< Theosophists' Ideas as to the Nature of Spirits (continued from page 11-283) >
and whence the divine essence has for over departed, our brothers the Spiritualists, insist on applying the title of “spirits of the dead”— well and good—they are not spirits at all, they are of the earth, earthy, all that remains of the dead when their spirits have flown; but if this be understood, and it be nevertheless considered desirable to call them that to which they are the precise antitheses, it is after all merely a case of misnomer.
But let there be no mistake as to what these ere; hundreds and thousands of lost and ruined men and women all over the globe attest the degradation to which constant subjection to their influence in mediumship, &c., too generally leads, and we who know the truth should ill discharge our duty if we did not warn all Spiritualists in the strongest terms possible, against allowing this misuse of terms to mislead them as to the reel nature and character of the disembodied entities with which they so constantly and confidingly deal.
Now probably Spiritualists will admit that our views would explain the vast mass of trash, frivolous nonsense and falsehood communicated through mediums, as also the manner in which so many of these, good and honest to begin with, gradually grow into immoral impostors. But many objections will be raised. One man will say—“I have repeatedly conversed with my late father—a better, kind-hearted, more spiritual-minded man never lived—and on one occasion he told me a fact, unknown to me, and, I believe, to every one living, which I subsequently verified.”
Nothing is simpler; the father’s imago was in the son’s mind; thus put en rapport, the disembodied elementary which, if of one of the more intelligent classes, has glimpses of things in the astral light, and can here and there dimly distinguish the pictures which record every deed, word and thought, (pictures which we are all unconsciously incessantly evolving, pictures which survive long after those who originated them have passed away) the elementary, we say, scanning these, easily picks up sufficient facts for its purpose, and by its will materializes itself, partly out of matter drawn from the medium’s body, partly out of inert kosmic matter drawn to it by the help of the elementals or half-blind forces of nature which it, and probably the medium also, has attracted, and stands forth the counterpart of the dead father and talks of things known only to that dead father. Of course, if the matter talked of wore known to any present, both elementary and medium, if in a trance, could equally know it, but we have purposely supposed one of those rare eases which are considered to be the strongest proofs of “spirit identity,” as it is called. Of course, too, everything that has once passed before that son’s mind, intonation of voice, tricks of manner, infirmities of temper, though apparently forgotten at the moment, are really indelibly recorded in his memory, as is proved by their immediate recognition when reproduced by the elementary Who has fished them out of those dormant records.
And it must be remembered that these apparently strong and perfect oases are very rare, and that the elementaries who come as A. or B., usually, if they personate people of any note, make gross blunders and almost without exception betray their falsehood in one way, or another, Shakespeare and Milton dictating trash, Newton grossly ignorant of his own Principia, and Plato teaching a washed-out Neoplatonic cum sentimental Christian philosophy, and so on. At the same time undoubtedly in rare cases the ghostly relics of very clever, very bad and very determined men constitute disembodied entities of high intelligence, which survive for a lengthened period, and the wickeder and more material they are in all their tendencies, the longer do they escape disintegration.
The Orthodox Church is much nearer the truth when it calls the entities that are mostly dealt with in seances-rooms “devils,” than are the Spiritualists who call them Spirits. We do not mean that they are at all generally actively malevolent, but their magnetic attractions are evil, and they incline and lead those with whom they have much to do, to the same evil material passions which have been their own ruin.
Naturally now some Spiritualists will object that this cannot be true since despite the mass of folly and gibberish, or worse, often heard in seance-rooms, the purest sentiments and really lofty ideas and teachings are not so very rarely expressed through mediums.
Several points have, however, to be home in mind. In the first place, though proved unfit for further development, and, therefore, doomed in most cases by the eternal law of the survival of the fittest to be disintegrated and, losing personal consciousness, to be worked np again in the lower worlds into new combinations, all elementaries are by no means actively wicked all round. On the balance, their whole natures prove to have a greater affinity to matter than to spirit, and they are, therefore incapable <... continues on page 11-286 >