Religion: After Death

Although Christian churches are officially committed to belief in Heaven as an ultimate reward for good, many a Christian considers it bad taste to speculate in detail upon life after death. Lacking evidence, a minister's conception of Heaven is not much more valid than was that of Mark Twain, who in Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven pictured it as a place where people do what they always wanted to do on earth; where, on sheer worth, a backwoods poet from Tennessee takes precedence over Shakespeare.

Spiritualists, however, claim to know much about the afterlife through their contact with the departed. To their body of belief was added this week a notable book supposedly transmitted from the Spirit World by a New England farm boy named Wilfred Brandon who claims that the Revolutionary War ended his earthly life after 19 years in 1781. Incarnation, a Plea from the Masters*; was "dictated" by means of automatic writing to Edith Ellis, a playwright and onetime actress, now in her 70's and author of a current London success called The Lady of La Paz.

Wilfred Brandon is the most modern-minded U. S. spirit to tell earthlings about his own particular brand of the Hereafter, a realm which has been most conspicuously charted by such Britons as Rev. G. Vale Owen and Sir Oliver Lodge. The fact that Brandon uses such contemporary words as "job" and "fun" he explains by recounting how a number of "Masters" (i. e., veteran spirits) transported him "by their mental power," on a lengthy tour of the great cities of the world. The ability of spirits to visit the Earth, Brandon makes clear, has nothing to do with their life on the "Astral" plane, from which eventually they may ascend to a "Spiritual" plane. Spirit Brandon broadly corroborates the view held by many Spiritualists: The Astral plane is divided into nations corresponding to those of the world below. On that plane, he implies, spirits speak the same languages they spoke on Earth.

On incarnation, to most Spiritualists a controversial subject, Spirit Brandon is positive. He declares spirits may, if they are smart, abandon their memories of their last life and return to earth as a new personality in a new body. As developed by Astral scientists and practiced with the aid of seasoned Astral physicians, the simplest method involves merging any spirit with the body of an earthly infant of five to eight weeks. "The act," reports Spirit Brandon, "requires the physician to see, in his mind's eye, the spinal cord of both the child and the soul who is to incarnate. The physician can, with a little peculiar visualization, merge the two." For successful incarnation, says Brandon, training is necessary and many a spirit will give up for good his chance to return to Earth rather than attempt to "learn how to control his vibrations."