Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/40

36 have looked into the phenomena of haunted houses. These elemental artificials are embodiments of man's will and thought. Once wrought together by longing, fear or crime, they may last for ages. An elemental, it has been wisely said, is a perfect storage battery from which there is practically no leakage. After a thousand years, a conception carefully worked out and firmly wrought together exhibits unimpaired vitality. In a famous case, such an artificial still warns the direct descendents of Sir Godfrey de Gespensterheim of their approaching doom by repeating in their ears the strange wailing music which was the dirge of his beloved son, Sir Lienhardt, seven hundred years ago in Palestine.

When these artificials are formed consciously and purposely they may be made the engines of tremendous power. Occultists of both the white and the black schools use them frequently and no influence in all the psychical universe can be so potent. But the evil use is not so common as it would be were it not that the highest occult power is granted only to the virtuous, and the black magicians are often torn to pieces by fiends of their own raising. Thus cast back into Devachan, their former power is lost to them and their reincarnation as dogs or monkeys by way of purification is extremely probable. This accounts for the multitudes of these animals in the streets of Benares and Constantinople. It is their nature to haunt the scenes of their physical exploits. To make artificials of extreme virulence and power has been the work of the sect known as the Lords of the Dark Face. Among other things they formed 'wonderful speaking animals who had to be quieted by an offering of blood lest they should awaken their masters and warn them of impending destruction.' From creatures of this type, created for a special purpose and afterwards neglected by an overworked magician, the race of parrots is descended. The devotees of the ghostly goddess Kale once performed rites too horrid to describe, and the results of which were the submergence of the continent of Lemuria with the loss. of sixty-five million, two hundred and eighty-five thousand human lives, besides several myriads of promising anthropoids only lately condensed from Devachan. Even Ram, a mere Swami who has been in Nirvana only as a mahatma's honored guest, could speak a word which could blast your mountains, blight your fruit or growing grain or flood your valley with the waters of the sea. Such mystic words there be and Ram knows them. Ram's finger could point unerringly to the limitless fountains of gold in your hills. But Ram stays his voice and withholds his hand, for his life is a life of meekness and self-renunciation and these things must not be.

It is in the formation of artificials that a man's real character appears, whether" on the physical earth or in Astrum or Devachan. The true adept forswears all that may be harmful to others. He may not use his power for his own advancement, hence his vow of poverty