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theless a terribly serious sub-stratum of truth
beneath the eerie stories which pass from mouth
to mouth among the peasantry of Central Eu-
rope. The general characteristics of such tales
are too well known to need more than a passing
reference; a fairly typical specimen of the vam-
pire story, though it does not profess to be more
than the merest fiction, is Sheridan le Fanu s -
Carmilla-, while a very remarkable account of
an unusual form of this creature is to be found
in -Isis Unveiled-, vol. i., p. 454. All read-
ers of Theosophical literature are familiar with
the idea that it is possible for a man to live a
life so absolutely degraded and selfish, so ut-
terly wicked and brutal, that the whole of his
lower Manas may become entirely immeshed in
Kama, and finally separated from its spiritual
source in the higher Ego. Some students even
seem to think that such an occurrence is quite
106 The Astral Plane
a common one, and that we may meet scores of
such soulless men, as they have been called,
in the street every day of our lives, but this,
happily, is untrue. To attain the appalling pre-
eminence in evil which thus involves the entire
loss of a personality and the weakening of the
developing individuality behind, a man must
stifle every gleam of unselfishness or spiritu-
ality, and must have absolutely no redeeming
point whatever; and when we remember how
often, even in the worst of villains, there is to
be found something not wholly bad, we shall
realize that the abandoned personalities must
always be a very small minority. Still, compar-
atively few though they be, they do exist, and
it is from their ranks that the still rarer vam-
pire is drawn. The lost entity would very soon
after death find himself unable to stay in Ka-
maloka, and would be irresistibly drawn in full
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consciousness into his own place, the myste-
rious eighth sphere, there slowly to disintegrate
after experiences best left undescribed. If, how-
ever, he perishes by suicide or sudden death,
he may under certain circumstances, especially
if he knows something of black magic, hold him-
self back from that awful fate by a death in life
scarcely less awful the ghastly existence of the
vampire. Since the eighth sphere cannot claim
him until after the death of the body, he pre-
serves it in a kind of cataleptic trance by the
horrible expedient of the transfusion into it of
blood drawn from other human beings by his
semi-materialized Kamarupa, and thus postpones
his final destiny by the commission of whole-
sale murder. As popular superstition again
quite rightly supposes, the easiest and most
effectual remedy in such a case is to exhume
and burn the body, thus depriving the crea-
108 The Astral Plane
ture of his -point d appui-. When the grave
is opened the body usually appears quite fresh
and healthy, and the coffin is not infrequently
filled with blood. Of course in countries where
cremation is the custom vampirism of this sort
is impossible.
The Werewolf, though equally horrible, is the
product of a somewhat different Karma, and in-
deed ought perhaps to have found a place un-
der the first instead of the second division of
the human inhabitants of Kamaloka, since it
is always during a man s lifetime that he first
manifests under this form. It invariably im-
plies some knowledge of magical arts sufficient
at any rate to be able to project the astral body.
When a perfectly cruel and brutal man does
this, there are certain circumstances under which
the body may be seized upon by other astral
entities and materialized, not into the human
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form, but into that of some wild animal usually
the wolf; and in that condition it will range the
surrounding country killing other animals, and
even human beings, thus satisfying not only its
own craving for blood, but that of the fiends
who drive it on. In this case, as so often with
the ordinary astral body, any wound inflicted
upon the animal materialization will be repro-
duced upon the human physical body by the
extraordinary phenomenon of repercussion; though
after the death of that physical body the Ka-
marupa, which will probably continue to ap-
pear in the same form, will be less vulnerable.
It will then, however, he also less dangerous, as
unless it can find a suitable medium it will be
unable to materialize fully.
It has been the fashion of this century to
scoff at what are called the foolish supersti-
tions of the ignorant peasantry; but, as in the
110 The Astral Plane
above cases, so in many others the occult stu-
dent finds on careful examination that obscure
or forgotten truths of nature lie behind what
at first sight appears mere nonsense, and he
learns to be cautious in rejecting as well as
cautious in accepting. Intending explorers of
the astral plane need have little fear of encoun-
tering the very unpleasant creatures described
under this head, for, as before stated, they are
even now extremely rare, and as time goes on
their number will happily steadily diminish. In
any case their manifestations are usually re-
stricted to the immediate neighbourhood of their
physical bodies, as might be supposed from their
extremely material nature.
9. -The Black Magician or his pupil.-
This person corresponds at the other extrem-
ity of the scale to our second class of departed
entities, the chela awaiting reincarnation, but
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in this case, instead of obtaining permission
to adopt an unusual method of progress, the
man is defying the natural process of evolution
by maintaining himself in Kamaloka by magi-
cal arts sometimes of the most horrible nature.
It would be easy to make various subdivisions
of this class, according to their objects, their
methods, and the possible duration of their ex-
istence on this plane, but as they are by no
means fascinating objects of study, and all that
an occult student wishes to know about them
is how to avoid them, it will probably be more
interesting to pass on to the examination of an-
other part of our subject. It may, however, be
just mentioned that every such human entity
which prolongs its life thus on the astral plane
beyond its natural limit invariably does so at
the expense of others, and by the absorption of
their life in some form or another.
112 The Astral Plane
II. NON-HUMAN.
Though it might have been thought fairly obvi-
ous even to the most casual glance that many
of the terrestrial arrangements of nature which
affect us most nearly have not been designed
exclusively with a view to our comfort or even
our ultimate advantage, it was yet probably un-
avoidable that the human race, at least in its
childhood, should imagine that this world and
everything it contains existed solely for its own
use and benefit. Undoubtedly we ought by this
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