Category: Isis Unveiled: H. P. Blavatsky (1877)

"New York, Feb. 7, 1877 (continued): "Dr. X, hastened to her, made eager magnetic passes about her face and neck, and propped up her head and shoulders on cushions. And there she lay like a person sick and suffering, occasionally moaning, turning restlessly, etc. I suppose a full half hour then elapsed, during which seemed [...]

"New York, Feb. 7, 1877. "I cheerfully obey your request for a written statement of what I related to you orally, as having been witnessed by me in Paris, last summer, at the house of a highly respectable physician, whose name I have no authority to use, but whom, after the usual French fashion of [...]

"Not many years ago, one of the worst of superstitions, scientists held to be that of believing that the murderer's portrait remained impressed on the eye of the murdered person, and that the former could be easily recognized by examining carefully the retina. The "superstition" asserted that the likeness could be made still more striking [...]

"And this is what we find in the explanatory notes of Colonel Yule, in relation to this degrading Asiatic "superstition": "Marco's account of the pearl-fishery is still substantially correct. At the diamond mines of the northern Circars, Brahmans are employed in the analogous office of propitiating the tutelary genii. The shark charmers are called in [...]

"There are many spots in the world where the strangest phenomena have resulted from what was later ascertained to be natural physical causes. In Southern California there are certain places on the seashore where the sand when disturbed, produces a loud musical ring. It is known as the "musical sand", and the phenomenon is supposed [...]

"The monstrous bird of the Arabian Nights, or "Arabian Mythology", as Webster calls the Ruc, (or Roc), having been identified, the next thing in order is to discover and recognize that Alladin's magical lamp has also certain claims to reality. Describing his passage through the great desert of Lop, Marco Polo speaks of a marvelous [...]

"To deny to the Chinese or any people of Asia, whether the Central, Upper, or Lower, the possession of any knowledge, or even perception of spiritual things, is perfectly ridiculous. From one end to the other the country is full of mystics, religious philosophers, Buddhist saints, and magicians. Belief in a spiritual world, full of [...]

"In the same essay, another Chinese story is translated, and to the same effect:  "I knew a man", says the author, "who during his life had killed many living beings, and was at last struck with an apoplexy. The sorrows in store for his sin-laden soul pained me to the heart; I visited him and [...]

"Those who are ready to accuse the Chinese of irreligion will do well to read Schott's Essays on Buddhism in China and Upper Asia. "In the years Yuan-yeu of the Sung, (A.D. 1086-1093), a pious matron with her two servants lived entirely to the Land of Enlightenment. One of the maids said one day to [...]

"Struck with the accounts of magical exhibitions witnessed and recorded by travelers of every age who had visited Tartary and Thibet, Colonel Yule comes to the conclusion that the natives must have had "at their command the whole encyclopaedia of modern 'Spiritualists'. Duhalde mentions among their sorceries the art of producing by their invocations the [...]