Ghosts I Have Seen.

by Violet Tweedale.

CHAPTER I

"SILK DRESS" AND "RUMPUS"

From the terrible conditions of the present I have turned back to the past, for a little joy and a great deliverance.

In the present one lives no longer from day to day, but from hour to hour, and even a fleeting memory of the joys that are no more refreshes the soul--wearied, and fainting with a pallid anxiety that wraith-like envelops the whole being in a thrall of sadness.

To-day I heard music which I had known and loved in the happy, careless long ago, and whilst I was lost in a dream of half-forgotten bliss I smelt the fragrance of mimosa flower. I cannot describe the sensations of joy that thrilled through my whole being. An involuntary moving of the spirit, an emergence into a dream world, described by the Greeks as "ecstasy." The music fashioned the invisible link, and I was back again on a hillside where the mimosa grew in native abundance. Now, one thinks of France only as a hideous battle plain, but memory, the true dispensator of time, is never bound by years. She keeps ever fresh, in glowing colors, those ideal moments that gather up the utter joys of life into one divine sheaf of memory.

It is not only for its great uses that we must have memory, but for its joys. It rends the gray veil shrouding present existence, and shows us life as what it really is. A phantasmagoria of wonder, wrapped in mystery.

The day of miracles is not past, it never will be past, but if you want miracles you must have the power of seeing them.

I have written in this book of the miracles I have seen. Some of them any one can see, others are reserved for the delectation of the few.

I have written of strange visitants from other realms, and of that vivid illumination which at moments lays bare the hidden springs of life, when the spirit emerges beyond the limit of human thought, and familiar things, beyond the horizon of life, and touches a sphere beyond immortality. It is a condition that the grave has nothing to do with, a beholding beyond the frontiers of the soul.

I have written of the spiritual life, for without this spiritual life a palace would be no wider than a tomb. The vastness of the spirit world defies description. It can choose its own pathways, and any one of these long, long roads leading to the great mysteries.

It is now almost universally acknowledged that psychic experiences, of a specific nature, occur at certain times to certain people, that are not explicable by any known science. Generally, they are experiences which point to the continuity of the human consciousness with a wider spiritual environment, from which the normal man is shut off.

A few such experiences that have come to me I record.

I hope that I have never tried to convince others of the truth of these experiences. If I have done so it has been unconsciously done. I am absolutely persuaded that such phenomena can only become convincing when personally experienced. Such matters ought not to be accepted on hearsay. It is mere folly for one woman to attempt to demonstrate to another the existence of the human soul. The most that A can communicate to B, of any part of her own experiences, is so much of it as is common to the experiences of both.

I have proved conclusively to my own consciousness that I am linked up with a wider consciousness from which, at times, such experiences flow in.

I know my soul to be in touch with a greater soul, which at moments enters into communication with me, and opens out a vastness which it is impossible to translate into words, and which annihilates s.p.a.ce and time.

I have had my vision, and I know. Therefore I am quite unmoved by criticism or ridicule.

I believe that what has come to me will come to all, and there is no need to hurry the process. We are simply a tiny part of a whole, which has neither beginning nor end. We live in a universe which is infinite in time and s.p.a.ce, which has always existed in some form, and will go on in some form for ever. The discovery of the law of the indestructibility of matter has proved this beyond a doubt.

At some second in time our Universe will be dissolved into new systems, for the life of a solar system lasts only a second in eternity, but that need not worry us yet. There is lots of time for man to realize his soul, and all will doubtless do so at some moment in their many earth lives.

The cla.s.sic idea is that the Golden Age lies in the past, but the Stoic doctrine of recurring cycles in the ages of the world seems to suggest that the Golden Age may return.

There are people to-day who ask, "Is this the end of the world?"

More probably it is the end of an age. The harvest may be ripe for the sickle to be thrust in. The opposition of good and evil may have reached their fullest manifestation. It may be the hour in eternity for a complete readjustment of the little ant-hills we call great nations.

