A "theosophist" or "occultist" of almost any modern school explains such visions by saying they are "pictures in the astral light" and that all objects and events leave their images in the astral light as upon a photographic plate, and that we must distinguish between spirits and these unintelligent pictures. I was once at Madame Blavatsky's when she tried to explain predestination, our freedom and God's full knowledge of the use that we should make of it. All things past and to come were present to the mind of God and yet all things were free. She soon saw that she had carried us out of our depth and said to one of her followers with a mischievous, mocking voice: "You with your impudence and your spectacles will be sitting there in the Akasa to all eternity" and then in a more meditative voice, "No, not to all eternity for a day will come when even the Akasa will pass away and there will be nothing but God, chaos, that which every man is seeking in his heart." Akasa, she was accustomed to explain as some Indian word for the astral light. Perhaps that theory of the astral pictures came always from the despair of some visionary to find understanding for a more metaphysical theory. It is, however, ancient. To Cornelius Agrippa it is the air that reflects, but the air is something more than what the word means for us. "It is a vital spirit passing through all beings giving life and substance to all things ... it immediately receives into itself the influences of all celestial bodies, and then communicates them to the other elements as also to all mixed bodies. Also it receives into itself as if it were a divine looking-glass the species of all things, as well natural as artificial," it enters into men and animals "through their pores" and "makes an impression upon them as well when they sleep as when they awake and affords matter to divers strange dreams and divinations.... Hence it is that a man passing by a place where a man was slain and the carcase newly laid is moved by fear and dread; because the air in that place being full of the dread species of man-slaughter does being breathed in, move and trouble the spirit of the man with a like species ... whence it is that many philosophers were of the opinion that the air is the cause of dreams." Henry More is more precise and philosophical and believes that this air which he calls _Spiritus Mundi_ contains all forms, so that the parents when a child is begotten, or a witch when the double is projected as a hare, but as it were, call upon the _Spiritus Mundi_ for the form they need. The name "Astral Light" was given to this air or spirit by the Abbé Constant who wrote under the pseudonym of Élephas Lévi and like Madame Blavatsky, claimed to be the voice of an ancient magical society. In his _Dogma et Rituel de la Haute Magie_ published in the fifties, he described in vague, eloquent words, influenced perhaps by the recent discovery of the daguerreotype these pictures which we continually