In the same essay, another Chinese story is translated, and to the same effect: “I knew a man,” says the author, “who during his life had killed many living beings, and was at last struck with an apoplexy. The sorrows in store for his sin-laden soul pained me to the heart; I visited him, and exhorted him to call on the Amita; but he obstinately refused. His illness clouded his understanding; in consequence of his misdeeds he had become hardened. What was before such a man when once his eyes were closed? In this life the night followeth the day, and the winter followeth the summer; that, all men are aware of. But that life is followed by death, no man will consider. Oh, what blindness and obduracy is this!” (p. 93).

These two instances of Chinese literature hardly strengthen the usual charge of irreligion and total materialism brought against the nation. The first little mystical story is full of spiritual charm, and would grace any Christian religious book. The second is as worthy of praise, and we have but to replace “Amita” with “Jesus” to have a highly orthodox tale, as regards religious sentiments and code of philosophical morality. The following instance is still more striking, and we quote it for the benefit of Christian revivalists:

“Hoang-ta-tie, of T’anchen, who lived under the Sung, followed the craft of a blacksmith. Whenever he was at his work he used to call, without intermission, on the name of Amita Buddha. One day he handed to his neighbors the following verses of his own composition to be spread about:—

“Thereupon he died. But his verses spread all over Honan, and many learned to call upon Buddha.”[896]

To deny to the Chinese or any people of Asia, whether Central, Upper, or Lower, the possession of any knowledge, or even perception of spiritual things, is perfectly ridiculous. From one end to the other the country is full of mystics, religious philosophers, Buddhist saints, and magicians. Belief in a spiritual world, full of invisible beings who, on certain occasions, appear to mortals objectively, is universal. “According to the belief of the nations of Central Asia,” remarks I. J. Schmidt, “the earth and its interior, as well as the encompassing atmosphere, are filled with spiritual beings, which exercise an influence, partly beneficent, partly malignant, on the whole of organic and inorganic nature.... Especially are deserts and other wild or uninhabited tracts, or regions in which the influences of nature are displayed on a gigantic and terrible scale, regarded as the chief abode or rendezvous of evil spirits. And hence the steppes of Turan, and in particular the great sandy Desert of Gobi have been looked on as the dwelling-place of malignant beings, from days of hoary antiquity.”

Marco Polo—as a matter of course—mentions more than once in his curious book of Travels, these tricky nature-spirits of the deserts. For centuries, and especially in the last one, had his strange stories been completely rejected. No one would believe him when he said he had witnessed, time and again, with his own eyes, the most wonderful feats of magic performed by the subjects of Kublai-Khan and adepts of other countries. On his death-bed Marco was strongly urged to retract his alleged “falsehoods;” but he solemnly swore to the truth of what he said, adding that “he had not told one-half of what he had really seen!” There is now no doubt that he spoke the truth, since Marsden’s edition, and that of Colonel Yule have appeared. The public is especially beholden to the latter for bringing forward so many authorities corroborative of Marco’s testimony, and explaining some of the phenomena in the usual way, for he makes it plain beyond question that the great traveller was not only a veracious but an exceedingly observant writer. Warmly defending his author, the conscientious editor, after enumerating more than one hitherto controverted and even rejected point in the Venetian’s Travels, concludes by saying: “Nay, the last two years have thrown a promise of light even on what seemed the wildest of Marco’s stories, and the bones of a veritable Ruc from New Zealand lie on the table of Professor Owen’s cabinet!”[897]

The monstrous bird of the Arabian Nights, or “Arabian Mythology,” as Webster calls the Ruc (or Roc), having been identified, the next thing in order is to discover and recognize that Aladdin’s magical lamp has also certain claims to reality.

Describing his passage through the great desert of Lop, Marco Polo speaks of a marvellous thing, “which is that, when travellers are on the move by night ... they will hear spirits talking. Sometimes the spirits will call him by name ... even in the daytime one hears these spirits talking. And sometimes you shall hear the sound of a variety of musical instruments, and still more commonly the sound of drums.”[898]

In his notes, the translator quotes the Chinese historian, Matwanlin, who corroborates the same. “During the passage of this wilderness you hear sounds,” says Matwanlin, “sometimes of singing, sometimes of wailing; and it has often happened that travellers going aside to see what those sounds might be, have strayed from their course and been entirely lost; for they were voices of spirits and goblins.”[899] “These goblins are not peculiar to the Gobi,” adds the editor, “though that appears to have been their most favored haunt. The awe of the vast and solitary desert raises them in all similar localities.”

Colonel Yule would have done well to consider the possibility of serious consequences arising from the acceptance of his theory. If we admit that the weird cries of the Gobi are due to the awe inspired “by the vast and solitary desert,” why should the goblins of the Gadarenes (Luke viii. 29) be entitled to any better consideration? and why may not Jesus have been self-deceived as to his objective tempter during the forty days’ trial in the “wilderness?” We are quite ready to receive or reject the theory enunciated by Colonel Yule, but shall insist upon its impartial application to all cases. Pliny speaks of the phantoms that appear and vanish in the deserts of Africa;[900] Æthicus, the early Christian cosmographer, mentions, though incredulous, the stories that were told of the voices of singers and revellers in the desert; and “Mas’udi tells of the ghûls, which in the deserts appear to travellers by night and in lonely hours;” and also of “Apollonius of Tyana and his companions, who, in a desert near the Indus by moonlight, saw an empusa or ghûl taking many forms.... They revile it, and it goes off uttering shrill cries.”[901] And Ibn Batuta relates a like legend of the Western Sahara: “If the messenger be solitary, the demons sport with him and fascinate him, so that he strays from his course and perishes.”[902] Now if all these matters are capable of a “rational explanation;” and we do not doubt it as regards most of these cases, then, the Bible-devils of the wilderness deserve no more consideration, but should have the same rule applied to them. They, too, are creatures of terror, imagination, and superstition; hence, the narratives of the Bible must be false; and if one single verse is false, then a cloud is thrown upon the title of all the rest, to be considered divine revelation. Once admit this, and this collection of canonical documents is at least as amenable to criticism as any other book of stories.[903]

