I left my native land, and for many years sojourned among the wandering Arabs. This course of action was not understood by my countrymen. They could not see the mystic star that drew me away from their busy haunts. The Magi of the East had stood at my cradle and endowed me with the noble gift of the Seeress.
The power of reading the future does not belong to the Northern people. It is the darkest and deepest well that reflects the star above it; the dark and swarthy East is thus endowed. The pale North cannot give out impressions. I was an exception to this rule.
There are those who at birth are possessed of Eastern spirits—Asiatics. Andrew Jackson Davis is not a Northern man—he is an Asiatic. Look at his olive complexion, his keen eye, his beard and hair of jetty black, his visage,—all betray the race which inspired him.
The faculty of discerning the future belongs only to certain races, and it cannot be universal. Many spirits profess to read the future, but few can do so correctly.
Yet the life of man is mapped out in every particular, even before his birth. Men are like planets. The future of the planet Earth could have been foretold before it was thrown off from the sun and while it was yet in a molten state; so each step in an individual life could be foretold: yet it requires ability to enter into the peculiar magnetic condition in order to obtain the power of foretelling. It may be said if the future of man is thus mapped out, even as was the creation and progression of the earth, it becomes merely a scientific affair to prophesy the future of any given individual. This is true, but the inquirer will observe how many hundreds and hundreds of years science has been engaged in discovering facts concerning this world’s history. The eye of prophecy could foresee those facts and foretell them, though it could not lay down any scientific basis in regard to them.
The events which will take place to-morrow may be said to have already transpired.
The water that is rising from yon creek will increase in volume. Conditions which have been for days and weeks in preparation will suddenly conspire, causing the stream to rise to such a height that the city will be overflowed, bridges swept away, and certain individuals submerged by the current and their lives lost.
This disastrous occurrence is governed by a law which the keen observer of nature could have foretold years previous to the event.
As in the natural world the traveller in the desert beholds the mirage of some city which is hundreds of miles distant, suddenly arising upon the sandy waste, so, in the spirit world, the spectrum form is projected, and events which are to take place are made visible before their actual occurrence. But, as in the natural world spectrum forms occur only under certain atmospheric conditions, so in the spirit world it is the conjunction of circumstances and the blending of magnetic currents that make it possible for coming events to be revealed upon the level plane which is set apart for this purpose in the summer land.
Man at the present day is so constituted that a revealment to him of coming events in detail would be injurious; and experience proves that such disclosures, when made to him in dreams or otherwise, are profitless, as he always fails to foil the evil of which he is forewarned.