PSYCHO-PHONE
MESSAGES

RECORDED BY
FRANCIS GRIERSON

Spiritual Messages from the late General U. S. Grant, on Adequate Preparation in America; Thomas Jefferson, on the Future of American Democracy; Benjamin Disraeli, on English and Irish Affairs; Prince Bismarck, on the Indemnities; John Marshall, on the Psychology of the Supreme Court of the United States; Alexander Hamilton, on the Forces that Precede Revolution; Abraham Lincoln, on the Future of Mexico; Robert Ingersoll, on Our Great Women; Henry Ward Beecher, on the New Puritanism; Benjamin Wade, of Ohio, on President Harding; General B. H. Grierson, on Japan, Mexico and California, etc.

PSYCHO-PHONE
MESSAGES

RECORDED BY
FRANCIS GRIERSON

Published by
AUSTIN PUBLISHING COMPANY
Los Angeles, California

Copyright, June 1921
By B. F. Austin

INTRODUCTION

The word “psycho-phone” was first suggested and used by Mr. Francis Grierson in a lecture I heard him deliver before the Toronto Theosophical Society, August 31st, 1919, a year before Thomas Edison announced his intention of devising an instrument which he hopes will serve to establish intercourse between our world and the world of spirit.

My own experiences as a student in this sphere of psychic research in Europe and America, covering a period of thirty years, convince me that we have here a revelation of a new mode of spiritual communication unlike anything heretofore given to the world, not only different in quality but different in purpose.

From personal knowledge I can state that the recorder of these messages has not acted on ideas advanced by anyone living on our plane.

Looking back over the past two decades, I am led to believe that Mr. Grierson’s predictions in “The Invincible Alliance,” and in that startling poem, “The Awakening in Westminster Abbey,” forecasting the war and the tragic events in Ireland, were spiritual and psycho-phonic in character.

From 1909 to 1911 Francis Grierson was the acknowledged leading writer on “The New Age,” of London, which at that time had as contributors, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, the two Chestertons, Hillaire Belloc—in one word, all the most prominent writers and advanced thinkers in Britain, yet not one of them except Mr. Grierson could see the approaching world upheaval.

Early in 1909 he published a series of articles in that weekly depicting the coming war, and nothing of so drastic a nature had ever appeared in an English publication. In the spring of 1913 these articles were published in book form in London and New York under the title of “The Invincible Alliance.”

In the Westminster Abbey composition, published in “The New Age” in 1910, the characteristics of four personalities are plainly manifest—Coleridge, Milton, Shelley and Shakespeare—and I have not forgotten the sensation caused by this great work in London at the time of its appearance.

Having had occasion to study the social and psychic conditions in France, Germany, Italy, Austria and England before the great war, and after having been an eye witness of scenes unique in the annals of musical inspiration in the artistic and literary circles of Europe as well as the most intellectual of the royal courts, in which Mr. Grierson was the central figure, I now have a better understanding of the work he accomplished and its far-reaching import. The more complex the work the longer must be the preparation, and we are now confronted with what will appear to many as the most interesting phase of Mr. Grierson’s psychic gifts, for the seer who ushered in the new mystical movement by the publication of “Modern Mysticism” in 1899 is now the recorder of messages which must induce thinking and unprejudiced minds to pause and consider such matters in a new light, and it is to be hoped that many more messages like these may be recorded by the same hand.

As I write, I have before me a unique collection of letters written to Mr. Grierson by men and women eminent in philosophy, art, music, literature and journalism, in Europe and America. Among the letters that Mr. Grierson values the most in this remarkable album are eight from members of the French Academy, with Sully Prudhomme, winner of the first Noble Prize, heading the list. Which reminds me that I heard him say one evening in Paris, after hearing Mr. Grierson’s music: “You have placed me on the threshold of the other world. There are not words in the French language to express what I have felt tonight!” Up to that moment the famous Academician had been known as an avowed agnostic.

Maeterlinck writes that the first Grierson volume (in French) influenced him more than any book he had ever read. There are four letters from the Belgian mystic.

This album is filled with expressions from the most authoritative minds in literature and art, as well as statesmen, soldiers and diplomats, such as Jules Simon, the Duc de Broglie, Lord Lytton, British ambassador at Paris; Lord Reading, British ambassador at Washington; Field Marshall Lord Wolseley, General B. H. Grierson, U.S.A., leading members of the Bonaparte family in Paris, Prince Henri of Orleans (son of Louis Philippe), Princess Eulalia of Spain, and crowned heads who gave receptions in Mr. Grierson’s honor during the past thirty years. There are letters from distinguished Americans, such as Col. Henry Watterson (who wrote two long editorials on Mr. Grierson in the Louisville “Courier Journal”), Henry Mills Alden, editor of “Harper’s Monthly,” Prof. William James, Marion Reedy, Edwin Markham, Edith Thomas, Mary Austin, and many leading professors of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, the Universities of Illinois, Wisconsin and California.

Edwin Bjorkman says, in his “Voices of Tomorrow”:—

“To Francis Grierson belongs the honor of having first attained to prophetic vision of the common goal. In his first volume, published in Paris in 1889, he suggested every idea which since then has become recognized as essential not only to Bergson and Maeterlinck but to the constantly increasing number of writers engaged in making the time conscious of its own spirit. As we read essay after essay it is as if we beheld the globe of life revolving slowly between us and some unknown source of light.”

The following remarks from the London “Outlook” seem to me pertinent to the subject:—

“Grierson is an Englishman, for he was born in Cheshire; Scotland may justly claim him in that he is a direct descendent of Sir Robert Grierson, the famous Laird of Lag, who is the hero of Scott’s novel, ‘The Red Gauntlet’; that America has had a part in the making of him all readers of that wonderful book, ‘The Valley of Shadows,’ know; France can claim him since he began his musical career in Paris and published his first book in French; but no special country can claim to have developed his genius—that is cosmopolitan.”

As “Current Opinion” says, in a long study: “He presents a unique combination of thinker, writer, artist and musician who owes nothing to any school or any master or system of training; and his experience is without a parallel in the