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Astral Plane Non-human
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Lucid Dreams Waking Within the Dream - Making a List
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Affirmations and OOBE
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Lucid Dreams Waking Within the Dream - Too Dumb for Words
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Energy Patterns & OBE
Astral Plane Dead
To begin with, of course this very word "dead" is an absurd misnomer,
as most of the entities classified under this heading are as fully
alive as we are ourselves; the term must be understood as meaning
those who are for the time unattached to a physical body. They may be
subdivided into nine principal classes as follows:
1. _The Nirmanakaya._
This class is just mentioned in order to make the catalogue complete,
but it is of course very rarely indeed that so exalted a being
manifests himself upon so low a plane as this. When for any reason
connected with his sublime work he found it desirable to do so, he
would probably create a temporary astral body for the purpose, just as
the Adept in the Mayavirupa would do, since the more refined vesture
would be invisible to astral sight. Further information about the
position and work of the Nirmanakayas may be found in Madame
Blavatsky's _Theosophical Glossary_ and _The Voice of the Silence_.
2. _The Chela awaiting reincarnation._
It has frequently been stated in Theosophical literature that when the
pupil reaches a certain stage he is able with the assistance of his
Master to escape from the action of what is in ordinary cases the law
of nature which carries a human being into the devachanic condition
after death, there to receive his due reward in the full working out
of all the spiritual forces which his highest aspirations have set in
motion while on earth. As the pupil must by the hypothesis be a man of
pure life and high thought, it is probable that in his case these
spiritual forces will be of abnormal strength, and therefore if he, to
use the technical expression, "takes his Devachan," it is likely to be
an extremely long one; but if instead of taking it he chooses the Path
of Renunciation (thus even at his low level and in his humble way
beginning to follow in the footsteps of the Great Master of
Renunciation, GAUTAMA BUDDHA Himself), he is able to expend that
reserve of force in quite another direction--to use it for the benefit
of mankind, and so, infinitesimal though his offering may be, to take
his tiny part in the great work of the Nirmanakayas. By taking this
course he no doubt sacrifices centuries of intense bliss, but on the
other hand he gains the enormous advantage of being able to continue
his life of work and progress without a break. When a pupil who has
decided to do this dies, he simply steps out of his body, as he has
often done before, and waits upon the astral plane until a suitable
reincarnation can be arranged for him by his Master. This being a
marked departure from the usual course of procedure, the permission of
a very high authority has to be obtained before the attempt can be
made; yet, even when this is granted, so strong is the force of
natural law, that it is said the pupil must be careful to confine
himself strictly to the Kamaloka while the matter is being arranged,
lest if he once, even for a moment, touched the devachanic plane, he
might be swept as by an irresistible current into the line of normal
evolution again. In some cases, though these are rare, he is enabled
to avoid the trouble of a new birth by being placed directly in an
adult body whose previous tenant has no further use for it, but
naturally it is not often that a suitable body is available. Far more
frequently he has to wait on the astral plane, as mentioned before,
until the opportunity of a fitting birth presents itself. In the
meantime, however, he is losing no time, for he is just as fully
himself as ever he was, and is able to go on with the work given him
by his Master even more quickly and efficiently than when in the
physical body, since he is no longer hampered by the possibility of
fatigue. His consciousness is of course quite complete, and he roams
at will through all the divisions of the Kamaloka with equal facility.
The chela awaiting reincarnation is by no means one of the common
objects of the astral plane, but still he may be met with
occasionally, and therefore he forms one of our classes. No doubt as
the evolution of humanity proceeds, and an ever-increasing proportion
enter upon the Path of Holiness, this class will become more numerous.
