King Solomon's Goat

by George Willard Bartlett

Opening a Lodge of Entered Apprentices.

Sen. War.: “Brother, the lambskin in all ages has been considered an emblem of purity.” This lambskin is the skin of the Lamb of God. It is worn on the stomach for occult reasons. The female emblem, the Eye, is stamped upon it for the same occult reasons. The mystic societies, sun-worshippers and Jews were anciently devotees of the lamb as well as the cow. They sacrificed him and adorned themselves with his skin as a saving rite. The Ram is identical with the god Priapus. You remember that Saul sent David out to gather one hundred Philistine mementos to put in the Ark of the Covenant. These mementos and the lambskin are of equal efficacy, both being relics of the crucifixion.

When christ came in the sign of Capricorn, he came as the goat. At the celebration of Lupercalia in Rome, they sacrificed the goat christ. Two young men are chosen, and the dagger, or Signa Tau, or the Mark of the Living God, is drawn in blood in their foreheads. Then they cut the goatskin into thongs and run about lashing all they meet. “The young wives like to be lashed, fancying that it will make them fruitful.” “The Jews in Jereboam’s time had priests for the service of their divinities, the sacred billy-goats.”—Plutarch, 1-78. The religious sorcerers, who sought to invoke demons, formed their magic circle with strips of goatskin nailed to the ground with four nails from the coffin of a dead child. As the circle was made of the skin of christ, the demons dare not pass it to attack the sorcerer. This is the circle of the Kabalists, of which King Solomon was the Most Worshipful, Sublime and Exalted Phalatz.

In the ritual ascribed to Pope Honorius, the method of raising the Devil was by sacrificing a black cock, which is an emblem of Christ. The eyes, tongue and heart are torn out and burnt to ashes. These are religious symbols and objects of adoration. The sorcerer also sacrifices a lamb, and places the ashes of the eye, the tongue and the heart on the lambskin. He prays to Jesus that the lambskin, with the signs thereon, may save him from the wiles of the demons, that they may be terrified by the sight of these figures. This, I think, is the origin of the figures on the Mason’s lambskin. This ritual provided that the eye, the cross and the moon should be drawn on the lambskin.

In the Fellowcraft degree of the ritual, when the candidate has stuck the heel of his right foot in the hollow of the left, which is a sacred mystic rite that will save your immortal soul from Hell, the Sen. War. says: “You will now show the Worshipful Master the Degree Gag (?) and sign of an Entered Apprentice, and when you step forward, place the heel of your left foot in the hollow of the right. You will now advance with me to the altar. You are now to be made a Fellowcraft in due form. You will now bare your left foot and side and your breast expose. You now receive the mark of the square on the breast.” The Tau Cross, a symbol of identical significance with the square, was used in the Bacchic and Eleusinian Mysteries. It was laid upon the breast of the initiate to cause him to be born again. The square is the Egyptian Ka, the idol worshipped by the savages in the temples of darkest Africa, and which is also worshipped in the Kaaba at Mecca. Ka, Kaaba, abba, father, papa and pope all have the same meaning. See “Kaaba” Stand. Dic.

In the initiation the candidate was allowed to play that he was Hiram Abiff. He was conducted around the circle of the zodiac from one door of the Temple to another and encountered three of the beasts of the four cardinal points, that is, the gentlemen who played the parts of the beasts in the heavenly drama.

First Right. Master: Hiram, give me the sign of a Master Mason.

Sen. Dea.: Candidate, the sign cannot be given except in the presence of three, Solomon, King of Israel, Hiram, King of Tyre, &c.

Master: For the second time I demand of you the sign of a Master Mason.

Sen. Dea.: You cannot have that.

Master: Hiram, for the third and last time I demand of you the sign of a Master Mason. Give it to me, or I will take your life.

Sen. Dea.: You shall not have that (but the candidate can have this, and he hits him on the head with the 24-inch gauge, in the play, as near as I can make out.)

At the Second Right, the Master makes the same demands.

Sen. Dea.: You shall not have that. Blow with the square (on the head of the candidate, I presume, but as he is still alive, he is conducted to the beast at the third door.)

Third Right: The Master repeats the same demands.

Sen. Dea.: Lord of Darkness (who is about to kill the sun-christ in the west) you shall not have that.

Third Right: Damn thee take that, blow with gavel on forehead, (and the candidate or human sacrifice falls dead, in the play.)

Second Right: We have slain our Grand Master Hiram.

Third Right: What shall we do with the body?... Let us carry it a due West course from the Temple (because the crucified sun is buried in the west) and bury it in a grave sunk due East and West.

Master: Brother Sen. War. What is the commotion?

Sen. War.: Our Grand Master Hiram is assassinated.

Master: How was he assassinated?

Sen. War.: By the Brothers at the door of the Temple.

Master: Our Grand Master Hiram may be ill. You will cause search to be made for him in the secret antichambers of the Temple and see if he can be found.

Sen. War.: Search has been made, Worshipful, and he cannot be found.

According to the Egyptian religion Souphis Khunfu Nefer Hept, Lord of the Underworld, murdered the Great Architect. The victim, whether he be called the Great Architect, or Hiram, or Adonis, or Horus, or Christ is always and ever the setting sun murdered by the darkness, or Prince of Darkness, called Sat in Egypt and Satan with us. The sacrifice of Hiram Abiff is one form of the Passion Play.

A Masonic society, established in China from the earliest times, is called Our Ladyship’s Society and the Queen of Heaven Society. In the Chinese society the candidate is made to pass through the arch of swords. He could not be born again or come forth into the light unless he passed through the door of life and came out of the cave. The Chinese god Fo was born of a virgin impregnated by a ray of the sun, as shown in Christian pictures of Mary. In the Indian Mysteries three hierophants sit in the East and the West and the South. After an invocation to the sun, the candidate is baptized, his shoes taken away from him, and he is made to circumnavigate the cavern three times with the sun. He is conducted through seven dark caverns and assailed by legions of hobgoblins. The victim slaughtered is called Siva, and the lamentations of Maya for the death of Siva correspond to the weeping of Mary at the tomb of Christ. The sword was aimed at the throat of the candidate by the Evil One, but he was brought forth at last into the light. The Eye was marked on his forehead and the Tau Cross on his breast. He was presented with the sacred girdle or apron, the magical stone and the talismanic jewel for the breast.—Isis Unveiled.

In the Mysteries of Aphrodite, a male emblem is handed to the initiate, and those initiated bring a piece of money to her as her hire. Demeter, of the Eleusinian Mysteries, is identical with Mary, and Clement says that he knows not whether she is the mother or wife of the god Zeus or Deus. This god is a serpent. The token of the Sabazian Mysteries is this serpent god gliding over the human breast. The offspring of the rape of Proserpine (Mary) by this god was christ, the bull.—Clement 1-29. If you wish to know what foul things were kept in the Ark of the Covenant, see Clement 1-31.

According to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in the judgment in Amenti, or the Lower World, the deceased or candidate for Heaven is given the name of Osiris, and he is tried before the supreme god Osiris and forty other deities or beasts. An altar stands before the supreme god on which is placed the bribes offered by the soul to god. The forty-two deities are the judges of the forty-two sins. One is called the Devourer of Shades, another the Cracker of Bones, and another the Eater of Hearts. If the soul denies that he has committed the forty-two sins, the judges must acquit him, but if he is convicted of being a land-grabber, he cannot get by, as the priests propose to attend to all that business themselves. In the Christian Judgment, the judges will be the confessors, monks and virgins.—The Elucidarium.

