Heaven.
The Lord doeth all things well.
He consigns the Jews to Heaven,
And all the rest to Hell.
There are forty nine heavens to which we ordinary mortals may attain, so
you needn’t worry. Besides, there are certain aristocratic heavens
reserved for the great and good men of high spirituality, such as Moses,
the fakir, thief and murderer, and David, the bandit, outlaw and
assassin, and Solomon, the fratricide, Mormon and pillar of Ashtoreth,
and all the popes, bishops, priests and ministers. We will each go to
that place we like the best, and to which we are fitted by our
vibration. Some of us, like certain ministers, will go to that heaven
where the beautiful fairies are. The ancient Jews will have a little
heaven of their own, where they can worship the three balls and the
ass-headed god and the god with whiskers on, and where they will have a
chance to cop the golden paving stones, and sell corner lots, and insure
their palace not made with hands eternal in the heavens.
And the ancient Scotch Presbyterian will walk the golden streets with
his savage, gore-imbued devil-god, in his paradise overlooking the abyss
of Hell, where he can gloat over the souls in torment, as they rise up
out of the Bottomless Pit every thousand years, each one fastened by his
tongue to a hook on an endless chain, which rises from such a fathomless
depth of hellfire that it takes the victim a thousand years to make the
circuit. It is claimed that these heavens and hells are built up from
the astral substance by the imaginative power of the minds of the
different religious sects.
This region contains all the heavens that have ever been dreamed of in
theology, each filled with the devotees of the various creeds. Each of
the great religions has its own particular region in which its disciples
gather, worship and rejoice. In each region the religious soul finds
just what he had expected and hoped to find on the other shore. You may
even see the golden crowns, harps and stiff halos in some cases and hear
the eternal chant of praise. These heavens are not eternal. Everything
on the astral plane is subject to change like all other matter. Even the
religious progress and change their opinions.—Astral World, 70.
The occultists do not, as a rule, disclose the process by which you may
see the astral visions and pass out of the physical and journey in the
astral body. But this is one way to see the pictures in the astral
light: Between sleeping and waking, in the neutral state of Jagrata,
when the eyes are closed and a numbness falls upon the body, and you
experience a floating sensation, take note of the visions that appear to
you, if any, and then by your will power impress them upon physical
brain, so that you may remember them. These visions may be pictures on
the astral light or scenes on the astral plane, but whatever they are,
some of them prove to be true prophetic visions.
One occult teacher advised those who wished to induce trance to go into
the silence, that is, to go into a room by yourself, where you will not
be disturbed, and lie down and completely relax the muscles and think of
nothing at all. The Hindus say fix your mind on your navel, but some fix
their gaze on a crystal. You will see the visions when you doze off, if
you can get them at all.
When you are in the astral body it is possible to remember the
experiences of your previous lives, that is, the lives of your
ancestors. In the physical body heredity and memory are stored in the
cromatin or brain matter of all the millions of cells of the body. The
human astral body is made up of the astral bodies of all the cells. It
is possible that memory is inherent in the astral matter of all the
cells, and that in the astral we are more in rapport with the cells than
in the physical.
In the lowest astral plane next to the earth, it is said, is the region
where the astral shells or corpses disintegrate, an arm sloughing off
here, a leg there, and a head elsewhere. It is claimed that the spirits
have deserted these shells. If you should happen to meet one of these
ghosts walking in a graveyard without any legs or without any head, it
may scare you into a fit, but it will not do you any harm, for it is
dead. Then there are certain spectres or phantoms whose company is very
undesirable when you take a lonely walk in the ghoul-haunted woodlands.
These elemental spirits like to play practical jokes and have a little
fun with you, but they will not do you any harm, unless you are
sufficiently weak to allow them to obsess you. Cast out fear, cultivate
a strong will, and be, like Solomon, the master of demons and men.
“There are certain entities or beings in the astral world which never
were human and never will be, for they belong to an entirely different
order of nature. They are fairies, satyrs, imps and goblins. At
spiritual seances they sometimes play elfish pranks. They seem to be
particularly apt to play tricks on neophytes in psychic research who
seek to penetrate the astral without proper instruction. To such a one
they appear as hideous forms, monsters &c.”—Astral World, 92.
Some of the elementals are electric spirits and confer upon the medium
the power of magnetic healing. The medium, upon the approach of the
spirit, is charged with electricity. The spirit may appear as a bird
with a human face and a parrot’s bill and sharp, black eyes and body
covered with hair, and deliver messages which can be heard
clairaudiently by the medium. That reminds us of the claim of Mahomet
that a little bird stood on his shoulder and whispered the laws of the
Koran in his ear. They are certainly the Devil’s own laws.
“Many of the angels on the astral and the ghosts that haunt houses are
thought forms created by the people who imagine them, and obtain all
their apparent mind from the action of the thought force of their
creators. Repeated thought and repeated belief will serve to keep alive
and strengthen these entities, otherwise they will disappear in time.
Many supernatural visitors, saints and semi-divine beings of all
religions have been formed in this way. The power of the devils arise in
the same way.”—Idem.
According to the Theosophists man has two souls, the animal and the
spiritual, and at death the animal soul or spook, together with the
spiritual soul, passes to that part of the astral called Kamaloka, or
place of spooks, the lowest plane. But the spirit soon deserts the spook
and leaves it to meet its just reward in the second death, because on
earth it desired too much of carnal pleasures. The spooks retain all the
impressions accumulated in the earth life and can communicate with
mortals through mediums. Among these are the demons that obsess human
beings. The spiritual soul passes on to Devachan, or the house of gods,
which evidently includes those astral planes where the religious grovel
before their various imaginary idols. See “What is Theosophy,” 46. This
alleged spiritual soul, that deserts its brother soul in the depths of
Hell, receives its due reward, for in the sub-heaven to which it goes,
it has no memory of the earth life, consequently it is not immortal, and
it is in jail and cannot get out. It would be better to stay in Hell
with the spook, for it could have more fun haunting houses than
worshipping imaginary gods with a lot of stiff-necked orthodox
hypocrites.
In Ceylon they have twenty six heavens, and at the end of the world
period they kill off all the spirits in all these heavens except those
in the five upper spheres, the four highest of which are Nirvana.
You need not think that because you go across that you will have
surcease from sorrow. It is only in the highest heavens that they have
no sorrow, and that is because they don’t know anything. You cannot
obtain happiness here or hereafter by purchasing absolution from any
fakir, but only by doing to others as you would be done by. The astral
planes of the Spiritualists in which the soul may advance, improve and
ultimately attain to the highest heaven, corresponds with Purgatory,
that superlative graft of religion. You can be prayed out of this limbo,
if your relatives are willing to put up the stuff, otherwise you will be
shoveled down into Hell. But a cheaper way is to have a Hindu prayer
wheel. I am going to devote the immense revenues which I shall receive
from this pious work to the construction of prayer wheels, which will be
placed at street corners on all the highways and byways, so that even he
who runs can turn the wheel and bring around to the open slot, so that
God can see it, one of the many prayers printed on the wheel, for
instance: “O, God, save my mother-in-law from Hell.”
In the coma, between sleeping and waking, the gates of the astral world
are sometimes opened, and you can see the ghosts on the astral plane,
great throngs of spirits, having no indication of piety, all busily
engaged in their favorite occupations or sports. If in this state of
Jagrata you happen to float into a graveyard, you will see the ghosts
lying or sitting on their graves or pacing up and down beside them with
bowed heads and in deep thought, trying to figure out how they got there
and where they are going. See Seership, 179.
It is said that two persons can exchange bodies if they wish. Or if
someone else has a better body than you have, and you wish to steal it,
invite him to take a trip with you in his astral body on the astral
plane. All the time keep commanding your astral body, sotto voce, to
enter into his body, and when his astral body has emerged, prepared to
take a trip with you in spook-land, that is the instant for your astral
body to take possession of his physical body and leave his astral body
out in the cold. But be careful to back into his body, for if your
astral body enters his physical body face to face, you will be in wrong
end to and will be crazy as a loon. Now there is no place for the other
astral body to go except into your abandoned physical body, and as you
are a wicked robber who just stole a house, he will probably hesitate
about entering the body of such a person, and if he delays too long, he
will be a lost spook, condemned to wander forever in the land of shades.
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.
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.
Each of the thousands of atoms, of which said primitive life cell was
composed, had a soul destined to take its place in some descendant, if
it had an opportunity. And the souls are waiting in the atoms to be
born, and not in Heaven as asserted by the Yogi philosophers. The Yogis
claim that the souls are waiting in some department of the Buddhist
heaven crying to be born. Bosh! They are waiting in the spermatozoa,
those little monsters, those little devils that drive their great human
masters to crime and murder, to the gallows and the stake; there they
are howling to be born. In their frantic race to enter the ovum, as
shown under “Spermatozoa,” Stand. Dic., no wonder they are excited. They
have been waiting 500,000,000 years for the opportunity to become human
beings.
