"Astral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this old festival, you must know the legend of those astral divinities to whom offerings used to be made, even by, the Imperial Household, on the seventh day of the seventh month. The legend is Chinese. This is the Japanese popular version ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... not want it, they clearly did not deserve it. They were evidently people on a low, material plane of existence, and quite incapable of appreciating the symbolic value of sensuous phenomena. The question of phantasmic apparitions, and the development of astral bodies, was of course quite a different matter, and really not under his control. It was his solemn duty to appear in the corridor once a week, and to gibber from the large oriel window on the first and third ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... thoroughly. Nor is it very convenient to go and wash one's hands every time a lamp is used, because it was not thoroughly cleaned or duly put in order, when it should have been. Nor is it easy to clean an elegant carpet which has become soiled, or replace a valuable astral lamp, or mirror, which has been broken, simply for the want of thorough attention in those who have the care of these things. These little inconveniences, constantly recurring, might rouse a person to reflection, one would think, ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... system was at stake—published a white paper, —or a green paper,—I forget which,—in denial of all my adventures and disclosures. In this they proved (1) that all entry into Germany by dreams had been expressly forbidden of the High General Command; (2) that astral bodies were prohibited and (3) that nobody else but the Kaiser was allowed to have visions. They claimed therefore (1) that my article was a fabrication and (2) that for all they knew it was humorous. There the ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... Loquacious, garrulous, eloquent Smell Olfactory Sight Visual, optic, perspicuous, conspicuous Side Lateral, collateral Skin Cutaneous Spittle Salivial Shoulder Humeral Shepherd Pastoral Sea Marine, maritime Share Literal Sun Solar Star Astral, sideral, stellar Sunday Dominical Spring Vernal Summer Estival Seed Seminal Ship Naval, nautical Shell Testaceous Sleep Soporiferous Strength Robust Sweat Sudorific Step Gradual Sole Venal Two Second Treaty Federal ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... fire was blazing in his parlor, as, returned from his long, wet walk, he was sitting by it with his feet comfortably incased in slippers. The astral was burning brightly on the centre table, and a group of children were around it, studying ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... gabbled for two weeks over this luxury, which seemed unparalleled; but a few months later the community was proud of it, and several rich manufacturers restored their houses and set up fine salons. Modern furniture came into the town, and astral lamps ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... he was coming. Well, the great Towle detached this astral body once at a seance and, for a ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... The cashier of the local trust has compromised an astral body, and has squandered on her all our funds, including a lot of first mortgages on Nirvana. I suppose he's been dabbling in futures and is short in his accounts. I sha'n't be ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... physical body and its double are in a rough way the vehicles of the give and take of physical existence, but for the experiences of pain and pleasure and for the dwelling place of the passions, desires and emotions, we have an astral body. Here the theosophist makes much use of vibrations and colours, and apparently our changing play of emotion is reflected in a play of colour which puts the chameleon to shame and makes us in our ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... female creature seemed to have as many hands as Briareus, all reaching for things they wanted, or gesticulating and brandishing money, or snatching for change. If each distracted girl had had half a dozen highly trained astral bodies with which to serve these terrible ladies, it would not have been enough. More ladies would ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... Robert Browning told her all this shortly after, but before he told, she had divined his thought. For solitude and loneliness and heart-hunger had given her the power of an astral being; she was in communication with all the finer forces that pervade our ether. He would love her back to life and light—he told ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... perfectly good taste, though the heavy old beams and high wainscoting of the walls speak of ages gone by. But so it is. The cheerful paper-hangings have the air of belonging to the old walls; and such modernisms as astral lamps, card-tables, gilded Cologne-bottles, silver taper-stands, and bronze and alabaster flower-vases, do not seem at all impertinent. It is thus that an aged man may keep his heart warm for new things and new friends, and often furnish ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... the leaded windows brilliant; he opened them wide and leaned out on the sill, arms folded. The pale astral light illuminated a fairy world of meadow and garden and spectral trees, and two figures moving like ghosts down by the fountain among the roses—Rosalie and Grandcourt pacing the gravel paths shoulder to ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... gathered together beneath our luminous star, in the Study, for we have a large hanging astral lamp, which beautifully illumines the room, with its walls of pale yellow paper, its Holy Mother over the fireplace, and pleasant books, and its pretty bronze vase, on one of the secretaries, filled with ferns. Except once Mr. Emerson, no one hunts us out in the evening. Then Mr. Hawthorne ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... head, the hair, and particularly the hairpins were. On two occasions a leaf was placed between the hands and the plate, and the outline of the leaf was left upon the latter. From these experiments it was concluded that the rays—whatever they might be—were emitted by the "etheric body" (the "astral" body, the "double") and not by the physical body, since their intensity did not seem to correspond in any way to the anatomical distribution of ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... the determinative prefix for a god or a goddess being, in the oldest form, a picture of an eight-rayed star, it has been assumed that Assyro-Babylonian mythology is, either wholly or partly, astral in origin. This, however, is by no means certain, the character for "star" in the inscriptions being a combination of three such pictures, and not a single sign. The probability therefore is, that the use of the single star to indicate the name of a divinity ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... work of Reginald Scott is a compilation of the absurd and superstitious ideas concerning witches so generally entertained at the time, and the pretended conclusion is a serious treatise on the various means of conjuring astral spirits. ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... must be truly wonderful—you manage to exercise it at so great a distance, or perhaps you send out your astral body to do the observing, which must be the reason why it's invisible ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... struck at them and cut off a leg of one of the cats. To his astonishment it was a woman's leg, and next morning he found one of the witches short of the corresponding limb.[775] Glanvil tells a story of "an old woman in Cambridge-shire, whose astral spirit, coming into a man's house (as he was sitting alone at the fire) in the shape of an huge cat, and setting her self before the fire, not far from him, he stole a stroke at the back of it with a fire-fork, and ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... well-trained mind and will; some of them were what she would describe as "psychological tricks," the creation of images by force of imagination, and in pressing them on others as a "collective hallucination"; others, such as the moving of solid articles, either by an astral hand projected to draw them towards her, or by using an Elemental; others by reading in the Astral Light, and so on. But the proof of the reality of her mission from those whom she spoke of as Masters ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... the power, or something has the power," said the Indian, "of detaching you from your actual body, and your astral body has been into another planet. By your description I think it must be the planet Venus. It may happen to you again, and for a longer period—for a ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... pained and disappointed when I asked him if I might not give him some. He doesn't even know how he got here from London; he doesn't think he came by train, so perhaps he was wafted here in some astral manner. He looked so bewildered too when I said the word 'money,' and evidently he had to think what it was, because it is so long since it has meant anything to him. So if he wants anything, I have told him to go into any shop and ask that it shall be put down ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... a ribald and voluptuous word to use in such a matter as this. It was generally felt that the Reverend Archibald Jones and Miss Chetwynd the elder would lift marriage to what would now be termed an astral plane. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... first five minutes in Gopher Prairie. She stared at the passing motor, at Kennicott and the girl beside him. In that fog world of transference of emotion Vida had no normal jealousy but a conviction that, since through Carol she had received Kennicott's love, then Carol was a part of her, an astral self, a heightened and more beloved self. She was glad of the girl's charm, of the smooth black hair, the airy head and young shoulders. But she was suddenly angry. Carol glanced at her for a quarter-second, but looked past her, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... to believe that Eustace was ever at any pains to conceal the effects of this astral phenomenon from his family, for its members were very quickly excited. If in that vale the woman-call could be heard by ears attuned to its haunting cadences, so also did the frightened mother-call echo its equally primitive ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... all the time since retiring to rest. There MIGHT be something in Charlie's mandarin theory.... According to Charlie, so many queer, inexplicable things happened in the world. Occult—subliminal—astral—thoughtwaves. These expressions and many more occurred to her as she recollected Charlie's disconcerting conversations. There MIGHT.... One ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... evening the astral lamp was lighted earlier than usual, because Laurence was very much engaged in looking over the collection of portraits which had been his ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the lyre, is said to have derived the idea of it from the harmony of the spheres. This astral music, apprehended by reason alone, is said to form one of the delights of heaven. 