My reasons for writing, compiling and editing the following extraordinary treatise - a very difficult task, because wholly out of the ordinary literary channels - a subject almost wholly unknown to the great majority of readers and a labor that necessitated very extensive reading and research of and among
were threefold: First, to relieve myself of the pressure
of correspondence on the subject of the treatise, and occult matters
generally, by recording the principal points upon which inquiries
are made of me, from the fact that I am generally supposed to
be thoroughly versed in many of those subtle sciences which for
ages have constituted the special studies of the fraternities
Pythagorean and Rosicrucian, to which I have, for many years,
had the honor and privilege to belong(27). The Second motive was
that of obliging one who, in the dark hour of sickness, proved
to me a friend indeed and, thirdly, because the time had come
wherein, at least partially, to ventilate a much misunderstood
and tabooed subject, especially as the opportunity was offered
me just then to avail myself of very rare and unusual facilities
of obtaining information of the subjects treated of, from one
of the first masters of occult science now on the globe in flesh
and blood and bone - I allude to the famous Armenian Philosopher,
Cuilna Vilmara, then on a brief visit to the shores of Republican
and matter-of-fact America.
-----------------------------------------------
(27) Written in 1864.
-----------------------------------------------
Aside from these motives is another: Within these past few years there has grown up a very widespread discontent regarding theories, theorists, and the real causes underlying and subtending the strange and varied Psychical Phenomena of the age. Especially is this true with reference to the but little understood, yet in reality vast science of magnetics, one branch of which the following pages are devoted to. The want was felt for a handbook. That want is here supplied.
Amidst the heavy pressure on my time, health and vital power, but little opportunity has been hitherto afforded the writer hereof, to give the subject the attention it so richly deserves. The task of bringing its scattered ends together has been imperfectly performed herein perhaps; yet have I fearlessly stripped it of the garb of mystery purposely thrown around it by pseudo-mystics, charlatans and the rank impostors who abound on all hands, and bring odium and disgrace on a matter whereof they are wholly ignorant.
Mirror-seeing is unquestionably a fact and a science, however some may fail in their efforts to see, and despite the sneers of others who are wise in their own conceit, know nothing whatever of the principia of what which they so glibly deride and condemn, and who have not the kind or quality of brains or mental power possessed by those who are better qualified than they are.
Mirror-seeing is but another mode and phase of clairvoyance; it is the self-same power, reached by a different road and different processes, but is and can be carried to a far greater degree of perfection by many persons, while others totally and wholly fail. And here I strongly advise all to refrain from the expense and trouble of mirror-experimentation, who have no tendencies of an interior magnetic or mesmeric character. But possessing these, it is highly probable that satisfactory results will follow a proper trial.
The famous Dr. Dee, of London, and thousands of others,
since and before him, used a plate of polished cannel coal (which
identical plate I have myself seen in the British Museum), and
other instrumentalities also, as a means whereby to scan and cognize
mysteries otherwise wholly unreachable. Some sturdy mater-of-fact
people in these material days, wherein a great deal of pseudo-miracleism
is current, along with a very little that is real and genuine,
are apt to ridicule and laugh at the idea that a mere physical
agent can enable one to penetrate the floors of the waking world,
and come up, all brilliant and keen, upon the other side. Such
scout the notion that an oval, concave, black-white mirror, or
a crystal, or even a splotch of ink in a virgin’s hand,(28)
are really such instrumentalities; and yet I know that such is,
incontrovertibly, the fact; and there are thousands in
this country who can testify to the startling truth of what Dee
and others claimed in that regard:
What if upon the mirror’s face serene
Your lot in life be written? What, if its pearly sphere
Disclose to mortal view the far and dark unseen?
This seemeth strange, yet doth to me appear.
I, far events can often clear preview,
And in my thrice-sealed, dark prospective glass
Forsee what future days shall bring to pass.There, various news I learn, of love and strife,
Peace, war, health, sickness, death and life;
Of loss and gain; of famine and of store;
Deceits of husbands, wives; of travels on the shore;
Of storms at sea; the rise and fall of stocks;
The market’s state; and great commercial shocks;
Of business speculations; good fortune in the air;
of when to stop, or go; ‘gainst danger to prepare;
Of turns of fortune; changes in the state;
The fall of favorites; projects of the great.
-----------------------------------------------
(28) This may be male or female. It is best that these
shall not have reached the age of puberty, and better yet, if
the mind is free from all thoughts of sex desire.
-----------------------------------------------
The mystical has been to me a more familiar fact than that of friends on earth. In its solemn school of dim and solitary discipline, learned I the languages of other peopled worlds.
Unquestionably Immortality is a truth, sublime as Creation, more solid than the granite hills; and it has been demonstrated in a thousand ways, physically, by viewless spiritual beings. There have been true mediums; there may be still; but it is equally certain that scores of heartless tricksters abound, whose business it is to counterfeit these testimonies from the dead. These wretched people thrive, for they are sustained by an unthinking class of believers in spiritualism, who care all for phenomena, nothing for principia.
Just so in other departments of occult science. False
media and pretended clairvoyants, and what I call “horse-radish
spiritualists,” abound on all hands - downright, unreasoning
fanatics, a class of most wretched people who, for the sake of
a little pecuniary gain, will not, do not hesitate, in the grossest
possible manner, to counterfeit true and real, and by their trickery
bring odium on true spiritualism and genuine seership.
In these days a real medium or clairvoyant is the marked exception
to a very broad rule. Just so is it with crystal and mirror seeing,
there being ten false to every single true one in the land. The
thing itself is older that any civilization now of the globe,
yet nevertheless, like genuine mediumship, is constantly being
counterfeited. Indeed, turn whichever way you will, a great and
deep-seated discontent prevails, in the household of the spiritual
faith. It is not so among Rosicrucians,(29) albeit their belief
in spirits is as strong as strong can be; not fanatical but
strong. The people are getting tired of modern spiritualism,
for they accept, as I do, its real facts, but discard its jargon
and crudities. Interested parties try to hide its blotches, but
these will show themselves. The reason is that there is too much
theorizing and too little religion; too much head, and a great
sparseness of heart. Carlyle wrote to a friend of mine that a
certain given form of moder spiritualism was the “liturgy
of Dead Sea apes.” Much of it is; but out of what is good
and true in it will spring, I hope, glorious things of heart and
hope in the good time coming.
-----------------------------------------------
(29) This is entirely due to the fact that Rosicrucians
do not now and never have depended on external forces and entities
for their peace of mind. Rosicrucians believe in the existence
of many things but they proceed directly to the Soul of the Universe
for their knowledge and their strength. They obey the Biblical
behest, ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,
and all these things shall be added unto you.’ To the Rosicrucian
this means that he is to seek, find, develop and bring to Illumination,
i.e., Light, his soul; then he may proceed more or less directly,
according to his attainment, for strength, power and the knowledge
and guidance he needs.
-----------------------------------------------
Madame George Sand gives and account of the famous
Comte de St. Germain,(30) one of the most remarkable magic-mirrorist
that ever lived this side of the hills in India, and of whom it
was claimed that he had lived for centuries, despite the wear
and tear of time, and the surging revolutions of decaying empires.
-----------------------------------------------
(30) Compte de St. Germain was a member of the Secret
Council of the Rosicrucian fraternity of that day and the instructor
of the famous Cagliostro. Cagliostro is not to be confused with
that Balsamo of whom so much has been written and who has been
so roundly abused by a multitude of writers. These were two entirely
distinct persons. Much of the history of both St. German and Cagliostro
will be found in the magazine The Initiates and the People.
-----------------------------------------------
“What makes this Comte de St. Germain an interesting a remarkable personage, to say that, in my opinion, is the number of new and ingenious claims by which he unravels the doubtful points of the obscurer history of States. Question him abut any subject or epoch of history, and you will be surprised to hear him unfold or invent an infinity of probable and interesting things, which throw a new light on what has been doubtful and mysterious. Mere erudition does not suffice to explain history. This man must have a mighty mind and great knowledge of humanity....It is with great difficulty that he can be made to talk of the wonderful things. ...He is aware that he is treated as a charlatan and dreamer, and this seems to trouble him much. ...He refuses to explain his supernatural power. ..He has filled Europe with countless strange tales.”
Of Count Cagliostro, George Sand says: “It is well known, when Frederick the Great ordered him to quit Berlin, that he left it in his carriage, in propria persona, at twelve exactly, passing at the same time through each of the gates; at least twenty thousand people will swear to that. The guards at every gate saw the same hat, wig, carriage and horses, and you cannot convince them that on that day there were not at least six Cagliostros in the field.” That same Cagliostro fashioned and owned a magic mirror, now in Florence, Italy, in which whosoever he permitted to gaze, could and did see any three things or persons they desired to, no matter whether living or dead! And thousands as sacredly believe this as they do that two and two make four. Nor is this belief any part or parcel of spiritism, so-called; nor superstition; but it is perfectly scientific, the whole thing being of a magnetic nature - clairvoyance under unusual conditions, and easily formulated exactly, as will be done before I finish this monograph. I quote:
Frederick, the Great, was thus forced to resume his philosophical serenity without assistance.
He said, “Since we are talking of Cagliostro,
and the hour for ghosts and stories has come, I will tell you
one which will show how hard it is to have faith in sorcerers.
My story is true; for I have it from the person to whom it happened
last year.”
“Is the story terrible? Asked La Mettrie.
Perhaps,” said Frederick.
“Then I will shut the door; for I cannot listen with a door gaping.”
La Mettrie shut the door, and the king spoke as follows:
“Cagliostro, as you know, had the trick of showing
people pictures, or rather magic mirrors on which he caused the
absent to appear. He pretended to be able to reveal the most secret
occupations of their lives in this manner. Jealous women went
to consult him about the infidelities of their husbands, and some
lovers and husbands have learned a great deal about their ladies’
capers. The magic mirror has betrayed mysteries of iniquity.
Be that as it may, the opera-singers all met one night and offered
him a good supper and admirable music, provided he would perform
some of his feats. He consented, and appointed a day to meet Conciolini,
the Signore Astrua, and Porporina and show them heaven or hell,
as they pleased.
“The Barberini family were also there. Giovonna Barberini asked to see the late Doge of Venice, and as Cagliostro gets up ghosts in very good style, she was very much frightened, and rushed completely overpowered from the cabinet in which Cagliostro had placed her, tete-a- tete with the doge. La Porporina with the calm expression which, as you know, is so peculiar to her, told Cagliostro she would have faith in his science, if he would show her the person of whom she then thought, but whom it was not necessary for her to name, for if he was a sorcerer, he must be able to read her Soul as he would read a book.
“‘What you ask is not a trifle,’ said our count; ‘yet I think I can satisfy you, provided that you swear, by all that is holy and terrible, not to speak to the person I shall evoke to make no motion nor gesture, to utter no sound, while the apparition stands before you.’
“Porporina promised to do so, and went boldly into the dark closet.
“I need not tell you, gentlemen, that this young woman is one of the most intellectual and correct persons to be met with. She is well educated, thinks well about all matters, and I have reason to know no narrow or restricted idea makes any impression upon her.
“She remained in the ghost-room long enough to make her companions very uneasy. All was silent as possible, and finally she came out very pale, and with tears streaming from her eyes. She immediately said to her companions, ‘If Cagliostro be a sorcerer, he is a deceiving one: Have faith in nothing that he shows you.’ She would say no more. Conciolini, however, told me a few days after, at one of my concerts, of this wonderful entertainment. I promised myself to question Porporina about it, the first time she sang at Sans Souci. I had much difficulty in making her speak of it, but thus she told me:
“‘Cagliostro has, beyond a doubt, the strange
power of producing spectres so like truth that it is impossible
for the calmest minds to be unmoved by them. His knowledge, however,
is incomplete, and I would not advise you, sire, to make him your
Minister of Police, for he would perpetrate strange mistakes.
Thus, when I asked him to show me the absent person I wished to
see, I thought of my music-master, Porpora, who is now at Vienna.
Instead of him, I saw in the magic-room a very dear friend I lost
during the current year.’”(31)
-----------------------------------------------
(31) It is a mistaken idea that the seer, however great
he may be, is capable of causing certain persons to appear through
the medium of a mirror or even that dictated messages can be given.
