are and symbol. Presently I dozed off
again and began half to dream and half to see, as one does between sleep
and waking, enormous flowers and grapes. I awoke and recognized that what
I had dreamed or seen was the kind of thing appropriate to the symbol
before I remembered having used it. I find another record, though made
some time after the event, of having imagined over the head of a person,
who was a little of a seer, a combined symbol of elemental air and
elemental water. This person, who did not know what symbol I was using,
saw a pigeon flying with a lobster in his bill. I find that on December
13, 1898, I used a certain star-shaped symbol with a seeress, getting her
to look at it intently before she began seeing. She saw a rough stone
house, and in the middle of the house the skull of a horse. I find that I
had used the same symbol a few days before with a seer, and that he had
seen a rough stone house, and in the middle of the house something under a
cloth marked with the Hammer of Thor. He had lifted the cloth and
discovered a skeleton of gold with teeth of diamonds, and eyes of some
unknown dim precious stones. I had made a note to this last vision,
pointing out that we had been using a Solar symbol a little earlier. Solar
symbols often call up visions of gold and precious stones. I do not give
these examples to prove my arguments, but to illustrate them. I know that
my examples will awaken in all who have not met the like, or who are not
on other grounds inclined towards my arguments, a most natural
incredulity. It was long before I myself would admit an inherent power in
symbols, for it long seemed to me that one could account for everything by
the power of one imagination over another, telepathy as it is called with
that separation of knowledge and life, of word and emotion, which is the
sterility of scientific speech. The symbol seemed powerful, I thought,
merely because we thought it powerful, and we would do just as well
without it. In those days I used symbols made with some ingenuity instead
of merely imagining them. I used to give them to the person I was
experimenting with, and tell him to hold them to his forehead without
looking at them; and sometimes I made a mistake. I learned from these
mistakes that if I did not myself imagine the symbol, in which case he
would have a mixed vision, it was the symbol I gave by mistake that
produced the vision. Then I met with a seer who could say to me, 'I have a