There are many spots in the world where the strangest phenomena have resulted from what was later ascertained to be natural physical causes. In Southern California there are certain places on the sea-shore where the sand when disturbed produces a loud musical ring. It is known as the “musical sand,” and the phenomenon is supposed to be of an electrical nature. “The sound of musical instruments, chiefly of drums, is a phenomenon of another class, and is really produced in certain situations among sandhills when the sand is disturbed,” says the editor of Marco Polo. “A very striking account of a phenomenon of this kind, regarded as supernatural, is given by Friar Odoric, whose experience I have traced to the Reg Ruwán or flowing sand north of Kabul. Besides this celebrated example ... I have noted that equally well-known one of the Jibal Nakics, or ‘Hill of the Bell’ in the Sinai desert; ... Gibal-ul-Thabúl, or hill of the drums.... A Chinese narrative of the tenth century mentions the phenomenon as known near Kwachau, on the eastern border of the Lop desert, under the name of “the singing sands.”[904]

That all these are natural phenomena, no one can doubt. But what of the questions and answers, plainly and audibly given and received? What of conversations held between certain travellers and the invisible spirits, or unknown beings, that sometimes appear to whole caravans in tangible form? If so many millions believe in the possibility that spirits may clothe themselves with material bodies, behind the curtain of a “medium,” and appear to the circle, why should they reject the same possibility for the elemental spirits of the deserts? This is the “to be, or not to be” of Hamlet. If “spirits” can do all that Spiritualists claim for them, why can they not appear equally to the traveller in the wildernesses and solitudes? A recent scientific article in a Russian journal attributes such “spirit-voices,” in the great Gobi desert, to the echo. A very reasonable explanation, if it can only be demonstrated that these voices simply repeat what has been previously uttered by a living person. But when the “superstitious” traveller gets intelligent answers to his questions, this Gobi echo at once shows a very near relationship with the famous echo of the Théâtre Porte St. Martin at Paris. “How do you do, sir?” shouts one of the actors in the play. “Very poorly, my son; thank you. I am getting old, very ... very old!” politely answers the echo!

What incredulous merriment must the superstitious and absurd narratives of Marco Polo, concerning the “supernatural” gifts of certain shark and wild-beast charmers of India, whom he terms Abraiaman, have excited for long centuries. Describing the pearl-fishery of Ceylon, as it was in his time, he says that the merchants are “obliged also to pay those men who charm the great fishes—to prevent them from injuring the divers whilst engaged in seeking pearls under water—one-twentieth part of all that they take. These fish-charmers are termed Abraiaman (Brahman?), and their charm holds good for that day only, for at night they dissolve the charm, so that the fishes can work mischief at their will. These Abraiaman know also how to charm beasts and birds, and every living thing.”

And this is what we find in the explanatory notes of Colonel Yule, in relation to this degrading Asiatic “superstition:” “Marco’s account of the pearl-fishery is still substantially correct.... At the diamond mines of the northern Circars, Brahmans are employed in the analogous office of propitiating the tutelary genii. The shark-charmers are called in Tamil, Kadal-Katti, “sea-binders,” and in Hindustani, Hai-banda, or “shark-binders.” At Aripo they belong to one family, supposed to have the monopoly of the charm.[905] The chief operator is (or was, not many years ago) paid by the government, and he also received ten oysters from each boat daily during the fishery. Tennent, on his visit, found the incumbent of the office to be a Roman Catholic Christian (?), but that did not seem to affect the exercise of the validity of his functions. It is remarkable that not more than one authenticated accident from sharks had taken place during the whole period of the British occupation.”[906]

Two items of fact in the above paragraph are worthy of being placed in juxtaposition. 1. The British authorities pay professional shark-charmers a stipend to exercise their art; and, 2, only one life has been lost since the execution of the contract. (We have yet to learn whether the loss of this one life did not occur under the Roman Catholic sorcerer.) Is it pretended that the salary is paid as a concession to a degrading native superstition? Very well; but how about the sharks? Are they receiving salaries, also, from the British authorities out of the Secret Service Fund? Every person who has visited Ceylon must know that the waters of the pearl coast swarm with sharks of the most voracious kind, and that it is even dangerous to bathe, let alone to dive for oysters. We might go further, if we chose, and give the names of British officials of the highest rank in the Indian service, who, after resorting to native “magicians” and “sorcerers,” to assist them in recovering things lost, or in unravelling vexatious mysteries of one kind or another, and being successful, and at the time secretly expressing their gratitude, have gone away, and shown their innate cowardice before the world’s Areopagus, by publicly denying the truth of magic, and leading the jest against Hindu “superstition.”

Not many years ago, one of the worst of superstitions scientists held to be that of believing that the murderer’s portrait remained impressed on the eye of the murdered person, and that the former could be easily recognized by examining carefully the retina. The “superstition” asserted that the likeness could be made still more striking by subjecting the murdered man to certain old women’s fumigations, and the like gossip. And now an American newspaper, of March 26, 1877, says: “A number of years ago attention was attracted to a theory which insisted that the last effort of vision materialized itself and remained as an object imprinted on the retina of the eye after death. This has been proved a fact by an experiment tried in the presence of Dr. Gamgee, F.R.S., of Birmingham, England, and Prof. Bunsen, the subject being a living rabbit. The means taken to prove the merits of the question were most simple, the eyes being placed near an opening in a shutter, and retaining the shape of the same after the animal had been deprived of life.”

If, from the regions of idolatry, ignorance, and superstition, as India is termed by some missionaries, we turn to the so-called centre of civilization—Paris, we find the same principles of magic exemplified there under the name of occult Spiritualism. The Honorable John L. O’Sullivan, Ex-Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States to Portugal, has kindly furnished us with the strange particulars of a semi-magical séance which he recently attended with several other eminent men, at Paris. Having his permission to that effect, we print his letter in full.

