human
or
gpt
of almost any modern school explains such visions by saying they are
human
and that all objects and events leave their images in the astral light as upon a photographic plate, and that we must distinguish between spirits and these unintelligent pictures. I was once at Madame Blavatsky's when she tried to explain predestination, our freedom and God's full knowledge of the use that we should make of it. All things past and to come were present to the mind of God and yet all things were free. She soon saw that she had carried us out of our depth and said to one of her followers with a mischievous, mocking voice:
gpt
You with your impudence and your spectacles will be sitting there in the Akasa to all eternity and then in a more meditative voice,
human
No, not to all eternity for a day will come when even the Akasa will pass away and there will be nothing but God, chaos, that which every man is seeking in his heart. Akasa, she was accustomed to explain as some Indian word for the astral light. Perhaps that theory of the astral pictures came always from the despair of some visionary to find understanding for a more metaphysical theory. It is, however, ancient. To Cornelius Agrippa it is the air that reflects, but the air is something more than what the word means for us.
gpt
It is a vital spirit passing through all beings giving life and substance to all things ... it immediately receives into itself the influences of all celestial bodies, and then communicates them to the other elements as also to all mixed bodies. Also it receives into itself as if it were a divine looking-glass the species of all things, as well natural as artificial, it enters into men and animals
human
and
gpt
Henry More is more precise and philosophical and believes that this air which he calls _Spiritus Mundi_ contains all forms, so that the parents when a child is begotten, or a witch when the double is projected as a hare, but as it were, call upon the _Spiritus Mundi_ for the form they need. The name
human
Astral Light was given to this air or spirit by the Abbé Constant who wrote under the pseudonym of Élephas Lévi and like Madame Blavatsky, claimed to be the voice of an ancient magical society. In his _Dogma et Rituel de la Haute Magie_ published in the fifties, he described in vague, eloquent words, influenced perhaps by the recent discovery of the daguerreotype these pictures which we continually confuse with the still animate shades. A more clear exposition of a perhaps always incomprehensible idea is that of Swedenborg who says that when we die, we live over again the events that lie in all their minute detail in our memory, and this is the explanation of the authors of _The Adventure_ who believe, as it seems, that they were entangled in the memory of Marie Antoinette. I have met students who claimed to have had knowledge of Lévi's sources and who believed that when at last a spirit has been, as it were, pulled out of its coil, other spirits may use its memory, not only of events but of words and of thoughts. Did Cornelius Agrippa identify soul with memory when, after quoting Ovid to prove that the flesh cleaves to earth, the ghost hovers over the grave, the soul sinks to Oxos, and the spirit rises to the stars, he explains that if the soul has done well it rejoices with the almost faultless spirit, but if it has done ill, the spirit judges it and leaves it for the devil's prey and
gpt
Remembering these writings and sayings, I find new meaning in that description of death taken down by Lady Gregory in some cottage:
human
The shadow goes wandering and the soul is tired and the body is taking a rest.