The Salem Witchcraft, the Planchette Mystery, and Modern Spiritualism: With Dr. Doddridge's DreamStowe, Harriet Beecher
History
The Salem Witchcraft, the Planchette Mystery, and Modern Spiritualism: With Dr. Doddridge's Dream
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Spiritualism; Upham, Charles Wentworth, 1802-1875. Salem witchcraft; Witchcraft -- Massachusetts -- Salem
_P._ You now have some idea of the doctrine of spheres; you will,
however, understand that the spheres of created beings, owing to a unity
of origin, are universally co-related, and, under proper conditions, can
act and react upon each other. You have before had some true notion of
the laws of _rapport_, which means relation or correspondence. You will
understand, further, that there can be no action between any two things
or beings in any department of creation except as they are in _rapport_
or correspondence with each other, and that the action can go no farther
than the _rapport_ or correspondence extends. Now, two spirits can
always, when it is in divine order, readily communicate with each other,
because they can always bring themselves into direct _rapport_ at some
one or more points. Though matter is widely discreted from spirit, in
that the one is dead and the other is alive, yet there is a certain
correspondence between the two, and between the degrees of one and the
degrees of the other; and according to this correspondence, relation,
or _rapport_, spirit may act upon matter. Thus your spirit, in all its
degrees and faculties, is in the closest _rapport_ with all the degrees
of matter composing your body, and for this reason alone it is able to
move it as it does, which it will no longer be able to do when that
_rapport_ is destroyed by what you call death. Through your body it is
_en rapport_ with, and is able to act upon, surrounding matter. If,
then, you are in a susceptible condition, a spirit can not only get into
_rapport_ with your spirit, and through it with your body, and control
its motions, or even suspend your own proper action and external
consciousness by entrancement, but if you are at the same time _en
rapport_ with this little board, it can, through contact of your hands,
get into _rapport_ with _that_, and move it without any conscious or
volitional agency on your part. Furthermore, under certain favorable
conditions, a spirit may, through your sphere and body combined, come
into _rapport_ even with the spheres of the ultimate particles of
material bodies near you, and thence with the particles and the whole
bodies themselves, and may thus, even without contact of your hands,
move them or make sounds upon them, as has often been witnessed. Its
action, however, as before said, ceases where the _rapport_ ceases; and
if communications from really intelligent spirits have sometimes been
defective as to the quality of the intelligence manifested, it is
because there has been found nothing in the medium which could be
brought into _rapport_ or correspondence with the more elevated ideas of
the spirit. The spirit, too, in frequent instances, is unable to prevent
its energizing influences from being diverted by the reactive power of
the medium, into the channels of the imperfect types of thought and
expression that are established in his mind, and it is for this simple
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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