In this interesting case simple Spiritualism has transcended its routine and encroached upon the limits of magic. The features of mediumship are there, in the double life led by the sensitive Madame Y., in which she passes an existence totally distinct from the normal one, and by reason of the subordination of her individuality to a foreign will, becomes the permutation of a priestess of Egypt; and in the personation of the spirit of Beethoven, and in the unconscious and cataleptic state into which she falls. On the other hand, the will-power exercised by Dr. X. upon his sensitive, the tracing of the mystic circle, the evocations, the materialization of the desired flower, the seclusion and education of Madame Y., the employment of the wand and its form, the creation and use of the serpents, the evident control of the astral forces—all these pertain to magic. Such experiments are of interest and value to science, but liable to abuse in the hands of a less conscientious practitioner than the eminent gentleman designated as Dr. X. A true Oriental kabalist would not recommend their duplication.

Spheres unknown below our feet; spheres still more unknown and still more unexplored above us; between the two a handful of moles, blind to God’s great light, and deaf to the whispers of the invisible world, boasting that they lead mankind. Where? Onward, they claim; but we have a right to doubt it. The greatest of our physiologists, when placed side by side with a Hindu fakir, who knows neither how to read nor write, will very soon find himself feeling as foolish as a school-boy who has neglected to learn his lesson. It is not by vivisecting living animals that a physiologist will assure himself of the existence of man’s soul, nor on the blade of the knife can he extract it from a human body. “What sane man,” inquires Sergeant Cox, the President of the London Psychological Society, “what sane man who knows nothing of magnetism or physiology, who had never witnessed an experiment nor learned its principles, would proclaim himself a fool by denying its facts and denouncing its theory?” The truthful answer to this would be, “two-thirds of our modern-day scientists.” The impertinence, if truth can ever be impertinent, must be laid at the door of him who uttered it—a scientist of the number of those few who are brave and honest enough to utter wholesome truths, however disagreeable. And there is no mistaking the real meaning of the imputation, for immediately after the irreverent inquiry, the learned lecturer remarks as pointedly: “The chemist takes his electricity from the electrician, the physiologist looks to the geologist for his geology—each would deem it an impertinence in the other if he were to pronounce judgment in the branch of knowledge not his own. Strange it is, but true as strange, that this rational rule is wholly set at naught in the treatment of psychology. Physical scientists deem themselves competent to pronounce a dogmatic judgment upon psychology and all that appertains to it, without having witnessed any of its phenomena, and in entire ignorance of its principles and practice.”[907]

We sincerely hope that the two eminent biologists, Mr. Mendeleyeff, of St. Petersburg, and Mr. Ray Lankester, of London fame, will bear themselves under the above as unflinchingly as their living victims do when palpitating under their dissecting knives.

For a belief to have become universal, it must have been founded on an immense accumulation of facts, tending to strengthen it, from one generation to another. At the head of all such beliefs stands magic, or, if one would prefer—occult psychology. Who, of those who appreciate its tremendous powers even from its feeble, half-paralyzed effects in our civilized countries, would dare disbelieve in our days the assertions of Porphyry and Proclus, that even inanimate objects, such as statues of gods, could be made to move and exhibit a factitious life for a few moments? Who can deny the allegation? Is it those who testify daily over their own signatures that they have seen tables and chairs move and walk, and pencils write, without contact? Diogenes Laërtius tells us of a certain philosopher, Stilpo, who was exiled from Athens by the Areopagus, for having dared to deny publicly that the Minerva of Pheidias was anything else than a block of marble. But our own age, after having mimicked the ancients in everything possible, even to their very names, such as “senates,” “prefects,” and “consuls,” etc.; and after admitting that Napoleon the Great conquered three-fourths of Europe by applying the principles of war taught by the Cæsars and the Alexanders, knows so much better than its preceptors about psychology, that it would vote every believer in “animated tables” into Bedlam.

Be this as it may, the religion of the ancients is the religion of the future. A few centuries more, and there will linger no sectarian beliefs in either of the great religions of humanity. Brahmanism and Buddhism, Christianity and Mahometanism will all disappear before the mighty rush of facts. “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh,” writes the prophet Joel. “Verily I say unto you ... greater works than these shall you do,” promises Jesus. But this can only come to pass when the world returns to the grand religion of the past; the knowledge of those majestic systems which preceded, by far, Brahmanism, and even the primitive monotheism of the ancient Chaldeans. Meanwhile, we must remember the direct effects of the revealed mystery. The only means by which the wise priests of old could impress upon the grosser senses of the multitudes the idea of the Omnipotency of the Creative will or First Cause; namely, the divine animation of inert matter, the soul infused into it by the potential will of man, the microcosmic image of the great Architect, and the transportation of ponderous objects through space and material obstacles.

Why should the pious Roman Catholic turn away in disgust at the “heathen” practices of the Hindu Tamil, for instance? We have witnessed the miracle of San Gennaro in good old Naples, and we have seen the same in Nârgercoil, in India. Where is the difference? The coagulated blood of the Catholic saint is made to boil and fume in its crystal bottle, to the gratification of the lazzaroni; and from its jewelled shrine the martyr’s idol beams radiant smiles and blessings at the Christian congregation. On the other hand, a ball of clay filled with water, is stuffed into the open breast of the god Sûran; and while the padre shakes his bottle and produces his “miracle” of blood, the Hindu priest plunges an arrow into the god’s breast, and produces his “miracle,” for the blood gushes forth in streams, and the water is changed into blood. Both Christians and Hindus fall in raptures at the sight of such a miracle. So far, we do not see the slightest difference. But can it be that the Pagan learned the trick from San Gennaro.

