[459] According to General Pleasonton’s theory of positive and negative electricity underlying every psychological, physiological, and cosmic phenomena, the abuse of alcoholic stimulants transforms a man into a woman and vice versa, by changing their electricities. “When this change in the condition of his electricity has occurred,” says the author, “his attributes (those of a drunkard) become feminine; he is irritable, irrational, excitable ... becomes violent, and if he meets his wife, whose normal condition of electricity is like his present condition, positive, they repel each other, become mutually abusive, engage in conflict and deadly strife, and the newspapers of the next day announce the verdict of the coroner’s jury on the case.... Who would expect to find the discovery of the moving cause of all these terrible crimes in the perspiration of the criminal? and yet science has shown that the metamorphoses of a man into a woman, by changing the negative condition of his electricity into the positive electricity of the woman, with all its attributes, is disclosed by the character of his perspiration, superinduced by the use of alcoholic stimulants” (“The Influence of the Blue Ray,” p 119).
[460] Plato: “Timæus.”
[461] Littré: “Revue des Deux Mondes.”
[462] See des Mousseaux’s “Œuvres des Demons.”
[463] Du Potet: “Magie Devoilée,” pp. 51-147.
[464] Ibid., p. 201.
[465] Baron Du Potet: “Cours de Magnetisme,” pp. 17-108.
[466] “De Occulto Philosophiâ,” pp. 332-358.
[467] Cicero: “De Natura Deorum,” lib. i., cap. xviii.
[468] Eliphas Levi.