Lehal Library

a courier, who had been sent by the merchants of Stockholm during the fire. The account he brought confirmed Swedenborg's statement in every particular, and a further courier, despatched by the King, arrived at the Governor's house on Tuesday morning, giving fuller details of the ravages of the conflagration, and further stating that it had been got under at 8 p.m., the very hour which Swedenborg had reported. Well, there it is, travelling clairvoyance! I forget what Swedenborg called it; he had a name of his own for most things. Godly man that he was, he thought Quakers should only be permitted to live among the beasts. But he could see things happening three hundred miles away. How was it done? A good deal depends on a correct solution, since it would supply a key to many things in the nature of man which are not yet understood. It is proposed to consider here if such a feat, and hundreds like it, may not be more correctly attributed to flight than to vision, and to suggest that the flight is performed by the etheric component in man's make-up. And here I must offer an apology for my use of "etheric". Most previous writers on the subject have preferred to speak of astral travel and astral projection. "The term 'astral body'," says Ralph Shirley, "is constantly used as a synonym for the 'etheric body'. Sylvan Muldoon, and other practitioners of the art, write about 'astral projection', meaning, of course, the extrusion of the subtle body from its physical envelope. Why, we may ask, not call it 'etheric projection'? I confess I cannot answer this question except by saying that the phrase 'astral projection' has become stereotyped, and is therefore regarded as the recognized phrase for a particular form of locomotion outside the physical form."