American cinematographer (Nov 1921-Jan 1922)

10 THE AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER December 1, 1921 Photographing the Unseen Is it Up to the Camera to Bridge the Gap Between the Sensible and Super-Sensible Worlds? Do the Fairies Still Dance on the Laisun? Joseph McCullough, late editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and last, save Henry Watterson, of that brilliant coterie of journalists whose names and papers were celebrated during the golden age of American journalism, wrote a beautiful editorial about the fairies dancing on the lawn. McCullough had a soul above the merely commercial and material, and loved to put into his writings the poetic, the mystical and the philosophical, and in this particular editorial he assured his readers, both youthful and grown up, that the fairies still danced upon the lawn, and that the nearer we kept to the fairies the happier we would be. This editorial of the great editor has long abode in the heart of the writer, who was reminded of it recently when there came into his hands five very wonderful photographs from England, the authenticity of which was vouched for by the publishers and by many people who know of their origin or who had to do with bringing them to the attention of the public. It seems that the Strand Magazine of December, 1920, and March, 1921, described these pictures in detail and told how they originated, but as both the photographs and the description are copyrighted, only a brief outline may be permitted here. It seems that two little girls, Iris and Alice Carpenter, cousins, living in a little Yorkshire, England, village, were both gifted with clairvoyant power of a quality which enabled them to see and be on quite familiar terms with fairies and gnomes who inhabited a glen in which was a waterfall near their home, and the pictures herein mentioned were snapped by these little girls with an ordinary small pocket camera. One of the pictures snapped by Iris shows Alice with four very distinct tiny fairy forms dancing about in the bushes on a level with her shoulders. The details are very charming and realistic. This picture was shot in July, 1917. A second snapped by Alice shows Iris seated on the grass playing with a gnome, a quite different figure from the graceful and lovely fairies, but a delight to behold, nevertheless. This picture was made in September, 1917. A third, snapped by Iris, shows Alice and a single fairy in the air, about on a level with the little girl's face. The little creature looks to be about eight inches high, is human in form and with diaphanous wings. A fourth picture, taken in August, 1920, shows Alice in closeup, a fairy standing on a bush, offering a flower to her. The fifth, and last of the collection, is so remarkable that it would be impossible to produce it by trick photography. It is a snapshot of a bunch of grass and flowers, showing four fairly distinct fairy forms, three of which are encased in sheathes or cocoons hanging in the grasses. They look as diaphanous as cobwebs. The little girls were astonished at what the camera caught as, while they are familiar with the fairies, they had never seen these strange things. Nature Spirits Of fairies or nature spirits, Mr. D. N. Dunlap, an English scholar, in an introduction to a lecture on the subject, delivered in London in 1920, says: "When we turn our attention to the subject of elemental Intelligences or Nature-Spirits, we are confronted by this immediate difficulty, that we are led at the very beginning beyond and behind the world which we know through the channels of the senses. Sense perception does not help us at all in our study of that mysterious realm of life which constitutes the invisible background of physical manifestation. Madame Blavatsky warned us long ago that to describe Nature-Spirits or Elementals as having definite and corporeal form was likely to lead into great error. She said that those mysterious beings named Salamanders, Sylphs, Undines and Gnomes by Paracelsus and other Western Occultists; Bhutas, Devas, Ghandharvas by Eastern wisdom; Daemons by the Alexandrian School, and so on, were possessed of neither form nor consciousness at all, as we understand those terms, and that to imagine otherwise would lead into a psychic materialism far more obstructive to real occult progress than the theories of modern scientific thought which would deny the existence of any such spirits. "Humanity is at present passing through a cycle of evolution during which the brain intelligence is developing at the expense of the direct spiritual intuition of early man; it is now, and will be for a long time to come, man's task to regain the conscious knowledge of those worlds of ethereal matter whose denizens play such a fundamental role in the life of humanity. Ages ago man possessed in his body organs whereby supersensible worlds and beings were perceived and known more directly than we today perceive physical objects. He could not only look out into and control the life of worlds of elemental matter below him in the evolutionary scale, he could also look out into worlds peopled by hierarchies of beings, infinitely beyond him. He was not limited to the yields of his five senses, and indeed it is from one point of view true to say that the senses are the gates which shut man off from the consciousness he should possess as a Spiritual Being. They obstruct his vision alike of the worlds above him and the worlds below him, although they have an absolutely necessary function to fulfill in the development of his self-consciousness." Mr. Leadbeater's Researches In his work, entitled "The Hidden Side of Things," published in 1913, C. W. Leadbeater, an English writer on philosophical, scientific and occult subjects, says, in part, on this subject, of which he treats exhaustively: "Another factor which exercises great influence (over human beings) under certain restrictions, is the nature-spirit. We may regard the nature-spirits of the land as in a sense the original inhabitants of the country, driven away from some parts of it by the invasion of man, much as the wild animals have been. Just like wild animals, the nature-spirits avoid altogether the great cities and all places where men most do congregate, so that in those their effect is a negligible quantity. But in all quiet country places, among the woods and fields, upon the mountains or out at sea, nature-spirits are constantly present, and though they rarely show themselves, their influence is powerful and all-pervading, just as the scent of the violets fills the air though they are hidden modestly among the leaves. * * * The naturespirits constitute an evolution apart, quite distinct at this stage from that of humanity. * * * Several Streams of Evolution "Even in this world of ours the divine life is pressing upwards through several streams, of which ours is but one, and numerically by no means the most important. It may help us to realize this if we remember that, while humanity in its physical manifestation occupies only quite a small part of the surface of the earth, entities at a corresponding level on other lines of evolution, not only crowd the earth far more thickly than man, but at the same time populate the enormous plains of the sea and the fields of the air. * * * (Continued on page 12) (r — ^ Ask About Us CROUSE-DAVIDGE HAROLD BELL WRIGHT LABORATORIES 1511 Cahuenga Avenue Hollywood PHONE HOLLY 2366