HPB-SB-10-422

H. P. Blavatsky Scrapbooks

from Adyar archives of the International Theosophical Society

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vol. 10, p. 422	volume 10, page 422 vol. title: vol. period: 1879-1880 pages in vol.: 577
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< Concerning "Geists" (continued from page 10-421) >

ing understanding as coming from Harris than as coming from Swedenborg. Only we must not flatter ourselves that modern Spiritualism affords a fully satisfactory answer. Its phenomena and communications are helpless before the metaphysical questions we inevitably encounter. Nevertheless, I would not be understood as throwing doubt upon the proofs of true disembodied intelligence which these phenomena in my judgment certainly afford. For instance, I do not think the geists, or larvae of deceased men tied Zöllner’s knots. Operations transcending the power and knowledge of man must have an intelligent source, and I am bound to admit that there is evidence on record, far better than any I have ever been privileged to obtain, of spirit identity thoroughly probed and tested. But our most frequent visitant seems to be the “geist.” It must not be forgotten that Harris is one of the greatest of living “seers,” so that Spiritualists will hardly be consistent in rejecting his testimony, whatever they may think of his opinions or teachings. He can hardly have mistaken the true living intelligence or spirit of man for the “geist” as he describes it, presumably from much experience.

mr. t. l. harris on “geists.”

1. Concerning the nature of geists, it is permitted to make an extract from a volume, still in manuscript, entitled “The Annunciation of the Son of Man.”

2. “Death does indeed open the way out of the natural world; but it is broad, not narrow; descending, not ascending; easy, not difficult. It tends to a great catastrophe, not contemplated in the primitive structure of that wonderful creation made in the image of God, male and female, and endowed with wisdom and power of rule over all creatures of air and earth and sea. The truth of the Christian is the despair of the philosopher. Cultivated nations furnish the sepulchres; when Christ’s redemption shall be fulfilled there will be no sepulchres.

3. “After the decease of man he divides into two parts: the Spirit, which is personal; and the Geist, the shadow man, which is impersonal. The geist holds in its fine structures the man’s whole life—every thought, every act, every condition through which he passed—the whole story of his days. The pre-historic rain drops still leave their imprints in the soft clay on which they fell, now become rock. Whatever the man’s spirit did, in and through its natural body, is more than dinted in the geist, or shadow body; it is builded in, for good or for evil. This shadow body is endowed with its own shadowy consciousness, in which, by continuity, is retained the more natural consciousness of the spirit of the man; but as it were, in a moonlight mist of recollection—a vague, tremulous, semi-dream. The geist, after decease, is not taken, as the spirit is, by angels; it drifts out of the body. The cord is cut by which spirit, body and geist made one in the flesh; and the geist, by its own levity, floats away, softly and easily, as thistle-down. Man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?

4. “These geists are, in many instances, visible to clairvoyants. She of Endor saw the geist of Samuel, and declared that she saw men as gods, rising up out of the ground. As was the man, so his geist is, representatively; and the geist thinks himself the man, in a sort of semi-wise and semi-foolish manner. If a man possessed great intellectual faculties, and put them forth through a long life—since character tells everywhere—he has built a great geist, if not a great name; he has sent forth a splendid representation of himself into the world of shadows. The majority of the geists, however, may be classed under the general name of imbeciles; imbeciles as compared with, or measured against the powers of the child.

5. “They neither grow nor decrease; as the tree falleth, so it lies. The man’s spirit made them, in such sense that they are a secondary creation, modified after a fashion not implied in the structure of the primordial man.

6. “The geist inhabits the last state of the man whose geist he is. That last state is reproduced in a shadowy, fantastic, image-world, whose vacuities seem to geist-vision such things as the bed whereon it slept, the money it hoarded, the house it lived in, the recollection of the things that were wrought in and through his structure. He tends to an endless reproduction of his former owner’s habits, manners and ways.

8. “The geist of Homer talks good Greek, sonorous, resounding. He is a geist in the Homeric style; but when he comes in contact with a medium, he will, for the time, be drawn into the medium’s body, and come out again a Homer who communicates in the tongue of that ‘inspirational’ person. He will, if left to himself, fill the chinks and crannies of the medium’s natural mind. ‘It is Homer, it is the divine Homer that possesses me; now I shall compose a new Iliad.’ Soon the geist goes about his business, and of that ‘New Iliad’ the world hears no more.

9. “The geist at once shuns and seeks <... continues on page 10-423 >