Spiritual vampirism

INTRODUCTION.

On page 392 of the concluding sketch of a late series, the Tales of the Southern Border, occurs the following passage:—

" THE ESCRITOIRE.

" The author, being a resident of New York during the period of the leading incidents narrated as occurring in that city, had formed the acquaintance of the principal personage. Himself a Southerner, he had, from the natural affinities of origin, inevitably been attracted toward Carter. The intercourse between them, at first reserved, had imperceptibly warmed into a degree of intimacy, which, however, had by no means been such as to render him at all cognisant, beyond the merest generalities, of the progress of his private affairs. He was not a little surprised, therefore, at finding, one day, an elegant escritoire or cabinet, of dark, rich wood, heavily banded in the old-fashioned style with silver, which had been placed, in his absence, on the table of his sanctum. A note, in a sealed envelope, lay upon it. He instantly recognised the handwriting of the address as that of Mr. Carter, and broke the seal.

" It was evidently written in great haste, but without any sign of trepidation. It ran thus:—

" My dear Friend:

" I have no time for explanations, as I am in the midst of hurried preparations for an unexpected yacht-voyage—upon which I set sail in a few minutes. I send you an escritoire, which was left in my charge by a highly valued friend. He was an extraordinary man; and its contents will be, I doubt not, of great value to the world.

" It was given me, with the injunction that it should not be opened until six months after his death. The six months were up some weeks since, but I have lately been too much otherwise absorbed to think of making use of the privilege of the key. I now therefore transfer to you this bequest in full, with the proviso that you will not open it for six months. If at the end of that time I have not been heard from, please open, and without reserve make what use of it your excellent sense may justify. Please take charge of whatever correspondence may arrive to my address for the same length of time, at the expiration of which you will also please to consider yourself as my executor—open my correspondence and proceed as you may think best. Pardon this unceremonious intrusion of responsibilities upon an intimacy, the terms of which I hardly feel would strictly justify me; but the plea that I know no one else whom I can trust, and have no time for further explanation, will I am sure justify me in the eyes of a brother Southron.

" Yours truly,

"Frank Carter.

Six months having elapsed, and still no news of my singular friend Carter, the fulfilment of the important duties of executor, thus unexpectedly devolved upon him, were deferred by the narrator as long as his sense of duty would possibly admit. At last, when longer delay would have seemed to assume almost the aspect of criminality, the duty of opening the cabinet was unwillingly entered upon.

On my next meeting with my friend Carter, who proved still to be in the land of the living, I spoke to him of the cabinet and its remarkable contents, which had so unexpectedly been left in my charge; offering to resign to him my trusteeship. To this, however, he would by no means consent, but continued to insist, as in his original letter, that I should without reserve make what use of it my sense of propriety might dictate. I was finally overruled into undertaking the mere arrangement and editorship of its contents—for the revelations there made are in many respects so strangely horrifying and unusual, that I fear the world will be little disposed to pardon my agency in giving them publicity. However, as I believe them to be, in every respect, genuine life-experiences, I have determined to make the venture, come what will of it. We shall therefore give, as proper introduction to the singular narrative which we have selected from beneath the blood-stained seals of the cabinet it has been our fate to open, the following singular paper, which we found lying separately above the folds of the MS. which constitutes the History of Etherial Softdown.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MESMERIC IMPOSITION.

TO BE READ BY PHILOSOPHERS ONLY. [1]

[1]

The Story begins at Chapter I.—Ed.

The existence of what may be called the nervous or Odic fluid—the sympathetic element—has been partially known to all ages. The knowledge of this powerful secret, in moving and controlling mankind, has been professionally and almost exclusively confined to the adepts of all sects, religions, and periods; though it has occasionally, in various ways, leaked out of the penetralia, principally through its forms, accompanied with little or no apprehension of their vital meaning. It is in this way that a series of scientific phenomena, the discovery of which probably originated with a remote priestcraft, and had been made to subserve exclusive ends, has gradually been fragmented among the people, and in many imperfect, ignorant, and vitiated forms has now become the common property of science.