“The Buddhist novice, like the Freemasons, is forced to bare his shoulder and breast and give up his money and bare his feet, in fact to simulate the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience of the Buddhist.”—Buddha & Early Buddhism, 136.

In Lalita Vistara, Buddha is called the Great Physician, and at his appearance the sick are healed, the deaf are cured, the blind see. He cures by the laying on of hands or mesmerism. Akasa, the mesmeric fluid or the astral light, and the Spirit of God are one in the East. Buddha was born of a virgin, presented in the Temple, disputed with the doctors, was tempted in the wilderness, passed his life in preaching and working miracles, and descended into Hell and ascended into Heaven.—Idem, 80.

Heaven was also calmly purloined from Buddhism. The Buddhist heaven is the city four square of John, with the gates of gold and silver, adorned with precious stones. The great throne of God stands in the centre thereof by the gem lake or crystal sea, by which stands the Tree of Life or Tree of Infamy. The Buddhist religion is wholly phallic. See Book of All Religions, 86.

If you read the life of Buddha in the Ency. Brit. you will find that it is almost identical with the life of Christ. In any Chinese store you can buy an idol of Buddha, who, like Christ, is the god of life, bringing us life and life yet more abundantly. He wears a fish skin for a miter, showing that he is the fish god, and on his divine and radiant forehead is the Eye, and on his stomach, between his clasped hands, is the sacred Tree of Life. These divine secrets should not be disclosed to the uninitiated, but, to tell the truth, I am convinced that this is the origin of the hermaphrodite abdominal Eye, worn and revered by all the great and good men from the time our religion found its birth in the foul sties of India down to the immortal Washington.

CHAPTER XVII.
Revelations.

If you do not believe that all the beasts of the zodiac bear rule in Heaven, read Revelations with your eyes open. The Ram is the Grand Vizier. The Bull is also there, with eyes before and behind, and the Lion and the Man, the Waterman, in fact the four beasts of the four cardinal points of the zodiac.

Ch. 1, v 7, says: “Behold he cometh with clouds.” It is evident from Revelations that Christ is one of the seven Buddhas who came at the end of each cycle, and the seven were one, and that one was the sun in the heavens. Budhi means the Word, one of our beloved idols. “I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last,” that is, he is the same God that came at first as Adam and last as the Lamb of God. It is claimed that the Revelations were stolen and the original was written before the Fish God came. In verse 12, John saw seven golden candle-sticks, typifying the seven christs or lights of the world, “and one of the seven was like unto the Son of Man.” The Persian fire god Agni is called the Son of Man, and it is claimed that John got the Revelations from the Persians. In the Clementines St. Clement says: “Christ, it is said, has changed his forms and names from the beginning of the world.”—Clement, cap. 51.

Verse 18 says: “I am he that liveth and was dead,” that is, the sun that was crucified annually at the winter solstice, when it stood still for three days, or remained in the tomb three days, and was reborn on the 25th of December. “And have the keys of death and Hell.” The christ that was crucified in the west, according to the Egyptian religion, was Judge of the Underworld and carried the keys and descended into Hell when the sun went down. They were the keys of Hell, not Heaven, that were transmitted to St. Peter.

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Ch. 2, v 7 says: “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life,” which being interpreted means that the successful candidate or worthy brother will be permitted to eat the male emblem. Verse 17 says: “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna,” which is a small round cake or wafer in the Mithraic Mysteries, representing the female emblem. In these Mysteries they killed a lamb or bull christ and sprinkled the candidate with its blood, as we drink the blood of Christ and eat his flesh in the depths of our beastial ignorance, superstition and depravity.

“And will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, the Word, which no man knoweth save him that receiveth it.” This stone is the symbol of Siva, and the new name is Ling, the secret, the Sanscrit name of the Word. St. Clemens says: “It is difficult to exhibit the pure and transparent Word to swinish hearers. (All are swine except the priests and ministers.) For nothing they could hear would be more ludicrous to the multitude. The truly sacred Word is deposited in the shrine (Monstrance). It is improper that these emblems should be exposed to those who have never been purified in soul. The Mysteries were established because it was wise that the holy and blessed contemplation of realities be concealed.”

In Ch. 4, v 3, the four beasts and the four and twenty elders, the angels and saints and all the other vermin in Heaven fall down and knock their foreheads on the ground, groveling in abject baseness, servility and degradation before the sardine stone or pillar that sits on the throne in the royal arch of the rainbow, and before the beast, (the bull). This lovely pillar is worshipped throughout India. You will find the above scene and this foul worship depicted in Inman’s A. P. & M. C. Symbolism, Plate XIX. John has set a foul pagan idol on the throne of Heaven.

Ch. 12, v 1. The woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet, with a crown of twelve stars, is Mary, the moon goddess, the wife of the sun-god, and the crown of twelve stars are the twelve christs that she bore, or that crowned her labors in the twelve signs of the zodiac. The dragon that waited to devour the child is called Herod in the other story of Mary and Jesus. In the Hindu myth, from which this is copied, the woman fled to the wilderness, as Mary fled to Egypt. According to another astronomical legend, when the sun-god is born on the 25th of December, old King Sagittarius, the Archer or Herod, who lives in the next house (November), tries to kill the Son of God with the arrow of death.

If you refer to an astronomical chart, you will see depicted there all the gods that ever existed. In the first sign, Leo, is the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the christ that came in the Golden Age, 12,934 years ago, a Jew god, that would not do a thing to you but rend you and steal your shirt.

In the sign of Gemini you see the Twins, or Castor and Pollux, or Cain and Abel, or Romulus and Remus, or Solomon and Adonijah, or Jacob and Esau. Cain has a club in his hand, with which he kills his brother god, as Romulus killed Remus and Solomon killed Adonijah. In the sign of Taurus, you will see Auriga, a Mystic of high degree kissing the goat, and Orion, the Lord of Darkness, killing the bull christ. And there is the triangle of seven stars that Christ held in his hand. This is the solar system of the Pleiades, of which the great star Alcyone is the sun, and around which the whole universe revolves. It is the Kingdom of Heaven and the home of god and his sons Jesus and the Devil.

In the sign of Aries, you see the Lamb of God and the christ Perseus, who has just amputated the Medusa’s head and destroyed the serpents of which the hair was composed. In the next sign of Pisces is the beautiful Andromeda (mother of men), or Mary, bearing the fish-god, the Son of Man, under her arm, as Isis bears it on her head. In the sign of Scorpio, you will see Christ or Orpheus overcoming the Great Serpent. And another christ, Hercules by name, holds a club in one hand and two serpents in the other, to whom, as representing the Devil or the infernal god Cerberus, he is about to administer, in the classic language of modern ministers, a good wallop.

