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DIVINATION & AUGURY IN A MODERN LIGHT
or encouraging: hands 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 no 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 modern 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. Sometimes 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 these "shells" is very short lived. The personalities, according to them, who have mostly communicated in the old auguries, are either Elementals and Elementaries, or else human beings, still incarnated, but withdrawn from the world, Adepts, Rishis, Arhats, Mahatmas, Yogis and so forth.
This group also offers the best justification for the practices of Palmistry and Astrology by a dogma. proved, like Euclid's axioms, more by an appeal to necessity than by scientific evidence-called Karma, which states that all our actions and sufferings in this.
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