At certain periods in our normal life, certain subjects lying quite outside our earthly experience begin quite suddenly to be talked of and written upon. No one knows why, no one, outside occultism, can even form a conjecture why such subjects should suddenly obsess the brains of a considerable number of persons, why they should crop up in the most unexpected places, or why they should form the foundations of a considerable mass of literature.
It would appear as if they were floating in the air at some particular time, and masses of people catch them up like germs, and carry them about until their power is exhausted.
I will give an instance. In the years just before the war "The Great God Pan" drifted across our mental horizon and was at once drawn into our aura.
No one knows anything about "The Great God Pan." He is supposed to belong to mythology, but novelists of distinction at once began to write upon him, not one after the other, but simultaneously. I read at least three thrilling novels in which he figured largely, and I myself was impelled to write a novel upon the same subject.
I began the book knowing nothing of the god, beyond what I could gather from the London Library, and Frazer's "Golden Bough," but as I proceeded I was conscious of new information drifting in from without, and on finishing the book I found that other authors had been at work on the same subject.
"The Great God Pan" appeared on the stage, and a popular actress sang a song about him. One heard his name mentioned constantly in society, and hideous stories were told of him in Bohemian art circles. He was the bugbear of the séance room, journalists mentioned him in quite serious articles, and I once heard his name spoken from a pulpit.
The bare fact of this seemingly inconsequent disease (for it almost amounted to a disease with us) drifting into our stolid British atmosphere was not curious to the occultist, who is aware that at certain times, certain subjects are flooded in on us from "the other side" by those who have our welfare at heart.
I never heard any explanation of why Pan should have come here to play quite an important part in our mental lives, or why he should have obsessed so many of us for about a couple of years. The more one discovered about him the less one liked him, but psychics are led to believe that there are many schemes of evolution hovering about us, and interpenetrating our own, though not visible to our normal consciousness.
It may therefore be that "The Great God Pan" did actually come into our atmosphere, and thus his individuality impressed itself upon those whose minds were plastic to such impressions. Possibly he arrived on this earth much as an aerolite arrives, drawn out of his own orbit by the superior attraction of this globe.
"The Great God Pan" was, what might be termed, the forerunner of the devil's reincarnation. The belief in a personal devil was rapidly dying out amongst us, in spite of "The Sorrows of Satan," and the belief in "The Prince of this World" so insisted upon throughout the Old and New Testaments.