lifrieu af Kevhwi, iOf'i/OiJ. 



Leading Articles. 



4°3 



OCCULTISM IN THE MAGAZINES. 



The Occult Revieu! and Broad Views for March 

 both discuss the marvellous case of Miss Beau- 

 champ, as told by Dr. Moreton Prince in his fascina- 

 ting book on ''The Disassociation of a Personality." 

 The Occult Review thinks that 



the fact that tJie personality in c«rlaiu cases is liable U3 he 

 split up into three or tour separate iiiclividualitie.s, alt tur 

 a time at least ttiinkiii'.r anil acting indeiieuiteiitly. and 

 possessed of t)tall.\ liitfereiit cliaracteristics, luucli more 

 contrasted than those of many separate inifiviilual enti- 

 ties, is surely sufficient evidence to in-ove that conscious in- 

 dividuality by itself is no suarantec of immortality 



Mr. Sinnett, in Broad Views, regards the case as 

 not proven. He sajs : — 



It may be that all the cuniplexittes concerniiiK the vari- 

 ously numbered B.'s do represent no more than abnormal 

 phases of one entity, and the patient treatment bestowed 

 upon them hy the h.\piinttc t>rofessor may quite poss.hly 

 have dissi))ated the ahnoinial conditions wiiicli at one time 

 forbade more tliaii one aspect of the persniiality to be 

 manifest at any piven nirmieut. But no one <'omi)rehentlin(i 

 anything concerning suiHTpih.xsical states of consciousness, 

 familiar to those for whom the astral plane is a pnyx de 

 conu<iig»ance, can doubt for a moment that Sally is an in- 

 dependent entity. 



I'he Occult Review tells a gruesome story of the 

 death of a famous scientist on June 7th. 1905, who 

 appears to have perished, together with his assis- 

 tant, while making .nttenipts to distil the Elixir of 

 Life. The story rtcills Zanoni, and the moral is 

 that the dwellers on the threshold guard the secrets 

 of the occult world. He said a year before his death 

 that he had to contend continually with a gruesome 

 crowd of elementals who seemed at first to freeze 

 the blood in his veins. In the same magazine Miss 

 Catherine Bates describes her experiences with Mrs. 

 Piper and her controls. " A Southern Rector," 

 seventy years old, tells among other marvellous ex- 

 periences how he profits by the results of unconscious 

 cerebration : — 



As a baker places his doui;h into the oven, so at nit^hl- 

 fall on going to bed I place the rough material of a lecture, 

 a. sermon a set of verses, a difficult problem, and so forth, 

 in my mind, and on wakine: up in the morning everything 

 is clear, concise, and arrani-ed in logical order. 



Broad Vie-ivs divagates too much into controversial 

 theology. Mrs. Sinnett writes on " Nicolas Flamel 

 and the Alchemical Mystery."' The paper on Uncon 

 scious Progress in Occultism is interesting reading. 



In the Annals of I'sycliical Science for February 

 the Rev. A. B. I.eslie points out the bearing of 

 psychical research upon the religious life. He 

 says : — 



The two great facts that metapsychical studies have 

 brought out. and may fairly claim to have established as 

 verifiable, are these;— Fir.st. that our whole mental life is 

 not comprised within our directly conscious experience. 

 This alone is of vast import in relation to the religious 

 life for, at any rate, it implies a larger self with larger 

 possibilities of good and evil; and secondly, that this 

 deeper self is in lelation to other entities, and is there- 

 fore a connecting link with a world of thought and being 

 accessible in a way hitherto unrealised. 



There is an interesting paper describing telepathic 

 experiments made lietween two ladies, which shows 

 that the power of sending and receiving telepathic 



messages is capable of development with prac- 

 tice: - 



.Vs a rule, lieginuers will find it easier to transmit the 

 ilioughl 01 an object which is actually belore their eyes 

 at the time, choosing, when possible, something which has 

 attracted a good deal ol attention during the Hay. The 

 i;ercipient. meanwhile, siiould determine to think of no-. 

 thing at all. but merely to exiiect an iinpiessiiin Irom the 

 agent; at first the attempt to ni.ike the mind a complete 

 blank will be attended with .1 leeling of anxiety lest the 

 lime fixed tor the experiment should slip hy lielore the mind 

 IS sufflcientlv at rest to receive telepathic impressions, but 

 here the possibility of ilerrrrtd prrcipirucr comes to the 

 rescue. 



A DOUBLE PERSONALITY. 



The discovery that Fiona Macleod was William 

 Sh^rp leads Mrs. Hinkson (Katharine Tynan) in the 

 l-oiUu'jhtly to raise the question whether, after all, 

 there wert- not two persons inhabiting one frame. 

 She asks, How far did William Sharp himself be- 

 lieve in Fiona Macleod? — 



Was it a difBcult and obscure mental case, or something 

 Ijclongiiig to mysteries to which we have as yet no key.' 

 Ii reminds one of the old days of possession, when a wan- 

 dering spirit entered into and took possession of a man. 

 S)ioke with a voice not his. uttered words of which he had 

 no knowledge, spoke words of wisdom out of a simple habi- 

 tation. If one could accept some such theory as this much 

 would Ije explained. 



That finally the mystery will be relegated to the region ol 

 mental phenomena seems likely enough. 



.V friend of Mr. Sharps, who w;i8 in the secret from the 

 lieginning. writes to me. with iierinission to publish his 

 letter : — 



There was no deception, however, for the popular way ot 

 putting it that he simply masqueraded as Fiona Macleod 

 hicks all real understanding. 1 donl believe cither our 

 plivsiologv or psychology, or even the incipient re-union of 

 both, can yet fuUv explain any such strange combination 

 of normal and abnormal elements, but that there was a 

 Strom- tendency to a dissolution of i)ersonality into dis- 

 tinct components, and that F. M. reiiresented the highest 

 piodnct of this recurrent process. I have little doubt. You 

 know more or' less, doubtless, of the stories of dual and 

 even triple i>ersonality which medical psychologists, es- 

 pecially, have established; of varieties of religious experi- 

 ence, and so on. Well, here was the process at work upon 

 a hi'-'her type than those as yet ohserveil and recorded, 

 and a680cia"ted with a definite variety of poetic experience.' 



M this rate, every dramatic genius will be a high 

 multiple of personality, and Shakespeare will be 

 another Legion, with dramatis persona- instead of 

 (liulaiene swine. 



In the January Westermann the most interesting 

 article is that bv Eugen Kalkschmidt, on Max 

 Klinger as a Painter and as an Etcher. As Klinger 

 is a musical devotee as well as an artist, it is not 

 surprising that he should lay the sister arts under 

 contribution, and as an admirer of Brahms he has 

 given us a large number of etchings, lithographs, 

 etc., with subjects suggested by Brahms's works. 



In the Gni's Realm for February, Miss Gertrude 

 Bacon describes her ballooning experiences. A 

 night ascent, she says, is an entrancing experience, 

 but finer still is the dawn as seen from aloft. The 

 descent of the balloon seems most fraught with 

 danger, and the stunning shock experienced when 

 the balloon strikes the ground sounds anything but 

 pleasant. 



