The astral light is both god and the Devil, the creator and the destroyer and also the Nirvana of the Buddhists. It is the Ah of the Hindus, or Iah or Eh Ei Eh of the Hebrews. It is life or the life-giving fluid. It is the Od and Ob of Moses and the Kabalists. When it acts on those that are drawn within its current it is the Ob or Python. Moses was determined to exterminate those witches who, sensitive to its influence, allowed themselves to fall under the control of the vicious beings which move in the astral waves like fish in the water.—Isis Unveiled, 1-158. Porphery says that “these beings are mischievous and deceitful, though some are gentle and harmless, but so weak as to have the greatest difficulty in communicating with mortals. Their powers of reasoning are in a latent state, and therefore they themselves irresponsible.” But St. Augustine says: “These spirits are deceitful through malice. They pass themselves off for gods and for the souls of the defunct.” St. Jerome says that some of these elementary spirits or satyrs, with the legs and tails of goats, were exhibited at Alexandria, and one of them was pickled and sent to the Emperor Constantine, which he highly appreciated, as he was usually in the same condition. The Devil says, according to Edgar Allan Poe: “In a climate so sultry as mine it is frequently impossible to keep a spirit alive for more than two or three hours, and unless pickled immediately (and a pickled spirit is not good eating) they will smell.”
They called out sixty thousand militia in Cevennes, France, in 1700 to drive the Devil out of the boys and girls and babes at the breast who prophesied in pure French, a language unknown to them. The Prior reported to Rome that the Devil was so powerful that no torture and no amount of exorcism is able to dislodge him. He says he closed their hands on burning coals, and they were not even singed, that he wrapped their bodies in cotton soaked with oil and set them on fire and could not even blister their skins, that balls were shot at them and found flattened between the skin and clothes.
Perhaps the greatest number of miracles ever performed in the world were pulled off by the Devil at the tomb of Abbe Paris from 1727 to 1749. The sick were cured, the deaf made to hear and the blind to see. Often a young girl among the convulsionaries would bend back into an arc, her loins supported by the sharpened point of an iron rod, and beg to be pounded with a fifty pound stone suspended from the ceiling. The stone was allowed to fall repeatedly with all its weight upon her abdomen, and the girl enjoyed it and cried for more, and no injury was found upon her person. When violent blows were struck with a sledge-hammer upon a drill held against her stomach she cried out: “O! how delightful, that does me good. Strike twice as hard if you can.”—Isis Unveiled.
CHAPTER XI
Life Cells.
I Am the I Am, the Hebrew God, is supposed by Christians to be the First Cause, but the assumption of a first cause is quite unnecessary, and further, if you postulate a creative god, some impertinent person might ask you who made God. It is just as well to start with matter, in which mind and energy are inherent, which is eternal, infinite, immortal, self-existent and sustaining, requiring no supreme power as a basis or background, as set forth in the Sankhya System of the Hindus. See Phil. & Relig. of India, 55.
The attraction or love of one mass of matter for another is the energy. It is that love that creates all forms. The atoms go a-chasing after other atoms, even as you and I. There can be no attraction without mind. Anaxagoras and Empedocles believed in a dualism of mind and matter. The latter says: “The periods of the formation of the world depend upon the alternate prevalence of love and hate. During certain periods all heterogeneous atoms are separated from each other by hate, during others they are everywhere united by love.”
Haeckel says: “These three fundamental attributes, matter, force and sensation, are found inseparably united throughout the whole universe in every atom and every molecule.”
Edgar Allan Poe says: “That which is not matter is not at all. The ultimate unparticled matter not only permeates all things but impels all things. This matter is God. What men attempt to embody in the word ‘thought’ is this matter in motion. The unparticled matter, or God, in quiescence is what men call mind. The motion of the unparticled matter is the universal thought of the universal mind. This thought creates. All things are but the thought of God. For new individualities gross matter is necessary. To create individual, thinking beings, it was necessary to incarnate portions of the Divine Mind. Thus man is individualized. Divested of corporate investiture, he were God.”
According to the Ionic philosophy matter is by nature endowed with life, and life is inseparably connected with matter.—Ueberweg’s Hist. of Philosophy, 1-32.
It is said that in the beginning a male electron or spirit, or purusha, or soul, from the spirit principle of the universe, becoming involved in the material ether, formed a vortex, about which the female or material electrons of the ether revolved, thus producing an atom, the basis of all visible forms. The electron attracts the particles of matter in the ether as a magnet attracts steel. The electrons are called units of electricity, and there are perhaps a thousand in an atom. The space between these ions is comparatively as great as the space between the planets of our solar system. Leucippus, of Abdera, says that souls are round atoms.