“Know, O, Asclepius,” says Hermes, “that as the Highest One is the father of the celestial gods, so is man the artisan of the gods who reside in the temples, and who delight in the society of mortals. Faithful to its origin and nature, humanity perseveres in this imitation of the divine powers; and, if the Father Creator has made in His image the eternal gods, mankind in its turn makes its gods in its own image.” “And, dost thou speak of statues of gods; O, Trismegistus?” “Verily, I do, Asclepius, and however great thy defiance, perceivest thou not that these statues are endowed with reason, that they are animated with a soul, and that they can operate the greatest prodigies. How can we reject the evidence, when we find these gods possessing the gift of predicting the future, which they are compelled to tell, when forced to it by magic spells, as through the lips of the divines and their visions?... It is the marvel of marvels that man could have invented and created gods.... True, the faith of our ancestors has erred, and in their pride they fell into error as to the precise essence of these gods ... but they have still found out that art themselves. Powerless to create soul and spirit, they evoke the souls of angels and demons in order to introduce them into the consecrated statues; and so make them preside at their Mysteries, by communicating to idols their own faculty to do good as well as evil.”

It is not antiquity alone which is full of evidence that the statues and idols of the gods at times exhibited intelligence and locomotive powers. Full in the nineteenth century, we see the papers recording the capers played by the statue of the Madonna of Lourdes. This gracious lady, the French Notre Dame, runs away several times to the woods adjoining her usual residence, the parish church. The sexton is obliged to hunt after the runaway, and bring her home more than once.[908] After this begins a series of “miracles,” healing, prophesying, letter-dropping from on high, and what not. These “miracles” are implicitly accepted by millions and millions of Roman Catholics; numbers of these belonging to the most intelligent and educated classes. Why, then, should we disbelieve in testimony of precisely the same character, given as to contemporary phenomena of the same kind, by the most accredited and esteemed historians—by Titus Livy, for instance? “Juno, would you please abandon the walls of Veii, and change this abode for that of Rome?” inquires of the goddess a Roman soldier, after the conquest of that city. Juno consents, and nodding her head in token of acquiescence, her statue answers: “Yes, I will.” Furthermore, upon their carrying off the figure, it seems to instantly “lose its immense weight,” adds the historian, and the statue seems rather to follow them than otherwise.[909]

With naïveté, and a faith bordering on the sublime, des Mousseaux, bravely rushes into the dangerous parallels, and gives a number of instances of Christian as well as “heathen” miracles of that kind. He prints a list of such walking statues of saints and Madonnas, who lose their weight, and move about as so many living men and women; and presents unimpeachable evidence of the same, from classical authors, who described their miracles.[910] He has but one thought, one anxious and all-overpowering desire—to prove to his readers that magic does exist, and that Christianity beats it flat. Not that the miracles of the latter are either more numerous, or more extraordinary, or suggestive than those of the Pagans. Not at all; and he is a fair historian as to facts and evidence. But, it is his arguments and reflections that are priceless: one kind of miracle is produced by God, the other by the Devil; he drags down the Deity and placing Him face to face with Satan, allows the arch-enemy to beat the Creator by long odds. Not a word of solid, evident proof to show the substantial difference between the two kinds of wonders.

Would we inquire the reason why he traces in one the hand of God and in the other the horn and hoof of the Devil? Listen to the answer: “The Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolical Church declares the miracles wrought by her faithful sons produced by the will of God; and all others the work of the spirits of Hell.” Very well, but on what ground? We are shown an endless list of holy writers; of saints who fought during their whole lives with the fiends; and of fathers whose word and authority are accepted as “word of God” by the same Church. “Your idols, your consecrated statues are the abode of demons,” exclaims St. Cyprian. “Yes, it is these spirits who inspire your divines, who animate the bowels of your victims, who govern the flight of birds, and who, mixing incessantly falsehood with truth, render oracles, and ... operate prodigies, their object being to bring you invincibly to their worship.”[911]

Fanaticism in religion, fanaticism in science, or fanaticism in any other question becomes a hobby, and cannot but blind our senses. It will ever be useless to argue with a fanatic. And here we cannot help admiring once more the profound knowledge of human nature which dictated to Mr. Sergeant Cox the following words, delivered in the same address as before alluded to: “There is no more fatal fallacy than that the truth will prevail by its own force, that it has only to be seen to be embraced. In fact the desire for the actual truth exists in very few minds, and the capacity to discern it in fewer still. When men say that they are seeking the truth, they mean that they are looking for evidence to support some prejudice or prepossession. Their beliefs are moulded to their wishes. They see all, and more than all, that seems to tell for that which they desire; they are blind as bats to whatever tells against them. The scientists are no more exempt from this common failing than are others.”

We know that from the remotest ages there has existed a mysterious, awful science, under the name of theopœa. This science taught the art of endowing the various symbols of gods with temporary life and intelligence. Statues and blocks of inert matter became animated under the potential will of the hierophant. The fire stolen by Prometheus had fallen down in the struggle to earth; it embraced the lower regions of the sky, and settled in the waves of the universal ether as the potential Akâsa of the Hindu rites. We breathe and imbibe it into our organic system with every mouthful of fresh air. Our organism is full of it from the instant of our birth. But it becomes potential only under the influx of WILL and SPIRIT.

Left to itself, this life-principle will blindly follow the laws of nature; and, according to conditions, will produce health and an exuberance of life, or cause death and dissolution. But, guided by the will of the adept, it becomes obedient; its currents restore the equilibrium in organic bodies, they fill the waste, and produce physical and psychological miracles, well-known to mesmerizers. Infused in inorganic and inert matter, they create an appearance of life, hence motion. If to that life an individual intelligence, a personality, is wanting, then the operator must either send his scin-lecca, his own astral spirit, to animate it; or use his power over the region of nature-spirits to force one of them to infuse his entity into the marble, wood, or metal; or, again, be helped by human spirits. But the latter—except the vicious, earth-bound class[912]—will not infuse their essence into these inanimate objects. They leave the lower kinds to produce the similitude of life and animation, and only send their influence through the intervening spheres like a ray of divine light, when the so-called “miracle” is required for a good purpose. The condition—and this is a law in spiritual nature—is purity of motive, purity of the surrounding magnetic atmosphere, personal purity of the operator. Thus is it, that a Pagan “miracle” may be by far holier than a Christian one.

