Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/37

Rh necessary while the matter is arranged, lest by a touch of the Devachanic plane the waiting ego be swept by irresistible current into the line of normal evolution. In some cases, to avoid this strange accident, incomprehensible to you who have never left the limits of Alcalde, and to escape the trouble of a new birth, with the pains of teething and the other woes of childhood, the adept will enter some adult body, abandoned temporarily or permanently by its former tenant. The advantages of remaining bodiless are, however, considerable, as this avoids the hampering possibility of fatigue while retaining perfect consciousness. The disadvantage is that as nothing can touch the being in question, it can touch nothing for itself. Here, too, gather many of those who have abandoned the physical life, to be returned to it, in reincarnation, not having perfectly achieved higher possibilities. Most of these remain, however, on the astral plane, never falling below the density of shades.

The third class, known as 'shells,' are soulless bundles of qualities fastened together by will or thought and so retaining a human resemblance though all vestige of humanity has departed. Such, when seen by the canny, are recognized as ghosts. In writings of adepts you will find accounts of psychically developed persons, that is, persons possessed of second sight, who have seen about cemeteries 'hundreds of these bluish-white misty forms, hovering over the graves where are laid the physical vestures which they have recently left,' These shells may be galvanized into a very horrible form of temporary life, but this is only done by the loathsome rites of one of the worst forms of the black magic, which you of Alcalde, most of you not even initiates, much less adepts, could never be made to understand.

Still more unpleasant are the incubi, or clusters of wicked qualities, wrenched by violence from their possessors as a stone is torn from an unripe fruit. These take a fiendish delight in exercising the arts of delusion which the higher plane puts in their power to lead others to the excesses which proved fatal to themselves. For such a one to meet a medium with whom it is in affinity is indeed terrible, for by such means its existence may be indefinitely prolonged. Still worse are the vampire and the were-wolf, which we of the Fifth Eoot Race now seldom encounter, but which, to Slavic and Germanic adepts of the earlier centuries were objects of fear and danger in the astral regions and even as high upward as Devachan. All these are human in their origin. Not so the fifth class, the occasional visitors from other planets. Of these wonderful creatures we know nothing, for only the highest of high adepts have the power of moving from planet to planet, and even I do not understand how it is performed. When these visitors appear, they choose a body temporarily created out of unused ethereal matter belonging to the earth. Over this they wear a distinctive badge, a ring indicating Saturn, a series of belts indicating Jupiter or a tiny flaming