Catherine Crowe

“ There must be few, indeed, who leave this earth fit for heaven; for, although the immediate frame of mind in which dissolution takes place is probably very important, it is surely a pernicious error, encouraged by jail chaplains and philanthropists, that a late repentance and a few parting prayers can purify a soul sullied by years of wickedness. Would we at once receive such a one into our intimate communion and love? Should we not require time for the stains of vice to be washed away and habits of virtue to be formed? ”

“ Truth, if it do not emanate from an acknowledged authority, is generally rejected; and error, if it do, is as often accepted; while, whoever disputes the received theory, whatever it be—we mean especially that adopted by the professors of colleges—does it at his peril. But there is a day yet brooding in the bosom of time, when the sciences will be no longer isolated; when we shall no longer deny, but be able to account for, phenomena apparently prodigious, or have the modesty, if we can not explain them, to admit that the difficulty arises solely from our own incapacity. ”

“ On another night, however, behold! the youth appears to him again, and asks him if he knows him; and Sennadius related to him all the particulars of his former dream, which he well remembered. ‘Then,’ said the youth, ‘was it while sleeping or waking that you saw these things?’—‘I was sleeping,’ answered Sennadius. ‘You are right,’ returned the youth, ‘it was in your sleep that you saw these things; and know, O Sennadius, that what you see now is also in your sleep. But if this be so, tell me where then is your body?’—‘In my bed-chamber,’ answered Sennadius. ”

“ He raised his axe and aimed a blow at Catherine—a blow which, to her horror, my mother could not intercept, though she had snatched up a three-legged stool, the sole furniture of the apartment, for that purpose. She could not, she felt, fling the stool at the figure without destroying Alexes, who kept shooting out and in between her and the ghastly thing. She tried in vain to scream; she besought my father, in agony, to avert the impending stroke; but he did not hear, or did not heed her, and stood motionless, as in a trance. ”

“ Conceive what this awakening must be to an earth-bound spirit—to one altogether unprepared for its new home—carrying no light within it—floating in the dim obscure—clinging to the earth, where all its affections were garnered up: for where its treasure is, there shall it be also. It will find its condition evil, more or less, according to the degree of its moral light or darkness, and in proportion to the amount of the darkness will be its incapacity to seek for light. ”

“ We are encompassed on all sides by wonders, and we can scarcely set our foot upon the ground, without trampling upon some marvellous production that our whole life and all our faculties would not suffice to comprehend. Familiarity, however, renders us insensible to the ordinary works of nature; we are apt to forget the miracles they comprise, and even, sometimes, mistaking words for conceptions, commit the error of thinking we understand their mystery. But there is one class of these wonders with which, from their comparatively rare occurrence, we do not become familiar ”

“ To any one who has been fortunate enough to witness one genuine case of clairvoyance, I think the conception of this universal sense will not be difficult, however the mode of its exercise may remain utterly incomprehensible. As I have said above—to the great Spirit and Fountain of life, all things, in both space and time, must be present. However impossible it is to our finite minds to conceive this, we must believe it. It may, in some slight degree, facilitate the conception to remember that action, once begun, never ceases—an impulse given is transmitted on for ever ”

“ The ghost now comes in a perfect human shape, and is dressed in a loose robe, with a girdle, and has on its head a four-cornered cap. It has a projecting chin and forehead, fiery, deep-set eyes, a long beard, and high cheek-bones, which look as if they were covered with parchment. A light radiates about and above his head, and in the midst of this light she sees the outlines of the spectre.
“Both she and her fellow-prisoners declare, that this apparition comes several times in a night, but always between the evening and morning bell. ”

“ Believing the appearance to be an illusion, because they can not bring themselves to believe in ghosts, simply amounts to saying, “I don’t believe, because I don’t believe;” and is an argument of no effect, except to invalidate their capacity for judging the question, at all; but the second reason for not believing, namely, that they do not wish to do so, has not only the same disadvantage, but is liable to much more serious objections; for it is our duty to ascertain the truth in an affair that concerns every soul of us so deeply ”

“ Neither is the comparative rarity of these phenomena any argument against their possibility. There are many strange things which occur still more rarely, but which we do not look upon as supernatural or miraculous. Of nature’s ordinary laws, we yet know but little; of their aberrations and perturbations, still less. How should we, when the world is a miracle and life a dream, of which we know neither the beginning nor the end! We do not even know that we see anything as it is, or rather, we know that we do not. We see things but as our visual organs represent them to us ”

“ Goodness is truth, and truth is light—and wickedness is falsehood, and falsehood is darkness; and so it will be seen to be. Those who have not the light of truth to guide them, will wander darkly through this valley of the shadow of death; those in whom the light of goodness shines will dwell in the light, which is inherent in themselves. The former will be in the kingdom of darkness—the latter in the kingdom of light. ”

“ We are part spirit and part matter: by the former we are allied to the spiritual world and to the absolute spirit; and as nobody doubts that the latter can work magically, that is, by the mere act of will—for by the mere act of will all things were created, and by its constant exertion all things are sustained—why should we be astonished that we, who partake of the Divine nature and were created after God’s own image, should also, within certain limits, partake of this magical power? ”

“ And by investigation, I do not mean the hasty, captious, angry notice of an unwelcome fact, that too frequently claims the right of pronouncing on a question; but the slow, modest, pains-taking examination, that is content to wait upon Nature, and humbly follow out her disclosures, however opposed to preconceived theories or mortifying to human pride. If scientific men could but comprehend how they discredit the science they really profess, by their despotic arrogance and exclusive skepticism, they would surely, for the sake of that very science they love, affect more liberality and candor. ”

“ Joseph Ennemoser, of Berlin, appears to be one of the most eminent, maintains that the explanation of the mystery is to be chiefly sought in the great and universal law of polarity, which extends not only beyond the limits of this earth, but beyond the limits of this system, which must necessarily be in connection with all others; so that there is thus an eternal and never-ceasing inter-action, of which, from the multiplicity and contrariety of the influences, we are insensible, just as we are insensible to the pressure of the atmosphere, from its impinging on us equally on all sides. ”

“ The sympathetic effects of multitudes upon each other, of the young sleeping with the old, of magnetism on plants and animals, are now acknowledged facts: may not many other asserted phenomena that we yet laugh at be facts also, though probably too capricious in their nature—by which I mean, depending on laws beyond our apprehension—to be very available? For I take it, that as there is no such thing as chance, but all would be certainty if we knew the whole of the conditions, so no phenomena are really capricious and uncertain: they only appear so to our ignorance and shortsightedness. ”

“ We must grope our way through the dim path before us, ever in danger of being led into error, while we may confidently reckon on being pursued by the shafts of ridicule—that weapon so easy to wield, so potent to the weak, so weak to the wise—which has delayed the births of so many truths, but never stifled one. The pharisaical skepticism which denies without investigation, is quite as perilous, and much more contemptible, than the blind credulity which accepts all that it is taught without inquiry ”

“ The only way, therefore, of attaining any glimpses of the truth in an inquiry of this nature, where our intellect can serve us so little, is to enter on it with the conviction that, knowing nothing, we are not entitled to reject any evidence that may be offered to us, till it has been thoroughly sifted, and proved to be fallacious. That the facts presented to our notice appear to us absurd, and altogether inconsistent with the notions our intellects would have enabled us to form, should have no weight whatever in the investigation. Our intellects are no measure of God Almighty’s designs ”

“ Most persons will have heard of this peculiarity attending the appearance of ghosts. In the case of Professor Dorrien’s apparition, mentioned in a former chapter, Professor Oeder saw it, when there was no light in the room, by a flame which proceeded from itself. When he had the room lighted, he saw it no longer, the light of the lamp rendering invisible the more delicate phosphorescent light of the spectre: just as the bright glare of the sun veils the feebler lustre of the stars, and obscures to our senses many chemical lights which are very perceptible in darkness. ”

“ The soul is subject to the spirit; and its functions are, to will, or choose, to think, and to feel, and to become thereby cognizant of the true, the beautiful, and the good; comprehending the highest principle, the highest ideal, and the most perfect happiness. The Ego, or I, is the resultant of the three forces, Pneuma, Psyche, Soma—spirit, soul, and body.
In the spirit or soul, or rather in both conjoined, dwells, also, the power of spiritual seeing, or intuitive knowing; for, as there is a spiritual body, there is a spiritual eye, and a spiritual ear, and so forth ”

“ With respect to the faculty of ghost-seeing, he said, it depends on several circumstances, external and internal. People who live in the bustle and glare of the world seldom see them, while those who live in still, solitary, thinly-inhabited places, like the mountainous districts of various countries, do. So if I go into the forest by night, I see the phosphoric light of a piece of rotten wood; but if I go by day I can not see it; yet it is still there. Again, there must be a rapport. A tender mother is awakened by the faintest cry of her infant, while the maid slumbers on and never hears it ”

“ Dismissing the idea, therefore, that heaven and hell are places in which the soul is imprisoned, whether in bliss or woe, and supposing that, by a magnetic relation, it may remain connected with the sphere to which it previously belonged, we may easily conceive that, if it have the memory of the past, the more entirely sensuous its life in the body may have been, the closer it will cling to the scene of its former joys ”

“ But the rashness and levity with which mankind make professions of believing and disbelieving, are, all things considered, phenomena much more extraordinary than the most extraordinary ghost-story that ever was related. The truth is, that not one person in a thousand, in the proper sense of the word, believes anything; they only fancy they believe, because they have never seriously considered the meaning of the word and all that it involves. ”

“ He is like an unfortunate caterpillar that ‘can not entirely free itself from the integuments of its reptile life which chain it to the earth, while its fluttering wings vainly seek to bear it into the region to which it now belongs.’ But there is another kind of haunting, which is still more mysterious and strange, though by no means unfrequent, and which, from the odd, sportive, mischievous nature of the disturbances created, one can scarcely reconcile to our notions of what we understand by the term ghost ”

“ We must next remember, that this earthly body we inhabit is more or less a mask, by means of which we conceal from each other those thoughts which, if constantly exposed, would unfit us for living in community; but when we die, this mask falls away, and the truth shows nakedly: there is no more disguise; we appear as we are—spirits of light, or spirits of darkness;—and there can be no difficulty, I should think, in conceiving this, since we know that even our present opaque and comparatively inflexible features, in spite of all efforts to the contrary, will be the index of the mind ”

“ Thus the ecstatic woman will be more frequently a seer, instinctive and intuitive; man, a doer and a worker; and as all genius is a degree of ecstasy or clear-seeing, we perceive the reason wherefore in man it is more productive than in woman, and that our greatest poets and artists, in all kinds, are of the former sex, and even the most remarkable women produce but little in science or art; while on the other hand, the feminine instinct, and tact, and intuitive seeing of truth, are frequently more sure than the ripe and deliberate judgment of man ”

“ There is, as the Scriptures say, but one way to salvation, though there are many to perdition—that is, though there are many wrongs, there is only one right; for truth is one, and our true liberty consists in being free to follow it; for we can not imagine that anybody seeks his own perdition, and nobody, I conceive, loves vice for its own sake, as others love virtue, that is, because it is vice: so that, when they follow its dictates, we must conclude that they are not free, but in bondage, whose ever bond-slave they be, whether of an evil spirit, or of their own organization ”

“ Mankind are endowed by nature, not only with the faculty of penetrating into the regions of the supersensuous and invisible, but also of working magically above and below, or in the worlds of light and darkness. As the Eternal fills the world, sees, and is not seen, so does the soul (N’schamach) fill the body, and sees without being seen. The soul perceives that which the bodily eye can not. Sometimes a man is seized suddenly with a fear, for which he can not account, which is because the soul descries an impending misfortune. ”