Essays In Occultism, Spiritism, Demonology E-Book

William R. Harris

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 152

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

As far back as history goes, at all times, in all lands, and among all peoples materializations of spirits have occurred. The spirit manifestations to-day are but a repetition of those which took place in pre-Christian times. The war and the publications of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Oliver Lodge, W. J. Crawford, and Emile Boirac have given to Spiritism a popular vogue and impetus. By a singular coincidence books on Spiritism, published in Germany, France, and Italy have appeared almost simultaneously with English and American publications on this weird subject. Many of these have given a quasi-scientific endorsation to Spiritism, and have contributed official support to the current belief in the reality of Spiritistic phenomena. Catholic students of these phenomena have never doubted their reality. While admitting and conceding the impositions, frauds, trickery and deceptions of many professional mediums. Catholic psychologists and theologians, who for nearly two thousand years have investigated the subject, hold that materializations have always taken place and are occurring to-day, and that no theory of fraud or delusion can account for them. Contents: Preface I - Preliminary Discourse Ii - The Sixth Sense Iii - The Sense Of Orientation Iv - Wonders Of Bilocation V - Bicorporeity Vi - Dual Personality Vii - Spiritism, Ancient And Modern Viii - Spiritism- What Is It? Ix - Apparitions X - Demoniacal Possession Xi - What Of The Dead? Xii - Spirits Of Another World

Leseprobe

Essays In Occultism, Spiritism, Demonology

William R. Harris

Contents:

Preface

I - Preliminary Discourse

Ii - The Sixth Sense

Iii - The Sense Of Orientation

Iv - Wonders Of Bilocation

V - Bicorporeity

Vi - Dual Personality

Vii - Spiritism, Ancient And Modern

Viii - Spiritism— What Is It?

Ix - Apparitions

X - Demoniacal Possession

Xi - What Of The Dead?

Xii - Spirits Of Another World

Essays in Occultism, W. R. Harris

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Germany

ISBN: 9783849622671

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

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PREFACE

As far back as history goes, at all times, in all lands, and among all peoples materializations of spirits have occurred. The spirit manifestations to-day are but a repetition of those which took place in pre-Christian times. The war and the publications of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Oliver Lodge, W. J. Crawford, and Emile Boirac have given to Spiritism a popular vogue and impetus. By a singular coincidence books on Spiritism, published in Germany, France, and Italy have appeared almost simultaneously with English and American publications on this weird subject. Many of these have given a quasi-scientific endorsation to Spiritism, and have contributed official support to the current belief in the reality of Spiritistic phenomena. Catholic students of these phenomena have never doubted their reality. While admitting and conceding the impositions, frauds, trickery and deceptions of many professional mediums. Catholic psychologists and theologians, who for nearly two thousand years have investigated the subject, hold that materializations have always taken place and are occurring to-day, and that no theory of fraud or delusion can account for them. Planchette and Ouija board answers and automatic writing are facts of every-day experience, but that these responses, materializations, spirit communications and the like, are messages from the dead, Catholic psychology denies. Applying the methods of physics to psychic phenomena, Professor Crawford, in his latest work, "The Reality of Psychic Phenomena," believes he has demonstrated not only the actuality and truth of these phenomena, but also the existence of a hitherto unknown manner of manifestation of psychic or spirit energy. Conan Doyle, in his book, "The New Revelation," asserts that these spirit communications establish a new religion, a "New Revelation," a re-birth of the Christian religion, while Emile Boirac informs us in his "Psychology of the Future" that these phenomena lay the foundations of a new psychology, dealing with the obscure forces latent in the nature of man. These three well-known writers are firm believers in Spiritism and in the possibility of communicating with the souls of the dead. Professor Crawford in his brief preface says that he is "personally satisfied that the spirits are the souls of human beings who have passed into the beyond." But Catholic psychologists, and many distinguished non-Catholic writers who have studied Spiritism, state that no evidence which would be accepted in any court of law has been given to prove that the spirits responding to human summons are the souls of men and women who at one time lived upon the earth. They contend that the phenomena are produced and controlled by fallen angels, spirits of evil, and that so far from being communications from the dead, they are actually malign manifestations of diabolic force. They also contend that these phenomena are manifestations of demoniac spirits with whom the Catholic Church forbids all those who listen to her voice to hold intercourse. Mr. J. Godfrey Raupert, who has devoted many years to the study of psychic phenomena, asks in his book, "The Supreme Problem": "Can we reasonably believe that the heretofore relations and friends will avail themselves of means so repulsive and so disastrous as are the spiritistic methods in order to furnish evidence to the living that they still survive?" The distinguished British scientist Sir William Barrett, writing on Spiritism, says: "For my own part, it seems not improbable that the bulk, if not the whole of the physical manifestations witnessed in a spiritual séance, are the product of human-like, but not really human, intelligence-good or bad, daimonia they may be-which congregate around the medium, as a rule drawn from that particular plane of mental and moral development in the unseen which corresponds to the mental and moral development of the medium. Moreover, if there is any truth in the view suggested above of a possible source of the purely physical manifestations, it seems to me that the Apostle Paul, in the Epistle to the Ephesians, points to a race of spiritual creatures, similar to those I have described, but of a malignant type, when he speaks of beings not made of flesh and blood inhabiting the air around us and able injuriously to affect mankind. Good as well as mischievous agencies doubtless exist in the unseen; this, of course, is equally true if the phenomena are due to those who once lived upon the earth. In any case, granting the existence of a spiritual world, it is necessary to be on our guard against the invasion of our will by a lower order of intelligence and morality." In harmony with the will and the orders of Almighty God, the Catholic Church not only denounces Spiritism, but also commands her children to abstain from all intercourse and communication with spirits, whether they be of the dead or demoniacal. She condemns also spirit communications because of the frightful results which inevitably follow all sustained Spiritistic practices. And in her denunciations she is supported by influential members of the Church of England, clergymen and eminent scientists. Members of the Spiritistic cult may protest against the severe condemnation pronounced on Spiritism by the Catholic Church; but, with Dr. Raupert we ask them to "Please examine the evidence. Putting theology aside, examine, with an unbiased mind the Spiritistic phenomena. You will quickly become convinced that a transcendental intelligence is certainly manifesting itself through these phenomena, and you will also find that this intelligence is a powerfully evil force." Centuries of experience have taught Catholic psychologists and doctors that devotion to Spiritism has worked ravages upon the minds of weak-willed and impressionable people, and has driven many to suicide and insane asylums. Whether these statements and the Catholic view of Spiritism are accepted or rejected, the frightful consequences resulting from communication with transcendental spirits should be plainly understood, and all thoughtful Christians should unite in denouncing the cult of Spiritism and spirit manifestations.