All the seer can do is to prepare the mirror and then that which
is hidden deep in the heart will be portrayed. In many instances
our deepest feelings may be subconscious, and it is only when
we come in touch with things of a spiritual nature that they betray
themselves and - us.
-----------------------------------------------
“Peste!” said D’Argens, “that is more wonderful even than the apparition of a living person.”
“Wait a moment, gentlemen. Cagliostro had no doubt but that what he had shown was the phantom of a living person, and, when it had disappeared, asked Porporina if what she had seen was satisfactory. ‘In the first place, monsieur,” said she, ‘I wish to understand it. Will you explain?’ - “That surpasses my power. Be assured that your friend is well, and usefully employed .” - To this the signora replied, ‘Alas! sir, you have done me much wrong; you showed me a person of whom I did not think, and who is, you say, now living. I closed his eyes six months ago.’”...
“All this is very fine,” said La Mettrie; “But does not explain how your majest’s Porporina saw the dead alive. If she is gifted with as much firmness and reason as your majesty says, the fact goes to disprove your majesty’s argument. The sorcerer, it is true, was mistaken, in producing a dead rather than a living man. It, however, makes it the more certain that he controls both life and death. In that respect, he is greater than your majesty, which, if it does not displease your majesty, has killed many men, but never resuscitated a single one.”
“Then we are to believe in the devil,” said the king, laughing at the comic glances of La Mettrie at Quintus Icilius.
“To conclude... Your Porporina is either foolish or credulous, and saw her dead man, or she was philosophical, and saw nothing. She was frightened, however.”
“Not so; she was distressed,” said the king, “as all naturally would be, at the sight or portrait which would exactly recall a person loved, but whom we shall see no more. But if I must tell you all, I will say, that she subsequently was afraid, and that her moral power after this test was not in so sound a state as it was previously. Thence forth she has been liable to a dark melancholy, which is always the proof of weakness or disorder of our faculties. Her mind was touched, I am confident, though she denies it.”
“... “And I Confess I am under the influence,
if not under the power of Cagliostro. Imagine, that after having
promised to show me the person of whom I thought, the name of
whom he pretended to read in my eyes, he showed me another. Besides,
he showed me a person as living, whom he did not know to be dead.(32)
Notwithstanding this double error, he resuscitated the husband
I had lost, and that will ever be to me a painful and inexpressible
enigma.”
-----------------------------------------------
(32) There are no dead except those who have destroyed
themselves by committing sins against the “Holy Ghost.”
All others are as active shortly after passing as they are in
life. In fact, more so, because the inertia of the body drops
off after we leave the earth plane and then the “spirit”
governs, incites to action and dictates. We use the term “spirit:
for the reason that no term has as yet been coined which exactly
suits the condition of a Soul which has not been Illuminated in
life on earth and is therefore not in reality Self-Conscious.
-----------------------------------------------
“He showed you some phantom, and fancy filled up the details.”
“I can assure you that my fancy was in no respect
interested. I expected to see in a mirror some representation
of Maestro Porpora, for I had spoken often of him at supper, and
while deploring his absence, had seen that Cagliostro paid no
little attention to my words. To make his task more easy, I chose
in my mind the face of Porpora, as the subject of the apparition,
and I expected him certainly, not having as yet considered the
test as serious. Finally, at perhaps the only moment in my life
in which I did not think of the Count, he appeared.(33) Cagliostro
asked me when I went into the magic closet, if I would consent
to have my eyes bandaged, and follow him, holding on to his hand.
As he was a man of good reputation, I did not hesitate; but made
it a condition that he would not leave me for an instant. ‘I
was going,’ said he, ‘to address you a request not to
leave me a moment, and not to let go my hand, without regard to
what may happen, or what emotion you may feel.’ I promised
him; but a simple affirmative did not suffice. He made me solemnly
swear that I would make no gesture nor exclamation, but remain
mute and silent during the whole of the experiment. He then put
on his glove, and having covered my head with a hood of black
velvet, which fell over my shoulders, he made me walk about five
minutes without my being able to hear any door opened or shut.
The hood kept me from being aware of any change in the atmosphere,
therefore I could not know whether I had gone out of the room
or not, for he made me make such frequent turns, that I had no
appreciation of the direction. At last he paused and with one
hand removed the hood, so lightly that I was not even aware of
it. My respiration having become more free, he informed me that
I might look around. I found myself, however, in such intense
darkness that I could ascertain nothing. After a short time, I
saw a luminous star, which at first trembled, and soon became
brilliant before me. At first, it seemed most remote; but, when
at its brightest, appeared very near me. It was produced, I think,
of a light which became more and more intense, and which was behind
a transparency. Cagliostro made me approach the star, which was
an orifice pierced in the wall. On the other side of that wall
I saw a chamber, magnificently decorated, and filled with lights
regularly arranged. This room, in its character and ornaments,
had every air of a place dedicated to magical operations. I had
not time, however, to examine it, my attentions being absorbed
by a person who sat before a table. He was alone, and hid his
face with his hands, as if immersed in deep meditation. I could
not see his features, and his person was disguised by a costume
in which I had hitherto seen no one. As far as I was able to remark,
it was a robe or cloak of white satin, faced with purple, fastened
over the breast with hieroglyphic gems, on which I observed a
rose, a triangle, a cross, a death’s-head, (34) and many
rich ribbons of various kinds. All that I could see was that it
was not Porpora. After one or two minutes, this mysterious personage,
which I began to fancy a statue, slowly moved its hands, and I
saw the face of Count Albert distinctly, not as it had last met
my gaze, covered with the shadows of death, but animated amid
its pallor, and full of soul in its serenity; such, in fine, as
I had seen it in its most beautiful seasons of calm and confidence.(34)
I was on the point of uttering a cry, and by an involuntary movement
crushing crystal which separated him from me. A violent pressure
of Cagliostro’s hand reminded me of my oath, and impressed
me with I know not what vague terror. Just then a door opened
at the extremity of the room in which I saw Albert; and many unknown
persons, dressed as he was, joined him, each bearing a sword.
After having made strange gestures, as if they had been playing
a pantomine, they spoke to him, in a very solemn tone words I
could not comprehend. He arose and went towards them, and replied
in words equally strange, and which were unintelligible to me,
though now I know German nearly as well as my mother tongue. This
dialogue was like that which we hear in dreams, and the strangeness
of the scene, the miracle of the apparition, had so much of this
character, that I really doubted whether I dreamed of not. Cagliostro,
however, forced me to be motionless, and I recognized the voice
of Albert so perfectly that I could not doubt the reality of what
I saw. At last, completely carried away by the scene, I
was about to forget my oath and speak to him, when the hood again
was placed over my head and all became dark. ‘If you make
the least noise,’ said Cagliostro, ‘neither you not
I well see the light again.’ I had strength enough to follow
him, and walk for a long time amid the zigzags of an unknown space.
Finally, when he took away the hood again, I found myself in his
laboratory, which was dimly lighted as it had been at the commencement
of this adventure. Cagliostro was very pale, and still trembled,
for, as I walked with him, I became aware of a convulsive agitation
of his arm, and that he hurried me along as if he was under the
influence of great terror. The first thing he said was to reproach
me bitterly about my want of loyalty, and the terrible dangers
to which I had exposed him by wishing to violate my promises.
‘I should have remembered,’ said he, ‘that women
are not bound by their word of honor, and that one should forbear
to accede to their rash and vain curiosity.’ His tone was
very angry.
-----------------------------------------------
(33) Thought is frequently superficial. In the deeper
moments of life we may be thinking, nevertheless beneath the thought
there is memory which is far stronger than the moment’s thought;
it is memory which shadows itself in the spiritual vision, rather
than either the superficial thought or desire of the moment.
(34) The insignia of a Brother of the Rose Cross. Having
attained in life to the status of Illumination it is but natural
that he should be seen just as in life, for he who has attained
Initiation or Illumination, will continue after life just as during
life. He is merely active in a different sphere.
-----------------------------------------------
“Hitherto I had participated in the terror of my guide. I had been so amazed at Albert’s being alive, that I had not inquired if this was possible. I had even forgotten that death had bereft me of this dear and precious friend. The emotion of the magician recalled to me that all this was very strange, and that I had seen only a spectre. My reason, however, repudiated what was impossible, and the bitterness of the reproaches of Cagliostro caused a kind of ill-humor, which protected me from weakness. ‘You feign to have faith in your own falsehood,’ said I, with vivacity; ‘ah, your game is very cruel. Yes; you sport with all that is most holy, even with death itself.’
“‘Soul without faith, and without power,’ said he, angrily, but in a most imposing manner. ‘You believe in death, as the vulgar do, and yet you had a great master - one who said: “We do not die. Nothing dies; there is nothing dies.” You accuse me of falsehood, and seem to forget that the only thing which is untrue here is the name of death in your impious mouth.’ I confess that this strange reply overturned all my thoughts, and for a moment overcame the resistance of my troubled mind. How came this man to be aware of my relations with Albert, and even the secrets of his doctrine? Did he believe as Albert did, or did he make use of this as a means to acquire an ascendency over me?
“I was confused and alarmed. Soon, however, I
said that the gross manner of interpreting Albert’s faith
could not be mine, and that God, not the impostor Cagliostro,
can invoke death, or recall life. Finally, convinced that I was
the dupe of an inexplicable illusion, the explanation of which,
however, I might some day find, praising coldly the savoir
faire of the sorcerer, and asked him for an explanation of
the whimsical conversation his phantoms had together. In relation
to that he replied, that it was impossible to satishy me, and
that I should be satisfied with seeing the person calm, and carefully
occupied. ‘You will ask me in vain,’ added he, ‘what
are his thoughts and actions in life. I am ignorant even of his
name. When you desired and asked to see it, there was formed between
you two a mysterious communication, which my power was capable
of making able to bring you together. All science goes no farther.’(35)
-----------------------------------------------
(35) An exact statement of the Law. The seer or master
can do no more than establish a communication, the Soul then reveals
itself. The wise man does not speak of that which he has seen
but remembers the statement of Paul: “How that he [Paul]
was caught up into paradise and heard unspeakable words, which
it is not possible for a man to utter.”
-----------------------------------------------
“‘Your science,’ said I, ‘does not reach that far even; I thought of Porpora, and you did not present him to me.’
“‘Of that I know nothing,’ said he, in a tone serious and terrible. ‘I do not wish to know. I have seen nothing either in your mind, or in the magic mirror. My mind would not support such a spectacle, and I must maintain all my senses to exercise my power. The laws of science are infallible, and consequently, though not aware of it yourself, you must have thought of some one else than Porpora, since you did not see the latter.’”
“Such is the talk of madmen of that kind,” said the princess, shrugging her shoulders. “Each one has his peculiar mode; though all, by means of a captious reasoning, which may be called the method of madness, so contrive, by disturbing the ideas of others, that they are never cut short, or disturbed themselves.”
He certainly disturbed mine.” said Consuelo; “and I was no longer able to analyze them. The apparition of Albert, true or false, made me more distinctly aware that I had lost him forever, and I shed tears.
“‘Consuelo,’ said the magician in a solemn tone, and offering me his hand (you may imagine that my real name, hitherto unknown to all, was an additional surprise, when I heard him speak it), ‘you have great errors to repair, and I trust you will neglect nothing to regain your peace of mind.’ I had not power to reply. I sought in vain to hide my tears from my companions, who waited impatiently for me in the next room. I was more impatient yet to withdraw, and as soon as I was alone, after having given a free course to my grief, I passed the night in reflections and commentaries on the scenes of this fatal evening. The more I sought to understand it, the more I became lost in a labryinth of uncertainty; and I must own that my ideas were often worse than an implicit obedience to the oracles of magic would have been. Worn out by fruitless suffering, I resolved to suspend my judgment until there should be light. Since then, however, I have been impressionable, subject to the vapors, sick at heart, and deeply sad.”
... “You are about to tell me that he died during the conclusion of the marriage ceremony. I will, however, tell you that he is not dead, that no one, that nothing, dies, and that we may still have communion with those the vulgar call dead, if we know their language and the secret of their lives.”