When it is understood that this nervous fluid is nothing more nor less than that force—whether electrical, magnetic, odic, or otherwise named—which, lubricating the nervous system in man, produces all vital phenomena—is, in a word, the vital force—the active principle of life—it will not be difficult to comprehend how important a knowledge of its laws may be rendered to even those relations of life not exclusively physical.

Mesmer promulgated, under his own name, as a new and astounding discovery in science, something of the sympathetic laws to which this nervous or Odic fluid is subject, and by

which the vital and spiritual relations of man to the external universe are in a great measure modified, and even controlled. This was no discovery of his, but had been the mainly exclusive secret of the ancient priesthood; employed alike in the ceremonies of the novitiate in the Thibetian temples of Buddha, in the Egyptian Initiation, and in Grecian Pythism. But the particular reason why his announcements caused such prodigious excitement, in 1784, as to run all Paris mad, even including the court of the wary Louis XVI., and still continue to excite and madden mankind, is, that, as the sympathetic ecstacies and furors, superinduced by the mummeries of his famous vat, were called by a new name, the people failed to recognise them, although they had been familiarised with, and even acting habitually under their influence, while surrounded by accessories of a more sacred character. The immediate success of Mesmer’s experiments amazed men. He, in fact, little knew what he was doing himself; the effects he understood how to produce, because accident had furnished him with the formulas. Having gone through these, which, though most grotesque and preposterous, later experience has shown, really included all the passes and other conditions necessary to establish sympathy through the nervous fluid with the victims of his delusion, he proceeded to produce exhibitions the most extraordinary the world ever saw, except in the hideous and frantic orgies of some wild, barbaric creed, and the parallels to which, in this country, are to be found in the shrieks and bellowings of a fanatic camp-meeting, Miller ascension-tent, Mormon rite, or hard-cider political mass-meeting.

Beginning with the postulate that Nature abhors a vacuum, it does not seem difficult to understand something, at least, of the rationale of this sympathetic influence of one man over another. The laws of the distribution of this Odic force seem to bear a somewhat general affinity to those of electricity. The surcharged cloud discharges its superfluous fluid into the cloud more negatively charged. The man holding a superfluous amount of vital or Odic force, can dismiss a portion of this—along the course of its proper lightning-rods, or conveyers, the nerves—into the organisation of a being more negatively charged, or, in other words, of a weaker man. As electricity can only act upon inert matter through its proper media, the elements, so the Odic fluid can only act upon organised matter normally through its proper medium, the nerves of vitality. This communication of the Odic fluid, by which sympathy between the two beings has been established, can be, to a certain degree, regulated and controlled by manipulations which bring the thumbs and fingers of the hand, which are properly Odic poles, in contact with certain great nerves, or centres of nerves, along which the influence can be readily communicated. These manipulations, the vital and original meanings of which these Mesmer agitators have betrayed, may be traced very clearly through the most important ceremonies of religion, and the secret orders of fraternisation in the world. From this point of view, how significant the laying-on of hands in ordination, the joining of hands in the marriage ceremony, &c.

Here let us remark, that we would no more be understood as accusing a Christian Priesthood, in modern times, of having made an improper use, either inside or out of their profession, of the manipulations mentioned above, than we would think of accusing them of having, as a class, any special knowledge of their significance beyond that of ceremonial forms, set down in the discipline. It has been to the Heathen Priesthood that we have consistently attributed a knowledge of the psychological meaning of these ceremonials, which have descended through the Hebrew and Christian churches as avowedly divested of vital significance, and intended, in their arbitrary exaction, as, to a certain degree, ordained tests of Christian faith and obedience.

