It is observable that in all countries where a secret of this sort exists, there is always found some custom which may be looked upon as either the cause or the consequence of the discovery. In Hindostan, for example, in order to test the truth of an accusation, the cobra capello is flung into a deep pot of earth with a ring; and if the supposed criminal succeeds in extracting the ring without being bitten by the serpent, he is accounted innocent. So the sacred asps in Egypt inflicted death upon the wicked, but spared the good. Dr. Allnut mentions that he saw a negro in Africa touch the protruded tongue of a snake with the black matter from the end of his pipe, which he said was tobacco-oil. The effects were as rapid as a shock of electricity. The animal never stirred again, but stiffened, and was as rigid and hard as if it had been dried in the sun.
It is related of Machamut, a Moorish king, that he fed on poisons till his bite became fatal and his saliva venomous. Cœlius Rhodiginus mentions the same thing of a woman who was thus mortal to all her lovers; and Avicenna mentions a man whose bite was fatal in the same way.
The boy that was found in the forest of Arden, in 1563, and who had been nourished by a she-wolf, made a great deal of money for a short time, after he was introduced to civilized life, by exempting the flocks and herds of the shepherds from the peril they nightly ran of being devoured by wolves. This he did by stroking them with his hands, or wetting them with his saliva, after which they for some time enjoyed an immunity. His faculty was discovered from the circumstance of the beasts he kept never being attacked. It left him, however, when he was about fourteen, and the wolves ceased to distinguish him from other human beings.
However, my readers will, I think, ere now have supped full with wonders, if not with horrors—and it is time I should bring this book to a conclusion. If I have done no more, I trust I shall at least have afforded some amusement; but I shall be better pleased to learn that I have induced any one, if it be but one, to look upon life and death, and the mysteries that attach to both, with a more curious and inquiring eye than they have hitherto done. I can not but think that it would be a great step if mankind could familiarize themselves with the idea that they are spirits incorporated for a time in the flesh; but that the dissolution of the connection between soul and body, though it changes the external conditions of the former, leaves its moral state unaltered. What a man has made himself, he will be; his state is the result of his past life, and his heaven or hell is in himself. At death we enter upon a new course of life, and what that life shall be depends upon ourselves. If we have provided oil for our lamps, and fitted ourselves for a noble destiny and the fellowship of the great and good spirits that have passed away, such will be our portion; and if we have misused our talent, and sunk our souls in the sensual pleasures or base passions of this world, we shall carry our desires and passions with us, to make our torment in the other—or perhaps be tethered to the earth by some inextinguishable remorse or disappointed scheme, like those unhappy spirits I have been writing about—and that perhaps for hundreds of years; for, although they be evidently freed from many of the laws of space and matter, while unable to leave the earth, they are still the children of time and have not entered into eternity. It is surely absurd to expect that because our bodies have decayed and fallen away, or been destroyed by an accident, that a miracle is to be wrought in our favor, and that the miser’s love of gold, or the profligate’s love of vice, is to be immediately extinguished, and be superseded by inclinations and tastes better suited to his new condition! New circumstances do not so rapidly engender a new mind here, that we should hope they will do so there: more especially as, in the first place, we do not know what facilities of improvement may remain in us; and in the second, since the law that like seeks like must be undeviating, the blind will seek the blind, and not those who could help them to light.
I think, too, that if people would learn to remember that they are spirits, and acquire the habit of conceiving of themselves as individuals, apart from the body, that they would not only be better able to realize this view of a future life, but they would also find it much less difficult to imagine, that, since they belong to the spiritual world on the one hand, quite as much as they belong to the material world on the other, that these extraordinary faculties, which they occasionally see manifested by certain individuals, or in certain states, may possibly be but faint rays of those properties which are inherent in spirit, though temporarily obscured by its connection with the flesh—and designed to be so, for the purposes of this earthly existence. The most ancient nations of the world knew this, although we have lost sight of it, as we learn by the sacred books of the Hebrews.
According to the Cabbalah, “Mankind are endowed by nature, not only with the faculty of penetrating into the regions of the supersensuous and invisible, but also of working magically above and below, or in the worlds of light and darkness. As the Eternal fills the world, sees, and is not seen, so does the soul (N’schamach) fill the body, and sees without being seen. The soul perceives that which the bodily eye can not. Sometimes a man is seized suddenly with a fear, for which he can not account, which is because the soul descries an impending misfortune. The soul possesses also the power of working with the elementary matter of the earth, so as to annihilate one form and produce another. Even by the force of imagination, human beings can injure other things; yea, even to the slaying of a man!” (The new platonist, Paracelsus, says the same thing.) The “Cabbalah” teaches that there have in all times existed men endowed with powers, in a greater or less degree, to work good or evil; for, to be a virtuoso in either, requires a peculiar spiritual vigor: thence, such men as heroes and priests in the kingdom of Tumah (the kingdom of the clean and unclean). “If a man therefore sets his desires on what is godly, in proportion as his efforts are not selfish, but purely a seeking of holiness, he will be endowed, by the free grace of God, with supernatural faculties; and it is the highest aim of existence, that man should regain his connection with his inward, original source, and exalt the material and earthly into the spiritual.” The highest degree of this condition of light and spirit is commonly called “the holy ecstasy,” which is apparently the degree attained by the ecstatics of the Tyrol.
I am very far from meaning to imply that it is our duty, or in any way desirable, that we should seek to bring ourselves into this state of holy ecstasy, which seems to involve some derangement of the normal relations between the soul and body; but it is at least equally unwise in us to laugh at, or deny it or its proximate conditions, where they really exist. It appears perfectly clear that, as by giving ourselves up wholly to our external and sensuous life, we dim and obscure the spirit of God that is in us—so, by annihilating, as far as in us lies, the necessities of the body, we may so far subdue the flesh as to loosen the bonds of the spirit, and enable it to manifest some of its inherent endowments. Ascetics and saints have frequently done this voluntarily; and disease, or a peculiar constitution, sometimes does this for us involuntarily: and it is far from desirable that we should seek to produce such a state by either means, but it is extremely desirable that we should avail ourselves of the instruction to be gained by the simple knowledge that such phenomena have existed and been observed in all ages; and that thereby our connection with the spiritual world may become a demonstrated fact to all who choose to open their eyes to it.
With regard to the cases of apparitions I have adduced, they are not, as I said before, one hundredth part of those I could have brought forward, had I resorted to a few of the numerous printed collections that exist in all languages.
Whether the view I acknowledge myself to take of the facts be or not the correct one—whether we are to look to the region of the psychical or the hyperphysical for the explanation—the facts themselves are certainly well worthy of observation; the more so, as it will be seen that, although ghosts are often said to be out of fashion, such occurrences are, in reality, as rife as ever: while, if these shadowy forms be actually visiters from the dead, I think we can not too soon lend an attentive ear to the tale their reappearance tells us.
That we do not all see them, or that those who promise to come do not all keep tryst, amounts to nothing. We do not know why they can come, nor why they can not; and as for not seeing them, I repeat, we must not forget how many other things there are that we do not see: and since, in science, we know that there are delicate manifestations which can only be rendered perceptible to our organs by the application of the most delicate electrometers, is it not reasonable to suppose that there may exist certain susceptible or diseased organisms, which, judiciously handled, may serve as electrometers to the healthy ones?