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Information is sometimes obtained in the same sort of way at the spiritualistic séance of modern days, but in that case the messenger employed is more likely to be a recently-deceased human being functioning more or less freely on the astral plane though even here also it is sometimes an obliging nature-spirit, who is amusing himself by posing as somebody's departed relative.
It will be found that there are five, four of them being really varieties of clairvoyance, while the fifth does not properly come under that head at all, but belongs to the domain of magic. Let us take this last one first, and get it out of our way. By the assistance of a nature-spirit.
Another class of hauntings which take the form of bell-ringing, stone-throwing, or the breaking of crockery, has already been referred to, and is almost invariably the work of elemental forces, either set blindly in motion by the clumsy efforts of an ignorant person trying to attract the attention of his surviving friends, or intentionally employed by some childishly mischievous nature-spirit.
A shell so occupied can communicate at a séance and masquerade as its original owner, since some of his characteristics and certain portions of his memory can be evoked by the nature-spirit from his astral corpse. When a man falls asleep, he withdraws in his astral body, leaving the whole of the physical vehicle behind him.
The circumstances of his appearance are distinctly Teutonic in character, and are such as to make one doubt that the Devil of the German peoples has evolved from the classical satyr. May it not be that the Teutonic folk possessed some nature-spirit from which they evolved a Satanic figure of their own?
There are occasions, though at present these are rare, when the Karma of the person so praying is such as to permit of assistance being directly rendered to him by an Adept or his pupil, and there is also the still rarer possibility of the intervention of a Deva or some friendly nature-spirit; but in all these cases the easiest and most obvious form for such assistance to take would be the strengthening and the intelligent direction of the elemental already formed by the wish.
Just as the name "elementary" has been given indiscriminately by various writers to any or all of man's possible post-mortem conditions, so this word "elemental" has been used at different times to mean any or all non-human spirits, from the most godlike of the Devas down through every variety of nature-spirit to the formless essence which pervades the kingdoms lying behind the mineral, until after reading several books the student becomes absolutely bewildered by the contradictory statements made on the subject.
The Greek conquest was the one Rome did not survive. Conquered Greece overflowed her, and washed her out; changed her traditions, her religion, the whole color of her life. If Greece had not stepped in, myth-making and euhemerizing, who would have saved the day at Lake Regillus? Not the Great Twin Brothers from lordly Lace-daemon, be sure. Who then? Some queer uncouth Italian nature-spirit gods?
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