... “While for the miracles which are about to be accomplished, God, who apparently mingles in nothing, who is eternal silence, creates among us beings of a nature superior to our own, both for good and evil - angels and demons - hidden powers. The latter are to test the just, the former to ensure their triumph. The contest between the great powers has already begun. The king of evil, the father of ignorance and crime, defends himself in vain. The archangels have bent the bow of science and of truth, and their arrows have pierced the corslet of Satan. Satan roars and struggles, but soon will abandon falsehood, lose his venom, and, instead of the impure blood of reptiles, will feel the dew of pardon circulate through his veins. This is the clear and certain explanation of all that is incomprehensible and terrible in the world. Good and evil contend in higher regions which are unattainable to men. Victory and defeat soar above us, without its being possible for us to fix them. ...Yes; I say it is clear that men are ignorant of what occurs on earth. They see impiety arm itself against fate, and vice versa. They suffer oppression, misery, and all the scourges of discord, without their prayers being heard, without the intervention of the miracles of any religion. They now understand nothing; they complain, they know not why. They walk blindfolded on the brink of a precipice. To this the Invisibles impel them, though none know if their mission be of God or of evil, as at the commencement of Christianity, Simon, the magician, seemed, to many, a being divine and powerful as Christ. I tell you all prodigies are of God, for Satan can achieve none without permission being granted him, and that among those called invisibles, some act by direct light from the Holy Spirit, while to others the light comes through a cloud, and they do good, fatally thinking that they do evil.”
... “ A few rare persons have the power of commanding their ideas in a state of contemplative idleness, which is granted less frequently to the happy in this world than those who earn their living by toil, persecution, and danger. All must recognize this mystery as providential, without which the serenity of many unfortunate creatures would appear impossible to those who have not known misfortune.”
... “She then went to a rich toilette - a table of white marble sustaining a mirror, in a golden frame, of excellent taste. Her attention was attracted by an inscription on the upper ornament of the mirror. It was: ‘If your soul be as pure as your crystal, you will see yourself in it always - young and beautiful. But if vice has withered your heart, be fearful of reading in me the stern reflection of moral deformity.’”
... “If the thought of evil be in your heart, you are unworthy of contemplating the divine spectacle of nature; if your heart be the home of virtue, look up and bless God, who opens to you the door of a terrestrial paradise.”
The loftiest spiritualism the world ever saw - that of ancient Jewry - recognized the truth of such mirrors, for they - the “Urim and Thummin” - polished breast-plates - were used for purposes of a celestial divination, and are still so used today. Even many of the modern spiritualists recognized the same truths, for their papers frequently contain articles on crystal-seeing, and the magical uses of various jewels and precious stones; while one of their noblest “Psalms of Life” contains this beautiful verse:
“But most the watching angels guide the thought,
If in the mortal’s heart be wrong or error,
Soon by the pure and viewless influence taught,
He sees the end where leads the tortuous path,-
Its darkness and its dangers; and, awaking,
He finds within his soul a holier faith,
and turns, with heart, his sin forsaking.”
The chief Rosicrucian of all England says,(36) in
his recent work on Fire, “When the mind is surrendered
up, as a clear glass (or in, and to it), - shows of the
magical world roll in.” Again: “The gauge is according
to the amount of absorption out of ths world - flights which the
intelligence takes into the worlds not about us. ...We are as
the telescope in the perfect sight-making of the optic glasses
- in the focus of his glasses of sense. But there are other
landscapes...and new sights float over, and through, the man-perspectives,
and, in new adjustments of the preternatural Soul-sight, new worlds
are penetrated to, or, which is the same, undulate, centrically,
to us, from out the universal flat of shows. Basis of the Rosicrucian
secret system,(37) and of all true mysticism or occult knowledge,
it is the only thing possible. ...We can glow, by working,
as by heavy strokes upon our nature, as like iron in a forge.
And this, with an exalting light, forced out - the Immortal fire
- wealth - out of another world, even to grow visible to men’s
mortal eyes. This is ecstasy, and the Divine Illumination.(37)
None the less real, because we see nothing of it in the world.
Else we should be, as the Bible says, Gods. ...It is in this magical
world of God’s light, that sainthood becomes possible, and
that the solid world and the exterior nature obey the God-like
nature, - worked and drawn, magically, into the circle of its
power...by the all-compelling magnetism. Trodden of the spirit.
...It is a God-instinctive, magic life, in which unliving things
are, really,taken to live. ...the first magician, who is as such
recorded, and who gave distinct teachings on the subject of magic,
is Zoroaster. The genius of Socrates, Plotin, Porphyrius, and
Iamblichus, of Chichus and Scaliger and Cardanus, is placed in
the first rank, which included inward (or magic) sight. In later
times Robert Fludd (1638-53) and the great magnetist and mirror-seer,
Paracelsus. We have records of over three thousand grand masters
of the art, - all dead; and of scores - all living - right in
our land, -ay, within rifle-shot of where these lines are penned.
The plane of the mirror is before us, within so few feet or inches;
but its lanes lead down the ages, and its reads up the starry
steeps of the Infinite. Its field is - the Vastness below, within,
above, and around - and elsewhere; but what else where contains
all life next off this life - is an immortal factness. ...
-----------------------------------------------
(36) Hargrave Jennings. Randolph and Jennings were very
close to each other and for many years maintained a regular correspondence.
(37) Jennings here reveals a great deal of the true Rosicrucian
system though not many will be able to understand his barely veiled
hints. However, all who have even partly entered the Path will
comprehend and at least in part, be able to apply.
------------------------------------------------
“In ancient times a natural basin of rock, kept constantly full by a running stream, was a favorite haunt for its magical effects. The double meaning of the word reflection ought here to be considered, and how, gazing down into the clear water, the mind is disposed to self-retirement, and to contemplation deeply tinctures with melancholy. Rock pools and gloomy lakes figure in all stories of magic: witness the Craic-pol-nain in the Highland woods of Laynchork; the Devil’s Glen in the County of Wicklow, Ireland; The Swedish Blokula; the witch-mountains of Italy; and the Babiagora, between Hungary and Poland. Similar resorts, in the glens of Germany, were marked, as Tacitus mentions, by salt-springs.
“It was, really, only another form of divination by the gloomy water-pool, that attracted so much public attention, a few years ago, when Mr. Lane, in his work on Modern Egypt, testified to its success as practiced in Egypt and Hindostan. That gentleman, having resolved to witness the performance of this species of Psycho-vision, the magician commenced his operations by writing forms of Invocation, to his familiar spirits, on six slips of paper; a chafing-dish, with some live charcoal in it, was then procured, and a boy summoned who had not yet reached the age of puberty. Mr Lane inquired who were the persons that could see in the magic mirror, and was told that they were a boy not arrived at puberty, a virgin, a black female slave, and a pregnant woman.
“To prevent any collusion between the sorcerer and the boy, Mr Lane sent his servant to take the first boy he met. When all was prepared, the sorcerer threw some incense, and one of the strips of paper, into the chafing-dish. He then took hold of the boy’s right hand and drew a square, with some mystical marks, on the palm; in the centre of the square he formed the magic mirror, and desired the boy to look steadily into it, without raising his head. In this mirror, the boy declared that he saw, successively a man sweeping, seven men with flags, an army pitching its tents, and the various officers of state attending on the Sultan.
“The rest must be told by Mr. Lane himself. ‘The sorcerer now addressed himself to me, and asked me if I wished the boy to see any person who was absent or dead. I named Lord Nelson; of whom the boy had evidently never heard, for it was with much difficulty that he pronounced the name after several trials. The magician desired the boy to say to the Sultan, “My master salutes thee, and desires thee to bring Lord Nelson. Bring him before my eyes, that I may see him speedily.” the boy then said so, and almost immediately added: “A messenger has gone and brought back a man dressed in a black (or, rather, dark blue) suit of European cloths; the man has lost his arm.” He then paused for a moment or two, and, looking more intently and more closely into the mirror said, “No; he has not lost his left arm, but it is placed to his breast.” This correction made his description more striking than it had been without it, since Lord Nelson generally had his empty sleeve attached to the breast of his coat. But it was the right arm that he had lost. Without saying that I suspected the boy had made a mistake, I asked the magician whether the objects appeared, in the mirror, as if actually before the eyes, or as if in a glass which makes the right appear left. He answered that they appeared as in a common mirror. This rendered the boy’s description faultless. Though completely puzzled, I was somewhat disappointed with his performances, for they fell short of what he had accomplished, in many instances, in presence of certain of my friends and countrymen. On one of these occasions, an Englishman present ridiculed the performance, and said that nothing would satisfy him but a correct description of the appearance of his own father; of whom he was sure no one of the company had any knowledge. The boy, accordingly, having called by name for the person alluded to, described a man, in a Frank dress, with his hand placed on his head; wearing spectacles; and with one foot on the ground and the other raised behind him, as if he were stepping down from a seat. The description was exactly true in every respect; the peculiar position of the hand was occasioned by an almost constant headache, and that of the foot or leg, by a stiff knee, caused by a fall from a horse in hunting. On another occasion, Shakespeare was described with the most minute exactness both as to person and dress; and I might add several other cases in which the same magician has excited astonishment in the sober minds of several Englishmen of my acquaintance.’ So far, Mr. Lane, whose account may be compared with that given my Mr. Kinglake, the author of Eothen.
“It may be worth adding, that, in a recent case of hydromancy know to the writer, the boy could see better without the medium than with it; though he could also see reflected images in a vessel of water. This fact may be admitted to prove that such images are reflected to the eye of the seer from his own mind and brain. How the brain becomes thus enchanted, or the eye disposed for vision, is another question. Certainly it is no proof that the recollected image, in the mind of the inquirer, is transferred to the seer, as proofs can be shown to the contrary. When we look closely into it, Nature seems woven over, almost with a magical web, and forms of the marvelous are rife.” ...
“Are there intelligent things, of which we know nothing, dealing with the world? Is all a wondrous mechanism, a perfect play of solids which proceeds unerringly, and of whose laws the scientific people are the only interpreters? Are there no such things as miracles? Is the progress of things never changed? And, once out of the world, do the departed never return?
“Is all chance? Cannot the future ever be foreseen? Are all the strange matters told us mere fables or inventions? The forgery of the imaginative mind, or the self-belief of the deluded?
“Whence came that fear which has always pervaded the world? How comes it that, in all times, spirits have been believed? Cannot history, cannot science, cannot common sense conjure this phantom of spiritual fear, until it really resolve into the real? Cannot the apparition be laid? Cannot we eject this terror of invisible thinking things - spectators of us - out of the world? Nothing is really done until this be done, if it can ever be done. Man is absolutely not fairly in his world, until this other thing is out of it.
“It cannot be done. And why? Because this fear lies buried in the truth of things. Man’s interest lies quite the other way of believing it. This dread of the supernatural is the clog upon his boldness - the mistrust which spoils his plans - which interferes with his prosperity - which brings a cloud over the sunshine of his certainties. Man, then, is afflicted with this fearful mistrust, that after all, perhaps, his life may be the ‘dream,’ and that unknown future which is filled with those whom he knew, is the ‘waking.’ Where have our friends gone? Where shall we go? Are there well-known faces about us, though we see them not? Are there silent feet amidst our loud feet? And is it possible to come suddenly upon these - ay, and to hear? Miracle, or flash, in the (contrarily-struck) waves of spirit and body. ...
“Men secretly tremble. But they hide their fears under the supposed defiance and in the boastful jest. In company they are bold. Separately they reflect, in their own secret minds, that, after all, these things may be true. True from such and such confirmatory surmises of their own; true from, perhaps, some personal unaccountable experiences, or from the assurance of some personal unaccountable experiences, or from the assurance of some friend whom they are disposed to believe. But only disposed to believe. Modern times reject the supernatural; are supposed to have no superstition. Superstition? When this modern time is full of superstition!
“But, unfortunately, man has restless curiosity; he loves real truth; he solicits that which he can finally depend upon. He would believe if he could. But the evidence of supernatural things is so evasive - so fantastic - so, in one word, unreliable, that he will hold by the ordinary scientific explanations. All mystery, he says, is that only partially known. When that which constitutes a thing is understood, man declares, the mystery ceases. He only finds nature. Unknown nature before - now known nature.
