SEERSHIP; Guide to Soul Sight - Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

the latent truth in them - may be said, indeed, almost with one consent - though longing to tell - to
begin to parade a sort of shame at their revelations. And pray wherefore? They are already met
more than half-way in every sensible man’s mind. There are few families - nay, there is scarcely an
individual - who has not had something naturally unexplainable in his history. The supernatural
tale always finds an echo in every breast.
“Now, if discredited by writers, the ‘supernatural’ should not be treated of by them. There are
plenty of subjects at which they may play but that - if they believe any life but their ordinary life -
so serious one. If the possibility of the supernatural be believed, and its instances be accepted, they
are bound, as candid men and honest men, to make the avowal that they believe. The explanations
which are frequently offered of things appearing as supernatural, are greatly more difficult to
credit than the extra-natural matters themselves. Of some unaccountable things, in fact, nobody
credits the ‘explanations.’ The uncomfortable fact is got rid of. The subject is dismissed, to make
way for the next soliciting object. The wonder is given up as unexplainable. And that is the whole
process. This is a very easy, though not a very conclusive or satisfactory method of disproving. We
suppose we disbelieve. ...
“We are weary of the jargon whereby strange and unexplainable - possibly natural - doubtless
natural - phenomena have been degraded. The history of all unknown things has been thus similar,
that at the outset, they have invariably been invested with the attributes of the magical. We must
carefully guard ourselves from credulity. Such things as these presumed Spiritual Disclosures have
been known in all ages. There is nothing newer, other than that they have been suddenly and widely
noticed, in these psychologico-magnetic displays - this supposed spiritual betrayal - this counterworking
and false working of the universal transitive evolvement - these aberrations of polarity. We
have an abiding dislike to, and we cordially dissent from all this epileptic wandering; all this
convulsive, incoherent, blameworthy - nay, audacious reaching out at forbidden things. The
pampered human mind can run into any extremes. We, on the contrary, are friends to the solidest
and plainest common sense.
“We apprehend that the explanation of the great majority of the spiritual manifestations - as they
are called - may be, that the forceful magnetism with which the world is charged is, in states of
excitement, impelled through the medium - probably the stronger through the reflective
VACUITY; and that it undulates again outwards, as we see the rings, or rather the single ring,
upon a sheet of water circumvolve from about a stone suddenly dropped in. The exterior, magnetic,
unconscious rings may become intelligent, from which ‘motived circles’ - obeying laws of which we
know nothing, or from which invisible walls, come sounds - vibrates motion. It may be at the
intersection of these ‘out-of-sense’ circles - which, from the multitude of minds, must be
innumerable, though they are altogether unsuspected - at which are struck all that strange
attraction and repulsion which we call sympathy and antipathy, and in which are mind-commerce,
and all the puzzling phenomena of the so-called spiritual shows. Thus the mind answers to itself.
And instead of ‘spirit’ having much to do with it, it is mainly the invisible ‘microscopical,’
‘unnecessary work to the world’ of man’s own other nature; real spirit being in the majority of
cases still as far off as ever, and outside and transcended of all of it! All the grave gossip and