3. _The Ordinary Person after death._
Needless to say, this class is millions of times larger than those of
which we have spoken, and the character and condition of its members
vary within extremely wide limits. Within similarly wide limits may
vary also the length of their lives upon the astral plane, for while
there are those who pass only a few days or hours there, others remain
upon this level for many years and even centuries. A man who has led a
good and pure life, whose strongest feelings and aspirations have been
unselfish and spiritual, will have no attraction to this plane, and
will, if entirely left alone, find little to keep him upon it, or to
awaken him into activity even during the comparatively short period of
his stay. For it must be understood that after death the true man is
withdrawing into himself, and just as at the first step of that
process he casts off the physical body, and almost directly afterwards
the etheric double and the Prana, so it is intended that he should as
soon as possible cast off also the astral or kamic body, and pass
into the devachanic condition, where alone his spiritual aspirations
can find their full fruition. The noble and pure-minded man will be
able to do this, for he has subdued all earthly passions during life;
the force of his will has been directed into higher channels, and
there is therefore but little energy of lower desire to be worked out
in Kamaloka. His stay there will consequently be very short, and most
probably he will have little more than a dreamy half-consciousness of
existence until he sinks into the sleep during which his higher
principles finally free themselves from the kamic envelope and enter
upon the blissful rest of Devachan.
For the person who has not as yet entered upon the path of occult
development, what has been described is the ideal state of affairs,
but naturally it is not attained by all, or even by the majority. The
average man has by no means freed himself from the lower desires
before death, and it takes a long period of more or less fully
conscious life on the astral plane to allow the forces he has
generated to work themselves out, and thus release the higher Ego. The
body which he occupies during this period is the Kamarupa which may be
described as a rearrangement of the matter of his astral body; but it
is much more defined in outline, and there is also this important
difference between the two that while the astral body, if sufficiently
awakened during life to function at all freely, would probably be able
to visit all, or at any rate most, of the subdivisions of its plane,
the Kamarupa has not that liberty, but is strictly confined to that
level to which its affinities have drawn it. It has, however, a
certain kind of progress connected with it, for it generally happens
that the forces a man has set in motion during earth-life need for
their appropriate working out a sojourn on more divisions than one of
the Kamaloka, and when this is the case a regular sequence is
observed, commencing with the lowest; so that when the Kamarupa has
exhausted its attractions to one level, the greater part of its
grosser particles fall away, and it finds itself in affinity with a
somewhat higher state of existence. Its specific gravity, as it were,
is constantly decreasing, and so it steadily rises from the denser to
the lighter strata, pausing only when it is exactly balanced for a
time. This is evidently the explanation of a remark frequently made by
the entities which appear at _seances_ to the effect that they are
about to rise to a higher sphere, from which it will be impossible, or
not so easy, to "communicate" through a medium; and it is as a matter
of fact true that a person upon the highest subdivision of this plane
would find it almost impossible to deal with any ordinary medium.
It ought perhaps to be explained here that the definiteness of outline
which distinguishes the Kamarupa from the astral body is of an
entirely different character from that definiteness which was
described as a sign of progress in the astral of the man before death.
There can never be any possibility of confusion between the two
entities, for while in the case of the man attached to a physical body
the different orders of astral particles are all inextricably mingled
and ceaselessly changing their position, after death their activity is
much more circumscribed, since they then sort themselves according to
their degree of materiality, and become, as it were, a series of
sheaths or shells surrounding him, the grossest being always outside
and so dissipating before the others. This dissipation is not
necessarily complete, the extent to which it is carried being governed
by the power of Manas to free itself from its connection with any
given level; and on this also, as will be seen later, the nature of
the "shade" depends.
The poetic idea of death as a universal leveller is a mere absurdity
born of ignorance, for, as a matter of fact, in the vast majority of
cases the loss of the physical body makes no difference whatever in
the character or intellect of the person, and there are therefore as
many different varieties of intelligence among those whom we usually
call the dead as among the living. The popular religious teaching of
the West as to man's _post-mortem_ adventures has long been so wildly
inaccurate that even intelligent people are often terribly puzzled
when they recover consciousness in Kamaloka after death. The condition
in which the new arrival finds himself differs so radically from what
he has been led to expect that it is no uncommon case for him to
refuse at first to believe that he has passed through the portals of
death at all; indeed, of so little practical value is our much-vaunted
belief in the immortality of the soul that most people consider the
very fact that they are still conscious an absolute proof that they
have not died. The horrible doctrine of eternal punishment, too, is
responsible for a vast amount of most pitiable and entirely groundless
terror among those newly arrived in Kamaloka who in many cases spend
long periods of acute mental suffering before they can free themselves
from the fatal influence of that hideous blasphemy, and realize that
the world is governed not according to the caprice of some demon who
gloats over human anguish, but according to a benevolent and
wonderfully patient law of evolution. Many members of the class we are
considering do not really attain an intelligent appreciation of this
fact at all, but drift through their astral interlude in the same
aimless manner in which they have spent the physical portion of their
lives. Thus in Kamaloka, exactly as on earth, there are the few who
comprehend something of their position and know how to make the best
of it, and the many who have not yet acquired that knowledge; and
there, just as here, the ignorant are rarely ready to profit by the
advice or example of the wise.
