Vision: The Revised 1937 Edition

THE SOUL IN JUDGMENT

Paul Valéry in the “Cimetière Marin” describes a seaside cemetery, a recollection, some commentator explains, of a spot known in childhood.² The midday light is the changeless absolute and its reflection in the sea “les œuvres purs d’une cause éternelle”.³ The sea breaks into the ephemeral foam of life; the monuments of the dead take sides as it were with the light and would with their inscriptions and their sculptured angels persuade the poet that he is the light, but he is not persuaded. The worm devours not only the dead, but as self-love, self-hate, or whatever one calls it, devours the living also. Then after certain poignant stanzas and just when I am deeply moved he chills me. This metropolitan, who has met so many reformers, who has learnt as a part of good manners to deny what has no remedy, cries out “Cruel Zénon! Zénon d’Elée!”, condemning that problem of a tortoise and Achilles because it suggested that all things only seemed to pass; and in a passage of great eloquence rejoices that human life must pass.^I,4 I was about to put his poem among my sacred books, but I cannot now, for I do not believe him. My imagination goes some years backward, and I remember a beautiful young girl singing at the edge of the sea in Normandy words and music of her own composition. She thought herself alone, stood barefooted between sea and sand; sang with lifted head of the civilisations that there had come and gone, ending every verse with the cry: “O Lord, let something remain”.6

I cannot imagine an age without metropolitan poet and singing girl, though I am convinced that the Upanishads—somebody had already given her the Pyramids—were addressed to the girl.

Certain Upanishads describe three states of the soul, that of waking, that of dreaming, that of dreamless sleep, and say man passes from waking through dreaming to dreamless sleep every night and when he dies.⁷ Dreamless sleep is a state of pure light, or of utter darkness according to our liking, and in dreams “the spirit serves as light for itself”. “There are no carts, horses, roads, but he makes them for himself.”⁸

III

The Spirit is not those changing images—sometimes in ancient thought as in the “Cimetière Marin” symbolised by the sea^II—but the light,^III and at last draws backward into itself, into its own changeless purity, all it has felt or known. I am convinced that this ancient generalisation, in so far as it saw analogy between a “separated spirit”, or phantom and a dream of the night, once was a universal belief, for I find it, or some practice founded upon it, everywhere. Certainly I find it in old Irish literature, in modern Irish folk-lore, in Japanese plays, in Swedenborg, in the phenomena of spiritualism, accompanied as often as not by the belief that the living can assist the imaginations of the dead.¹⁰ A farmer near Doneraile once told me that an aunt of his own appeared stark naked after her death and complained that she could not go about with the other spirits unless somebody cut a dress to her measure and gave it to a poor woman in her name.¹¹ This done she appeared wearing the dress and gave thanks for it. Once an old woman came to Coole Park, when I was there, to tell Lady Gregory that Sir William Gregory’s ghost had a tattered sleeve and that a coat must be given to some beggar in his name.12 A man, returned after many years spent in the West Indies, once told me and others of the apparition of a woman he had known in a dress that he had not known, copied, he discovered, from her portrait made after he had left England.¹³ May I not use such tales to interpret all those model houses, boats, weapons, slaves, all those portraits and statues buried in ancient tombs?¹⁴