Cells propagate by division; that is my original ancestor, a little,
round mass of protoplasm, divided itself into two cells to produce
offspring, and all of my ancestors have done the same through all these
millions of years, consequently I have in my body, in all of the cells,
some of the original matter of which my original cell ancestor was
composed. That is eternity’s great highway by which the soul walked
down.
The human germ cell divides in the same manner into two individuals and
we propagate, as our earliest ancestors did, by casting off a cell,
which, being joined by a cell of the opposite sex, becomes fertilized.
The human embryo develops by repeated subdivisions of this twin cell,
and each one of the myriads of cells so produced is a living, thinking
being.
The question has arisen why the cells in an embryo arrange themselves in
the form of the parent, and it has been asserted that they are so
distributed by God in pursuance of a Divine plan. But it is actually
done by the volition of the cells themselves. Each cell takes its proper
position in compliance with the instruction of its parent cell, and if
removed by force to some other part of the embryo, will return to its
original place, thus evincing the most surprising intelligence. It must
be remembered that a molecule is as large as a universe, that there is
no such thing as size, that as much ability may be stored up in the
nerve centre of a cell as in all the debris of a human brain.
We are immortal, but with no memory of past lives. If we do not
propagate, this life will be the end of our line that has continued
unbroken for millions of years, and we will have to go back into the
abysmal void, into the womb of chaos and commence all over again. That
will be our fate in any case. Only that cell of our bodies which may be
incorporated in our progeny will continue in human form. That cell is a
remote relative of ours, having descended from the ancestral germ cell
from which our embryo was developed.
Of the earliest plant cells, developed by spontaneous generation in the
primordial epoch, some developed tails, or projected filaments of
protoplasm from their jelly-like bodies. With these tails they propelled
themselves through the primeval seas, and thus separated themselves from
the plants and became animals. In this earliest epoch of life’s history
all beings lived in the water. These primitive plants possessed as much
soul and mind as the animals that thus branched off from them, and all
plants still possess soul and mind.
But I am sorry to say that my ancestor, who thus projected a tail and
became an animal, was a degenerate, a lazy loafer, a robber, a murderer
and a cannibal. We all have to live on protoplasm. The plants made their
own living plasm, manufacturing it from inorganic matter, but the
animals were too indolent to do such laborious work, when they could
just as well kill and eat the plant cells and subsist on them. In this
way they lost the recipe for making plasm, and we descendants are
consequently born cannibals, condemned to rob, murder, despoil and eat
our fellow beings, or starve.
My next beautiful ancestor, to whom I will introduce you, was an animal
consisting of numerous cells arranged in the form of a sack or stomach,
called a blastoderm or gastraea. There was no central brain at this
time, each cell having a brain of its own.
Yesterday, while patrolling my beat down in the mine, in a drift in the
limestone, the earliest sedimentary deposit laid down on the bed of the
primeval ocean, I found the house of my archaic ancestor, willed to me
by him millions of years ago, and delivered by him to me yesterday. It
is a minute shell, with which he protected his precious stomach. This
stomach took its flight to Heaven in the earliest dawn of time, but the
house, one of the many mansions of the soul, preserved intact came down
to me through unnumbered ages, while myriad races came into being and
faded into eternity, and religions sprang up and flourished and waned,
and empires rose and rotted and fell.
In the next stage, the stomach has become elongated, and the nerve
centre or spinal cord makes its appearance along the whole length of the
body. At this period my beloved grandfather was a very aristocratic and
exclusive worm, belonging to one of the first families, and, like them,
had as much brains in his tail as in his head, for no cranial brain had
yet developed.
The remaining steps of the evolution, through which my ancestors have
passed, are depicted in the development of the human embryo, and I will
ask you to read up on the subject of embryology, which I have found
quite as interesting as dime novels.
Transcriber's Notes
Several obvious punctuation errors have been silently corrected.
Signa Tau was used consistently so it was not changed to Sigma Tau.
On pages 2 and 55, alter was changed to altar.
On page 71, metalic was changed to metallic, twice.
On page 83, phanton was changed to phantom.
On page 95, colaborated was changed to collaborated.
On page 97, tate-a-tate was changed to tête-à-tête.
On page 103, bear was changed to bare.
On page 121, polutes was changed to pollutes.
On page 127, Astral Word was Changed to Astral World.
Other variations in spelling, punctuation, accents and hyphenation
remain as in the original.
In Chapter III, the four symbols in the UTF-8 text version have been
approximated with UTF-8 characters which are very similar.
Italics are represented thus _italic_.