'If philosophers had placed that enjoyment not in sweet sounds but in the contemplation of the Creator, they would have spoken fitly; ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... of me to-night, as you walk after dinner under the glorious chestnut trees you describe in the park at Champel-les-Bains. I wish you had an astral body! It wouldn't take up any room, or have to pay railway fares, or wait for invitations to visit, and it could easily be one of the party in Sir Lionel's car. So nice to have it sitting between me ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... By the way, Nellie, you must have sent an astral warning that you were coming along. We were just ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... enchanted, so to speak, by everything she saw, and at the same time dazzled by the abundant light. In the forepart of the hall were burning four or five wall lights, the reflectors themselves very primitive, simply of tin-plate, which, however, only improved the light and heightened the splendor. Two astral lamps with red shades, a wedding present from Niemeyer, stood on a folding table between two oak cupboards. On the front of the table was the tea service, with the little lamp under the kettle already lighted. There were, beside ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... of their sentiments and folklore, superstitions, symbolism, mysticism, use in protection, prevention, religion and divination, crystal gazing, birth-stones, lucky stones and talismans, astral, zodiacal, and planetary. ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... of the noon makes blind the blue As towards the goal his burning axle glares; There is a fiery trumpet thrilling through Wide heaven and earth with deeds of one who dares.— With peaks of splendid name, Wrapped round with astral flame, Here is ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... be a Theosophist, and used to sit in her room upstairs projecting her astral body out of the window into the back yard, and pulling it in again like a ball on a rubber string—just for practice, you know. But that ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... Enlil ruled 33 stars, Anu 23 stars, and Ea 15 stars. They also possessed lists of the fixed stars, and drew up tables of the times of their heliacal risings. Such lists were probably based upon very ancient documents, and prove that the astral element in Babylonian religion ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum
... could fill with emptiness the place where she now sat and smiled. In some mystical way eternity had breathed upon this hour and given it immortality. It had been suddenly touched with a wand into an enchanted permanence. Theosophists tell of an astral light, where every moment of time endures in strange paintings upon space. Isabel and Theophil and Jenny were sitting together in the ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... ASTRAL BODY, an ethereal body believed by the theosophists to invest the animal, to correspond to it, and to be capable of BILOCATION ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... familiar way common to the children of the world, but with the cool, cheerful, casual, wholly impersonal attitude of Shaker friendship, a relation seemingly outside of and superior to sex, a relation more like that of two astral bodies than the more intimate one of a budding ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was to be in the air—'unwrapped'—and in it the Jewel of Seven Stars, so that wherever there was air she might move even as her Ka could move! This, after thinking it over, Mr. Trelawny and I agreed meant that her body could become astral at command, and so move, particle by particle, and become whole again when and where required. Then there was a piece of writing in which allusion was made to a chest or casket in which were contained all the Gods, and Will, and Sleep, the two latter ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... "potential" energy, the infinitesimal atomic engines, the "kinetic" force, the chemical motors, the subtle intangible magnetic currents, whereby in the thundering, hissing, whirling laboratory of Nature, nebulae grow into astral and solar systems; the prophetic floral forms of crystals become, after disintegration, instinct with organic vegetable germs,—and the Sphinx Life—blur-eyed—deaf, blind, sets forth on her slow evolutionary journey through the wastes of aeons; mounting finally into that ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Why with Life's essence here I'm thrilled. Then all thy prophecies I hear, And in my being feel them all fulfilled. And as the narrow rim of eye Contains the vast and all-encircling sky. So in the confines of the soul The undulating universe may roll. And out in space, my soul set free, I turn an astral forged key Which opes the door 'twixt God and me, I hear the secrets of Eternity! In Immortality I trust, Believing that the cosmic dust— Alike in man and skies star-sown— Is pollen from the ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... I do mean," she said. "It's a sort of power that grows—and oh, Bill, I'd do anything in the world to get rid of it! But this woman whom I saw standing by Lionel Varick in the porch was not a spirit. She was an astral body; that is, she was alive somewhere else: it was her thoughts—her vengeful, ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... whiter than snow and more brilliant than stars," said then Cuculain, "which are before us upon the plain, as if Heaven with its astral lights and splendour were outspread ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... ridge, And "Gibson's corner," in old time, For squirrel hunting was most prime, "Prime" is a somewhat slangy phrase For these high philologic days, And in connexion, be it stated, With a spot to science dedicated. J.H.P. Gibson's astral lecture Will place this fact beyond conjecture. Bound that old spot now thronged by all, Has many a chipmonk met his fall By dart from youthful sportsman's bow, Which laid the striped beech-nutter low. No central Ottawa was then, As now, ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... as chief of the National pantheon in the Hammurabi Age, was, like Tammuz, a son, and therefore a form of Ea, a demon slayer, a war god, a god of fertility, a corn spirit, a Patriarch, and world ruler and guardian, and, like Tammuz, he had solar, lunar, astral, and atmospheric attributes. The complex characters of Merodach and Tammuz were not due solely to the monotheistic tendency: the oldest deities were of mystical character, they represented the "Self Power" of Naturalism as well as the spirit groups ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... after all, a sort of spiritual second self, a sort of astral residuum left behind by a personality of this kind, which