The Soul's Question

Another recovered EHB lecture: "The Soul's Question - Whither Am I Bound?" from The Spiritual Magazine for December of 1870, where it appears between an essay on Greatrakes by Thomas Shorter (writing as Thomas Brevoir) and a long extract from a "Baron de Bunsen" work with which I am not familiar.

I am working on the annotated version of Art Magic at present, and this essay - published five years prior to AM and delivered earlier than that - indicates pretty clearly that EHB was already familiar with, and promoting, the cosmogony that TAOAM promotes in Section II of Art Magic. Of particular note is EHB's emphasis on the condition of the group of souls she refers to in this essay as "the dwellers on the threshold" -- those that TAOAM refers to as "the souls of evil or unprogressed men". This notion of a purgatory -- for that is surely what it is -- will come to be problematic for Spiritualists, once its opponents point out the possibility -- or probability -- that spirit communication is confined to communication with these dwellers on the threshold, progressed souls having moved on to a higher sphere, as it were.