But of whatever grade the entity's intellect may be, it is always a
fluctuating and on the whole a gradually diminishing quantity, for the
lower Manas is being drawn in opposite directions by the higher Triad
which acts on it from above its level and the Kama which operates from
below; and therefore it oscillates between the two attractions, with
an ever-increasing tendency towards the former as the kamic forces
wear themselves out. And here comes in the evil of what is called at
_seances_ the "development" of a spirit through a medium--a process
the object of which is to intensify the downward pull of the Kama, to
awaken the lower portion of the entity (that being all that can be
reached) from the natural and desirable unconsciousness into which it
is passing, and thus to prolong unnaturally its existence in the
Kamaloka. The peculiar danger of this will be seen when it is
recollected that the real man is all the while steadily withdrawing
into himself, and is therefore as time goes on less and less able to
influence or guide this lower portion, which nevertheless, until the
separation is complete, has the power to generate Karma, and under the
circumstances is obviously far more likely to add evil than good to
its record. Thus the harm done is threefold: first, the retardation of
the separation between Manas and Kama, and the consequent waste of
time and prolongation of the interval between two incarnations;
secondly, the extreme probability (almost amounting to certainty) that
a large addition will be made to the individual's evil Karma, which
will have to be worked out in future births; thirdly, the terrible
danger that this abnormal intensification of the force of Kama may
eventually enable the latter to entangle the whole of the lower Manas
inextricably, and so cause the entire loss of an incarnation. Though
such a result as this last-mentioned is happily uncommon, it is a
thing that has happened more than once; and in very many cases where
the evil has fallen short of this ultimate possibility, the individual
has nevertheless lost much more of his lower Manas by this additional
entanglement with Kama than he would have done if left to withdraw
into himself quietly as nature intended. It is not denied that a
certain amount of good may occasionally be done to very degraded
entities at spiritualistic circles; but the intention of nature
obviously is that such assistance should be given, as it frequently
is, by occult students who are able to visit the astral plane during
earth-life, and have been trained by competent teachers to deal by
whatever methods may be most helpful with the various cases which they
encounter. It will be readily seen that such a scheme of help,
carrying with it as it does the possibility of instant reference to
higher authorities in any doubtful case, is infinitely safer than any
casual assistance obtained through a medium who may be (and indeed
generally is) entirely ignorant of the laws governing spiritual
evolution, and who is as liable to the domination of evil or
mischievous influences as of good ones.
Apart altogether from any question of development through a medium,
there is another and much more frequently exercised influence which
may seriously retard a disembodied entity on his way to Devachan, and
that is the intense and uncontrolled grief of his surviving friends or
relatives. It is one among many melancholy results of the terribly
inaccurate and even irreligious view that we in the West have for
centuries been taking of death, that we not only cause ourselves an
immense amount of wholly unnecessary pain over this temporary parting
from our loved ones, but we often also do serious injury to those for
whom we bear so deep an affection by means of this very regret which
we feel so acutely. As one of our ablest writers has recently told us,
when our departed brother is sinking peacefully and naturally into
pre-devachanic unconsciousness "an awakening may be caused by the
passionate sorrow and desires of friends left on earth, and these,
violently vibrating the kamic elements in the embodied persons, may
set up vibrations in the Kamarupa of the disembodied, and so reach and
rouse the lower Manas not yet withdrawn to and reunited with its
parent, the spiritual intelligence. Thus it may be roused from its
dreamy state to vivid remembrance of the earth-life so lately left.
This awakening is often accompanied by acute suffering, and even if
this be avoided the natural process of the Triad freeing itself is
rudely disturbed, and the completion of its freedom is delayed."