to certain natures becomes more sacred and suggestive than any of those tedious speculations or literary theories about which ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... all the parlors of the region from the time of his boyhood to that of his father and Old Crow. There was the center table with the album and three red volumes of Keepsakes and Garlands, a green worsted mat, hopefully designed to imitate moss, and on the depression in its center the astral lamp. On the wall opposite were pictures of Tenney's father and mother, painful enlargements from stiff photographs, and on the neighboring wall a glazed framing of wax flowers and a hair wreath. The furniture was black walnut upholstered ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... Possibilities." Even when the author meant to be most lucid Bean found him not too easy. "In order to simplify the theory of the Karmic cycle," dictated the white-bearded one for his Introduction, "let us think of the subplanes of the astral plane as horizontal divisions, and of the types of matter belonging to the seven great planetary Logoi as perpendicular divisions crossing these others ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... till she fortunately discovered that she had put the date of her birth wrong by three hours, which would, of course, completely alter the aspect of the heavenly bodies, and cause the best of astrologers to err. Veronica Terry talked darkly of experiences in the psychic world, of astral bodies, etheric doubles, elemental entities, and nature spirits. She went to sleep at night with her thumbs and big toes crossed, in the hope of bringing back the adventures of her dreams into her waking ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... i. 7. Job declared the law of pneumatics when he declared that "God maketh weight for the winds." Long before Madler, the celebrated Russian astronomer, published his remarkable opinion: "I regard the Pleiades as the central group to the whole astral system, and the fixed stars, even to its outer limits, marked by the Milky Way; and I regard Alcyone as that star of all others, composing the group which is favored by most of the probabilities as being the true central sun of the universe," Moses tells ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... astral body—by appointment. And the plan was made for your deliverance. Rather hard lines that you should kick ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... cases the man has only left his physical body temporarily, whereas in death he has left it forever. In the case of death, the link which unites soul and body, as seen by clairvoyant vision, is broken, but in trance or sleep it is released. The real man is then in the astral world. He now functions in his astral body, which becomes a vehicle for expressing consciousness, just as the physical body is an instrument for expressing ...
— The Secret of Dreams • Yacki Raizizun
... slave of the vortex; but the slave has become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. It is this stuff [indicating her body], this flesh and blood and bone and all the rest of it, that is intolerable. Even prehistoric man dreamed of what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the body ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... Vedas or Persian, our admiration for him went on increasing, and my kinsman, a theosophist, was firmly convinced that our fellow-passenger must have been supernaturally inspired by some strange "magnetism" or "occult power," by an "astral body" or something of that kind. He listened to the tritest saying that fell from the lips of our extraordinary companion with devotional rapture, and secretly took down notes of his conversation. I fancy that the extraordinary man ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... however deep, has a tendency to repair the loss and reunite; a piece of lost skin is very soon replaced by another. Hence, if a man, partially flayed alive, may sometimes survive and be covered with a new skin, so our astral, vital body—the fourth of the seven (having attracted and assimilated to itself the second) and which is so much more ethereal than the physical one—may be made to harden its particles to the atmospheric changes. The whole secret is to succeed in evolving it out, and separating ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... or statuette of lion, or stag, or Indian hunter—and a very choice statuette too—appropriate for the rosewood or marble bracket of parlor or library; never the animal itself, or the hunter himself. Indeed, who wants the real animal or hunter? What would that do amid astral and bric-a-brac and tapestry, and ladies and gentlemen talking in subdued tones of Browning and Longfellow and art? The least suspicion of such actual bull, or Indian, or of Nature carrying out itself, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... sack. Then, on awakening in the midst of the usual struggle, he would at once get up and transfer the bag to a new and more ingenious crypt. It was not that he was the direct victim of these phantasms; but he believed in omens and thought-transference, and he deemed these dream-robbers to be the astral projection of real personages who happened at those particular moments, no matter where they were in the flesh, to be harboring designs, in the spirit, upon his wealth. So he continued to bleed the unfortunates ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... fun reigned supreme. The very flames danced and capered in the polished grate. A pair of prim candles, that had been staring at the astral lamp, began to wink at other candles far away in the mirrors. There was a long bell-rope suspended from the ceiling in the corner, made of glass beads, netted over a cord nearly as thick as your wrist. It generally hung in the shadow, and made no sign; ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... the Theosophical Society, with all its absurdities of levitation and the astral body, has been compelled to bear some witness to Jesus Christ. He is "the light that