< Spirit Photography in the Dark – Manifestations with Mme. Blavatsky (continued from page 4-200) >
letter-paper in which he had carefully folded it in its smooth unruffled condition. She at once made a careless twist of it and tied it round her neck. When we returned from the dining room to her warmer snuggery of a parlour, she took it off and threw it on the table by her side. I remarked, “You treat in very unceremonious fashion that beautiful handkerchief which has been sent to you all the way from Thibet. Since you can get them so easily, have you any objection to give that one to me?”—“Oh, certainly not, if you would like to have it,” and she tossed it over to me. I smoothed out its creases as well as I could, again wrapped it in a sheet of paper, and put it in my breast pocket. Later on, as I was taking my departure, and we were all on foot, she said, “Oh, just give me that handkerchief for a moment.” Of course I obeyed. She turned her back to me for an instant or two, and then, turning again to me, she held out two handkerchiefs, one in each hand. “Take whichever you please; I thought that perhaps you might prefer this one (handing me the new one) since you have seen it come.’’ Of course I did so, and after travelling about fifteen miles by rail that night, I gave it to the lady best entitled to receive a favour thus conferred upon me by another lady, which latter lady, by the way, claims to be septuagenarian, though looking only about forty. When I left America, a few days afterwards, it had not yet melted away, nor wafted back to Thibet, on a “current of astral fluid.” I should add that the second handkerchief was a perfect fac-simile of the first, down to every detail of the name in ancient oriental characters; which, by the way, was evidently written or painted in some black pigment or ink, not stamped mechanically.
And now I come to the reason why I recall these reminiscences of nearly a year ago, in connection with John King’s protest against having stolen out of shops the above-mentioned flowers and confectionery, and of his having, as he said, “reproduced them from the essence of the things.” In the course of the evening with Madame Blavatsky (this was before the reproduction of the second handkerchief), I had referred to the anterior phenomenon of the beads of the chaplet, and asked Madame Blavatsky whether they (the “Adepts” of the Orient) claimed that they can make matter— create real, palpable, ponderable objects—out of nothing. “No,” she answered, “that is impossible. There must be a basis, a first object. Then it can be reproduced.” Is not this (I would ask) something like John King’s making his flowers and confectioneries “from the essence of the things,” such as they already existed in material reality in the hothouses or in Sirandin’s shop in the Rue de la Paix? And does it not suggest any glimmer of light upon the practical modus operandi through which five loaves and two small fishes were once (by an extraordinary Virgin-Born Messiah-Prophet of the Most High Supreme) made to feed a mighty multitude who were an hungered? Is there a power in spirit under the control of great supernal authority, to concrete into what we call Matter the spiritual “essence of things”? Or to gather out of universal nature, the air, electricity in its diverse forms, terrestrial and animal magnetism, human organisms, &c., the elements for the concretion of what we call material objects? And to do it by a flash of thought, by a wave of will? Does this throw some light on the phenomenon (now so familiar to us here, and to so many others everywhere else) of the materialisation of spirits?
But paulo minova canamus. My particular business in this correspondence is to record and testify to plain, honest, simple facts—facts patiently and keenly observed by three calm, cool, and critical minds. I like to feel terra firma under foot. Let my friends and brother Spiritualists over there in England fill splendid columns of your large type with essays on their observations of psychic things in general, viewed from balloon altitudes, to which I humbly decline to soar. Let psychic eagles stretch pinions made of fine-writing quills, out of sight towards the sun (beware of landing in the moon!). I am a more humble terrestrial bird. They may call, or think, me a goose if they like: the least flighty of birds. In other words, I am an old-fashioned Spiritualist (what, are we already, some of us, “old-fashioned”?). I believe in the possibility, and in the fact, of our continued communication with our loved and (not) lost. Nay, I do not merely “believe” in that—I know it, if I know anything; if I may be said {pace the metaphysicians) to know that I have ten fingers and ten toes, and that two and two make four.
I have had evidence of that great fundamental truth—evidence demonstrative and conclusive—to the most critical, and the most severely logical, mind. Therefore, I am sure that I too shall live again; that my continued life will depend upon what I make this one; that “death” is only evolution, like that of the butterfly (the psyche) from the caterpillar. And therefore, and therefore, and therefore, and a great many divine therefores, hang, in an endless succession, reaching from earth to heaven, upon that first inductively established truth, which is indeed the pearl of great price, for the dear sake of which alone I attend good stances, and write the record of them to The Spiritualist, for the benefit of those readers who like facts as well as I do, and as much as Goethe said he hated them.
Paris, Jan. 27.
Occultism
...
... in their giving us their facts first and their conclusions afterwards, instead of reversing the process, if indeed they are able to copmlete a reversal.
Editor's notes
- ↑ Occultism by unknown author. Some lost words and the ending were recovered by HPB.