(_Death and After_, p. 32.) It would be well if those whose loved ones
have passed on before them would learn from these undoubted facts the
duty of restraining for the sake of those dear ones a grief which,
however natural it may be, is yet in its essence selfish. Not that
occult teaching counsels forgetfulness of the dead--far from it; but
it does suggest that a man's affectionate remembrance of his departed
friend is a force which, if properly directed into the channel of
earnest good wishes for his progress towards Devachan and his quiet
passage through Kamaloka might be of real value to him, whereas when
wasted in mourning for him and longing to have him back again it is
not only useless but harmful. It is with a true instinct that the
Hindu religion prescribes its Shraddha ceremonies and the Catholic
Church its prayers for the dead.
It sometimes happens, however, that the desire for communication is
from the other side, and that an entity of the class we are
considering has something which it specially desires to say to those
whom it has left behind. Occasionally this message is an important
one, such as, for example, an indication of the place where a missing
will is concealed; but more often it seems to us quite trivial.
Still, whatever it may be, if it is firmly impressed upon the mind of
the dead person, it is undoubtedly desirable that he should be enabled
to deliver it, as otherwise the anxiety to do so would perpetually
draw his consciousness back into the earth-life, and prevent him from
passing to higher spheres. In such a case a psychic who can understand
him, or a medium through whom he can write or speak, is of real
service to him. It should be observed that the reason why he cannot
usually write or speak without a medium is that one state of matter
can ordinarily act only upon the state next below it, and, as he has
now no denser matter in his organism than that of which the Kamarupa
is composed, he finds it impossible to set up vibrations in the
physical substance of the air or to move the physical pencil without
borrowing living matter of the intermediate order contained in the
etheric double, by means of which an impulse can readily be
transferred from the one plane to the other. Now he would be unable to
borrow this material from an ordinary person, because such a man's
principles would be too closely linked together to be separated by any
means likely to be at his command, but the very essence of mediumship
is the ready separability of the principles, so from a medium he can
draw without difficulty the matter he needs for his manifestation,
whatever it may be. When he cannot find a medium or does not
understand how to use one he sometimes makes clumsy and blundering
endeavours to communicate on his own account, and by the strength of
his will he sets elemental forces blindly working, perhaps producing
such apparently aimless manifestations as stone-throwing,
bell-ringing, etc. It consequently frequently happens that a psychic
or medium going to a house where such manifestations are taking place
may be able to discover what the entity who produces them is
attempting to say or do, and may thus put an end to the disturbance.
This would not, however, invariably be the case, as these elemental
forces are occasionally set in motion by entirely different causes.
But for one entity who is earth-bound by the desire to communicate
with his surviving friends, there are thousands who, if left alone,
would never think of doing so, although when the idea is suggested to
them through a medium they will respond to it readily enough, for
since during earth-life their interests were probably centred less in
spiritual than in worldly affairs, it is not difficult to re-awaken in
them vibrations sympathetic to matters connected with the existence
they have so lately left; and this undesirable intensification of
earthly thoughts is frequently brought about by the interference of
well-meaning but ignorant friends, who endeavour to get communications
from the departed through a medium, with the result that just in
proportion to their success he is subjected to the various dangers
mentioned above. It should also be remembered that the possible injury
to the entity itself is by no means all the harm that may accrue from
such a practice, for those who habitually attend _seances_ during life
are almost certain to develop a tendency to haunt them after death,
and so themselves in turn run the risks into which they have so often
brought their predecessors. Besides, it is well known that the vital
energy necessary to produce physical manifestations is frequently
drawn from the sitters as well as from the medium, and the eventual
effect on the latter is invariably evil, as is evinced by the large
number of such sensitives who have gone either morally or psychically
to the bad--some becoming epileptic, some taking to drink, others
falling under influences which induced them to stoop to fraud and
trickery of all kinds.
4. _The Shade._
When the separation of the principles is complete, the Kamaloka life
of the person is over, and, as before stated, he passes into the
devachanic condition. But just as when he dies to this plane he leaves
his physical body behind him, so when he dies to the astral plane he
leaves his Kamarupa behind him. If he has purged himself from all
earthly desires during life, and directed all his energies into the
channels of unselfish spiritual aspiration, his higher Ego will be
able to draw back into itself the whole of the lower Manas which it
put forth into incarnation; in that case the Kamarupa left behind on
the astral plane will be a mere corpse like the abandoned physical
body, and it will then come not into this class but into the next.