lighteth every man," and he has given even to this system some elements of truth. We do not hesitate to recognize the truth that Buddha and Confucius, taught, and to regard ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... that the field is situated which the emperor, in accordance with ancient custom, sows every spring. Here, too, is to be found the "Temple of the Earth," to which the sovereign resorts at the summer solstice, to acknowledge the astral power which lightens the world, and to give thanks for ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... said Colin Camber; "one of nature's secrets not yet discovered by conventional Western science. It was known to the Egyptian priesthood, of course; hence the Vocal Memnon. It was known to Madame Blavatsky, who employed an 'astral bell'; and ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... very clear teaching that they are there and that the no-man's-land which separates us from the normal heaven, that third heaven to which St. Paul seems to have been wafted in one short strange experience of his lifetime, is a place which corresponds with the Astral plane of the mystics and with the "outer darkness" of the Bible. Here linger those earth-bound spirits whose worldly interests have clogged them and weighed them down, until every spiritual impulse had vanished; the man whose life has been centred on money, on worldly ambition, or on ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of the Army Corps in a general order published to specially commend it. Naturally his spirit rose to meet these expanding liberties of achievement. He looked for further promotion—for eminence. In a vague glimmer, growing ever stronger and clearer, he could see himself in the astral splendor of the official stars of a major-general—for in the far day of the anticipated success of the Confederacy he looked to be an officer ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the butler swung the door back, he was recalled to the matter of Tom Brainard by the sight of a familiar figure that floated toward him as airily as had its astral ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... audience. It was a question. Would the thumbs go down or up? Life and death held the chances even; but it was at the will of Heaven, not of the stars. "Hoc habet" must follow the stroke ordered from beyond the astral clusters ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... our divine man, the precious quintessence of the New England type, invaluable for his stimulating and ennobling strain; but his genius is too astral, too select, too remote, to incarnate and give voice to the national spirit. Clothe him with flesh and blood, make his daring affirmations real and vital in a human personality and imbued with the American spirit, and we are ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... and visiting and dancing and hunting and motoring and yachting, of following fashion and seeking pleasure in whatever might have been the vogue of the minute. Some other self, some pale, secondary, astral self, must have crossed and recrossed the Atlantic and been a guest in great houses and become a favorite in London, Paris, Biarritz, Florida, Scotland, Rome! Some other self must have been sought out for her society, admired for her style, and privileged ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... the main switches on the control board, spun around in his chair, and noted the time on the astral chronometer. "Touchdown ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... mainly through the Sub-Consciousness, I will explain you Clairvoyance (that is, not the mere seeing of pictures, which is a phenomenon akin to dreaming, but the vision of other people's Sub-Consciousnesses), ghosts, witchcraft, possession, wraiths, Mahatmas, astral bodies, etc., etc. But it is rather absurd to call in a new mystery to explain what may not even be facts. And so, till I am convinced either of ghosts or of telepathy, I must accord an impartial incredulousness to both. Credat Christianus, F. W. Myers or W. T. Stead! For I gather ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... exhibited a wide range of variety both in period and in orbital form. A new department of physical astronomy was thus created,[55] and rigid calculation for the first time made possible within the astral region. The vast problem of the arrangement and relations of the millions of stars forming the Milky Way was shown to be capable of experimental treatment, and of at least partial solution, notwithstanding the variety ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... Herschels, the sky has been "gauged" in all directions by the telescope, so as to ascertain the conditions of different parts with respect to the frequency of the stars. The result has been a conviction that, as the planets are parts of solar systems, so are solar systems parts of what may be called astral systems—that is, systems composed of a multitude of stars, bearing a certain relation to each other. The astral system to which we belong, is conceived to be of an oblong, flattish form, with a space wholly or comparatively vacant in the centre, while the extremity ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... little cabin, the prettiest, charming-est, most delightful little dog-hole in the world; not much bigger than an old-fashioned alcove for a bed. It is lighted by little round glasses placed in the deck; so that to the insider, the ceiling is like a small firmament twinkling with astral radiations. For tall men, nevertheless, the place is but ill-adapted; a sitting, or recumbent position being indispensable to an occupancy of the premises. Yet small, low, and narrow as the cabin is, somehow, it affords ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... or emotional state has its own astral hue, tint, shade or color. The Primary Colors, Red, Blue and Yellow. The Secondary Colors, Green, Orange and Purple. The combinations of Olive, Russet and Citrine. Black and White, and how formed. Key to the Astral Colors. Red the Physical Color; Blue, the Spiritual; ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi
... came into the world. Cicero, by the very terms which he uses to refute the Chaldeans, shows that the result of these ideas was to consider all infirmities and monstrosities that new-born infants exhibited as the inevitable and irremediable consequence of the action of these astral positions. This being granted, the observation of similar monstrosities gave, as it were, a reflection of the state of the sky; on which depended all terrestrial things; consequently, one might read in them the future with as ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... "Arrivals." Mark Twain's Phantom Lady. Phantom Dogcart. Influence of Expectant Attention. Goethe. Shelley. The Wraith of the Czarina. Queen Elizabeth's Wraith. Second Sight. Case at Ballachulish. Experiments in sending Wraiths. An "Astral Body". Evidence discussed. Miss Russell's Case. "Spirits of the Dying." Maori Examples. Theory of Chance Coincidence. In Tavistock Place. The Wynyard Wraith. Lord Brougham's Wraith Story. Lord Brougham's Logic. The Dying Mother. Comparison ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... complete ignorance of his tenancy, enabled me, as a "sensitive," to pick up this special influence from many others presumably present; and that the memories of the past galvanised the impression into some sort of temporary astral existence. The entity to whom I seemed to be speaking was doubtless not the Judge Forbes of later life, but some distorted image of his earlier days of disappointed ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... beliefs, which think themselves new, and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young, like the fine ladies at the opera. I suppose now you do not believe in corporeal transference. No? Nor in materialization. No? Nor in astral bodies. No? Nor in the reading of thought. No? Nor in hypnotism . ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... is the wheel of Time—i.e., measured according to the solar, lunar and astral revolutions. The importance of Ashtavakra's reply is this: May the meritorious deeds performed at proper times, during the revolution of this wheel of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... astronomy, it was a source of constant delight. What is more, it provided a link of common interest that soon ripened into friendship between himself and his odd old tutor, who had been obliged hitherto to pursue his astral researches in solitude, since to Madame and to Juliette these did not appeal. Night by night, especially after the winter snows began to fall, they would sit by the stove in the little observatory, gazing at the stars, making calculations, ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... "Subterranean and for the most part Invisible People heretofore going under the name of Elves, Fawnes, and Fairies, or the like."[36] In this discourse, the author, "with undoubting mind," describes the fairy race as a sort of astral spirits, of a kind betwixt humanity and angels—says, that they have children, nurses, marriages, deaths, and burials, like mortals in appearance; that, in some respect, they represent mortal men, and that individual ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... a dream or a wandering reverie. I was not unwilling to have more light in the apartment, and presently had lighted an astral lamp that stood on a table.—He pointed to a portrait hanging against the wall.—Look at her,—he said,—look at her! Wasn't that a pretty neck to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... conjured him. "May cost you something more, but it 'll be worth the money. If it's true, what some them Blavetsky fellers claim, you can visit us here in your astral body—git in with 'em the right way. I should like to have you try it. What's the reason India wouldn't be as good for him as Egypt, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... mysteries of some marvellous cabala would be revealed, and not finding what I wanted (though indeed I discovered much that was worldly new to me), I returned to the good old ghost-haunted paths trodden by my ancestors, to dryads and elves and voices from the stars, and the archaeus formed by the astral spirit (not the modern Blavatsky affair, by-the-bye), which entyped all things . . . and so went elving and dreaming on ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... beyond all this we know that man possesses an astral and a mental body, each of which can in process of time be aroused into activity, and will respond in turn to the vibrations of the matter of its own plane, thus opening up before the Ego, as he learns to function through these vehicles, two entirely new and far ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... is earthly, or something of the kind, clashing with the opinion of the artist, who thought the next letter should be l, i.e., that the souls should know each other by light emanating from their astral bodies. The General, with his bushy grey eyebrows gravely contracted, sat gazing at the hands on the saucer, and, imagining that it was moving of its own accord, kept pulling the saucer towards b. The pale-faced young artist, ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... shoulders, the watchmen carry about with them a long staff, at the end of which is a circular knob full of small spikes that resemble the rays of a star, on which account the staff is called the Morning Star; and with one of these astral knobs the noble Lord, in a scuffle, was struck on the head. The inhabitants of Bergen still remember the Marquis; and while they condemn the conduct of their countryman, exalt the character of the young nobleman; and I believe myself, that the local trade of the ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... an excuse to call, some detail of work which, more easily than not, could have waited until the next day. He was not only using the detail of work as a means to visit Mary but as an excuse to escape a parlour lecture on "What astral vibrations does your given name bring you?" by a