A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, December 1949 — page 26: what you’re looking at

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

2 In some, the alls that carry these memories seem to e lacking. In others they are incom- lete, blurred, having many hiati. But in thers, a few, they are complete, the ees records clear, to be real like a printed 3 Saag if the needle of consciousness, the _ eye of consciousness, can be turned upon _ them.” _He ignored me; to Dr. Lowell he said - with intense earnestness : ss s tell you, Dr. Lowell, that this ts __- so—in spite of all that has been written ___ Of the germ plasm, the chromosomes, the _. genes—the little carriers of heredity. I Bn tell: you I have proved it to be so. And I tell you that there are minds in which are memories that go back to a time ; when man was not yet man. Back _to the memories of his ape-like forefathers. a _ Back further even than that—to the first = _ amphibians who crawled out of the sea =e -and began the long climb up the ladder =. OF evolution to become what we are to- day.” se J HAD no desire now to interrupt, no _ = desire to anger—the man’s intensity of belief was too strong. He said: “Dr. Caranac has spoken, contemptu- Ae ously, of the transmigration of souls. I say __ that man can imagine nothing that cannot ____ be, and that he who speaks contemptuously of any belief therefore is an ignorant man. I say that it is this inheritance of -" memories which is at the bottom of the _ belief in reincarnation—perhaps the be- _ lief in immortality. Let me take an il- ‘ta P) i! TORN 7 SA _____lustration from one of your modern toys _._ —the phonograph. What we call con- sciousness is a needle that, running along ____ the dimensions of tiie, records upon cer- tain cells its experiences. Quite as the recording needle of a phonograph does -_- upon the master disks. = -“T can run this needle back over these geez cells after they have been stored away, aS turning the graphs upon them into— memories. Hearing again, seeing again, _____ living again, the experiences recorded on them, Not always can the consciousness find one of these disks it seeks. Then we =~ say that we have forgotten. Sometimes _ the graphs are not deep cut enough, the Ths a CAPS i 7 ae eo — — - os ~ “4 oe - A. MERRITT’S FANTASY disks blurred—and then we say memory is hazy, incomplete. “The ancestral memories, the ancient. disks, are stored in another part of the brain, away from those that carry the memories of this life. Obviously this must be so, else there would be confusion, and the human animal would be hampered by intrusion of memories having no relation to his present environment. In the ancient days, when life was simpler and the en- vironment not so complex, the two sets of memories were closer. “That is why we say that ancient man relied more upon his ‘intuitions’ and less upon reasoning. That is why prim- itive men today do the same. time went on, and life grew more com- plex, those who depended less upon the ancestral memories than those which dealt with the problems of their own time— those were the ones with the better chance to survive. Once the cleavage had be- gun, it must perforce have continued rap- idly—like all such evolutionary processes. “Nature does not like*to lose entirely anything it has once created. Therefore it is that at a certain stage of its de- velopment the human embryo has the gills of the fish, and at a later stage the hair of an ape. And, therefore, it is that in certain men and women today, these storehouses of ancient memories are ly stocked—to be opened, Dr. Caranac, and having been opened, to be read.” I smiled and drank another glass of wine. Lowell said: “That is all strongly suggestive, Dr. de Keradel. If your theory is correct, then these inherited memories would without doubt appear as former lives to those who could recall them. They could be a basis of the doctrine of transmigration of souls, of reincarnation. How else could the prim- itive mind account for them?” De Keradel said: “They explain many things—the thought of the Chinese that unless a man have a son, he dies indeed. The folk saying —'A man lives in his children’ ” Lowell said: “The new-born bee knows precisely the law and duties of the hive. It does not have to be taught to fan, to clean, to mix the pollen and the nectar into the jellies oO But as. * ack ~~ —rs - c ju Eomicbooks.com