Lives of Alcyone

strengthened when he discovered that the boy was exceedingly
sensitive, and responded much more readily than he himself did to
some of the occult influences which he had learnt how to evoke.
He tried a number of mesmeric experiments with Alcyone, and
attained unexpected success, finding that when he had thrown him
into a trance various entities could speak through him, and he could
also be used as an instrument for clairvoyant investigation. Although
he himself constantly mesmerised Alcyone he never permitted
anyone else to do so, and he also taught Alcyone how to mesmerise
others, and how to invoke nature-spirits. He set him to practice
crystal-gazing, and automatic writing with a stylus. In this way, he
constantly received communications from various dead people and
also from living entities, and after a time these not only wrote
through him, but even began to use him as a medium and to speak
though him.
These two people, then, the uncle and the nephew, lived a
kind of inner life of their own, for Alcyone’ s parents, though they
knew all about what was taking place, were but little interested in it,
and inclined to regard it as somewhat useless and nonsensical,
though quite glad to share in the credit when Alcyone’ s
clairvoyance happened to discover something useful, as once or
twice happened. Various other phenomena took place, many of
them by no means unlike those with which we meet in modern
Spiritualism, but these were regarded by those who knew of them
with a good deal of hesitation and suspicion, some holding them
with a certain respect, as a kind of inspiration. The young Alcyone
occasionally passed into a trance during which materialisation
occurred.