About such men as Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyry, there gathered this heavenly nimbus. It was evolved by the power of their own souls in close unison with their spirits; by the superhuman morality and sanctity of their lives, and aided by frequent interior ecstatic contemplation. Such holy men pure spiritual influences could approach. Radiating around an atmosphere of divine beneficence, they caused evil spirits to flee before them. Not only is it not possible for such to exist in their aura, but they cannot even remain in that of obsessed persons, if the thaumaturgist exercises his will, or even approaches them. This is MEDIATORSHIP, not mediumship. Such persons are temples in which dwells the spirit of the living God; but if the temple is defiled by the admission of an evil passion, thought or desire, the mediator falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is opened; the pure spirits retire and the evil ones rush in. This is still mediatorship, evil as it is; the sorcerer, like the pure magician, forms his own aura and subjects to his will congenial inferior spirits.
But mediumship, as now understood and manifested, is a different thing. Circumstances, independent of his own volition, may, either at birth or subsequently, modify a person’s aura, so that strange manifestations, physical or mental, diabolical or angelic, may take place. Such mediumship, as well as the above-mentioned mediatorship, has existed on earth since the first appearance here of living man. The former is the yielding of weak, mortal flesh to the control and suggestions of spirits and intelligences other than one’s own immortal demon. It is literally obsession and possession; and mediums who pride themselves on being the faithful slaves of their “guides,” and who repudiate with indignation the idea of “controlling” the manifestations, “could not very well deny the fact without inconsistency. This mediumship is typified in the story of Eve succumbing to the reasonings of the serpent; of Pandora peeping in the forbidden casket and letting loose on the world, sorrow and evil, and by Mary Magdalene, who from having been obsessed by ‘seven devils’ was finally redeemed by the triumphant struggle of her immortal spirit, touched by the presence of a holy mediator, against the dweller.” This mediumship, whether beneficent or maleficent, is always passive. Happy are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously, by that very cleanness of their inner nature, the dark spirits of evil. For verily they have no other weapons of defense but that inborn goodness and purity. Mediumism, as practiced in our days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe of Nessus.
“The tree is known by its fruits.” Side by side with passive mediums in the progress of the world’s history, appear active mediators. We designate them by this name for lack of a better one. The ancient witches and wizards, and those who had a “familiar spirit,” generally made of their gifts a trade; and the Obeah woman of En-Dor, so well defined by Henry More, though she may have killed her calf for Saul, accepted hire from other visitors. In India, the jugglers, who by the way are less so than many a modern medium, and the Essaoua or sorcerers and serpent-charmers of Asia and Africa, all exercise their gifts for money. Not so with the mediators, or hierophants. Buddha was a mendicant and refused his father’s throne. The “Son of Man had not where to lay his head;” the chosen apostles provided “neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in their purses.” Apollonius gave one half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half to the poor; Iamblichus and Plotinus were renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs, or holy mendicants, of India are fairly described by Jacolliot; the Pythagorean Essenes and Therapeutæ believed their hands defiled by the contact of money. When the apostles were offered money to impart their spiritual powers, Peter, notwithstanding that the Bible shows him a coward and thrice a renegade, still indignantly spurned the offer, saying: “Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.” These men were mediators, guided merely by their own personal spirit, or divine soul, and availing themselves of the help of spirits but so far as these remain in the right path.
Far from us be the thought of casting an unjust slur on physical mediums. Harassed by various intelligences, reduced by the overpowering influence—which their weak and nervous natures are unable to shake off—to a morbid state, which at last becomes chronic, they are impeded by these “influences” from undertaking other occupation. They become mentally and physically unfit for any other. Who can judge them harshly when, driven to the last extremity, they are constrained to accept mediumship as a business? And heaven knows, as recent events have too well proved, whether the calling is one to be envied by any one! It is not mediums, real, true, and genuine mediums that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the spiritualists.
