The Desire World is the abode of those who have died, for some
time subsequent to that event, and we may mention in the above connection that the so-called
“dead” very often stay for a long while among their still
living friends. Unseen by their relatives they go about the familiar rooms. At first they
are often unaware of the condition mentioned:“that two persons may
be in the same place at the same time,” and when they seat themselves in a chair or
at the table, a living relative may take the supposedly vacant seat. The man we mistakenly
call dead will at first hurry out of his seat to escape being sat upon, but he soon learns
that being sat upon does not hurt him in his altered condition, and that he may remain in
his chair regardless of the fact that his living relative is also sitting there.
In the lower regions of the Desire World the whole body of each
being may be seen, but[pg 079]in the highest regions only the head seems to remain. Raphael, who like
many other people in the middle ages was gifted with a so-calledsecond sight, pictured that
condition for us in his Sistine Madonna, now in the Dresden Art Gallery, where Madonna and
the Christ-child are represented as floating in a golden atmosphere and surrounded by a host
of genie-heads: conditions which the occult investigator knows to be in harmony with actual
facts.
Among the entities who are, so to speak,“native” to that realm of nature, none are perhaps
better known to the Christian world than the Archangels. These exalted Beings were human at
a time in the earth's history when we were yet plant-like. Since then we have advanced two
steps: through the animal and to the human stage of development. The present Archangels have
also made two steps in progression; one, in which they were similar to what the angels are
now, and another step which made them what we call Archangels.
|