Certain London spiritualists for some years past have decked out a Christmas tree with presents that have each the names of some dead child upon it, and sitting in the dark on Christmas night they hear the voice of some grown-up person, who seems to take the presents from the tree, and the clamorous voices of the children as they are distributed.¹⁵ Yet the presents still hang there and are given next day to an hospital. Could anything be more Egyptian, more Assyrian? It was essential that the clothes should be given in the name of the dead, that the portrait should be the ghost’s own portrait, that the presents for the children should be dedicated or given, not merely hung there; in dreams we finish what we began awake or what the waking suggest. I think of two ghost lovers in a Japanese play asking a wandering Buddhist priest to marry them, of two that appeared to a Catholic priest in Aran, according to an Aran tale, with a like object,¹⁶ of a young spirit medium who promised that she would marry a certain old man after death but was compelled by her controls to withdraw the promise because, though she had not meant it, she might have had to fulfil it, of an Indian who told Florence Farr¹⁷ that he hated acting, for if a man died playing Hamlet he would be Hamlet after death.¹⁸ Upon the other hand a spirit may meet some spirit in the séance-room to ask forgiveness for something done in life, a forgiveness not always granted, and once at the request of a certain dead Sister of Mercy I discovered where the Mother Superior she had served under in the Crimea lived and died, and she came again to thank me.¹⁹ Because I had connected their lives here she had found her there, though not to share her state, being less holy. I had suggested away the nightmare as though sitting by the bedside of a somnambulist.

The Mandookya Upanishad describes a fourth state, which is reached not in dreamless sleep but in contemplation and in wakefulness.20 This fourth state, pure light to those that reach it, is that state wherein the soul, as much ancient symbolism testifies, is united to the blessed dead.

Because we no longer discover the still unpurified dead through our own and others’ dreams, and those in freedom through contemplation, religion cannot answer the atheist, and philosophy talks about a first cause or a final purpose, when we would know what we were a little before conception, what we shall be a little after burial.

V²¹

The period between death and birth is divided into states analogous to the six solar months between Aries and Libra.^IV,22 The first state is called The Vision of the Blood Kindred, a vision of all those bound to us through Husk and Passionate Body.²³ Apparitions seen at the moment of death are part of the vision, a synthesis, before disappearance, of all the impulses and images which constitute the Husk. It is followed by the Meditation, which corresponds to what is called the “emotion of sanctity” on the Great Wheel; the Spirit and Celestial Body appear.²⁴ The Spirit has its first vision and understanding of the Celestial Body, but that it may do so, it requires the help of the incarnate, for without them it is without language and without will. During the Meditation^V Husk and Passionate Body disappear, but may persist in some simulacrum of themselves as do the Mask and Will in primary phases. If the Husk so persist, the Spirit still continues to feel pleasure and pain, remains a fading distortion of living man, perhaps a dangerous succuba or incubus, living through the senses and nerves of others. If there has been great animal egotism, heightened by some moment of tragedy, the Husk may persist for centuries, recalled into a sort of life, and united to its Spirit, at some anniversary, or by some unusually susceptible person or persons connected with its past life.

In the third discarnate state, a state I shall presently describe, it may renounce the form of a man and take some shape from the social or religious tradition of its past life, symbolical of its condition. Leap Castle, though burnt down during our Civil War and still a ruin, is haunted by what is called an evil spirit which appears as a sheep with short legs and decaying human head.26 I suggest that some man with the Husk exaggerated and familiar with religious symbolism, torn at the moment of death between two passions, terror of the body’s decay with which he identified himself, and an abject religious humility, projected himself in this image.²⁷ If the Passionate Body does not disappear, the Spirit finds the Celestial Body, only after long and perhaps painful dreams of the past, and it is because of such dreams that the second state is sometimes called the Dreaming Back.²⁸ If death has been violent or tragic the Spirit may cling to the Passionate Body for generations. A gambler killed in a brawl may demand his money,^VI a man who has believed that death ends all may see himself as a decaying corpse,^VII,30 nor is there any reason why some living man might not see reflected in a mirror or otherwise some beloved ghost, thinking herself unobserved, powdering her face as in Mr. Davies’ poem.^31,VIII

The first night she was in her grave,

As I looked in the glass

I saw her sit upright in bed;

Without a sound it was;

I saw her hand feel in the cloth

To fetch a box of powder forth.

She sat and watched me all the while

For fear I looked her way;

I saw her powder cheek and chin,

Her fast corrupting clay.

Then down my lady lay and smiled,

She thought her beauty saved, poor child.