We know the rise and fall of nations to be an historical fact, apparently based on an immutable law. This recurring phenomenon cannot be explained, though there are theories. Possibly the true one may be found in the failure or compliance to respond to the challenge: "Advance to a higher spiritual plane or perish." It may be that the right of continuance depends upon the answer to that challenge.

What brought about the decline of those mighty civilizations whose monuments of antiquity seem to mock our pride? What insidious disease brought about the fall of Rome? The beauty and inspiration of Greece was arrested by some swift decay, and the giant temples and Pyramids of Egypt, and the Mounds of Mesopotamia, testify to a grandeur far surpa.s.sing ours.

In the world's morning time, before the mists began to clear, we can trace the rise and fall of a score of mighty Empires. From out their present tombs of tragic silence arise figures, colossal sculptured figures, with faces and forms of commanding power. a.s.syrians, a mighty race, leaving behind whole libraries of record, chiseled upon indestructible pages. The lost arts of three thousand years ago.

Earlier still the earth resounded to the thunder of Xenophon's thousands, and the chariots of Persia sweeping after them. Lying deeper still in the shroud of antiquity the Pharaohs emerge as mighty conquerors, and we can dimly discern in the Empire of the Chaldeans the movement of a gorgeous civilization, and the majestic figures of men versed in mystic, and, to us, unknown lore. In Italy, memorials of a refined people, who were precursors of Roman power, have been found, forms of perfect grace in delicate vases and coins of gold and silver.

The old Etruscan art is traced back to the a.s.syrians' sculpture. The snowy crown of ancient Greece budded and bloomed in the mighty halls of a.s.syria's splendor, hundreds of years before Christ. No phantom world could furnish a mightier or more resplendent host.

Reading of those proud and mighty civilizations brings the simple life of the Nazarene very near to us in years, it also shows us how quickly great splendors are sanded over by the hands of time. The British Museum holds the sculptured records of twenty-five hundred years. Whilst the flames, kindled by the mob of Christian monks, from the great Alexandrian library rose to Heaven, the temple fronts of the Pharaohs, the Pyramids, the Sphinx, loomed out of the conflagration. The impotent torches of the fanatics were powerless against such imperishable records. What of our records? Will these ancient civilizations be remembered when the fame of modern nations has vanished utterly? Which has the best chance of enduring in the future? The paper and pasteboard of to-day, or the monuments of stone, to which the Monarchs of bygone Empires entrusted the history of their unsurpa.s.sed grandeur?

"If thou hadst known in this thy day, even thou, the things which belong to thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes."

This is the epitaph written across the tombs of all nations now crumbling into dust.

"The things which belong to thy peace." The things which never die or fade, whose continuity is never broken, the Divine seeds that cannot perish, the things which are immortal. The winged soul in its aeon-long pilgrimages through eternity to home.

I find it easy to write to-day upon psychic subjects, for everywhere I discern the dawn of what Conan Doyle, in his deeply interesting book, calls "The new revelation."

To one who, for the last forty years, has been immersed in all branches of occult research, the change of view that has come over the world in four years is very remarkable. Every one is now interested in the human soul, and all that appertains to it. The speeding up in the number of psychic experiences coming to light is enormous. So often now I come across "the last man in the world to see or hear anything" who has just been accorded a startling experience, and the rank skeptic is becoming a thing of the past.

Whilst sitting in solitude it is interesting to let one's thoughts slip back to childhood, and trace the present life in the mirror of the old.

I discover that in the immediate now there is nothing new, but only that which has its symbol in the old. I seem to get only the much clearer vision of what once was vague and cloudy, or wholly unconsidered by the mind of youth.

In that garden of memory I can set old happenings in a new light, and measure my slow footprints in the age-long journey behind me. Two facts emerge from out such musings. Firstly, the journey of my soul takes a spiral path, which at intervals brings me face to face with the old things that I have learned to modernize by dressing in fresh thought forms, as new perceptions are won. Perceptions prophetic of the greater capacity for attainment when the Divine Power is permitted to unfold itself without let or hindrance.

