he fixed stars, because
in their case the distances are so enormously greater. The pole star, for
example, is so far off that light, traveling at the inconceivable speed
above mentioned, takes a little more than fifty years to reach our eyes;
and from that follows the strange but inevitable inference that we see the
pole star not as or where it is at this moment, but as and where it was
fifty years ago. Nay, if tomorrow some cosmic catastrophe were to shatter
the pole star into fragments, we should still see it peacefully shining in
the sky all the rest of our lives; our children would grow up to
middle-age and gather their children about them in turn before the news of
that tremendous accident reached any terrestial eye. In the same way there
are other stars so far distant that light takes thousands of years to
travel from them to us, and with reference to their condition our
information is therefore thousands of years behind time. Now carry the
argument a step farther. Suppose that we were able to place a man at the
distance of 186,000 miles from the earth, and yet to endow him with the
wonderful faculty of being able from that distance to see what was
happening here as clearly as though he were still close beside us. It is
evident that a man so placed would see everything a second after the time
it really happened, and so at the present moment he would be seeing what
happened a second ago. Double that distance, and he would be two seconds
behind time, and so on; remove him to the distance of the sun (still
allowing him to preserve the same mysterious power of sight) and he would
look down and watch you doing not what you are doing now, but what you
were doing eight minutes and a quarter ago. Carry him to the pole star,
and he would see passing before his eyes the events of fifty years ago; he
would be watching the childish gambols of those who at the same moment
were really middle-aged men. Marvellous as this may sound, it is
literally and scientifically true, and cannot be denied."

Flammarion, in his story, called "Lumen," makes his spirit hero pass at
will along the ray of light from the earth, seeing the things of different
eras of earth-time. He even made him travel backward along that ray, thus
seeing the happenings in reverse order, as in a moving picture running
backward. This story is of the greatest interest to the occultist, for
while the Akashic Records are not the same as the light records, yet the
analog