“When the sun shall have passed through the sign of Virgo, the Great Cycle of 25,868 years will be ended. The sun then enters the sign of Leo, and this junction of Virgo and Leo, this secret of the Great Cycle, is expressed in the Sphinx of Egypt, the woman and the lion conjoined. This is the mystery of the ages, the pillar on the border of Egypt, which shall be for a sign and a testimony.”—Daughter of the Druids, 276. It is said that in that great Day Draconis will again be the pole star, and the great pyramid is so constructed that at the end of the Great Year the light from Draconis will again shine through the passage in the pyramid that leads to the Bottomless Pit, or the dragon will be cast into the Bottomless Pit.

In the sign of Virgo is the Virgin Mary, the mother of all the gods, and the Great Serpent will be seen waiting there for her to deliver another god for his consumption. Ch. 5, v 1, says that the book was sealed with seven seals, corresponding with the seven comings or avatars of Christ, when the book was opened or the word was preached. When the first seal was opened, Christ appeared as Sagittarius, the Archer. “And behold a white horse and he that sat on him had a bow.” When he had opened the third seal, behold a black horse, and he that sat thereon had a pair of balances in his hand. This is the Christ that came in the sign of Libra or the Scales, who weighed them in the balance and found them wanting.

Ch. 4, v 6. The four beasts referred to are the four hieroglyphic beasts of the priests and magicians, which they placed on the playing cards of Egypt, the lion, the bull, the man and the eagle. They are zodiacal gods and sit in the North, the East, the South and the West respectively. The churches declare truly that a pack of cards is the Devil’s book. Cards were invented by the priests, and they are reeking with sacred, occult and religious emblems. The pack is composed of four sets of ten. Ten is a Kabalistic sacred number, for there are ten persons in the Hebrew Godhead, and 10 or IO is the name of God. Then there are the four beasts or aces, and the Trinity is represented by the king, queen, and jack. The clubs, or the three sacred balls of the Jews, are the symbol of the male god and the Trinity. Any deeper meaning can only be disclosed to the initiated. The heart is the cup or chalice or Eye of Isis, the symbol of love. The queen of hearts is clothed with the sun and moon, and she is Mary, the Queen of Heaven. The Queen of spades holds in her left hand the sacred candle, and she is adorned with another male emblem, the fleur de lys, and in her right hand is the flower of Isis, a female emblem, the same as the circles and rosaries with which she is also decorated. The seven circles are the emblems of the seven joys that Mary had. The twelve precious stones in the jewel on her breast correspond with the twelve christs she bore and the twelve jewels in the Ephod of the high priest.

The jack of hearts carries the male emblem in his hand and the three links are on his belt to show that he is an Oddfellow in good standing. The jack of spades holds up the three links, and the spade itself is a patent, combination, hermaphrodite, religious emblem of sufficient magic potency to save from the pains of Tophet all who gaze upon its sacred and occult form. The king of hearts performs the occult and saving rite of putting the sword or cross through the crown. This crown is adorned with shamrocks, and on his coat he wears the seven hearts or chalices. He belongs to the zodiacal sign of the Lion, and this is the heart sign, and in it is found the constellation of the Chalice. And he holds his hand on his breast like Buddha to show that he is a Mason in due form.

Rev. 7-4. The angel seals in their foreheads 144,000 Jews with the Signa Tau or Word, the signet of the Living God. The devotees of Siva also wear this Tree of Infamy on their foreheads. John says that it is the Father’s name written in the forehead. Only those sealed with this Baum Bosheth can sit with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the other beasts around the Throne. All but the 144,000 Jews can go to Hell. The priests draw the cross or Signa Tau in ashes on the foreheads of their devotees every Ash Wednesday.

Rev. 16-12. And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the earth, and I saw three unclean spirits, like frogs, come out of the mouth of the Dragon and out of the mouth of the beast. For they are the spirits of devils which go forth unto the kings of the earth to gather them to the great day of God Almighty. The sixth angel is the angel of the sixth sign of the zodiac, our present sign, the Waterman, and the nations of the earth are now fighting the battles of Armageddon. We are now at the end of a Great Cycle. The end of the world has come according to the astrological and theological fakirs, and the inhabitants of the earth are again being destroyed, this time by fire and sword. Christ now comes to bring a sword upon the earth.

According to the Christians, all the nations engaged in the war, save two, march forth under the banner and protection of Jehovah, the God of Battles, and he divides himself into two persons and, perched upon two clouds, commands the two contending hosts, urging them on to kill each other. After this holocaust of blood and carnage, there will be found no fool so utter as to assert that God rules the destinies of mankind.

CHAPTER XVIII.
The Clergy.

The Presbyterian clergy or sorcerers of Scotland, of old times, claimed that they could consign their deluded victims to Heaven or Hell by a word, and could by their magic power strike with death any enemy of God, that is, the clergy. They would not allow anyone to remain in town who failed to go and hear their sermons. Buckle says the clergy kept the people in a worse than Egyptian bondage, inasmuch as they enslaved mind as well as body.

“John Knox sanctioned the murder of the Roman Archbishop Beaton of Scotland in 1548, and shut himself up with the assassins in the palace of the Archbishop. When the Catholic power was destroyed in Scotland by the nobles in 1560 and the church property confiscated by them, the Protestant clergy claimed that it was impious to secularize ecclesiastical property, and that they should be endowed with the spoils of the war, that it was right for the Lords to plunder the Church of Rome, but the loot should be turned over to them. They said that what rightly belonged to them was devoured by idle bellies. The Presbyterian clergy said that King James was a traitor and had seven devils inside of him, and he ought to be seized. And their associate in crime, the Earl of Gourie, entrapped the King into his castle in order to murder him.”—Buckle’s Hist. Civ. 2-201.

The Presbyterian clergy said that cheerfulness was to be guarded against. Smiling, provided it stopped short of laughter, might occasionally be allowed, still being a carnal pastime, it was a sin to smile on Sunday. A Christian has no business with love or sympathy. He has his own soul to attend to, that is enough for him. On Sunday in particular he must never think of benefitting others and thus break the Sabbath. On no occasion must food or shelter be given to a starving man unless he is a Presbyterian.

“In priest-ridden Spain, Charles V, the tool of religion, in his will provided that all heretics should be put to death and that the Inquisition should be upheld. Under his orders, according to Grotius, 100,000 persons were beheaded, buried alive and burnt at the stake in the Netherlands. Phillip II, of Spain, said it was better not to reign at all than to reign over heretics. The Duke of Alva, in this reign, boasted that in five or six years he had put to death in cold blood more than 18,000 heretics, beside a still greater number of infidels he had slain on the battlefield.”—Idem 2-14.

When it was proposed to expel from Spain the remnant of Moors remaining, who had turned Christians and were baptized by force, Bleda, the Dominican, said that every Moor in Spain should have his throat cut, because it was impossible to tell which of them were Christians at heart, but God knew his own and he could sort them out. About one million of the most industrious inhabitants of Spain were hunted out like wild beasts. Many were slain as they approached the coast, others were beaten and plundered, and the majority in the most wretched plight sailed for Africa. During the passage the crew in many of the ships butchered the men, ravished the women and threw the children into the sea. From this time Spain began to degenerate. The tyranny of religion was supreme. While every other country was advancing, Spain, numbed into a death-like torpor, spell-bound and entranced by the accursed superstition, presented to Europe a solitary instance of constant decay.“—Idem, 2-53.