Even in the case of a man of somewhat less perfect life almost the
same result may be attained if the forces of lower desire are allowed
to work themselves out undisturbed in Kamaloka but the majority of
mankind make but very trifling and perfunctory efforts while on earth
to rid themselves of the less elevated impulses of their nature, and
consequently doom themselves not only to a greatly prolonged sojourn
on the astral plane, but also to what cannot be described otherwise
than as a loss of a portion of the lower Manas. This is, no doubt, a
very material method of expressing the great mystery of the reflection
of the higher Manas in the lower, but since only those who have passed
the portals of initiation can fully comprehend this, we must content
ourselves with the nearest approximation to exactitude which is
possible to us; and as a matter of fact, a very fairly accurate idea
of what actually takes place will be obtained by adopting the
hypothesis that the manasic principle sends down a portion of itself
into the lower world of physical life at each incarnation, and expects
to be able to withdraw it again at the end of the life, enriched by
all its varied experiences. The ordinary man, however, usually allows
himself to be so pitiably enslaved by all sorts of base desires that a
certain portion of this lower Manas becomes very closely interwoven
with Kama, and when the separation takes place, his life in Kamaloka
being over, the manasic principle has, as it were, to be torn apart,
the degraded portion remaining within the Kamarupa.
This Kamarupa then consists of the particles of astral matter from
which the lower Manas has not been able to disengage itself, and which
therefore retain it captive; for when Manas passes into Devachan these
clinging fragments adhere to a portion of it and as it were wrench it
away. The proportion of the matter of each level present in the
Kamarupa will therefore depend on the extent to which Manas has become
inextricably entangled with the lower passions. It will be obvious
that as Manas in passing from level to level is unable to free itself
completely from the matter of each, the Kamarupa will show the
presence of each grosser kind which has succeeded in retaining its
connection with it.
Thus comes into existence the class of entity which has been called
"The Shade"--an entity, be it observed, which is not in any sense the
real individual at all (for he has passed away into Devachan), but
nevertheless, not only bears his exact personal appearance, but
possesses his memory and all his little idiosyncrasies, and may,
therefore, very readily personate him, as indeed it frequently does at
_seances_. It is not, of course, conscious of any act of
impersonation, for as far as its intellect goes it must necessarily
suppose itself to be the individual, but one can imagine the horror
and disgust of the friends of the departed, if they could only realize
that they had been deceived into accepting as their loved one a mere
soulless bundle of all his worst qualities. Its length of life varies
according to the amount of the lower Manas which animates it, but as
this is all the while in process of fading out, its intellect is a
steadily diminishing quantity, though it may possess a great deal of a
certain sort of animal cunning; and even quite towards the end of its
career it is still able to communicate by borrowing temporary
intelligence from the medium. From its very nature it is exceedingly
liable to be swayed by all kinds of evil influences, and, having
separated from its higher Ego, it has nothing in its constitution
capable of responding to good ones. It therefore lends itself readily
to various minor purposes of some of the baser sort of black
magicians. So much of the matter of the manasic nature as it possesses
gradually disintegrates and returns to its own plane, though not to
any individual mind, and thus the shade fades by almost imperceptible
gradations into a member of our next class.
5. _The Shell._
This is absolutely the mere astral corpse in process of
disintegration, every particle of the lower Manas having left it. It
is entirely without any kind of consciousness or intelligence, and is
drifted passively about upon the astral currents just as a cloud might
be swept in any direction by a passing breeze; but even yet it may be
galvanized for a few moments into a ghastly burlesque of life if it
happens to come within reach of a medium's aura. Under such
circumstances it will still exactly resemble its departed personality
in appearance, and may even reproduce to some extent his familiar
expressions or handwriting, but it does so merely by the automatic
action of the cells of which it is composed, which tend under
stimulation to repeat the form of action to which they are most
accustomed, and whatever amount of intelligence may lie behind any
such manifestation has most assuredly no connection with the original
entity, but is lent by the medium or his "guides" for the occasion. It
is, however, more frequently temporarily vitalized in quite another
manner, which will be described under the next head. It has also the
quality of being still blindly responsive to such vibrations--usually
of the lowest order--as were frequently set up in it during its last
stage of existence as a shade, and consequently persons in whom evil
desires or passions are predominant will be very likely, when they
attend physical _seances_, to find these intensified and as it were
thrown back upon them by the unconscious shells.