The true name of the second state,IX that of Taurus, is the Return and it has for its object the Spirit’s separation from the Passionate Body, considered as nature, and from the Husk considered as pleasure and pain.³³ In the Dreaming Back, the Spirit is compelled to live over and over again the events that had most moved it; there can be nothing new, but the old events stand forth in a light which is dim or bright according to the intensity of the passion that accompanied them. They occur in the order of their intensity or luminosity, the more intense first, and the painful are commonly the more intense, and repeat themselves again and again. In the Return, upon the other hand, the Spirit must live through past events in the order of their occurrence, because it is compelled by the Celestial Body to trace every passionate event to its cause until all are related and understood, turned into knowledge, made a part of itself.³⁴ All that keeps the Spirit from its freedom may be compared to a knot that has to be untied or to an oscillation or a violence that must end in a return to equilibrium.³⁵ I think of the Homeric contrast between Heracles passing through the night, bow in hand, and Heracles, the freed spirit, a happy god among the gods. I think of it in William Morris’ translation:

And Heracles the mighty I saw when these went by;

His image indeed: for himself mid the gods that never die

Sits glad at the feast, and Hebe fair-ankled there doth hold,

The daughter of Zeus the mighty and Hera shod with gold.36

After its imprisonment by some event in the Dreaming Back, the Spirit relives that event in the Return and turns it into knowledge, and then falls into the Dreaming Back once more. The Spirit finds the concrete events in the Passionate Body, but the names and words of the drama it must obtain, the Faculties having gone when the Husk and Passionate Body disappeared, from some incarnate Mind, and this it is able to do because all spirits inhabit our unconsciousness or, as Swedenborg said, are the Dramatis Personae of our dreams.^X,37 One thinks of those apparitions haunting the places where they have lived that fill the literature^XI of all countries and are the theme of the Japanese Nō drama. Though only visible to the seer when Spirit and Passionate Body are joined, they are constantly repeated until, at last forgotten by the Spirit, they fade into the Thirteenth Cone.³⁹ The more complete the Dreaming Back the more complete the Return and the more happy or fortunate the next incarnation.^XII After each event of the Dreaming Back the Spirit explores not merely the causes but the consequences of that event.

Where the soul has great intensity and where those consequences affected great numbers, the Dreaming Back and the Return may last with diminishing pain and joy for centuries.41 The Spirit,^XIII that it may make the Passionate Body intelligible, can not only tap the minds of the living but examine letters and books, once they come before the eyes of the living, although it can see nothing that does not concern the dream, for it is without reflection or the knowledge that it is dead.⁴³ If the event was shared by many, those many may seem present and yet be but the figures of the dream. Each must dream the event alone. Sometimes the Spirit under the influence of the Celestial Body and what are called Teaching Spirits—Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone—may not merely dream through the consequences of its acts but amend them, bringing this or that to the attention of the living.⁴⁴ I have found a belief among Irish country people that the death of father or mother may sometimes bring good luck to child or family. Upon the other hand our actions affect the dead. Some years ago there were various small inexplicable noises and movements in my house, and I was told that a certain Spirit wanted to discover certain facts necessary to her Dreaming Back by creating discussion, or that Teaching Spirits wished to assist her by creating that discussion. It is from the Dreaming Back of the dead, though not from that of persons associated with our past, that we get the imagery of ordinary sleep. Much of a dream’s confusion comes from the fact that the image belongs to some unknown person, whereas emotion, names, language, belong to us alone. Having kept a steady watch upon my dreams for years I know that so long as I dream in words I know that my father, let us say, was tall and bearded. If, on the other hand, I dream in images and examine the dream immediately upon waking I may discover him there represented by a stool or the eyepiece of a telescope, but never in his natural shape, for we cast off the concrete memory (lose contact with the Record as it affects ourselves) but not the abstract memory when we sleep.45