“The faculty of wonder is a gift; by wonder we mean that highest exhaustive knowledge of the things of this world, upon which to set up, or to construct, the machinery of converse with another. By the ladder of the several senses, we climb to the top platform, the general sense. In most men’s minds this bridge of intelligence is not stretched. And this knowledge of the supernatural is rejected like precious gems to grasp which there are, literally, no hands. A compliant cowardice, and an ashamed, merely half-belief have pervaded writers who, really, ought to have known better - who believed while they denied. ...
“We feel sensation of surprise and shame, that some writers who, out of the secret strength of their minds, and not out of its weakness, saw that there is more in that which is called superstition than meets the eye, should, because they hesitated and were afraid to deal with it seriously, condescend to disparage and to treat it with ridicule. Superstition is degrading; a sense of the supernatural is ennobling. Walter Scott - although from the constitution of his mind he could not fail to be a believer - has surmised and supposed, and apologized for, and toned into, commonplace and explained, until he has resolved all his wonders - we may say, stripped all his truths - into nothing. Will it never be seen that even truth - that is - our truth - may be only plausible? Walter Scott’s mind was not profound enough for a really deep sense of the Invisible. We greatly doubt whether he had, or by nature could have, the true wise man’s sense of the Great Unseen; that which holds this world but as an island in it. Whether, indeed, he did not designedly deal with the marvelous, and chip and pare, amidst his superstitions, and trim all up with the instincts of a romancist, and the eye to a balance in his favor of the mere worldly man, is a fair suspicion. As a clear-headed, common-sense man, who in his good nature, and in his admiration of it, wanted to stand well with the world; as a man who thoroughly enjoyed his life, and possessed an abundance of rich and marketable imagination - as all this, Walter Scott converted superstitions as into his stock in trade. We seriously mistrust whether, while believing, he did not - to please the world - still deny; whether in his affected and even pretendedly laughing disclaimers he was not secretly bowing, all the time before the very thing he though it allowable to barter. This, if true, was disingenuous, if not something worse.
“Nearly all the writers who have treated of the marvellous have done so in the disbelieving vein. It is the fashion to seem to sneer. All of this acting before the world comes from the too great love of it; arises out of the fear of that which may be said of us. There prevails a too great compliance with convention; to great a meeting of the universal prejudice. Men are too apologetic, even in their faiths. In the face of standards, few men have the boldness to be singular. Habit dictates our form of thought, as equally as it legalizes our dress. We dreadfully fear the world.
“Other narrators and exponents of the supernatural - though aware of the always powerfully interesting material which they have at command - instead of being imbued with the strong sense of the latent truth in them - may be said, indeed, almost with one consent - though longing to tell - to begin to parade a sort of shame at their revelations. And pray wherefore? They are already met more than half-way in every sensible man’s mind. There are few families - nay, there is scarcely an individual - who has not had something naturally unexplainable in his history. The supernatural tale always finds an echo in every breast.
“Now, if discredited by writers, the ‘supernatural’ should not be treated of by them. There are plenty of subjects at which they may play but that - if they believe any life but their ordinary life - so serious one. If the possibility of the supernatural be believed, and its instances be accepted, they are bound, as candid men and honest men, to make the avowal that they believe. The explanations which are frequently offered of things appearing as supernatural, are greatly more difficult to credit than the extra-natural matters themselves. Of some unaccountable things, in fact, nobody credits the ‘explanations.’ The uncomfortable fact is got rid of. The subject is dismissed, to make way for the next soliciting object. The wonder is given up as unexplainable. And that is the whole process. This is a very easy, though not a very conclusive or satisfactory method of disproving. We suppose we disbelieve. ...
“We are weary of the jargon whereby strange and unexplainable - possibly natural - doubtless natural - phenomena have been degraded. The history of all unknown things has been thus similar, that at the outset, they have invariably been invested with the attributes of the magical. We must carefully guard ourselves from credulity. Such things as these presumed Spiritual Disclosures have been known in all ages. There is nothing newer, other than that they have been suddenly and widely noticed, in these psychologico-magnetic displays - this supposed spiritual betrayal - this counter-working and false working of the universal transitive evolvement - these aberrations of polarity. We have an abiding dislike to, and we cordially dissent from all this epileptic wandering; all this convulsive, incoherent, blameworthy - nay, audacious reaching out at forbidden things. The pampered human mind can run into any extremes. We, on the contrary, are friends to the solidest and plainest common sense.
“We apprehend that the explanation of the great majority of the spiritual manifestations - as they are called - may be, that the forceful magnetism with which the world is charged is, in states of excitement, impelled through the medium - probably the stronger through the reflective VACUITY; and that it undulates again outwards, as we see the rings, or rather the single ring, upon a sheet of water circumvolve from about a stone suddenly dropped in. The exterior, magnetic, unconscious rings may become intelligent, from which ‘motived circles’ - obeying laws of which we know nothing, or from which invisible walls, come sounds - vibrates motion. It may be at the intersection of these ‘out-of-sense’ circles - which, from the multitude of minds, must be innumerable, though they are altogether unsuspected - at which are struck all that strange attraction and repulsion which we call sympathy and antipathy, and in which are mind-commerce, and all the puzzling phenomena of the so-called spiritual shows. Thus the mind answers to itself. And instead of ‘spirit’ having much to do with it, it is mainly the invisible ‘microscopical,’ ‘unnecessary work to the world’ of man’s own other nature; real spirit being in the majority of cases still as far off as ever, and outside and transcended of all of it! All the grave gossip and delusion, therefore, of religious communication and of impartments - truly pieced out, in his wild imagination, individualities, must fall to the ground. The phenomena are indisputable. What they are, the scientific world has yet to learn. We seem to fall, in these things, into a wide field of vital magnetism. And also into mind-contagion. ...
“To reduce the question into the narrowest limits
- do spirits exist? Is there anything apart from the solid, the
tangible, the senses of man, the bulk of nature? Can intelligences
exist without a body? Is the world of soul within the world of
flesh, or is the world of flesh within the world of spirit. Which
is the real thing, the material or the immaterial? All the speculation
- all the purposes of life - may be confined within these circumscribed
bounds. Either this world is all, or it is almost nothing. For
if the senses are all of the man; if Nature is just the mere solids
which she presents to us; if the course of circumstances is fortuitous;
if we are, really, alone in the world; if nothing is believable
- and therefore possible - but what is demonstrable; if human
reason is everything, and common sense the true guide and the
only guide; why, then, - if all that the world tells us be really
true, - the sooner we close the account with this outside phantom-world
the better! In this case AWAY WITH IT! And away with all the spiritual
tales which are told to us!(36) The quicker that we realize to
ourselves the fact that all of the supernatural - though, possibly,
amusing - is all of the untrue, the more conformable it will be
to the comfortable exercising of ourselves. We are children otherwise.
Why should we frighten ourselves with fair tales? Why bring over
us this damp of the phantasmagoric view of life? We must, surely,
be as the rude and ignorant - as the very unlettered - in distressing
ourselves concerning this supposed outside watch of which fabulists
have found it their interest to tell us. Surely, in this nineteenth
century, when exploration has sifted the world, and science has
exposed, however admirable, all the watchwork of it; when superstitions
have been, even from their last lurking-places, expelled, and
when teaching has almost - we are compelled to use the significant
word almost - settled things, we can dismiss our belief
in this old world-mistaken idea of the reappearance of the dead;
of anything which has ceased out of the world. We can get rid
of the fear of the preternatural. In one word, supernaturalism
is untrue, because nature is true. And because it has nothing
of the supernatural in it. All the groping in the world cannot
discover a thing that is not there. ...
-----------------------------------------------
(38) And this will then sweep with it all religious beliefs,
all mystical ideas, all the accounts of miracles, and will leave
us only two distinctly drawn classes: those people and their beliefs
whom we call “sane and practical,” and who are free
from all religion and mysticism; and those whom we term insane
because they live in what we term fancy. The just man cannot give
credence to one phase of religious thought with its miracles and
discount all others. Either the non-human, non-material activity
exists and is manifested through various agencies and in different
phases, of it is non-existent. We must choose which idea we wish
to accept. To condemn one phase is to condemn all.
-----------------------------------------------
“Science-men are kings in their own domain, which
is the world of sense.(39) But they are very untrustworthy guides
out of it. They can domesticate us very satisfactorily in this
world, and can, piece by piece, put the machinery of it into our
hand. But they can never give us another. Nor will their glance
ever arrest one invisible visitant from out another world; nor
will their sight ever penetrate, for a moment, past that shadowy
curtain - which is yet, perhaps, penetrable - which divides the
Seen from the Unseen. Let us give Science due honor; but let us
not render up to it our hopes of the future, as equally as all
of us of the present. ...
-----------------------------------------------
(39) But let one of these master scientists become afflicted
with an old-fashion toothache, and attack of acute indigestion,
or run a splinter under his nail, and all his “science”
avails him nothing! He will be but a child again and if the pain
be continued, sufficiently long, be ready to believe in seven
different heavens and all supernatural things, at one and the
same time! Men, scientists or otherwise, are but boasting children.
When the sun shines and digestion is normal and the nerves tingle
with health, then there is neither God nor any of his realms save
the matter-of-fact world. But let the sun hide behind a cloud,
and attack of the spleen afflict, and the nerves be on edge, they
immediately are as filled with fear and superstition as the veriest
jungle savage. After all, it is very much a matter of good or
poor digestion. Don’t believe it! Watch yourself and your
fellow men.
-----------------------------------------------
“True magic lies in the most secret and inmost
powers of the mind. Our spiritual nature is still, as it were,
barred within us.(40) All spiritual wonders, in the end, become
but wonders of our own minds.
-----------------------------------------------
(40) The work of the Secret Schools is to open up and
develop these inmost powers of the mind, to remove the bars that
imprison the mind and Soul, and to release our innate potential
spiritual forces that they may search throughout all the realms
of being.
-----------------------------------------------
“In magnetism lies the key to unlock the future science of magic, to fertilize the growing germs in cultivated fields of knowledge, and reveal the wonders of the creative mind.
“Magic is a great, secret, sudden and disbelieved-in wisdom, out of this world, and its opposite. Reason is a great public, relied-on mistake - in this world, and the same with it, in its, by man, accepted operations. The one treads down, and destroys the world. The other springs with it, and makes it. Therefore is one the worldly true and believed, since man makes himself in it, and grows, into his being, in it. And therefore is the other, in the world-judgment, false and a lie, and a juggle, since man is contradicted in it. So says Paracelsus. ...
“The crystal seers and mirror viewers use their talent in telling love-sick girls their fortunes, and,” ten score more such things are said. What of it? God gave all men brains, but some put them to swindling uses. Are brains, per se, bad things to posses? Barbers use leaves of literature to wipe their razors on; yet essays nor the art of printing had that end in view. Trunks are lined with sheets of the Bible, but the books were printed to fatten souls upon. “But all people can’t successfully use these crystals and mirrors?” No one knows till they try. A gentleman of Cambridge left me ten minutes ago, who had stopped a little time, while floating down the river of life, at Spiritualists’ Island, but grew tired of the fruit - religious, social, philosophic, and so on, reputed to grow there; just as I did, and thousands more have, and still more thousands do and will; and he owned a very valuable Trinue glass. I doubt if America possesses a more splendid seer than that builder of brick houses and philosophical systems! Why? Because the glass enabled him, by its magnetic fulness, to burst the bondage of a perverse brainism, and reach the streams that flow beneath the senses. That is all.
