(1) Those of the recently deceased whose place of burial is not far
away. This class will be quite coherent in accordance with the life and
thought of the former owner. An unmaterial, good, and spiritualized
person leaves a shell that will soon disintegrate. A gross, mean,
selfish, material person’s shell will be heavy, consistent, and long
lived: and so on with all varieties.
(2) Those of persons who had died far away from the place where the
medium is. Lapse of time permits such to escape from the vicinity of
their old bodies, and at the same time brings on a greater degree of
disintegration which corresponds on the astral plane to putrefaction on
the physical. These are vague, shadowy, incoherent; respond but briefly
to the psychic stimulus, and are whirled off by any magnetic current.
They are galvanized for a moment by the astral currents of the medium
and of those persons present who were related to the deceased.
(3) Purely shadowy remains which can hardly be given a place. There
is no English to describe them, though they are facts in this sphere.
They might be said to be the mere mould or impress left in the astral
substance by the once coherent shell long since disintegrated. They
are therefore so near being fictitious as to almost deserve the
designation. As such shadowy photographs they are enlarged, decorated,
and given an imaginary life by the thoughts, desires, hopes, and
imaginings of medium and sitters at the _séance_.
(4) Definite, coherent entities, human souls bereft of the spiritual
tie, now tending down to the worst state of all, _avitchi_, where
annihilation of the personality is the end. They are known as black
magicians. Having centred the consciousness in the principle of _kama_,
preserved intellect, divorced themselves from spirit, they are the
only damned beings we know. In life they had human bodies and reached
their awful state by persistent lives of evil for its own sake; some
of such already doomed to become what I have described, are among us
on earth to-day. These are not ordinary shells, for they have centred
all their force in _kama_, thrown out every spark of good thought or
aspiration, and have a complete mastery of the astral sphere. I put
them in the classification of shells because they are such in the
sense that they are doomed to disintegration consciously as the others
are to the same end mechanically only. They may and do last for many
centuries, gratifying their lusts through any sensitive they can lay
hold of where bad thought gives them an opening. They preside at nearly
all _séances_, assuming high names and taking the direction so as to
keep the control and continue the delusion of the medium, thus enabling
themselves to have a convenient channel for their own evil purposes.
Indeed, with the shells of suicides, of those poor wretches who die at
the hand of the law, of drunkards and gluttons, these black magicians
living in the astral world hold the field of physical mediumship and
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