Why not,” I said to a Master’s messenger, “give to all these gaping theosophical children throughout the Society, the whole truth at once? Collect all the doctrines and the interlocking prophecies together, whether about the world of men or the world of the Gods; arrange all the facts respecting the evolution of men an the planet, with all the details about dividing of races and the hidden descent of tribes: then give it out for good and all.”

Looking at me seriously, he said, “Would they believe it?

I think not.” But he left behind him some stray jottings ….

“The science-worshipping theosophist, thinking that the brighter day will only come when men of science are convinced that the Masters knew all that is to be known, would have revelations regarding missing links and the dispersion of races. But the dawn of a new age is not heralded by such divulgements; and to tell the facts before the time would only result in strife, bitterness, and laughter.

Not even the devotees of the Worship of the Dead, who follow after mediums and say that the souls of the deceased return to detestable surroundings in heated cabinets, would admit a single fact that militated against pet theories. Yet we know that the souls of good men who have died do not trouble the world. They leave behind them the ‘coat of skin’, full of what wickedness they were unable to disperse in life. This unsavory remainder is worshipped by the medium-hunter, and because out of the astral light it reports facts and words not thought of by the sitters, the real man is accused, and by default convicted, of returning here. Such spiritualists as believe thus are consecrating corpses and making Gods of the demons of the air. Will they believe this?

“The extraordinary psychical manifestations occurring during the last forty years all over the Western world have been dubbed by the ‘spiritists’ as the awakening of men and the new, best, last philosophy, whereas they merely marked the changes beginning in the great heart and mind of the collective Western man. In relation to what is heralded and will be, they are as is the changing voice of the youthful chorister to its full development into a basso profundo.

“By careful and painstaking attention to this worship of the dead, new forms are created in the astral light, compounded of the reliquæ of deceased people and the matter added by elementals; they imitate the dead in word, gesture, recollection, and other indicia of identity, and delude the living, because these elementals like the new surroundings thus found. One small section only of the elemental nature is thus affected, but it likes not to relinquish a grasp once taken upon us mortal-gods.

“Although this Death-Cult calls itself scientific, we have not yet heard of any careful or other collecting of statistics about appearances through mediums of the same deceased person at more than two places at once. But any careful reader can find that such things are reported every day and no deduction drawn from it.

“The real deceased one in his blissful state after death feels a twinge every time his shade is called up in the charnel house of a living medium’s body.

“The money paid to mediums for ‘spirit communications’ is haunted by astral beings of a certain order. They plunge upon the medium, and find their appropriate dwelling in the bad and not in the good part of his nature. The temple of the Holy Ghost is thus turned into a den of thieves.

“The trajectory of a spiritual being through space is visible to the human eye from only one point, and very often it is seen as a curved line when in fact it is otherwise. One sort of elemental being moves in an epicycloidal curve. Looked at by one person’s eye it is a straight line, to the other observer it is a curve, while a third sees it as a triangle. 

“Every thought has with it in its journey all the physical, mental, and moral attributes of the thinker; but the recipient may be able only to perceive one of those attributes, and then, instead of getting the thinker’s thought, he may hear the rate of vibration in the body of the thinker, and all he sees then is a small white star.

“There are beings who have their existence in your body. Some live but a moment, others for longer periods.

“Where cities are ‘destined’ to be built, whole armies of celestial beings build an imaginary city and try to induce men to erect the objective structures there; and the founding of a city is an occasion of joy or deep sorrow for those who can see the nature of its builders.

“There are certain spots in the land now uninhabited, over which swarm hosts of elementals. They have their own city there, and when men pass that way they whisper to them, show pictures of a city, of its buildings, and its future; and soon or late the human beings come and erect their dwellings there.

Your American continent is full of these spots, and crowded with memories of past glories that elbow each other for space.

“Although each thought goes on through infinite space, many thoughts sent out from your mind are, so to say, lost on the way; for they meet opposite thoughts or stronger ones which deflect them from the course desired, and they thus fly on to a goal not in the mind of the thinker, or through weakness of impulse they fall easily away from the appointed orbit.

“In one aspect the Astral Light may be compared to a howling mob of rival musicians, each engaged on a different tune. Who enters there has need to know how to distinguish the right tune, or dire confusion will result in his mind.”

URBAN (William Q. Judge), 
Path, February 1889