And Milton writes like any Platonist of his time:
"For Spirits, when they please,
Can either sex assume, or both; so soft
And uncompounded is their essence pure,
Not ty'd or manacled with joint or limb,
Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones,
Like cumbrous flesh; but, in what shape they choose,
Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure,
Can execute their aery purposes,
And works of love or enmity fulfil."
Note [11]. The seers and healers in this section differ but little from clairvoyants and spirit mediums of the towns, and explain their powers in much the same way. Indeed one of Lady Gregory's story-tellers will have it that America is more full than Ireland of faeries, and describes the mediums there to prove it. It is often through some virtue in these country seers and healers that the faeries or spirits are able to affect men and women and natural objects. Mrs. Sheridan says that a child could not have been taken if she had not been looking on, and one hears again and again that even when the faeries fight among themselves or play at hurley, there must be a man upon either side. We are all in a sense mediums, if the village seer speaks truth, for through any unsanctified emotion, love, affection, admiration, the spirits may attain power over a child or horse or whatever is before our eyes, and perhaps, as the controls of mediums will sometimes say, they can only see the world through our eyes. Albert de Rochas, borrowing a theory from the seventeenth century, has suggested with the general assent of spiritists that the fluidic or sidereal body of the medium, the mould upon which the physical body is, it may be, built up, is more detachable than in persons who are not mediums, and that the spirits make themselves visible by transforming it into their own shape or into what shape they please and attain by its means a power over physical objects. (See L'Extériorisation de la Motricité.) Instead of the expensive crystal of the Bond Street clairvoyant, Biddy Early gazed into her bottle, but that is almost the whole difference. If the dreams and visions of Connacht have more richness and beauty than those of Camberwell, it is that Connacht, having no doubts as to our survival of death, is not always looking for but one sort of evidence, and so can let things happen as they will. The brother or sister or the like who comes to the knowledgeable man or woman after death is but the "guide" that has been so common in England and America, since the Rochester rappings, and a country form of Plutarch's "dæmon." At other moments, however, "seer" or "healer" resembles a witch or wizard rather than a modern medium.
In one thing, however, they always resemble the medium and not the witch. They seem to have no dealings with the devil. The Irish Trials for witchcraft of the English and continental type took place among the English settlers. I have never come across a case of a "compact" nor has Lady Gregory, nor have I read of one.
Note [12]. It is almost unthinkable to Lady Gregory and myself, who know Mrs. Sheridan, that she can ever have seen a drawbridge in a picture or heard one spoken of. Nor does this instance stand alone. I have had in my own family what seemed the accurate calling up of an unknown past but failing a link of difficult evidence still unfound, coincidence, though exceedingly unlikely, is still a possible explanation. I have come upon a number of other cases which are, though no one case is decisive, a powerful argument taken altogether. In The Adventure (MacMillan), an elaborate vision of this kind is recorded in detail and, accepting the record as accurate, the verification is complete. Two ladies found themselves in the garden of the Petit Trianon in the midst of what seemed to be the court of Marie Antoinette, in just the same sudden way in which some countryman finds himself among ladies and gentlemen dressed in what seem the clothes of a long passed time. The record purports to have been made in November and December 1901, whereas the vision occurred in August. This lapse of time does not seem to me to destroy the value of the evidence, if the record was made before its corroboration by long and difficult research.[2] Accepting the good faith of the narrators, both well-known women and of established character, its evidence for some more obscure cause than unconscious memory can only be weakened by the discovery in some book or magazine accessible to the visionaries before their visit to the Trianon, of historical information on such minute points as the dress Marie Antoinette wore in a particular month, and the position of ornamental buildings and rock work not now in existence. There is a great mass of similar evidence in Denton's Soul of Things though its value is weakened by his not sufficiently allowing for thought transference from his own mind to that of his sensitives.
A "theosophist" or "occultist" of almost any modern school explains such visions by saying they are "pictures in the astral light" and that all objects and events leave their images in the astral light as upon a photographic plate, and that we must distinguish between spirits and these unintelligent pictures. I was once at Madame Blavatsky's when she tried to explain predestination, our freedom and God's full knowledge of the use that we should make of it. All things past and to come were present to the mind of God and yet all things were free. She soon saw that she had carried us out of our depth and said to one of her followers with a mischievous, mocking voice: "You with your impudence and your spectacles will be sitting there in the Akasa to all eternity" and then in a more meditative voice, "No, not to all eternity for a day will come when even the Akasa will pass away and there will be nothing but God, chaos, that which every man is seeking in his heart." Akasa, she was accustomed to explain as some Indian word for the astral light. Perhaps that theory of the astral pictures came always from the despair of some visionary to find understanding for a more metaphysical theory. It is, however, ancient. To Cornelius Agrippa it is the air that reflects, but the air is something more than what the word means for us. "It is a vital spirit passing through all beings giving life and substance to all things ... it immediately receives into itself the influences of all celestial bodies, and then communicates them to the other elements as also to all mixed bodies. Also it receives into itself as if it were a divine looking-glass the species of all things, as well natural as artificial," it enters into men and animals "through their pores" and "makes an impression upon them as well when they sleep as when they awake and affords matter to divers strange dreams and divinations.... Hence it is that a man passing by a place where a man was slain and the carcase newly laid is moved by fear and dread; because the air in that place being full of the dread species of man-slaughter does being breathed in, move and trouble the spirit of the man with a like species ... whence it is that many philosophers were of the opinion that the air is the cause of dreams." Henry More is more precise and philosophical and believes that this air which he calls Spiritus Mundi contains all forms, so that the parents when a child is begotten, or a witch when the double is projected as a hare, but as it were, call upon the Spiritus Mundi for the form they need. The name "Astral Light" was given to this air or spirit by the Abbé Constant who wrote under the pseudonym of Élephas Lévi and like Madame Blavatsky, claimed to be the voice of an ancient magical society. In his Dogma et Rituel de la Haute Magie published in the fifties, he described in vague, eloquent words, influenced perhaps by the recent discovery of the daguerreotype these pictures which we continually confuse with the still animate shades. A more clear exposition of a perhaps always incomprehensible idea is that of Swedenborg who says that when we die, we live over again the events that lie in all their minute detail in our memory, and this is the explanation of the authors of The Adventure who believe, as it seems, that they were entangled in the memory of Marie Antoinette. I have met students who claimed to have had knowledge of Lévi's sources and who believed that when at last a spirit has been, as it were, pulled out of its coil, other spirits may use its memory, not only of events but of words and of thoughts. Did Cornelius Agrippa identify soul with memory when, after quoting Ovid to prove that the flesh cleaves to earth, the ghost hovers over the grave, the soul sinks to Oxos, and the spirit rises to the stars, he explains that if the soul has done well it rejoices with the almost faultless spirit, but if it has done ill, the spirit judges it and leaves it for the devil's prey and "the sad soul wanders about hell without a spirit and like an image?" Remembering these writings and sayings, I find new meaning in that description of death taken down by Lady Gregory in some cottage: "The shadow goes wandering and the soul is tired and the body is taking a rest."
I was once talking with Professor James of experiences like to those in The Adventure and said that I found it easiest to understand them by believing in a memory of nature distinguished from individual memory, though including and enclosing it. He would, however, have none of my explanation and preferred to think the past, present, and future were only modes of our perception and that all three were in the divine mind, present at once. It was Madame Blavatsky's thought, and Shelley's in the Sensitive Plant:
"That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away;
'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed, not they.
"For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change; their light
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure."