King Solomon's Goat

by George Willard Bartlett

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.