Witchcraft of New England Explained by Modern SpiritualismPutnam, Allen
Religion
Witchcraft of New England Explained by Modern Spiritualism
Putnam, Allen
Spiritualism; Witchcraft -- New England
All the marvelous works of both ancient and modern Spiritualism may have
occurred, and yet none of them have been, in fact, "more than natural,"
however much so some minds may be accustomed to deem them. Take psychic
forces as natural instrumentalities, take both embodied and disembodied
intelligences who had skill and power for the control of such forces, and
with these take also others who had special susceptibilities for yielding
to psychic action, and you will then have in your conceptions ample
natural means for the production of each and every marvel that was ever
described in human history, and all such may have been produced without
any more help or hindrance in kind from either God or the devil, than we
all receive in the ordinary acts of daily life. Bring in what is meant by
either magnetism, or mesmerism, or psychology, or psychism, or by any
other term expressive of that action upon and within a human being, which
lets either his own spirit-senses or the forces of some outside
intelligence get play therein independent of and superior to the owner's
outer or physical senses, and we then may have fitting and adequate
instrumentality through which finite intelligence can legitimately produce
all the marvels that human eyes have ever witnessed. Professor Cromwell F.
Varley, one of England's most eminent electricians, said, when addressing
a committee of the London Dialectical Society, "I believe the mesmeric
trance and the spiritual trance are produced by similar means, and I
believe the mesmeric and the spiritual forces are the same. They are both
the action of a spirit, and the difference between the spiritual trance
and the mesmeric trance I believe is this: in the mesmeric trance, the
will that overpowers or entrances the patient is in a human body; in the
spiritual trance, that will which overpowers the patient is not in a human
body."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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