July 1892 - The Emma Hardinge Britten Archive

Extracts from the Second Volume of "Ghost/and." 175
ponds in its nature and functions to the Spiritual body of
animated beings, and as their spiritual bodies and innermost
spirits, in duality, constitute soul, so the Spiritual
part of all material things, clothed and enveloped in astral
light, constitutes, in duality with the innermost spiritual
part, the soul-principle of worlds and all material bodies
in space. Material forms in time grow old, decay, and
break up, but what they have been remains engraved in
the astral light, which receives the impress of all the
vestiges, wrecks, and ruins of forms that have been broken
up and massed together, age after age, and it is the
pictures of these vestiges, wrecks, and ruins, fixed in the
astral light and inhering in and about the earth, that you,
good sir, have drawn.
" In these sketches you see the mausoleums of the ages,
still retaining portions of the undying elements of souIthe
soul of the world-yet massed together in fragments
and vestiges only. • See this cup I hold?' I added
(taking up a china cup from the table), 'who can tell the
history of the clay of which it was formed? Go back
through the ages and the colours that paint its surface,
the coal mines of the fire in which it was burned; the
trees that hardened into that coal, the creatures that
sheltered under or lived on the fruit or leaves of that tree;
in a word, a million years of births, deaths, growths, and
transformations, are all locked up in the history of this
cup.' All around me were silent, save the artist,
who, in a low voice broken by emotion, queried softly,
" But why am I selected to draw these broken mausoleum
forms of the long, long ago?"
"Because you are fitted to do so," I replied. "These
are the days of the unveiling, the seals are all broken, the
veil of mystery is rent in twain, and the foundations of
the religion of Nature are being laid. You are one of
the builders, though you know it not; and Spirit revelators,