Lives of Alcyone

All this was under the control of a kind of spirit-guide who
called himself Narayan to whom they paid great respect, regarding
him as a divine manifestation. This entity promised to take care of
the medium under all conditions, to protect and develop him, and he
held out hopes of great occurences later when the boy should be
grown up. Among other things he advised the practice of
psychometry, and accordingly they took a great deal of trouble to
procure suitable specimens, such as fragments of stone, small
articles of various kinds from different countries, and anything that
might be supposed to have been connected with any ancient
civilisation. Alcyone soon proved apt at this work. They held many
sittings, and acquired by degrees a vast amount of information about
the earlier stages of the world’ s history, about hill-tribes and
primitive men and prehistoric animals. By means of some articles
which had been brought from Central Asia they got on the track of
that early fifth Root-Race civilisation; by means of other objects
which had been brought from Atlantis, Alcyone had visions of the
great City of the Golden Gate, and also a series of pictures from
Atlantean history. Indeed they compiled by degrees books of history
of all the three places—early India, Central Asia, and Atlantis itself.
The entity calling himself Narayan commented on what they saw,
and sometimes gave explanations. In this way they produced by
degrees quite a mass of literature, and it said that Percy had no
other object in life than the prosecution of these studies.
Many of those who came to ask for help or advice were
suffering from various diseases, and Narayan met with considerable
success in prescribing for these, having chiefly a small set of herbal
remedies, which on the whole worked well. His prescriptions had
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