A Book Written by the Spirits of the So-Called Dead

by Unknown

“April 24. At this time those living on the planet Mars do not die or pass through the change called death as you do here. They have no diseases that cause the untimely taking off of the inhabitants. Disease has long since been banished. All of the procreating elements of disease residing in the materiality of the globe or the surrounding atmosphere have been by progressive development eliminated. And even before this had fully occurred the people had learned the laws of health and the process of neutralizing and rendering harmless the lurking germs that remained. You may perceive from this what a happy people they are. There are no untimely deaths on Mars. Children grow up to manhood and womanhood; yet there is no fixed standard of time when all die, that is, no definite and invariable period of longevity. And right here comes in a great law, now operative on Mars, that the people of earth know nothing about, for it has never been communicated before, namely, children can not die there. It was never designed that they should die here. Marriage being brought about, as before stated, by the grand law of magnetic attraction or spiritual affinity, and all diseases being banished and their producing causes annihilated, nothing but absolutely sound and perfect physical and mental organizations are imparted to offspring by their progenitors. You see at once the idea, for I must be brief—the children being perfect in health of body and mind by procreation, and there being no diseases to affect them after birth, death can not touch them, in fact can touch none before the time arrives, varying in point of longevity for the separation of spirit and body. None die before the full maturity of stature, and some live to be a very advanced age. After reaching complete development or stature, they pass out of and away from the material in point of time, according to the antecedent conditions of their varied being. Some arrive after maturity to the estate of progressive experience in the form sooner than others, and when this period arrives, whether it be at thirty, forty, fifty or a hundred years, they pass on to their ultimate and higher state of being in the spiritual spheres. It is known when each shall pass out of the form long before the event transpires, and all due preparation is accordingly made therefor. Your scientists have discovered, and rightly, too, that about every seven years the atoms and particles composing your physical organizations change and give way to new ones. But this is gradual and imperceptible. On Mars, at this period of development, the changes are much more frequent, and these successive changes determine the approach of dissolution, and instead of death in an hour or a day, it goes on perceptibly and without pain or suffering for years. Every change lessens the material composites of the body, and at each a nearer approach to the spiritual takes place, until finally the physical, by the gradual process of embodied sublimation or attenuation, passes away, and the spiritual becomes supreme. This culmination is equivalent to what you call death, except that there is no attending pain, no death struggle, and no physical body afterwards to take care of and lay away. The body, by successive changes, has seemingly vanished into nothingness and been absorbed in the atmosphere.

“April 27. We have been expecting you to inquire of us how the people live on the planet Mars, what kind of architecture in the construction of their business houses, habitations, etc.; what kind of food they eat, and with what raiment are they clothed, etc.

“You will have observed from what we have heretofore made known to you that the services of four classes of professional worthies have been dispensed with, simply because the people have progressed beyond their utility, namely, lawyers, doctors, preachers and politicians. Lawyers can only thrive and exist professionally in a land where conscience is not permitted to exercise its native simplicity and positive purity, and where the lower passions and propensities are largely dominant. When conscience, active, pure and simple, is allowed to manifest its functions in perfect unrestraint, and to act as the governing power in the regulation of human conduct, the presence and office of the barrister are no longer of use. Lawyers flourish as a general proposition on strife and contention, bad faith and unfair dealing; and when these shall happily end, like poor cashiered Cassio, their occupation will be gone. The doctors grow opulent by medication, because of the ignorance of the people with reference to the true laws of marriage, proper antenatal conditions, neglect of proper hygiene, and ignorance as to overcoming or rendering harmless the deleterious conditions, both atmospheric and from the undeveloped state of inherent nature. But when, by progressing beyond their harmful influences, or by enlightenment and healing gifts, the people shall obtain a complete mastery over them, disease shall be banished, then the avocation of the physician ends, and he will have to seek a livelihood in other pursuits.

“The preacher lives in comfortable indolence because of the ignorance and superstition of the people. His office is one of hypocrisy and fraud. Hypocrisy, because if he is not a fool, he knows his teachings are not true, and of fraud, because by dissembling he extorts from his parishoners a dishonorable subsistence. When the people grow sufficiently wise they will be taught by the denizens of the spirit world truth and righteousness. Then the mission or office of the sacerdotal gentlemen will be closed, and they can seek employment in the many more honorable occupations. The politician, cunning and subtle, swims along smoothly upon the rolling current of the credulity of the people and his own duplicity. He prospers because you have not as yet grown into full political manhood, and he succeeds in hoodwinking you with the belief that his heart is overflowing with patriotism and anxious solicitude for the public weal. But I must leave this class—the politicians—to the tender mercies of several gentlemen who are waiting the opportunity to contribute their part to your enterprise.

“April 28. The coarse food necessary for you in order to keep up the crude materiality of which your physical make-up is composed, is not needed by the denizens of Mars. In the composition of your physical bodies is a representative of all the material elements in nature—iron, calcium, wood, earth, etc.—and it is easily demonstrated by microscopic inspection and chemical analysis, that in every drop of blood in the human system all these varied and numerous elements are represented. Hence man may be safely considered a microcosm, or nature in her vast domain, reflected in miniature. But you still exist in the realm of the crude, and yet you are vastly more refined than in the ages past, and forward, onward, and upward is the line of march marked out for you by the infinitely wise director of all things. On the planet Mars no animal food is used, because among other reasons the physical properties of the body do not require the elements of animal flesh to replace nature’s wastes. Thousands of former species of animals have become extinct, swallowed up in the ever surging maelstrom of progression or absorbed in the higher forms. Vegetation in the planet Mars is quite different, both in expression or appearance, and constituent composition from the vegetation of your planet. Here the aroma residing in the vegetable and escaping therefrom, is largely absorbed and neutralized by the grossness of the vegetable itself, while on Mars the grossness has become so diminished that to the senses the aroma has almost become tangibly objective, and this aroma is food strengthening and invigorating, is nearly sufficient of itself to support existence in the form without the assistance of the more substantial fibers of the parent vegetable. Yet in a certain prepared form the substantial material is used. The time is not very far distant, as I am assured, when the people there will subsist on aromatic emanations from material productions, aided by magnetic, electric, and other atmospheric properties used simply by inhalation. In the water you use are to be found teeming millions of living and moving animalcules. They are enabled to live on the elements of the water in its present gross state, but on the planet Mars the water has been dispossessed of its life germinating and life sustaining properties to aquatic productions, and has thus progressed with all other things and beings. No life or form of life is now brought into being there, but such higher types as are fitted to pass with the planet into spiritual conditions; and the water being so purified by nature’s refining processes is as different from your ordinary water as clear, sparkling sprays projected from your fountains and dancing in the sunbeams are to the murky waters of your rivulets immediately after a violent rain-storm. I will resume this subject in my next.

“May 1. On Mars they have learned how to produce from the soil itself any vegetable that naturally grows therefrom. In the soil itself reside all the constituent elements of all vegetation in their infinite variety. You may thoughtlessly answer, that in order to produce any species of vegetation used for table consumption, the seed or germ must first be sown in the soil beneath the surface, but you forget that this process is but the result of civilization and art, and that originally, that is before you learned how to obtain and use seed, the products sprang of themselves and apparently spontaneously from the earth. Whence did they come? and whence were their germinating and generating powers obtained? Think a little deeply on the subject, and you will be led irresistibly to the correct conclusion that in the soil exists all the requisite elements in the production of vegetation by growth. The people of Mars have acquired the knowledge which enables them to produce out of the soil, abstractly considered, all the essential qualities of the vegetable without waiting for the tedious process of growth. This process is purely chemical, and everybody there understands it. Hence you see they do not have to buy vegetables, for all can have their essential qualities for food without cost to the consumer. Long since the ownership of the soil by individuals was abandoned for the general common good, and on this subject the primitive condition of affairs in your planet prevails universally on Mars—that is to say everybody owns realty, one just as much as another. This is pure unadulterated agrarianism in its highest and most perfect form.

“It is often asked in your intercourse with the world of spirits: What are the employments of spirits? what are they about? what do they do? etc. It is pertinent to inquire, What are the employments of the people of Mars still embodied? What do they do since we have discovered that they do not now toil for the acquisition of riches, because they have no possible use for them; no taxes to pay, no governmental machinery to support, no lawyers to annoy, no preachers to vex, torture, and maintain, no doctors to nauseate with their drugs, no politicians to hoodwink the people and feed at the public crib, no grocery bills to look after and liquidate, etc. Before we answer these and many other important queries, we shall see what the people do for raiment with which to clothe themselves, and what they do for shelter, if, indeed, shelter is necessary. If we shall discover that these are free gifts from the father, then the employments of the embodied Marsians becomes a question of very interesting and pressing importance.

