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.