Not only does this condition exist without being recognized; not only just here lies the whole secret and field of Education in child, woman and man, but so ignorant are thousands as to these patent facts and basic principles, that they covet and strive after this confusion, this devolution, in the vain search for knowledge, light, and truth.
These are the office, the function and the result to the subject (or victim) of Mediumship and Hypnotism. They yield the Will, the mastery of their own house, to another.
The servants may be tractable for a while, but an alien is seated upon the throne, and the Master is no longer King in his own realm.
Others may indeed learn something from his undoing, from the crimes committed upon him, just as we learn from criminals how we ought not to live.
Whether ignorantly, voluntarily, by persuasion, or by force of a stronger will, the medium and the hypnotic subject are victims either of ignorance or of design, to their own undoing.
These psychical experiences have been found in all ages and among every people of whom we have any valid history, from the red Indians of the North to the Voodoos of Africa, and from the Hill Tribes of India to the earliest Scandinavian Tribes and the islands of the sea.
As civilizations advanced, the more intelligent and unscrupulous individuals, ambitious of knowledge or power, regardless of the rights or well-being of others, and discovering these powers, exercised them for their own aggrandizement. This has been known through the ages as Black Magic, and is laughed at to-day by so-called “Scientists” as “nothing but the fears, credulity, and superstitions of the ignorant multitude.” This was the core of Egyptian Paganism, and is the very genius of Clericalism to-day—the domination of the Individual Will, through superstition and fear.
Owing to seismic and cataclysmic shocks, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, and great epidemics of disease, whole peoples have been dominated by fear or frenzied by superstitious dread, so that whole villages and cities became literally “mad-houses,” and were often depopulated.
Read the story of “Peter, the Hermit,” and “The Crusades,” the “Black Death,” the “Great Plague” that swept over Europe in the Thirteenth century; or that of the “Flagellants,” and the “Dancing Mania,” where whole villages became “Dancing Dervishes,” samples of which may occasionally be found to-day in the cities of America, the “Yogis” that are “Buddhas” or “Christs” in New York, and the Dowies that were “Elijahs” in Chicago, the Genius of Point Loma, Obispo, Santa Rosa, “Oahspe,” “Solar-Biology,” and again, et hoc genus omne! Verily! “there is nothing new under the sun.”
Contrast these individuals with an individual of sound mind, good judgment, and a well-ordered life, and see how and where and why the wreck inevitably follows.