For the objector to affirm that the Brahman-adepts and the fakirs admit that of themselves they are powerless, and can only act with the help of disembodied human spirits, is to state that these Hindus are unacquainted with the laws of their sacred books and even the meaning of the word _Pitris_. The _Laws of Manu_, the _Atharva-Veda_, and other books, prove what we now say. “All that exists,” says the _Atharva-Veda_, “is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence the gods are in the power of the Brahmans.” This is logical, albeit seemingly paradoxical, and it is the fact. And this fact will explain to those who have not hitherto had the clew (among whom Jacolliot must be numbered, as will appear on reading his works), why the fakir should be confined to the first, or lowest degree of that course of initiation whose highest adepts, or hierophants, are the _sannyâsis_, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy. Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu _Genesis_, or _Book of Creation_ of _Manu_, the _Pitris_ are called the _lunar_ ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called “human spirits” in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them: “Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas,[161] the Gandarbas[162] and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas,[163] and the Pitris--_lunar ancestors of the human race_” (See _Institutes of Manu_, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed “progenitors of mankind”). The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the dæmons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the “miracles” were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad dæmons, who control the powers of nature, the _elementals_, who are subordinate to the power of him “who knows.” A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir _palīt_, or _chutnā_, as that of a female human spirit _pichhalpāi_, not _pitris_. True, _pitara_ means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitrā-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras. To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the _Bagavat_ state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyâsis, the gurus, and yogis?