Who that has seen the performance of the fakirs of Southern India, can doubt the existence of theopœa in ancient times? An inveterate skeptic, though more than anxious to attribute every phenomenon to jugglery, still finds himself compelled to testify to facts; and facts that are to be witnessed daily if one chooses. “I dare not,” he says, speaking of Chibh-Chondor, a fakir of Jaffna-patnam, “describe all the exercises which he performed. There are things one dares not say even after having witnessed them, for fear of being charged with having been under an inexplicable hallucination! And yet, ten, nay, twenty times, I saw and saw again the fakir obtain similar results over inert matter.... It was but child’s play for our ‘charmer’ to make the flame of candles which had, by his directions, been placed in the remotest corners of the apartment, pale and become extinguished at will; to cause the furniture to move, even the sofas on which we sat, the doors to open and shut repeatedly: and all this without quitting the mat upon which he sat on the floor.

“Perhaps I will be told that I saw imperfectly. Possibly; but I will say that hundreds and thousands of persons have seen and do see what I have, and things more wonderful; has one of all these discovered the secret, or been able to duplicate these phenomena? And I can never repeat too often that all this does not occur on a stage, supplied with mechanical contrivances for the use of the operator. No, it is a beggar crouched, naked, on the floor, who thus sports with your intelligence, your senses, and all that which we have agreed among ourselves to style the immutable laws of nature, but which he appears to alter at will!

“Does he change its course? ‘No, but he makes it act by using forces which are yet unknown to us,’ say the believers. However that may be, I have found myself twenty times at similar performances in company with the most distinguished men of British India—professors, physicians, officers. Not one of them but thus summarized his impressions upon quitting the drawing-room. ‘This is something terrifying to human intelligence!’ Every time that I saw repeated by a fakir the experiment of reducing serpents to a cataleptic state, a condition in which these animals have all the rigidity of the dry branch of a tree, my thoughts have reverted to the biblical fable (?) which endows Moses and the priests of Pharaoh with the like power.”[913]

Assuredly, the flesh of man, beast, and bird should be as easily endowed with magnetic life-principle as the inert table of a modern medium. Either both wonders are possible and true, or both must fall to the ground, together with the miracles of Apostolic days, and those of the more modern Popish Church. As for vital proofs furnished to us in favor of such possibilities, we might name books enough to fill a whole library. If Sixtus V. cited a formidable array of spirits attached to various talismans, was not his threat of excommunication for all those who practiced the art, uttered merely because he would have the knowledge of this secret confined within the precincts of the Church? How would it do for his “divine” miracles to be studied and successfully reproduced by every man endowed with perseverance, a strong positive magnetic power, and an unflinching will? Recent events at Lourdes (of course, supposing them to have been truthfully reported) prove that the secret is not wholly lost; and if there is no strong magician-mesmerizer concealed under frock and surplice, then the statue of Notre-Dame is moved by the same forces which move every magnetized table at a spiritual seance; and the nature of these “intelligences,” whether they belong to the classes of human, human elementary, or elemental spirits depends on a variety of conditions. With one who knows anything of mesmerism, and at the same time of the charitable spirit of the Roman Catholic Church, it ought not to be difficult to comprehend that the incessant curses of the priests and monks; and the bitter anathemas so freely pronounced by Pius IX.—himself a strong mesmerizer, and believed to be a jetattore (evil eye)—have drawn together legions of elementaries and elementals under the leadership of the disembodied Torquemadas. These are the “angels” who play pranks with the statue of the Queen of Heaven. Any one who accepts the “miracle” and thinks otherwise blasphemes.

Although it would seem as if we had already furnished sufficient proofs that modern science has little or no reason to boast of originality, yet before closing this volume we will adduce a few more to place the matter beyond doubt. We have but to recapitulate, as briefly as possible, the several claims to new philosophies and discoveries, the announcement of which has made the world open its eyes so wide within these last two centuries. We have pointed to the achievements in arts, sciences, and philosophy of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Chaldeans, and Assyrians; we will now quote from an author who has passed long years in India studying their philosophy. In the famous and recent work of Christna et le Christ, we find the following tabulation:

“Philosophy.—The ancient Hindus have created from the foundation the two systems of spiritualism and materialism, of metaphysical philosophy and of positive philosophy. The first taught in the Vedantic school, whose founder was Vyasa; the second taught in the Sankya school, whose founder was Kapila.

“Astronomical Science.—They fixed the calendar, invented the zodiac, calculated the precession of the equinoxes, discovered the general laws of the movements, observed and predicted the eclipses.

“Mathematics.—They invented the decimal system, algebra, the differential, integral, and infinitesimal calculi. They also discovered geometry and trigonometry, and in these two sciences they constructed and proved theorems which were only discovered in Europe as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was the Brahmans in fact who first deduced the superficial measure of a triangle from the calculation of its three sides, and calculated the relations of the circumference to the diameter. Furthermore, we must restore to them the square of the hypotenuse and the table so improperly called Pythagorean, which we find engraved on the gôparama of the majority of great pagodas.

“Physics.—They established the principle which is still our own to-day, that the universe is a harmonious whole, subject to laws which may be determined by observation and experiment. They discovered hydrostatics; and the famous proposition that every body plunged in water loses of its own weight a weight equal to the volume which it displaces, is only a loan made by the Brahmans to the famous Greek architect, Archimedes. The physicists of the pagodas calculated the velocity of light, fixed in a positive manner the laws which it follows in its reflection. And finally, it is beyond doubt, from the calculations of Surya-Sidhenta, that they knew and calculated the force of steam.