Plotinus, when asked to attend public worship of the gods, is said to have proudly answered: “It is for them (the spirits) to come to me.” Iamblichus asserted and proved in his own case, that our soul can attain communion with the highest intelligences, with “natures loftier than itself,” and carefully drove away from his theurgical ceremonies[733] every inferior spirit, or bad dæmon, which he taught his disciples to recognize. Proclus, who “elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors into a complete system,”[734] according to Professor Wilder, “believed with Iamblichus in the attaining of a divine power, which, overcoming the mundane life, rendered the individual an organ of the Deity.” He even taught that there was a “mystic password that would carry a person from one order of spiritual beings to another, higher and higher, till he arrived at the absolute divine.” Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and “common soothsayers,” and declared that it was his “peculiar abstemious mode of life” which “produced such an acuteness of the senses and created other faculties, so that the greatest and most remarkable things can take place.” Jesus declared man the lord of the Sabbath, and at his command the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from their temporary abodes; a power which was shared by Apollonius and many of the Brotherhood of the Essenes of Judea and Mount Carmel.
It is undeniable that there must have been some good reasons why the ancients persecuted unregulated mediums. Otherwise why, at the time of Moses and David and Samuel, should they have encouraged prophecy and divination, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained schools and colleges in which these natural gifts were strengthened and developed, while witches and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were put to death? Even at the time of Christ, the poor oppressed mediums were driven to the tombs and waste places without the city walls. Why this apparent gross injustice? Why should banishment, persecution, and death be the portion of the physical mediums of those days, and whole communities of thaumaturgists—like the Essenes—be not merely tolerated but revered? It is because the ancients, unlike ourselves, could “try” the spirits and discern the difference between the good and the evil ones, the human and the elemental. They also knew that unregulated spirit intercourse brought ruin upon the individual and disaster to the community.
This view of mediumship may be novel and perhaps repugnant to many modern spiritualists; but still it is the view taught in the ancient philosophy, and supported by the experience of mankind from time immemorial.
It is erroneous to speak of a medium having powers developed. A passive medium has no power. He has a certain moral and physical condition which induces emanations, or an aura, in which his controlling intelligences can live, and by which they manifest themselves. He is only the vehicle through which they display their power. This aura varies day by day, and, as would appear from Mr. Crookes’ experiments, even hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting from interior causes. The medium’s moral state determines the kind of spirits that come; and the spirits that come reciprocally influence the medium, intellectually, physically, and morally. The perfection of his mediumship is in ratio to his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in equal degree. When he is fully “developed” perfectly passive—his own astral spirit may be benumbed, and even crowded out of his body, which is then occupied by an elemental, or, what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own. But too often the cause of the most celebrated crime is to be sought in such possessions.
Physical mediumship depending upon passivity, its antidote suggests itself naturally; let the medium cease being passive. Spirits never control persons of positive character who are determined to resist all extraneous influences. The weak and feeble-minded whom they can make their victims they drive into vice. If these miracle-making elementals and disembodied devils called elementary were indeed the guardian angels that they have passed for, these last thirty years, why have they not given their faithful mediums at least good health and domestic happiness? Why do they desert them at the most critical moments of trial when under accusations of fraud? It is notorious that the best physical mediums are either sickly or, sometimes, what is still worse, inclined to some abnormal vice or other. Why do not these healing “guides,” who make their mediums play the therapeutists and thaumaturgists to others, give them the boon of robust physical vigor? The ancient thaumaturgist and apostle, generally, if not invariably, enjoyed good health; their magnetism never conveyed to the sick patient any physical or moral taint; and they never were accused of VAMPIRISM, which a spiritual paper very justly charges upon some medium-healers.[735]
If we apply the above law of mediumship and mediatorship to the subject of levitation, with which we opened our present discussion, what shall we find? Here we have a medium and one of the mediator-class levitated—the former at a seance, the latter at prayer, or in ecstatic contemplation. The medium being passive must be lifted up; the ecstatic being active must levitate himself. The former is elevated by his familiar spirits—whoever or whatever they may be—the latter, by the power of his own aspiring soul. Can both be indiscriminately termed mediums?