“The French Revolution freed the world from ecclesiastical tyranny and opened an unobstructed path to Napoleon, who had given the death blow to the Inquisition, the great slaughter house, where they butchered in the name of the Lamb.”—Isis Unveiled, 2-22.

The Brahmins, the clergy of India, were quite as disreputable as the others. The Institutes of Manu provided that if a common person molested a Brahmin, he was to be put to death. If he sat on the same carpet with a Brahmin, he was to be maimed for life. If he listened to the reading of the sacred books, burning oil was to be poured into his ears, and if he committed them to memory, he was to be killed. If he spoke disrespectfully of a Brahmin, an iron stile ten fingers long was to be thrust red-hot into his mouth. To give to the Brahmins or will them your property was an act of the highest piety.

The laws of the clergy in certain provinces of France, ruled by them in old times, provided that every man that died without bequeathing part of his estate to the church, should be deprived of the Sacrament (and would consequently go to Hell). If he died without making a will, his relatives were obliged to prevail upon the Bishop to appoint arbitrators to determine what sum the deceased should have given to the church in case he had made a will. At one time in France, “married couples could not sleep together the first three nights without purchasing leave of the church.”—Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, 665.

“Pope John XII was assassinated in the arms of his mistress. Crecentious, the illegitimate son of John X, caused Benedict VI to be murdered. His faction elected Boniface VII, and a third faction elected John XV, who was put to death by Boniface. We find shortly after 1044 Benedict IX, a boy of twelve, and Rholeme and Sylvester III all reigning at the same time, and all leading the most profligate and scandalous lives.”—Doubts of Infidels, 95. Bishop Hopkins says that “the great body of the clergy before the seventh century were steeped in licentiousness, avarice, simony, cruelty, violence and blood. They consecrated every vice in the interest of so-called religion, they graduated sins by pecuniary amercement, they commissioned assassins, having pardoned them before the commission of the murder.”

The priests or Magi of Persia, as ecclesiastical bandits, were unexcelled. The people had to give up one tenth of their income to these magical fakirs. Every woman in Babylon was obliged to offer her person for sale one day in the year at the temple of Astarte, and the money went to the priests. The pirates of Babylon ransacked the world and bought or stole the most beautiful women on earth for the use of the priests, who made a pretence of offering them up as human sacrifices to Baal. The god held in his hand the appropriate symbol of the traffic, the circle and the pillar, that may still be seen in nearly all churches. The beautiful sacrifice was placed on the lap of the god in the presence of the audience, to be devoured by the lions that surrounded the god. But after the meeting the priests drove the lions out and stole the sacrifice, as priests always did steal the offerings from god.

The Egyptian priests were the rulers of the whole, and owned one third the land of Egypt. Besides the princely revenue from this immense landed estate, they received, in addition to their salaries, all the offerings and sacrifices that the fools gave up as an atonement for sin. A very large part of their income was derived from the Bethel or Brothel maintained around the temple of the goddess Hathor, the cow, the wife of the god Ammon, which is another name for the Ram god or the lamb of god. Every woman in Egypt was obliged to sell herself for one month at this temple. And then, besides, there were the regular sacred ladies who lived constantly in the temple. The priests chose the most beautiful, then the remainder were turned over to the mob of pious dupes and devotees. The young lady who earned the most money for the priests was, in the after life, assigned by Osiris, alias Yahvah, to a seat beside the Golden Throne. This rotten pagan church subsequently changed its name to Christian.

Calvin, the blood-drenched, the fiend incarnate, one of the founders of the Protestant Churches, compelled his lady parishioners to confess on the rack their indiscretions, and then threw them naked into the lake and drowned them. He hanged a child for cursing its parents, burned old women as witches, and burned alive Michael Servetus for contradicting Moses in asserting that Palestine was a desert that did not flow with milk and honey. Calvin died in convulsions of fear, raving and cursing because he thought he was going to Hell.

Oliver Cromwell, the pious Puritan, the murder demon, the regicide, the usurper, with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other, rode at the head of his army of religious fanatics singing psalms. This sanctified Christian, upon the capture of Drogheda, Ireland, himself reported to Parliament that he massacred two thousand of the garrison. He fired St. Peter’s Church, to which the people had fled, and put a thousand of them to the sword. All the friars were killed but two. And the likes of him settled Boston and robbed and murdered the Indians. One of these Puritan buccaneers, named Will Bartlett, in Boston, in 1637, was sentenced to be set in the stocks, with his tongue in a cleft stick, because he got drunk and cussed and swore and refused to go to church on Sunday.

In those blithesome days a citizen could not vote unless he belonged to the Congregational Church and kissed the big toe of Cotton Mather, the superstitious bigot, the Prosecutor of the New England Protestant Inquisition. Ridpath says that Mather was chiefly responsible for the horrors and crimes of the Salem Witchcraft, and that this massacre, torture and imprisonment of 263 innocent persons was started by a Salem minister for the purpose of revenging himself upon those of his flock who antagonized him.—Ridpath’s Hist. of U. S. 131. The Quakers were perhaps the only decent body of Christians up to that time, and for that reason the Puritan pirates and slave-dealers hung four of them, one woman and three men, on Boston Common.

“Infuse a few different kinds of religious poison into a community of human beings, and they hate each other like tigers. Religious creeds have a worse effect on a man than booze. You can work the booze out of your system and quit the stuff, but when a victim is loaded up on some rotten brand of orthodoxy, it is hard to do anything with him. A Protestant will damn the Catholics, and a Catholic will yell ‘To Hell with the Protestants,’ and both will hate the Jews.”—Roman Religion, 27.

The churches have soaked the earth with the blood of their countless victims. Frederick, the Emperor of Germany, sentenced heretics of all descriptions alive to the flames. Sixty thousand heretics were slaughtered in the city of Beziers. Seventy thousand Huguenots were put to death in France. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew began at midnight, Aug. 23, 1572, and the carnival of death lasted seven days. Medals commemorating the holy event were distributed among the loyal butchers.—Roman Religion, 35.

“When the Crusaders took Jerusalem from the Moslems in 969 A. D., they massacred all the Mussulmans and burned the Jews alive. Seventy thousand persons were put to death in a week to attest the superior morality of the Christians.”—Boston Sun. American.

Dr. Fernald says that Sultan Bejazet wrote to Pope Alexander VI that he would give him 300,000 ducats, several cities and the shirt of Jesus Christ if His Holiness would kill Zimzim, the brother of the Sultan, “and you Most Illustrious Lord will not commit a crime, since by your religion Christians are ordered to exterminate heretics and infidels.” The Ency. Brit. says that “the unfortunate prince was murdered by Alexander, who received 300,000 ducats as the reward of the crime.” Zimzim was held captive by certain bandits in Rhodes, a Commandery of the Knights of St. John, a Christian organization under the domination of Alexander. Alexander was a Borgia, whose children were all illegitimate.

CHAPTER XIX.
The Bible.

As the Old Testament was originally written without vowels, the Lord only knows what it meant. The best the copyists could do was to make a good guess at the meaning, or supply whatever vowels suited their purposes.—See Ency. Brit. 3-64.