“Chemistry.—They knew the composition of water, and formulated for gases the famous law, which we know only from yesterday, that the volumes of gas are in inverse ratio to the pressures that they support. They knew how to prepare sulphuric, nitric, and muriatic acids; the oxides of copper, iron, lead, tin, and zinc; the sulphurets of iron, copper, mercury, antimony, and arsenic; the sulphates of zinc and iron; the carbonates of iron, lead, and soda; nitrate of silver; and powder.

“Medicine.—Their knowledge was truly astonishing. In Tcharaka and Sousruta, the two princes of Hindu medicine, is laid down the system which Hippocrates appropriated later. Sousruta notably enunciates the principles of preventive medicine or hygiene, which he places much above curative medicine—too often, according to him, empyrical. Are we more advanced to-day? It is not without interest to remark that the Arab physicians, who enjoyed a merited celebrity in the middle ages—Averroès among others—constantly spoke of the Hindu physicians, and regarded them as the initiators of the Greeks and themselves.

“Pharmacology.—They knew all the simples, their properties, their use, and upon this point have not yet ceased to give lessons to Europe. Quite recently we have received from them the treatment of asthma, with the datura.

“Surgery.—In this they are not less remarkable. They made the operation for the stone, succeeded admirably in the operation for cataract, and the extraction of the fœtus, of which all the unusual or dangerous cases are described by Tcharaka with an extraordinary scientific accuracy.

“Grammar.—They formed the most marvellous language in the world—the Sanscrit—which gave birth to the greater part of the idioms of the Orient, and of Indo-European countries.

“Poetry.—They have treated all the styles, and shown themselves supreme masters in all. Sakuntala, Avrita, the Hindu Phædra, Saranga, and a thousand other dramas have their superiors neither in Sophocles nor Euripides, in Corneille nor Shakspere. Their descriptive poetry has never been equalled. One must read, in the Megadata, “The Plaint of an Exile,” who implores a passing cloud to carry his remembrances to his cottage, his relatives and friends, whom he will never see more, to form an idea of the splendor to which this style has been carried in India. Their fables have been copied by all modern and ancient peoples, who have not even given themselves the trouble to color differently the subject of these little dramas.

“Music.—They invented the gamut with its differences of tones and half-tones much before Gui d’ Arezzo. Here is the Hindu scale:

Sa—Ri—Ga—Ma—Pa—Da—Ni—Sa.

“Architecture.—They seem to have exhausted all that the genius of man is capable of conceiving. Domes, inexpressibly bold; tapering cupolas; minarets, with marble lace; Gothic towers; Greek hemicycles; polychrome style—all kinds and all epochs are there, betokening the origin and date of the different colonies, which, in emigrating, carried with them their souvenirs of their native art.”

Such were the results attained by this ancient and imposing Brahmanical civilization. What have we to offer for comparison? Beside such majestic achievements of the past, what can we place that will seem so grandiose and sublime as to warrant our boast of superiority over an ignorant ancestry? Beside the discoverers of geometry and algebra, the constructors of human speech, the parents of philosophy, the primal expounders of religion, the adepts in psychological and physical science, how even the greatest of our biologists and theologians seem dwarfed! Name to us any modern discovery, and we venture to say, that Indian history need not long be searched before the prototype will be found of record. Here we are with the transit of science half accomplished, and all our ideas in process of readjustment to the theories of force-correlation, natural selection, atomic polarity, and evolution. And here, to mock our conceit, our apprehensions, and our despair, we may read what Manu said, perhaps 10,000 years before the birth of Christ:

“The first germ of life was developed by water and heat” (Manu, book i., sloka 8).

“Water ascends toward the sky in vapors; from the sun it descends in rain, from the rain are born the plants, and from the plants, animals” (book iii., sloka 76).

“Each being acquires the qualities of the one which immediately precedes it, in such a manner that the farther a being gets away from the primal atom of its series, the more he is possessed of qualities and perfections” (book i., sloka 20).

“Man will traverse the universe, gradually ascending, and passing through the rocks, the plants, the worms, insects, fish, serpents, tortoises, wild animals, cattle, and higher animals.... Such is the inferior degree” (Ibid.).

“These are the transformations declared, from the plant up to Brahma, which have to take place in his world” (Ibid.).

“The Greek,” says Jacolliot, “is but the Sanscrit. Pheidias and Praxiteles have studied in Asia the chefs-d’œuvre of Daonthia, Ramana, and Aryavosta. Plato disappears before Dgeminy and Veda-Vyasa, whom he literally copies. Aristotle is thrown into the shade by the Pourva-Mimansa and the Outtara-Mimansa, in which one finds all the systems of philosophy which we are now occupied in re-editing, from the Spiritualism of Socrates and his school, the skepticism of Pyrrho, Montaigne, and Kant, down to the positivism of Littré.”

Let those who doubt the exactness of the latter assertion read this phrase, extracted textually from the Outtara-Mimansa, or Vedanta, of Vyasa, who lived at an epoch which the Brahmanical chronology fixes at 10,400 years before our era:

“We can only study phenomena, verify them, and hold them to be relatively true, but nothing in the universe, neither by perception nor by induction, nor by the senses, nor by reasoning, being able to demonstrate the existence of a Supreme Cause, which could, at a fixed point of time, have given birth to the universe, Science has to discuss neither the possibility nor impossibility of this Supreme Cause.”

