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DIVINATION & AUGURY IN A MODERN LIGHT 221
manifest to the flesh or materialize entirely or partially. Sometimes they materialize only their voice-organs,
sometimes only their hands. Those who accept these • facts can accept some of the records of augury, which
we classified in our fifth group. Direct voices warning or encouraging: bands writing on walls: angels and gods appearing in the forms of men: the rattling of furniture and noise of chariots, and so forth.
But wide as is the ground over which the spiritualist theories throw light, there are still some facts about the older practices of divination which are not yet explained.
A spiritualist has 10 phenomena to justify a belief that warnings can be given to men by earth-quakes, tempests and the like. It is here that our last group of speculators take new ground. As most mordern orientals belong to this class, readers of this Magazine will pardon me if I call the group the Neo-Buddhist Theosophists. These agree with the spiritualists in affirming the influence of external personalities, but differ in maintaining that they are not human excarnated beings. Someti mes they admit that the last, expiring, semi-automatic throes of a dissolving human personality may cause effects in our material world, but the influence of trese "shells" is very short lived. The personalities, according to them, who have mostly communicated in the old auguries, are either Elementa!s and Elementarles, or else human
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