. 127
- ↑ image by unknown author. Human-like bean
- ↑ image by unknown author. Three bottles
- ↑ image by unknown author. Angry woman
Sources
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Spiritual Scientist, v. 3, No. 11, November 18, 1875, p. 127