THE AUTHOR.

"There are more things, Horatio, in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." -HAMLET.

Among the occult sciences I include the cult of Spiritism, and I do not deny that associated with it are fraud, deception and trickery, but can anyone believe that scholars like de Mirville and Des Mousseaux and scientists like Lodge, Flammarion, Barret, Richet, Wallace, and James, who, after many years of experience with mediums, after patient examination of the cult, and intelligent study of the subject, abandoned materialism for Spiritism-were deceived. They have all confessed their absolute belief in the objective reality of spirit phenomena. The only ground of dispute between these eminent men and Catholic and Anglican investigators of the cult is the nature of the beings or intelligences which produce the phenomena.

I - PRELIMINARY DISCOURSE

Before entering upon any disquisition or explanation of miracles or phenomena of the occult sciences, it is well to bear in mind that the wonders and miracles recorded in the lives of the saints and in the annals of ecclesiastical history are not in the same class with, nor so faith-compelling as are the miracles of the New Testament, which serve to confirm our faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ and n the holiness and perpetuity of the religion He established. Apart from the fact that these testamentary signs and miracles are recorded in books written under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, and confirmed by the voice of the Church, it must be remembered that they are included in the deposit of faith and may only be denied under penalty of incurring the guilt of heresy and committing an act of manifest impiety. All other miracles, no matter how well authenticated, rest upon what is termed legal evidence, and the Church leaves us free to accept or reject them. This is not saying that, if a miracle is substantiated and approved by rightly constituted ecclesiastical authority and we refuse to credit it, we are not incurring a note of rashness and mental arrogance. But let us bear in mind this truth. We must believe with the Apostles and the Fathers that the Holy Spirit is the soul of the Church and that, while the Third Person of the Adorable Trinity dwells in and animates the Church, miracles will, for all time, occur as manifestations of the in dwelling of the Holy Ghost in the Kingdom on earth of Jesus Christ, and as testimonies of God's love for his children. Let me predicate however that, without faith in God, miracles, signs, wonders and certain "psychic phenomena" are impossible of solution, and. that, without belief in the inspiration of the Bible, they are difficult to explain. We are surrounded by mysteries-by miracles, by prodigies, by the incomprehensible. In the purely material world the smallest grain of sand defies the powers of the human mind. For six thousand years science has examined it, has turned it to the light, placed it under the microscope, divided and subdivided it; she has tormented it with experiments, wearied it with interminable questions to extract from it some answer touching its intimate composition; she has asked it with a curiosity that is never satisfied: "Whence came you  After I have divided you, can I divide you again  And will there be still something yet to divide when time shall be no more  " So on the rim of the infinite, science hesitates, stumbles, is bewildered, is seized with vertigo, and at last exclaims: "I am as one groping in the dark." So with attraction, that mysterious and wonderful power of a primal, elemental law or force that no man has ever seen, touched or heard, and which in its silent and mysterious influence surpasses all other known powers. And what do we know of that substance of infinite tenuity, yet of immense elasticity, which permeates all space and every other substance, which cannot be seen or felt or weighed, and whose composition is unknown 1 So far as we know, it offers no resistance to the motion of planetary bodies, yet its existence is made manifest by its property of transmitting chemical rays, light, radiant heat, electricity, and probably some more recondite forms of energy, at fabulous velocity from the remotest parts of the universe, and by means of vibrations, the nature of which, with their astounding frequency and pitch, has been determined by mathematicians. The