There is also another variety of corpse which it is necessary to
mention under this head, though it belongs to a much earlier stage of
man's _post-mortem_ history. It has been stated above that after the
death of the physical body the Kamarupa is comparatively quickly
formed, and the etheric double cast off--this latter body being
destined to slow disintegration, precisely as is the kamarupic shell
at a later stage of the proceedings. This etheric shell, however, is
not to be met with drifting aimlessly about, as is the variety with
which we have hitherto been dealing; on the contrary, it remains
within a few yards of the decaying physical body, and since it is
readily visible to any one even slightly sensitive, it is accountable
for many of the commonly current stories of churchyard ghosts. A
psychically developed person passing one of our great cemeteries will
see hundreds of these bluish-white, misty forms hovering over the
graves where are laid the physical vestures which they have recently
left; and as they, like their lower counterparts, are in various
stages of disintegration, the sight is by no means a pleasant one.
This also, like the other kind of shell, is entirely devoid of
consciousness and intelligence; and though it may under certain
circumstances be galvanized into a very horrible form of temporary
life, this is possible only by means of some of the most loathsome
rites of one of the worst forms of black magic, about which the less
said the better. It will thus be seen that in the successive stages of
his progress from earth-life to Devachan, man casts off and leaves to
slow disintegration no less than three corpses--the physical body,
the etheric double and the Kamarupa--all of which are by degrees
resolved into their constituent elements and utilized anew on their
respective planes by the wonderful chemistry of nature.
6. _The Vitalized Shell._
This entity ought not, strictly speaking, to be classified under the
head "human" at all, since it is only its outer vesture, the passive,
senseless shell, that was once an appanage of humanity; such life,
intelligence, desire and will as it may possess are those of the
artificial elemental animating it, and that, though in terrible truth
a creation of man's evil thought, is not itself human. It will
therefore perhaps be better to deal with it more fully under its
appropriate class among the artificial entities, as its nature and
genesis will be more readily comprehensible by the time that part of
our subject is reached. Let it suffice here to mention that it is
always a malevolent being--a true tempting demon, whose evil influence
is limited only by the extent of its power. Like the shade, it is
frequently used to further the horrible purposes of the Voodoo and
Obeah forms of magic. Some writers have spoken of it under the name
"elementary," but as that title has at one time or other been used for
almost every variety of _post-mortem_ entity, it has become so vague
and meaningless that it is perhaps better to avoid it.
7. _The Suicide, or victim of sudden death._
It will be readily understood that a man who is torn from physical
life hurriedly while in full health and strength, whether by accident
or suicide, finds himself upon the astral plane under conditions
differing considerably from those which surround one who dies either
from old age or from disease. In the latter case the hold of earthly
desires upon the entity is more or less weakened, and probably the
very grossest particles are already got rid of, so that the Kamarupa
will most likely form itself on the sixth or fifth subdivision of the
Kamaloka, or perhaps even higher; the principles have been gradually
prepared for separation, and the shock is therefore not so great. In
the case of the accidental death or suicide none of these preparations
have taken place, and the withdrawal of the principles from their
physical encasement has been very aptly compared to the tearing of the
stone out of an unripe fruit; a great deal of the grossest kind of
astral matter still clings around the personality, which is
consequently held in the seventh or lowest subdivision of the
Kamaloka. This has already been described as anything but a pleasant
abiding-place, yet it is by no means the same for all those who are
compelled for a time to inhabit it. Those victims of sudden death
whose earth-lives have been pure and noble have no affinity for this
plane, and the time of their sojourn upon it is passed, to quote from
an early Letter on this subject, either "in happy ignorance and full
oblivion, or in a state of quiet slumber, a sleep full of rosy dreams
". But on the other hand, if their earth-lives have been low and
brutal, selfish and sensual, they will, like the suicides, be
conscious to the fullest extent in this undesirable region; and they
are liable to develop into terribly evil entities. Inflamed with all
kinds of horrible appetites which they can no longer satisfy directly
now they are without a physical body, they gratify their loathsome
passions vicariously through a medium or any sensitive person whom
they can obsess; and they take a devilish delight in using all the
arts of delusion which the astral plane puts in their power in order
to lead others into the same excesses which have proved so fatal to
themselves. Quoting again from the same letter:--"These are the
Pisachas the _incubi_ and _succubae_ of mediaeval writers--demons of
thirst and gluttony, of lust and avarice, of intensified craft,
wickedness and cruelty, provoking their victims to horrible crimes,
and revelling in their commission". From this class and the last are
drawn the tempters--the devils of ecclesiastical literature; but their
power fails utterly before purity of mind and purpose; they can do
nothing with a man unless he has first encouraged in himself the vices
into which they seek to draw him.
