6. Hauntings-g

I remember, many years ago, when I had but little know ledge of occultism and no pretentions at all to psychism, that two friends and myself were amusing ourselves by turning over each other’s trinket-boxes. I picked up a handsome amethyst cross from one of them, and immediately exclaimed: “There is something extraordinary about this cross. It feels as if it were alive.” “That was the cross that was given me at my first communion,” replied my friend,” and it was originally a bishop’s pectoral cross.” Her sister was greatly interested, and immediately brought her own jewel-case to me and asked me if I could pick out her first communion cross also, for, like her sister, she was a Roman Catholic, and these crosses that were given them as presents on the occasion of their first communion had been specially blessed by the priest. I was greatly interested to observe that from three or four ornamental crosses I was able to pick one which felt warm and living and electric to the hand, and pass it across to her, saying, “This is your communion cross,” and it was. I remember once, as a small child, picking up a dying rook; the creature lay motionless on my knee for a few minutes, and then gave a flutter and died. I had never seen death before, but I needed no one to tell me that I saw it now. The “feel” of the creature, before and after that flutter, was different. I can only compare the feel of the magnetised and the unmagnetised crosses to the difference between the living and the dead bird. But the Christian is not the only religion that can magnetise its ceremonial instruments. There are other ritualistic religions, and some of these are debased. We ought to use much caution before we place about our rooms as ornaments objects which may have been associated with cults whose nature we do not understand. Many of them, of course, belong to the Brummagem cult, and are dedicated to no more desperate deity than Mammon; but the genuine curio is a different matter. I had an example of this once in the British Museum. I was visiting the room in the basement which contains a collection of plaster casts of the famous statues of antiquity, the originals being elsewhere. Suddenly I became aware of a sense of magnetic power. I turned towards it, and saw a small altar. Reading the label, I found that this was not a cast but the original. It is a very interesting test of psychism to sample the atmosphere of the different rooms of the British Museum. The benign and brooding peace of the Buddhist Room is a thing to be remembered. The flavour of the long Ethnological Room is a thing to be got out of the mouth as quickly as possible. To me, at any rate, the Egyptian Room is disappointing; the mummies all seem neither malignant or benignant, but merely cynical. Perhaps I should feel differently, however, if I spent a night with them. Magnetism, which is dispersed during the day, charges up again during the silence and darkness of the night. I remember visiting Stonehenge amid a crowd of trippers and chars-a-blancs, and thinking that the glory had departed; but it was a very different affair when I visited it in the desolation of a bleak spring day after its long winter solitude. It had charged up again, and was as formidable as anyone could wish. I should hesitate, therefore, to say that because the mummies and I have never struck sparks when we met in the British Museum, that their reputation is groundless. At the time that Tut-ankh-amen’s tomb was being opened I said to myself, If the mummy’s curse does not work in this case, I shall lose my faith in occultism. We all know how it has worked, even unto the third and fourth generation.