pale-faced young woman. The pale-faced young woman boasted of an advanced soul and was making a snug bank account from the rich set in undertaking occult analyses of their ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... limited scientific knowledge justifies. For the masses of the people the whole question of cosmical development resolves itself into "a balancing of authorities;" they are not in a position to verify the reasonings for and against this theory by actual observation of astral phenomena, and the application of mathematical calculus; they are, therefore, guided by balancing in their own minds the statements of the distinguished astronomers who, by the united suffrages of the scientific world, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... to see and talk with the captain, but to-night he shrank unaccountably from meeting either of the ladies. It is under such circumstances that many a man finds Fate unkind. Even as he stood there the hall door flew open and a bright beam from the astral lamp within shot athwart the road. A blithe voice called back in answer to some presumable remonstrance. "What nonsense, Margaret! I can run over there as well as not and be back in a moment." The door closed, and muffled ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... suns could no more blaze in one hemisphere, than Walter de Montreal and Cola di Rienzi live in the same city. The star-seers tell us that we feel a secret and uncontrollable antipathy to those whose astral influences destine them to work us evil; such antipathy do I feel for yon fair-faced homicide. Cross not my ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the starting ramp, her ports closed, her crew making last-minute preparations. Ringing the huge spaceport, crews from other ships paused in their work to watch the first vessel make the dash around the Moon in a frantic race against the astral chronometer. In the temporary grandstands at the north end of the field, thousands of spectators from cities all over Earth leaned forward, ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... and ask Sam's advice about advising Peter, and I read the rest of the peony pages in comfort. Right then, too, I made up my mind that I was going to get ground bone to plant at the roots of all the peonies if I had to use my own skeleton to do it and would only see them bloom with astral eyes. ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... overwhelming longing for sympathy; neither did it strike Nelson, who believed in all sorts of occult influences, that his confidence in a stranger was unwarranted. He would have told you that his "psychic instincts" never played him false, although really they were traitors from their astral cradles to ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... ghostly night-born feeling that she still belonged to Walter, living or dead, and a wonder as to where in all the world he might be. A defiant protest that she idealized Walter, that he wasn't so awfully superior to the Champs du Pom-Pom as this astral body of his was pretending, and a still more defiant gratitude to Mr. Schwirtz as she crawled into the tousled bed and Mrs. Lawrence half woke to yawn, "Oh, that—you—Gold'n? Gawd! I'm sleepy. Wha' time ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... almost vulgar manner of speech was in reality foreign to both Tutt and Miss Wiggin and it was born of the instant, due doubtless to some peculiar juxtaposition of astral bodies in Cupid's horoscope unknown to them, but which none the less had its influence. Strange things happen on the eve of St. Agnes and on Midsummer Night—even in ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... his eyes; in which another medium, on handling a jewel, conjured up, it would seem with marvellous exactness, the games and processions of ancient Greece, as though the objects permanently retained the recollection or rediscovered the "astral negatives" of all the events which they once witnessed. But it will be understood that, in such cases, any effective control is, so to speak, impossible and that the part played by telepathy cannot be decided. It is important, therefore, ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Inspector," he declared, "even to divert my mind from the eternal contemplation of the Fu-Manchu problem. This would appear to be distinctly a case of an 'astral bell' such as we sometimes hear ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... might discern them. What you and I suffer from are defects implanted by idle nursemaids and doting mothers. Let us, for the moment, adopt the policy of the theosophists and sit in consultation apart from our astral bodies. Who killed Sir Alan Hume-Frazer? I answer, a relative. What relative? Someone we do not know, whom he did not know, or who committed murder because he was known. What sort of person is the murderer? A man physically like either David or Robert, so like that 'Rabbit Jack' would swear ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... in each set of envelopes, and sometimes the Theosophist has to revise his ideas about man when he begins this practical line. Theosophy quite usefully and rightly, for the understanding of the human constitution, divides man into many parts and pieces. We talk of physical, astral, mental, etc. Or we talk about Sthula-sarira, Sukshma-sarira, Karana-sarira, and so on. Sometimes we divide man into Anna-maya-kosa, Prana-maya-kosa, Mano-maya-kosa, etc. We divide man into so many pieces in order to study him thoroughly, ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... Marsh, or my wife, on each side of him. If there should be any attempt to rush the cabinet, we must get there first. I will be outside the cabinet working the rappings, the floating music, and the astral bodies." At the sight of the expression these words brought to the face of Gaylor, Vance permitted himself the shadow of a smile. "I can take care of myself," he went on, "but remember—Vera must not be caught outside ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... just come in: she is