Moses was a magician, a thief and a murderer according to the Bible, a fakir who foisted upon the Hebrews a magnificent system of priestly plunder. In pursuance of Moses pretence that the world was created in six days, and that their god El or Bel or Baal rested on the seventh, he commanded the people to refrain from labor on that day and go to church, so that he would have frequent opportunities to pick their pockets. The story of Moses’ birth and secretion in an ark of bulrushes was taken from the Babylonians, where it was applied to King Sargon, according to tablets excavated at Babylon.

The great, learned and profound Irenaeus says that there must be four gospels because there are four winds of heaven. This is a fair sample of the logic of theologians. The fact is, there are four gospels because those four jumped from the floor onto the table at the council of Nice. There was at that time so much doubt as to what alleged sacred writings were inspired by God, that the delegates put them all together under the communion table one night at the close of the session, and agreed that those that got up on top of the table during the night should be considered as inspired, and those that were too weak to get up on the table should be stamped as the work of the Devil.

“Many of the bishops in these councils were ruffians and were followed by crowds of vicious supporters, who stood ready on the slightest excuse to maim and kill their opponents.”—Keeler’s Hist. of the Bible. Tichenor says that “they decided all holy questions by a vote or a knock-down fight. It is doubtful if any of them drew a sober breath during the entire proceedings.” Millman says that “they fought in the streets and much blood was shed.”—Millman’s Hist. Christianity. “What these drunken, fighting, ignorant, pagan priests declared to be received from God, that is what is taught as Divine to-day. To this day they cram their abominable lies of devils and damnation into the brains of little children. The miserable, crazy creeds of Christendom were concocted by these brawling pagan priests, and their poison still pollutes the souls of men. Fire all the gods of all the creeds into the melting pot, and out comes the brazen face of Mammon.”—Tichenor.

Another reason why there are four gospels, according to Irenaeus, was because the Cherubim had four faces. But he thus calls attention to the fact that Christianity was spawned in the sties of paganism, as the Jews took the four beasts of the Cherubim, the bull, the lion, the eagle and the man, from the idolatrous Babylonians. And the four Evangelists adopted the four beasts as their totems and placed their beastly images on the four gospels. The Maya Indians and the Mexicans worshipped the same four idols of the four quarters of the heavens.—Ency. Brit. 12-823. The priests of the Ojibways wear the horns of the bull and sacrifice to the dragon or great serpent (Mary) that wears on its head the crescent moon. They also worship the eagle and the Tree of Life. The Ojibway picture writing shows that the Indian Adam and Eve had the same disgraceful scandal in the garden of Eden. See “Indians,” Ency. Americana.

It is claimed that Apollonius of Tyana (alleged to be the original of Paul and Christ) came through a medium and said: “Nine epistles were made a present to me by Pharaotes, a Satrap of Taxila, between Babylon and India. These epistles contained all that is embraced in the present epistles claimed to have been written by Paul. Further, I retired to the Isle of Patmos in 69 and 70 A. D. and wrote in a trance state an almost identical story with that attributed to St. John. The Christian Gospels were all preached by me at Jerusalem, Ephesus, Philippi, Rome, Antioch, Alexandria and Babylon, and in all those countries I healed the sick, cured the blind and raised the dead. The original of the four gospels I obtained at Singapore. They treated of the four stages of the life of Buddha.”—Antiquity Unveiled, 21.

Moses and God were mad at the Midianites because the Jews had entered into the tents of the Midianite ladies and worshipped Baal Poer, from which ensued a plague among the Congregation of the Lord. Num. 31-18. And they warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded, and slew all the males and took all the women and children captive. Moses was wroth because they had saved all the women and children, and ordered all the males among the children to be killed and all the females to be turned over to the soldiers for outrage. And he ordered all the women murdered except the virgins, of whom 16,000 went to the soldiers and 16,000 to the people, but the soldiers and the people were compelled to pay of these into the storehouse of the Lord 3200 in tithes. “And the priests laid with the virgins at the door of the Tabernacle.” Such a monstrosity of iniquity, such a fiend incarnate from the shades of Hell is the senior member of the firm of Moses and the Lamb.

The history of Moses is copied from the history of Bacchus, who was called Mises by the Egyptians. Like Moses, Bacchus was born in Egypt, he sojourned on Mt. Sinai, he passed through the Red Sea on dry land, he was a lawgiver and wrote the laws on two tables, he was found in a box that floated on the water, he smote a rock and wine gushed forth, and Bacchus was worshipped and these deeds of his sung in Egypt, Phenicia, Syria, Arabia and Greece before Abraham’s day.—Doubts of Infidels, 31.

The account of creation as given in the Bible has been found on tablets in the ruins of Nineveh, written in a language that was dead and buried before the Jews ever existed. In this Persian cosmogony the name of the first man was Adomah, and of the woman Hevah.

The Greeks said miracles for fools. Paul boasts of lying for the glory of God and catching converts with guile. Chrysostom said: “Great is the force of deceit.” St. Hermas, an Apostolic Father, said that he always lived in dissimulation and affirmed a lie for truth to all men.— Doubts of Infidels, 78.

You will see that the Bible is dedicated to King James, and that he is canonized in the dedication, probably because he kept fifty mistresses and was in the habit of becoming beastly intoxicated without provocation.

The only real revelations received by the priests and prophets of any religion were spirit messages, and the Lord only knows whether these were from God or the Devil, from good or bad spirits. In fact it is claimed by some spiritualists that all the good spirits are in Heaven with God and can’t get out. In other words, they are in limbo, while those that were not so good are at liberty to visit the loved spots and fond friends of earth and indulge on the astral in their favorite pastimes, whether it be a prayer meeting or a poker game. This is purgatory, the next story above Hell, which is the earth.

Gibbon said that Eusebius was a consummate liar. The Gospel of Matthew and the Epistle to the Hebrews were his work, taken from the lives of Christna and Apollonius and the records of the Essenes and some of the Jewish and Phenician legends.

A Coptic version of the life of Apollonius in the possession of the monks of Seville, Spain, about 1458, was placed in the hands of Juan Hermonez for translation. In the margin was a Latin translation, in which the name of Apollonius had been changed to John among many other falsifications. The Latin translation was almost identical with the Gospel of St. John. When Hermonez called the attention of the Superior to these changes, he was seized and thrown into a dungeon, in which he was allowed to starve and rot.

The Bible has been too much neglected, due, no doubt, to the general impression that, being religious, it must be dry. Far from it. For instance: Elohim, the gods, made the light and days and nights four days before they made the sun. They made a firmament, probably of metal, to divide the ocean above from the ocean below, and had windows in it, so that they could open them and drown the inhabitants of the earth whenever they got drunk and needed a little diversion. And they stuck the sun, moon and stars in the metal firmament, which revolved around the earth.

When the serpent was not working, he was coiled around the Tree of Life telling Eve in snake language what luscious fruit the tree bore. For this interference with the plans of the gods, they made the serpent crawl on his belly. He had been crawling on his back.

Moses and his first assistant fakir, Aaron, destroyed all the horses and cattle in Egypt by a murrain, and then, as Pharaoh still had a stiff neck, they destroyed them all again by hail. Then, as Pharaoh still had trouble with his neck, they killed all the first-born of Egypt, both men and cattle. Then the Israelites fled, and Pharaoh hitched up his horses, that had been killed three times, to his six hundred chariots and pursued the chosen of God, who had pinched all the jewelry of the Egyptians. The Bible is full of these delightful stories from beginning to end. If you have conscientious scruples against reading the Bible, you will find them attractively set forth in Le Brun’s Doubts of Infidels.

