service of correcting a copyist's error in her symphony Andromde.

44 The Opera singer and medium Claire Vautier (born 1848) described in her Souvenirs d'une voyante a phantom music played on the piano that rendered the march from Meyerbeer's The Prophet with a novel conclusion: the composer's spirit said that this was the original version.45 Charles Gounod, not surprisingly, holds the palm for spirit activities, as he dictated a whole volume of poems from beyond the grave to his mistress Georgia Weldon.46 The spirits of great artists encountered by spiritualists, like the impotent shades of Homer's Hades, seem to be incapable of creating great art. Theosophists and other esotericists, unlike believing spiritualists, do not find this surprising, because they do not accept that the entity speaking through a medium is the individuality who lived on earth as Shakespeare, Gounod, etc. They hold that the essence of the being, and that which caused his greatness, has no need to stay in earth's atmosphere. These posthumous creations, when they do not come from the unconscious of the medium or of others present, can only derive from the "psychic detritus" scattered around the world, or else (especially in Theosophical doctrine) from elementals masquerading as spirits of the dead. As for performing mediums like Mrovak, their "marvels" are due either to the activation of unconscious potential or to "possession" (however that may be defined). Their achievement falls far short of that of professional performers, who at their best are not unconscious but hyper-conscious of every detail.Towards 1897 the well-known occultist Paul Sdir (real name, Yvon Leloup) obtained very strange results from a medium plunged into magnetic sleep, i.e., hypnotized.47 Like Rochas and Hughes, Sdir entered on his experiments in a scientific spirit. He thought of them as involving three elements: (1) a sound producer; (2) a receptive medium; (3) a recording apparatus. What he did was to play musical tones (first element) that were supposedly inscribed on the "astral light" (second element), then perceived clairvoyantly by a medium (third element). Sdir used two sorts of tones: notes on the piano, and Hindu mantras. His report is illustrated with drawings, with some indications of color, temperature and movement. The Buddhist mantram Om Mani Padme Hum translated into four pale-green interlaced circles, with a sensation of cold. The "mantra of the element of ether" was a B-minor arpeggio, visible as a green ring with its circumference ormnamented with blue arrows. The "Forms of the Latin Alphabet in the solar astral realm" are made of disks and squares. The lowest C of the piano gave a form like a bright-red helmet, while C-flat was a blue rectangle with a green point at the center. These experiments preceded by several years the better-known ones of Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, whose results were published as Thought Forms (1905).48 Recent art-historians admit that these

colored illustrations of the human aura had a direct effect on the first abstract painters (Mondrian, Kandinsky, etc.).49 Thought Forms had the advantage over Sdir's re