If the most abject savage, with a brain “very little inferior to that of a philosopher”[536] (the latter developed physically by ages of civilization), is still, as regards the actual exercise of his mental faculties, very little superior to an animal, is it just to infer that both he and the ape will not have the opportunity to become philosophers; the ape in this world, the man on some other planet peopled equally with beings created in some other image of God?
Says Professor Denton, when speaking of the future of psychometry: “Astronomy will not disdain the assistance of this power. As new forms of organic being are revealed, when we go back to the earlier geologic periods, so new groupings of the stars, new constellations, will be displayed, when the heavens of those early periods are examined by the piercing gaze of future psychometers. An accurate map of the starry heavens during the Silurian period may reveal to us many secrets that we have been unable to discover.... Why may we not indeed be able to read the history of the various heavenly bodies ... their geological, their natural, and, perchance, their human history?... I have good reason to believe that trained psychometers will be able to travel from planet to planet, and read their present condition minutely, and their past history.”[537]
Herodotus tells us that in the eighth of the towers of Belus, in Babylon, used by the sacerdotal astrologers, there was an uppermost room, a sanctuary, where the prophesying priestesses slept to receive communications from the god. Beside the couch stood a table of gold, upon which were laid various stones, which Manetho informs us were all aërolites. The priestesses developed the prophetic vision in themselves by pressing one of these sacred stones against their heads and bosoms. The same took place at Thebes, and at Patara, in Lycia.[538]
This would seem to indicate that psychometry was known and extensively practiced by the ancients. We have somewhere seen it stated that the profound knowledge possessed, according to Draper, by the ancient Chaldean astrologers, of the planets and their relations, was obtained more by the divination of the betylos, or the meteoric stone, than by astronomical instruments. Strabo, Pliny, Helancius—all speak of the electrical, or electro-magnetic power of the betyli. They were worshipped in the remotest antiquity in Egypt and Samothrace, as magnetic stones, “containing souls which had fallen from heaven;” and the priests of Cybelè wore a small betylos on their bodies. How curious the coincidence between the practice of the priests of Belus and the experiments of Professor Denton!
As Professor Buchanan truthfully remarks of psychometry, it will enable us “ ... to detect vice and crime. No criminal act ... can escape the detection of psychometry, when its powers are properly brought forth ... the sure detection of guilt by psychometry (no matter how secret the act) will nullify all concealment.”[539]
Speaking of the elementary, Porphyry says: “These invisible beings have been receiving from men honors as gods ... a universal belief makes them capable of becoming very malevolent: it proves that their wrath is kindled against those who neglect to offer them a legitimate worship.”[540]
Homer describes them in the following terms: “Our gods appear to us when we offer them sacrifice ... sitting themselves at our tables, they partake of our festival meals. Whenever they meet on his travels a solitary Phœnician, they serve to him as guides, and otherwise manifest their presence. We can say that our piety approaches us to them as much as crime and bloodshed unite the Cyclopes and the ferocious race of giants.”[541] The latter proving that these gods were kind and beneficent dæmons, and that, whether they were disembodied spirits or elementary beings, they were no devils.
The language of Porphyry, who was himself a direct disciple of Plotinus, is still more explicit as to the nature of these spirits. “Demons,” he says, “are invisible; but they know how to clothe themselves with forms and configurations subjected to numerous variations, which can be explained by their nature having much of the corporeal in itself. Their abode is in the neighborhood of the earth ... and when they can escape the vigilance of the good dæmons, there is no mischief they will not dare commit. One day they will employ brute force; another, cunning.”[542] Further, he says: “It is a child’s play for them to arouse in us vile passions, to impart to societies and nations turbulent doctrines, provoking wars, seditions, and other public calamities, and then tell you ‘that all of these is the work of the gods.’ ... These spirits pass their time in cheating and deceiving mortals, creating around them illusions and prodigies; their greatest ambition is to pass as gods and souls (disembodied spirits).”[543]
Iamblichus, the great theurgist of the Neo-platonic school, a man skilled in sacred magic, teaches that “good dæmons appear to us in reality, while the bad ones can manifest themselves but under the shadowy forms of phantoms.” Further, he corroborates Porphyry, and tells that “ ... the good ones fear not the light, while the wicked ones require darkness.... The sensations they excite in us make us believe in the presence and reality of things they show, though these things be absent.”[544]
Even the most practiced theurgists found danger sometimes in their dealings with certain elementaries, and we have Iamblichus stating that, “The gods, the angels, and the dæmons, as well as the souls, may be summoned through evocation and prayer.... But when, during theurgic operations, a mistake is made, beware! Do not imagine that you are communicating with beneficent divinities, who have answered your earnest prayer; no, for they are bad dæmons, only under the guise of good ones! For the elementaries often clothe themselves with the similitude of the good, and assume a rank very much superior to that they really occupy. Their boasting betrays them.”[545]