CHAPTER XX.
Heaven.

The Lord doeth all things well.

He consigns the Jews to Heaven,

And all the rest to Hell.

There are forty nine heavens to which we ordinary mortals may attain, so you needn’t worry. Besides, there are certain aristocratic heavens reserved for the great and good men of high spirituality, such as Moses, the fakir, thief and murderer, and David, the bandit, outlaw and assassin, and Solomon, the fratricide, Mormon and pillar of Ashtoreth, and all the popes, bishops, priests and ministers. We will each go to that place we like the best, and to which we are fitted by our vibration. Some of us, like certain ministers, will go to that heaven where the beautiful fairies are. The ancient Jews will have a little heaven of their own, where they can worship the three balls and the ass-headed god and the god with whiskers on, and where they will have a chance to cop the golden paving stones, and sell corner lots, and insure their palace not made with hands eternal in the heavens.

And the ancient Scotch Presbyterian will walk the golden streets with his savage, gore-imbued devil-god, in his paradise overlooking the abyss of Hell, where he can gloat over the souls in torment, as they rise up out of the Bottomless Pit every thousand years, each one fastened by his tongue to a hook on an endless chain, which rises from such a fathomless depth of hellfire that it takes the victim a thousand years to make the circuit. It is claimed that these heavens and hells are built up from the astral substance by the imaginative power of the minds of the different religious sects.

This region contains all the heavens that have ever been dreamed of in theology, each filled with the devotees of the various creeds. Each of the great religions has its own particular region in which its disciples gather, worship and rejoice. In each region the religious soul finds just what he had expected and hoped to find on the other shore. You may even see the golden crowns, harps and stiff halos in some cases and hear the eternal chant of praise. These heavens are not eternal. Everything on the astral plane is subject to change like all other matter. Even the religious progress and change their opinions.—Astral World, 70.

The occultists do not, as a rule, disclose the process by which you may see the astral visions and pass out of the physical and journey in the astral body. But this is one way to see the pictures in the astral light: Between sleeping and waking, in the neutral state of Jagrata, when the eyes are closed and a numbness falls upon the body, and you experience a floating sensation, take note of the visions that appear to you, if any, and then by your will power impress them upon physical brain, so that you may remember them. These visions may be pictures on the astral light or scenes on the astral plane, but whatever they are, some of them prove to be true prophetic visions.

One occult teacher advised those who wished to induce trance to go into the silence, that is, to go into a room by yourself, where you will not be disturbed, and lie down and completely relax the muscles and think of nothing at all. The Hindus say fix your mind on your navel, but some fix their gaze on a crystal. You will see the visions when you doze off, if you can get them at all.

When you are in the astral body it is possible to remember the experiences of your previous lives, that is, the lives of your ancestors. In the physical body heredity and memory are stored in the cromatin or brain matter of all the millions of cells of the body. The human astral body is made up of the astral bodies of all the cells. It is possible that memory is inherent in the astral matter of all the cells, and that in the astral we are more in rapport with the cells than in the physical.

In the lowest astral plane next to the earth, it is said, is the region where the astral shells or corpses disintegrate, an arm sloughing off here, a leg there, and a head elsewhere. It is claimed that the spirits have deserted these shells. If you should happen to meet one of these ghosts walking in a graveyard without any legs or without any head, it may scare you into a fit, but it will not do you any harm, for it is dead. Then there are certain spectres or phantoms whose company is very undesirable when you take a lonely walk in the ghoul-haunted woodlands. These elemental spirits like to play practical jokes and have a little fun with you, but they will not do you any harm, unless you are sufficiently weak to allow them to obsess you. Cast out fear, cultivate a strong will, and be, like Solomon, the master of demons and men.

“There are certain entities or beings in the astral world which never were human and never will be, for they belong to an entirely different order of nature. They are fairies, satyrs, imps and goblins. At spiritual seances they sometimes play elfish pranks. They seem to be particularly apt to play tricks on neophytes in psychic research who seek to penetrate the astral without proper instruction. To such a one they appear as hideous forms, monsters &c.”—Astral World, 92.

Some of the elementals are electric spirits and confer upon the medium the power of magnetic healing. The medium, upon the approach of the spirit, is charged with electricity. The spirit may appear as a bird with a human face and a parrot’s bill and sharp, black eyes and body covered with hair, and deliver messages which can be heard clairaudiently by the medium. That reminds us of the claim of Mahomet that a little bird stood on his shoulder and whispered the laws of the Koran in his ear. They are certainly the Devil’s own laws.

“Many of the angels on the astral and the ghosts that haunt houses are thought forms created by the people who imagine them, and obtain all their apparent mind from the action of the thought force of their creators. Repeated thought and repeated belief will serve to keep alive and strengthen these entities, otherwise they will disappear in time. Many supernatural visitors, saints and semi-divine beings of all religions have been formed in this way. The power of the devils arise in the same way.”—Idem.

According to the Theosophists man has two souls, the animal and the spiritual, and at death the animal soul or spook, together with the spiritual soul, passes to that part of the astral called Kamaloka, or place of spooks, the lowest plane. But the spirit soon deserts the spook and leaves it to meet its just reward in the second death, because on earth it desired too much of carnal pleasures. The spooks retain all the impressions accumulated in the earth life and can communicate with mortals through mediums. Among these are the demons that obsess human beings. The spiritual soul passes on to Devachan, or the house of gods, which evidently includes those astral planes where the religious grovel before their various imaginary idols. See “What is Theosophy,” 46. This alleged spiritual soul, that deserts its brother soul in the depths of Hell, receives its due reward, for in the sub-heaven to which it goes, it has no memory of the earth life, consequently it is not immortal, and it is in jail and cannot get out. It would be better to stay in Hell with the spook, for it could have more fun haunting houses than worshipping imaginary gods with a lot of stiff-necked orthodox hypocrites.

In Ceylon they have twenty six heavens, and at the end of the world period they kill off all the spirits in all these heavens except those in the five upper spheres, the four highest of which are Nirvana.

You need not think that because you go across that you will have surcease from sorrow. It is only in the highest heavens that they have no sorrow, and that is because they don’t know anything. You cannot obtain happiness here or hereafter by purchasing absolution from any fakir, but only by doing to others as you would be done by. The astral planes of the Spiritualists in which the soul may advance, improve and ultimately attain to the highest heaven, corresponds with Purgatory, that superlative graft of religion. You can be prayed out of this limbo, if your relatives are willing to put up the stuff, otherwise you will be shoveled down into Hell. But a cheaper way is to have a Hindu prayer wheel. I am going to devote the immense revenues which I shall receive from this pious work to the construction of prayer wheels, which will be placed at street corners on all the highways and byways, so that even he who runs can turn the wheel and bring around to the open slot, so that God can see it, one of the many prayers printed on the wheel, for instance: “O, God, save my mother-in-law from Hell.”

