The Equinox (Volume I, Number II)

THE SEER Ir is not to be wondered that the magic strain to which P. had been placed during the last seven months should have long since blossomed into flowers of weird and wonderful beauty. And so we find, as far back as the beginning of November 1899, the commencement ofa series of extraordinary visions as wild and involved as many of those of Blake or St. Francis. But before entering upon these visions, it will be necessary to explain that by a vision we mean as definite a psychological state and as certain and actual a fact to the mental eye, as the view of a landscape is considered to be to the physical eye itself. And so when we have occasion to write “he saw an angel,” it is to be taken that we mean by it as absolute a fact as if we had written ‘he saw a mountain,” or “he saw a cow.” It, however, is not to be accepted that by this we lay down that either angels or cows exist apart from ourselves, they may or they may not ; but it is to be taken that angels, and mountains and cows are ideas of equal value in their own specific spheres : the astral and the material ; and that they have their proper place in existence, whatever existence may be, and that every experience, normal, abnormal, subnormal or supernormal, whether treated as an illusion or a fact, is of equal value so 295