 |
vol. title: vol. period: 1879-1880 pages in vol.: 577 |
Spirit Individuality
While on the one hand, such strong evidence of spirit identity exists as in the plentiful well-authenticated cases of a spirit appearing to one, two, three or more persons, and giving him the first news of the death of his body, on the other hand, there are cases in which the spirits are apparently not the persons they say they are, and it is an open question even whether they be spirits at all. Immense self-conceit is known to medical men to be one of the symptoms of a form of lunacy, the sufferer for instance believing himself to be the Emperor of Morocco, or having been incarcerated for laying claim to the English Crown. Inclining in this direction are those forms of mediumship in which the individual believes himself to be in communication with the Lord of Hosts, or with other sacred intelligences, but whose common-place revelations through their chosen earthen vessels in no way shake the faith or self-conceit of the latter. Lower still, in a kind of descending scale, are the spirits of Milton and Shakspeare, writing trash in bad metre, or the spirit of Faraday, talking bad grammar and palpably false science. Mixed up with all this, we have more intelligent spirits, usually with more humble names, who take pains to give evidence satisfactory to the legal mind, that they are the persons they say they are, so that the facts, taken as a whole, present a tangled skein to unravel.
What is the explanation of the great names given by certain spirits, yet who clearly are not the persons they say they are? Sometimes they give the name of a great mythological individual who never had any existence, but who their medium believes to have once lived on earth; and sometimes they give the name of a real man, coupled with glaringly inaccurate statements about his life in this world.
Swedenborg believed himself to be sometimes in direct communication with the Almighty, who was consequently dwarfed to the limits of a venerable but good man, whose plan of construction of the heavens, hells and earths of the Universe, could thus be made known to a weak mortal. This is (in a higher <... continues on page 10-430 >
Editor's notes
- ↑ Spirit Individuality by unknown author, London Spiritualist, The, No. 420, September 10, 1880, pp. 121-22
Sources
-
London Spiritualist, No. 420, September 10, 1880, pp. 121-22