Teaching Spirits are Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone, or their representatives who may be chosen from any state, and are those who substitute for Husk and Passionate Body supersensual emotion and imagery; the “unconscious” or unapparent for that which has disappeared; the Spirit itself being capable of knowledge only. They conduct the Spirit through its past acts; should the code that Spirit accepted during life permit, they may conduct it through those in past lives, especially those that fell where the Four Faculties^XIV of its phase fall upon the wheel of the cycle, seeking always the source of its action. We must, however, avoid attributing to them the pure benevolence our exhausted Platonism and Christianity attribute to an angelical being. Our actions, lived in life, or remembered in death, are the food and drink of the Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone, that which gives them separation and solidity.

But knowledge of the past is not sufficient. The second stage contains in addition to the Dreaming Back and the Return what is called the Phantasmagoria, which exists to exhaust, not nature, not pain and pleasure, but emotion, and is the work of Teaching Spirits.⁴⁷ The physical and moral life is completed, without the addition of any new element that the objects of hope may be completed, for only that which is completed can be known and dismissed. Houses appear built by thought in a moment, the spirit seems to eat, drink and smoke, the child appears to grow to maturity, or perhaps with the help of Teaching Spirits a Christmas Tree is created, Christ or some saint or angel descends, dressed as in statue or picture; if the life was evil, then the Phantasmagoria is evil, the criminal completes his crime. It is indeed a necessary act of the human soul that has cut off the incarnate and discarnate from one another, plunging the discarnate into our “unconsciousness”. The Phantasmagoria completes not only life but imagination. Cornelius Agrippa speaks of those among the dead who imagine themselves “surrounded by flames and persecuted by demons” and, according to his seventeenth-century translator, confers upon them the name “Hobgoblin”.48 The various legends of spirits that appear under the impulse of moral and emotional suffering must be attributed to this state and not to the Dreaming Back, where the constraint is physical. I think of a girl in a Japanese play whose ghost tells a priest of a slight sin, if indeed it was sin, which seems great because of her exaggerated conscience. She is surrounded by flames, and though the priest explains that if she but ceased to believe in those flames they would cease to exist, believe she must, and the play ends in an elaborate dance, the dance of her agony.⁴⁹ I think of those stories which I have already summarised where some ghost seeks not to perfect an event that concerns the living, but its own emotional or moral peace.

VII

At the end of the second state, the events of the past life are a whole and can be dismissed; the emotional and moral life, however, is but a whole according to the code accepted during life. The Spirit is still unsatisfied, until after the third state, which corresponds to Gemini,^XV called the Shiftings, where the Spirit is purified of good and evil.⁵⁰ In so far as the man did good without knowing evil, or evil without knowing good, his nature is reversed until that knowledge is obtained. The Spirit lives—I quote the automatic script—“The best possible life in the worst possible surroundings” or the contrary of this; yet there is no suffering: “For in a state of equilibrium there is neither emotion nor sensation”.51 In the limits of the good and evil of the previous life . . . the soul is brought to a contemplation of good and evil; “neither its utmost good nor its utmost evil can force sensation or emotion”. I remember MacKenna’s translation of the most beautiful of the Enneads, “The Impassivity of the Dis-Embodied”.⁵² This state is described as a true life, as distinguished from the preceding states; the soul is free in the sense that it is subject to necessary truth alone, the Celestial Body is described as present in person instead of through “Messengers”.⁵³

It is followed by a state corresponding to Cancer which is said to pass in unconsciousness, or in a moment of consciousness called the Marriage or the Beatitude.⁵⁴ It is complete equilibrium after the conflict of the Shiftings; good and evil vanish into the whole. It is followed by an oscillation, a reversal of the old life; this lasts until birth and death bring the Shiftings and the Marriage once more, a reversal not in knowledge but in life, or until the Spirit is free from good and evil.^XVI My instructors have described the Marriage as follows: “The Celestial Body is the Divine Cloak lent to all, it falls away at the consummation and Christ is revealed”, words which seem to echo Bardesan’s “Hymn of the Soul”, where a King’s son asleep in Egypt (physical life) is sent a cloak which is also an image of his body.^XVII He sets out to his father’s kingdom wrapped in the cloak.

