itants are. Do good spirits dwell then so near us, or are they sent
on such messages?" The question, indeed, poseth most of us, but we
cannot leave the inquiry alone. M. Larigot, realising this
preoccupation, has in the course of his investigations, during many
years, arrived at the conclusion that there is an Art of the
Supernatural, apart from the difficult science of psychical research,
worth cultivating for its own sake. So he has gone to Glanvil and Arise
Evans and the credulous old books--to Edgar Poe and Lord Lytton and the
modern writers who tell supernatural tales. He gives us their material
without positing its unquestionable effect as police-court evidence, and
if we recognise its artistic interest, he does not mind much if we say
at last with one great visionary, "Hoc est illusionum." But into those
realms of illusion we ought not, if he is right, to enter lightly. Those
who do enter there are warned that, having done so, they will not remain
the same; they become aware of what Eugenius meant, who said:

"I am unbody'd by thy Books, and Thee,
And in thy papers find my Extasie;
Or if I please but to descend a strain,
Thy Elements do screen my Soul again.

I can undress myself by thy bright Glass,
And then resume th' Inclosure, as I was.
Now I am Earth, and now a Star, and then
A Spirit: now a Star, and earth again ..."

We see that there is another aspect to the occultation of Orion, and a
very ominous one. Aurelius appeared to St. Augustine and made clear a
dark passage to him in his reading, and that great Divine and Father of
the Church knew it to be an enlightenment from above. But what of the
other visitants from regions that are unblessed? Paracelsus has taught
us to be careful in our dealings with the realities and the phantasies,
as he would conceive them, of the other world; for "under the Earth do
wander half-men." And there are other and worse manifestations due to
Black Magic or Nigromancy, and to the black witches and white and the
false sorcerers who have violently intruded into the true mystery--"like
swine broken into a delicate Garden." Against these subtle and powerful
magicians no weapons, coats of mail, or brigandines will help, no
shutting of doors or locks; for they penetrate through all things, and
all things are open to them.

Writing as a physician, Paracelsus sought to anticipate by his
_Celestial Medicine_ and his _Twelve Signs_ the whole mystery