Secondly, the further on the soul journeys the more solitary the road becomes. One by one the old companion pilgrims drop away. Perhaps it is that on that long, lone trail the traveler must be free.

Very early in my life came the consciousness that everywhere about me, in the infinitely above, in the infinitely below, permeating heart, mind and soul, is life--endless, eternal.

On this sh.o.r.eless ocean of existence, without form or name, the soul is afloat. Birth and death are the tides, the ebb and flow of the ocean of life. The human soul is but a ripple on the sea of existence, and phenomenal life is but a flash in the eternity of eternities. All the teeming lives of effort around us, all the travail and suffering to which humanity is destined, are ordained for the great purpose of soul evolution. G.o.d sets the balance at every grave. That which distinguishes every man is the vast dower of our nature, eventually the same to all, the pa.s.sing incidents of station, fortune, talent, are mere surface varieties.

I find in my mind the existence of something illimitably beyond mind, doubtless a common experience. I do not know what that something is, but it is very real, and it invariably shows me how cribbed, cabined and confined this life really is. I cannot even tell what it is that confines me. I only know that there is a limitless world full of infinite possibilities all around me. I seem always to have known this, but I cannot grasp it. True, at rare intervals, I catch a glimpse through a rift in the clouds, then they close again.

At such moments I experience an ecstasy of heart sweet happiness, so marvelously sweet, so pure, so near Divine with its deep wordless thoughts of infinite beauty. Such regions are not so much impenetrable as ineffable. They are glimpses gained at some great alt.i.tude, from which I can look down on the mortal pageant and behold mysteries in which I take no part, but by which I am encircled, as an island, by infinity. Such are luminous and splendid moments, when the soul beholds the world in its real mystic beauty. It is the hour of transfiguration, in which the veil drops from the heart and the film from the eyes, so that we see life as G.o.d means it to be.

Often, as a mere child, when lying awake in those nights, whose stillness have a quality of awe, the silence would be broken by weird, barbaric songs which wafted a sense of old, wild adventurous life, and in a curious quality of mystery I saw violet mountains sleeping in sunlight, above a sea of amethyst. Childish visions, but sacred nights.

Very many years pa.s.sed before I understood them.

On hot velvety nights in June a curious scent of smoke would come to me, the measured hollow beating of bells, and a tremulous far-away piping.

Years after, I stood alone one evening on the slopes of Etna, amid the pale asphodels and the desolation of tumbling lava fields, and I heard the pipes of Pan, the reed pipe of the herd boy, and linked the past with the present. Again, pa.s.sing through a region where the smoke rose from the charcoal burners' fires the scent of an ancient memory came vaporing up, the unfamiliar scent that puzzled my childhood, and I was away in a flash, to wait for the soul to free herself and return from the world's edge.

I had to journey further east before I heard again at dawn the ring of camel bells as a caravan broke camp, and then I understood the visions of my youth, as I listened to the measured hollow beating, and watched a strange medley of eastern traffic trail away across the desert.

Sometimes, when the nursery clock seemed to tick more loudly than usual, I saw a gigantic water-wheel, and behind it ma.s.sive rocks with the hewn tombs of ancient kings, and beyond them lay distant glamorous mountains, white sails creeping amid warm purple isles, set in a gulf of turquoise.

Sometimes I have dreamed holy things, and waked to find myself over-awed by the sublimity of the vision and the glory of the Universe.

So many of those childish visions I have identified in later life, but there is one which eludes me. It is a great white road leading to the farther east, and I see it drenched in white sunlight. Tinkling mule trains pa.s.s along it, and I know now it is in some way connected with Ida that saw ancient Troy, and the Capital of Pontus, the seat of Mithridates' Court, and the Empire of Trebizond. Some day, who knows, I may walk upon it.

Looking back I can recollect nothing psychic happening to me before the age of six. I can fix that date upon which I became actually aware of the other world. It all happened through "Silk dress" and "Rumpus."