VIII

In the Purification (corresponding to the sign Leo) a new Husk and Passionate Body take the place of the old; made from the old, yet, as it were, pure. All memory has vanished, the Spirit no longer knows what its name has been, it is at last free and in relation to Spirits free like itself. Though the new Husk and Mask 56 have been born, they do not appear, they are subordinate to the Celestial Body. The Spirit must substitute for the Celestial Body, seen as a Whole, its own particular aim. Having substituted this aim it becomes self-shaping, self-moving, plastic to itself, as that self has been shaped by past lives. If its nature is unique it must find circumstances not less unique before rebirth is possible. It may stay in the Purification for centuries—become, if it died amidst some primitive community, the guardian of well or temple or be called by the Thirteenth Cone to the care of the newly dead. I think of those phantoms in ancient costumes seen by some peasant seers exercising such authority. “We have no power”, said an inhabitant of the state, “except to purify our intention”, and when I asked of what, replied: “Of complexity”.⁵⁷ But that Purification may require the completion of some syntheses left unfinished in its past life. Because only the living create it may seek the assistance of those living men into whose “unconsciousness” or incarnate Daimon, some affinity of aim, or the command of the Thirteenth Cone, permits it to enter. Those who taught me this system did so, not for my sake, but their own.^XVIII,58 The Spirit’s aim, however, appears before it as a form of perfection, for during the Purification those forms copied in the Arts and Sciences are present as the Celestial Body. In piecing together detached statements, I remember that some spirit once said to me: “We do nothing singly, every act is done by a number at the same instant.”⁵⁹ Their perfection is a shared purpose or idea. I connect them in my imagination with an early conviction of mine, that the creative power of the lyric poet depends upon his accepting some one of a few traditional attitudes, lover, sage, hero, scorner of life. They bring us back to the spiritual norm. They may, however, if permitted by the Thirteenth Cone, so act upon the events of our lives as to compel us to attend to that perfection which, though it seems theirs, is the work of our own Daimon.

The sixth and final state (corresponding to Scorpio 60) called the Foreknowledge must substitute the next incarnation, as fate has decreed it, for that form of perfection. The Spirit cannot be reborn until the vision of that life is completed and accepted. The Spirit, now almost united to Husk and Passionate Body, may know the most violent love and hatred possible, for it can see the remote consequences of the most trivial acts of the living, provided those consequences are part of its future life. In trying to prevent them it may become one of those frustrators dreaded by certain spirit mediums. It cannot, however, without the assistance of the Thirteenth Cone affect life in any way except to delay its own rebirth. With that assistance it can so shape circumstances as to make possible the rebirth of a unique nature. One must suppose such spirits gathered into bands—for as yet they are without individuality—and with the consent of the Thirteenth Cone playing a part resembling that of the “censor” in modern psychology.⁶¹ During its sleep in the womb the Spirit accepts its future life, declares it just.

The Spirits before the Marriage are spoken of as the dead. After that they are spirits, using that word as it is used in common speech. During the Dreaming Back the Spirit is alone with its dream; during the Return in the presence of those who had a part in the events explored in the Dreaming Back; in the Phantasmagoria and in the Shiftings of those summoned by the Thirteenth Cone and the Celestial Body respectively; in the Purification, of those chosen by itself.

In the Meditation it wears the form it had immediately before death; in the Dreaming Back and the Phantasmagoria, should it appear to the living, it has the form of the dream, in the Return the form worn during the event explored, in the Shiftings whatever form was most familiar to others during its life; in the Purification whatever form it fancies, for it is now the Shape-changer of legend:

’Twas said that she all shapes could wear;

And oftentimes before him stood,

Amid the trees of some thick wood,

In semblance of a lady fair;

And taught him signs, and showed him sights

In Craven’s dens, on Cumbrian heights.62

The Dreaming Back is represented upon the cone or wheel by a periodical stoppage of movement.

