Muscle-reading
The concentration of thought on any particu-- lar object produces a tendency to muscular activity. Thus if a name be thought of the muscles of the larynx may range themselves as if for the pronunciation of that name. This is known as "subconscious whispering." Or there may be an unconscious movement towards the object in the mind. It is the interpretation of these involuntary Basket used in the Mithraic mysteries to carry sacred serpents ISHILLER Mithra Mithraic temple Inlaid pavement, showing Eleusinian neophyte carrying a sheaf of corn and fire 000 1000 American-Indian drawing of the initiation ceremony of the Midiwiwin ANCIENT MYSTERIES [ face p. 230 INITIATE INTO THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES, accompanied by Demeter and Persephone From Michaelis, Century of Archeological Discovery (with permission from the publisher, Mr. John Murray) [ face p. 281 movements by a second person, or percipient, that frequently passes for genuine telepathy. The thoughtreading exhibited on the public platform, when it is not the result of fraud, may be in reality muscle-reading. The act of reading these slight muscular indications of the thoughts may be unconscious or instinctive-indeed, must be so, since they are much too fine to be perceived by the grosser consciousness consciousness.
Myers, Frederic William Henry (1843-1901): Poet, essayist, and student of psychic science, was born at Keswick, Cumberland, and educated at Cheltenham and Cambridge. In 1865 he became classical lecturer there, but in 1872 abandoned this post for that of school inspector. He published several volumes of poems and essays, some of the former of considerable beauty, though it is chiefly as an essayist that he is known. He has done excellent work in the region of psychic science, being one of the original group who founded the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, and remaining to the end of his life one of its most useful members. Though he did not belong to the sceptical school of which Mr. F. Podmore is the chief representative, Mr. Myers' view-point was decidedly not that of the average spiritualist. The evidence for the survival of the soul after death he found not in the somewhat puerile 66 spirit" manifestations, but in the subliminal Consciousness, that wide region that lies beneath the threshold of man's ordinary consciousness, wherein Mr. Myers believed to discern traces of unused faculties, clairvoyance, retrocognition, precognition, telekinesia, and so on. All the phenomena of trance, hypnotism, automatism, and spiritualism he grouped together as phenomena of the subliminal consciousness. The results of his researches were embodied in a posthumous work entitled Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (1903). He also wrote the introduction to Gurney's Phantasms of the Living. He died at Rome in 1901, and was buried at Keswick Keswick.
Myomancy was a method of divination by rats or mice and is supposed to be alluded to in Isaiah lxvi., 17. Their peculiar cries, or some marked devastation committed by them, was taken for a prognostic of evil. Ælian relates that Fabius Maximus resigned the dictatorship in consequence of a warning from these creatures; and Cassius Flaminius, according to Varro, retired from the command of the cavalry for no greater reason. From Herodotus we learn that the army of Sennacherib, when he invaded Egypt was infested by mice in the night, and their quivers and bows gnawed in pieces; in the morning, therefore, being without arms, they fled in confusion, and many of them were slain. Such a foreboding of evil could not very well be questioned, or its consequences averted, by the commander, but very different was the case when one of Cato's soldiers told him in affright that the rats had gnawed one of his shoes. Cato replied that the prodigy would have been much greater if the shoe had gnawed a rat! Horapollo in his curious work on the Hieroglyphics of Egypt, describes the rat as a symbol of destruction, and, what is more to our purpose, the Hebrew name of this animal is from a root which signifies to separate, divide, or judge; and it has been remarked by one of the commentators on Horapollo that the mouse has a finely discriminating taste. An Egyptian MS. in the " Bibliothèque Royale at Paris, contains the representation of a soul going to judgment, in which one of the figures is depicted with the head of a rat and the well-known wig. It is understood that the Lybian rats and the mouse of Scripture are the same as the Arabian jerboa, which is characterised by a long tail, bushy at the end, and short fore-legs. The mice and emerods of gold, I. Sam. v., 6, 7, were essentially charms having a precise symbolic meaning. 66 at Mysteries