Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1907-03-16
MASTER OF MYSTERY
DR.. Papus of Paris and His
Weird Health Doctrines.
A CHIEF OF BROTHERHOODS
Has Unique Theory of the Causes of
Fleshly Ills.
THE POWER OF SUGGESTION
Air Filled With Vague, shadowy
Workers for Evil Moving Every
where With Tireless Energy.
A CHIEF OF BROTHERHOODS
THE POWER OF SUGGESTION
Special Correspondence. OF The Star.


PARIS, March 3, 1907.
Are you in bad luck? Change your
| friends; change your surroundings. Are
| you sick and ailing? Change your bed
room; move to new house visit Free
bad influences. Flee the spot infested by
mschievous intelligential vapors that keep
up In you and yours the idea of your sick
ness,'
The speaker was a strange Partisan per-
sonality, doctor of the faculty, who has
abandoned medicine for mystery-Papus the
elementalist, the renovator of occultism in
France and conscious chief of powerful
affiliated brotherhoods.
l was struck by this strange doctrine of
how to treat vapory pests. They are not
spirits. They are shadowy, half-developed.
halt; situated natural forces grown or grow
ing up around us, with elementary intell-
gence and impulse. They float about in the
atmosphere. They attach themselves to To-
calities, where they accumulate. You can
imagine them grossly as wreaths or wisps
of almost immaterial vapor or as heavy
spiritual fogS.
They are ever striving to act, and they
are not very capable says DR.. Papus.
They stir up crank ideas of all kinds in us
suspicious, angers, vanities; because they
get their best activity by playing house In
human consciousness; and as they can
play only with such materials as they hnd
ready made in us, self-centered ideas of
sickness, bad luck and persecution natu-
rally predominate.
Regularly, however-and here is the i'm
portant point-the elementals are easily de-
ceived and inundated. Changing the wall
paper of a bed room may result in q pa
tents recovery from chronic sickness, as
we shall DR.. Papus is no long-halred,
wild-eyed enthusiast, but an alert and edu-
Gated Partisan.
A Converted M. D.
Would it interest you to know how
doctor of medicine, after eleven years of
hospital practice, came to be experiment
tally convinced of the nothingness of mate
realistic doctrines?" he asked, and L sad
yes.
Il will scarcely enumerate the physiological
proofs he began, the disappearance of all
the material cells of the body in less than
every seven years, according to the expert
ments of Flourens; the DEATH of each nerV-
Gus cell after the production of the idea
according to Claude Bernard the inde-
pendence of the neurons, discovered by
Ramon Cajal; all this would take us too
far: but it was only after having been an
ardent Darwinian that l came, little by Ut
tie, to see that evolution represents only
half of a cycle we'll known to the ancients.
During ten years of study atsthe Ma
tional Library l found the lost key OF the
Tarot translated the Sefer Jesirah, and
was led to scientific spiritualism. In order
TO continue such researches l attached my
self to the service of Mesnet at the Hos
pital st. Antoine, and then worked under
LUIS at the Charlie. 1t was during the
six wears that l was chief of the latters
laboratory that l began to see vaguely
something of the transcendental creative
powers of suggestion-of deception-and be-
gan writing treatise on me hHeu ldeas
of humanity-I did not finish it. l was not
ready / had not yet met
The occultst hesitated, as If fearing to
say too much.
I'VE made some strange experimental
Notifications in eXteriorzation and envoute-
ment (Which means hoodoo): we hesitated
between good and bad, wise and unwise;
because there are things possible, monsieur,
it is not we'll to tamper with
You gave up spiritualsm also? l asked.
I'm the usual sense. yes he answered.
Thought is force. 1t can accumulate H.
self, multiply itself, work on what We call
matter and radiate around us. The turn
ing tables of spiritualism teach US that
the souls of living persons can vibrate out
side their corporal enVelopeS-to the point
of producing the Illusion of another being.
Even spiritualists confess this strange phe-
nomenon as alternating with true manifes-
tatonS."
He hestated again, choosing his words.
In Deep Water.
Here we begin to get into deep water.
We send out from ourself, in spiritualistic
sittings, forces Of which we have little
knowledge but which can raise themselves
up before us; which can even reply to us
as If they were other beings, or at least
energies completely foreign to u.s. Mon
sieur What becomes of them?'
DO they become elementals?' I asked
and the occultist smiled ominouS approval
I'VE may look on certain spiritualistic sit
tings as laboratory experiments in the in
visible; because the wisps of impulse and
intelligence let loose in them samples
of creations that have been going on since
the dawn of civilization. We speak COM
monty of letting loose a thought on the
world. Balzac was lowering over the truth
when he said thoughts accumulate and
come to acquire a semi-consciousness.
When a sick man goes to live in forest,
how is it he always gets well? Why are
the inhabitants of countries so Wig
orous and enterprising?
why do we take vacations in the coun-
try, mountains and seaside?' 1 continued,
to follow his thought. "Materialists would