Ghosts I Have Seen, and Other Psychic ExperiencesTweedale, Violet
Religion
Ghosts I Have Seen, and Other Psychic Experiences
Tweedale, Violet
Ghosts; Parapsychology
Some one was singing, a distant melody was creeping nearer, yet I was
aware it had never been distant, it was only becoming louder.
I suddenly felt afraid of myself. The air about me was ringing with
vibrations of weird, unearthly music, seemingly as much around me as it
was above and behind me. It had no whereabouts, it was unlocatable. As I
listened my whole body quivered with wild elation, and the sensation of
the unforeseen.
There was rhythm in the music, yet it was unlike anything I had ever
heard before. It sounded like a Pastorale, and it held a call to which
my whole being wildly responded.
Who was the player, and what was his instrument? He might have been a
flautist, and he played with a catching lilt, a luxurious abandon that
was an incarnation of Nature. It caught me suddenly away to green
Sicilian hills, where the pipes of unseen players echo down the mountain
sides, as the pipes of Pan once echoed through the rugged gorges and
purple vales of Hellas and Thrace.
Alluring though the music was, and replete with the hot fever of life,
it carried with it a thrill of dread. Its sweetness was cloying, its
tenderness was sensuous. A balmy scent crept through the room, of wild
thyme, of herbs, of asphodel and the muscadine of the wine press. It
enwrapt me like an odorous vapor.
The sounds began to take shape, and gradually mold themselves into
words. I knew I was being courted with subtlety, and urged to fly out of
my house of life and join the Saturnalia Regna. The player was speaking
a language which I understood, as I had understood no tongue before. It
was my true native tongue that spoke in the wild ringing lilt, and I
could not but give ear to its enchantments and the ecstasy of its joy.
My soul seemed to strain at the leash. Should I let go? Like a powerful
opiate the allurement enfolded me, yet from out its thrall a small
insistent voice whispered "Caution! Where will you be led: supposing you
yield your will, would it ever be yours again?"
Now my brain was seized with a sense of panic and weakness. The music
suddenly seemed replete with gay sinfulness and insolent conquest. It
spoke the secrets which the nature myth so often murmurs to those who
live amid great silences, of those dread mysteries of the spirit which
yet invest it with such glory and wonderment.
With a violent reaction of fear I rose suddenly, and as I did so the
whole scene was swept from out the range of my senses. I was back once
more in Blavatsky's room with the creeping twilight and the far off
hoarse roar of London stealing in at the open window. I glanced at
Madame Blavatsky. She had sunk down in her chair, and she lay huddled up
in deep trance. She had floated out with the music into a sea of earthly
oblivion. Between her fingers she held a small Russian cross.
I knew that she had thrust me back to the world which still claimed me,
and I went quietly out of the house into the streets of London.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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