6. Hauntings-h

No novelist, deriving his ideas of ancient Egypt from an encyclopedia article on Egyptology and some photographs, would have dared stretch the long arm of coincidence anything like as far. The Egyptians attached great importance to the preservation of the physical body. The tombs of great men, as is well known, were protected by means of what are popularly called spells, and the power and scope of Egyptian magic are things that very few people realise. The modern student of occultism who reads Iamblichos on the Egyptian Mysteries, will have a surprise. In most cases, however, the purchaser of Egyptian curios has nothing to fear; the worst that they will yield to psychic investigation is a vision of labour disputes in a mass- production factory. I have, however, heard of a very wonderful psychometric reading which was obtained from a mummy which, when subsequently unrolled, was found to consist entirely of French newspapers of recent date! I have always been greatly amused by the indignation of Egyptologists against tomb robbers. After all, is there any distinction between the earlier and later visitors to a tomb save that one lot work by day and the other by night? In the view of the people who made the tomb, and spared nothing to render it inviolate and preserve the peace of their dead, the workers by night would probably be preferred, for they merely robbed, and did not strip and expose the nude bodies to the public gaze. There was a terrible outcry recently when some bodies were moved in a village church yard to make room for the monument chosen to decorate the grave of a famous public man. Even the people whose religious feelings were not outraged by this act of sacrilege regarded it as in shocking bad taste. Yet nobody proposed to strip the graveclothes from the body of someone’s wife or mother and photograph it stark naked. When it comes to the question of a mummy’s curse, I am afraid that my sympathies are entirely with the mummy. The initiate is strictly counselled that he should never blaspheme the name by which another knoweth his God, for it is the same force that he himself worships represented by another symbol. “The ways to God are as many as the breaths of the sons of men,” says the old Arab proverb. We should have enough sympathy with the struggles of another soul towards the light not to desecrate the things that are sanctified by his hopes and endeavours, even if by nothing else. The Father of us all may understand their significance better than we do, and by His acceptance consecrate them for ever. There are many Europeans who have a great affection for the Buddha, and have His statue in their rooms (though sometimes they confuse it with Chenresi, the stout and beaming god of good-luck). That the influence of that great Being, the Light of Asia, is noble and benignant, I would be the last to deny; but the statues of the Buddha are a different matter, and need to be approached with caution if genuine. Some of the worst black magic in the world is a debased form of Buddhism. To say this is not to insult that venerable faith, for it is only lack of opportunity that prevents the Black Mass from occupying that dubious eminence. In the Thibetan monasteries of the Dugpa sect there are temples each one of which contained literally thousands of statues of the Buddha. On various occasions one or another of these monasteries has been raided, either by rival religionists or Chinese troops, and its curios scattered. To be the possessor of one of these Buddhas, magnetised by Dugpa rites, is not a very pleasant thing. I had a curious experience with a Buddha upon one occasion.