“May 4. I suspect that you already anticipate the tenor of what we have to tell you in regard to the clothing of the people of Mars, what texture, how derived, etc. Your keen perceptions and astute comprehension enables you to see at a glance that if this law of progression, as applied to the material, whereby the lowest forms are reached and operated upon, lifting with its strong arms into higher and still higher conditions, be true, it must be true and in regard to all material things—the soil, rock, wood, water, etc., animal and vegetable life, and as we shall have occasion to show further on, to the mundane atmosphere surrounding the planet. All things progress and advance in like and equal ratio, leaving nothing behind or unaffected by the law. This advancing march of matter from the crude and gross into the more refined and sublimated is seemingly slow, but nevertheless sure and unerringly, indiscriminate, and precise. Therefore the raiment worn by the denizens of Mars has reached the same altitude of refinement as all other material things.

“The seasons, once resembling yours, spring, summer, autumn, and winter, have nearly merged, that is to say, have nearly blended into one perpetual season of summer loveliness. The austerity of winter, with its stormy blasts and cold, piercing wind waves has long since ceased to be; no frosts to nip and blight the fruits and flowers; no chilling autumns, with withering leaf, to inspire with melancholy and sadness. What will surprise you in this connection is, that, while the cold temperature has wrought its work in the development of the past, and is only known to have once existed by historic relation, the intense heat of summer has also disappeared. When you have severely cold winters, almost unendurable even in your temperate zones, your wise philosophers theorize that your ultimate destiny is to freeze out; that the icebergs and ice glaziers of the north are ultimately either to roll over the now fair portions of the earth, destroying all things animate, or that their freezing breath will sweep over the globe involving in death all the fair and lovely forms of nature’s productions, including godlike man, the apex and crowning glory of creation. But lo! when the earth straightens up on her axis and the cold waves retreat and sink away in their northern hiding place, and the genial and vernal season with its pleasant temperature returns, these same philosophers take a breathing spell, rest awhile, and conclude that it has not been so very cold after all; and when the summer comes, if it happens to be unusual in the intensity of its heat, and the solar rays seem to almost melt into molten ruin all things, and to scorch the forest leaves and wilt the waving harvests, these same philosophical wiseacres change tactics, reverse their position, and with one heroic bound jump to a directly opposite conclusion, namely: that we are all destined ultimately to burn up and become annihilated in a general conflagration by solar heat igniting the combustible material of the planet and its surrounding atmosphere. Oh, how impotent in philosophy! A simple and humble inquiry settles the question. Why destroy this fair earth, daily and hourly becoming still fairer? Does God do any thing without an allwise and beneficent purpose? Is it possible for Him to do a silly, foolish thing? He would certainly not destroy the earth unless there was thereby some noble and beneficent purpose to subserve. What grand purpose, good and wise, can be accomplished by ending the existence of a planet that has as yet scarcely begun to live? To assume that He will do such a thing, is to assume that He has become disappointed and disgusted with his own creation, which annuls His wisdom and foresight, or that He delights in folly, making a world and then destroying it because He can, or for any other silly and insufficient reason. To thus assume is to dishonor Him as a God, and to invest Him with the attributes of a devil.

“Wonderful changes do occur marking epochs, or cycles, in the history of all planets. Where you live to-day, thousands upon thousands of years ago another race of human beings lived, attaining a certain degree of development in science and art, but upon the fulfillment of their mission they passed away from the face of the earth. Where you now live was once swept over by old ocean, and where the deep waters and angry billows of the Atlantic now roll and revel once lived a race of people called the Atlantians, but their land with its embellishments of art and progressive development became submerged by the changes of the mighty waters, and now lies buried beneath its rolling deep and lashing waves. But observe in all this that the globe goes on, and succeeding developments of man and material things come forth far in advance of the former order of things. What, if in the womb of time it is reserved for Atlantis to arise from her watery entombment and to flourish again with renewed and increased grandeur, involving the submersion of other portions of the earth’s surface, including your own? This would not be death to any portion of the planet in any high and exalted sense, but a progressive change, a revivifying of life, a quickening and impulsion of being in the grand advancing march of development and sublimation. As we write, the theme expands and enlarges, and as the power begins to wane we find we have not discoursed minutely on the subject of raiment, and beg your indulgence for a resume of the subject in our next.