Thus, gradually but surely, will the whole of antiquity be vindicated. Truth will be carefully sifted from exaggeration; much that is now considered fiction may yet be proved fact, and the “facts and laws” of modern science found to belong to the limbo of exploded myths. When, centuries before our era, the Hindu Bramaheupto affirmed that the starry sphere was immovable, and that the daily rising and setting of stars confirms the motion of the earth upon its axis; and when Aristarchus of Samos, born 267 years B.C., and the Pythagorean philosopher Nicetè, the Syracusan, maintained the same, what was the credit given to their theories until the days of Copernicus and Galileo? And the system of these two princes of science—a system which has revolutionized the whole world—how long will it be allowed to remain as a complete and undisturbed whole? Have we not, at the present moment, in Germany, a learned savant, a Professor Shoëpfer, who, in his public lectures at Berlin, tries to demonstrate, 1, that the earth is immovable; 2, the sun is but a little bigger than it seems; and 3, that Tycho-Brahe was perfectly right and Galileo perfectly wrong?[914] And what was Tycho-Brahe’s theory? Why, that the earth stands immovable in the centre of the universe, and that around it, as around its centre, the whole of the celestial vault gravitates every twenty-four hours; and finally, that the sun and moon, apart from this motion, proceed on curved lines peculiar to themselves, while Mercury, with the rest of the planets, describes an epicycloid.

We certainly have no intention to lose time nor devote space to either combating or supporting this new theory, which suspiciously resembles the old ones of Aristotle and even the Venerable Bede. We will leave the learned army of modern Academicians to “wash their family linen among themselves,” to use an expression of the great Napoleon. But we will, nevertheless, avail ourselves of such a good opportunity as this defection affords to demand once more of science her diploma or patents of infallibility. Alas! are these, then, the results of her boasted progress?

It was hardly more than yesterday when, upon the strength of facts within our own observation, and corroborated by the testimony of a multitude of witnesses, we timidly ventured the assertion that tables, mediums, and Hindu fakirs were occasionally levitated. And when we added that, if such a phenomenon should happen but once in a century, “without a visible mechanical cause, then that rising is a manifestation of a natural law of which our scientists are yet ignorant,” we were called “iconoclastic,” and charged, in our turn, by the newspapers, with ignorance of the law of gravitation. Iconoclastic or not, we never thought of charging science with denying the rotation of the earth on its axis, or its revolution around the sun. Those two lamps, at least, in the beacon of the Academy, we thought would be kept trimmed and burning to the end of time. But, lo! here comes a Berlin professor and crushes our last hopes that Science should prove herself exact in some one particular. The cycle is truly at its lowest point, and a new era is begun. The earth stands still, and Joshua is vindicated!

In days of old—in 1876—the world believed in centrifugal force, and the Newtonian theory, which explained the flattening of the poles by the rotatory motion of the earth around its axis, was orthodox. Upon this hypothesis, the greater portion of the globular mass was believed to gravitate toward the equator; and in its turn the centrifugal force, acting on the mass with its mightiest power, forced this mass to concentrate itself on the equator. Thus is it that the credulous scientists believed the earth to rotate around its axis; for, were it otherwise, there would exist no centrifugal force, and without this force there could be no gravitation toward the equatorial latitudes. It has been one of the accepted proofs of the rotation of the earth, and it is this deduction, with several others, that the Berlin professor declares that, “in common with many other scientists,” he “rejects.”

“Is this not ridiculous, gentlemen,” he concludes, “that we, confiding in what we were taught at school, have accepted the rotation of the earth around its axis as a fact fully demonstrated, while there is nothing at all to prove it, and it cannot be demonstrated? Is it not cause of astonishment that the scientists of the whole educated world, commencing with Copernicus and Kepler, should have begun by accepting such a movement of our planet, and then three and a half centuries later be searching for such proofs? But, alas! though we search, we find none, as was to be expected. All, all is vain!”

And thus it is that at one stroke the world loses its rotation, and the universe is bereaved of its guardians and protectors, the centrifugal and centripetal forces! Nay, ether itself, blown out of space, is but a “fallacy,” a myth born of a bad habit of using empty words; the sun is a pretender to dimensions to which it was never entitled; the stars are twinkling dots, and “were so expressly disposed at considerable distances from one another by the Creator of the universe, probably with the intention that they should simultaneously illumine the vast spaces on the face of our globe” says Dr. Shoëpfer.

And is it so that even three centuries and a half have not sufficed the men of exact science to construct one theory that not a single university professor would dare challenge? If astronomy, the one science built on the adamantine foundation of mathematics, the one of all others deemed as infallible and unassailable as truth itself, can be thus irreverently indicted for false pretences, what have we gained by cheapening Plato to the profit of the Babinets? How, then, do they venture to flout at the humblest observer who, being both honest and intelligent, may say he has seen a mediumistic, or magical phenomenon? And how dare they prescribe the “limits of philosophical inquiry,” to pass beyond which is not lawful? And these quarrelling hypothesists still arraign as ignorant and superstitious those giant intellects of the past, who handled natural forces like world-building Titans, and raised mortality to an eminence where it allied itself with the gods! Strange fate of a century boasting to have elevated exact science to its apex of fame, and now invited to go back and begin its A B C of learning again!

Recapitulating the evidence contained in this work, if we begin with the archaic and unknown ages of the Hermetic Pimander, and come down to 1876, we find that one universal belief in magic has run through all these centuries. We have presented the ideas of Trismegistus in his dialogue with Asclepius; and without mentioning the thousand and one proofs of the prevalence of this belief in the first centuries of Christianity, to achieve our purpose we have but to quote from an ancient and a modern author. The first will be the great philosopher Porphyry, who several thousand years after the days of Hermes, remarks in relation to the prevailing skepticism of his century, the following: “We need not be amazed in seeing the vulgar masses (οἱ πολλοι) perceive in statues merely stone and wood. Thus it is generally with those who, ignorant in letters, find naught in stylæ covered with inscriptions but stone, and in written books naught but the tissue of the papyrus.” And 1,500 years later, we see Mr. Sergeant Cox, in stating the case of the shameful prosecution of a medium by just such a blind materialist, thus expressing his ideas: “Whether the medium is guilty or guiltless ... certain it is that the trial has had the unlooked-for effect of directing the attention of the whole public to the fact that the phenomena are asserted to exist, and by a great number of competent investigators are declared to be true, and of the reality of which every person may, if he pleases, satisfy himself by actual inspection, thus sweeping away, thus and for ever, the dark and debasing doctrines of the materialists.”