But it is by no means indispensable to the exhibition of the Odic phenomena, that the processes of manipulation should have been literally gone through with in all cases—nor, indeed, in the majority even—for some of the most apparently inexplicable and extraordinary of them all are brought about without such intervention. Take, as comparatively modern instances, such effects as those produced by the preaching of Peter the Hermit, when not only vast armies of men were moved like flights of locusts toward the Desert, on the breeze of his fiery breath, to disappear, too, as they, within its bosom, and never be heard from again, but even great armies of children rushed in migratory hordes to the sea-ports, to ship for the Holy Land!—and those produced by the crusade of Father Mathew against intemperance, in our time, when all Ireland lay wailing at his feet. These great furors were precisely identical with those already enumerated, so far as the sympathetic or motive power went. So with the story of the rise of Mahomet, Joe Smith, Miller, and all such agitators. They are usually men of prodigious vital power, and of course surcharged with the Odic fluid, who begin these great movements; and they possess, beside, vast patience and endurance. They begin by filling the individuals in immediate contact with them, as Mahomet did his own family, with the superfluity of the Odic force in themselves, and having thus obtained a single medium by this immediate contact—which, although it may not imply the formal manipulations with preconceived design, implies the accidental equivalents—the circle gradually enlarges through each fresh accession, in much the same way that it began, until, after a few patient years of unshaken endurance, the apostle finds himself surrounded by thousands and thousands of human beings, whose volition is swayed through this Odic force—this sympathetic medium—by his own central, resolute, and self-poised will, as if they were but one man. His moveless volition has been, from the beginning, the base and axis of the vast sympathetic movement going on around him, and upon the single strength of the Odic force within him, all depends, until, through a thorough organisation of ceremonial laws and observances, the system of which he was the vital centre assumes a corporate existence, and can stand alone.

This is about the method in which all such organisations, radiating from the one man power or centre, widen their circles to an extreme circumference, until the force of the pebble thrown into the great lake is exhausted. So it is with all sympathetic excitements—from the Dancing Dervishes, the Shaking Quakers, or the Barking Brothers, to the vast Empire of France, led frenzied over the world in the will-o’-the-wisp chase of universal sovereignty, by the fantastic will of a Napoleon. These are some of the general phenomena of sympathy, and there are many quite as extraordinary, if not as broad in what are called atmospheric or epidemic conditions, which go to prove the universality of this sympathetic law.

The distinctions between Od and Heat, Od and Electricity, as well as Od and Magnetism, have been so clearly demonstrated by the investigations of Baron Reichenbach as to leave at present no choice between the terms. Od expresses that force which, differing in many essential properties from the other two, can alone through its phenomena be reconciled with what we know of the Sympathetic or Nervous Fluid. It is therefore used as a synonym of this mysterious agency, and as conveying a far higher definition and significance than either the term Electricity or Mesmerism.

The worst and the best that the agitation begun by Mesmer has accomplished, is, to have stripped old Necromancy of its mysterious spells, by revealing something of the rationale of them, while at the same time, in unveiling its processes to the sharp eyes of modern knaves, they have been enabled to appropriate and practise them again with even more than the old success, under the new christening of scientific experiment. It is, I think, easily enough shown, by a minute and circumstantial comparison of the cotemporary history of the dark age of black art ascendancy in Europe, which was literally the dark age of chivalry, with that of Cotton Mather witch-burning enlightenment in New England, that the arts practised by the accused in both these countries, and at all other such periods in all other countries, were nearly identical with each other; and those familiarised to us through the doings of mesmeric manipulation, revelation, clairvoyance, spiritual knockings, &c., &c., are generally the very same, though assuming slight shades of difference, indicating some progressive development. A partial knowledge of psychological laws, which was formerly, and with great plausibility, considered altogether too dangerous pabulum for the vulgar mind, has been sown broadcast by the empiricism of this mesmeric movement, the principal oracles and expounders of which have been clearly as ignorant of the causes with which they agitated, as ever wrinkled crone of peat-smoked hovel was of the true laws of that occult palmistry, through the practice, or vague traditions of which, she finally prophesied herself into the martyrdom of the red-hot ploughshares, or the warm resting-place of the pot of boiling pitch. They only know that certain formulas produce certain results, and as they are blundering entirely in the dark, they mix those which have a basis in science with the crude and meaningless forms which ignorance, with its abject cunning, easily supplies. From such amalgamations have arisen the mummeries of conjuration in whatever form, and by the imprudent use of which, the credulous, simple and superstitious, are so easily frightened from their propriety, and thus made easy victims of more dangerous arts.

