Occultism is not either good, safe, nor amusing for the vast majority of people. Spiritualism as generally practised is a kind of beneficent bobbing into the Tom Tiddler’s ground of the Unseen. There is a pleasing conceit that if the Powers of Evil turn up it will be enough to utter a Protestant prayer and say that because you are “good” a bogy can’t touch you. This is a rather childish way of treating the Powers--in point of fact, it does not work, it is very much like saying that lightning cannot strike you because you have rubber heels to your boots. It is a melancholy reflection that the very people who go about reading little handbooks on “Knowledge is Power,” never realize that it is the right use of knowledge that means Power and that sometimes the coming of Power without knowledge spells catastrophe for all concerned. Besides the dangerous and perplexing beast manifestations, there is a third class of phenomenon which is manifestly neither human nor animal, but bears a close relationship to Elemental Forces such as Fire, Air, or Water. These phenomena are the only ones properly described as due to elementals, but a certain confusion has arisen through the use of this word as applied to all spirit phenomena which were not broadly classifiable as human. Ghosts, giant appearances, and ferocious and evil spirits of all kinds have been described as elementals, so that the word has lost its real precision. Originally all these outside spirits not known as the souls of mortals were classed as being spirits of Earth or Fire, Air, or Water, and by this arbitrary relation to the elements became known as Elementals. In effect only phenomena where no apparent organic or physical materialization or incarnation of any kind occurs should be classified as purely elemental. Of these the heat elemental is a phenomenon that is occasionally observed. Air or wind phenomena are also known, but I know of no case where earth or water phenomena apart from “apports” by a materialized presence claiming to be an earth or water elemental, have been noted. To my mind the organic presence destroys the evidential value of the latter accounts due to the effect of elementals as distinct from spirits. The elementals are properly those intelligences (the word spirits conveys a wrong implication) that are termed in the old rituals the Powers of Fire, Air, Earth, and Water. In magic it was held that these Powers were served by spirits, but there is reason to suppose that this view rose from the too literal interpretation of the old rituals and maltranslation of the occult “Grimoires” of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The appearance of these elementals is rare and sporadic, usually associated with a place or an individual rather than with the sitting of a séance.