Still, in harmony with Porphyry and other theurgists, who affirmed the different natures of the manifesting “spirits” and the personal spirit or will of man, Mr. Sergeant Cox adds, without committing himself any further to a personal decision: “True, there are differences of opinions ... and perhaps ever will be, as to the sources of the power that is exhibited in these phenomena; but whether they are the product of the psychic force of the circle ... or, if spirits of the dead be the agents, as others say, or elemental spirits (whatever it may be) as asserted by a third party, this fact at least is established—that man is not wholly material, that the mechanism of man is moved and directed by some non-material—that is, some non-molecular structure, which possesses not merely intelligence, but can exercise also a force upon matter, that something to which, for lack of a better title, we have given the name of soul. These glad tidings have by this trial been borne to thousands and tens of thousands, whose happiness here, and hopes of a hereafter, have been blighted by the materialists, who have preached so persistently that soul was but a superstition, man but an automaton, mind but a secretion, present existence purely animal, and the future—a blank.”

“Truth alone,” says Pimander, “is eternal and immutable; truth is the first of blessings; but truth is not and cannot be on earth: it is possible that God sometimes gifts a few men together with the faculty of comprehending divine things with that of rightly understanding truth; but nothing is true on earth, for everything has matter on it, clothed with a corporeal form subject to change, to alteration, to corruption, and to new combinations. Man is not the truth, for only that which has drawn its essence from itself, and remains itself, and unchangeable, is true. How can that which changes so as not to finally be recognized, be ever true? Truth, then, is that only which is immaterial and not enclosed within a corporeal envelope, that which is colorless and formless, exempt from change and alteration; that which is ETERNAL. All of that which perishes is a lie; earth is but dissolution and generation; every generation proceeds from a dissolution; the things of earth are but appearances and imitations of truth; they are what the picture is to reality. The things of earth are not the TRUTH!... Death, for some persons, is an evil which strikes them with profound terror. This is ignorance.... Death is the destruction of the body; the being in it dies not.... The material body loses its form, which is disintegrated in course of time; the senses which animated it return to their source and resume their functions; but they gradually lose their passions and their desires, and the spirit ascends to heaven to become a HARMONY. In the first zone, it leaves behind itself the faculty of increasing and decreasing; in the second, the power of doing evil and the frauds of idleness; in the third, deceptions and concupiscence; in the fourth, insatiable ambition; in the fifth, arrogance, audacity, and temerity; in the sixth, all yearning after dishonest acquisitions; and in the seventh, untruthfulness. The spirit thus purified by the effect on him of the celestial harmonies, returns once more to its primitive state, strong of a merit and power self-acquired, and which belongs to it properly; and only then he begins to dwell with those that sing eternally their praises of the Father. Hitherto, he is placed among the powers, and as such has attained to the supreme blessing of knowledge. He is become a GOD!... No, the things of earth are not the truth.”

After having devoted their whole lives to the study of the records of the old Egyptian wisdom, both Champollion-Figeac and Champollion, Junior, publicly declared, notwithstanding many biassed judgments hazarded by certain hasty and unwise critics, that the Books of Hermes “truly contain a mass of Egyptian traditions which are constantly corroborated by the most authentic records and monuments of Egypt of the hoariest antiquity.”[915]

Closing up his voluminous summary of the psychological doctrines of the Egyptians, the sublime teachings of the sacred Hermetic books, and the attainments of the initiated priests in metaphysical and practical philosophy, Champollion-Figeac inquires—as he well may, in view of the then attainable evidence—“whether there ever was in the world another association or caste of men which could equal them in credit, power, learning, and capability, in the same degree of good or evil? No, never! And this caste was subsequently cursed and stigmatized only by those who, under I know not what kind of modern influences, have considered it as the enemy of men and—science.”[916]

At the time when Champollion wrote these words, Sanscrit was, we may say, almost an unknown tongue for science. But little in the way of a parallel could have been drawn between the respective merits of the Brahmans and the Egyptian philosophers. Since then, however, it has been discovered that the very same ideas, expressed in almost identical language, may be read in the Buddhistic and Brahmanical literature. This very philosophy of the unreality of mundane things and the illusion of the senses—whose whole substance has been plagiarized in our own times by the German metaphysicians—forms the groundwork of Kapila’s and Vyasa’s philosophies, and may be found in Gautama Buddha’s enunciation of the “four truths,” the cardinal dogmas of his doctrine. Pimander’s expression “he is become a god” is epitomized in the one word, Nirvana, which our learned Orientalists most incorrectly consider as the synonym of annihilation!

This opinion of the two eminent Egyptologists is of the greatest value to us if it were only as an answer to our opponents. The Champollions were the first in Europe to take the student of archæology by the hand, and, leading him on into the silent crypts of the past, prove that civilization did not begin with our generations; for “though the origins of ancient Egypt are unknown, she is found to have been at the most distant periods within the reach of historical research, with her great laws, her established customs, her cities, her kings, and gods;” and behind, far behind, these same epochs we find ruins belonging to other still more distant and higher periods of civilization. “At Thebes, portions of ruined buildings allow us to recognize remnants of still anterior structures, the materials of which had served for the erection of the very edifices which have now existed for thirty-six centuries!”[917] “Everything told us by Herodotus and the Egyptian priests is found to be exact, and has been corroborated by modern scientists,” adds Champollion.[918]

Whence the civilization of the Egyptians came, will be shown in volume II., and in this respect it will be made to appear that our deductions, though based upon the traditions of the Secret Doctrine, run parallel with those of a number of most respected authorities. There is a passage in a well-known Hindu work which may well be recalled in this connection.