One whose psychic sight has been opened will often see crowds of these
unfortunate creatures hanging round butchers' shops, public-houses, or
other even more disreputable places--wherever the gross influences in
which they delight are to be found, and where they encounter men and
women still in the flesh who are like-minded with themselves. For such
an entity as one of these to meet with a medium with whom he is in
affinity is indeed a terrible misfortune; not only does it enable him
to prolong enormously his dreadful life in Kamaloka but it renews for
perhaps an indefinite period his power to generate evil Karma, and so
prepare for himself a future incarnation of the most degraded
character, besides running the risk of losing a large portion or even
the whole of the lower Manas. On this lowest level of the astral plane
he must stay at least as long as his earthly life would have lasted if
it had not been prematurely cut short; and if he is fortunate enough
_not_ to meet with a sensitive through whom his passions can be
vicariously gratified, the unfulfilled desires will gradually burn
themselves out, and the suffering caused in the process will probably
go far towards working off the evil Karma of the past life.
The position of the suicide is further complicated by the fact that
his rash act has enormously diminished the power of the higher Ego to
withdraw its lower portion into itself, and therefore has exposed him
to manifold and great additional dangers: but it must be remembered
that the guilt of suicide differs considerably according to its
circumstances, from the morally blameless act of Seneca or Socrates
through all degrees down to the heinous crime of the wretch who takes
his own life in order to escape from the entanglements into which his
villainy has brought him, and of course the position after death
varies accordingly.
It should be noted that this class, as well as the shades and the
vitalized shells, are all what may be called minor vampires; that is
to say, whenever they have the opportunity they prolong their
existence by draining away the vitality from human beings whom they
find themselves able to influence. This is why both medium and sitters
are often so weak and exhausted after a physical _seance_. A student
of occultism is taught how to guard himself from their attempts, but
without that knowledge it is difficult for one who puts himself in
their way to avoid being more or less laid under contribution by them.
8. _The Vampire and Werewolf._
There remain two even more awful but happily very rare possibilities
to be mentioned before this part of our subject is completed, and
though they differ very widely in many ways we may yet perhaps group
them together, since they have in common the qualities of unearthly
horror and of extreme rarity--the latter arising from the fact that
they are really relics of earlier races. We of the fifth root race
ought to have evolved beyond the possibility of meeting such a ghastly
fate as is indicated by either of the two headings of this
sub-section, and we have so nearly done it that these creatures are
commonly regarded as mere mediaeval fables; yet there _are_ examples to
be found occasionally even now, though chiefly in countries where
there is a considerable strain of fourth-race blood, such as Russia or
Hungary. The popular legends about them are probably often
considerably exaggerated, but there is nevertheless a terribly serious
sub-stratum of truth beneath the eerie stories which pass from mouth
to mouth among the peasantry of Central Europe. The general
characteristics of such tales are too well known to need more than a
passing reference; a fairly typical specimen of the vampire story,
though it does not profess to be more than the merest fiction, is
Sheridan le Fanu's _Carmilla_, while a very remarkable account of an
unusual form of this creature is to be found in _Isis Unveiled_, vol.
