[254] Eliphas Levi: “Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie.”
[255] Plato hints at a ceremony used in the Mysteries, during the performance of which the neophyte was taught that men are in this life in a kind of prison, and taught how to escape from it temporarily. As usual, the too-learned translators disfigured this passage, partially because they could not understand it, and partially because they would not. See Phædo § 16, and commentaries on it by Henry More, the well-known Mystic philosopher and Platonist.
[256] The akasa is a Sanscrit word which means sky, but it also designates the imponderable and intangible life-principle—the astral and celestial lights combined together, and which two form the anima mundi, and constitute the soul and spirit of man; the celestial light forming his νοὺς, πνευμα, or divine spirit, and the other his ψυχη soul orastral spirit. The grosser particles of the latter enter into the fabrication of his outward form—the body. Akasa is the mysterious fluid termed by scholastic science, “the all-pervading ether;” it enters into all the magical operations of nature, and produces mesmeric, magnetic, and spiritual phenomena. As, in Syria, Palestine, and India, meant the sky, life, and the sun at the same time; the sun being considered by the ancient sages as the great magnetic well of our universe. The softened pronunciation of this word was Ah—says Dunlap, for “the s continually softens to h from Greece to Calcutta.” Ah is Iah, Ao, and Iao. God tells Moses that his name is “I am” (Ahiah), a reduplication of Ah or Iah. The word “As” Ah, or Iah means life, existence, and is evidently the root of the word akasa, which in Hindustan is pronounced ahasa, the life-principle, or Divine life-giving fluid or medium. It is the Hebrew ruah, and means the “wind,” the breath, the air in motion, or “moving spirit,” according to Parkhurst’s Lexicon; and is identical with the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters.
[257] Bear in mind that Kavindasami made Jacolliot swear that he would neither approach nor touch him during the time he was entranced. The least contact with matter would have paralyzed the action of the freed spirit, which, if we are permitted to use such an unpoetical comparison, would re-enter its dwelling like a frightened snail, drawing in its horns at the approach of any foreign substance. In some cases such a brusque interruption and oozing back of the spirit (sometimes it may suddenly and altogether break the delicate thread connecting it with the body) kills the entranced subject. See the several works of Baron du Potet and Puysegur on this question.
[258] “La Magie Devoilée,” p. 147.
[259] “Magie au XIXme Siècle,” p. 268.
[260] Ibid.
[261] Brierre de Boismont: “Des Hallucinations, ou Histoire raisonnée des apparitions, des songes, des visions, de l’extase du Magnetisme,” 1845, p. 301 (French edition). See also Fairfield: “Ten Years Among the Mediums.”
[262] Cabanis, seventh memoir: “De l’Influence des Maladies sur la Formation des Idées,” etc. A respected N. Y. legislator has this faculty.
[263] Irenæus: Book iii., chap. ii., sec. 8.