In April, 1896, Horace H. Day, the famous financier and true philanthropist, came to my house in Pleasant St., Boston. That morning I had been mirror-gazing, for pleasure’s sake, and the doors of the inner worlds had not yet wholly closed; and I distinctly foresaw, and told him, that in September the country would feel a monetary crash. Result - the “gold panic” of that month, carrying ruin to thousands, and some to sudden death by self-slaughter. I know one man who forecasts the markets by means of another Trinue; he deals in grain, and as the sheaf which appears in the glass rises or falls, so inevitably will the market. All he wants is capital to buy, or a sensible man to follow his magneto-commercial barometer. He will soon have both. I know a woman who never fails to tell correctly all that others want to know. She is getting rich. But I deprecate this sort of thing; it borders close upon a mere prostitution of a divine instrumentality; for, properly used, this agency is not only second to none other for intromissional and psycho-visional purposes, but is liable to not one single objection, which all others are. Drugs, fumes, odors, ethers, mesmerism, all and each of them disturb the nervous system, injure the brain, and their effects are all unhealthy and abnormal; but the mirror is free from all that, and the things, persons, events, and symbols seen, are actual, almost tactual - as clear, plain and distinct as any other plano-diorama, resembling the effects of the camera obscura, and no abnormal state is induced; for the seer is wide awake, broadly intelligent, in possession of every sense, in all its integrity and watchfulness; while at the same time there is no strain whatever upon the brain; no tension of the nerves. In mesmeric lucidity, the visions rapidly pass away; never again can they be reproduced or recalled; but, in the mirror, any given face, place, picture of any locality, or symbolism, can, by an effort of the Will, be made to remain fixed, stationary, and solid, as long as the seer shall elect; besides which, an infinitely greater percentage of persons can successfully use them than can be effected by any or all combined of the above-specified agencies. There are also many diverse drugs, and mesmeric modes; but there are only two sorts of magic mirrors in existence - the crystalline, which are but of little use, and of which the polished coal is a sample; besides being exceedingly difficult to obtain, seeing that only coal of a peculiar shade and grain will answer the purpose; and even then is utterly useless unless of a size, without crack, difference, solidity or flaw, sufficient to be correctly ground, shaped, and polished; for the whole thing depends upon the power of the mirror to attract, and retain upon its surface, the magnetic fluid thrown from the eyes; on which magnetic surface in all cases the things seen appear, and not upon or in the surface or substance of the mirror itself, as is apparently the case; but mostly above and in front of it. Sometimes, indeed, the seer sees through the mirror, which, in that case, serves precisely the same ends and uses to the spirit of the out-looker, that the eye-pieces and object-glasses do to the external senses of the telescopist and microscopical investigator. In mesmeric vision there is a necessary and unget-rid-of-able rapport and magnetic sympathy between the operator and the subject, which latter is, therefore, quite as likely to give forth the pictures, images, memories ad fancies of the former, as he or she is to reveal the actual truth of and from the outside world. “But spiritual or spirits’ magnetisms are not so likely to intrude fantasies; and therefore, what a medium sees must be true and real.” To which I reply, - the objections against human magnetism are tenfold stronger against the spiritual, or the spirits, so-called, even when it is real and true, which it is not, over once in at least two hundred times; for beyond all cavil, what passes for spiritual trance is, in the vast majority of cases, either simulated, delusive, the effect of mental habit, the effect of the physico-mental influence of the parties present, or the result of a diseased condition of the nerves and brain. But suppose, for argument’s sake, a real and bona fide case of spiritual magnetism. How is the medium or bystander to know whether the thing seen is a real photograph of the unseen by mortals, or a transcript from the playful fancy of a disembodied wag or experimenter? The medium cannot tell, because the very term and service both indicate a person played upon, - and instrument actual in unseen hands; a machine worked by unknown forces, - a mere automaton, made to move, do, act and say, at the will of a power of which neither they or the bystanders know literally anything whatsoever! There is no standard of comparison. The medium is a nobody in the matter, while the invisible, and necessarily totally unknown, operator, is all in all! The difference, therefore, between positive seership and mediumship in any form is the difference of a whole species; or that between hearing a description of Paris, and seeing Paris one’s self; that is to say, it is the difference between act and experience, and the merest hearsay. These opinions are based upon over twenty years’ experience and observation of both classes of phenomena.
The second class or order of mirrors, the first embracing all the coals, light-colored metallic mirrors, and crystals, none of which are of much worth, as compared with the perfected instrument of the last century, and the present, are those made upon strictly scientific principles as to form, in the first place. After innumerable experiments, it was found that upon removing the skull, and slicing the brain of dead human beings horizontally, just above the ear, that all heads of all the human races were shaped precisely alike, and that all differences of external contour depended upon the volume of matter on the periphery or outside surface of the brain, - the cortical matter. It was found, also, that the brain, at the foundation-point, was of the same general form or shape as the earth on which we dwell; that is to say, an oblate spheroid, whence, by experiment, it was deduced that such section of a figure, oblately spheroidal, was also the very best possible form of a magic mirror. Such a figure having two mathematically true and absolutely certain foci, so that a stream of magnetism being thrown upon one focus slid along the surface and returned to the centre of the other focus, from the centre of the fore-brain, thus completing a magnetic circuit, and rendering the portion of brain in the line of contact exceedingly active, by reason of its increased magnetic play and motion of the brain-particles there situate. So much for the shape. But experiment also demonstrated that something else was wanted beside the peculiar outline; for if the fluid impinged upon a perfectly plain surface, it would bound back, and the result of its action would be merely the magnetization of the organs in the fore-brain; beside which, much of the fluid would penetrate the surface, and be lost in space. Then a long series of experiments were instituted by different master-chemists, of different scientific lodges, in various parts of the world, to find a substance which would prevent the escape of the refined vif - this extremely subtle, magnetic fluid - as the sides of a tub prevent the escape of water. Hence, an alteration in the surface-form of the mirror became requisite, nay, wholly indispensable. A point of the very first importance before the application of the proposed insulating material, even if such should be discovered; which, for a long period of time seemed problematical.
If the convex form was used, the fluid - even supposing the retentive material was applied - would roll off, like a soap-bubble from a pipe bowl. If it was convex, the mass of the invisible globe of magnetic aura would roll off at the ends and sides, and hang in a mass beneath the mirror, which of course would never do. And now months were spent in that particular research, until at last a concave was adopted for the glass itself; a thin film of gold was placed close to it on the edge of a peculiarly constructed compound concavo-convex frame, made in conformity with the known laws governing the motion of rare fluids, ethers, and gaseous bodies.
The next step was to find an insulating substance, and one having elective, electric and chemical and magnetic affinity to and with the finest form of magnetism known to science and to human experience. It had already been demonstrated that what would insulate and hold electricity was but an open sieve to that same element in its higher forms and modes; hence, recourse must be had to something else. And so experiments were made, separate and combined, with the alkaline metal, Lithium, Sodium, Potassium, and the hypothetical substance, Ammonium, but without complete success. Then come the metals of the alkaline earths, Magnesium, Calcium, Barium, and Strontium, but without avail. Then experiments were made with the proper earths, Didymium, Cerium, Lanthanum, Zirconium, Norium, Erbium, Beryllium, Thorium, Yttrium, Tervium, and Aluminum; but still the proper thing was not found. Attention and trial was next turned to the oxide-forming metals proper, whose oxides form powerful bases, and these are Copper, Uranium, Lead, Cobalt, Zinc, Cadmium, Nickel, Bismuth, Iron, Chromium and Manganese; but you might as well try to hold sunlight in a basket, as to confine magnetism within walls made of any, or all combinations of these metals. Therefore the next series of texts embraced the oxide-forming metals proper, whose oxides form weak bases, or acids, namely, Arsenic, Tin, Vandium, Osmium, Niobium, Antimony, Titanium, Molybdenum, Tantalum, Molybdenum, Tantalum, and Tungsten; a nearer approach, but still not the thing required, albeit much time, a deal of money, and more patience, had been expended. Then came the noble metals, whose oxides are reducible by heat, namely, Rhodium, Ruthenium, Silver, Platinum, Iridium, Mercury, Palladium, and Gold. Of course the isomorphous groups of substances, embracing Sulphur, Selenium, Chlorine, Cyanogen, Phosphorus, Fluorine, Iodine and Bromine, were also called into play, and a few of them, as some of the others, were found partially, but not wholly applicable to the purpose sought to be attained, not even by the aid of others of the non-metallic elements, viz., Oxygen, Nitrogen, Carbon, Boron, Hydrogen, and Silicon, albeit it was found that fusible combinations of fifteen of these score or two of substances, associated with Phthalic acid and Paranapthalene, constituted just the thing required, namely, a compound with strong elective and electric characteristics, presenting a perfectly even, white-black surface, and sensitive in the highest possible degree. Of course this substance is very difficult to make, and well it is that such is the case, else the land would be flooded with counterfeit or very imperfectly constructed mirrors. As it is, it is impossible to make them properly in this country, and only one man ever imports them, and that man is Cuilna Vilmara, from whose lips I am now reporting, in as plain English as I can command, this exhaustive monograph upon a very difficult subject - for it is not easy to correctly catch the meaning of a man whose speech is part English, French, German, Italian, Armenian, and Arabic, and yet by dint of great patience, chemical information, two linguists, and half-a-dozen lexicons, I have succeeded in getting the pith and marrow of all he had to say, as himself agreed was the case when reading the French translation. Hence, it will be understood that I herewith give the views of this great master of the subject, as well as, and interspersed with, my own and others’ beliefs and knowledges of the matters under consideration.
The man whose experiences are wholly confined to things of the practical every-day life, is a mere shell, floating on the sea, totally ignorant of the amazing wealths lying scattered beneath the surface, and piled up in mountains on the ocean floors; for there are more real worlds under this outside life of ours, than human brain can number. Dream-life, so wonderful, vivid, oftentimes strangely prophetic, is but one of these; and there is a real state even behind that life of Dreams; and we reach its mystic borders by the mesmeric roads, while we gaze into its very depths by the mysterious lens I am here writing about. There is no accident, no chance, only such seem to be to our outer senses; but when the veil-pall that hangs over the inner senses is removed, we at once glance down the mystic lanes, and are in the street of chances; hence the future as the present - and the past is a fact, and all their events are now! Wherefore it is not difficult to foretell what shall be, if we but get beneath the veil and glance along the floors of the world. God’s numbers never change. They are perpetual Fixedness, - scannable by whoever has the sciences.
Sir David Brewster, albeit he attempts to pervert the account to other ends, says that, “It can scarcely be doubted that a concave mirror was the principal instrument by which the heathen gods (disembodied heroes) were made to appear in the ancient temples. ...Escuapius often exhibited himself to his worshippers of Tarsus; and the temple of Enguinum, in Sicily, was celebrated as the place where the goddesses (disembodied heroines) exhibited themselves to mortals.” Iamblichus informs us that the ancient magicians caused the gods to appear among the vapors disengaged from fire; and the conjurer, Maximus, terrified his audience by making the statue of Hecate laugh. Damascius, quoted, in a bad cause by Salverte, says, “In a manifestation [the cause of which, that is, a magic mirror, ought not to be revealed] ...there appeared on the wall of the temple a mass of light which at first seemed to be very remote; it transformed itself, in coming nearer, into a face evidently divine and supernatural, of a severe aspect, but mixed with gentleness, and extremely beautiful.” According to the institution of a mysterious religion the Alexandrians honored it as Osiris and Adonis.
The Emperor Basil, of Macedonia, inconsolable at the loss of his son, went to Theodore Santabaron, celebrated for his miracles, who exhibited to him the image of his beloved son, magnificently dressed, and mounted upon a superb charger. The youth rushed toward his father, threw himself into his arms and - disappeared! This aerial image was no trick, for even now optics cannot do anything of the sort; but it unquestionably was produced in, or by, and through, a magic mirror. The plea in this case, of imposture, is absurd.
Mr. Roscoe, in his life of Benvenuto Cellini, gives a thrilling account of that famous artist’s adventure with spectres raised by magical means, and, what is more to the purpose neither Roscoe, Brewster, or Smith, pretend to claim that they, the spectres, were mere figments of fancy. On the contrary, all three admit the thing was real! True, they attempt to stave off the supernatural conclusion; but do it very lamely indeed, for it is pretended by them that the magic lantern, playing upon volumes of smoke, accounts for the whole terrific affair, totally forgetful of the fact that Cellini’s experience took place in the middle of the sixteenth century, whereas Kircher did not invent that instrument till a hundred years later! The paragraph in italics on page 154, of Smith’s edition of Brewster’s Magic, is too puerile and contemptible to merit notice. Such hard-headed people would fain make us believe that all ghostly appearances are phasmas - even that of Jesus after his death; and that all that is knowable they know; when, aside from the multitudinous impostures, there are enough real spiritual visitations and visions to base the hopes of a million worlds upon. In no case, whether the objects viewed are physical or mental - as in dreams, etc., is it the eye which sees, but the faculty of consciousness within the eye, brain, Soul, of the observer; and as man is a spiritual being, it follows that he has a series of inner senses underlying and subtending his external ones, and which series of internal senses are adapted to his natural-born spiritual nature; and all that he requires is a bridge to help him span the thick matter and reach the spiritual ether. This the mirror enables many, though not all, to do.
