Occultism and Spiritualism

than the Clerk can send a dispatch without electricity. We have chosen examples drawn from contemporary sciences to present the doctrines of occultism in a clear manner, avoiding the recall of a multitude of old technical terms that would only have served to muddle our exposition. It may now be seen that this plastic mediator is something other than a pure philosophical conception, and that this idea appears to correspond to a physiological reality. Let us proceed with our analysis of the astral body. We shall now call upon those few experimenters who, in recent years, have sought to realize in a positive manner the possibilities of verifying these ancient and ever identical teachings.

Occultists claim, indeed, that the nervous system of organic life is but the temporary support of the Principle constituting the Plastic Mediator, and that this principle is luminous when seen independently of material organs—which is to say that this principle can radiate around the body in which it is normally enclosed. This "exit of the astral body," to use the technical expression, may be incomplete—that is to say, partial—or total. In the former case, we witness certain phenomena studied by Magnetizers and Spiritists, of which we shall speak again regarding Practice; in the latter case, the doubling of the individual can be observed at a distance by several witnesses—as is the case with several Saints of Christianity—and it is thus that occultists explain most so-called "telepathic" facts and the spiritist phenomena of materializations in the majority of serious experiments not resulting from fraud.

Several contemporary researchers have sought to verify these assertions experimentally and by recording the produced phenomena upon pho-