We are perfectly aware, at the same time, that every work of this kind, in which there is an attempt to combine mysticism and history, could be treated in the same way; and all we desire to accomplish is, if possible, to bring home to the minds of indiscriminate admirers. of the works of Mrs. Kingsford that it would be as well for them to study the subjects for themselves and not pin their faith to a single individual. What above all things we require is the getting at the facts. "Verify quotations, and again verify quotations, and yet again verify quotations," was the wise injunction once given by a famous Oxford tutor to his favourite pupil when embarking on a literary career, and we may add to this triple-headed Cerberus of an injunction which guards the way to the secret halls of history, "Check and counter-check and re-check your reminiscences," if you have any.

Let us take warning by past experience and avoid falling into the errors of our ancient selves. There is no more delusive path to travel on than the indiscriminate "interpretation" of ancient allegories and myths. In the early centuries of Christianity men were busily engaged at compiling "syntheses" of every system in existence; the more opposed were any two systems, the more anxious were they to reconcile them. They were to have a universal key of interpretation which should unlock the world allegories and myths; they interpreted everything in heaven and on earth, and saw myth and fable of the soul in the most straightforward narratives of human imbecility. Nothing too much" was forgotten, and "all or nothing" took its place.

It is always a lighter strain on the intellect to take up an extreme position; it eliminates the disquieting factor of discrimination and induces the pleasing delusion of being for ever quite certain of one's own ground. The more incongruous the revelation, the more virtue is there in the faith of the extremist. Such a frame of mind leads to that acme of absurdity-belief in the infallibility of some particular revelation; or even to that most imbecile of all follies-belief in the infallibility of some particular person. In all the above we criticize ourselves as well as others. The members of the Theosophical Society-a considerable number of them at any rate-have ever had a tendency in this direction. They must have a particular hero or heroine whom they do their best to injure by clothing them in a

Nessus shirt of fancied impeccability. Or if they be not heroworshippers of this type, then they will have a set of infallible dogmas; and taking hints and amateur expositions, based, for the most part, on misunderstanding, as absolute verities, do their best to for ever destroy the credit of that Sacred Science for which they protest themselves ready to sacrifice their lives.

Let us finally conclude these notes with a few remarks on the reminiscences of past births put forward by Mrs. Kingsford. Among other personalities she was persuaded that she had occupied the bodies of Anne Boleyn, Joan of Arc, Faustina the younger, wife of Marcus Aurelius, Mary Magdalene, an Egyptian priestess or Bacchic votary, and Queen Esther. It will be a shock to Christian readers. to learn that Mary Magdalene should have degenerated into Annia Faustina, whose profligacy was so open and infamous, and so notoriously known to all except to her wilfully blind husband. What, again, had Anne Boleyn to specially recommend her? We expected better things of the disciples of Jesus, and cannot but think. that Mrs. Kingsford too readily identified herself with her imaginations. Mr. Maitland, too, does not seem to have made much of an advance when disincarnating from the body of "John the Beloved " —who lay on the breast of the Lord, and at the ripe old age of ninety was seer of the Apocalyptic Vision of Patmos-into the body. of Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic; for Mr. Maitland is persuaded of these things. Marcus Aurelius was born in 121 A.D.; and John must have died about 90 or so. Surely he should not have forgotten all his Christianity and his great Master in thirty short years? We are willing to entertain the idea of some similarity between the characters of Titus Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus and Mr. Maitland, for they are both sententious enough, but we decline emphatically to connect the writer of the autobiography under review with John, the brother of the Lord. Reserving all opinion as to the historical accuracy of the Gospels, we have too high a respect for the great Teacher whom the Christians worship, to do aught but indignantly hurl back the aspersion which such overwhelming vanity has cast upon his brother. It is because of such things that we are convinced that Mr. Maitland has done his best to destroy the reputation of The Perfect Way-an all the more regrettable state of affairs seeing that there are so many good ideas scattered throughout the volume. G. R. S. M.

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MAN AND HIS BODIES.

II. THE ASTRAL BODY.

(Continued from Vol. XVII. p. 507.)