In the coma, between sleeping and waking, the gates of the astral world are sometimes opened, and you can see the ghosts on the astral plane, great throngs of spirits, having no indication of piety, all busily engaged in their favorite occupations or sports. If in this state of Jagrata you happen to float into a graveyard, you will see the ghosts lying or sitting on their graves or pacing up and down beside them with bowed heads and in deep thought, trying to figure out how they got there and where they are going. See Seership, 179.

It is said that two persons can exchange bodies if they wish. Or if someone else has a better body than you have, and you wish to steal it, invite him to take a trip with you in his astral body on the astral plane. All the time keep commanding your astral body, sotto voce, to enter into his body, and when his astral body has emerged, prepared to take a trip with you in spook-land, that is the instant for your astral body to take possession of his physical body and leave his astral body out in the cold. But be careful to back into his body, for if your astral body enters his physical body face to face, you will be in wrong end to and will be crazy as a loon. Now there is no place for the other astral body to go except into your abandoned physical body, and as you are a wicked robber who just stole a house, he will probably hesitate about entering the body of such a person, and if he delays too long, he will be a lost spook, condemned to wander forever in the land of shades.

Do not allow them to palm off any gods upon you. Do not allow anyone to assume authority over you. I charge you to teach your descendants these things from father to son, down through the clanging corridors of time, down through the endless vista of eternity. There is nothing but matter in the universe, and all matter is equal. This being so, all forms produced therefrom, whether visible or invisible, must be equal, and one form has no right to assume authority over another. All beings are composed of matter, be they gods or be they worms, and no one mass of matter is superior to another or worthy of worship. The worm that crawls the earth is the equal of the king that sits upon a throne. Never bow the knee to anything that walks or swims or flies, that lives in the flesh or that exists only in the diseased imagination of depraved religious fanatics. Remember this: There is none greater than you in Heaven or Earth or Hell.

THE DEVIL’S HALF ACRE.
By Willard Bartlett.
From the Beacon.

In rummaging through the attic of an old wraith-haunted, country house, I discovered a course of lessons in Yogi Philosophy. These lessons I devoured with avidity, and practiced with assiduity the occult rites, until I could readily pass into the silence and project my astral body or ghost to any desired place. In fact the unruly ghost would sometimes quit the body without my consent and leave me stranded high and dry without any soul.

One night while I lay sleeping, my astral body left the physical and sped through the air, as it had a very bad habit of doing, to Hapenny, the very last place on earth, the place manufactured by the Devil out of scraps and old junk, which he had left over after building Hell. But my perverted soul always insisted on going there whenever it succeeded in bursting through the carnal and beating down its being’s door.

The soul atom or Ego is said to be located in the Medulla Oblongata. If the soul is immortal, it is probably an electron. An atom is said to be composed of ions or electrons, and probably is subject to dissolution, and consequently not immortal. But as no one ever saw an atom or electron on account of their extreme minuteness, for the purpose of this veracious story, we will call the soul an atom and play it is eternal. An atom is a vortex ring of ether in a constant state of vibration, and assumed to resemble in form a ring of smoke. Some of the Hindus claim that a Purusha or soul from the countless spirit ions constituting the spirit principle of the universe, the akasa or astral light, becoming involved in the ether, originates the vortex movement by which the atom is produced. The ether is the ultimate refinement of matter, a body of extreme tenuity that pervades the whole universe and permeates all grosser bodies. By the waves of this ether all the vibrations of light, heat, sound, energy, electricity and life are transmitted.

The electron is an extremely minute corpuscle or particle endowed with life, mind and energy. A thousand electrons, more or less, revolve in the atom at a terrific rate around a central sun, thus resembling the solar system. This central sun is a male or positive electron, and all those revolving about it are females or negative electrons and constitute the harem of the central sun, thus establishing polygamy at the very basis of life. Our solar system is an atom in a great cosmic animal or god called Pan, the all-god.

In my nocturnal journeys, I thought I was clothed in the carnal body, but as I was transported through the air, I must necessarily conclude that I traveled in the astral body and on the astral plane, in which astral bodies move about and ghosts manifest, together with doubles, wraiths, hobgoblins and dopplegangers, to which latter class I belonged. The astral body, one of the bodies of the soul, is composed of fine, ethereal matter, and in form is a duplicate of the human body. It is claimed that this body persists for some time after death, but eventually disintegrates.

Many a night I have been there in Hapenny when the body lay many miles away. These were not ordinary dreams. I was actually there, that is, I being in the soul atom or astral body. One night I was conducted through a new manufactory there, which I had never seen with the mortal eyes and never knew existed. But the next time I went there in the body, I found the building just as I had seen it in the vision.

The favorite outing place of my doppleganger is the Devil’s Half Acre, or Murderer’s Paradise. It always flies to that obsessed and accursed spot hard by the gates of Tophet, close round the hinges of Hell. Traveling in the astral body, I can see both the quick and the dead, but as I am always out there at night, the live ones are asleep, and only the spooks are abroad, prowling hither and yon in the moon’s pale rays, visiting again, like myself, the scenes of former crimes. These are earth-bound spirits who, during life, lived out a low, degraded existence, and they are bound by their own desires and the vibration of their astral bodies to these astral slums. I stood out on the old road in front of the dilapidated shack formerly occupied by a gun-fighter, and watched the astral bodies as they glided to and fro in the air.

There was Mr. B. with a red gash from ear to ear and a crimson stream of blood running down over the white, astral, vapor-like body. Around the body was the aura, a cloudy vapor extending outward to a distance of two or three feet in the shape of an egg, an emanation of a dark and dismal color, corresponding to his dark and dismal career. It was in back of that very shack that he cut his throat and burst the door that bound him to the mortal clay, crying as he passed over that he was eternally lost and damned, as the church had hypnotized him into believing. But that Hell is immeasurably preferable to the Devil’s Half Acre, because the astral body is relieved of pain, hunger and thirst and the necessity of laboring for food and clothing. In fact, I believe that we are in Hell now, that this is the lowest plane of existence. In the Devil’s Half Acre the poor and wretched outcasts of the earth, embellished with dirt and clad in rotting rags, lived on three cents a day.

There was something in the atmosphere of the neighborhood that urged all the inhabitants on to crime. The family life was a hell on earth. The place was obsessed by the Devil and accursed of God. A village will acquire a character of its own. It is claimed that all the evil thoughts of all the vicious inhabitants of a vile place will linger in the surrounding atmosphere for years and exercise a baneful influence on all who dwell there. In the Devil’s Half Acre you could not take a step without treading on the crimson stain of a reeking crime. The spooks were and are now as thick as Tophet there; the place is haunted by ghosts and fiends unholy in Death and Hell bedight. It was the obsession of the place by the powers of evil that attracted to it all the notorious criminals.

The next spook to pollute the atmosphere was that of Mr. D. who, when on earth, was engaged in the banking business. In his left hand he carried a jimmy and in his right a gun, and he was peering here and there looking for a safe to crack or a cashier to shoot up. He was floating through the air at a height of about ten feet, and on his forehead blazed the blood-red mark of Cain, and his black aura was lighted by the fires of Tophet. When in life he lived in the house across the road. From this house also emerged a ghost with a halter around its neck. It was there with the halter he had swung himself over the battlements of time and dropped into eternity. The vicious influence of this house was irresistible. It is well to know this law of thought obsession and avoid these accursed places.