Indian Buddhists cease to offer sacrifice for a particular dead person after three generations, for after that time he must, they believe, have found a new body. A typical series of lives described by my instructors suggest that as an average limit, but in some cases rebirth comes very soon.⁶³ If a Spirit cannot escape from its Dreaming Back to complete its expiation, a new life may come soon and be, as it were, a part of its Dreaming Back and so repeat the incidents of the past life. There are stories Asiatic and European of those who die in childhood being reborn almost at once.

The more complete the expiation, or the less the need for it, the more fortunate the succeeding life. The more fully a life is lived, the less the need for—or the more complete is—the expiation. Neither the Phantasmagoria, nor the Purification, nor any other state between death and birth should be considered as a reward or paradise. Neither between death and birth nor between birth and death can the soul find more than momentary happiness; its object is to pass rapidly round its circle and find freedom from that circle.

Those who inhabit the “unconscious mind” are the complement or opposite of that mind’s consciousness and are there, unless as messengers of the Thirteenth Cone, because of spiritual affinity or bonds created during past lives.

All the involuntary acts and facts of life are the effect of the whirring and interlocking of the gyres; but gyres may be interrupted or twisted by greater gyres, divide into two lesser gyres or multiply into four and so on. The uniformity of nature depends upon the constant return of gyres to the same point. Sometimes individuals are primary and antithetical to one another and joined by a bond so powerful that they form a common gyre or series of gyres. This gyre or these gyres no greater gyre may be able to break till exhaustion comes. We all to some extent meet again and again the same people and certainly in some cases form a kind of family of two or three or more persons who come together life after life until all passionate relations are exhausted, the child of one life the husband, wife, brother or sister of the next. Sometimes, however, a single relationship will repeat itself, turning its revolving wheel again and again, especially, my instructors say, where there has been strong sexual passion. All such passions, they say, contain “cruelty and deceit”64—I think of similar statements in D. H. Lawrence’s Rainbow and in his Women in Love⁶⁵—and this antithetical cruelty and deceit must be expiated in primary suffering and submission, or the old tragedy will be repeated.

They are expiated between birth and death because they are actions, but their victim must expiate between death and birth the ignorance that made them possible. The victim must, in the Shiftings, live the act of cruelty, not as victim but as tyrant; whereas the tyrant must by a necessity of his or her nature become the victim. But if one is dead and the other living they find each other in thought and symbol, the one that has been passive and is now active may from within control the other, once tyrant now victim. If the act is associated with the Return or the Purification the one that controls from within, reliving as a form of knowledge what once was tyranny, gives not pain but ecstasy. The one whose expiation is an act needs for the act some surrogate^XIX or symbol of the other and offers to some other man or woman submission or service, but because the unconscious mind knows that this act is fated no new gyre is started. The expiation, because offered to the living for the dead, is called “expiation for the dead” but is in reality expiation for the Daimon, for passionate love is from the Daimon which seeks by union with some other Daimon to reconstruct above the antinomies its own true nature.⁶⁷ The souls of victim and tyrant are bound together and, unless there is a redemption through the intercommunication of the living and the dead, that bond may continue life after life, and this is just, for there had been no need of expiation had they seen in one another that other and not something else. The expiation is completed and the oscillation brought to an end for each at the same moment. There are other bonds, master and servant, benefactor and beneficiary, any relation that is deeper than the intellect may become such a bond. We get happiness, my instructors say, from those we have served, ecstasy from those we have wronged.

