Chapter XII

Certainly in most writings before our time the body of an apparition was held for a brief, artificial, dreamy, half-living thing. One is always meeting such phrases as Sir Thomas Browne's "they steal or contrive a body." A passage in the _Paradiso_ comes to mind describing Dante in conversation with the blessed among their spheres, although they are but in appearance there, being in truth in the petals of the yellow rose; and another in the Odyssey where Odysseus speaks not with "the mighty Heracles," but with his phantom, for he himself "hath joy at the banquet among the deathless gods and hath to wife Hebe of the fair ankles, child of Zeus, and Hero of the golden sandals," while all about the phantom "there was a clamour of the dead, as it were fowls flying everywhere in fear and he, like black night with bow uncased, and shaft upon the string, fiercely glancing around like one in the act to shoot."

W.B.Y.

_14th October, 1914._

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The Japanese _Noh_ play _Awoi no Uye_ has for its theme the exorcism of a ghost which is itself obsessed by an evil spirit. This evil spirit, drawn forth by the exorcism, is represented by a dancer wearing a "terrible mask with golden eyes."

[2] Besides the well-known books of Atsikof, Myers, Lodge, Flammarion, Flournoy, Maxwell, Albert De Rochas, Lombroso, Madame Bisson, Delanne, etc., I have made considerable use of the researches of D'Ochorowicz published during the last ten or twelve years in _Annales des Science Psychiques_ and in the English _Annals of Psychical Science_, and of those of Professor Hyslop published during the last four years in the _Journal_ and _Transactions of the American Society for Psychical Research_. I have myself been a somewhat active investigator.

[3] Henry More considered that "the animal spirits" were "the immediate instruments of the soul in all vital and animal functions" and quotes Harpocrates, who was contemporary with Plato, as saying, "that the mind of man is ... not nourished from meats and drinks from the belly but by a clear and luminous substance that redounds by separation from the blood." Ochorowicz thought that certain small oval lights were perhaps the root of personality itself.

[4] Herodotus has an equivalent tale. Periander, because the ghost of his wife complained that it was "cold and naked," got the women of Corinth together in their best clothes and had them stripped and their clothes burned.

NOTES

NOTES

NOTE 1. A woman from the North would probably be a faery woman or at any rate a "knowledgeable" woman, one who was "in the faeries" and certainly not necessarily at all a woman from Ulster. The North where the old Celtic other world was thought to lie is the quarter of spells and faeries. A visionary student, who was at the Dublin Art School when I was there, described to me a waking dream of the North Pole. There were luxuriant vegetation and overflowing life though still but ice to the physical eye. He added thereto his conviction that wherever physical life was abundant, the spiritual life was vague and thin, and of the converse truth.

NOTE 2. St. Patrick prayed, in _The Breastplate of St. Patrick_, to be delivered from the spells of smiths and women.

Transcriber's Notes:

Obvious punctuation and spelling errors have been fixed throughout.

Inconsistent hyphenation is as in the original.