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by Louis Jacolliot (Author)
WE will lay aside, for the present, our inquiries into the general subject of the primitive civilizations of the far East, and the people who have sprung from the Brahminic stock in the old world, in order to publish the result of such researches as we have been able to make, during our long residence in India, into the subject of occult science, and the practices of those who have been initiated into the sect of the Pitris, which is Sanscrit for spirits or ancestral shades. This is neither a doctrinal book nor a work of criticism. We are not called upon to decide, either for or against, the belief in spirits, either mediating or inspiring, which was held by all who had been initiated in the temples of antiquity, which is to-day the keystone of the philosophical and religious instruction of the Brahmins, and to which many of our Western thinkers and scientists seem inclined to assent. Being neither an advocate of this belief, nor the opposite, we are, on that account, better able to write its history. An ardent partisan would have been too credulous, and would have taken everything upon trust. A rabid opponent would have made it his business to disparage and discredit it. We
