“Herodotus tells us that in the eighth of the towers of Belus, in Babylon, used by the sacerdotal astrologers, there was an uppermost room, a sanctuary, where the prophesying priestesses slept to receive communications from the god.
Beside the couch stood a table of gold, upon which were laid various stones, which Manetho informs were all aerolites. The priestesses developed the prophetic vision in themselves by pressing one of these sacred stones against their heads and bosoms. The same took place at Thebes, and Patara, in Lycia. This would seem to indicate that psychometry was known and extensively practiced by the ancients.
We have somewhere seen it stated that the profound knowledge possessed, according to Draper, by the ancient Chaldean astrologers, of the planets and their relations, was obtained more by the divination of the betylos, or the meteoric stone, than by astronomical instruments.
Strabo, Pliny, Hellanicus – all speak of the electrical, or electromagnetic power of the betyli. They were worshipped in the remotest antiquity in Egypt and Samothrace, as magnetic stones, “containing souls which had fallen from heaven”; and the priests of Cybele wore a small betylos on their bodies. How curious the coincidence between the practice of the priests of Belus and the experiments of Professor Denton!
As Professor Buchanan truthfully remarks of psychometry, it will enable us “…to detect vice and crime. No criminal act…can escape the detection of psychometry, when its powers are properly brought forth…the sure detection of guilt by psychometry (no matter how secret the act) will nullify all concealment.””
H. P. Blavatsky
