body of a lower creature after once attaining humanity. At this
he laughed out, and said that the real degradation was not in the
penance but in the sin. "It is not by the penance, but by incurring
the need of the penance, that the soul is degraded. The man who
sullies his humanity by cruelty or lust, is already degraded thereby
below humanity; and the form which his soul afterwards assumes
is the mere natural consequence of that degradation. He may again
recover humanity, but only by means of passing through another
form than that of the carnivora. When you were told * that certain
creatures were redeemable or not redeemable, the meaning was this:
They who are redeemable may, on leaving their present form, return
directly into humanity. Their penance is accomplished in that form,
and in it, therefore, they are redeemed. But they who are not
redeemable, are they whose sin has been too deep or too ingrained
to suffer them to return until they have passed through other lower
forms. They are not redeemable therein, but will be on ascending
again. Others, altogether vile and past redemption, sink continually
lower and lower down the stream, until at length they burn out.
They shall neither be redeemed in the form they now occupy, nor in
any other."

--Paris, May 11, 1880

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* The reference is to an instruction received by her four years
previously, but not in sleep, and not from Apollonius, though from
a source no less transcendental. (Ed.)

*** Remembering, on being told this dream, that "Eliphas Levi,"
in his Haute Magic, had described an interview with the phantom