Art Magic

"May this soul of mine, which is a ray of perfect wisdom, pure intellect, and eternal essence, which is quenchless light and eternal heat, fixed within a changeful, created body, be re-united by devout meditation and divine science, with the Spirit, supremely blest and infinitely wise."

In all clear and thorough analyses of the Egyptian mysteries, the corner-stone of belief rests on the assumption that the First Great Cause is a Spirit. That the first and only element of Being was Soul - that it existed eternally, and filled infinity. By its power of will it separated itself into emanations and elements, And by its own inherent capacity for creation, the unresting element of force was evolved; then came matter, and by the action of force on matter, the unspeakable wisdom of the uncreated soul, moving on the ocean of clues, created Form and evolved order. The fiery particles of matter ascended to form luminous bodies, the heavier descended and aggregated into earth, seas, plants, animals, and the bodies of men.

From the eternal soul proceeded successive emanations of spiritual beings, more or less elevated according to their status of ascent or descent in the grand scale of the Spiritual Kingdom.

Herodotus affirms that the Egyptians were the first people who distinctly taught the immortality of the human Soul, but the same doctrine, and in all probability, the original of all religious systems, was enunciated in India, when the Egyptian Dynasty was yet in its infancy. More of the specialty of belief in both these monumental nations will hereafter be given when treating of their magical ceremonies; but it is in order to observe here, that the foundation of their famous mysteries was laid in the belief that the soul had fallen from an original state of purity and innocence, had gravitated from a spiritual essence to a material body, and that the chief end, aim, and scope of earthly being, was to conduct the soul through successive stages of purification, back into original alliance with Deity.

This is the central doctrine of Plato, Pythagoras, Jamblichus, Plutarch, and, indeed, of all the most renowned sages, philosophers, and historians who flourished from the beginning of historic times, to those of the early Christian fathers. The Cabalists, Gnostics, Essenes, Therapeuts, the Mystics of the mediaeval ages, and some of the seers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cherished similar opinions concerning the origin of soul, and its probationary experiences.

In this category of testimony we cannot exclude the witness of those, who, as spirits themselves, freed from the materialistic shadows which obscure our vision and darken our intuitions, must be more qualified than we are to disclose the realities of past and future states of spiritual being.

Amongst all the latter-day revelations claiming to originate with the enfranchised souls of those who had once lived on earth, none come to mortals with more untrammelled freedom from human intervention, than the revelations of Kerner's Seeress, Madame Hauffe, commonly called "The Seeress of Prevorst," and the Somnambules of Alphonse Cahagnet, a working man of Paris, once a materialist; a mere curious experimenter in the outset, with the modern marvel of animal magnetism, but one who, as an impartial and intelligent interpreter of unlooked for revelations received through the magnetic sleep, constitutes one of the best and least questionable of the witnesses for spiritual truth and revelation in the nineteenth century.

About the year 1846 or '7, Mons. Cahagnet, having become very familiar with somnambulistic revelations from the world of spirits, and enjoying the privilege of this communion through several of the most remarkable and lucid subjects that the age afforded, received a number of communications affirming the fact of the soul's existence anterior to its appearance upon earth. Whilst denying emphatically any belief in the doctrines of the Re-incarnationists, and declaring against it in the most positive terms, the communicating spirits uniformly alleged that, when freed from the trammels of matter, they all remembered having lived in an anterior state of purity and innocence as spirits; that they perceived how truly and wisely their earthly lives were designed for probationary purposes, and meant to impart vigor and knowledge to the soul; but that once undergone, it was never again repeated, and the return of the soul to its former spiritual state was never interrupted by re-incarnations on earth. These spirits, too, alleged that the sphere of eternity afforded the souls of evil or unprogressed men all the opportunities necessary to purify them from sin and its effects, through innumerable stages of progress.

A witness so unexpected as these spirits afford, and revelations so full of evidence of their genuine character, cannot be dismissed without a few examples of their style of teaching.

A spirit communicating with the ecstatic Bruno, says: "We are born and die but once; when we are in heaven, it is for eternity."

Q. "Do we recollect our earthly existence?" A. "Yes, and our anterior one also." Q. "What anterior existence?" A. "Before appearing on earth, man lived in a spiritual world similar to the one in which he lives on quitting earth. Each awaits his turn in this world to appear on earth, an appearance necessary, a life of trials none can escape."