But it is a study of the fearful uses which have been made by the evil-disposed, of this partial knowledge of the laws of relation of soul to the body, that is more interesting now than these olden disguises of the same evil in more helpless forms; as now, through the mesmeric agitation, it has really attained to some gleam of causes—has now something of scientific illumination to steady and give direction to its reckless and deadly aim. In the radius of its hurtful circumference, the vicious power of the witch, fortune-teller or conjuror, was as much more circumscribed than that of the semi-scientific charlatan of clairvoyance, as the vision of the mole is less than that of the viper, which, at least, looks out into the sunshine though every cloud may impede its malignant gaze.

The relative degrees in which the Odic or sympathetic fluid may be found exhibited in the different individuals of our race, have been previously remarked in general terms. In the sexes, we most usually find the positive pole in man, who gives out, and the negative in woman, who receives and absorbs from him, the dispenser. Though this be the general rule so far as the sexes are concerned, it is by no means the universal rule for the race—since there are among men but few positive poles, or fixed centres of Odic radiation; and where such are found, they are observed to possess much of what we commonly call influence with or upon others. All the parties, therefore, within the circle of this sympathetic radiation, or magnetic attraction, as it is popularly termed, must necessarily be, relatively to this positive pole, negative poles, without regard to sex—while each of these comparatively negative poles may in turn be a positive pole, or Odic centre, to those below or of weaker nature than himself.

Those men who have been known to all humanity as prophets, poets, law-givers, discoverers, reformers, &c., are, and have been, what we mean by positive Odic poles; for while they have seemed to stand in immediate and direct communion with the spiritual source of all wisdom, they have at the same time given out the impulse thus granted, to the people by whom they are surrounded, thus acting as the chosen media of divine revelation, and from the cloudy summits of Sinais handing down the tables of the law to all the tribes.

Now there is a mighty radiation of the Odic force from these men, through which the love, wisdom, or rather will in them—or sent through them—is made operative upon the great masses of mankind; and this same radiation, in the greater or less degrees, is found emanating from a thousand different sources at the same time, affecting man for evil as well as for good; for, when we comprehend that this Odic or sympathetic force is the sole medium of communication with the spiritual and invisible world, as well as with the visible and material world, it can then be easily understood how what are called evil and good spirits should through it affect mankind. This will be fully illustrated when we observe the common conditions of health and disease. Health is good and disease is evil; and these are the two eternally antagonistic chemical forces in the universe. Health is that normal condition of the body which enables it to resist evil and maintain the proper balance of the spiritual and material elements. Disease is that abnormal condition of the body in which the integrity of the spiritual and organic functions has been destroyed through the sympathetic media by evil, and good overcome.

In either case, the balance is destroyed, and the immediate consequence may be, in the one, sudden paroxysms of fearful insanity, or in the other, sudden death, as in common apoplexy.