LET us study this astral body under these impacts from within and without. We see it permeating the physical body and extending around it in every direction like a coloured cloud. The colours vary with the nature of the man, with his lower, animal, passional nature, and the part outside the physical body is called the kâmic aura, as belonging to the kâma or desire body, commonly called the astral body of man.* For the astral body is the vehicle of man's kâmic consciousness, the seat of all animal passions and desires, the centre of the senses, as already said, where all sensations arise. It changes its colours continually as it vibrates under thoughtimpacts; if a man loses his temper, flashes of scarlet appear; if he feels love, rose red thrills through it. If the man's thoughts are high and noble they demand finer astral matter to answer to them, and we trace this action on the astral body in its loss of the grosser and denser particles from each sub-plane, and its gain of the finer and rarer kinds. The astral body of a man whose thoughts are low and animal is gross, thick, dense, and dark in colour-often so dense that the outline of the physical body is almost lost in it; whereas that of an advanced man is fine, clear, luminous and bright in colour, a really beautiful object. In such a case the lower passions have been dominated, and the selective action of the mind has refined the astral matter. By thinking nobly, then, we purify the astral body, even without having consciously worked towards that end. And be it remembered that this inner working exercises a

*This separation of the "aura" from the man, as though it were something different from himself, is misleading, although very natural from the point of view of observation. The "aura" is the cloud round the body, in ordinary parlance; really, the man lives on the various planes in such garments as befit each, and all these garments or bodies interpenetrate each other; the lowest and smallest of these is called "the body," and the mixed substances of the other garments are called the aura when they extend beyond that body. The kâmic aura, then, is merely such part of the kamic body as extends beyond the physical.

potent influence on the thoughts that are attracted from without to the astral body; a body which is made by its owner to respond habitually to evil thoughts acts as a magnet to similar thoughtforms in its vicinity, whereas a pure astral body acts on such thoughts with a repulsive energy, and attracts to itself thoughtforms composed of matter congruous with its own.

As said above, the astral body hinges on one side to the physical, and it is affected by the purity or impurity of the physical body. We have seen that the solids, liquids, gases and ethers of which the physical body is composed may be coarse or refined, gross or delicate. Their nature will in turn affect the nature of their corresponding astral envelopes. If, unwisely careless about the physical, we build into our dense bodies solid particles of an impure kind, we attract to ourselves the correspondingly impure kind of what we will call the solid astral. As we, on the other hand, build into our dense bodies solid particles of purer type, we attract the correspondingly purer type of solid astral matter. As we carry on the purification of the physical body by feeding it on clean food and drink, by excluding from our diet the polluting kinds of aliment-the blood of animals, alcohol, and other things that are foul and degrading-we not only improve our physical vehicle of consciousness, but we also begin to purify the astral vehicle and take from the astral world more delicate and finer materials for its construction. The effect of this is not only important as regards the present earth-life, but it has a distinct bearing also as we shall see later-on the next post-mortem state, on the stay in the astral world, and also on the kind of body we shall have in the next life upon earth.

Nor is this all: the worse kinds of food attract to the astral body entities of a mischievous kind belonging to the astral world, for we have to do not only with astral matter, but also with what are called the elementals of that region. These are entities of higher and lower types existing on that plane, given birth to by the thoughts of men, and there are also in the astral world depraved men imprisoned in their astral bodies, known as elementaries. The elementals are attracted towards people whose astral bodies contain matter congenial to their nature, while the elementaries naturally seek those who indulge in vices such as they themselves encouraged

while in physical bodies. Any person endowed with astral vision sees, as he walks along our London streets, hordes of loathsome elementals crowding round our butchers' shops, and in beer-houses and gin-palaces elementaries specially gather, feasting on the foul emanations of the liquors, and thrusting themselves, when possible, into the very bodies of the drinkers. These beings are attracted by those who build their bodies out of these materials, and such people have these surroundings as part of their astral life. So it goes on through each stage of the astral plane; as we purify the physical we draw to ourselves correspondingly pure stages of the astral

matter.

Now of course the possibilities of the astral body largely depend on the nature of the materials we build into it; as by the process of purification we make these bodies finer and finer, they cease to vibrate in answer to the lower impulses, and begin to answer to the higher influences of the astral world. We are thus making an instrument which, though by its very nature sensitive to influences coming to it from without, is gradually losing the power of responding to the lower vibrations, and is taking on the power of answering to the higher-an instrument which is tuned to vibrate only to the higher notes. As we can take a wire to produce a sympathetic vibration, choosing to that end its diameter, its length and its tension, so we can attune our astral bodies to give out sympathetic vibrations when noble harmonies are sounded in the world around us. This is not a mere matter of speculation or of theory; it is a matter of scientific fact. As here we tune the wire or the string, so there we can tune the strings of the astral body; the law of cause and effect holds good there as well as here; we appeal to the law, we take refuge in the law, and on that we rely. All we need is knowledge, and the will to put the knowledge into practice. This knowledge you may take and experiment on first, if you will, as a mere hypothesis, congruous with facts known to you in the lower world; later on, as you purify the astral body, the hypothesis will change into knowledge; it will be a matter of your own firsthand observation, so that you will be able to verify the theories you originally accepted only as working hypotheses.

Our possibilities then of mastering the astral world, and of becoming of real service there, depend first of all on this process of