A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, December 1949 — page 27: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

oe . we ~ See < en ~~. ; i. * a2 +, ~ -_ te CREEP, SHADOW! that produce the queen and the drone, the different jelly that is placed in the cell of the worker. None teaches it the complex duties of the hive. The knowledge, the memory, is in the egg, the wriggler, the nymph. It is true, too, of the ants, and of many insects. But it is not true of man, nor of any other mammal,” De Keradel said “It is true also of—man.” CHAPTER 4 The Lost City of Ys HERE was a devil of a lot of truth in what de Keradel had said. I had come across manifestations of that same ancestral memory in odd corners of the earth. I had been burning to cor- roborate him, despite that excusable dig of his.at my ignorance. I would have liked to talk to him as one investigator to a far better informed other one, Instead I drained my glass and said severely “Briggs—I have not had a drink for five minutes,” and then to the table in general: “Just a moment. Let us be logical. Anything so important as the soul and its travels deserves the fullest con- sideration. Dr. de Keradel began this discussion by asserting the objective ex- istence of what the showman produced. That is correct, Dr. de Keradel ?” He answered, stiffly : “Yes,” I said; “Dr. de Keradel then adduced certain experiments of Dr. Charcot in hypnotism. Those cases are not convincing to me. In the South Seas, in Africa, in Kamchatka, I have heard the most arrant fakirs speak not in two or three but in half a dozen voices. It is a well-known fact that a hypnotized subject will sometimes. speak in different voices. It is quite as well known that a schizoid, a case of mul- tiple personality, will speak in voices rang- ing from high soprano to bass. And all this without ancestral memories being involved. It is a symptom of their condition. Noth- ing more. Am I right, Dr. Lowell?” Lowell said: “You are.” I said: “As for what Charcot’s subjects told him—who knows what they had heard their grandmothers say? Stories passed down by the family—heard when children, treasured by the sub-conscious. Built up, improvements suggested, by = Charcot finds two or | Charcot himself, three points true, naturally, There is none so credulous as he who seeks evidence to support his idée fixe, his pet theory. So — these few points become all. Well, lam — not so credulous as Charcot, Dr. de Kera- del.” ae He said: “I read your interviews in the newspaper. I seemed to detect a certain — amount of credulity there, Dr. Caranac.” — So he had read the interview. I felt — Bill press my foot again. I said: “I tried to make plain to the reporters that belief in the hokum was necessary to — make the hokum effective. I admit thatto the victim of his belief it doesn’t make much difference whether it was hokum or reality. But that doesn’t mean that the hokum is real or can affect anybody else. And I tried to make plain that the defense — against the hokum is very simple. Itis— don’t believe it.” The veins on his forehead began to twitch again. He said “By hokum you mean, I assume, nonsense.” “More than that,” I said, cheerfully, “Bunk !” Dr. Lowell looked pained, I drank my wine, and grinned at the Demoiselle. Helen said: “Your manners aren’t so good tonight, darling.” I said: “Manners—hell! What’re man- nets in a discussion of goblins, incarna- tion, ancestral memories and Isis, Set and Black God of the Scyths who looked like a frog? Now I’m going to tell you some- thing, Dr. de Keradel. I’ve been in a lot of out of the way corners of this globe. I went there hunting for Goblins and de- mons. And in all my travels, I’ve never seen one thing that couldn’t be explained — on the basis of hypnotism, mass sugges- tion, or trickery. Get that. Not one thing And I’ve seen a lot.” That was a lie—but I wanted to see the effect on him. I saw it. The veins in his temples were twitching more than ever, his lips were white. I said: “Years ago I had a brilliant idea which puts the whole problem in its simplest form. The brilliant idea was based on the | fact that the hearing is probably the last sense to die; that after the heart stops the brain continues to function as long as it. while the KS has enough oxygen; and that (C(©) oO anliiceleveye)