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

by Unknown

“You have voluntary and involuntary functions or organs; the voluntary only, the involuntary never, can be suspended for certain periods of time. Your respiration and blood circulation are involuntary, and as long as you remain embodied in flesh will continue to perform their appropriate functions, whether you wake or sleep, for they are not subject to or influenced by the will. And it is by the unconscious operation of these that your voluntary functions when suspended in sleep are replenished and reinvigorated. You are, as at present constituted, made up corporally of gross material, which becomes wearied and exhausted by the active exercise or operation of the voluntary functions, and the nerve force will expend itself unless periodically reimbursed and replenished, and restored to its normal condition by the intervention and recuperative power of sleep. When in the ages to come your people lose this grossness in their material composition, your inclination to sleep and the necessity for it will abate and become lessened correspondingly to your successive stages of advancement in progressive development.

“Thus is revealed to you the fact that on Mars, at this time, the inhabitants have but very little need of sleep. They sleep, but in a modified sense as to periods, duration and manner. They rest when fatigued, and for brief periods pass into a state of languor or stupidity, to some extent analogous to your sleeping state, which is never required oftener than once a week, and then only for a few hours.

“Your spirit friends will tell you that they never sleep, but rest, and ever keep in mind that the people of Mars are closely approximating the spiritual. Then, again, on Mars they do not have night as you do, and consequently not the same nocturnal influences to suggest and invite sleep. This suggests another subject germane to our line of thought. In nature you find always two extremes, that seem to stand in antipodal relations to each other. Let us give a few instances in illustration: You have day and night, cold and heat, male and female, fire and water, good and evil, etc. Some of these seem to be at fierce war with each other, and yet what a delusion! This seeming antagonism is but the working of a law that shall eventuate in the production of the completest harmony. Undeveloped people, ignorant of the jewel-crowned truths, as yet concealed from them in the grand arcana of nature and the progressive sciences, laugh and sneer at the idea of marriages in spirit life, when the unvarnished truth is that man, considered in his independent and separate sexual relation, is but a half man, and can not become rounded out into fully developed manhood until consociated in conjunctive union with the opposite sex—not indeed and truly until the man and woman become twain, one flesh, or, in better phraseology, spiritually unitized.

“The day and night will continue until finally and by gradual processes the night is banished, and vanishes in the splendor of a continuously refulgent and sunlit atmosphere. On Mars this condition is almost reached, and the night there resembles the shadings thrown over the earth when a cloud passes over the face of your moon at hightide, and ultimately even this shall be no more, for in the spiritual spheres of Mars, as in your exalted ones, there are no shadows to obscure or mar the radiant light of the spiritual sun, and Mars itself is fast approaching this sublime condition. We must withhold what we have to say in regard to the seeming strife between good and evil for our next.

“May 12. The people of christendom have had it rung in their ears for nearly two thousand years that man is essentially bad, unutterably wicked, unspeakably depraved, and, worst of all, this horrid state comes to him, not of his own creating, but by inevitable and unavoidable inheritance. In our ignorance and credulity how we have wept over the weakness and folly of our first parents in yielding to the flattery and persuasive eloquence of the cruel serpent in the pure and primitive bowers of Eden. Our tears have flown and flown, with no gentle, soothing hand to touch our eyes and bid them cease; no voice panoplied with authority to speak to; no words of hope and cheer. We have been told in answer to our anxious entreaties for blissful hope and loving counsel that there is a superabundance of evil in us, and a trifling, insignificant quantity of good, and that nothing short of a miracle of regeneration can save us from unutterable and unending misery in the life to come; that without this miraculous interposition of divine grace, the little good that is in us will be swallowed up and devoured by the appalling evil of our sinfully inherited natures. Oh, man, how you degrade your true nobility, your godlike and divine nobility, by bowing the knee to this hideous monster of falsehood, and by kneeling at this unholy shrine. In direct opposition to this abominable and degrading doctrine stands the truth in its pristine and noble beauty.

“According to this Christian doctrine we behold in man a combination of good and evil, and in the struggle for the mastery the evil is to be mightier than the good. The good emanating from and partaking of the majestic excellence of the eternal, infinite God must, alas, succumb to and be overthrown by evil, its unholy rival. Can man conceive of a scheme more degrading and heartless, and more completely dishonoring to God and his infinite perfections of wisdom, goodness and power—a doctrine more utterly subversive of moral goodness, deific excellence, and that more completely wrecks the moral government of God and dumps into one common funeral heap the hopes and happiness of the human race. No, no, this is not true; it is false, false, basely false.

“What is the true theory of good and evil? Man, oh, man, hearken to the voice of truth, and be wooed and won by its gentle entreaties. Let the scales of ignorance and superstition fall from your eyes. Look upward for truth, and be baptized in its beauteous light, and cleansed in its pure and holy waters. Evil is the assemblage of elements in the concrete, if I may be permitted so to speak, and is simply undeveloped good, or good in a lesser degree. Evil is evanescent and transitory, good is permanent and eternally enduring. The fittest of all things in the grand scheme of progression only survive, while all else is doomed to perish. The good and the true are as enduring and everlasting as the eternal God himself, while the evil and the false are fleeting, unenduring, and carry within themselves the insatiate and unappeasable elements of ultimate annihilation. Be assured of this, for no truth in God’s illimitable universe has been more firmly established on a more indestructible foundation. Good day.

“May 15. Astronomers will tell you that in their observations through the telescope the planet Mars presents a red brilliancy not observably characteristic of the other planets in your solar system, which they are unable to account for. Considering the vastness of the subject, the immense distance in space where the scintillating orbs are chanting their silent songs of praise to God, the difficulties in the way of observation, etc., the discoveries in the domain of astronomy have been fully as remarkable, important, and satisfactory, as in any other field of scientific investigation. But still only a very little compared with the immensity of the subject has been disclosed and some of that mixed and interlarded with error. Astronomy will become the greatest of all sciences when by new apparatus and new appliances the spiritual spheres belonging to the various planets shall have been discovered. This success will be achieved in the coming time. On Mars the people have mastered this problem, and I was surprised to learn that they knew all about our spiritual spheres from their far distant standpoint of observation, and that they knew minutely all the characteristic and inherent qualities of your planetary atmosphere. They have long since invented instruments by which they are enabled to photograph in minute detail and perfect fidelity of representation every material object on the earth. And you will be surprised when I tell you that I inspected Stockholm, London, Paris, New York, your own queen city, Cincinnati, etc., in a more perfect form of presentation than your artists can reproduce on canvas with pencil and brush, and at the same time I was standing in spirit in the immeasurable immensity of space on the planet Mars. I can not give you even in outline, much less in detail, the modus operandi of this achievement, and will only say that the rays of light in reflective power will yet dawn upon your scientists and philosophers as the agent of discoveries and accomplishments not now even dreamed of by the people of earth. I want to add right here a prophetic statement, which you may carefully note, that the time is not so very far distant when your inspired inventors will devise and construct an instrument that will disclose to the human material eye, to the astonishment of the world, your own spirit land; for let it be well understood that your spirit world has a real, tangible, objective existence, that will yet yield its rich treasures in scientific revealments for the enlightenment and progress of your race. In very truth the spirit world is the only real and permanent one, constructed by the infinite master builder for all eternal time, while your physical and material, except their spiritual essences, are but the shadows and temporary projections from the spiritual. Logically and metaphysically speaking, the spirit world is the pre-eminent cause of your world, the mere transitory effect. This being true, your keen sense hastens you at once to the conclusion, founded in reason and truth, that an effect can not be greater or more enduring than the cause that produced it, but must of necessity and in the very nature of things be infinitely less.

“May 18. A people so pre-eminently advanced in all that appertains to the sublimation of their being, and all that surrounds them, and in which they come in contact, must necessarily be exceedingly refined and æsthetic in their mannerisms, habits of life, intercourse with each other, and in their vocations and employments. In the very nature of things it could not be otherwise. From what has been heretofore said relating to the highly favored and inestimably progressed denizens of Mars, it is not difficult to see that their pursuits must necessarily and almost entirely relate to the realm of the intellectual and spiritual, as they have passed beyond the requirements and demands of that which pertains to the material phase of existence. Physical wants require physical exertion to supply them. Material requirements necessitate attention to and labor in the domain of the material, and this, for obvious reasons, that need not be stated or discussed. It may be prudent, however, to premise that when the physical constitution requires substantially gross materials to keep up and maintain the corporealities of our nature, we must look to the productions of the farm and the fruitage of the forest, and also to animal food, which are always in quality and degree in exact correspondence to our status or state of progression. But when we lose the constituent elements of corporeal being that belong to the lower strata of the constitution of things, we require something more refined and sublimated, and lo, always it is at hand to meet the exigency, for let it ever be borne in mind that the law that is incessantly and without intermission working away in solving the great problem of life and being, moving upward from the lower to the higher, is not confined in its operations to only form or species of being, but applies to and operates upon all, whether rational or irrational, animate or inanimate, and pushes all forward and upward with perfect and precise equability and in exact and equally proportional degree, none advancing more rapidly than the rest and none lagging behind. Thus, you perceive the infinite order and the beautiful symmetry of the great law of evolution and progression. Herein is necessitated varied changes in the value and character of vocation and employments, suited to the continued mutations of things in the endless series of progressive changes.

“At one period in the history of Mars the art of photography was discovered. Of course it attracted great attention and challenged admiration. It was regarded not only as wonderful but marvelous. The discoverer was almost deified, for he was thought to be endowed with something of the divine nature not discoverable in others, until the art advanced step by step, improvement on improvement, when the divinity with which the discoverer had been invested by the admiring multitudes dwindled into insignificance, and the very sensible conclusion reached that he was merely highly gifted and spiritually inspired, but altogether human still. Compare the primitive system of photography, limited as it was, to objects of immediate presence to that now existing, whereby worlds and systems of worlds are made tributary to its discoveries and achievements. Now, instead of the wonders of the art inspiring hero worship of the men engaged in its studies and who produce the wondrous results, a feeling of awe and veneration for the continually increasing wonders of the creation is inspired. The admiration is justly transferred from man to the creator and the stupendous majesty of his laws and works. On Mars photography is now and has been for a long time a favorite and delightful employment pursued by the many, for all have the advantages of it. Therefore the study, not only of their own world, but numerous others, constitutes a pleasant, instructive, and intellectually remunerative employment. Nor is this confined and limited to material worlds, but reaches out and embraces the spiritual spheres of each.