The condition of death is mental activity and physical quiescence. If the activity can be had without the quiescence of death, or greatest aim - a new avenue or means of knowing - is attained. This is all the mesmerist and the mirrorist claim to achieve; and both have proved and made good that claim in numberless instances.
The spiritual, therefore the substantial reality of all being, is above and beyond the other senses, and it is only either by his rising to it, through the floors of the outer world beneath which he sinks, or by its descent to him, that he can cognize the actualities of that superior world. In either case, if his motive be good, he ascends toward God. If evil, then his account must be rendered for his act.
When a man, his organs of perception, his intelligent principle, is suspended from its matter-bounded exercise, he can enter the domain of the real, through the gates, of the inner senses; catch glimpses of the forward world, and, therefore, cannot fail of actual outside show, experience, and being. In the interior state he throws open the windows of his Soul, and lets in the sunshine and glory of the spaces; hence all true seers can but deprecate the prostitution of Clairvoyance - true, and therefore very rare - to immoral uses; or that of the mirrors to mere fortune-telling, and such like ends; for, although unquestionably these things have been are, and can be done, with rare and marvelous success and efficiency by their means, yet it is like causing a first-class race-horse to draw a butcher’s cart, or, conning rich attire to plough the land. Hence the caution and advice, simply because the mirror is the gate to another world, another field, another department of the “Inside World.”
Says Hargrave Jennings, on of the master Rosicrucians of England - a man whose writings on Fire rank him high among the true genii of the world of letters, and one from whom I have largely quoted in this monograph - a man who deservedly occupies a lofty place in the esteem and affection of every true brother of the Arch Fraternity of Rosicrucians - in his last great work concerning the Curious Things of the Outside World: “The Phantasmagoria of real things are revealed to us only when we escape the outer world.” In other words, when we elude by mental swiftness these cast-iron, outward-seeming senses of ours; and when we take a God-bath in the rivers that flow by our Souls. There is a light of slumbrous beauty beneath this world-light of ours, and the spaces are thronged with aerial intelligences, unseen by material man. They, to him, wait in darkness, but his darkness is theirs and “our” effulgent light, because it illumines the waste of what to him is mystery. That realm is no shadow-country, no phantom-land. It is a country without sound and noise; yer the fulness of melody echoes through its gorgeous halls, and the wingless cherubim are there in effulgent majesty, to guard its mystic splendors; hence, none but true, brave, feeling Souls can wholly enter therein. It is a regal domain where our under life is topmost. Gautama Buddha, seer of all seers of the olden time, and equalled only now, if ever, tried, to stupid man, these sublime mysteries to reveal; and in that land he has waited six thousand years for the advent of understanders, just as that other king, the lonely Man of Nazareth and Bethlehem, waited nineteen hundred years to find a score of Christians! Are they found?
It is only in deep absorption that the Soul can outwit
the body. Thus, when a man is tempted to waste his manhood in
the lap of lust, his senses ever urge him to the deed, albeit
he knows it is pollution and death which invite him to the horrid
banquet, death-charged and dreadful!(41) But the very instant
he sets his Soul to gaze upon the temptress, he sees her hollow
heart, and realizes the danger to his Soul and body; and the sight
and the knowledge frees him, that moment, from his thrall; his
boiling blood cool, recedes to its proper channels; his tempestuous
passion subsides, and, though weak and exhausted, he still remains
a MAN, which is never the case when lust extinguishes its fires
in the arms of wanton passion. Lo, here, what a truth!
-----------------------------------------------
(41) See Eulis,
by Dr. P.B. Randolph.
-----------------------------------------------
As in the telescope the landscape only is possible, not at either end among the mistakes of the unadjusted glasses, but in the exact focus, where the sight-point is caught, even so we Rosicrucians hold that supernatural beings only are possible; visible at that cross-point where the angelic contraction and the magic dilatation intersect. In short, man being himself as the telescope, it is only at the magico-magnetic focus at which the spirit world and the essential worlds are to be spied into. Under the dominion of lust, hatred, avarice, wrong, no man can enter either! Therefore virtue is its own reward! Divine and supernatural illumination is the only road to absolute truth.
The Platonic philosophy of vision is, that it is the
view of objects really existing in interior light,(42) which assume
form; not according to arbitrary laws, but according to the state
of the mind. This light unites with exterior light in the eye,
and is thus drawn into a sensuous of imaginative activity; but,
when the outward light is separated, it reposes in its own serene
atmosphere. It is, then, in this state of interior repose that
all really inspired and correct visions occur. It is the same
light so often spoken of in ancient books and modern experiences.
It is the light revealed to Pimander, Zoroaster, and the
sages of the East. It is Boehmen’s Divine Vision or Contemplation;
Molinos’ Spiritual Guide, and the inner life of all true
men - few, and women - many.(43) It is the FOUNDATION-FIRE upon
which all things whatever are builded; ambushed everywhere; bursting
out when least expected; slumbering for ages, yet suddenly illuminating
an inebriate’s brain, so that he shall see the moral snakes
and larvæ of his perversion assume physical proportion and
magnitude to fright him back to temperance, virtue, and his forsaken
God!
-----------------------------------------------
(42) The identical teachings of the Fraternity of the
present day. Platonic philosophy, as already pointed out, formed
part of the fundamental teachings of the Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis
instituted in, or about 1616.
(43) It is this Light which the Masters seek to bring
into manifestation within the Acolyte, and all the training and
drills taught the Neophyte have this end in view. Some of the
first exercises prepare the body, others the mind, and finally
there is the Drill, which is the “Door,” leading into
the interior realm of Light and sight.
-----------------------------------------------
No amount of merely intellectual quickness, sharpness, or solidity will avail the searcher for the unseen! Only a meek spirit, attention, perseverance, faith, open the doors which lead to the vastitudes.
The world we live in is full of the pattering of ghostly
feet, and the music of spiritual singers. It is not difficult
to hear them. I may not here write concerning the methods of invocation,
because fools will laugh,(44) and the fraternity of the mystical,
everywhere, would grieve thereat; and yet it is certain that perfumes,
odors, and vapors of magnetic character have, in ages past, and
may again and in ages yet to be, proved immense aids to the true
seer. There are hundreds who visited the “Rosicrucian Rooms”*
in Boylston St., Boston, who marvelled greatly at hearing no raps
or ticks, and seeing no clouds pass over the splendid mirror there
owned and used, until perfumes were scattered and incense burned
- whereupon, thousands of patterings rained upon the silver tripod,
and glory-clouds, in presence of and seen by scores, floated over
the black-sea face of the peerless mirror.
-----------------------------------------------
(44) Because the method is so simple in itself, yet leads
to such wondrous results if faithfully, trustfully and consistently
practiced. It is forever the little, the seemingly insignificant
things, which lead to great results, and that is why the great
mass miss that which is really worth while in life, and which
elevates observant ones to the status of the gods.
* The Rosicrucian Rooms were opened in 1860 and continued
open until late in 1872 when fire destroyed them. Headquarters
of the Fraternity were then moved to Toledo, Ohio. A formal organization
has been in continuous activity and at no time has authority been
conveyed to anyone not trained within the order.
-----------------------------------------------
The belief of the supernatural is the only escape out of the coldest infidelity; and the word magic every where is but another term for magnetic, which, being understood, at once remove all its mysteries from the region of the “Black Arts,” so-called, into the beautiful realms of ethereal science.
Not every person can see in a mirror of any sort whatever;
and hundreds of those who can see in them are unable to procure
a genuine instrument. To such I recommend a very cheap and beautiful
substitute, in the form of a concaved Claude Lorraine mirror,
easily made. Mould a lump of clay a foot square, slightly convex.
Dry, and bake it hard, and smooth its surface as perfectly as
possible. Then press pasteboard on it till all is smooth and even.
Now make another exactly to match it, concave. Between these two
place a sheet of fine plate-glass. Bake it till it conforms to
the required shape. Make two alike.(45) Between these two, cemented
one-fourth inch apart. Pour black ink till full; seal the aperture
left for that purpose, and you have a very good substitute for
a magnetic mirror. Else take a glass saucer filled half full of
black ink, and you will have as good a mirror as Lane saw so successfully
worked in Egypt. A crystal glass of pure water has often served
a good purpose to the same end; and, in fact, there are numberless
forms of substitutes for the genuine mirror, some of which are
very good, but of course not equal to even an ordinary Trinue
glass. The rules and laws governing these substitutes are precisely
the same as those of genuine glasses.
-----------------------------------------------
(45) Manufacturers of plate glass are usually willing
to accept orders for convex plates, and mirrors can then be easily
made. We have seen some very beautiful homemade ones which answered
every purpose and every test. The potency of the mirror will depend
almost entirely on the mood and the love which possessed the maker
during the time occupied in the task.
-----------------------------------------------
“It will never do to urge that these things lie beyond us. A fruitful source of the spiritual lowness of the modern time is the resolute averting of the face from deep thoughts, which of course, give trouble. That all the lifting of the mind, that all the sublimest speculation, that all the occupancy of the thoughts by these intensely noble and refining investigations; that all these high ideas, and great ideas, about God’s providence, and his purposes in the world, end, when pushed to answer, just where they began - that is, where they first opened, and in no wise attaining to definite result - this is, of course, as true as that men cannot help their speculations and their wonder. But we unconsciously pass higher and become something better, in such thoughts. We teach ourselves to place the world at a distance. We grow spiritualized; and the very amount of our pleasures multiplies, because it purifies. The fault of the time is haste - is conceit - is a wilful disregard of the higher truths - is a protesting speed to be back again amidst the business of the world - a cowardly acknowledgment of incapacity to cope with the contemplation of man’s possible higher destiny - a hypocritical putting-forward of reliance upon and acknowledgment of a beneficent superintending Providence in the abstract. The time is so unenthusiastic, everything is so questioned for its utilities, and all is so toned down to commonplace, that it is the voice of exclamation and alarm only that can arouse. To obtain a hearing we must call aloud.
“We are involving ourselves in too many deductions. We are thickening ourselves in our mechanic dreams too much. We are posing ourselves with systems. We are living the heart out of us. We are making very clockwork of the grand intensities of nature. Formalism is becoming as a second nature to us, and our methods of living is the translation of the life-long charities into pounds and pence. Even our very fine cases - as we may so, perhaps, to ‘curiously’ figure it - are growing vastly too fine, vastly too wonderful, and too elaborately wrought for us. Why not be of rougher material, and of mere painted outside - of bulk and not sentiment - of the coarse, solid components - of wood and of varnish - instead of making up of such exquisite vermilion blood, and of flesh of a marble-like whiteness in the female examples of us? There be something in superb colors, like you! Why, when we are so laboriously casting ourselves as into ingots for the devil’s golden Hades, should we make all this hypocritical fuss about moral improvement? Surely we might as well become stumps - blocks - turn into dead, hard wood, as mean and unhandsome as Lapland idols, when all our foolish pity, and all our human sympathies, are being most convincingly argued and demonstrated out of us; and when the very affections are strangled - oh, think me not too direct and plain-spoken, my dear, contented, but, perhaps, too compliant reader - like irregular children; those which are only sure to bring their parents into discredit. Children of no town, since they belong not to a town, where money abounds! Owning not love, since they cannot claim affinity with the love of banknotes!