Thus the popular fallacy, that all things having a source in the spiritual, or rather the invisible, must of necessity be good, is in a very simple way exposed. We see there may be what are called evil, as well as good spirits, which hold communion with us; and the safest and only true general rule with regard to such matters is, that, while the good spirits are those propitious chemical forces which make themselves known to us in love, and joy, and peace, through the unbounded happiness of the normal conditions of health, the evil spirits are those vicious chemical forces, morbid delusions, and malign revelations, which are made known to us through all other diseased conditions as well as that of Clairvoyance. Remember that no such being has yet been known throughout the whole range of Mesmeric experiment as a healthy Clairvoyant, or a subject who has attained to the super-eminence of Clairvoyance, who was not what they fancifully term delicate—that is, liable to those diseases which are well known to supervene upon nervous weakness, exhaustion, or emasculation. This condition of nervous exhaustion renders them, of course, the very negation of the negative pole of sympathy, and the first person approaching them, who possesses the ordinary Odic conditions of health, is clutched hold of by their famine-struck vitality, in the agonised plea for life! life!

Give! give! is still the insatiable cry. They must have the Odic fluid restored, and that, in taking from your enough, they exhaust and undermine the holy purposes of your life to make up that deficit in their own—which loathsome vice has brought about—the hideous selfishness of weakness rather rejoices. The sympathetic rapporte being once established, they can at least, through this dangerous medium, live in the integrities of your life, and enjoy, both physically and spiritually, a surreptitious vitality, which, while it reflects the prevailing phenomena of your own mind and spiritual being, has, in addition, some approximation even to the physical exaltation of your higher health.

These human vampires or sponges may be, therefore, as well absorbents of the spiritual as animal vitality. Their parasitical roots may strike into the very centres of life, and their hungry suckers remorselessly draw away the virility of manhood, or the spiritual strength.

They seem to be mainly divided into two classes, one of which, born, seemingly, with but a rudimentary soul, attains to its apparent spiritual though merely mental development, by absorption of the spiritual life in others, through the Odic medium. Another class, born with a predominating spirituality based upon a feeble physique, is ravenous of animal strength, and can only live by its sympathetic absorption of the same from others, through the same pervading medium. Of the two, the first is the evil type; for, born in the gross sphere of the passions, with a vigorous organisation, but faintly illuminated at the beginning with that golden light of love which is spiritual life, the fierce half-monkey being is propelled onwards, and even upwards, by the basest of the purely animal instincts, appetites, and lusts. If such beings strive towards the light of the harmonious and the beautiful, it is not because they yearn for either the holy or the good, but because it lends a lurid charm to appetite and glorifies a lust.

The other character, in whom the spiritual predominates, whether from a natal inequality, as is very frequently the case, or from the sheer exhaustion of the physical powers, through emasculating vices, is yet, in itself, good, so far as its morbid conditions leave it an unaccountable being; but, as its revelations and utterings depend entirely upon the Odic characters and will of those from whom its strength may be derived, it can only be regarded, whether used for evil or good, as a medium. This character is the common Clairvoyant, to whom we are indebted for those strangely-mingled gleams of remote truth, with errors the most grave and injurious, which have so tended to confuse the judgment of mankind in regard to the phenomena of Clairvoyance. Such persons can be made as readily the medium of any falsehood which the knavish passions of their Mesmerisers may dictate, as they can be caused to announce, by a will as strong, but soul more pure, the disconnected myths of science and of history, which have so surprised the world in what are called the Revelations of Andrew Jackson Davis. This man belongs to our second class, and is purely a medium of the sympathetic fluid. His organisation is most sensibly sympathetic and delicately responsive, but is too feeble to balance his spiritual development. His case stands, therefore, as the most remarkable modern instance of what the ancients termed " vaticination ; but, as has been the case with other false prophets, his gifts have proved of no value, except to knaves. He was undoubtedly practised upon by a choice set of such characters; and, now that he has found in marriage a sympathetic restoration, through the physical, of its needed balance with the spiritual, he has lost his lying gift" of prophecy.

We have examined this man carefully, and are convinced that the whole mystery of his revelations and character may be contained in a nut-shell. He is to the sphere of intellectual and spiritual sympathy, and in a lower sense, precisely an analogous case with that of Mozart in the sphere of the musical and spiritual. When the great soul of