i., p. 454. All readers of Theosophical literature are familiar with
the idea that it is possible for a man to live a life so absolutely
degraded and selfish, so utterly wicked and brutal, that the whole of
his lower Manas may become entirely immeshed in Kama, and finally
separated from its spiritual source in the higher Ego. Some students
even seem to think that such an occurrence is quite a common one, and
that we may meet scores of such "soulless men," as they have been
called, in the street every day of our lives, but this, happily, is
untrue. To attain the appalling preeminence in evil which thus
involves the entire loss of a personality and the weakening of the
developing individuality behind, a man must stifle every gleam of
unselfishness or spirituality, and must have absolutely no redeeming
point whatever; and when we remember how often, even in the worst of
villains, there is to be found something not wholly bad, we shall
realize that the abandoned personalities must always be a very small
minority. Still, comparatively few though they be, they do exist, and
it is from their ranks that the still rarer vampire is drawn. The lost
entity would very soon after death find himself unable to stay in
Kamaloka, and would be irresistibly drawn in full consciousness into
"his own place," the mysterious eighth sphere, there slowly to
disintegrate after experiences best left undescribed. If, however, he
perishes by suicide or sudden death, he may under certain
circumstances, especially if he knows something of black magic, hold
himself back from that awful fate by a death in life scarcely less
awful--the ghastly existence of the vampire. Since the eighth sphere
cannot claim him until after the death of the body, he preserves it in
a kind of cataleptic trance by the horrible expedient of the
transfusion into it of blood drawn from other human beings by his
semi-materialized Kamarupa, and thus postpones his final destiny by
the commission of wholesale murder. As popular "superstition" again
quite rightly supposes, the easiest and most effectual remedy in such
a case is to exhume and burn the body, thus depriving the creature of
his _point d'appui_. When the grave is opened the body usually appears
quite fresh and healthy, and the coffin is not infrequently filled
with blood. Of course in countries where cremation is the custom
vampirism of this sort is impossible.
The Werewolf, though equally horrible, is the product of a somewhat
different Karma, and indeed ought perhaps to have found a place under
the first instead of the second division of the human inhabitants of
Kamaloka, since it is always during a man's lifetime that he first
manifests under this form. It invariably implies some knowledge of
magical arts--sufficient at any rate to be able to project the astral
body. When a perfectly cruel and brutal man does this, there are
certain circumstances under which the body may be seized upon by other
astral entities and materialized, not into the human form, but into
that of some wild animal--usually the wolf; and in that condition it
will range the surrounding country killing other animals, and even
human beings, thus satisfying not only its own craving for blood, but
that of the fiends who drive it on. In this case, as so often with the
ordinary astral body, any wound inflicted upon the animal
materialization will be reproduced upon the human physical body by the
extraordinary phenomenon of repercussion; though after the death of
that physical body the Kamarupa, which will probably continue to
appear in the same form, will be less vulnerable. It will then,
however, he also less dangerous, as unless it can find a suitable
medium it will be unable to materialize fully.
It has been the fashion of this century to scoff at what are called
the foolish superstitions of the ignorant peasantry; but, as in the
above cases, so in many others the occult student finds on careful
examination that obscure or forgotten truths of nature lie behind what
at first sight appears mere nonsense, and he learns to be cautious in
rejecting as well as cautious in accepting. Intending explorers of the
astral plane need have little fear of encountering the very unpleasant
creatures described under this head, for, as before stated, they are
even now extremely rare, and as time goes on their number will happily
steadily diminish. In any case their manifestations are usually
restricted to the immediate neighbourhood of their physical bodies, as
might be supposed from their extremely material nature.
9. _The Black Magician or his pupil._
This person corresponds at the other extremity of the scale to our
second class of departed entities, the chela awaiting reincarnation,
but in this case, instead of obtaining permission to adopt an unusual
method of progress, the man is defying the natural process of
evolution by maintaining himself in Kamaloka by magical
arts--sometimes of the most horrible nature. It would be easy to make
various subdivisions of this class, according to their objects, their
methods, and the possible duration of their existence on this plane,
but as they are by no means fascinating objects of study, and all that
an occult student wishes to know about them is how to avoid them, it
will probably be more interesting to pass on to the examination of
another part of our subject. It may, however, be just mentioned that
every such human entity which prolongs its life thus on the astral
plane beyond its natural limit invariably does so at the expense of
others, and by the absorption of their life in some form or another.
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Astral Plane Non-human
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Astral Plane Inhabitants
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