THEORY OF PNEUMATOLOGY, IN REPLY TO THE QUESTION, WHAT OUGHT TO BE BELIEVED OR DISBELIEVED CONCERNING PRESENTIMENTS, VISIONS, AND APPARITIONS, ACCORDING TO NATURE, REASON, AND SCRIPTURE
Book Details + Condition: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman (London). First (English) Edition, 1834. Hardcover. 460 pages. By Dr. Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling. Translated from German, with copious notes, by Samuel Jackson. Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740-1817) was a noted German author and physician who was best known under his assumed name, Heinrich Stilling. He was a professor at several German universities and founder of a German spiritual school of cosmology, and a contemporary of Franz A. Mesmer. His book "Theorie der Geister-Kunde" (1808; English translation "Theory of Pneumatology", 1834) contains a great number of authentic narratives of apparitions and similar phenomena. Jung-Stilling expounds upon the doctrine of a psychic body, based on the luminiferous ether. According to Jung-Stilling, animal magnetism undeniably proves that we have an inward man, a soul, constituted of the divine spark, the immortal spirit, possessing reason and will, and of a luminous body that is inseparable from it. Contents include: Remarks upon the Nature of Man; Materialism Examined and Refuted; On Forebodings, Etc; On Apparitions, Etc; and more. An overall firm and clean copy of a scarce edition, with tight binding; a few library notations (call no. on spine; bookplate on interior board; perforated stamp on title page); interior is otherwise clean and free of markings. It has been rebound in brown cloth boards. Please see below for more information on this groundbreaking, forward-thinking author.
Light, electricity, magnetic forces, and ether appear to be all one and the same body under different modifications, according to the author. This light substance, or ether, is the element that connects body and soul and the spiritual and material worlds. When the inward man—the human soul— forsakes the outward sphere, where the senses operate and merely continue the vital functions, the body falls into an entranced state, or a profound sleep, during which the soul acts more freely and powerfully. All its faculties are elevated. The more the soul is divested of the body, the more extensive, free, and powerful is its inward sphere of operation. It has, therefore, no need of the body in order to live and exist. The body is rather a hindrance to it. The soul does not require the organs of sense—it can see, hear, smell, taste, and feel in a much more perfect state. The boundless ether that fills the space of our solar system is the element in which spirits live and move, according to Jung-Stilling. The atmosphere that surrounds our earth, down to its center, and particularly the night, is the abode of fallen angels and of human souls that die in an unconverted state. Jung-Stilling discouraged communications with the spirit world as sinful and dangerous. He considered trance a diseased condition. He believed implicitly in the efficacy of prayer and claimed psychic powers himself. More than ten weeks before the event, he predicted the tragic fate of Swiss writer Johann Kaspar Lavater, who was shot by a soldier in Zürich in 1801. [Encyclopedia.com]