“We have forgotten the inside of the cup in the burnishing of the exterior. Nor - after all - do we live half our life. Our triumph in the common conveniences of life - spite of our vaunting of our perfection in them - go not great lengths. We can forge an anchor. But we cannot cook a dinner. We can spin thousands of yards of calico in two or three revolutions of a wheel. But we, personally, curve so indifferently, that we can scarcely make a bow. The banks groan with our gold. And yet we have not the knowledge profitably - by which we here mean towards our Soul’s advantage - to expend a single dollar. In the universal Plutus-conversion, our heads - so to speak - are growing into gold, while our hearts are fast becoming but as the merest blown paper-bag inside of us!
“Is this Dutch like life of toys and trifles right? Is this all of nature; and all of us? Oh, this wilderness of flowers, and, of, the eternal forests! Let the mind, for a moment, glance at that inexpressible microcosm - far from the vulgar disturbances of the pavements, and out of sight of the glare of the city - in which are the thin, spiry stalks, in whose invisibly minute veins course up the bright-green blood. What a neglected treasury is this world of our, in which lie undreamed-of riches for the seeking! Why abandon them all - desireless - to the inviting angels who stand sentinels upon a Paradise upon which we might enter! Oh - stretching above us - all ye vast fields! Blue as the very ultimate floor of covintiy; throbbing with world, as through the intensity of an all-exultant, all even violently God-declarant life! Oh, all ye thousand visible wonders, that scatter spells, as of the fruitful magic, through all this most invisibly populous universe; this universe, whether of man’s mind or of the larger macrocosm! Pronounce, ye that know, whether evil, meanness, or wresting to false purpose - whether aught of bad - should profane a theatre of grandeur so immense? Is not man himself - show ought to be the arch-glory, as the recognition of it - but as he would seem so desirous of making himself the blot upon this excellence, the lie to all this overpowering sublimity? Is he not, himself (to speak to him the language which he may best understand), the bankrupt in this myriad of banks, whence thought can - and virtue might - draw their inexhaustible supplies?
“Were gold-ribs the very framework of the world, and were they torn out of their mighty sockets; were even the Genius of its Riches shown, barless and central, throned at the very heart of this so detestably, because so for its material glory, worshipped globe - would the sight, or the possession, match against thine immortal chance? Were the spirit of the material world exposed, in a single revelation, in all his blasting splendors, would - O thou miserably merchandising heart! thou seller of thy seat amidst the star-girt saints! thou wretched contemner of the chance offered thee, for thy salvation, by thy God! - would all this compensate for the averting, for one moment, from thee, of the face of the rulers of thine Immortal destinies? Confess, thou mad and besotted man! - avouch, thou less defiant than hypocritical rebel to God’s heavenly care of thee! - would thy very hugest heap of dross match in value with the tiniest flower, into whose thirsty cup the heaven-missioned spirit poured his eternal dew? Christening to Immortality!
“Boastest thou of thy world, and of thy dignity
- in thy science - out of it? Art! - what is art to the reticulation
of a fungus? What is it to the fine-spun tracery of the meanest
moss? Labor - what is thy labor, that thou shouldst pride thyself
upon it - when the whole frame of stars be nightly moved? Pride
- why, what a shallow thing is this pride, when to the lily of
the field even Dolomon, in all his glory, has been declared not
equal! What be thy stars and ribbons - thy rings and spots - when,
than all, the snake hath more splendid? What be thy braveries,
and all thine ingenious adornment, when the summer insect - less
than thee the ‘painted child of dirt’ - surpasseth thee
at them? What be thy money, when, with whatever assurance thou
reliest upon it, it may not spot for thee, as gold nails, thy
final melancholy, and, for thy body, long-lasting house? Hoarder
for that day of enjoyment which shall never come to thee, in thy
last earthly house, all thy tenfold fences of precious metal useless,
art thou content to put up with most ignoble lead! Thou leavest
all thy wealth, all ‘thy goods and chattels,’ and, for
aught thou knowest, thou forfeitest thy very Soul; and at that,
perhaps, terribly sudden summons, thou stand’st not even
solitary! For is there not thy misspent life thee to confront?
Thou hast bargained away thine heritage, and hast spent the price.
And, now, as that as which to be it hath been thy greatest boast
- a good ‘man of business’ - thou must, in rendering
up thyself, perform thine own half of the obligations. If the
real law be that life to come be alone purchasable by good deeds
- as any lawyer will tell thee, friend, if thou consultest him
- thou hast miscalculated the law. In thine own interest’s
sake, then, better a single virtuous act than a reiteration of
money victories!(46) Better, for thee, the prayer of the poor
man, and the blessings of the fatherless and of the widow, than
a whole shipload of plate, an avenue of bowing menials, and a
whole court of flatterers! Remember that the reckoning with thee,
must come. Disencumber yourself in time. Perhaps the very ‘conveyances
of thy lands’ may not be contained in that box, in which
there will be found, at last, but too much room for the possessor
himself!
-----------------------------------------------
(46) In the final analysis, only that which helps the
race a step forward is of actual value. It is not Immortality
to store up a mountain of gold. It is, however, the act of Immortalization
to see that this money is used in the alleviation of those who
suffer and are in pain; to educate the ignorant so that they may
free themselves from bondage; to tear the veil of ignorance and
superstition from the mind of man; to lead all who seek to the
Center of Light. If any have millions, they collected their store
from the many. If they leave these millions to friends and relatives,
they but weaken them. If they see to it that this wealth is left
to those who will use it wisely for the good of the many, in the
founding of institutions of real learning, the establishment of
Sanatoria for the removal of mental blindness, then they will
have accomplished real things and helped to Immortalized the Soul.
Every effort of the Secret Schools is toward this end and though
these schools may not dictate to their Acolytes, they indicate
the right Path to follow.
-----------------------------------------------
“Art thou wise - even in the world’s sense? Art thou sagacious as to the relative meanings of ‘debtor and creditor?’ When all the world attesteth that these things which I have written concerning inner worlds and the methods of admission thereto, are true, shalt thou, then, persevere in so hopeless a chance of phantoms - of fine false things which flee from thee? Shalt thou, with this knowledge, strain for an imagined good, which even in thine own hand, melteth? Shalt thou, with all these results which experience avoucheth as imminent, still sleep the sleep of fools? Still, with no alarm, fold the accustomed hands, and acquiesce because we see all the world doing so likewise? Shalt thou waste thy precious hours in the pursuit of those anticipated fine things, which, for all thy knowledge to the contrary, art to prove as daggers to thee? If missing thee, perhaps to prove nets to the feet to trip up, or pits of selfishness, or of mistake, into which they shall fall, to those to whom thou leavest thine accumulation! That for which thou canst have no farther use, keep it as tenaciously as thou mightest want! Those that thou fanciest best beloved, may but inherit direct ruin in heiring thy riches. That which might have been as a gold mosaic pavement for thee to walk over in thy lifetime, may, in the sinking under thee in thy final disappearance out of this slippery world, convert as into a devil-trap to thy children.
“Love not money, then other than ‘wisely’ and not ‘too well.’ Grow back into the simplicity of thy childhood. Time hastens from thee. Thou, really, hast not that half century which thou proposest to live. Live at once, in leading a new life. Prate not in thy vanity, but get thyself to thy knees, thou foolish man! And confess thyself a very child - ay, more than a child - in the true wisdom. Recall thy mind to better things than thy wreitched traffic, in which by far to much thou imitatest the muckworm. Make much of the holy affections which, like flowers, heaven hath planted in the mind of thee, if thou, like an ox, wouldst not tread them so daily out with thy brutish feet; and of thy children. Each of thine innocent little children contradicteth thee. Thine own youth is that which the most completely exposeth thy false policy. Think that thou hast but the poorest portion of life in thy present life. Thy widest margin of profit, and thy very mound of bonds and of bank-notes, alike shall prove but clogs - ay, but as tons of dead weight - in the hour when unexpected affliction shall start up before thee, or in that time that thou hast thy real summons out of this world. Chains are wealth - ay, chains of heaviest link; hell-forged, but self-wound in one’s unconsciousness of acquisition - of which, for its escape, in the last hour the angels have, perhaps, to free the struggling Soul! The blessings of the orphan and of the widow - of the lately down-trodden, of but the now rescued - shall be the wings upon which, in triumph out of the clay, shalt thou mount to the face of God! Then to thy heart shall penetrate, and to thine ears shall reach, that blessed assurance, welcoming thee within the doors of the eternal places: ‘Even as thou didst it to the meanest of these thine earthly brethren, has thou done it unto me!’
“The roads of heaven, out of this mere, miserable, transitory man’s world - this world of disputes and difficulties, of the struggle, and of the eagerness, to live, but of the compelled and confused haste when death arrests - this place of weariness and discomfort, of - in the real reasons of things - very frequently, the high-placed low, and of the lowly-placed high - the ways, leading beyond those clouds of heaven towards which thou gazest, thou longing man! Have not those solid barriers of division, between body and spirit, which thou, sometimes, art taught to believe! Look out into the universe - important as thou thinkest thine own globe - and imagine what innumerable ‘mansions’ thy ‘Father’s house’ hath! But how many ways may the hope - which may be all of thee - travel into the celestial spaces! By how many natural and ethereal wickets the blessed may, according to their natures, enter! Are not the stars as bright doors, opening into the glory?
“‘God called up from dreams a man into the vestibule of heaven, saying, “Come thou hither, and see the glory of my house.” And to the servants that stood around his throne he said, “Take him and undress him from his robes of flesh; cleanse his vision, and put a new breath into his nostrils; arm him with sail-broad wings for flight. Only touch not with any change his human heart - the heart - the heart that weeps and trembles.”
“‘It was done; and, with a mighty angel for his guide, the man stood ready for his infinite voyage; and from the terraces of heaven, without sound or farewell, at once they wheeled away into endless space. Sometimes with the solemn flight of angel-wing they fled through Zaarrahs of darkness, through wildernesses of death, that divide the worlds of life; sometimes they swept over frontiers, that were quickening, under prophetic motions, towards a life not yet realized. Then, from a distance that is counted only in heaven, light dawned, for a time, through a sleepy film. By unutterable pace the light swept to them, they by unutterable pace to the light. In a moment the rushing of planets was upon them; in a moment the blazing of suns was around them. Then came eternities of twilight, that revealed, but were not revealed. To the right hand and to the left towered mighty constellations, that by self-repetitions and by answers from afar, that by counter-positions, that by mysterious combinations, built up triumphal gates, whose architraves, whose archways - horizontal, upright - rested, rose - at altitudes, by spans, that seemed ghostly from infinitude. Without measures were the architraves, past number were the archways, beyond memory the gates. Within were stairs that scaled the eternities above, that descended to the eternities below. Above was below, below was above, to the man stripped of gravitating body. Depth was swallowed up in height insurmountable, height was swallowed up in depth unfathomable. Suddenly as thus they rode from infinite to infinite, suddenly as thus they tilted over abysmal worlds, a mighty cry arose - that systems more mysterious, worlds more billowy - other heights, and other depths - were dawning, were nearing, were at hand.
“‘Then the man sighed, stopped, shuddered, and wept. His overladen heart uttered itself in tears; and he said, “Angel, I will go no farther! For the spirit of man aches under this infinity. Insufferable is the glory of Gods’ house. Let me lie down in the grave, that I may find rest from the persecutions of the infinite! For end, I see, there is none.” And from all the listening stars that shone around issued one choral chant: “Even so it is! Angel, thou knowest that it is. End there is none that ever yet we heard of.” “End is there none?” the angel solemnly demanded. “Ah is this the sorrow that kills you?” But no voice answered, that he might answer himself. Then the angel threw up his glorious hands to the heaven of heavens, saying, “End is there none to the universe of God? Lo, also THERE IS NO BEGINNING!”...
“If the bond of the whole visible world be the universal magnetism, then the Immortal, unparticled spirit, of which this Magnetism be the shadow, may be that ineffable potentiality in which the real religion shall be, alone, possible. In this manner shall Sainthood be true of all time. In this ‘new world of the old world,’ shall miracle be possible. In this manner out of the familiar shall come the wonderful. In this angelic medium shall Heaven be! And alone be. ...
In “my book I have sought to cast loose the chains which men think they have of this dense, solid, soulless world of ours. Ignoring spirit out of it, as a thing of no account. Rejecting miracle, because it will not submit to a machinery which produces the world; but which is, of course, incompetent to explain the mastership over itself. Which machinery dissolves wholly at the frontier that separates the great, outside, unknown world, from the little, inside, know world.
