HPB-SB-10-133

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vol. 10, p. 133

H. P. Blavatsky Scrapbooks

from Adyar archives of the International Theosophical Society

vol. 10

 

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smiled upon me with his usual kindness, and said, Remember that when you were in Gascony the tempestuous climate was insupportable to you; I also am tired of it, I have quitted Gascony never to return, and I am going to Rome. At the conclusion of these words he had reached the end of the garden, and as I endeavoured to accompany him, he, in the kindest and gentlest manner, waved his hand; but upon my persevering he cried out in a peremptory way, Stay! you must not at present attend me. Whilst he spoke these words I fixed my eyes upon him and saw the paleness of death in his face. Seized with horror I uttered a loud cry which awoke me. I took note of the time. I told the circumstance to all my friends, and at the expiration of twenty-five days I received accounts of his death, which happened during the very same night on which lie had appeared to me.”—Page xlvii., The Sonnets, &c., of Petrarch, London: Bells, 1875.

The biographer airily and easily shows that “on a little reflection this incident will not appear to be supernatural as if any one ever supposed it was! But Thomas Campbell wrote his two octavos in the early part of the present century: in A.D. 1879 many would explain the apparition by something more substantial than “fanciful reveries” and “sleeper’s imagination.”

The last on my present list shall be the noble Tasso. It is well known that he was confined as a lunatic in the Hospital of St. Anne by Duke Alfonso of Este, whom Byron has duly punished. But the cause of an imprisonment which lasted from 1580 to 1587 is still undetermined. That Tasso was not mad is clear from his choice of subjects in his den of human horrors. The best proof of his sanity are the moral dialogues and the sad canzonets by which he restrained the flow of his imagination.

After a confinement of seven years two months and some days, the Pride of Italy was set free. He passed the autumn of 1588 at the seat of his friend and future biographer, Battista Manso, Marquis of Villa.

His soul had become deeply tinged with a belief in supernatural appearances, and he came habitually to affirm that a familiar spirit appeared to him of the nature of that which is declared to have attended Socrates. In the supposed presence of this being he often sunk into a profound abstraction, and even in the company of his friend Manso, once maintained an animated conversation with this imaginary inhabitant of an immaterial world—

“Of Providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate,”

with an earnestness and power which left no doubt of his own belief in the reality of his impressions (p. xxiv., The Life of Tasso, prefixed to Fairfax’s Recovery of Jerusalem. London: Kirby, 1817).

The biographer (Charles Knight) adds: “This may have been madness, but it was the madness of an ardent and philosophical spirit, which felt that there was other evidence of the beauty and wisdom of the Supreme Intelligence beyond that of the senses” (as if seeing were not a sense!), “and which went to the extremes which such a belief may produce in a fervid and undisciplined (?) imagination.”

This suggests a question which I have long wished to address to “idealists,” namely, what the idealistic name for themselves may be? I will not insult their learning by a disquisition upon the words idea and idealist, which are of the earth, earthy, of the materialistic, purely material. An idealist who believes in the ideas which he sees, is much in the same condition as a “spirit materialised,” i.e. a white-black, or a nothing-something.

I here conclude—for the present if you are willing —the extracts intended for those

Who will not make their judgments blind, Who face the spectres of the mind, And lay them.

Richard F. Burton.

Trieste, Dec, 4,1879.

Physical Phenomena

(To the Editor of “The Spiritualist.”)

Sir,—At this time of day to accumulate evidences of the simpler physical phenomena occurring at seances may, to Spiritualists, seem rather superfluous. But as you have thought fit to publish the rough “proof” with which I furnished Mr. Munton for the purpose of my examination before the Psychological Society, in which dates and particulars omitted from my “proof” were supplied, it may be as well to complete the published evidence, by the account referred to, from my notes made on the 7th Sept., 1875, of my seance that day with Mrs. Youngs, the “piano medium,” of New York.

“Went with O. in the evening to the medium, Mrs. Youngs. The manifestation was by bright gaslight. Mrs. Y. stood at the piano, played a tune and sang a song. Then she sat down, played, and the piano was raised at the end at which she sat, and beat time on the floor to -what she was playing. Afterwards she stood at the side, with her left hand on the piano, her right under mine, which was placed, palm upwards, beneath the side of the instrument. Again it was raised repeatedly. It was so heavy that a strong exertion of my force only sufficed to raise it about an inch. Its dimensions were as follows:—Length, 6 feet 11 inches; width, 3 feet 4 inches ; depth of case, 1 foot 3 1/2inches—7 3/4 octaves. Colonel Olcott measured it in my presence. I noticed when the manifestation took place under the latter conditions described, the muscles of Mrs. Y.’s right hand were violently contracted against mine, though not so as to force my hand upwards in spite of my resistance. But it was the sort of movement one notices in an idle hand, when the other, or some other limb, is strongly exerted, and her other band was at the edge of the piano, oldy partly upon it.* That she did it with her own unassisted force is, however, simply impossible, though it occurred to me that the thing might be done by some hidden leverage worked by the foot. When she was sitting at the piano I asked that she would allow her dress to be tied tightly round her, so as to leave a clear visible space between her whole person and the piano. This she refused for what I thought a frivolous reason—something about the exhausting character of tests, I think. However, we had examined the piano, and moved it, to be sure that there was no machinery or artificial attachment to the floor. So what can I say?”

I have often seen it stated that any investigator, by taking a little trouble, may satisfy himself of the genuine nature of the physical phenomena. From my own experience! should say that this is a great mistake, and that such off-hand assertions are likely to gain <... continues on page 10-134 >

* It should be remembered that when the above was written I was comparatively young in my investigations. I have now a very different theory, one quite consistent with the genuine character of the manifestation, to account for this contraction of the muscles.

Editor's notes

Sources

• 

  London Spiritualist, No. 381, December 12, 1879, pp. 281-82