unscientific mind may be disposed to regard its existence as a myth or at most as an abstract conception of the human mind, and yet that great scientist, Lord Kelvin, has declared that not only does it exist, but it is "the only substance we are confident of in dynamics and that the one thing we are sure of, is the reality and substantiality of this luminous ether." How do these myriad bodies of the universe, these silent, insensible bodies, unconsciously sustain that reciprocity of action and reaction which holds them in marvelous equilibrium, and in accord with one another! The visible creation is a veil behind which the invisible Creator "worketh hitherto"; a veil which conceals Him from the unbelieving, the impure, the self-sufficient and the proud, and through which the pure of heart alone may see, and even they only as St. Paul saw, "in a glass darkly," though with a promise of a revelation "face to face" when "the day breaks and the shadows flyaway." The Church explains this darkness of the intellect and weakness of perception when she tells us that the sin of Adam, our first parent, visited upon the human race "the wound of ignorance by which the intellect has been weakened, so that it has a difficulty in discerning truth, easily falls into error, and inclines more to things curious and temporal than to things eternal. ' , The mind of man to-day, as in the time of the Apostles, is "tossed about by every wind of doctrine," so that we are witnesses to the unseemly exhibition of Darwin, Maudsley, Tyndall, and Huxley denying the existence of another world, and Sir Oliver Lodge, Conan Doyle, and Emile Boirac communing with spirits and proclaiming aloud the immortality of the soul and the right of man to evoke the dead. If God has willed, and now wills, to bestow His gifts and mercies in a certain way and on certain persons, have we the right to reject His manifestations and insist, with Naaman the leper, "that He shall come out and put His hand on the place," and reveal to us how it is done?

There is in fallen human nature a tendency, more or less strong, but present in every individual of our race, to forget God. Man is prone to be the slave of the material and the sensual. He finds it hard to realize his dependence, from hour to hour, on the sustaining power and loving care of an unseen Father. Underneath him are the Everlasting Arms, but as they are not of flesh and blood, it demands the possession of supernatural faith to perceive them. Faith is not knowledge, it is not a production of the laboratory, but a supernatural gift which enables us to believe in and, in a sense, to see what is not visible. It is a faculty of the soul which demands constant exercise, else it will grow weak and, in time, incapable of seeing even" as in a glass darkly," through a veil of unsubstantial phenomena, into the spiritual kingdom of "Angels, Powers, Principalities, and Thrones." In order, then, to quicken our faith, and to help us to understand that God hath dominion over the living and the dead, to feel our dependence on Him for our daily bread, our health and life, He visits us, as in the days of David, with sorrow and affliction, famines, wars, and plagues. Again He makes his presence known through His Angels, or "by the spirits of the just made perfect," or in benignity and tenderness as in apparitions like those of Paray-le-Monial and Lourdes. Man in relation to animals, to the spheres of beings which are placed below him, occupies a distinct and, to them, a supernatural position, and to these creatures his actions are miraculous, in so far as they cannot understand them. Now, have we any authority for believing that there is a sphere, state, or place different from ours, occupied by beings of a subtler essence and a higher intelligence than belong to members of the human race? That is to say, that as we on this earth recognize the existence of the three kingdoms-animal, vegetable, and mineral-with their divisions and subdivisions, may there not be, and are there not, in the 'unseen world beings of an order superior to ours, endowed with or possessed of attributes, powers and faculties altogether unlike and superior to the endowments of our nature? If this be so, the powers of such beings would be as superior, from our point of vision, and their actions as miraculous, as are our actions from the standpoint of animals or of lower intelligences.