“Mine is not so much an attempt to restore to Superstition its dispossessed pedestal, as it is to replace the Supernatural upon its abdicated throne.
“And if, after listening for so long a time to the mighty eloquence of Saint Paul, when heaping inference on inference and proof on proof concerning the religion of the Redeemer, of which he was then so triumphant a champion, Agrippa breaks up his charmed revery, in which he, himself touches on confine of conviction, with the astonished exclamation: ‘Paul, Paul, thou almost persuadest me to be a Christian!’ may we not hope that, now, to the reflecting reader, such light of probability shall shine from our arguments, as that he, too, shall ‘almost see’ that the Supernatural may be possible about him even in his own familiar hours, and in this our modern and present day? ...
“In the work now in the reader’s hand, the author proposed to himself these certain objects. First: to the best of his power, to establish the possibility of the supernatural. This science denies. Next, to prove the present existence of the supernatural. This faith rejects. Lastly, to show that all religion is only possible, not in the thinking that we believe which means miracle, per se, but in the actually believing. For mankind may be divided - in the subject of belief in divine matters, or, rather, in the crediting of anything out of this world - into three great sections: First, into those who believe nothing; secondly, into those who would believe if they could; lastly, into those who think that they believe. In this last large class, are included - as to believe impossible things is impossible. - all the conscientious and ‘good’ of all the various orders. People can only believe according to the best of their power; and their common sense stops short of the conviction of miracle; in which, as I contend, real religion can alone lie. ...
“It will only be thoughts which arise out of what the author has said, that will set the reader musing. He will see that there lie other things beyond, farther reference to which in a work of this nature - indeed, in any work - would be improper. Those who will accept, as clear Illumination out of the fogs and the delusions of this world, are those who, by intelligence and by knowledge, are fitted to recognize. Ordinary readers, of whom, out of curiosity and the natural vivacity of mind, the author feels assured he will have many, will accept the same pages as most amusing matter, certain things in which will stimulate the profoundest thoughts in those who have the higher gift. For, in reading, there are two views. ...
“To the guardians of the more recondite and secret philosophical knowledge, of whom, in the societies - abroad and at home - there are a greater number, even in these days, than the uninitiated might suppose, it will be sufficient to observe that in no part of his book, though every reader will find - it is presumed - abundance of entertainment in it, is there approach by the author, to disclosures which, in any mind, might be considered too little guarded. ...
“Respecting the real meaning and purpose of the extraordinary
philosophy of the Rosicrucians - some slender portion of which
this book contains, as also do all of Dr. P. B. Randolph’s
works - indeed they are, from first to last, wholly Rosicrucian
- there is the profoundest general ignorance. All that is supposed
of them is that they were a mighty sect, whose acquirements -
and, indeed, practice - were involved in so much mystery that
the comprehension of them was scarcely possible. And this famous
secret society has been not only the problem, but the amusement,
and converted into the romance, of modern times. On the principle
- usually a very true one - that all of the unknown must, therefore,
be imposing, the story of these Cabalists has served the turn
of those who sought to impress. If modern writers have made use
of their history, it has been to weave up the materials into romance.
The name of the Rosicrucians has been a word of might with charlatans;(47)
they have been the means of exciting, with the dealers in fiction.
The character of the mystic fraternity - its designs and
objects - have been a potent charm with all those who thought
that they possessed, through it, a power of stimulating curiosity.
Members of the Society of the Rosy Cross have been introduced,
as heroes, in novels; have mysteriously fitted as the deus
ex machina, through tales of the imagination. From want of
knowledge of what they were, they have been supposed everything.
They have been wondered at - laughed at - feared - set down as
magicians, and as exempted from the common lot of the children
of men. Fanaticism, dreaming, imposture, and, in the milder form
of accusation, self-delusion; all this has been assumed of them.
From the curious forms in which they chose to invest their knowledge;
because of the singular fables which they chose to invest their
knowledge; because of the singular fables which they elected as
the medium in which their secrets should be hidden, they have
been looked upon as quite of another race - as scarcely men. But
they have been much mistaken.
-----------------------------------------------
(47) Most of these organizations base their teachings
either on neo-Theosophy, or on a popularized from of New Thought.
It is needless there to mention that they contain not a shred
of true Rosicrucian philosophy or training and are never - cannot
be! - presided over by anyone who has ever been an Acolyte in
the authentic Fraternity. They spring up in a night, gather crowds
to themselves within a short time because they offer a short and
rosy path to Initiateship, and, being unable to fulfil their promises,
as quickly die and are forgotten, leaving those who foolishly
followed them in a worse state than they were before.
-----------------------------------------------
“Justice is so late of arrival to all original thinkers
- the terms of prejudice, and of astonishment - not in the good
sense - are so long in falling off from profound searchers - that,
even now, the Rosicrucians - in other words, the Paracelsians,
or Magnetists(48) - are totally ignored as the arch-chemists to
whose deep thoughts and unrelaxing labors modern science is indebted
for most of its truths. As astrology, not the jugglers of the
stars, but the true exploration, seeking the method of being,
and of working, of the glittering habitants of space, as astrology
was the mother of astronomy, so is the lore of the Hermetic Brethren,
miscalled in only one of their names - and that the popular -
Rosicrucians - the groundwork of all present philosophy. In its
applied side, Rosicrucianism is the very science which is so familiar,
and so valuable. But as the Hermetic Beliefs are a great religion,
they, of course, have their popular adaptation and, in consequence,
there is a mythology to them. There must always be a machinery
to every faith, through which it may be known. And the mistake
of people is in accepting the childish machinery and the coarsely,
but fitly, colored mythology of a religion for the religion itself,
and all of it. Hence the Roscrucians’ supposed doctrine of
the invisible children of the various elements; its sylphs or
sylphids, its kobolds, krolls, gnomes, kelps, or kelpies, its
salamanders and salamandrines, and its undines; hence all the
picturesque but necessary catalogue of paraded items of belief,
to constitute it a system that the vulgar might accept as reconcilable
with sense. It is surprising that brighter intelligences have
not perceived all this as only coverings and concealments. It
ought to be seen, at once, that it is not possible to display
certain things. Mystics are the chief priests of every religion.
For perhaps there never was a worse-founded supposition than that
knowledge was for all people. The minds of some classes of
individuals never grow. Men who have arrived at the
last of their mental possibilities are as much children
to the higher intelligences, and are as unfit for their knowledge,
which has, however, the great merit of being sure to be disbelieved,
as the children, knowledge to whom, of higher things than their
capacity admits of, we conceal and falsify in nursery talk. All
that has, yet, been disclosed of the beliefs of the Rosicrucians
is fable fitted only to the comprehension of those who demanded
a mythos as the first necessity of a faith. As more and
more of the light is kindled in the mind, so is the disciple introduced
into the greater and greater truth. As he himself, becomes fit,
so are things fitted to him. And in the mystic sense, and,
because it is mystic, the only true sense, when men leave their
settled facts and move towards things assumed an unbelievable,
they only, by an inverse process, as it were, approach the real
facts and leave their children’s stories and fables. Mystical,
fantastical, and transcendental - nay, impossible - as the
studies and objects of the Rosicrucians seem in the modern ultra-practical
days, it is forgotten that the truths of contemporaneous science
are all based on the dreams of the old thinkers. Out of natural
philosophy, the occult brethren sought the spirits of natural
philosophy. And to this inner heaven - so unlike ordinary life
- through purifications, through invocations, through humbling
and prayers, through penances to break the terms of body with
the world, through fumigations and incensing to raise up another
world about them, and to place themselves en rapport with
the inhabitants of it, through the suspension of the senses and
thereby to the opening of other senses - to the shutting-out of
one state, in order to the passing into another state; to all
this the Rosicrucians sought to reach.(49)
-----------------------------------------------
(48) They have been known as Hermetists, Paracelsians,
Alchemists and in France especially, as Magnetists.
(49) Admittedly not an easy Path to follow and , for
this reason, the Fraternity and its labors will not speedily become
popular. Only the proportionately few are willing to follow the
leadings of the Law. This is also the reason why the authentic
Schools enroll one Acolyte while the clandestine organizations,
by offering the secrets and mysteries of heaven and earth plus
a path of roses, enroll thousands, only to disappoint them and
throw them back into the world with a loss of faith and weaker
than they were while living in their original ignorance.
-----------------------------------------------
“By the Philosopher’s ‘Stone’ we acknowledge that we mean the magic mirror, or translucent spirit-seeing crystal, in which impossible-seeming things are disclosed. The menstruum or universal dissolvent, a transmuting element, the elixir vitae or a power of general regeneration, magical means in their widest sense - a capacity to deal with the materials of nature until quite conrqry things are evolved of them; every phase of impossible knowledge has been assumed of these philosophers. That soon, outside of our material nature, the grand lights begin to shine, was their argument. But by the vulgar their accomplishments were suspected as the forbidden golden keys of the very treasure-house in which lie the means of unlocking the gates to the immortal knowledge!
“Those who take up these volumes will see, by what is advanced in this concluding chapter, that they deal with no crude or inconclusive fancies of merely enthusiastic, imaginative, theorizing people. Nor that they are to be defrauded in the unconscientious work, sought to be diverted from solid judgment in the flimsy attractions, nor simply seduced in the plausibilities of the book-making tribe; traitors - compelled or lured - to the great commonwealth of letters!”
The second volume of Curious Things by Hargrave Jennings, F.R.C., from which copious extracts have been made herein, in which will be found some very original and interesting speculation, points, as its keynote, as it were, to the following well-supported though surprising assertion: That extra-ordinary race, the Buddhists of Upper India (of whom the Phoenician Canaanite, Melchizedek, was a priest), who built the Pyramids, Stonehenge, Carnad, etc., can be shown to have founded all the ancient Mythologies of the World, which however varied and corrupted in recent times, were originally ONE and that ONE founded on principles sublime, beautiful, and true!
And at this stage of my book, I may, with propriety, cease addressing in the formal and distant third person, and, in my individual capacity, assure the kind reader (who has accompanied me thus far, and so long) that the volumes upon which he has been occupied have been the full work, in one manner and another, of two years, I first formed the notion of such a book as this at no less distant a date than nine years; namely, in 1851. It was in October, 1858, that I first commenced upon these volumes. Except a certain interval from December, 1859, until the succeeding March, when I was otherwise occupied, the task has held me, uninterruptedly, down to the present. Twenty years of metaphysics are exhibited in the conclusions of this book. They have, thus, the guarantee of delay and of thought. Much thinking produces good acting. ...
Distributed as over the wide and heaving sea of history, most numerous fragments, evidently of a mighty wreck - most wonderful the ship, and of materials and of design portentous and superhuman - have floated as to the thinker’s feet. Chips as of strange and puzzling woods - pieces that, dissevered, bore no meaning - contradictory objects - diverse matters, only, through keenness, with suspected relation - a beam, portions of rope, the angle of the prow, items that, by long guessing, could alone be discovered to have once constituted a fabric; these have been, as it were, gathered up, and built, into a whole Argo, humbly, in my book. And I have sought to reconstruct a majestic ship, and have traced a celestial and the sublimest story, which we have heired, unknowingly, through the ages. Whether I have succeeded in demonstrating the philosophical possibility of the Supernatural, I am not to be the judge.
There are seven distinct magnetic laws, which, when obeyed and enforced, cannot possibly fail of producing given effects or results; and the first of these, and without which but little can be done, either with reference to one’s self or another, is PERSISTENCE OF PURPOSE TO GIVEN END, AIM AND PURPOSE. My own career is a proof-case in point. Many years ago I made the discovery, elsewhere announced, that most of human ills, social, domestic, mental and moral, were the result of infractions, by excess, entire continence, or inversion, therefore perversion, of the sexual passion and instinct common to the human race. But there was no known cure for those evils, and I was therefore compelled to search for one in the regions of the unknown. With certain speculative and transmitted data to start from, I began and for long years continued, the investigation of the matter, with a persistence, patient research, and strength of will that shrunk at no obstacle, admitted no possibility of defeat or failure