Note {68a} — ANCIENT SPIRITUALISM.

Origen, or whoever wrote the Philosophoumena, gives a recipe for producing a luminous figure on a wall. For moving lights, he suggests attaching lighted tow to a bird, and letting it loose. Maury translates the passages in La Magie, pp. 58-59. Spiritualists, of course, will allege that the world-wide theory of spectral lights is based on fact, and that the hallucinations are not begotten by subjective conditions, but by a genuine ‘phantasmogenetic agency’. Two men of science, Baron Schrenk-Notzing, and Dr. Gibotteau, vouch for illusions of light accompanying attempts by living agents to transfer a hallucinatory vision of themselves to persons at a distance (Journal S. P. R., iii. 307; Proceedings, viii. 467). It will be asserted by spiritualists that disembodied agencies produce the same effect in a higher degree.