Unhappy shades, if sinful and sensual, they wander about (not shells, for their connection with their two higher principles is not quite broken) until their death-hour comes.  Cut off in the full flush of earthly passions which bind them to familiar scenes, they are enticed by the opportunities which mediums afford to gratify them vicariously.  They are the Pishachas, the Incubi and Succubae of mediaeval times; the demons of thirst, gluttony, lust, and avarice—­Elementaries of intensified craft, wickedness, and cruelty; provoking their victims to horrid crimes, and revelling in their commission!  They not only ruin their victims, but these psychic vampires, borne along by the torrent of their hellish impulses, at last—­at the fixed close of their natural period of life—­they are carried out of the earth’s aura into regions where for ages they endure exquisite suffering and end with entire destruction.

* * * * *

Now the causes producing the “new being” and determining the nature of Karma are Trishna (Tanha)—­thirst, desire for sentient existence—­and Upadana, which is the realisation or consummation of Trishna, or that desire.  And both of these the medium helps to develop_ ne plus ultra in an Elementary, be he a suicide or a victim.  The rule is that a person who dies a natural death will remain from “a few hours to several short years” within the earth’s attraction—­i.e._, the Kamaloka.  But exceptions are the cases of suicides and those who die a violent death in general.  Hence, one of such Egos who was destined to live, say, eighty or ninety years—­but who either killed himself or was killed by some accident, let us suppose at the age of twenty—­would have to pass in the Kamaloka not “a few years,” but in his case sixty or seventy years, as an Elementary, or rather an “earth-walker,” since he is not, unfortunately for him, even a “Shell.”  Happy, thrice happy, in comparison, are those disembodied entities who sleep their long slumber and live in dream in the bosom of Space!  And woe to those whose Trishna will attract them to mediums, and woe to the latter who tempt them with such an easy Upadana.  For, in grasping them and satisfying their thirst for life, the medium helps to develop in them—­is, in fact, the cause of—­a new set of Skandhas, a new body with far worse tendencies and passions than the one they lost.  All the future of this new body will be determined thus, not only by the Karma of demerit of the previous set or group, but also by that of the new set of the future being.  Were the mediums and spiritualists but to know, as I said, that with every new “angel-guide” they welcome with rapture, they entice the latter into a Upadana, which will be productive of untold evils for the new Ego that will be reborn under its nefarious shadow, and that with every seance, especially for materialization, they multiply the causes for misery, causes that will make the unfortunate