Fiery Lives on our plane correspond, in this controlling and organising function, with the One Life of the Universe,[7] and when they no longer exercise this function in the human body, the lower lives run rampant, and begin to break down the hitherto definitely organised body.  During bodily life they are marshalled as an army; marching in regular order under the command of a general, performing various evolutions, keeping step, moving as a single body.  At “Death” they become a disorganised and tumultuous mob, rushing hither and thither, jostling each other, tumbling over each other, with no common object, no generally recognised authority.  The body is never more alive than when it is dead; but it is alive in its units, and dead in its totality; alive as a congeries, dead as an organism.

Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily united by a mysterious force called the life-principle.  To the Materialist, the only difference between a living and a dead body is that in the one case that force is active, in the other latent.  When it is extinct or entirely latent, the molecules obey a superior attraction, which draws them asunder and scatters them through space.  This dispersion must be Death, if it is possible to conceive such a thing as Death, where the very molecules of the dead body manifest an intense vital energy....  Says Eliphas Levi:  “Change attests movement, and movement only reveals life.  The corpse would not decompose if it were dead; all the molecules which compose it are living and struggle to separate."[8]

Those who have read The Seven Principles of Man,[9] know that the etheric double is the vehicle of Prana, the life-principle, or vitality.  Through the etheric double Prana exercises the controlling and co-ordinating force spoken of above, and “Death” takes triumphant possession of the body when the etheric double is finally withdrawn and the delicate cord which unites it with the body is snapped.  The process of withdrawal has been watched by clairvoyants, and definitely described.  Thus Andrew Jackson Davis, “the Poughkeepsie Seer”, describes how he himself watched this escape of the ethereal body, and he states that the magnetic cord did not break for some thirty-six hours after apparent death.  Others have described, in similar terms, how they saw a faint violet mist rise from the dying body, gradually condensing into a figure which was the counterpart of the expiring person, and attached to that person by a glistening thread.  The snapping of the thread means the breaking of the last magnetic link between the dense body and the remaining principles of the human constitution; the body has dropped away from the man; he is excarnated, disembodied; six principles still remain as his constitution immediately after death, the seventh, or the dense body, being left as a cast-off garment.