The next spirit to make its appearance was my old friend Mr. E. who came from walking up and down in the earth trying to sell the girl he led by the hand. He was still on his uppers as usual, as I could see by the ragged condition of his astral body. The accompanying aura of a slate-green hue, embellished with dull-red flames, indicated a low, deceitful and sensual character. He stopped and, looking me over, said: “I remember you. Don’t you want to buy my wife here again? She is in good condition now. I admit that I cheated you forty years ago when I sold her to you for fifty cents, but now in the astral world she is a vision of youth and beauty.”

Then came the ghost of Mr. F., a Sunday School teacher, who operated on a class of young ladies in the vestry of the church, that time-worn vestry, that well-beloved vestry, where the foundations of their philosophy were laid. A very genial, loving gentleman he was too, but his scholars being exceedingly frivolous, he found it necessary, in order to impress upon them the Divine truths, to pat them on the knees and sort of instil religion into them by the massage process. He has found his heaven. He appeared on the astral, surrounded, embraced and beloved by that same dazzling galaxy of beauties, now a star-crowned angel band.

It is claimed that they have schools over there, in which those who so desire may be instructed in virtue and wisdom and assisted to advance. When at last they learn the great secret and discover the key that unlocks the horns of the bull, they pass through the low and narrow portal between the horns of Taurus, squeeze through the needle’s eye, and enter the higher heaven.

Then I saw a lot of ghosts and fragments of ghosts sometimes without any heads, and sometimes lacking limbs, floating about aimlessly without any rudders, for they were dead, and their spirits had fled, leaving in the Devil’s Half Acre their astral shells. That is what they are called when their spirits have departed in the spiritual body and left the astral body to return to the elements like the carnal body.

A human being in a normal condition is unable to see an astral body, or ghost, because the vibrations on the astral plane are too rapid for the human eye to see. The vibrations of the ultra-violet or X rays, at one end of the spectrum are too rapid, and the infra-red rays, at the other end of the spectrum, are too slow for the human eye to see. But we have astral senses, appurtenant to the astral body, duplicates of the physical senses, and persons in a trance and sometimes people asleep are able to use these astral senses and see and communicate with the denizens of the astral world.

THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE SOUL ATOM.
By Willard Bartlett.
From The Nautilus.

I will preface my story with the simple statement that I am now 500,000,000 years old, more or less, that the atom in which my soul is located, or which constitutes my soul, first found a home in what is called a living being, a cytod or cell, in the primordial or earliest epoch of earth’s history. A cell is a minute mass of living protoplasm, or jelly-like substance, not as large as the head of a pin, a combination of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, ammonia, sulphur, etc. While it is true that I existed before that, and, in fact, from all eternity, I previously resided in what is called inanimate matter, in the igneous rocks. But we will say that I was born when my soul atom became involved in the said protoplasm of one of the earliest plant cells.

All matter is endowed with mind, and a soul exists in every atom. It is impossible to produce new life, as it is said scientists have done, and impossible to create life, as God is claimed to have done, for life always existed in every atom. It is by certain combinations of matter that life becomes manifest in motion.

Each of the thousands of atoms, of which said primitive life cell was composed, had a soul destined to take its place in some descendant, if it had an opportunity. And the souls are waiting in the atoms to be born, and not in Heaven as asserted by the Yogi philosophers. The Yogis claim that the souls are waiting in some department of the Buddhist heaven crying to be born. Bosh! They are waiting in the spermatozoa, those little monsters, those little devils that drive their great human masters to crime and murder, to the gallows and the stake; there they are howling to be born. In their frantic race to enter the ovum, as shown under “Spermatozoa,” Stand. Dic., no wonder they are excited. They have been waiting 500,000,000 years for the opportunity to become human beings.

Cells propagate by division; that is my original ancestor, a little, round mass of protoplasm, divided itself into two cells to produce offspring, and all of my ancestors have done the same through all these millions of years, consequently I have in my body, in all of the cells, some of the original matter of which my original cell ancestor was composed. That is eternity’s great highway by which the soul walked down.

The human germ cell divides in the same manner into two individuals and we propagate, as our earliest ancestors did, by casting off a cell, which, being joined by a cell of the opposite sex, becomes fertilized. The human embryo develops by repeated subdivisions of this twin cell, and each one of the myriads of cells so produced is a living, thinking being.

The question has arisen why the cells in an embryo arrange themselves in the form of the parent, and it has been asserted that they are so distributed by God in pursuance of a Divine plan. But it is actually done by the volition of the cells themselves. Each cell takes its proper position in compliance with the instruction of its parent cell, and if removed by force to some other part of the embryo, will return to its original place, thus evincing the most surprising intelligence. It must be remembered that a molecule is as large as a universe, that there is no such thing as size, that as much ability may be stored up in the nerve centre of a cell as in all the debris of a human brain.

We are immortal, but with no memory of past lives. If we do not propagate, this life will be the end of our line that has continued unbroken for millions of years, and we will have to go back into the abysmal void, into the womb of chaos and commence all over again. That will be our fate in any case. Only that cell of our bodies which may be incorporated in our progeny will continue in human form. That cell is a remote relative of ours, having descended from the ancestral germ cell from which our embryo was developed.

Of the earliest plant cells, developed by spontaneous generation in the primordial epoch, some developed tails, or projected filaments of protoplasm from their jelly-like bodies. With these tails they propelled themselves through the primeval seas, and thus separated themselves from the plants and became animals. In this earliest epoch of life’s history all beings lived in the water. These primitive plants possessed as much soul and mind as the animals that thus branched off from them, and all plants still possess soul and mind.

But I am sorry to say that my ancestor, who thus projected a tail and became an animal, was a degenerate, a lazy loafer, a robber, a murderer and a cannibal. We all have to live on protoplasm. The plants made their own living plasm, manufacturing it from inorganic matter, but the animals were too indolent to do such laborious work, when they could just as well kill and eat the plant cells and subsist on them. In this way they lost the recipe for making plasm, and we descendants are consequently born cannibals, condemned to rob, murder, despoil and eat our fellow beings, or starve.

My next beautiful ancestor, to whom I will introduce you, was an animal consisting of numerous cells arranged in the form of a sack or stomach, called a blastoderm or gastraea. There was no central brain at this time, each cell having a brain of its own.

Yesterday, while patrolling my beat down in the mine, in a drift in the limestone, the earliest sedimentary deposit laid down on the bed of the primeval ocean, I found the house of my archaic ancestor, willed to me by him millions of years ago, and delivered by him to me yesterday. It is a minute shell, with which he protected his precious stomach. This stomach took its flight to Heaven in the earliest dawn of time, but the house, one of the many mansions of the soul, preserved intact came down to me through unnumbered ages, while myriad races came into being and faded into eternity, and religions sprang up and flourished and waned, and empires rose and rotted and fell.

In the next stage, the stomach has become elongated, and the nerve centre or spinal cord makes its appearance along the whole length of the body. At this period my beloved grandfather was a very aristocratic and exclusive worm, belonging to one of the first families, and, like them, had as much brains in his tail as in his head, for no cranial brain had yet developed.

The remaining steps of the evolution, through which my ancestors have passed, are depicted in the development of the human embryo, and I will ask you to read up on the subject of embryology, which I have found quite as interesting as dime novels.