What are these curious elementals?

Wraiths are floating spectral shapes, which although very distinct and life-like have no real separate intelligent life such as a soul would give. 

These are the mental and bodily emanations cast off from men, women, and children, and are so evanescent and ethereal that they take their shapes, and change, dissolving and forming again afresh. 

They are only an ethereal form of elemental life, which is not material enough for a long continued existence on the earth-plane although their consistency is much stronger on the astral plane.

Aerial forms often gather round an individual whose corrupted magnetism is unable to repel these dark, misshapen, human, yet inhuman, beings, which haunt the delirium of the drunkard. 

He has lost the will-force needful to protect him from such creatures, which cling like barnacles to him, and like leeches suck his animal vitality with a strange ghoulish intelligence akin to that of some noisome plant, which has fastened itself on a tree. 

These phantoms drop off only when a stream of healthy magnetism acts like a poison and kills them, so that they drop off and decay into immaterial dust. 

Should these fiendish ghouls not encounter a strong dose of healthy magnetism, they will go on for years floating about and drawing away the animal vitality of a human being until they become endowed with a certain amount of independent animal life of their own. 

At this stage they can be used by higher, more intelligent beings to carry out such work as their peculiar organisations fit them for.

These soulless creatures draw down and readily feed on an individual’s life-force. 

By draining the victim of his vitality, they cause a sense of exhaustion, which makes him fly to stimulants for relief. 

They have no intelligence to direct their own―or others’ movements―

They float about like fever germs generated in a foul atmosphere, and are attracted to one person more readily than to another. 

They possess a very low form of life and it is impossible for these astral parasites to influence the mind of a living-being.

Another class of elemental astrals are those of the earth―air―fire―water―whose bodies are formed from the material life-germs in each element. 

Some appear like the gnomes and elves who are said to inhabit mines and mountain caverns, which have never been exposed to daylight.

Such, too, are the fairies whom men have seen in lonely and secluded places among primitive races of men. 

Such with the variations caused by the different natures of the elements from which they are formed are the water-sprites and the mermaids of ancient fable, and the spirits of fire and air.

These beings possess life, but no souls, for their lives are drawn from and sustained by the lives of human beings, and are the reflections of the individuals among whom they dwell. 

Some of these beings are of a very low order of life―almost like the higher orders of plants, except that they possess an independent power of motion. 

Others are very lively and full of grotesque unmeaning tricks with the power of very rapid flight from place to place. 

Some are perfectly harmless, while others again are more malignant in their instincts, as the human beings from whom their life is drawn are of a more savage race. 

These curious earth elementals cannot exist long among nations where the more intellectual stage of development has been reached and they die and decay into the atmosphere. 

Thus, as nations advance and grow more spiritual, these lower life forms die out from the astral plane of that earth’s sphere and succeeding generations begin to doubt and deny they ever had an existence.