Chapter IX: {293} (3)

This would seem to indicate that psychometry was known and extensively practiced by the ancients. We have somewhere seen it stated that the {332} profound knowledge possessed, according to Draper, by the ancient Chaldean astrologers, of the planets and their relations, was obtained more by the divination of the betylos, or the meteoric stone, than by astronomical instruments. Strabo, Pliny, Helancius—all speak of the electrical, or electro-magnetic power of the betyli. They were worshipped in the remotest antiquity in Egypt and Samothrace, as magnetic stones, “containing souls which had fallen from heaven;” and the priests of Cybelè wore a small betylos on their bodies. How curious the coincidence between the practice of the priests of Belus and the experiments of Professor Denton!

As Professor Buchanan truthfully remarks of psychometry, it will enable us “ ... to detect vice and crime. No criminal act ... can escape the detection of psychometry, when its powers are properly brought forth ... the sure detection of guilt by psychometry (no matter how secret the act) will nullify all concealment.”[539]

Speaking of the elementary, Porphyry says: “These invisible beings have been receiving from men honors as gods ... a universal belief makes them capable of becoming very malevolent: it proves that their wrath is kindled against those who neglect to offer them a legitimate worship.”[540]

Homer describes them in the following terms: “Our _gods_ appear to us when we offer them sacrifice ... _sitting themselves at our tables, they partake of our festival meals_. Whenever they meet on his travels a solitary Phœnician, they _serve to him as guides_, and otherwise manifest their presence. We can say that _our piety_ approaches us to them as much as crime and bloodshed unite the Cyclopes and the ferocious race of giants.”[541] The latter proving that these gods were kind and beneficent _dæmons_, and that, whether they were _disembodied_ spirits or elementary beings, they were no _devils_.

The language of Porphyry, who was himself a direct disciple of Plotinus, is still more explicit as to the nature of these spirits. “Demons,” he says, “are invisible; but they know _how to clothe themselves_ with forms and configurations subjected to numerous variations, which can be explained by their nature _having much of the corporeal in itself_. Their abode is in the neighborhood of the earth ... and _when they can escape the vigilance of the good dæmons, there is no mischief they will not dare commit_. One day they will employ brute force; another, cunning.”[542] Further, he says: “It is a child’s {333} play for them to arouse in us vile passions, to impart to societies and nations turbulent doctrines, provoking wars, seditions, and other public calamities, and then tell you ‘that all of these is the work of the gods.’ ... These spirits pass their time in cheating and deceiving mortals, creating around them illusions and prodigies; _their greatest ambition_ is to pass as _gods_ and _souls_ (disembodied spirits).”[543]

Iamblichus, the great theurgist of the Neo-platonic school, a man skilled in sacred magic, teaches that “good dæmons appear to us _in reality_, while the bad ones can manifest themselves but under the _shadowy forms of phantoms_.” Further, he corroborates Porphyry, and tells that “ ... the _good ones fear not the light_, while the wicked _ones require darkness_.... The sensations they excite in us make us believe in the presence and reality of things they show, though these things be absent.”[544]

Even the most practiced theurgists found danger sometimes in their dealings with certain elementaries, and we have Iamblichus stating that, “The gods, the angels, and the dæmons, as well as the _souls_, may be summoned through evocation and prayer.... But when, during theurgic operations, a mistake is made, beware! Do not imagine that you are communicating with beneficent divinities, who have answered your earnest prayer; no, for they are bad dæmons, only under the guise of good ones! For the elementaries often clothe themselves with the similitude of the good, and assume a rank very much superior to that they really occupy. Their boasting betrays them.”[545]

Some twenty years since, Baron Du Potet, disgusted with the indifference of the scientists, who persisted in seeing in the greatest psychological phenomena only the result of clever trickery, gave vent to his indignation in the following terms:

“Here am I, on my way, I may truly say, to the land of marvels! I am preparing to shock every opinion, and provoke laughter in our most illustrious scientists ... for I am convinced that _agents of an immense potency_ exist _outside of us_; that they can _enter in us_; move our limbs and organs; and use us as they please. It was, after all, the belief of our fathers and of the whole of antiquity. Every religion admitted the reality of _spiritual agents_.... Recalling innumerable phenomena which I have produced in the sight of thousands of persons, seeing the _beastly indifference_ of _official_ science, in presence of a discovery which transports the mind into the regions of the unknown [sic]; an old man, at the very _moment when I ought to be {334} just being born_.... I am not sure if it would not have been better for me to have shared the common ignorance.

“I have suffered calumnies to be written without refuting them.... At one time it is simple ignorance which speaks, and I am silent; at another still, superficiality, raising its voice, makes a bluster, and I find myself hesitating whether or not to speak. Is this indifference or laziness? Has fear the power to paralyze my spirit? No; none of these causes affect me; I know simply that it is necessary to prove what one asserts, and this restrains me. For, in justifying my assertions, in showing the living FACT, which proves my sincerity and the truth, I translate OUTSIDE THE PRECINCTS OF THE TEMPLE the sacred inscription, WHICH NO PROFANE EYE SHOULD EVER READ.

“You doubt sorcery and magic? O, truth! thy possession is a heavy burden!”[546]

With a bigotry which one might search for in vain outside the church in whose interest he writes, des Mousseaux quotes the above language, as proof positive that this devoted savant, and all who share his belief, have given themselves over to the dominion of the _Evil One_!

Self-complacency is the most serious obstacle to the enlightenment of the modern spiritualist. His thirty years’ experience with the phenomena seem to him sufficient to have established intermundane intercourse upon an unassailable basis. His thirty years have not only brought to him the conviction that the dead communicate and thus prove the spirit’s immortality, but also settled in his mind an idea that little or nothing can be learned of the other world, except through mediums.

For the spiritualists, the records of the past either do not exist, or if they are familiar with its gathered treasures, they regard them as having no bearing upon their own experiences. And yet, the problems which so vex them, were solved thousands of years ago by the theurgists, who have left the keys to those who will search for them in the proper spirit and with knowledge. Is it possible that nature has changed her work, and that we are encountering different spirits and different laws from those of old? Or can any spiritualist imagine that he knows more, or even as much about mediumistic phenomena or the nature of various spirits, as a priest-caste who spent their lives in theurgical practice, which had been known and studied for countless centuries? If the narratives of Owen and Hare, of Edmonds, and Crookes, and Wallace are credible, why not those of Herodotus, the “Father of History,” of Iamblichus, and Porphyry, and hundreds of {335} other ancient authors? If the spiritualists have their phenomena under test-conditions, so had the old theurgists, whose records, moreover, show that they could produce and vary them at will. The day when this fact shall be recognized, and profitless speculations of modern investigators shall give place to patient study of the works of the theurgists, will mark the dawn of new and important discoveries in the field of psychology.