Death and After Author:Annie Wood Besant Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: APPENDIX. The following passage on the fate of suicides is taken from the Theosophist, September, i882. J"E do not pretend—we are not permitted—to deal ex... more »haustively with the question at present, but we may refer to one of the most important classes of entities, who can participate in objective phenomena, other than Klementaries and Elementals. This class comprises the spirits of conscious sane suicides. They are Spirits, and not Shells, because there is not in their cases, at any rate until later, a total and permanent divorce between the fourth and fifth principles on the one hand, and the sixth and seventh on the other. The two duads are divided, they exist apart, but a line of connection still unites them, they may yet reunite, and the sorely threatened personality avert its doom; the fifth principle still holds in its hands the clue by which, traversing the labyrinth of earthly sins and passions, it may regain the sacred penetralia. But for the time, though really a spirit, and therefore so designated, it is practically not far removed from a Shell. This class of spirit can undoubtedly communicate with men, but, as a rule, its members have to pay dearly for exercising the privilege, while it is scarcely possible for them to do otherwise than lower and debase the moral nature of those with and through whom they have much communication. It is merely,broadly speaking, a question of degree; of much or little injury resulting from such communication; the cases in which real, permanent good can arise are too absolutely exceptional to require consideration. Understand how the case stands. The unhappy being revolting against the trials of life—trials, the results of its own former actions, trials, heaven's merciful medicine for the mentally and spiritually diseased—det...« less