XII

Sometimes the bond is between an incarnate Daimon and a Spirit of the Thirteenth Cone. This bond created by the fixed attention of the Daimon will pass through the same stages as if it were between man and some ordinary discarnate spirit. Victimage for the Dead arises through such act as prevents the union of two incarnate Daimons and is therefore the prevention or refusal of a particular experience, but Victimage for a Spirit of the Thirteenth Cone results from the prevention or refusal of experience itself. This refusal may arise from pride, from the fear of injuring another or oneself, from something which we call asceticism; it may have any cause, but the Spirit of the Thirteenth Cone is starved. Such Spirit may itself create the events that incited the man to refuse experience, St. Simeon may be driven to his pillar.68 In the whirling of the gyres the incarnate Daimon is starved in its turn, but starved not of natural experience, but of supernatural; for, compelled to take the place of the Spirit, it transforms its natural craving—Eli! Eli! Lama Sabacthani!?⁶⁹—and this state is called Victimage for the Ghostly Self, and is described as the sole means for acquiring a supernatural guide. So closely do all the bonds resemble each other that in the most ascetic schools of India the novice tortured by his passion will pray to the God to come to him as a woman and have with him sexual intercourse; nor is the symbol subjective, for in the morning his pillow will be saturated with temple incense, his breast yellow with the saffron dust of some temple offering. Such experience is said, however, to wear itself out swiftly giving place to the supernatural union.⁷⁰ Sometimes the God may select some living symbol of himself. If the ascetic is a woman, some wandering priest perhaps, if a man, some wandering priestess, but such loves are brief. Sometimes, however, Victimage for the Ghostly Self and Victimage for the Dead coincide and produce lives tortured throughout by spirituality and passion. Cruelty and ignorance, which echo the Sage and Victim of Book I, constitute evil as my instructors see it, and are that which makes possible the conscious union of the Daimons of Man and Woman or that of the Daimon of the Living and a Spirit of the Thirteenth Cone, which is the deliverance from birth and death.

The Thirteenth Cone is a sphere because sufficient to itself; but as seen by Man it is a cone. It becomes even conscious of itself as so seen, like some great dancer, the perfect flower of modern culture, dancing some primitive dance and conscious of his or her own life and of the dance. There is a mediaeval story of a man persecuted by his Guardian Angel because it was jealous of his sweetheart, and such stories seem closer to reality than our abstract theology.⁷¹ All imaginable relations may arise between a man and his God. I only speak of the Thirteenth Cone as a sphere and yet I might say that the gyre or cone of the Principles is in reality a sphere, though to Man, bound to birth and death, it can never seem so, and that it is the antinomies that force us to find it a cone. Only one symbol exists, though the reflecting mirrors make many appear and all different.

I. Professor Bradley believed also that he could stand by the death-bed of wife or mistress and not long for an immortality of body and soul. He found it difficult to reconcile personal immortality with his form of Absolute idealism, and besides he hated the common heart; an arrogant, sapless man.⁵

II. I think it was Porphyry who wrote that the generation of images in the mind is from water.⁹

III. In my symbolism solar light, intellectual light; not the lunar light, perception.

IV. They correspond roughly to Phase 22, Phases 23, 24, 25, Phases 26, 27, 28, etc., upon the wheel of the Faculties which is at right angles to that of the Principles.

V. An automatic script describes this Meditation as lasting until burial and as strengthened by the burial service and by the thoughts of friends and mourners. I left this statement out of the text because it did not so much seem a necessary deduction from the symbol as an unverifiable statement of experience. The meaning is doubtless that the ceremonial obliteration of the body symbolises the Spirit’s separation from the Husk. Another automatic script describes the Spirit as rising from the head at death, Celestial Body from the feet, the Passionate Body from the genitals, while the Husk remains prone in the body (the Husk itself seen objectively) and shares its form. The Spirit is described as awakened from its sleep in the dead body.²⁵

VI. The late Dr. Abraham Wallace told me that he brought a medium to a haunted house and had a conversation with just such a ghost. He afterwards found, in an Annual Register for somewhere about 1770, a record of just such a brawl at that very house.²⁹

VII. I came on this example years ago; it seemed well authenticated.

VIII. This would be one of the most poignant poems in the language had not Mr. Davies in a verse I have not quoted made an inexplicable transition from “thou” to “you”.³²

IX. Roughly Phases 23, 24, 25 on the wheel of the Faculties.

X. My instructors said once that under certain circumstances a Spirit can draw knowledge of such things as language from the Husks of the other dead, but only if those Husks are separated from their Spirits. It seems that a mind must, as it were, release a thought before it becomes general property. Somebody years ago, at, I think, a meeting of the Society of Psychical Research, suggested that we transferred thought at some moment when we ceased to think of it.

XI. See An Adventure (Faber & Faber). This anonymous book was the work of two women, one the Head of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, the other her predecessor. It describes with minute detail a vision of Marie Antoinette and her Court, and of the gardens of the Petit Trianon as they were before the Revolution, and the research that proved the vision’s accuracy. The two ladies walking in the garden of the Petit Trianon shared the same vision. I have confirmed, as far as the meagre records permitted, a similar vision in my own family, and Sligo pilots and Galway farmers have told me of visions that seem to reproduce the costumes of past times.³⁸

XII. Compare the account of the Dreaming Back in Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell. My account differs from his mainly because he denied or ignored rebirth. Somebody has suggested that he kept silent deliberately, that it was amongst those subjects that he thought forbidden. It is more likely that his instructors were silent. They spoke to the Christian Churches, explaining the “linen clothes folded up”, and even what they said or sought to say was half-transformed into an opium dream by the faith of those Churches in the literal inspiration of the Bible.⁴⁰

XIII. A Robinson Crusoe who died upon his island and had not even a Man Friday for witness could, I am told, get the necessary information from his own Husk, but his Dreaming Back would be imperfect. He would lack not only physical but spiritual burial. The contents of his Husk being, as I suppose, too much himself, he would continue to look through a window-pane upon which he had breathed.⁴²

XIV. The past incarnations corresponding to his Four Faculties seem to accompany a living man. Once when a child was born in the house, the doctor, the mother and I smelt roses everywhere. Years afterwards I read in a book called Nursery Life Three Hundred Years Ago (I forget the author’s name) of a custom that lasted into the seventeenth century of washing new-born children in a bath “made wholesome . . . with red roses”, of rolling them in salt and roses, and of sprinkling them, when the parents could afford it,with oil of roses. If I assume that the Thirteenth Cone can send the forms from any incarnation which correspond to the place of Faculty or Principle, whether in the present or an earlier cycle, I have an explanation of that emergence during vision of an old Cretan myth described in my book Autobiographies.⁴⁶

XV. My instructors do not seem to use the astrological character of this, or indeed of any sign except Taurus, Pisces and the Cardinal signs.

XVI. The reversals of The Shiftings and the Purification are reflected in the alternation between Sage and Victim. Solar South (Cancer) is Lunar East. Lunar East is Phase 22. The interchange of Sage and Victim is comparable to the exchange of the Tinctures, but there is no reversal at the opposite point because the wheel of the Faculties completes itself while that of the Principles goes but half its distance (Book II, section VII).

XVII. A living man sees the Celestial Body through the Mask. I awoke one night when a young man to find my body rigid and to hear a voice that came from my lips and yet did not seem my voice saying, “We make an image of him who sleeps and it is not he who sleeps and we call it Emmanuel”.⁵⁵

XVIII. They say that only the words spoken in trance or written in the automatic script assist them. They belong to the “unconscious” and what comes from them alone serves. My interpretations do not concern them. In the mediumistic condition it sometimes seems as if dreams awoke and yet remained dreams.

XIX. A Bombay friend of mine once saw an Indian peasant standing by the road with many flowers beside her. She gave a flower to each passer-by with the words “I give this to my Lord”. Her Lord was the god Krishna, but the passionate may offer to their own dead a similar worship.⁶⁶