servants may be tractable for a while, but an alien is seated upon the throne, and the Master is no longer King in his own realm.
Others may indeed learn something from his undoing, from the crimes committed upon him, just as we learn from criminals how we ought not to live.
Whether ignorantly, voluntarily, by persuasion, or by force of a stronger will, the medium and the hypnotic subject are victims either of ignorance or of design, to their own undoing.
These psychical experiences have been found in all ages and among every people of whom we have any valid history, from the red Indians of the North to the Voodoos of Africa, and from the Hill Tribes of India to the earliest Scandinavian Tribes and the islands of the sea.
As civilizations advanced, the more intelligent and unscrupulous individuals, ambitious of knowledge or power, regardless of the rights or well-being of others, and discovering these powers, exercised them for their own aggrandizement. This has been known through the ages as Black Magic, and is laughed at to-day by so-called “Scientists” as “nothing but the fears, credulity, and superstitions of the ignorant multitude.” This was the core of Egyptian Paganism, and is the very genius of Clericalism to-day – the domination of the Individual Will, through superstition and fear.
Owing to seismic and cataclysmic shocks, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, and great epidemics of disease, whole peoples have been dominated by fear or frenzied by superstitious dread, so that whole villages and cities became literally “mad-houses,” and were often depopulated.
Read the story of “Peter, the Hermit,” and “The Crusades,” the “Black Death,” the “Great Plague” that swept over Europe in the Thirteenth century; or that of the “Flagellants,” and the “Dancing Mania,” where whole villages became “Dancing Dervishes,” samples of which may occasionally be found to-day in the cities of America, the “Yogis” that are “Buddhas” or “Christs” in New York, and the Dowies that were “Elijahs” in Chicago, the Genius of Point Loma, Obispo, Santa Rosa, “Oahspe,” “Solar-Biology,” and again, et hoc genus omne! Verily! “there is nothing new under the sun.”
Contrast these individuals with an individual of sound mind, good judgment, and a well-ordered life, and see how and where and why the wreck inevitably follows.
The pressure outside changes continually, and these things spread and grow like all contagions. Nature at times seems wrathful and destructive, and there are, no doubt, deep-seated conditions and changes in the magnetism of the earth and air, not yet comprehended by modern science.
In stamping out contagious and epidemic disease, simple cleanliness has been like a revelation from the gods, and modern surgery has only stopped short of the miraculous.
Society is but the aggregation of individuals, and on the one principle of Self-Control every individual is related to the negative or the positive side of psychical and physical epidemics.
There is scarcely an avenue along these lines that has not been more or less explored by modern science.
That knowledge is still incomplete; that mistakes have been made; that matters have been contemptuously set aside, belittled, or declared to be not worth investigation, was to have been expected. But the progress has been immense, and the light shines on many obscure and difficult problems, where before was the utter darkness of superstition and fear, dirt, degradation, and death.
These phenomena manifest on the physical plane, disturb the social state, and the relations of individuals to each other. They concern the environment of man in a world of matter, sense, and time.
But the Individual Intelligence, which is Man, lives also in another world, related to, but within, around, and beyond the physical.
Man senses or feels it as anterior to birth and extending beyond death. He calls it the subjective or Spiritual World.
The realm of his consciousness is related to it, as the body is related to the physical plane and the things of sense and time. His consciousness seems aware of both planes or both worlds, though ignorant of the real nature and meaning of both, and capable of interpreting neither correctly.
Man feels his way through the life on the outer plane guided by his experience of weight, measure, distance, resistance, and the like.
The other world – the inner, or subjective – seems distant, evasive, and unreal, and in contemplating it he is filled with uncertainty, dread, fear, and superstition.
Our friends die and disappear; we miss them, and mourn for them. Where are they? What will become of us when we die? Shall we ever meet them again?
Passing by religion and revelation, as we are dealing with facts and phenomena in the natural life of man, rather than with creeds and dogmas that undertake to cut the “Gordian Knot,” these questions stare everyone in the face, and in every age man has tried to solve them by actual knowledge.
Belief in ghosts, angels and demons is practically universal; and just here comes in the whole range of psychical phenomena, facts and fantasies, illusions, hallucinations and delusions, rational volition, reason dethroned, and the Will in Subjection, already referred to.
As individual experiences, subjective or objective, all are real. The fear incited by illusions and hallucination, or by “seeing a ghost,” regardless of the fact of its actual existence, is as real to the individual as that of meeting a serpent in the grass, or a tiger in the jungle.
Soothsayers, diviners, prophets, mediums, conjurers, and seers consequently have been found in every age and among every people. Ignorance, fear, dread of death, desire to know, have always provided them with patrons, followers, or disciples.
They have often reaped a rich harvest, and not unfrequently dominated a race or a people, as the Papacy does to-day.
Where they have failed to create belief, they have often triumphed through fear and anathema, and often supplemented these weapons by persecution, imprisonment, torture, and death, and so held sway.
Revelation begs the question; dogma forces the conclusion; and both dominate the soul without convincing and without knowledge.
CHAPTER III
MEDIUMSHIP, SEERSHIP, AND HYPNOSIS
Into this arena of the inquiring soul of man, came Modern Spiritualism.
It contained little or nothing new, as to methods, aims, or results.
The Church, Protestant and Catholic alike, uttered their warnings, called it “dealings with the devil,” but divested of political authority and without power to arrest or persecute, as in the past, were unable to stay the tide. It swept the country like a whirlwind. The average individual, desiring to know and to get tidings from departed friends, was unrestrained and unterrified.
He could not see why, if the gates were really ajar, angels might not communicate, no less than devils.
Then came the cry of “fraud,” often amply justified, and a cloud of uncertainty and unreliability settled over the phenomena generally. Unscrupulous men and women seeing their opportunity, sophisticated and exploited it, and “exposures” of these became common.
But in spite of all this, there remained facts, and groups of phenomena impossible to explain away.
Finally, men like Crookes and Wallace took up the subject and investigated the phenomena, not from the emotional, expectant, or fraternal aspect, but from the purely
