HAVE ANIMALS OCCULT FACULTIES? (Franz Hartmann's answer)

There was a time in the not “long ago” when there existed a great difference of opinion among the scientists as to whether animals were in possession of reasoning powers, and whether they could act occasionally according to logical reasoning and foresight, or were merely led by an unreasoning instinct.

It seems that this question has been settled; because there are so many instances known in which especially the higher animals (such as the elephant, the horse, or the dog) acted in a manner exhibiting an almost human intelligence and showing a comprehension of the emergencies of the case.

Elephants are employed in India for loading and unloading cars and perform their labor in a manner showing considerable intelligence; dogs employed for hunting or in the service of the police know their business; horses sometimes exhibit more intelligence than their drivers; even hogs can be trained to perform clever tricks. A case is known of a beaver who collected his winter supply of living frogs, and to keep them from hopping away and escaping he broke the backbone of each.

Volumes might be filled with examples of the intelligent working of the mind of animals, and also of their domestic affection and virtues.

The animal organism of man does not differ much from that of other beings; perhaps it is only a difference of degree. The brain is the instrument for thinking and the blood, with its central organ, the seat of affection and desire.

Animals have an astral body, and they are capable of forming mental images by means of their thoughts. They are consequently capable of appearing as ghosts after the death of their physical forms, and they may project their thought-bodies to the person or place of which they are thinking.

They are, on the whole, more clairvoyant than men or women; they have animal souls like ourselves, and consequently their own psychic or occult faculties and powers, even if they employ them instinctively and without scientific knowledge of the way in which they are employed. But even we employ our psychic powers usually without intellectual reasoning; because these powers belong to the soul and not to the reasoning intellect.

Paracelsus says that even the greatest magician or sorcerer performs his feats without knowing the way in which his magical powers act.

There is no doubt that animals may be hypnotized so as to make only one idea dominant in their minds, as is shown by the well-known experiments of drawing a chalk line in front of a hypnotized chicken, which the chicken, imagining itself to be imprisoned, dares not cross.

They are subject to thought-impression and can be acted upon by means of “telepathy,” as I have often proved to my own satisfaction by experiments made with a favorite horse of mine, which on certain occasions used to take the road which I willed it to take, without any other indication except my wish and my thought.

Two years ago a great sensation was caused in Germany by the public exhibition of a horse, which answered questions asked at random by the visitors, without being in contact with anybody, and without its trainer standing near, although he stood within hearing of the questions.

If, for instance, the number of the day of the week or month was asked, the horse gave the correct answer by so many times stamping his feet. I do not know what theory the scientists invented to explain this phenomenon, but it seemed to me that the questions were answered by the trainer by means of telepathic impressions made upon the mind of the horse.

Dogs and other animals know the intention of their master by merely looking at the expression of his face.  If you are afraid of a dog, even without showing it, your fear communicates itself to the dog; he becomes afraid of you and barks at you.

Animals, especially horses, dogs and birds are susceptible to astral impressions.  In haunted houses animals often perceive ghosts which are not seen by non-sensitive people.

Lord Lytton tells of a remarkable case of this kind in his story of a “haunted house,” and innumerable similar cases are known.

Only recently at the funeral of the assassinated King of Portugal, when the cortège arrived at the place of the tragedy, the horses attached to the hearse refused to proceed. They probably saw the horrible impressions in the astral light created there by that murder.

Adolphe d’Assier, a French writer, gives in his L’Humanité Posthume several interesting accounts of astral apparitions of animals and even of visible and tangible materializations.

I know by personal experience of several cases in which the astral bodies of pet dogs that died still haunted the premises and could be heard to act according to their previous habits, jumping on chairs and beds as they used to do while alive.  In spiritualistic literature many cases of apparitions of ghosts of dogs may be found.

I also have evidence that animals think of their friends, and that their thoughts may reach them; because love can carry the thought-image to any place, however far it may be, and create a mental impression.

For example, I was very fond of a little pet dog that was very intelligent and affectionate; it belonged to the Princess M.R. at Florence. Once while I was on a journey at Berlin this dog appeared to me, wearing a new collar, which I had not seen before. On my return to Florence I found that the dog had been ornamented with such a collar. The same little dog afterwards died, and I have seen his astral image several times and without thinking of him.  It therefore could not have been caused by my own imagination.

Mr. Leadbeater, in his book On the Other Side of Death, also cites some examples of apparitions of dogs, and one interesting story of a spectral dog may be found in Mr. Stead's Borderland (vol. iv, no. 5).

It is not to be supposed that a dog intends to project his thought-form; it may be sufficient that he loves his friend and thinks of him; and as we know that thinking beings, after they leave their physical bodies at death, have still an ethereal brain, there is no reason why we should not accept the theory, that deceased animals, as well as deceased human beings, may after death think of the persons they love, and thus appear to them in a spectral form.

More difficult to explain is the (to me) undoubted fact that animals, especially birds, seem sometimes to foretell the death of persons, even if these persons are far away.

A gentleman, Mr. S, was away from his residence in the country on a voyage. One night a great many owls settled on the roof of that house, making an awful noise and refused to be driven away. That same night Mr. S died in a place several hundred miles from his home. This may have been a coincidence; but it is remarkable that the owls neither before that night nor ever afterwards were seen on the roof of that house.

It is far easier to invent some explanation of such things or to pooh-pooh them out of existence than to discover their true cause. There are still a great many undiscovered mysteries in nature, especially in that part of science which deals with the psychology of our animals.

More comprehensible than the case with the owls is the following fact which has just now come to my observation. Two days ago the landlord of the house where I am living died of old age, and two days before his death two swallows, who had begun to build a nest in a place not far from the room where the sick man was lying, abandoned their work and left, although they had been in no way disturbed by anybody. It seems that they prognosticated that death even before the medical attendants could do so, and they disliked the death-atmosphere.

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Man is a compendium of the powers represented in the animal kingdom; but the animals are in many ways more clever than he. He may be said to be a “Jack of all trades, but master of none.” Fishes surpass him in swimming, birds in flying, dogs and cats in finding their w ay; spiders in spinning, birds in seeing at a distance, bats in seeing in the dark, horses in running, elephants in strength, monkeys in climbing, etc., etc.

Snakes have the power to fascinate birds, mice and small animals and force them to approach, to be devoured by them, and thus they employed the art of hypnotism long before the appearance of Mesmer and Braid; but in wanton cruelty man surpasses all the rest of creation.

It may be claimed that the faculties belonging to the animal kingdom are the property of the collective souls of their different species; but the same may be said in regard to the animal faculties of man. In mankind as in the lower animals the universal one life, the “animal soul of the world,” is manifested in individual forms.

The human form does not yet constitute any permanent and immortal individuality. A man without any higher aspiration than the satisfaction of his personal desires may be regarded as a bundle or collection of “desire elementals” without any real individual self.

True spiritual individuality begins only where the consciousness of a higher existence, the individual realization of the divine unity of all being, begins and selfishness and self-conceit ends.

Observation teaches that even in the animal kingdom a great deal of unselfish love is manifested in certain individuals, and the question arises how far individual immortality extends in the animal kingdom. This will be a problem for the science of the future to solve.

(The Occult Review, January 1909, p.40-43)