Through the best of all, Mons. Cahagnet's Lucides, Adele, in an interview with the spirit of the illustrious Swedenborg, these words were given: "The life anterior which we have all passed through, was, so to speak, a life of nothingness, of childbirth, of happiness like that which we enjoy on our exit from the earth; but this happiness cannot be comprehended, because it is not accompanied with sensations to prove its sweet reality, therefore God has deemed fit that we should pass through these successive lives, the first, on the globe of which I speak to you - a life unknown, of beatitude, devoid of sensation - the second, the one you enjoy, a life of action, sensation - a painful life placed between the two, to demonstrate through its contrast the sweetness of the third - the life of good and evil, without which we should not be able to appreciate the happy state reserved for us." ... Many more spirits communicating through different media confirmed these opinions and elaborated upon their truth and reasonableness, but the limitation of our space forbids further extracts.

In one of the principal cites of Hindostan, there resides, in the very focus of religious and political conservatism, a noble Hindoo, whose official rank and standing is by no means commensurate with his extreme poverty. Bound by the latter restriction and a careful observance of the forms and ceremonials which belong to his nation, he is compelled to hide in the depths of his highly spiritualized and intellectual nature the extraordinary revelations that have been made to him from invisible authors through the mediumship of his little niece, a child of some twelve years old. In the presence of this little one, whose quires of blank paper are rapidly filled up by no visible hands and without even the ordinary appliances of pens, pencils or ink.

It is enough to lay the blank sheets on a tripod, carefully screened from the direct rays of light, but still dimly visible to the eyes of attentive observers. The child sits on the ground and lays her head on the tripod, embracing its supports with her little arms. In this attitude she most commonly sleeps for an hour, during which time the sheets lying on the tripod are filled up with exquisitely formed characters in the ancient Sanscrit. Over four volumes of these writings have been thus produced and that in something less than a period of three years.

Questions are often laid in simple Hindostanee on the tripod, when information is sought by the family of the Hindoo, and the responses are always found embodied in some portions of the next writings received.

In answer to several questions concerning the origin of Soul and the doctrine of its transmigration through the forms of animals, one of the Sanscrit writings contained the following sentences:

"That the Soul is an emanation from Deity, and in its original essence is all purity, truth, and wisdom, is an axiom which the disembodied learn, when the powers of memory are sufficiently awakened to perceive the states of existence anterior to mortal birth. In the Paradises of purity and love, souls spring up like blossoms, in the all Father's garden of immortal beauty. It is the tendency of that Divine nature, whose chief attributes are Love and Wisdom, Heat and Light, to repeat itself eternally, and mirror forth its own perfections in scintillations from itself. These sparks of heavenly fire become souls, and as the effect must share in the nature of the cause, the fire which warms into life also illuminates into light, hence the soul emanations from the Divine are all love and heat, whilst the illumination of light, which streams ever from the great central Sun of being, irradiates all souls with corresponding beams of light. Born of love, which corresponds to Divine heat and warmth, and irradiated with Light, which is Divine wisdom and truth, the first and most powerful soul emanations repeated the action of their Supreme Originator, gave off emanations from their own being, some higher, some lower, the highest tending upward into spiritual essences, the lowest forming particled matter. These denser emanations, following out the creative law, aggregated into suns, satellites, worlds, and each repeating the story of creation, suns gave birth to systems, and every member of a system became a theatre of subordinate states of spiritual or material existence.

"Thus do ideas descend into forms, and forms ascend into ideas. Thus is the growth, development, and progress of creation endless, and thus must spirit originate and ever create worlds of matter, for the purposes of its own progressive unfoldment.

"Will the mighty march of creation never cease? Will the cable anchored in the heart of the great mystery, Deity, stretch out forever?

"'Forever!' shout the blazing suns, leaping on in the fiery orbits of their shining life, and trailing in their glittering pathway ten thousand satellites and meteoric sparks, whirling, flashing in their jeweled crowns, all embryonic germs of new, young worlds that shall be." ...

"Earths that have attained to the capacity to support organic life, necessarily attract it. Earths demand it. Heaven supplies it. From whence? As the earths groan for the lordship of superior beings to rule over them, the spirits, in their distant Edens, hear the whispers of the tempting serpent, the animal principle, the urgent intellect, which appealing to the blest souls in their distant paradises, fill them with indescribable longings for change, for broader vistas of knowledge, for mightier powers; they would be as the gods, and know good and evil; and in this urgent appeal of the earths for man, and this involuntary yearning of the spirit for intellectual knowledge, the union is effected between the two, and the spirit becomes precipitated into the realms of matter to undergo a pilgrimage through the probationary states of earth, and only to regain its paradise again by the fulfillment of that pilgrimage.

"When spirits lived as such, in paradise, emanations from a spiritual Deific source, they knew no sex, nor reproduced their kind .... When they fell, and the earth, like magnetic tractors drew them within the vortex of its grosser elements, they became what the earths compelled them to be. In the earlier ages of these growing worlds, the conditions of life were rude and violent, hence the creatures on them partook of their nature. Then, too, first obtained the nature of sex, and the law of generation. To people these earths, man, like the other living creatures, must reproduce his kind. All things in matter are male and female; minerals, plants, animals, and men. Spirit, the creative energy, is the masculine principle that creates; nature the passive recipient, is that which germinates; hence creation. Men must obey the law; hence sex and generation." ....

"Man lives on many earths before he reaches this. Myriads of worlds swarm in space where the soul in rudimental states performs its pilgrimages ere he reaches the large and shining planet named the Earth, the glorious function of which is to confer self-consciousness. At this point only is he man; at every other stage of his vast wild journey he is but an embryonic being - a fleeting, temporary shape of matter - a creature in which a part, but only a part, of the high imprisoned soul shines forth; a rudimental shape with rudimental functions, ever living, dying, sustaining a fleeting, spiritual existence, as rudimental as the material shape from whence it emerged; a butterfly springing up from the chrysolitic shell, but ever as it onward rushes, in new births, new deaths, new incarnations, anon to die and live again, but still stretch upward, still strive onward, still rush on the giddy, dreadful, toilsome, rugged path, until it awakens once more - once more to live and be a material shape, a thing of dust, a creature of flesh and blood, but now - a man.

"It is from the dim memory that the soul retains, first of its original brightness and fall, next of its countless migrations through the various undertones of being that antedate its appearance on this earth as a man, that the belief in the doctrine of the metempsychosis (transmigration of souls through the animal kingdom) has arisen.

"Yet it is a sin against divine truth to believe that the exalted soul that has once reached the dignity and upright stature of manhood should, or could, retrograde into the bodies of creeping things, or crouching animals - Not so, not so!"

In the fleeting images which antecedent states leave on the spiritual brain, in the half-effaced and half-imperfect perceptions of existence which each new stage of progress and each successive journey through various lower earths leave, like an unquiet, ill-remembered dream on the spirit's consciousness, the past becomes confused with the present, and something of what we have been imposes its shadow across the path of the future, as a dim possibility of what we may be.

"After the soul's birth into humanity, it acquires self-consciousness, knowledge of its own individuality, and closing up forever its career of material transformations, with the death of the mortal body, it gravitates on to a fresh series of existences in purely spiritual realms of being. Here the farther purifications of the soul commence anew; commence with that sublime attribute of self-knowledge which enables even the wickedest spirit to enjoy and profit by the change, for memory supplies him with lessons which urge him to struggle forward into conquest over sin, and prophetic sight stimulates him to aspire until he shall attain, by well-directed effort, the sublime heights of purity and goodness from which he fell, to become a mortal pilgrim."

The triumphant souls who enter Heaven by effort are God's ministering angels. Angels of power, wisdom, strength and beauty. The dwellers in the primal states of Eden are only Spirits. The first are God-men - heavenly men - strong and mighty Powers, Thrones, Dominions, World-Builders, glorious hierarchies of Sun-bright Souls who nevermore can fall. Spirits are but the breath, the spark, the shadow of a God; Angels are Gods in person .... During the various transitional states of the soul in passing through the myriad of forms and myriads of earths whereon their probations are outwrought, the changes are all effected by a process analogous to human death - during the period that subsists ere the soul, expelled from one material shape enters another, the drifting spirit, still enveloped by the magnetic aural body which binds it to the realm of matter, becomes for its short term of intermediate spiritual existence an Elementary Spirit."