standing by the window yonder." And this had happened so often that Nitocris, like her father, had come to regard the wraith, or astral body, as the Professor deemed it, of the unhappy lady almost as a member of the family. Of course, after he had passed the border into the realm of N4, Franklin Marmion speedily came to look upon her visits ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... But Barney's astral jokes were brought to a period by the sharp note of the bugle, as Colonel Oswald, very important under the eye of so many big-wigs, magnificently ordered the march. The regiment passed up the steep hill, out Fourteenth Street—then ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... leave us! we adore thee! stay!' Flowers, bursting from the seed, bathed her in their fragrance which uttered, 'Stay!' The giant Enakim came forth from Jupiter, leading Gold and its friends and all the Spirits of the Astral Regions which are joined with him, and they said, 'We are thine for seven hundred years.' At last came Death on his pale horse, crying, 'I will obey thee!' One and all fell prostrate before her. Could you but have seen them! They covered as it were a vast plain, and they cried ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... of the living. Their garnishing was apt to assist this impression. Large-patterned carpets, which always look discontented in little rooms, hair-cloth furniture, black and shiny as beetles' wing-cases, and centre-tables, with a sullen oil-lamp of the kind called astral by our imaginative ancestors, in the centre,—these things were inevitable. In set piles round the lamp was ranged the current literature of the day, in the form of Temperance Documents, unbound numbers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Sinnett came to London, and gave us lectures in drawing-rooms on Theosophy. He expatiated on the wonders performed by Madame Blavatsky with the aid of certain "Mahatmas," who by secret knowledge, had gained powers of prolonged existence, and of appearing in their "astral" forms at vast distances from their ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... If her passion for chemistry was giving way to a budding taste for decadent, symbolical verse, it was because one evening, whilst discussing Occultism with Hyacinthe, she had discovered an extraordinary beauty in him: the astral beauty of Nero's wandering soul! At least, said she, the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... of the cosmos as governors of the various interactions between levity and gravity. The astral aspect of the planetary system. Its reflexion in earthly substances. Beginnings of an astral conception of the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... in pretty fruitful soil the other night, for we're all just 'gone' on occultism. Only we don't know anything about it. Ah, there's Colonel Estcourt, I'll ask him if it's possible to have her down this evening. I don't mind which body she comes in: the Astral or the ordinary. In fact, I think I should prefer the former. Colonel!" she called out, raising her voice. "Come here, I ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... climbed the great wooded ridge opposite. How romantic it all was; the sunset valleys full of visible sleep; the glades suffused and interpenetrated with moonlight; the long valley of the Greenbrier stretching away to we knew not what silent cities; the river itself unseen under its "astral body" of mist! Then there was the ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... her own hands. This gave me the opportunity of making friends with him. He came to have a great affection for me, and I took to dropping in at his house at all times of the day, morning, noon or evening. His heart was as large as his body, and a halo of fancy used to surround him like a poetic astral body which seemed to be his truer image. He was always full of true artistic joy, and whenever I have been to him I have breathed in my share of it. Often have I come upon him in his little room on the third storey, ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... room—out of the house—even to a long distance. This 'Self' is the force that, I firmly believe, departs from us entirely on the first or second or third day after death. This is the force you could send back. The astral envelope. Do I ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... her narrow kitchen walls Stretched away into stately halls; The weary wheel to a spinnet turned, The tallow candle an astral burned; A manly form at her side she saw, And joy was duty ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... was very little to justify Ardan's hope. Barbican's theory of the elliptic orbit was unfortunately too well grounded to allow a single reasonable doubt to be expressed regarding the Projectile's fate. It was to gravitate for ever around the Moon—a sub-satellite. It was a new born individual in the astral universe, a microcosm, a little world in itself, containing, however, only three inhabitants and even these destined to perish pretty soon for want of air. Our travellers, therefore, had no particular reason for rejoicing over the new destiny reserved for the Projectile in obedience ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... and forth, staring with unseeing eyes at the confusion of the room—chairs pulled out from their accustomed places; two card-tables with a litter of cards and counters; the astral-lamp burning low on the rosewood table that was cluttered with old daguerreotypes belonging to the house. The dining-room door was ajar, and as she passed it she had a glimpse of the empty disorder of the room, and could hear her two ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... brought down the attack, for, besides drugs, there are certain violent emotions, certain moods of the soul, certain spiritual fevers, if I may so call them, which directly open the inner being to a cognisance of this astral region I have mentioned. In your case it happened to be a peculiarly potent ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood |
