The Project Guttenberg eBook of King Solomon’s Goat by Willard Bartlett

CHAPTER III. Religious Symbolism.

This is the Egyptian Tau Cross, the symbol of Apis, the bull, and other male gods: . Here is the male emblem shown as the Masonic square, as found in the ruins of Gaza: . This is the Egyptian K. Ka is the Egyptian name of the male emblem. See “Hieroglyphics”, Ency. Brit. This holy god, in the form of a stone, is stuck in the wall of the Kaaba, the shrine at Mecca, which shrine was built by Abraham, who was fond of chasing after gods with tarnished reputations. This god in Mecca is a meteorite seven inches long, brought down from Heaven by Gabriel, and about 300,000 pilgrims annually kiss this foul, germ-laden god to save their tarnal souls.

And this is the cross ansata of Egypt, , or cross of anx (life), a combination of the cross of the bull and the sacred symbol of Isis. The High Priest of Egypt wore three cross ansatas and three links on his breast-plate, symbols of the trinity. Many of the pagan religions, from which ours descended, used only the main portion of the cross, the shaft or upright, the symbol of Siva, Baal Poer and Jehovah. It is called phalatz in Hebrew, meaning broken. See the broken column of the Masons—A. P. & M. C. Symbolism.

You place the three balls of the pawnbroker or the shamrock of Ireland on top of the shaft, and you have the most archaic form of the cross, before which the devils tremble and fall in a fit. Christian crosses, wreaths, bells, squares, eyes, Asherim and Baalim have been discovered in the ruins of Gaza, in the fourth city that was destroyed about 1600 B. C. The original text of Ezek. 9:4 shows that the sign of Jehovah was the Signa Tau, or the cross of Taurus, the bull, with which the elect were sealed in their foreheads. In the Enchiridion, a prayer book and book of magic credited to Pope Leo III, he says: “By this sign Lord Tau, deliver me.”

The male emblem, or triangle, placed in the circle of Asherah makes the Three in One, the profound and esoteric mystery forever hidden from the profane and vulgar. That is the sacred quartet, those are the idols we worship.

Turn to Siva, Stand. Dic., and you will see that he has stolen all the pious Christian symbols, although he existed for ages before the Christians. In one hand is the circle and in another hand a trident or fleur de lys, a male emblem. Around his neck is a large rosary or stole. Thrusting his male head through this female emblem is a symbol of life and a saving rite. Putting his hand through a rosary is just as effective. We can trace the spotless lineage of our beloved religion back through the dim vistas of time to a very archaic and rotten ancestry.

In both the Christian and pagan symbolism the oval in which the saints and gods do stand is often represented as composed of roses and constitutes a rosary. The horseshoe brings good luck because it is identical with the cave, the arch and the grove and is the sacred emblem of the goddess Mary or Astarte. Both Buddha and Christ are represented as standing in the horseshoe or Royal Arch. I conclude that the Masonic Holy Royal Arch and the oval above the church altar, in which the Virgin stands, represent the Grove that Manasseh set up in the House of the Lord, 2 Kings, 21, and that Josiah burnt at the brook Kidron, 2 Kings, 23:6. The stole, worn by the priests, is equivalent to, and has all the mystic powers of, the cross ansata. It is well named “stole”, as the early Christians stole it from the pagan worship.

Serapis, the Egyptian god, is bedecked and bedizened with all the Christian emblems. He holds the crook of the Good Shepherd in one hand and the cross ansata in the other. He has the head and horns of a bull, showing that he is the son of the cow Hathor or Mary. And over his head are the Masons’ marks, the square and the eye, showing that he is in good standing in his lodge in Hell, for he, like christ, is Lord of the Underworld.

Refer to Vishnu, Stand. Dic., and you will see that pagan god wearing all the above emblems. He is christ and came as Rama in the sign of the Ram and as Krishna in the sign of Pisces. Turn to Krishna, and you will see the Hindu Madonna and christ that we kidnapped.

In the Sun. Am. Magazine, Aug. 29, 1910, we see a picture of Isis mourning at the bier of Osiris. At Egyptian funerals they assured the dead of eternal life by raising the symbol of Isis, the circle or rosary above the body. You will see that the head of the deceased at the wake is surrounded by male emblems, which gross symbols are now replaced in the present civilization by candles. You will see that Isis is bowing down before the Tree of Life, and that she has at hand a basket of perforated cakes, which she is about to offer to the Tree of Life, which tree is called Osiris or Baal or Moloch or Buddha or Yahveh or Iao or Siva or Jove according to the country in which the religion is perpetrated. If you place a wreath on a dead man’s stomach and seven candles around his head, he is no longer a meet candidate for Hell, but an heir of eternal glory. If you stick a cross through the wreath, it is a through ticket to the seventh heaven, and you may be assured that he will go through purgatory a-humping.

CHAPTER IV. The Sabbatic Goat or God of the Sabbath.

When the sun entered the sign of Capricorn, it was reborn as, or christ came as the goat, that individual on whom the Jews used to load all their sins and then drive him forth into the wilderness. They sacrificed goats on the altar because the goat was one of the ancient redeemers. Caesar says of Egyptian sacrifices: “Imprecations were uttered over the head of the expiatory victim, around whose horns a piece of byblus was rolled. The animal was generally led to some barren region sacred to Typhon. It is in this custom that lies the origin of the scapegoat of the Jews, who, when the ass-headed god was rejected by the Egyptians, began sacrificing to another deity, the red heifer.”

It was claimed by Madam Blavatsky and Elephas Levi that the hermaphrodite Goat of Mendes, or Baphomet, was anciently an object of worship and adoration by the mystic societies and at the Witches’ Sabbath. In Mysteries of Magic, 7 and 75, the author thus describes a Witches’ Sabbath: “Approach stealthily this cross roads among the rocks. A hoarse and funeral trumpet is heard, lurid torches burn on every side, a disorderly assembly surges around an empty seat. All look around in expectation, then suddenly fall prostrate and mutter: ‘He is here, ’tis himself.’ A goat-headed prince comes forward with bounds, he ascends the throne, turns around and stooping presents his back to the audience, which everyone approaches, black taper in hand, to salute and to kiss. Then he stands up with a discordant laugh and distributes to his favorites gold, secret instructions, occult medicines and poisons.”

The Goat of Mendes is pictured by Elephas Levi as a regular god. He wears the male emblem on his head like all gods in good standing and holds up three fingers, and has the double triangle in his forehead, and the caduceus, or male and female emblems, on his stomach. With one hand he coagulates or creates, and with the other he dissolves or destroys.

“Let us say boldly and loudly that all the inferior initiates of the occult sciences and the betrayers of the Great Arcanum have adored, do and will always adore that which is signified by the frightful figure of the Sabbatic Goat. Yes in our profound conviction, the Grand Masters of the ancient orders of the Templars adored Baphomet.”—Elephas Levi. It will be seen by the chart that the Masonic coat of arms, consisting of the four zodiacal beasts, is supported on either side by the goat god Pan.

Pan, the Good Shepherd, the son of Deus, with the horns and feet of a goat, is the same as the Devil or christ. At the Witches’ Sabbath in England, the women made manikins, or images of men, of clay or wax, and these they worshipped and played with. And when these images were properly magnetized, they could perform miracles therewith and summon up demons from the abyss. If they possessed sufficient will power and knew the occult and secret form of words to use, they could play that the manikin was an enemy, and then stick him through the heart with a needle, and the next morning the enemy would be dead. If their magical power was sufficiently potent, they could summon a satyr or subordinate goat god to take the place of the manikin and consummate the Sabbatical marriage ceremony. Their spells were said to be sufficiently powerful to reduce a human being to the primordial protoplasm, and then cause it to again pursue the path of evolution through the cell, the blastoderm, the devil-fish and all the other beasts constituting eternity’s great highway by which the soul walks down. This is similar to the unavoidable cycle, the circle of necessity, the inexorable doom of the sacred mysteries of the Serpents’ Catacombs of Egypt.

The countersign of the Witches’ Sabbath was the closed hand with the thumb between the first and second fingers pointing downward to the abyss. The meeting place was lighted only by the altar fire, where the human sacrifice sizzled to attract the phantoms and ghosts. And the devotees, singing mystic songs, danced hand in hand in a circle around the god Pan. They used the holy grail like the churches and mystic societies, and the drafts from this poisonous cup, the singing, the whirling dance and the incense from the altar brought on the oft-times fatal frenzies in which the victims fell shrieking to the ground, as they do among certain Christian sects. They were seized and possessed by foul fiends from the Pit, or elementary spirits, and sometimes by the spirits of serpents that materialized themselves in the writhing human victims and crawled out of the prostrate bodies in plain view of the audience. There in the blackest hour of the night the Vinum Sabbati was prepared, a few grains of white powder thrown into a glass of water. And each one that drank found himself attended by a companion, a shape of glamour and unearthly allurement beckoning him apart to share in joys more exquisite, more piercing than the thrill of any dream.—Machen’s House of Souls, 438.

Similar to these convulsionaries are the miserable creatures in Russia afflicted by strange disorders, which people attributed to possession by the Devil. They throng the entrance of cathedrals without daring to enter, lest their controlling demons cast them on the ground. At the Elevation of the Host, these half maniacs, half mediums begin crowing like cocks, barking, bellowing and braying, and finally fall down in fearful convulsions. They prophesy and see visions. Paracelsus, the magician, could cast the demons out of the persons so possessed by the power of a stronger demon which he carried around in his pocket. That reminds us of the Salem witch that fled from a mob of Christolators who were intent on burning her, but when they were about to seize her, she crawled into a bottle, and nobody ever saw her afterward.

In the Devil’s Mass of the Yezdis, or Devil worshippers and sorcerers of Mesopotamia, the Jakshas or aerial spirits carry their prayers to the Devil and the Afrites of the desert. In their prayer meeting they dance in a ring about their high priest and whirl and leap in the air and cut each other with daggers until they are soaked with blood for the purpose of attracting the ghosts. The mystic circle induces Satan to manifest himself in miracles. Enormous globes of fire appear and assume the shapes of monsters.

The Sabbath was the Sunday of the Hebrew Kabalists, the day of their religious assembly, or rather the night of their habitual meetings. This festival, surrounded by mysteries as it was, found its safeguard in the very fright of the vulgar and escaped persecution through the terror it occasioned. The early Christians celebrated the pagan Mysteries of Jesus and probably held a Witches’ Sabbath.—See Mystic Christianity, 212.

One should trim his finger nails on Friday, never on Thursday, otherwise the nails will commence growing on the Sabbath, and it is very wicked for the nails to grow on the Sabbath.—Kabala. The Israelite, after the endless Sabbath observances, should fold up his veil, but if he forgets to do so, he is to shake it thoroughly the next morning, so as to shake all the devils out of it. And the reason is known to the Lords of the Kabala.—Kabala Kitzur Sh’lh. It is a very pious act to say a prayer to the moon at the close of the Sabbath, for the moon is a symbol of Jacob, the lesser light, (who was a christ). The full moon, the Queen of Heaven is his mother, and the sun is his father. The new moon is Jacob or Christ.—Ibid, fol. 72, col. 2. You should learn these things together with all the other profound wisdom of the Talmud, for Rabbi Yochannan says that it is lawful to split open an unlearned man like a fish.

Constantine, the Roman Emperor and canonized saint, the superstition-besotted, the assassin, the fratricide, the parricide, the uxoricide, the filicide, the regicide, chosen from Heaven as the murderer-in-chief of the world, according to Eusebius, “held up by God to the human race as an exemplary pattern of godliness and destined to share the Empire of Heaven with Christ,” this was the bloated, red-faced profligate who established Sunday worship in 321 A. D. and compelled the Christians to worship the sun-god on Dies Solis, the Day of the Sun, because his own god was Apollo.—See First Council of Nice, 28. Constantine was the founder of Christianity, and, like father like son, it followed in his footsteps. He could not obtain absolution for his crimes from pagan priests, but Eusebius washed them whiter than snow. Some said that Constantine had to sacrifice an infant to obtain the blood for the absolution.

CHAPTER V. The Great God Baal.

The palm tree, the candle and the Asherim are symbols and images of Baal, and the two last are offered up as sacrifices, corresponding to the pillars and candles in the worship of Jehovah. Around the temple of Jehovah as well as the temple of Baal, in the Holy Land, were the ancient nunneries. The Kadishim or Holy Ladies lived in tents arranged in a circle about the temple, and on each side of each tent or Fornix stood a Knight of Kadish. The pious people who desired to worship god gave up to the guard a shekel (sixty cents) and entered into the tent of the Kadish, and the money so collected went to the service of god, which means the priestly white slavers and the Worshipful Knights of Kadish. The Kadishim were the same as the Deva Dasi, the concubines and dancing girls of the Hindu temples, the slaves of the gods. “There is reason to believe that the Israelites at an early date applied the name of Baal to Jehovah. Baal was represented on the high places by pillars,” as the strange god of John’s Revelation is pictured on his throne.—“Baal,” Ency. Brit. One hundred of the most beautiful and seductive daughters of the people, innocent girls of tender age, were torn from their homes by the ruthless priests to fill the holy places of god around each temple. The priests by constant iteration convinced the parents that it was a high honor to be permitted to devote their daughters to god, and that as a reward, in the great hereafter, they would sit beside the Great White Throne with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the other Jews, and all the hod-carriers, who, having washed their robes white in the blood of the Lamb, sit on their little golden thrones with their dudeens in their mouths and their hats gently tilted over one eye, while they decorate with tobacco juice the dazzling surface of the crystal sea.

At the great temple of Baal, they had a palm tree standing in the midst of the garden, and in the holy temple of Jehovah they had a stone pillar around which the Kadishim, at the vernal equinox, danced in the nude. This is the day dedicated to Astarte, or Ishtar or Easter. This occult ceremony is one of the most beautiful and entrancing in our refulgent and god-given religion. As the Tree of Life stands in the midst of the circle of females, so the rays from the sun penetrate the earth and annually renew its life. So the rays of the sun at high noon penetrated the ark, that old box in which the priests kept the male and female emblems, and before which King David for occult reasons danced in the altogether. The ark corresponds with the sacred Argha of the Hindus, an oblong vessel, a sacrificial chalice, used in the worship of Isis, Astarte and Venus. It is a most holy symbol, containing, in the play, the germs of all living things, and when we drink out of it at the communion service, we drink eternal life. They planted the Tree of Life in the midst of the garden or grove, as God planted the tree in the midst of the Garden of Eden. You will notice the serpent coiled about the tree in Eden. This is the symbol of Life. The serpent is a symbol of the female.

The Israelites were commanded not to worship idols, but in the darkest hour of their history, when their own God, Jehovah, had sent upon them the plague of serpents and consigned them to destruction, then they called upon the mighty sun-god, they looked upon the brazen serpent on a cross, the Elevation of the Host, and the remnant of Israel was saved. Israel, it is said, worshipped the serpent or Devil until about 726 B. C. You will see this same god on the Masonic chart.

The Talmud says that when Ben Asai and Ben Zoma were to be initiated into the Garden of Delights, Ben Asai looked and lost his sight, and Ben Zoma looked and lost his reason. Eusebius shows that St. James, the brother of Jesus and first Bishop of Jerusalem, never shaved or took a bath, and he alone could enter into the holy places.

The merry maidens who circulate about the May-pole on May-day are devoted devotees of the loving god Baal Poer. And we on Palm Sunday carry palm leaves from the sacred palm tree to show that we are faithful worshippers of the true god Baal.

In Italy, the clergy had at one time, according to Isis Unveiled, 2-5, a thriving trade in those things which they called the holy limbs of Saints Cosmo and Damiano. These male emblems were made of wax and certainly beautiful to behold. The divine spirit shining through them in resplendent glory cast its radiance afar. He who was so fortunate as to possess sufficient filthy lucre to purchase one saved his immortal soul from Hell, for was it not the symbol of life and the image of the great god.

For the form of the pillar as worshipped in Syria, see page 121, A. P. & M. C. Symbolism, and on the mall of Boston Common may be seen the same pillar as adored by us at the Hub of Universal Culture, erected there to commemorate the birth of American liberty. Let us hope that you will get out early in the morning and see the blue-bellied Puritans and the codfish aristocracy kneeling before this sacred shrine, with their hands thrust through their rosaries, praying that this great god may make them fruitful.

“The superstition of Europe instead of being diminished by the introduction of Christianity was only turned into a fresh channel. The new religion was corrupted by the old follies, the worship of the Virgin was substituted for the worship of Cybele, the mother of the gods. March 25th, Lady’s Day, dedicated to Mary, was formerly called Hilaria and dedicated to Cybele. The religion of mankind is the effect of their improvement not the cause of it.”—Buckle’s Hist. Civ. 1-188.

CHAPTER VI. Jehovah, alias Adonai.

According to the Hebrew lexicon יה (Yh or Ih) is one of the names of God. Y, I and J. are interchangeable, and Jehovah is identical with the god Yah of the Philistines and Iach or Iachus or Bacchus and Iao or Io and Jove. Bel of the Babylonians is the Chaldaic form of Baal, and according to Herodotus is identical with Zeus, who is the same as Deus or Jehovah. Ja or Jagannatha, the idol of the Hindus, is said to smile when a human blood sacrifice is thrown before his car.

Jehovah Binah seemed to be a favorite divinity among the Masons. The name of this daemon, or subordinate goddess, is written on the serpent in the magic circle of King Solomon, which he employed in raising the Devil, and as Sabbath appears in her title, and she belongs to the sphere of Saturn or Moloch, I conclude that she was the goddess of the Witches’ Sabbath. There are ten persons in the Hebrew godhead, and she is the third, the supernal mother, the wife of Kether, consequently the mother of god. See Lesser Key of King Solomon, 47.

According to the Standard Dictionary, (see “Sephira”) Jehovah is not the Supreme God, there is a party named Kether above him, the Ancient of Ancients. Baal, Bel or El is the fourth, next below Binah. He is the god of love and mercy, with whom we have no truck. We prefer the God of Battles. Baal Poer was worshipped in the groves under the name of Adonis. It may be seen by reference to the Hebrew Kabala, Kitzur Sh’lh, fol. 62, col. 1, that Adonai is called the Rock of Ages, like Christ. Madam Blavatsky says that Iachoh, Iach and Lord Sabaoth, the Baal Adonis or Bacchus, who was worshipped in the groves and public sods or Mysteries, under the polishing hand of Ezra, becomes Adonai, the one and supreme god of the Christians. The codex of the Nazarenes says: “Thou shalt not worship the sun, who is called Adonai and Kadush and El El. This Adonai will elect to himself a nation, Jerusalem will become the refuge and city of the abortive, who shall circumcise themselves with the sword and shall adore Adonai.” Israel is the same as Adonis. It means son of the Lord Ra, the Egyptian sun-god. So Israel was one of the christs, and it was his duty to wrestle with the Devil, Moloch. And he had a right to put his brother out and take his place, as christ, the new moon takes the place of the old moon (called the old and ugly christ) and as Solomon killed Adonijah and took his place.

Haeckel says Jehovah was originally derived from the heaven god called Moloch and Baal, also Seth and Typhon of the Egyptians and Saturn of the Greeks.

David says: “Who shall ascend into the high place of the Lord (Iach, in the original)? who shall stand in the place of his Kadishu (holy ladies)?”—Psalms, 24:3. “Solomon went to the high place of Gibeon, for there was the Tabernacle of God.”—2 Chron. 1:3. You will see that the high places were the temples of a foul worship by reference to 1 Kings, 3:3.

Yahevah is the ineffable name for which the Hebrews substituted Adonai. The Bacchantes, in their orgies or feasts of Iachus, pronounced the mystic word “Io Evohe.” Ei Eh Ei is I Am the I Am, and Ei was found inscribed on the temple of Apollo.—Plutarch, 1:14. Eidol is a doll or image of the god Ei, or Kether.

Jehovah is identical with the god Brahma. Every 4,320,000,000 years all the planets in our solar system are in conjunction. This is one day of Brahma, 365 times that is one year, and one hundred of these years is the lifetime of Brahma, then god dies, and thereafter we have to worry along without him.

The Trinity, instead of being a new revelation of the Christian religion, was taken from the trinities of the older pagan religions. The Chinese, the Hindus, the Babylonians, the Persians and the Egyptians each had a triune or hydra-headed god, a nightmare of their imagination, without foundation in nature or reason. If we have the only true religion, how is it that the Mexicans, before this country was discovered by the savages of Europe, had the trinity, the rite of baptism, the sign of the cross and purgatory. They had the tradition of the flood and the escape of Noah, and they offered as an oblation little, dough, male images of their savior as we do at the communion service.

Some claimed that the astral light or ether was the supreme god, that one portion of it was male (spirit), and the other part was female (matter), and that the living forms of matter produced by the union of these two gods, are the third person of the trinity, the son of man. Others claim that the incomprehensible god back of the ether, of which the latter is an emanation, is the supreme god, and that the spiritual portion of the ether is the Word or Son, and the material portion of the ether is the mother, and the union of the son and the mother produces the phenomenal world. This a charming family relationship eminently appropriate to our pot-pourri of superstitions, called religion.

Manu, the Hindu lawgiver, says: “The Sovereign Master, who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the son, or material forms.” The first name of this hermaphrodite god in the picture writing was IO.

Haeckel says that the Christian God is a gaseous vertebrate. Socrates was put to death because he did not believe in the gods and introduced new demoniacal beings (spirits).

In the Sunday American Magazine was also a picture of the Rock of Ages, in fact two pillars or Asherim or images of Asher are shown, together with two circles or groves. They were found in the ruins of Gaza. These are the idols that Abraham, David and Solomon worshipped when they hit the high places. And we still revere them and have the shafts erected over our graves and the wreaths placed upon the shafts so that we may be born again. If you do not think that Moses worshipped this rock god read Deut. 32:8. “Of the rock that begat thee thou art unmindful.” There were only seven thousand in all Israel that had not kissed the pillar.—1 Kings, 19:18.

There was also found in the ruins of Gaza an oval medallion in which stood “Horus, the strong bull, resplendent in strength.” Why is the Infant Jesus of Prague placed in an oval medallion? Why is the oval, with the Lamb in the centre thereof, placed on the front of the Infant Jesus, as it is on the front of the Virgin Mary? This picture of the Infant Jesus is a mine of esoteric symbolism. He has his name embroidered on his rich, elaborate dress, to wit, I E S. He holds up three fingers as he was taught to do when he was the infant Buddha, and on his head is the seven-rayed headdress of Buddha, the god of the seven-rayed sun.

If you have catarrh, place a medallion of the Infant Jesus on your nose, and the catarrh will disappear.—Miraculous Infant Jesus of Prague, 30. A medal of the Divine Infant has been known to cure a sore thumb, if fastened in faith to the diseased member and accompanied by nine days prayer.—Idem 36. A man in financial difficulties made a novena (nine days prayer) to the Holy Child, and at the end of the devotions somebody gave him $35. Then he commenced another novena and was helped to win a prize in a lottery. Then he commenced the third novena, and Jehovah compelled a grasping mortgagee to discharge his mortgage on the devotee’s house, and another party gave him $10.—Idem 52.

In the Hebrew Bible you will see that Bethel, or house of God, referred to in Genesis, 28:19, is spelt Bath Al, which means the house of the sun or sun-god, the same as Bothal or Brothel, the temple of worship of the Druids and Indians, a circle of twelve monoliths with a pillar in the centre, also called paradise. We changed the vowels and made it read Beth El, as we did not care to have our God related to such trash as Al and Allah, the Arabian god.

Arius and the Council of Nice agreed that the Son is called Wisdom. Refer to “Sephira,” Stand. Dic., and you will see that Jehovah is named Wisdom and that he is the son of, or first emanation from Kether, consequently it is claimed that he is one of the christs. The only gods ever worshipped were the sun and his wife, the moon, to whom he was not legally married. The idols are images of incarnate sun-gods.

CHAPTER VII. The Host, a Human Sacrifice.

The Monstrance was a conventionalized Assyrian Grove, containing the Host, the male and female emblems, and corresponded with the Ark and was transparent, so that the devotees could look on the blessed symbols and live forever. It was called the Monstrance because it contained the hermaphrodite monster, now or formerly worshipped by the devotees of all religions. The directions of St. Cyril, of Jerusalem, were: “After kissing all the brothers and sisters, you touch the consecrated things to the eyes, nose, mouth and ears.” See Ency. Brit. 8:632.

Under the mediumship of Eugene Vintras in Paris, the Devil placed his signature on the Hosts of the Church in characters of blood. The Abbe Charvoz brought one of the miraculously marked Hosts, bearing the signature of Satan, to Elephas Levi. One of the signatures was the Caduceus of the Greeks, the emblem of the Godhead, two serpents entwined about a rod, but the rod was omitted. Levi calls it the Typhonian sign manual because by omitting the rod, it thus denies the existence of the Supreme God Jehovah. The Devil, in the stigmata, asserts that there are only two gods, the two powers of the astral light, attraction and repulsion, the creator and the destroyer.—Mysteries of Magic.

“In the case of Father Gerard in 1731, who was tried at Aix, in France, for resorting to sorcery in the seduction of his parishioner, Mlle. Catherine Cadiere, it was shown that he breathed upon her, and that she instantly conceived a violent love for him and had extatic visions and hysterical convulsions, and stigmata or blood marks of the Passion appeared upon her, that is, the bleeding marks of thorns on her brow, of nails in her hands and feet, and of a lance cut in her side. Of the twenty five judges, twelve voted to send the priest to the stake.”—Isis Unveiled, 2-633.

The doctrine of transubstantiation, or the myth that the bread and wine become the actual body and blood of God, originated among the Hindus, and we stole it from them. The god Brahma was the astral light or magnetism, and when the priests charged the hosts with magnetism, they were charged with god, and consequently were gods. It is said that each separate part of this blood sacrifice is a Christ, so thousands of Christs were served up at a feast to be eaten by the savage devotees, and each cannibal ate a whole Christ to save his dastard soul. It is called the Host because they knifed him or struck him down, and it is called the Eucharist because they rejoice over his death and make a joyful feast upon the carcass. The Eucharist is one of the oldest rites of antiquity, instituted many hundreds of years before the Lord’s Supper. It was a repetition of the drama in Eden in commemoration of the fall into generation. By the worship of the foul idols in the Monstrance, by the idolatry of the Eucharist the pagans euchred the Devil out of their souls.

The Eucharist was a human sacrifice. The devotees groveling in abject superstition, offered up their Christ on the reeking, blood-stained altar, and ate his flesh and drank his blood to wash their sins away. At the twelfth general council of the Church, the bread and wine was made the flesh and blood of Christ, and at the Council of Trent they added the soul. So at the orgies, the depraved devotee destroyed both the body and soul of his savior by casting him into his carrion carcass, into that charnel house, into that cavernous and loathsome inferno, from which there is no escape, there to rot and disintegrate and forever die. Thus they subjected their savior to the foulest method of annihilation to save their worthless souls from Hell.

At the Passover the Jews sacrificed over 250,000 lambs to propitiate some blood-loving god. The altars and courts of the Temple ran red with the life blood of these innocent creatures. And certain beasts still sing: “And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.” “Such a blood-sacrifice is unworthy of any people except the worshippers of some heathen devil-god in darkest Africa.”—Mystic Christianity, 65.

When Richard, Robert, Sarah and Isabella Bartlett, at Lincoln, England, in 1521, expressed their opinions too freely on religious matters, they were burned at the stake by Bishop John Longland, but they were a pestiferous and seditious lot. They even objected to eating the male emblems, or images of the male, on communion day, and these double-dyed heretics denied the real presence of either Christ or Priapus in the images.

Here is what Taine says as to this affair: “The Bishops had received the right of imprisoning without trial laymen suspected of heresy, and the jurisdiction of all crimes, offenses and sins was given to the ecclesiastical tribunals. They burned Lord Cobham alive. With what shamelessness this power was transformed into a vehicle for extortions. A man begins to think when he is thus downtrodden. He asks himself if it is really by divine dispensation that mitred thieves thus practice tyranny and pillage. He wants to know if they themselves practice the regularity that they impose on others, and he learns strange things. Cardinal Wolsey writes to the Pope that both the secular and regular priests were in the habit of committing atrocious crimes, for which, if not in orders, they would have been promptly executed. A priest convicted of incest with the prioress of Kilbourn was condemned to carry a cross in a procession and pay a fine of 3s and 4p. In the reign of Henry VII the gentlemen and farmers of Carnarvonshire laid a complaint accusing the clergy of systematically seducing their wives and daughters. The Holy Father Prior of Maiden Bradley hath but six children, and but one daughter married yet of the goods of the monastery, trusting shortly to marry the rest. The royal visitors found concubines in the secret apartments of the Abbots. At the nunnery of Sion the confessors seduced the nuns and absolved them at the same time. There were convents, Burnett tells us, where all the recluses were found pregnant.”—Taine’s English Literature, 2-18.

“Bishop Longland, of Lincoln, about 1521, summons the relatives of the accused, brothers, women and children, and administers the oath. As they have already been prosecuted and have abjured, they must make oath, or they are relapsed, and the fagots await them. Then they denounce their kinsmen and themselves. Three of the accused were charged with passing the night together in reading the scriptures. Several of them at church, at the moment of the Elevation would not say their prayers and remained seated dumb as beasts. A brazier denied the real presence. Six were burnt alive. The children of John Scrivener were themselves obliged to set fire to their father’s funeral pyre. They saw him, bound by an iron chain, with clasped hands, praying amidst the smoke, whilst the flame blackened his skin and destroyed his flesh. Such sights are not forgotten.”—Idem.

“At the peril of his life the Englishman obtains some portion of the Bible, which Tyndale had just translated, and hides it and learns it by heart. Tyndale, the translator, was condemned, hunted, in concealment, his mind full of the idea of a speedy death and of the Great God, for whom at last he mounted the funeral pyre.”—Idem, 2-21.

If you do not believe that Priapus is christ, see Ency. Brit. 19-170, where he is represented as the shepherd god with a shepherd’s crook, and as the god of the vineyards and of fishermen, giving them abundant harvests. And sailors, in their sore distress, called upon him as Peter did.

“The Masons, in the darkness, hunt for Hiram Abiff, as the worshippers in the Eleusinian Mysteries hunted for their lost Cora.” In the grand finale the Mystics say: “I have taken the emblems from the kiste, and after kissing and tasting them, I have deposited in the bag, and from the bag back into the kiste.”

In the first illustrated English Bible, the Devil will be seen, wearing a pair of wings and a Hebrew nose, tempting Eve. He says: “Take this fruit, bite it and taste it.” You will see that the thing presented to her is not an apple at all, but the emblem of Ashtoreth. See Sun. Am. Mag. Dec. 20, 1914. You will also find in another illustration there the angel Gabriel, with the Word strapped on his back, descending into Hell to deliver the souls in torment.

Yesterday in passing a great church, when I raised my eyes to the cross, I there beheld on each arm of the cross, the circle, the same revered article that the Devil offered to Eve. This blessed and holy symbol is found engraven over the portals of the eternal rock temples of the ruined city of Petra, Arabia, that flourished in the time of Esau and his son Edom, as well as over the doors of the ancient churches of Ireland, and on the modern cathedrals. In fact this aesthetic Eye worship extends around the world, starting in the slums of India, it has circled the globe.

The Christian religion was copied largely from the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were founded at the city of Eleusis, near Athens. These mysterious rites were employed in the worship of Demeter or Mater, the mother god, or Mary. In these Mysteries the worshippers indulged in the foul orgies of the Agape. The men carried male emblems or Signa Taus, and the females carried the kiste or box. Placing the Signa Tau in the kiste caused them to be born again and saved their souls from Tophet.

CHAPTER VIII. Jesus Christ.

If the clergymen tell you that there is only one christ, politely present them with the seal of Belial. Each of the principal religions had twelve christs. Christ was never crucified, but the human race was crucified by religion from its very inception, and the Christian world wallowed in the Egyptian darkness of ignorance and superstition till in the middle ages, the golden age, no king in Europe could read and write.

Christ is the same as Agni, the sun god of the Aryans, who was called the Son of God and the Son of Man. The god Agni is represented by us by the idol, the Agnus Dei, the Ram God, that holds in his hoof a cross and some banner, perhaps the blood-stained banner of the Inquisition. Adam Kadmon, Enoch, Horus, Krishna, Ormazd, and Hermes, the patron of thieves and flocks, the son of Deus and Maia, these and many other gods are all identical with christ. Noah was the christ that came in the sign of the Waterman 25,868 years ago. In the Babylonian legend the deluge continued seven days, and the ship landed on Mt. Niser. This is a resurrection of the great god Dionysius or Bacchus, and the first thing he did when he got ashore was to get drunk. He is also Jehovah Nissi or the Egyptian god Osiris who was born on Mt. Nissa or Sinai in the month of Nisan or Easter.

Sephir Toldos Jeshu, a Kabalist, says: “A virgin named Mariam, betrothed to one Johannan was outraged by another man named Joseph Panther. Her betrothed left her. The child born was Jesus, named Joshua, adopted by his uncle Rabbi Jehosuah. He was initiated into the secret doctrines by Rabbi Elhanan, a Kabalist, and then by the Egyptian priests, who consecrated him High Pontiff of the Universal Secret Doctrine. Upon his returning to Judea his learning and powers excited the jealousy of the rabbis, and they publicly reproached him with his origin and insulted his mother.”

According to the Pretevangelium Jacobi, “From her third to her twelfth year Mary was in the Temple. When she became of nubile age, lest she should defile the Sanctuary of the Lord, she was committed to the guardianship of Joseph, an elderly man and a widower with a family. When the Virgin’s pregnancy was discovered, Joseph and she were brought before the high priest, and though asserting their innocence in all sincerity, were acquitted only after they had been tried with the water of the ordeal of the Lord.”—Ency. Brit. 15:590. Mary was then a virgin and ever after remained so, although she had other children.

The author does not believe that either of the above passages refers to the Christian Jesus. He is an Egyptian or Hindu deity, not a Jew.

The christs were all illegitimate. Their parents, the sun and moon, would have complied with the idiotic human laws if there had been any magistrate in Heaven to marry them. There was Asphalius of Greece, born of the Virgin Ethra out of wedlock. Then there are Romulus and Remus, alias Castor and Pollux or Gemini, the Twins of the zodiac. They were sons of a Vestal Virgin named Rhea. King Amulius, corresponding with Herod, commanded his servant to destroy the two children, but the servant put them in a trough or ark, and they floated on the river as Moses, who was also a christ, did in his ark, and as the males and females did in Noah’s Ark. Their mother claimed that their father was the god Mars. Unmarried ladies, in those halcyon days, always put their children up to the gods.—See Plutarch, 1:33.

Christ is a mythical sun-god, a rebirth of the sun in a new sign of the zodiac. The Church Fathers, in localizing the Christ in the Holy Land, could claim that any Jesus of that region was the Son of God, either Jesus, the bandit of Galilee, or the one described above, as long as his name corresponded with the I E S of Egypt, and as long as he was dead and could not defend himself. According to Josephus, the Jesus that lived in the reign of King Agrippa and Herod the Tetrarch was Jesus of Galilee, the captain of a band of robbers, a wicked man, a seditious person and an innovator, the leader of a tumult of mariners and poor people. He sacked the temple at Samaria. See Life of Josephus, 5.

Renan says that Philo, who died about 50 A. D., and who was born before Jesus, and who lived in Palestine during the alleged preaching of Christ, had never heard of him. Josephus does not mention a Christian sect at all. The Emperor Adrian called the Christians worshippers of Serapis, and that was probably the truth. Serapis is the Devil, with horns, Lord of the Underworld.

Christna, Apollo, Zeus and others, like Christ, were good shepherds. The Hindus represent Christna as crucified on the cross between two thieves, with the nail marks in his hands, and with a crown of seven points to show that he is the seventh avatar. His father was a carpenter, and he slew the great serpent Caliva and was worshipped in India ages before the Christian Era.

The doctrine of Christ and the atonement originated in heathendom. It came from the pagan sacrificers of human beings and the eaters of human flesh in human gore imbued. They took the doctrine from the Chaldean Kabala. It is a pagan myth. Bacchus or Dionysius was the god of the vine, and his worshippers drank his blood to wash their sins away. He was the son of Deus or Zeus and an earthly mother. He was slain or sacrificed at the winter solstice and went down into Hell. Hera, who corresponds with Herod, sought Bacchus to slay him. He was honored by festivals at Christmas, when the sun died, and at Easter when it was resurrected. His emblems were the bull, the ass and the goat. The Christians of Rome were ridiculed for worshipping an ass-headed god. The symbol of the Bacchic orgies is named Eva or Heva, identical with the serpent raised by the Hebrews in the wilderness. Heva means a female serpent and constitutes a part of god, the second part of the name Yaheva. The first part of that hermaphrodite god is Ya, the male, and the last part is Heva, the female, or serpent, or Devil.

Christ not only never rose from the dead, but he never existed. The doctrine of vicarious atonement is a lie and a farce. The Christian’s hope of escaping Hell by cowardly allowing another to suffer for his sins, has taken wings and flown away.

The Gnostics, one of the earliest Christian sects, formerly called Essenes, claimed that Christ was a phantom, that he was neither born nor suffered on the cross. See Book of All Religions, 213. Origen believed the same. He tells of the popular irrational Christianity based on the fictitious gospel history devised to assist the masses, who could not comprehend a spiritual christ.—Mystic Christianity, 211.

Madam Blavatsky says that this abominable doctrine of the forgiveness of sins is the cause of three fourths of the crimes of so-called Christians. The murdered victim goes to Hell in the midst of his sins, but the murderer receives absolution and goes to Heaven and sits with Christ beside the Golden Throne. The Parsis say: “If any of you commit sin under the belief that he shall be saved by somebody, both the deceiver as well as the deceived shall be damned to the day of Rasla Khaz. There is no savior. In the other world you shall receive the return according to your actions. Your savior is your good deeds.” Plato says in 2-187: “Even if there are gods, they can be bribed by prayers and offerings, so it is better to be unjust and offer of the fruits of injustice to the gods. By our sinning and praying and praying and sinning, the gods will be propitiated, and we shall be forgiven.”

The Jews offered seven lambs at the new moon because the Lamb came seven times. It is to be noted that they gave none of the offering to God except the refuse, the extremities and the fat and the lobe of the liver, but the priests had the breast and the right shoulder. The Lord and the mob were welcome to the offal.

We are saved by the blood of christ or Priapus, but the Jews were saved by the blood of the circumcision of Abraham, who was also a christ. “Abraham was circumcised on the day of the atonement, and God looks that day annually on the blood of the covenant of our father Abraham’s circumcision as atoning for all our iniquities.”—Talmud Yalcut Chadish, fol. 121, sec. 3.

When the young and beautiful philosopher, Hypatia, disclosed these sacred religious secrets in Egypt about 412 A. D., she was torn from her chariot by a Christian mob, dragged to a Christian church, stripped naked and ravished at the very feet of the idol of Christ, and then beaten to death by Peter, the Reader. Her body was cut into pieces, the flesh scraped from the bones with oyster shells, and the remnants cast into the fire by the order of the canonized saint, Bishop Cyril of Alexandria.—Ency. Brit. 12:596.

A Nazar or Nazarene, according to Hosea, was one who had consecrated himself to Bosheth, (a shameful thing, a foul idol.) It was in Nazareth that the Nazarenes anciently held their Witches’ Sabbath. Bosher is the Hebrew name of the Tree of Infamy. The “Sod of the Kadishim,” Psalms, 89:7, is rendered by the translators “Assembly of the Saints,” when it was in truth an orgy of the ladies devoted to the service of the Temple. Sod was the name given to the vile assemblies in the ancient Mysteries in Sodom, and the nature of the sacred ceremonies may be gathered from the name. They were the same as those of the ancient Christian Agape or Love Feast.

It is claimed that Apollonius of Tyana was the original of Christ, for the former was worshipped in Rome in the third century as the savior of man, and that no such person as Jesus Christ was then known. There was a sect that worshipped the Hindu Christos. Their religion was a mixture of Buddhism and Platonism, and their chief symbol was the phallic cross within the circle. The Christian religion takes its name and symbols from this Hindu religion. See Antiquity Unveiled, 98. Lucian says that the Christians spoke of Apollonius, called in Romans Apollos, as a god and took him for a lawgiver, and honored him with the title of Master.

Prior to the sixth Ecumenical Council, 680 A. D., the Christians worshipped an animal idol, the lamb on a cross, but it was found from ancient monuments that the pagans had worshipped the same idol. So the Council decreed that the figure of a man should be placed on the cross, Christ was not nailed to the cross until 680 A. D. and then by the Ecumenical Council.—Idem 161.

The pagan priests, at a very early date in the present era, finding that they were losing their hold on the people, concocted from pagan originals a new religion called the Christian. As a sop to the depraved and besotted worshippers of virgin-born gods, they alleged that their god was born of the Virgin Mary, and they seized upon and falsified the Hindu gospels, containing the life of Buddha, till they were made to appear to apply to the life of Christ. In order to bolster up this foul imposition and conceal the origin of Christianity, they destroyed the records of Grecian, Egyptian and Roman civilization and sank the world in darkness for a thousand years, filling it with woe and bloodshed. The success of this crime against their fellowmen set back the hands of time two thousand years. See Doubts of Infidels.

The doctrine of blood atonement came from Phoenicia, where they continually indulged in human sacrifice. In the event of an eclipse of the sun, the priests burned a man on a cross at the altar of the sun-god to avert the threatened calamity. “From the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour.” And on these altars, 2600 B. C., was I H S or I E S. As the E or H in Egyptian hieroglyphics is a circle, this sign was originally I O S. I represents the father god, and O the mother god, and S represents the son or serpent. The serpent was crucified on the cross by the Egyptians and Jews as a saving rite.

At the church festival of Tezcatlipoca in Mexico, they chose a prisoner as the incarnate representative of god and placed a garland and an embroidered mantle upon him, as the Jews did on Christ. Then they led him to the temple, where the priest cut his heart out and held the sacred bleeding heart up to the sun, and his body was eaten by the church members, as we eat the body of our Savior.

Rev. Robert Taylor says in his Diegesis: “Not a single passage written in the first century can be produced from any independent authority to show the existence of such a person as Jesus Christ or his disciples.” The silence of all contemporary writers respecting Jesus Christ is a notorious fact. Philo, Seneca, Plutarch, Juvenal, Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Lucian, who lived in that period, make no allusion to his works, nor even mention his name.—Doubts of Infidels, 66.

The christ Prometheus died for the salvation of the world and was nailed on the cross many hundreds of years before the Christian Era. And the christ Esculapius, the Great Physician, healed the sick and raised the dead and died in the West and rose again in the East.

Jonah was a christ or sun-god. The sign of the Goat in the Buddhist zodiac is represented by a leviathan or whale vomiting out the sacred Elephant, or sun, or Son of God. When the sun entered the sign of the Leviathan in December it was swallowed by the whale, but was vomited out again three days later on the 25th of December, when the sun commenced to return. Hence the story of Jonah and the whale, which has been so hard to swallow, and which has taxed our piety to the limit.

Ies is the Phoenician name of the god Bacchus. Ies, or Iesu, or Jesus was stolen from the Phoenicians and Egyptians, and the god Christos was taken from the Hindus and thrown together into the melting pot of Potoman of Alexandria, and out came Jesus Christ. Potoman compiled the Christian religion from Hindu, Greek and Egyptian originals.

If God made man in his own image, why does he have to be redeemed? It is true that man stubbed his toe and fell, but it was because he obeyed the command of God to increase and multiply. The Yogis claim that Christ was not virgin born, but was a virgin spirit split off of God and came to redeem the world. If he redeemed the world, how is it that the people are worse now than they ever were, that the history of his religion has been a history of depravity, vice, crime, murder and carnage, which has now culminated in a world-orgy of savagery, pillage and slaughter, of which the fiends in Hell would be incapable? How is it that the beasts, which have never been redeemed, the doves, the rabbits, the lambs, the deer, are far superior to us who were bought by the blood?

CHAPTER IX Hell-fire and Brimstone.

We are in Hell now. Rabbi Eleasher says that “the demons who were cast out of Heaven and the descendants of the witless progeny of matter and spirit became in the course of time the men of our planet, after having passed through every form of every one of the elements.”

Where did the Church dig up Hell? The Scandinavian Hell is not a place of punishment, but simply the abode of the dead. The dictionary says that Hades, the Hell of the Bible, is the abode of all the departed, the unseen spirit world. The Shoel of the Hebrews is the place of departed spirits, not a region of torment. The Underworld or Amenti, of the Egyptians, is a region of judgment and purification. The Onderah, the abyss of darkness of the Hindus, is an intermediate state or purgatory. Whence then came the dogma of Hell, that Archimedean lever of Christian theology, with which they have succeeded in holding in subjection the numberless millions of Christians for nineteen centuries.—Isis Unveiled.

Here is where Eusebius and the other Biblical writers got Hell. According to Mahabad, the christ and Adam of the Parsees, who wrote all the laws of God, Hell is peopled with ants, serpents and scorpions, ignorant, sick and indigent men and irreligious philosophers, and on account of the detestable qualities of the later, the ants, serpents and scorpions pounce upon and torture them. This is the Hell of Hells.—Dabistan, 81.

In the chart of the cosmogony of the Kabalists, representing their idea of the creation of the universe, the last and most insignificant creation is the earth, which they have labeled Hell, the abode of the Devil, the Kingdom of the Great Serpent according to the Buddhists.

In the religious Mysteries, if the soul has attained the final knowledge of the heavenly and infernal mysteries, the gnosis, complete reunion with the spirit, and knows the Word, at the death of the body, it becomes a god, or is absorbed into the soul of the world, the astral light, and becomes one of the creative deities or Elohim. If not, it has its part in the lake of fire and brimstone (the elements), the second death. This death is the gradual dissolution of the astral body into its primal elements and the banishment of the human spirit or electron into chaos.

Elephas Levi and many of the wise ones have said that the astral light is the Great Serpent or Devil, so we will go to the Devil anyway, no matter which path we pursue. What difference does it make whether we are united to the astral light or the material ether? All the atoms of all the elements have individual souls.

Krishna, the Hindu christ, Horus, the Egyptian christ, the Scandinavian Thor, the Greek Apollo and St. Patrick, the Irish christ, are all represented as killing the Great Serpent, the Devil. All of the christs, including Buddha, Bacchus, Hercules, Orpheus and Askelapius, as well as Jesus, descended into Hell and ascended again the third day. According to the Gospel of Nicodemus, Christ found Adam, Moses, David, Isaiah and all the other saints there, and as they had been burning in Hell several thousand years, their wings were pretty well singed and they were badly mussed up, but Christ took them by the hands and led them up to the Hebrew heaven, where the three balls are worshipped, together with the ass-headed god. The Devil had no one left to rule over except the depraved, uncircumcised gentiles and the elemental demons. The Gentiles cannot get past the gates of Tophet, but must linger for a time, and half a time, and ten thousand times while they do battle with the phantoms of Hell and wrestle with the Serpent of the Great Abyss.

“The Presbyterian clergy of Scotland delighted in telling their hearers that they would be roasted in great fires and hung up on hooks by their tongues. They were to be lashed with scorpions and see their companions writhing and howling around them. They were to be thrown into boiling oil and scalding lead. A river of fire and brimstone broader than the earth was prepared for them, their bones, their lungs and their liver were to boil but never be consumed, and while worms were gnawing at their bodies, they were to be surrounded by devils mocking and making pastime of their pains, the torment to be varied in its character as well as eternal in its duration. Hell was created before man came into the world, the Almighty having spent his previous leisure in preparing this place of torment, so that when the human race appeared, it might be ready for their reception.”—Buckle’s Hist. Civ. 2-293.

Hell is the lowest of the astral planes, in the immediate atmosphere of the earth, where the most of us go. Heaven is the highest of the spiritual planes, where God lives, but as nobody to speak of ever goes there, no one on the astral ever saw God or can make affidavit that he exists, and any spirit that claims that he has seen God is either deceiving us or is himself mistaken. He may have seen some astral idol, formed from the astral substance by the imagination and worshipped by the religion-besotted spirits. “The aura of the spirits in the lowest astral plane is the same as that of wicked human beings, a dark, cloudy or smoky emanation, streaked with the red flames of anger and passion. Deep shades of color whirl and swirl in the depths, lightning-like flashes shoot forth, and great bodies of lurid, smoky, clouds fly on the surface, having all the appearance of an inferno, and the region itself has the same aura, derived from the combined auras of its inhabitants. It is not surprising that the witches and wizards of the Bible, who could see by clairvoyant vision, described it as a Hell of fire and brimstone.”—Human Aura, 45.

According to the religion of Zoroaster, “Hell is the House of Destruction. It is the abode chiefly of the priests of bad religions,” that is, all religions except the Persian, but this is not to be taken seriously, as every religion is a joke. Here we have the original doctrine of the resurrection of the body, which our Christian ministers have had the consummate nerve to preach even here in this age of the world.

Mark Twain says in “The Mysterious Stranger”: “A God who mouths justice and mercy and invented Hell, mouths golden rules and forgiveness and invented Hell, who mouths morals to other people and has none himself, who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all, who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of placing it where it belongs upon himself.” The trouble with Mark was that he accepted as true all that silly superstition, all those puerile fairy tales, all those black lies from the Pit of Hell written and taught by the old priests and prophets. God never created the human race, he never made Hell. This cruel remark of Mark is libelous, almost bordering on blasphemy.

Read what the insane Church Fathers said: “There in Hell the intelligent fire burns the limbs and restores them, feeds on them and nourishes them.”—Felix.

The proud monarchs and magistrates (and everybody but the Christians) shall liquefy in the fierce flames of Hell.—Tertullian.

We shall be compensated by a perpetual spectacle of our persecutors in an ever-burning Gehenna being devoured by living flames.—Cyprian.

Ling or the Word is the Commander-in-chief of the universe.—Clement.

Every sinner kindles for himself the flame of his own fire, and is not plunged into some fire kindled by another.—Origen.

The wicked will be provided not with the old earthly body, but with an indestructible body capable of holding out forever against everlasting fire.—Lactantius.

The whole mass of the human race is condemned. If we can pray the wicked out of Hell, we can pray the devils out.—Augustine.

Everybody, infants included, go to Hell, unless they are baptized.—Ambrose.

There shall be eternal torments for all devils and skeptics.—Jerome.

Votive offerings by the living will reduce the torments of the dead. The blessed shall rejoice over the punishment of the damned.—Aquinas.

CHAPTER X. The Devil.

Christ overcame the Great Serpent, the Devil, and the Irish Bacchus, St. Patrick, drove all the snakes out of Ireland. The drunken Bacchus, whose Saturnalia was held on the 17th of March, when they poured out libations to him, was canonized and is now St. Bacchus, and his coffin and relics, endowed with magical and miraculous powers, were exhibited at Rome according to Isis Unveiled, 1:160.

Deus was Dyaus of the old Aryan or earlier Persian religion. Dyaus means to shine, and was a name of the sun. The followers of Zoroaster asserted that Dyaus was the Devil, and if they were right, it follows that Deus is the Devil. In this connection read the Lord’s Prayer, in which the ignorant worshipper endeavors to persuade the Lord not to lead him into temptation. According to the writers of the Bible, who were probably liars, He hardened the heart of Pharaoh, commanded the Israelites to steal, put an evil spirit into Saul and sent lying messages to the prophets. In Samuel it says that the Lord moved David to number Israel, but according to Chronicles it was the Devil who put him up to it. The words divine and devil are from Deva, the shining one, the Hindu god of light. Light is also luc, and Lucifer is a sun-god identical with Yahvah. The worshippers of Dyaus said that Ahura Mazda, of the Zoroastrians was the Devil. Ahura Mazda means I Am the I Am, and he is our God, the supreme God of the Hebrews, Kether, the father of Jehovah. According to the early Christians, the Gnostics and Nazarenes, the creator was Ilda Baoth, but in the Gospel of Nicodemus Ilda Baoth is Satan. Aaron sacrificed human beings to Azazel, identical with Moloch or the Devil. The Bible says that “man shall devote unto the Lord of all that he hath, both of man and beast. None devoted shall be redeemed, but shall surely be put to death.” We conclude that god and the Devil are one, that Brahma, Buddha, Dyaus, Ahura Mazda, Baal, Osiris, Jove, Bacchus, Christ, Priapus, Adonis, Deva and Devil are different names of the same god, and that god is a myth.

The Devil is an emanation of god. He is Typhon, also called Sat and Seth in the Egyptian religion. The Ency. Brit. says that he is a brother or son of Osiris, and we have shown that Osiris and god are one, so we conclude that the Devil is the son of god as claimed in Job, 1:6. The Salvation Army says: “You must be a lover of the lord if you want to go to Heaven when you die.” So you must love the Devil and all these beasts of pagan gods, or you will have to shovel coal while the endless years of eternity roll.

The Pentagram, by the power of which Solomon could summon the high gods to his assistance or call up the goblins damned, represents God when one horn of the star is in the ascendent or at the top, but when the two horns are in the ascendent, it represents the Devil or the goat. When Solomon summoned Gabriel to help him capture a new girl, the head of the star, on which is the mystic eye, was pointed toward the altar of evocation. But if he wished to raise the Devil, the horns of the goat were pointed toward the altar. In the infernal invocation Solomon wore a leaden cap, on which were the signs of the Moon, Venus and Saturn. He had two candles of human fat in a crescent candlestick, a copper vase holding the blood of the human victim, a censer containing incense moistened with the blood of a goat, four nails from the coffin of an executed criminal, the head of a black cat which has been fed on human flesh for five days, a bat drowned in blood, the horns of an immoral goat, the scull of a parricide. Then Solomon says in the evocation of the Devil: “By Adonai Elohim (the Creator), Adonai Jehovah (the Son), Adonai Sabbaoth (the Mother), by the womb of the Mother Adonai, by the Word of the Python and the Mystery of the Salamanders, by the Conclave of the Sylphs and the Gnomes, by the Demons of God in Heaven and Alamousin and Gibor, Come! Come! Come!”

On the Pentagram is the mystic word יחוח, Yahvah, the spelling of which indicates that it represents two hermaphrodite gods. יח, Yah, is the good god, and וח, Vah, is the god of evil. The good god is represented in a pack of cards by the king of hearts, the god of love, and his wife, the queen of diamonds. And the hermaphrodite god of evil is represented by the king of spades and his wife, Lilith, the queen of clubs. Aristotle said that Jehovah was Ormazd, the god of light, and Pluto, the god of darkness. Jehovah is the God of Wisdom, so is the Egyptian serpent god, called Sat or Satan.

The serpent god is the astral light, the magnetic current. The priests by their great will power could direct this current at pleasure and perform the wonders and miracles that held enthralled their besotted devotees. They claimed that they were serpents because the serpent god magnetism permeated their bodies. A manuscript found among the Toltecs of Mexico asserted that they were descended from the house of Israel. Voltan, the Mexican demigod, says that he is the son of the snakes. The hierophants of Egypt and Babylon called themselves the sons of the serpent god. The chief priest of the serpent god of the Mexicans says: “I am a snake myself.” The Druids of Britain used to say: “I am a serpent, I am a Druid.”—Isis Unveiled.

Cneph or Cohen Eph (divine serpent) of Egypt was the supreme god, the flying dragon, the divine spirit permeating all creation, like the serpent god of the Buddhists. This spirit is electricity. The Ophites, Christian Gnostics, claimed that the serpent that tempted Eve was Jesus Christ, the Great Architect of the Universe, or Cohen Eph. Eve represented matter, and the spirit permeating matter produces living beings.

The astral light is both god and the Devil, the creator and the destroyer and also the Nirvana of the Buddhists. It is the Ah of the Hindus, or Iah or Eh Ei Eh of the Hebrews. It is life or the life-giving fluid. It is the Od and Ob of Moses and the Kabalists. When it acts on those that are drawn within its current it is the Ob or Python. Moses was determined to exterminate those witches who, sensitive to its influence, allowed themselves to fall under the control of the vicious beings which move in the astral waves like fish in the water.—Isis Unveiled, 1-158. Porphery says that “these beings are mischievous and deceitful, though some are gentle and harmless, but so weak as to have the greatest difficulty in communicating with mortals. Their powers of reasoning are in a latent state, and therefore they themselves irresponsible.” But St. Augustine says: “These spirits are deceitful through malice. They pass themselves off for gods and for the souls of the defunct.” St. Jerome says that some of these elementary spirits or satyrs, with the legs and tails of goats, were exhibited at Alexandria, and one of them was pickled and sent to the Emperor Constantine, which he highly appreciated, as he was usually in the same condition. The Devil says, according to Edgar Allan Poe: “In a climate so sultry as mine it is frequently impossible to keep a spirit alive for more than two or three hours, and unless pickled immediately (and a pickled spirit is not good eating) they will smell.”

They called out sixty thousand militia in Cevennes, France, in 1700 to drive the Devil out of the boys and girls and babes at the breast who prophesied in pure French, a language unknown to them. The Prior reported to Rome that the Devil was so powerful that no torture and no amount of exorcism is able to dislodge him. He says he closed their hands on burning coals, and they were not even singed, that he wrapped their bodies in cotton soaked with oil and set them on fire and could not even blister their skins, that balls were shot at them and found flattened between the skin and clothes.

Perhaps the greatest number of miracles ever performed in the world were pulled off by the Devil at the tomb of Abbe Paris from 1727 to 1749. The sick were cured, the deaf made to hear and the blind to see. Often a young girl among the convulsionaries would bend back into an arc, her loins supported by the sharpened point of an iron rod, and beg to be pounded with a fifty pound stone suspended from the ceiling. The stone was allowed to fall repeatedly with all its weight upon her abdomen, and the girl enjoyed it and cried for more, and no injury was found upon her person. When violent blows were struck with a sledge-hammer upon a drill held against her stomach she cried out: “O! how delightful, that does me good. Strike twice as hard if you can.”—Isis Unveiled.

CHAPTER XI Life Cells.

I Am the I Am, the Hebrew God, is supposed by Christians to be the First Cause, but the assumption of a first cause is quite unnecessary, and further, if you postulate a creative god, some impertinent person might ask you who made God. It is just as well to start with matter, in which mind and energy are inherent, which is eternal, infinite, immortal, self-existent and sustaining, requiring no supreme power as a basis or background, as set forth in the Sankhya System of the Hindus. See Phil. & Relig. of India, 55.

The attraction or love of one mass of matter for another is the energy. It is that love that creates all forms. The atoms go a-chasing after other atoms, even as you and I. There can be no attraction without mind. Anaxagoras and Empedocles believed in a dualism of mind and matter. The latter says: “The periods of the formation of the world depend upon the alternate prevalence of love and hate. During certain periods all heterogeneous atoms are separated from each other by hate, during others they are everywhere united by love.”

Haeckel says: “These three fundamental attributes, matter, force and sensation, are found inseparably united throughout the whole universe in every atom and every molecule.”

Edgar Allan Poe says: “That which is not matter is not at all. The ultimate unparticled matter not only permeates all things but impels all things. This matter is God. What men attempt to embody in the word ‘thought’ is this matter in motion. The unparticled matter, or God, in quiescence is what men call mind. The motion of the unparticled matter is the universal thought of the universal mind. This thought creates. All things are but the thought of God. For new individualities gross matter is necessary. To create individual, thinking beings, it was necessary to incarnate portions of the Divine Mind. Thus man is individualized. Divested of corporate investiture, he were God.”

According to the Ionic philosophy matter is by nature endowed with life, and life is inseparably connected with matter.—Ueberweg’s Hist. of Philosophy, 1-32.

It is said that in the beginning a male electron or spirit, or purusha, or soul, from the spirit principle of the universe, becoming involved in the material ether, formed a vortex, about which the female or material electrons of the ether revolved, thus producing an atom, the basis of all visible forms. The electron attracts the particles of matter in the ether as a magnet attracts steel. The electrons are called units of electricity, and there are perhaps a thousand in an atom. The space between these ions is comparatively as great as the space between the planets of our solar system. Leucippus, of Abdera, says that souls are round atoms.

The religious claim that the Divine Thought or Word originated the vortex movement. As John did not care to proclaim that his god was Ling, which he had stolen from the Hindus, he called it the Word, another meaning of Ling, from Ling comes linguist. Word is the exoteric meaning designed for fools, and the other is the esoteric or hidden meaning known only to the initiates. I think that the Christians are in error in claiming John’s god as their own, but amid such a flock of gods the confusion is not surprising.

“New Light has arisen, coming from Heaven, it assumed a mortal form. Virgin receive God in thy bosom, and the Word flew into the womb. Becoming incarnate in time, and animated by her body, it was found in mortal image, and a boy was created.”—Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 17. Christna or the Word, the Hindu savior, like Christ was a shepherd, and he became entangled with the shepherdesses. He was born in the cave of Venus, as all Simon-pure christs have to be, and King Kamsa, in seeking to kill him, ordered the destruction of all male infants. He also had two fathers, God and Vasu Deva, the Earth god or Joseb. He and the god Vishnu were one.—Phil. & Relig. of India, 278.

The Hindus claim that the akasa or astral light, or Brahma, (electricity) originated the vortex movement that formed the atoms. Akasa is the source of life, the reservoir of all energy, the all-directing and omnipotent god. It was the indispensable agent of every magical performance, and the Brahmans said that they had to stir up Brahma in order to perform a trick in magic to delude their devotees. Madam Blavatsky says: “As God creates so can man create. By the action of the will power on the atoms he can call objective forms into being. The atoms are like automatic workmen moved by the influx of the will directed upon them.” “Every motion we make, every word we utter gives an impulse to the ether and thus creates atoms.”—Edgar Allan Poe.

Aristotle says: “The world always was and always will be. The ether fills the celestial spaces, and of it the spheres and stars are formed.” The atoms combine to form molecules, and these, being attracted together, form the gases of which nebulae are composed. These nebulae follow the same circular movement that prevails in the atoms, and the result of this movement is a solar system, the nucleus of which becomes the sun. The rings that separate from the main body in this revolution eventually break up and form planets. When these planets cool, we find all the atomic souls either in the water or imprisoned in the rocks or in the central fire. The sea beats up against the rocks, and the rains descend upon and disintegrate them and thus release the souls that were imprisoned there in the process of involution. Now they commence to evolve toward what the egotistic have termed man’s high estate.

Yogi Ramacharaka says: “The Yogi teaching informs us that even in the molten mass there were elementary forms that were to become the ancestral forms of the later living beings. From these elementary forms there gradually evolved, as the earth cooled and solidified, other forms, and so on until at last the first living form manifested. The lowest forms of what we call life were evolved from forms of crystal life, which indeed they very much resemble.”

Haeckel, the world’s greatest scientist, says: “Man descends immediately from the ape, and secondarily from a long line of lower vertebrates back to the Silurian fishes. The lowest man appeared on the earth about three million years ago.”—Riddle of the Universe, 82. Anaximander, of Miletus, says: “Living beings arose by gradual development out of the elementary moisture under the influence of heat. We land animals had in the beginning the form of fishes.”—Ueberweg, 1:35.

The atoms combining by their own desire and will formed a molecule, and the molecules by their own volition combined to form a life cell, our earliest ancestor, a minute, animate mass of protoplasm, the lowest form of animal life, born in the slum of the ocean bed millions of years ago. Myriads of these life cells form the human body. Each cell is a distinct individual, having brain, mind and soul. Haeckel says that the primordial living substance is plasm. We can live only by eating other living beings or plasm, that is, by cannibalism. Plants create living plasm out of alleged non-living matter, they form carbo-hydrates, and from these form plasm by a combination with water, carbolic acid, ammonia and nitric acid. We claim to have souls, but deny them to the plants, the divine creators whose chemical laboratories, the cells, are beyond human comprehension.

The cells arrange themselves in the embryo in the form of a human being by their own will. “They use the materials which are at hand, fabricating organs for themselves by instinct, and in the appointed hour are born in the shape which they have formed for themselves.”—Enoch, ch. 14. The human embryo in its development passes through all the forms through which the race has struggled in its evolution from stone, through the primordial cell, the worm, the fish, the saurian and gorilla. In the last stage, that of the gorilla, the embryo is entirely covered with hair like our beloved ancestors, and sometimes development is arrested at this point and a hairy child is born occasionally with a tail.

The scientists have discovered in the cell body a god more potent than any known deity and have named it centrosome. It is a being of stellar form, located just above the nucleus or nerve centre of the cell. It is a creator whose magic far excels the feats of gods or men. It divides one living being into two, splitting the brain and the body of the cell in halves in such a manner that the two individuals produced are the exact duplicates of the parent cell in form and character. The cell brain matter, called cromatin, is composed of strings of very minute granules, termed cromosome, which are supposed to contain all the hereditary traits. The division of each one of these cromosomes into equal halves gives to the individuals produced a similar character. The centrosome is one in the beginning, but before dividing the cell it divides itself into two persons, so that one of the centrosomes may accompany each of the two cells. Each centrosome seizes one half of the brain of the parent cell thus divided and draws it to one side of the cell to form the nucleus of one of the new cells. Then the whole body of the cell is divided in the centre.—Story of the Living Machine, 100. When the centrosome divides the cell, two cells are produced capable of reproducing themselves in like manner. Prof. A. Dastre says that “under suitable circumstances the lowest animated forms are immortal.”

Our soul is formed by the combination of the souls of the two germ cells from which the embryo originated. We existed in our parents prior to our advent here and in all of our ancestors for 500,000,000 years back, more or less. The conscious matter that constitutes me, the cromatin, existed in every one of my ancestors since we were washed out of the igneous rocks or spawned in the ocean depths. Jack London says: “I did not begin when I was born. I have been growing, developing through incalculable myriads of milleniums. All these experiences of all these lives and of countless other lives have gone to the making of the soul-stuff that is I.”

Elephas Levi says: “The millions of germ cells that fail to become human beings are transformed into phantoms or larvae. These larvae possess aerial bodies formed from the steam of blood. For this reason they seek out spilt blood, and were formerly nourished by the smoke of sacrifices. The cohesion of the parts of these phantastic organisms is so feeble that they fear a strong wind, large fires, and above all the points of swords. They are vampires.” This accounts for the craving of the gods for blood sacrifices. The spirits and phantoms were mistaken for gods by the drunken prophets.

“The cells are spheroids and they are men in embryo,” says Plato. “God caused the universe to move with a circular motion and created original man as a perfect circle. The sexes were originally three in number, man, woman and hermaphrodite, and they had two faces and four arms and four legs, but Zeus cut them in two. After the division the two parts of man, each desiring the other half, came together and threw their arms about one another eager to grow into one. Each of us when separate is but the indenture of a man, having one side only like a flat-fish, and he is always looking for his other half.”—Plato, 1-483.

The intelligence of the cells has been clearly established by overwhelming proofs. An egg or ovum is at first a small fertilized cell, and in its development or transformation into an embryo, it is at first divided into several cells, to wit, the head cell, the body cell, the tail cell and the food cells. Prof. Oppel, in his experiments in embryology, separated these cells, removing them from their proper positions, but the cells so removed, traveled about trying first one place and then another until they usually found their proper positions and there joined the body and grew thereon, producing a perfect animal. If they made a mistake and joined the body in the wrong place, a monster was produced.

Furthermore, a scientist produced a mushroom-shaped being by subjecting metallic salts to the action of a galvanic current. The particles of the metal gathered around the pole of the magnet in the shape of a mushroom. This thing was a living being, with alimentary canal in its stem, through which it drew its nourishment and added to its growth. It was only necessary that a current of life or electricity be introduced among the particles to cause them to assume the form of a living organism. The metallic tree is produced by the same means. A copper wire and a piece of zinc are suspended in a bottle of a solution of acetate of lead, and the particles of lead gather about the copper wire and put forth branches, limbs and foliage.—Yogi Ramacharaka.

Each atom of matter, each molecule and every life cell, of which man is composed, has a soul of its own. And it is claimed that beside the individual cell souls, man not only has a communal soul in his brain, but a soul in his Solar Plexus. After a frog is beheaded, if a drop of acid is placed on his body, he will wipe it off with his foot.

The development of animals out of frogs and men out of animals was held by Anaximenes 600 B. C., and the evolution of species was an accepted doctrine before the flood. In the Hindu books it is written: “When the world had issued out of the darkness, the subtle, elementary principles produced the vegetal seed, which animated first the plants, from the plants life passed into fantastical bodies which were born in the waters, then through a series of forms and various animals it reached man.”—Bhagavata.

Kapella, an Aryan sage, denied the existence of a first cause, claiming that everything in nature found itself developed only in consequence of material fatal forces. The ancient Kabalists said: “A stone becomes a plant, a plant a beast, a beast a man, a man a spirit, and the spirit a god.”

CHAPTER XII. Magic and Devil Worship.

Elephas Levi claimed that the attraction and repulsion of the atoms is caused by the astral light. “There exists an agent which is material and spiritual, a universal plastic medium, a common receptacle of the vibrations of motions and the images of forms, a fluid and a force. By means of this force all nervous apparatuses secretly communicate with each other, thence come sympathy and antipathy, thence dreams and second sight. The existence and use of this force is the great secret of practical magic. The astral light attracts, repels, vivifies and destroys all things under the influence of powerful wills. It can be directed by the leaders of souls. By means of this agent we can correspond instantaneously from one end of the earth to the other, discern what is taking place at the antipodes, heal or hurt at a distance. The Gnostics called it the burning body of the Holy Ghost. Life is produced by the action of the astral light on the ether or matter. In man it forms the astral body, it is the first envelope of the soul, and it is by combining with the most subtil fluids that it forms this etherized body or phantom. The astral body is nourished by the astral light, as the physical body is nourished by the earth. The astral light is saturated with souls, which it releases in the incessant generation of existences, and whose imperfect wills can be dominated and employed by stronger ones. The elementary spirits are like children, they torment those who concern themselves about them. It is these that produce the raps on the walls and furniture.”—Mysteries of Magic, 65.

“An individual can leave the physical body and actually travel on either the material or astral plane in the astral body. Many persons are able to travel thus in their ordinary sleep.”—Astral World, 25.

All magic is religious, having been invented by the priests or Magi. It is said that the religious bodies copied their demonology from the Kabala of the Jews, and that the latter borrowed their system of theurgy and theology from the Egyptian and Babylonian priests. If any one outside of the religious bodies started any opposition devil-worship, they were promptly burnt. All the magic rituals are derived from the Key of King Solomon, claimed to have been found in his sepulchre at Jerusalem.

In the Magic Grimore, ascribed to Pope Honorius, he says: “We have seen with what power Jesus commanded demons, which power was transmitted to St. Peter, and, as the lawful successors of St. Peter, having the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and desiring to share the power of invoking and commanding spirits, which has been reserved unto us alone, with our brethren, we have included in this Bull the manner of their invocation. And because it is meet that the ministers of the altar should have authority over rebellious spirits, we hereby depute unto them all the powers which we possess in virtue of the Holy Apostolic Chair.”—Book of Black Magic, 100.

In invoking the Devil or other choice spirits, it is necessary to murder some being. If the conjurer cannot or dare not murder a human being, he takes an innocent virgin lamb and cuts its throat and tears off its skin to use for a magic apron or parchment. Instead of the skin of a lamb, the caul of a new-born child may be used.—Idem.

The sign manual of the demon Valefor, the patron of thieves, contains two Maltese crosses rampant and three links. As Solomon and his entourage worshipped the demon Astaroth, they probably stole from him the two pillars at the door of the Temple and the double triangle above them, for they appeared in the seal of that spirit. There are two or more crosses in each of the seals or signatures of Solomon’s seventy two black fiends. Their motto is, “In this sign we conquer.”

Solomon imprisoned the seventy two devils, with all their legions, in a brazen vessel and sank it in a deep lake in Babylon. The Babylonians, thinking that there must be a great treasure in the vessel, took it out of the lake and broke it open, when out flew the chief devils immediately, with all their legions following them.—See Waite’s Book of Black Magic.

We still worship pagan gods. The Hexagram, or double triangle of Solomon, is still used by different sects and societies. On it is the name of Agla, a pagan sun-god, and also the name of Tau, the Egyptian bull christ Taurus, with the pagan symbol, the Tau cross. The god A. and O., Alpha and Omega, with which the Hexagram is adorned, is a foul Babylonian idol, the same as IO. It has been represented that the Devil falls prostrate before the cross. But, to tell the truth, Lucifer uses the sign himself, also the double triangle and the single triangle in his signature. And Belial has four crosses by which he lies.

When a sorcerer conjures up one of the seventy two demons, he must draw the double seal of Solomon (double triangle) and the Pentagram, (five-pointed star) on a parchment of calfskin. These must be worn on his white vestment, together with the seal of the spirit invoked. And the secret seal of Solomon (the pillar standing in a circle) must be drawn with the blood of a black, virgin cock on virgin parchment. This is part of the conjuration: “I invoke and conjure you, O Spirit, by God the Father, by God the son, by God the Holy Ghost, by the Most Glorious and Holy Mother of God, by her Sacred Heart, by her Blessed Milk, by the Power and Victory of Hell, by the Ministers of the Tartarean Seat. I exorcise thee in the names of El, Elohim, Zabaoth &c. do thou forthwith appear. I conjure thee by the Living and True God Heliorem (Helios, the sun god) and Tetragrammaton Jehovah (the God of four letters). Come! I Adonai Saday, King of Kings, commands thee.” See Lesser Key of King Solomon, 55.

There is no use in trying to invoke spirits or perform any tricks in black magic unless you have confessed and received the Holy Communion, and you must pray for assistance to the pagan gods Adonai, Eloim, Ariel, Yahveh and Gibor, and fast, and abstain from the society of females for nine days, and take a bath, and wear the garb of a priest or a Levite, and you must have the sacred Masons’ implements, the sword, the staff, the rod, the sickle and the poniard. See Waite’s Book of Black Magic.

That part of nature called the astral light or universal spirit was virtually the supreme god of all religions. It was the Heaven or Nirvana of the Buddhist, (where the soul is blown out like a lamp some believed.) When he attained to perfection and was reabsorbed in this godhead, he had stormed the heights of Heaven and attained eternal bliss. He considered that his spirit would no longer be subjected to endless incarnations in material forms. But there is no knowing when it would again by choice or compulsion enter the ether and form another atom and again commence the unavoidable cycle.

All the vile religions have scared the human race into ca’niption fits by their assertion that our souls will be lost unless we bow down to their priests and worship their idols. According to the original parent religion, the Hindu, if we obey the priests faithfully, we will go to Nirvana and become a creator or electron, or elementary spirit. And all the authorities, both pagan and Christian, agree that the elementary spirits are mischievous, wicked entities. It would be better to lose our souls, for in that case they are banished into the ether or chaos and become the nucleus of a material atom. If we go to Nirvana, we are one step farther removed from the ultimate goal of all the ambitions of all the heavenly electrons and material atoms, the supreme pinnacle of attainment, man’s high estate, which is greater than that of the gods.

The Theosophists revel in the mystic and occult. If they can construct a sentence that no one can understand, and that they do not know the meaning of themselves, they are in the seventh heaven of delight, their wisdom borders on the Divine. Stating their doctrine of transmigration in plain language: God sits at his desk in Heaven, with a great lot of pigeonholes before him, in each one of which is a soul in a state of coma. When he receives a wireless from the earth that Pat and Biddie McGee have formed in their marital relationship a psychic vortex, or soul vortex, he makes a grab at the pigeonholes and lights perhaps on the soul of Pythagoras and sticks it into the new-born embryo, which already has a soul, and there is no room for any other. See “Spermatozoa,” Stand. Dic., and note those very energetic individuals in a frantic race to enter the ovum and blossom out as human beings. You will then realize that the child already has a very lively soul, provided by nature, and there is no occasion for any doped soul, supplied by any idiotic human plan.

“The astral light keeps an unmutilated record of all that was, that is, or ever will be. The minutest acts of our lives are imprinted on it, and even our thoughts rest photographed on its eternal tablets. It is the Book of Life, it is the memory of God. If the medium or subject’s sight is ably directed by the mesmerizer, magician or spirit, the light must yield up its most secret records to our scrutiny.”—Astral World. It is claimed that each person’s atmosphere in the astral light is peopled with the images of his or her immediate family, thus accounting for the assertions of the mediums that they see the spirits of our lost ones.

Swedenborgians claimed that the human body is sometimes abandoned by the soul in consequence of overpowering fright, grief, despair or sickness, and that we encounter every day such living corpses. Into these bodies may enter the soul of an adept sorcerer or some earth-bound, disembodied soul. In insanity the astral soul is partly paralyzed, bewildered, and subject to the influence of every passing spirit of any sort, or it has departed forever, and the body is taken possession of by some vampire or human soul near its own dissolution, and clinging desperately to earth, whose sensual pleasures it may enjoy for a brief season longer by this expedient.

The ancients claimed that the soul was located in the solar plexus, and it was asserted that they could read, hear, see and smell through the navel. In our vermiform stage of development before evolution had supplied us with heads, the soul was perhaps in the stomach, but it may have moved since. Plato says that the divine part of the soul is located in the head. Haeckel says that the human soul is a combination of the souls of all the cells of the body. It is impossible to destroy any simple substance, and if it affords you any comfort, you can assume that the soul or ego is an indestructible electron. The Stoics claimed that the soul is in the heart, and that although it outlives the body, it is yet perishable and can only endure at the longest till the termination of the world period, 4,320,000,000 years. Epicurus claimed that “nothing that exists will ever cease to exist. Atoms exist from all eternity, and worlds were formed by their vortical motion. The soul is material and composed of exceedingly fine atoms, and is dispersed through the whole body. The rational soul is in the breast.” Stephanus, of Alexandria, says that “copper is like a man, it has a soul and body.” Yoga Ramacharaka says that “iron is alive and may be killed by poison.”

“Transmigration of the soul takes place in all flesh, in beasts, reptiles and fowls. For one form of uncleanness the soul will pass into a Gentile, for another into a mule, for others into an ass, a woman, a bat, a she-mule or a camel.”—Kabala Nishmath Chaim, Ch. 13, No. 1. It sometimes happens that one sacrifices an animal with a human soul in it. Therefore the slaughtering knife must be without defect, and the slaughter must needs be delicately done to avoid cutting the gizzard out of the human soul. “The soul of a murderer is transmigrated into water. Let no man drink from a running stream, lest the soul of a wicked sinner pass into him.”—Kabala Emeh Hamelech, fol. 153, col. 1.

“By a combination of the letters of the ineffable name Rava once created a man and sent him to Rav. Zera. The man being unable to reply when spoken to, the Rabbi said to him: ‘Thou art a creation of the company (of necromancers) return to thy dust.’ By the same means a Rabbi created pumpkins, melons, deers and roes.”—Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrim, ch. 7.

The soul, called Psyche, when she is at home, lives in that part of the brain called the Medulla Oblongata, and the spirit, called Budhi, lives in the next house up the street, the Pineal Gland. When Budhi, or the Word, wins the affections of Psyche, and they are married, the Word saves the soul, and the man who harbors these entities is illuminated and becomes a master.

If you read Genesis in the original Hebrew, you will find that Al or El, the sun, not the Christian God, says: “To every beast of the earth I gave a living soul.” The souls of human beings are composed of material as refined and spiritual as that of the souls of cockroaches and bedbugs, and men, if they behave themselves, are equally as good as those animals and of just as much importance in the universe.

CHAPTER XIII. Ghosts and Hobgoblins.

The Hindus of the Malibar coast said they had ghosts, but they knew them to be bad spirits, for good ones can hardly ever appear at all. Apuleius says the human soul is a demon or genius, an immortal god. According to Philo Judaeus, the air is filled with an invisible host of spirits, the bad ones are mortal, and the good ones are immortal. The soul, upon the death of the body, transforms into a lemure (phantom). If it is wicked, it is called a larvae. The ghosts who, through vice, fearful crimes and animal passions, are confined to the eighth sphere immediately surrounding the earth, are the magnetic vampires and demons so well known to mediaeval ecstatics, nuns, monks and witches, the blood demons of Porphery. They may be cast out by powerful magicians, but if a sorcerer is not available, you can take a saucer containing two ounces of nitre and pour over it one ounce of vitrol and place it under the bed of the obsessed, and the devil will take to his heels.

Paracelsus says: “It is possible that my spirit, without the aid of the body and through a fiery will alone, and without a sword, can stab and wound others. I can also bring the spirit of my adversary into an image, and then double him up and lame him.” According to Cotton Mather some young girls had become mediums by sitting with a West Indian negro woman. They declared that the spectres of various witches appeared to them and bit and pinched and stuck pins into them. Some of the witches confessed that they did afflict these girls by sticking pins into manikins made of wax or rags, and by clutching and pinching their hands together and wishing in what part and after what manner they would have the girls afflicted, and it was done.

If you are haunted by an objectionable ghost, provide yourself with a sword or a dagger and stab him when he makes his appearance. They are awfully afraid of swords, although if you cut one in two, he will join together again, or if you cut his head off or leg off, he will put the member right on again. But he does not like it, and will thereafter leave you severely alone. Bodin says that in 1557 an elementary, thundering demon fell down with the lightning into the house of one Poudot and kept throwing stones all about the room for several days. The magistrate came to investigate, and the spirit knocked his hat off and drove him out of the house. At last Poudot got a sword and slashed all around the room, whereupon the spirit disappeared.

Where the ghosts are real troublesome, you can drive them away by distributing holy medallions around the house where the ghosts can see them. As the medallions have been blessed or magnetized, God has been injected into them, and they consequently are gods, and mischievous spirits who cut up capers around the house are afraid of these deities. I have a blessed idol of Buddha on my desk to keep the ghosts out of the office and prevent them from interfering with the composition of this pious work.

Modern spirits are often lying spirits. They are ever on hand to humor the respective hobbies of the persons who communicate with them at circles, and deceive them. When Luther, the sorcerer, evoked the demon, he was told that he should not worship the Virgin. But when St. Dominic called upon the devils, they told him that nobody was damned that persevered in her holy worship. The golden legend of James de Viragine shows that the Virgin gave to St. Dominic a miraculous rosary, by which he could perform greater miracles than Christ. But a certain abandoned sinner was bold enough to doubt the virtues of the rosary, and immediately fifteen thousand devils took possession of him, and being questioned by St. Dominic, they emitted flames from the nostrils, eyes and ears of the demoniac and certified to the virtues of the rosary. Over a hundred angels appeared in golden armor, together with the blessed Virgin herself bearing a golden rod, with which she administered a sound thrashing to the demoniac. The numerous theological truths uttered by St. Dominic’s devils were embodied in so many articles of faith, according to Isis Unveiled, 2-76.

One who is unprotected, the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with the semblance of voices. In all the Mysteries, strong drink or anaesthetics were administered to the initiates to sunder the soul from the body and produce visions. The Sankhya system teaches that the ghost, or astral body, can shrink to such a minute space that it can penetrate anything, or enlarge to a gigantic body, or float through space, or standing on the earth can reach the moon, that its will is irresistible, having dominion over all things and the ability to attain every desire.

It is claimed that phantom hands have appeared at seances under test conditions and written messages on a table in broad daylight, when the medium was six or eight feet away, but the theory is that the materialized hand is an emanation from the medium, the astral hand of the medium. Madam Blavatsky says that “this is the spiritual or astral body that is raised in incorruption. It is useless to argue that these are spirit hands. To make hands or faces objective, they are compelled to use either the astral limb of the medium, or material furnished by the elementals, or the aural emanation of all persons present. Pure spirits will not and cannot show themselves objectively. Those that do are elementary spirits.”

Madam Blavatsky tells of the following wonderful manifestations that occurred in Thibet. A body of traveling Bikshus, or monks, claimed the power to reincarnate the Buddha in any infant. A child four months old was brought to their cave and set down in the middle of the room, while the monks sat in a circle around it at some distance. A skeptic minister sat close to the child to expose the trickery. The chief Pase Budha went into a trance, and his astral and spiritual body took possession of the child and made it walk and talk, saying “I am Buddha, I am the old Lama, I am his spirit in a new body.” The minister said: “The baby looked at me with an expression of intelligence that was simply awful. It sent a chill through me, I felt a real terror, my hair rose upon my head, and my blood ran cold. The eyes seemed to search my very soul with an expression that made me think that it was the face of the Superior himself, his eyes, his very look that was gazing upon me.”

If you wish to conjure up or materialize a spirit, purchase from the Yogis some ancient blood of a black cat, which comes in powdered form. This, together with a sparrow’s brain, burnt upon the altar will produce a smoke or vapor of peculiar odor and a color unknown and unnamed by human beings, being a combination of many colors. From the smoke of this magic altar it is possible for spirits to materialize, so that even persons without the astral vision can see them.

Sometimes a band of occultists will meet around their altar fire, which is kindled between the horns of the goat and fed with the ancient blood of a black cat and other material from which ghosts can materialize. The occultists stand in a row hand in hand, the Grand Master at the head by the altar, and all strongly command that a spirit shall manifest. As the command passes from one brother to another it gains force, and the power of the will is enormously augmented, and after a time there issues from the floor a thread of astral matter, which ascends perpendicularly and widens out as it ascends, assuming a human form, but weak, wavering and limp, bending this way and that on every breath of air. But after the circle has pumped the power into him for a while, he becomes sufficiently strong to walk or glide about and take a seat in the circle and talk to the members. The materialized body is soft and moist and cold as a corpse. When they wish him to disappear they stand again hand in hand, the Grand Master next to the spirit, and send the command from one to the other ordering the ghost to depart, and he will again become weak and wabbly and sink down to the floor and disappear through the same nail hole from which he emerged.

If the company wishes to engage in a dangerous experiment, one half of them will occupy one side of the hall and the other half the other side. They must first erect between them a circle of sheet lead, over which the devil cannot jump to attack any of the members. Then each bunch will think evil vindictive and murderous thoughts of the other bunch, and conjure up dire monsters to attack them, and soon a horrible, gigantic and vicious thought-monster, part beast, part devil and part human, will materialize and rush at the members and endeavor to attack them, but fortunately for them, he cannot pass the leaden circle, for if he could reach those that made him, he would strike them dead with a charge of electricity through the heart. In order to lay this devil they have conjured up, they have to clothe themselves entirely in silver-colored garments. They then enter the circle from both sides and close in on the monster. These silver-colored beings scare the devil to death, and he crawls back in his hole.

A man, named B, built a house with second-hand lumber from an old building that had been torn down. The old building was reputed to be haunted by the former owner, who was murdered there. The ghost was very mad because B took his lumber, and, in order to be revenged, he went with the lumber to the new house and haunted that. B says that the ghost would appear to him when he was going to sleep and jab him in the eye with his finger and seize his arm and hurl it against the wall. When B was half asleep one night, the ghost appeared with a pail of water and threw it all over him. The dog could see the ghost even when B could not, and would bark and show his teeth and propose to fight the phantom. B sold the house to some colored folks. They were scared white by the skilligin, gave up the property and demanded their money back, because the ghost was an incumbrance on the estate and a legal defect in title, he being in possession, claiming ownership.

St. Clemens Romanus says that Simon Magus (Paul), of the New Testament, could make himself invisible when and to whom he pleased. He created a man out of air, who passed through the rocks and mountains and flew along through the air. He threw himself from precipices without being injured and flung himself into the fire without being burned, he animated statues, he walked through the streets attended by strange figures, which he said were the souls of people departed.

CHAPTER XIV. Witches and Sorcerers.

“Burn everybody,” the Inquisition seemed to say, “God can easily sort out his own.” Poor fools, hysterical women and idiots were roasted alive for the crime of magic.

Catherine de Medicis, the author of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, had in her service an apostate Jacobin priest who was proficient in the black art. King Charles lay dangerously ill, and Catherine, the queen mother, had everything to lose by the death of the King. In her anxiety she commanded the priest to inquire of the Devil what should be done to save the life of the King. The priest, taking with him a beautiful child, went into the chapel and after administering to the child its first communion, decapitated it on the very steps of the altar and placed the palpitating head upon the paten. Then, standing on a reversed cross, he celebrated the Devil’s Mass before an image of the Demon, and commanded the Devil to answer by the lips of this murdered child the question of the Queen. Then a strange voice, which had nothing human about it, made itself audible in this poor little martyr’s head. But the sorcery availed nothing, the King died.—Elephas Levi.

“Pope Sylvester was publicly accused by Cardinal Benno with being a sorcerer and enchanter. The brazen oracular head made by his Holiness was of the same kind as the one fabricated by Albertus Magnus. The latter was smashed to pieces by Thomas Aquinas, not because it was the work of or inhabited by a demon, but because the spook, that was fixed inside by mesmeric power, talked incessantly and disturbed the eloquent saint. These heads and other talking statues, trophies of the magical skill of monks and bishops, were fac-similes of the animated gods of the ancient temples. It was demonstrated that this Pope was constantly attended by demons or spirits. Benedict IX, John XX and the VI and VII Gregory were all known as magicians. The latter Pope, it was said, could shake lightning out of his sleeve. In the latter part of the sixteenth century there was hardly a parish to be found in which the priests did not study magic and alchemy. John Reuchlin, father of the Reformation and teacher of Luther, was a Kabalist and occultist. The occult knowledge gleaned by religion from the fat fields of theurgy was sedulously guarded for its own use, and it sent to the stake only those practitioners who poached on its preserves. Between 1580 and 1595 in the single province of Lorraine, the President Remigius burned nine hundred witches.”—Isis Unveiled, 2-57.

“The gorgeous standard of the Inquisition is represented as waving in the Heavenly breezes at the foot of the Great White Throne of the Almighty. On its crimson, damask face is the cross, the symbol of the Son of God who died for mankind, with an olive branch on one side and a sword stained to the hilt with human gore on the other.”

“The true origin of the daily accusations and death sentences for witchcraft are traced by Dr. Soldan, of Stuttgart, to personal, political and religious enmities. Prince Bishop, John George II, of Bamberg, caused six hundred to be burned for sorcery in five years. The petty princes were not unwilling to seize upon any pretence to fill their coffers, the persons most persecuted being those whose property was a matter of consideration.”—Sorcery and Magic, 2-185. A horse was burnt at the stake in Lisbon in 1601 for witchcraft, because it could tell the number of spots on a card.

In the list of twenty nine burnings, or autos da fe, in nineteen months in Germany, 162 persons were murdered, of whom 28 were Protestants, 100 wealthy citizens and 34 little children, the youngest an infant. Wright says that 27 little girls, from seven to ten years of age, were burnt as witches. Lorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquamada in eighteen years burned at the stake 10,220 persons, and otherwise punished 97,321. In Andalusia alone, in a single year, the Inquisition sent to the stake 2000 Jews.—Buckle’s Hist. Civ. 1-136. “We learn that much money was realized by selling to the rich dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition.”—Conflict Between Religion and Science, 146.

Stevens says: “A monk of St. Anthony, having been at Jerusalem, brought home with him a bit of the finger of the Holy Ghost, the snoot of a seraphim, one of the nails of a cherub, one of the ribs of the Word Made Flesh, some rays of the Star of the East, and a vial of St. Michael’s sweat. Henry III, of England, received from the Grand Master of the Templars a vial containing some of the blood that Christ shed upon the cross, attested by the seal of the Patriarch of Jerusalem.”

The hand of one of the innocents massacred by Herod, although Herod died four years B. C., was, in 1837, still preserved in the Convent at Bethlehem. There also is the pit in which the bodies of the infants were thrown, and also the manger which came down from the constellation of the Crab. Some depraved Christian copped the stone on which the cock crowed when Peter denied his Master, and, in 1837, it was said to be in a church in Rome. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, among other wonders, is a monument erected over the grave of Adam, who never existed, and there is a polished marble bathtub or sarcophagus, which they claimed was the sepulchre hewn out of the rock. See Travels in Holy Land, 2-163.

The fight of the fools and fakirs over the location of the grave of a mythical sun-god is certainly ludicrous, but more amusing was the magic trick of the early Christians who stole the grave of Adam either from Hebron or Mecca and also swiped the grave of Christ from the Damascus Road, north of Jerusalem, and exhibited both, with other shell and three-card-monte games, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in the centre of Jerusalem, for the purpose of annexing the coin of the dupes, farmers and come-ons from all over the world.

According to Tichenor, over three hundred years after the crucifixion, St. Helena found the true cross, and also dug up the crosses of the two thieves, and this lumber was sold for centuries to millions of the faithful. Even a splinter will save you from Hell and cure you of what ails you. And the bones, hair and nails of the Apostles have been sold all over the world. You could formerly buy a gunnysack full of St. Peter’s fingers and toes if you had the necessary dough. The people not only worshipped the Mother of God, but worshipped St. Ann, the Grandmother of God. God came unto Mary in the form of Gabriel, and to prove it the monk Eiseling exhibited all over Europe a pin-feather from Gabriel’s wing, which he shed at the conference. Thorns, from the crown of thorns, the blood of Jesus, by the drop or the bottle, and the milk of the Holy Virgin were peddled out all over the world for centimes.—See Tichenor’s Roman Religion.

CHAPTER XV. The Great King Solomon. — King Solomon’s Signal of Distress.

Solomon’s Song is very choice reading and would be eminently appropriate to the foulest book on earth, the circulation of which would be a criminal offense under the law. The Christian compilers of the Bible have asserted in the headings of the Song that it represents the love of Christ and the Church. They were not only wilful liars, but foully besmirched their own church, for that was about 1200 years before their church existed. The whole context shows that it has nothing to do with the Christian Church, but is evidently the hymn book of the church of Ashtoreth, of which Solomon was a deacon. Any institution that foists upon the world such vile obscenity as the inspired word of God, is the Temple of the Devil, the antechamber of Hell, an annex of the Witches’ Sabbath. It should utterly perish from the face of the earth. In fact, the die is already cast, the handwriting is on the wall, the hand of death is on it now.

Solomon was Grand Master of the secret societies. Those things that were esoteric or secret or occult in magic and religion, claimed by the priests to be too sacred for the people, were either criminal or too vile to utter. That was the only reason for keeping them secret.

Solomon had cheated his brother Adonijah out of the throne to which the latter was entitled by birth, and Adonijah thought that he should at least be allowed to have Abishag, the sixteen-year-old beauty that they had put in bed with the dying King David to save his life. And he induced Bathsheba, the mother of Solomon, to make the request of the king. When Solomon had heard the petition of Bathsheba he said: “And why dost thou ask Abishag for Adonijah, ask for him the kingdom also.” Abishag is the only jewel in the Jewish crown, the most priceless legacy that King David left. A perfect beauty is more to be desired than the riches of a kingdom. I will not give her up. All the good things in Israel are reserved for the king. Then Solomon swore by the Lord saying: “God do so to me and more also if Adonijah hath not spoken this word against his own life. Now therefore as the Lord liveth Adonijah shall be put to death this day.” What ho! guards, summon Benaiah, Commander of the Knights of the Mystic Shrine of Asherah.

When Benaiah appeared, he bowed low before the throne, and, raising his right hand, made the occult sign of the Witches’ Sabbath. Then Solomon said: “Rise, O beloved of the king, favorite of the gods of the groves and the gardens. The king hath weighty matters to communicate to thee. It is reported that Adonijah, our brother, hath taken refuge at the shrine of that second-rate God Jehovah and doth cling to the horns of the altar. And behold all of Adonijah’s followers are devotees of Jehovah, while all of our partisans and all of you whom the king hath deigned to grace with official rank are devotees of Baal and Asherah. Now the king commandeth that you seek out all of those Jehovah worshippers who have stood by Adonijah and eliminate them from the problem of life. Go in and out among them and slay each one your father and your mother, your sister and your brother, if so be that they be among the rebels. Relieve them of life’s burdens. Do not be harsh with them, show them our royal mercy, shove them gently through the gates of Hell, cutting them with saws and with harrows of iron and with axes, emulating the clemency of our royal father, the bandit chief. As for Adonijah, fall upon him and slay him as he clings to the horns of the altar. It is true that the altar of a god is sacred ground and a refuge as a general proposition, but general propositions do not apply to the king, the king is above the law. What do I care for these imaginary gods, they are all right to scare children with, but they cut no ice with your Solomon.”

Solomon sat in all his glory upon the great throne of ivory and gold, flanked by the twelve brazen lions of the zodiac, and the Knights of the Mystic Shrine of Asherah in dazzling regalia guarded the beloved of the Lord. Around the throne, with naked swords and the three hundred golden shields, stood the Princes of the Tribes of Israel, as the rays of the setting sun, reflected from the jeweled walls of cedar and gold, bathed in dazzling light the royal panoplies of blue and purple and crimson.

And King Solomon’s sacred, hermaphrodite Billygoat, in trappings of purple and gold, wearing ribbons on his horns and ribbons on his tail, stood beside the golden throne with his revered back to the audience in accordance with the law in such case made and provided. And he informed the King in no uncertain words that he did not propose to be the goat any longer, that the Knights of the Mystic Shrine of Asherah, that had been assigned as priests to serve him, one of the highest gods, drank up all the wine sacrificed to him, and thus prevented him from getting as full as a goat, as required by the tenets of his religion. And further, they did not give him exercise enough, they called him Baphomet and Devil and other hard names and took him up out of the pit for a walk around the town only once a month, at dead of night, in the dark of the moon, when Hell yawns, and the graves give up their dead. Upon the conclusion of this divine oration, the whole audience crawled on their hands and knees up the steps of the golden throne and devoutly kissed the back of Baphomet, as we kiss the male and female emblems on the Pax.

This pious ceremony being completed, the Great King, raising the royal sceptre, summoned to his exalted presence the Commander of the Knights of the Mystic Shrine of Asherah and said: “While you, Benaiah, my faithful servant, go and kill Adonijah, my well beloved brother, I will hie me to my devotions, for I can see that at the mystic shrine on yonder hilltop, the luscious Asherah is yearning for me. My adored, my most beautiful, my ravishing one stands in the open door of the pagoda, the beautiful gate ajar, stands there in all her pristine loveliness, a beauty unadorned, young and plump and enchanting. See that innocent radiant face beaming with loving kindness, perfect in every feature, see that form divine, of which the gods in Heaven do envy me. She is my favorite nun, the incarnation of the Divine Asherah, and she is calling me to prayer. See her beckoning me over with that sweet hand, that angel hand that holds me, the King of the Earth and Sea, a willing slave in its gentle grasp. She says the door is open wide, and all who will may enter in, and no one is denied.”

Then while Benaiah slew Adonijah as he clung to the horns of the altar, Solomon and his court in gorgeous array, decked in purple and fine linen and blazing with jewels rare and gold to burn, marched in one grand pageant from the house of cedar and gold, out through the Golden Gate, to the high place of Asherah. When they reached the oval, foliated door between the two great pillars of Baal, beneath the blazing, golden dome of Asher, supported by the circle of monoliths or twelve zodiacal redeemers, they bowed low before the open portal and crossed themselves, and by thus drawing upon their bodies the male symbol, they became themselves male emblems and worthy to enter in, and a worthy offering to a female divinity.

The dazzling beauty who stood in the door of the pagoda then ran and threw herself into the arms of the king. He folded her pink and white form to his royal breast and impressed upon her ruby lips a long and loving caress, saying: “My divine one, my goddess, my life, my all, God is love, I know, I feel. Thou art the only angel e’er worshipped by Solomon the Magnificent. Thy lips are like the roses, like the sweet-scented, dew-bediamond roses in the royal gardens of Judea. Thine eyes are fathomless wells of priceless love, at which I drink till my soul is drunk and reels in its maddened delirium. Thy flesh is like the lilies of the valley, pure and white, meet vessel for a soul so true, white as the lilies of Asherah, white as the column of Baal, indeed so tempting and plump and luscious, that in thy divine and radiant neck I fain would bite the name of the King of the Earth and the Sea.

“Solomon offered one thousand burnt offerings in the great high place of Gibeon,” a brothel, where they worshipped the pillar and the grove.—1 Kings: 3-4. “And they set them up pillars and Asherim upon every high hill and under every green tree.”—2 Kings, 17-10. “Solomon loved the Lord, and the Lord loved Solomon.” They formed a mutual admiration society, and in Gibeon the Lord said to Solomon: “Ask what I shall give thee.” And “Solomon built a high place before Jerusalem at the Mount of Corruption (Mount of Olives) dedicated to Ashtoreth,” now replaced by the Church of the Ascension, erected over the footprint made by Christ in the rock when he jumped from the earth to Alcyone. The Bible says that Ashtoreth was the abomination of the Sidonians, but it happens that Asher, one of the aliases of the Hebrew god, was the husband of Ashtoreth.

The secret and mysterious name of the supreme God of the Hebrews, the Ancient of Ancients, was Eh Ei Eh, pronounced in three breaths, with hand to ear and the name at low breath. This is the name that was engraved on the great seal of Solomon, wherewith he conjured up demons from the abyss, for he was a potent wizard. By virtue of this great name and by rubbing the seal, Solomon became Lord of the Demons, and Beelzebub, at the mighty summons, would bob up serenely and obey the behests of the king. Solomon soared into the celestial altitudes and mastered the Divine secrets and learned the omnipotent words which constitute all the power of God over the demons. He penetrated into the remotest haunts of the spirits, whom he bound and forced them to obey him by the power of his clavicle (Key). He tells in the Key of Solomon the true composition of, with directions for making the dreadful blasting rod which causes the spirits to tremble, and which was used by God in driving Adam and Eve out of the Garden, and which he also used in casting the devils out of Heaven.—Book of Black Magic, 83.

Ashmedai, King of the Demons, and a great mason, collaborated with Solomon, Hiram of Tyre and Hiram Abiff in building the Temple. He was the one who fashioned the stones without the sound of hammer by means of an insect he had, called the Shameer, the same that Moses used in cutting the precious stones of the Ephod. The spirits evoked by Solomon said that Ashmedai had the Shameer, and they gave him the location of Ashmedai’s water-hole in the mountains, where he went to drink. Benaiah then went out and filled the water-hole with liquor and laid in wait near by. The demon came and drank the liquor, and when he was drunk, Benaiah bound him with a ring and a chain, on which was the name of God, so that he could not break it. Thus Solomon captured the demon and compelled him to call up Shameer, the insect stone-cutter, and prepare all the stones of the Temple.—Talmud Gittin, fol. 68, col. 1.

This jolly quartette of pagan and infernal pals, assisted by the masonic bug, in laying the foundation of the Temple, seized upon a hewer of wood and cut his throat and caught the blood in a vessel. After sprinkling the corner stone with the blood, they placed the vessel of human gore inside the stone and buried the body of the human sacrifice beneath it, that his spirit might guard the Temple and preserve it as long as grass grows and water runs. Then they danced around the stone the Dance of Death, or the dance of the Maccabees.

One day King Solomon, being bored about to death, and finding that all was vanity and vexation of spirit, wrote to his friend Manus, high priest of Baal, something as follows:

To His Eminence the High Priest of Baal, beloved of the Lord and the Devil, Grand High Potentate of the Knights of Kadish, Beloved Minister of the Holy of Holies, the sacred Grove of Asherah.

Behold the Great King Solomon, Lord of the Earth and the Sea, Patron of God Almighty, Imperial Potentate of the Imperial Divan of Ashtoreth, Grand High Mucky-Muck and Past Grand Master of the Phallic Cult.

Sends Greeting. And doth herein represent that he hasn’t a thing in the way of nice girls, only but just a thousand old hens that were passé in three days after their respective inauspicious arrivals, and the heart of the Great King doth yearn for a vision of youth and beauty from the corn fields of Bethlehem. If thou wouldst save the King’s life, get a move on and corral a fair virgin, with golden hair and eyes of blue, for verily a brunette doth make the King tired. The King recommendeth thee to bring the fair one to the back door of the palace, at the entering-in of the woodshed, for behold the thousand old hens have two thousand eyes, and each eye is jealous of your unhappy Solomon. Verily, they are determined that we shall not have a thing that is fresh and fair to look upon. They are a lot of old cats, and we pray thee to promulgate a feast to Moloch and Baal, and announce to the multitude that seven hundred back-number princesses and three hundred fat old concubines have been devoted, and will be passed through the fire to Moloch and Baal, and will be basted and roasted to a turn and served to the people with the gravy oozing out. May the blessings of the Great Gods Ashtoreth, Chemoth and Baal be with thee and thine.

One night King Solomon, together with his two old cronies, Hiram of Tyre and Hiram Abiff, went a-hunting in Jerusalem, which at that period was a noted sporting resort, abounding in all kinds of game. At length they caught a coon near the North Gate, at the high place of Asher, where were worshipped the images of the male, and took her to the king’s palace. She says (Sol. Song, 1-4): “The King hath brought me into his chambers.” Having reached the King’s apartments, Solomon said to Hiram of Tyre: “Wouldst thy Majesty kindly rush the duck? Thou wilt find the can behind the throne. And thou Abiff, wilt thou be so good as to go out in the woodshed and play tag with thyself for a season and half a season, while I pass the salve to this colored lady?”

Having got rid of the crowd, Solomon says: “Behold thou art fair my love, thou hast dove’s eyes. Thy nose is like unto the Tower of Lebanon that looketh toward Damascus, and the beautiful hump in the centre thereof is like unto that of a camel, that wabbleth ever this way and that.” And the buxom nigger wench, pouting her ruby, liver lips, replies: “Kiss me with the kisses of thy mouth, for thy love is better than wine. Because of the savor of thy good ointments, which counteract the Jewish odor diligently collected since thy last annual bath, therefore do the virgins love thee. I am black, but comely. I am not a nigger, but only tanned. They made me the keeper of vineyards, (deleted by the censor). Place thy left hand beneath my head, and thy right hand shall embrace me, (deleted by the censor). My beloved is mine, and I am his, a bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me.”

During the tête-à-tête, the captivating beauty was absent-mindedly picking the Tower of Lebanon, when Solomon said: “Knowest thou not that our laws prohibit the touching of the unwashed fingers to the nose, mouth or eyes. The Talmud says: ‘The evil spirit Bath Chorin rests upon the hands at night and will not depart until water is poured upon him three times over.’ That fairy tale is for the ignorant rabble. You and I have the gnosis. Some of the prophets say that the worship of Asherah, in which we indulge, is reprehensible, but who fashioned the first Grove among us? Ask them that.” In Jasher, 27-27, it is said that Abraham formed at Beersheba a Grove, and that he practiced all kinds of abominations. He gave to his seventeen children by Katurah charms by which they could exorcise spirits and perform all sorts of miracles in the black art.

When King Hiram returned with the booze, anticipating a jolly orgy with the wise one, he pounded loudly on the door of the King’s chamber. Solomon, being busy, petulantly said: “Get thee hence Hiram, or I will have the cop run thee in.” Then King Hiram was exceeding wroth, and threatened to make war on Solomon and come up to Jerusalem with one hundred thousand warriors and take the fair colored charmer away from the seductive Jewish King. Then Solomon replied: “Chase thyself back, Hiram, to besotted Tyre and make love to that great pillar, which, with much pomp and ceremony, thou hast recently erected there, and which thou dost salute with the holy kiss every morning at sunrise.”

CHAPTER XVI. The Mystic Societies. — Opening a Lodge of Entered Apprentices.

Pope Pius IX was accused of saying: “Damn the clandestine societies.” Oh, My! such shocking language, and so unjust too, for these quasi-religious societies, even like certain churches, were anciently faithful devotees of, and expert manipulators of the mystic symbols.

Dr. Dalcho, a Masonic writer, asserts: “God was the first Grand Master and Adam the second.” And Adam initiated Eve into the profound and archaic mystery of the square and the eye.

It may be interesting to know what they did at the Witches’ Sabbath and the meetings of the ancient mystic societies. They murdered their christ, that is what they did, and the Christians have always charged that they offered up human sacrifices. I should judge from the ritual of the Masons that it originated in the sacrifice of a human being, that in ancient times human beings were sacrificed in the mystic societies, from some of which, perhaps, Masonry descended. Here are extracts from an old ritual as near as the author can decipher them, not guaranteeing that they are correct:

Sen. War.: “Brother, the lambskin in all ages has been considered an emblem of purity.” This lambskin is the skin of the Lamb of God. It is worn on the stomach for occult reasons. The female emblem, the Eye, is stamped upon it for the same occult reasons. The mystic societies, sun-worshippers and Jews were anciently devotees of the lamb as well as the cow. They sacrificed him and adorned themselves with his skin as a saving rite. The Ram is identical with the god Priapus. You remember that Saul sent David out to gather one hundred Philistine mementos to put in the Ark of the Covenant. These mementos and the lambskin are of equal efficacy, both being relics of the crucifixion.

When christ came in the sign of Capricorn, he came as the goat. At the celebration of Lupercalia in Rome, they sacrificed the goat christ. Two young men are chosen, and the dagger, or Signa Tau, or the Mark of the Living God, is drawn in blood in their foreheads. Then they cut the goatskin into thongs and run about lashing all they meet. “The young wives like to be lashed, fancying that it will make them fruitful.” “The Jews in Jereboam’s time had priests for the service of their divinities, the sacred billy-goats.”—Plutarch, 1-78. The religious sorcerers, who sought to invoke demons, formed their magic circle with strips of goatskin nailed to the ground with four nails from the coffin of a dead child. As the circle was made of the skin of christ, the demons dare not pass it to attack the sorcerer. This is the circle of the Kabalists, of which King Solomon was the Most Worshipful, Sublime and Exalted Phalatz.

In the ritual ascribed to Pope Honorius, the method of raising the Devil was by sacrificing a black cock, which is an emblem of Christ. The eyes, tongue and heart are torn out and burnt to ashes. These are religious symbols and objects of adoration. The sorcerer also sacrifices a lamb, and places the ashes of the eye, the tongue and the heart on the lambskin. He prays to Jesus that the lambskin, with the signs thereon, may save him from the wiles of the demons, that they may be terrified by the sight of these figures. This, I think, is the origin of the figures on the Mason’s lambskin. This ritual provided that the eye, the cross and the moon should be drawn on the lambskin.

In the Fellowcraft degree of the ritual, when the candidate has stuck the heel of his right foot in the hollow of the left, which is a sacred mystic rite that will save your immortal soul from Hell, the Sen. War. says: “You will now show the Worshipful Master the Degree Gag (?) and sign of an Entered Apprentice, and when you step forward, place the heel of your left foot in the hollow of the right. You will now advance with me to the altar. You are now to be made a Fellowcraft in due form. You will now bare your left foot and side and your breast expose. You now receive the mark of the square on the breast.” The Tau Cross, a symbol of identical significance with the square, was used in the Bacchic and Eleusinian Mysteries. It was laid upon the breast of the initiate to cause him to be born again. The square is the Egyptian Ka, the idol worshipped by the savages in the temples of darkest Africa, and which is also worshipped in the Kaaba at Mecca. Ka, Kaaba, abba, father, papa and pope all have the same meaning. See “Kaaba” Stand. Dic.

In the initiation the candidate was allowed to play that he was Hiram Abiff. He was conducted around the circle of the zodiac from one door of the Temple to another and encountered three of the beasts of the four cardinal points, that is, the gentlemen who played the parts of the beasts in the heavenly drama.

First Right. Master: Hiram, give me the sign of a Master Mason.

Sen. Dea.: Candidate, the sign cannot be given except in the presence of three, Solomon, King of Israel, Hiram, King of Tyre, &c.

Master: For the second time I demand of you the sign of a Master Mason.

Sen. Dea.: You cannot have that.

Master: Hiram, for the third and last time I demand of you the sign of a Master Mason. Give it to me, or I will take your life.

Sen. Dea.: You shall not have that (but the candidate can have this, and he hits him on the head with the 24-inch gauge, in the play, as near as I can make out.)

At the Second Right, the Master makes the same demands.

Sen. Dea.: You shall not have that. Blow with the square (on the head of the candidate, I presume, but as he is still alive, he is conducted to the beast at the third door.)

Third Right: The Master repeats the same demands.

Sen. Dea.: Lord of Darkness (who is about to kill the sun-christ in the west) you shall not have that.

Third Right: Damn thee take that, blow with gavel on forehead, (and the candidate or human sacrifice falls dead, in the play.)

Second Right: We have slain our Grand Master Hiram.

Third Right: What shall we do with the body?... Let us carry it a due West course from the Temple (because the crucified sun is buried in the west) and bury it in a grave sunk due East and West.

Master: Brother Sen. War. What is the commotion?

Sen. War.: Our Grand Master Hiram is assassinated.

Master: How was he assassinated?

Sen. War.: By the Brothers at the door of the Temple.

Master: Our Grand Master Hiram may be ill. You will cause search to be made for him in the secret antichambers of the Temple and see if he can be found.

Sen. War.: Search has been made, Worshipful, and he cannot be found.

According to the Egyptian religion Souphis Khunfu Nefer Hept, Lord of the Underworld, murdered the Great Architect. The victim, whether he be called the Great Architect, or Hiram, or Adonis, or Horus, or Christ is always and ever the setting sun murdered by the darkness, or Prince of Darkness, called Sat in Egypt and Satan with us. The sacrifice of Hiram Abiff is one form of the Passion Play.

A Masonic society, established in China from the earliest times, is called Our Ladyship’s Society and the Queen of Heaven Society. In the Chinese society the candidate is made to pass through the arch of swords. He could not be born again or come forth into the light unless he passed through the door of life and came out of the cave. The Chinese god Fo was born of a virgin impregnated by a ray of the sun, as shown in Christian pictures of Mary. In the Indian Mysteries three hierophants sit in the East and the West and the South. After an invocation to the sun, the candidate is baptized, his shoes taken away from him, and he is made to circumnavigate the cavern three times with the sun. He is conducted through seven dark caverns and assailed by legions of hobgoblins. The victim slaughtered is called Siva, and the lamentations of Maya for the death of Siva correspond to the weeping of Mary at the tomb of Christ. The sword was aimed at the throat of the candidate by the Evil One, but he was brought forth at last into the light. The Eye was marked on his forehead and the Tau Cross on his breast. He was presented with the sacred girdle or apron, the magical stone and the talismanic jewel for the breast.—Isis Unveiled.

In the Mysteries of Aphrodite, a male emblem is handed to the initiate, and those initiated bring a piece of money to her as her hire. Demeter, of the Eleusinian Mysteries, is identical with Mary, and Clement says that he knows not whether she is the mother or wife of the god Zeus or Deus. This god is a serpent. The token of the Sabazian Mysteries is this serpent god gliding over the human breast. The offspring of the rape of Proserpine (Mary) by this god was christ, the bull.—Clement 1-29. If you wish to know what foul things were kept in the Ark of the Covenant, see Clement 1-31.

According to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in the judgment in Amenti, or the Lower World, the deceased or candidate for Heaven is given the name of Osiris, and he is tried before the supreme god Osiris and forty other deities or beasts. An altar stands before the supreme god on which is placed the bribes offered by the soul to god. The forty-two deities are the judges of the forty-two sins. One is called the Devourer of Shades, another the Cracker of Bones, and another the Eater of Hearts. If the soul denies that he has committed the forty-two sins, the judges must acquit him, but if he is convicted of being a land-grabber, he cannot get by, as the priests propose to attend to all that business themselves. In the Christian Judgment, the judges will be the confessors, monks and virgins.—The Elucidarium.

“The Buddhist novice, like the Freemasons, is forced to bare his shoulder and breast and give up his money and bare his feet, in fact to simulate the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience of the Buddhist.”—Buddha & Early Buddhism, 136.

In Lalita Vistara, Buddha is called the Great Physician, and at his appearance the sick are healed, the deaf are cured, the blind see. He cures by the laying on of hands or mesmerism. Akasa, the mesmeric fluid or the astral light, and the Spirit of God are one in the East. Buddha was born of a virgin, presented in the Temple, disputed with the doctors, was tempted in the wilderness, passed his life in preaching and working miracles, and descended into Hell and ascended into Heaven.—Idem, 80.

Heaven was also calmly purloined from Buddhism. The Buddhist heaven is the city four square of John, with the gates of gold and silver, adorned with precious stones. The great throne of God stands in the centre thereof by the gem lake or crystal sea, by which stands the Tree of Life or Tree of Infamy. The Buddhist religion is wholly phallic. See Book of All Religions, 86.

If you read the life of Buddha in the Ency. Brit. you will find that it is almost identical with the life of Christ. In any Chinese store you can buy an idol of Buddha, who, like Christ, is the god of life, bringing us life and life yet more abundantly. He wears a fish skin for a miter, showing that he is the fish god, and on his divine and radiant forehead is the Eye, and on his stomach, between his clasped hands, is the sacred Tree of Life. These divine secrets should not be disclosed to the uninitiated, but, to tell the truth, I am convinced that this is the origin of the hermaphrodite abdominal Eye, worn and revered by all the great and good men from the time our religion found its birth in the foul sties of India down to the immortal Washington.

CHAPTER XVII. Revelations.

If you do not believe that all the beasts of the zodiac bear rule in Heaven, read Revelations with your eyes open. The Ram is the Grand Vizier. The Bull is also there, with eyes before and behind, and the Lion and the Man, the Waterman, in fact the four beasts of the four cardinal points of the zodiac.

Ch. 1, v 7, says: “Behold he cometh with clouds.” It is evident from Revelations that Christ is one of the seven Buddhas who came at the end of each cycle, and the seven were one, and that one was the sun in the heavens. Budhi means the Word, one of our beloved idols. “I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last,” that is, he is the same God that came at first as Adam and last as the Lamb of God. It is claimed that the Revelations were stolen and the original was written before the Fish God came. In verse 12, John saw seven golden candle-sticks, typifying the seven christs or lights of the world, “and one of the seven was like unto the Son of Man.” The Persian fire god Agni is called the Son of Man, and it is claimed that John got the Revelations from the Persians. In the Clementines St. Clement says: “Christ, it is said, has changed his forms and names from the beginning of the world.”—Clement, cap. 51.

Verse 18 says: “I am he that liveth and was dead,” that is, the sun that was crucified annually at the winter solstice, when it stood still for three days, or remained in the tomb three days, and was reborn on the 25th of December. “And have the keys of death and Hell.” The christ that was crucified in the west, according to the Egyptian religion, was Judge of the Underworld and carried the keys and descended into Hell when the sun went down. They were the keys of Hell, not Heaven, that were transmitted to St. Peter.

Ch. 2, v 7 says: “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life,” which being interpreted means that the successful candidate or worthy brother will be permitted to eat the male emblem. Verse 17 says: “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna,” which is a small round cake or wafer in the Mithraic Mysteries, representing the female emblem. In these Mysteries they killed a lamb or bull christ and sprinkled the candidate with its blood, as we drink the blood of Christ and eat his flesh in the depths of our beastial ignorance, superstition and depravity.

“And will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, the Word, which no man knoweth save him that receiveth it.” This stone is the symbol of Siva, and the new name is Ling, the secret, the Sanscrit name of the Word. St. Clemens says: “It is difficult to exhibit the pure and transparent Word to swinish hearers. (All are swine except the priests and ministers.) For nothing they could hear would be more ludicrous to the multitude. The truly sacred Word is deposited in the shrine (Monstrance). It is improper that these emblems should be exposed to those who have never been purified in soul. The Mysteries were established because it was wise that the holy and blessed contemplation of realities be concealed.”

In Ch. 4, v 3, the four beasts and the four and twenty elders, the angels and saints and all the other vermin in Heaven fall down and knock their foreheads on the ground, groveling in abject baseness, servility and degradation before the sardine stone or pillar that sits on the throne in the royal arch of the rainbow, and before the beast, (the bull). This lovely pillar is worshipped throughout India. You will find the above scene and this foul worship depicted in Inman’s A. P. & M. C. Symbolism, Plate XIX. John has set a foul pagan idol on the throne of Heaven.

Ch. 12, v 1. The woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet, with a crown of twelve stars, is Mary, the moon goddess, the wife of the sun-god, and the crown of twelve stars are the twelve christs that she bore, or that crowned her labors in the twelve signs of the zodiac. The dragon that waited to devour the child is called Herod in the other story of Mary and Jesus. In the Hindu myth, from which this is copied, the woman fled to the wilderness, as Mary fled to Egypt. According to another astronomical legend, when the sun-god is born on the 25th of December, old King Sagittarius, the Archer or Herod, who lives in the next house (November), tries to kill the Son of God with the arrow of death.

If you refer to an astronomical chart, you will see depicted there all the gods that ever existed. In the first sign, Leo, is the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the christ that came in the Golden Age, 12,934 years ago, a Jew god, that would not do a thing to you but rend you and steal your shirt.

In the sign of Gemini you see the Twins, or Castor and Pollux, or Cain and Abel, or Romulus and Remus, or Solomon and Adonijah, or Jacob and Esau. Cain has a club in his hand, with which he kills his brother god, as Romulus killed Remus and Solomon killed Adonijah. In the sign of Taurus, you will see Auriga, a Mystic of high degree kissing the goat, and Orion, the Lord of Darkness, killing the bull christ. And there is the triangle of seven stars that Christ held in his hand. This is the solar system of the Pleiades, of which the great star Alcyone is the sun, and around which the whole universe revolves. It is the Kingdom of Heaven and the home of god and his sons Jesus and the Devil.

In the sign of Aries, you see the Lamb of God and the christ Perseus, who has just amputated the Medusa’s head and destroyed the serpents of which the hair was composed. In the next sign of Pisces is the beautiful Andromeda (mother of men), or Mary, bearing the fish-god, the Son of Man, under her arm, as Isis bears it on her head. In the sign of Scorpio, you will see Christ or Orpheus overcoming the Great Serpent. And another christ, Hercules by name, holds a club in one hand and two serpents in the other, to whom, as representing the Devil or the infernal god Cerberus, he is about to administer, in the classic language of modern ministers, a good wallop.

“When the sun shall have passed through the sign of Virgo, the Great Cycle of 25,868 years will be ended. The sun then enters the sign of Leo, and this junction of Virgo and Leo, this secret of the Great Cycle, is expressed in the Sphinx of Egypt, the woman and the lion conjoined. This is the mystery of the ages, the pillar on the border of Egypt, which shall be for a sign and a testimony.”—Daughter of the Druids, 276. It is said that in that great Day Draconis will again be the pole star, and the great pyramid is so constructed that at the end of the Great Year the light from Draconis will again shine through the passage in the pyramid that leads to the Bottomless Pit, or the dragon will be cast into the Bottomless Pit.

In the sign of Virgo is the Virgin Mary, the mother of all the gods, and the Great Serpent will be seen waiting there for her to deliver another god for his consumption. Ch. 5, v 1, says that the book was sealed with seven seals, corresponding with the seven comings or avatars of Christ, when the book was opened or the word was preached. When the first seal was opened, Christ appeared as Sagittarius, the Archer. “And behold a white horse and he that sat on him had a bow.” When he had opened the third seal, behold a black horse, and he that sat thereon had a pair of balances in his hand. This is the Christ that came in the sign of Libra or the Scales, who weighed them in the balance and found them wanting.

Ch. 4, v 6. The four beasts referred to are the four hieroglyphic beasts of the priests and magicians, which they placed on the playing cards of Egypt, the lion, the bull, the man and the eagle. They are zodiacal gods and sit in the North, the East, the South and the West respectively. The churches declare truly that a pack of cards is the Devil’s book. Cards were invented by the priests, and they are reeking with sacred, occult and religious emblems. The pack is composed of four sets of ten. Ten is a Kabalistic sacred number, for there are ten persons in the Hebrew Godhead, and 10 or IO is the name of God. Then there are the four beasts or aces, and the Trinity is represented by the king, queen, and jack. The clubs, or the three sacred balls of the Jews, are the symbol of the male god and the Trinity. Any deeper meaning can only be disclosed to the initiated. The heart is the cup or chalice or Eye of Isis, the symbol of love. The queen of hearts is clothed with the sun and moon, and she is Mary, the Queen of Heaven. The Queen of spades holds in her left hand the sacred candle, and she is adorned with another male emblem, the fleur de lys, and in her right hand is the flower of Isis, a female emblem, the same as the circles and rosaries with which she is also decorated. The seven circles are the emblems of the seven joys that Mary had. The twelve precious stones in the jewel on her breast correspond with the twelve christs she bore and the twelve jewels in the Ephod of the high priest.

The jack of hearts carries the male emblem in his hand and the three links are on his belt to show that he is an Oddfellow in good standing. The jack of spades holds up the three links, and the spade itself is a patent, combination, hermaphrodite, religious emblem of sufficient magic potency to save from the pains of Tophet all who gaze upon its sacred and occult form. The king of hearts performs the occult and saving rite of putting the sword or cross through the crown. This crown is adorned with shamrocks, and on his coat he wears the seven hearts or chalices. He belongs to the zodiacal sign of the Lion, and this is the heart sign, and in it is found the constellation of the Chalice. And he holds his hand on his breast like Buddha to show that he is a Mason in due form.

Rev. 7-4. The angel seals in their foreheads 144,000 Jews with the Signa Tau or Word, the signet of the Living God. The devotees of Siva also wear this Tree of Infamy on their foreheads. John says that it is the Father’s name written in the forehead. Only those sealed with this Baum Bosheth can sit with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the other beasts around the Throne. All but the 144,000 Jews can go to Hell. The priests draw the cross or Signa Tau in ashes on the foreheads of their devotees every Ash Wednesday.

Rev. 16-12. And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the earth, and I saw three unclean spirits, like frogs, come out of the mouth of the Dragon and out of the mouth of the beast. For they are the spirits of devils which go forth unto the kings of the earth to gather them to the great day of God Almighty. The sixth angel is the angel of the sixth sign of the zodiac, our present sign, the Waterman, and the nations of the earth are now fighting the battles of Armageddon. We are now at the end of a Great Cycle. The end of the world has come according to the astrological and theological fakirs, and the inhabitants of the earth are again being destroyed, this time by fire and sword. Christ now comes to bring a sword upon the earth.

According to the Christians, all the nations engaged in the war, save two, march forth under the banner and protection of Jehovah, the God of Battles, and he divides himself into two persons and, perched upon two clouds, commands the two contending hosts, urging them on to kill each other. After this holocaust of blood and carnage, there will be found no fool so utter as to assert that God rules the destinies of mankind.

CHAPTER XVIII. The Clergy.

The Presbyterian clergy or sorcerers of Scotland, of old times, claimed that they could consign their deluded victims to Heaven or Hell by a word, and could by their magic power strike with death any enemy of God, that is, the clergy. They would not allow anyone to remain in town who failed to go and hear their sermons. Buckle says the clergy kept the people in a worse than Egyptian bondage, inasmuch as they enslaved mind as well as body.

“John Knox sanctioned the murder of the Roman Archbishop Beaton of Scotland in 1548, and shut himself up with the assassins in the palace of the Archbishop. When the Catholic power was destroyed in Scotland by the nobles in 1560 and the church property confiscated by them, the Protestant clergy claimed that it was impious to secularize ecclesiastical property, and that they should be endowed with the spoils of the war, that it was right for the Lords to plunder the Church of Rome, but the loot should be turned over to them. They said that what rightly belonged to them was devoured by idle bellies. The Presbyterian clergy said that King James was a traitor and had seven devils inside of him, and he ought to be seized. And their associate in crime, the Earl of Gourie, entrapped the King into his castle in order to murder him.”—Buckle’s Hist. Civ. 2-201.

The Presbyterian clergy said that cheerfulness was to be guarded against. Smiling, provided it stopped short of laughter, might occasionally be allowed, still being a carnal pastime, it was a sin to smile on Sunday. A Christian has no business with love or sympathy. He has his own soul to attend to, that is enough for him. On Sunday in particular he must never think of benefitting others and thus break the Sabbath. On no occasion must food or shelter be given to a starving man unless he is a Presbyterian.

“In priest-ridden Spain, Charles V, the tool of religion, in his will provided that all heretics should be put to death and that the Inquisition should be upheld. Under his orders, according to Grotius, 100,000 persons were beheaded, buried alive and burnt at the stake in the Netherlands. Phillip II, of Spain, said it was better not to reign at all than to reign over heretics. The Duke of Alva, in this reign, boasted that in five or six years he had put to death in cold blood more than 18,000 heretics, beside a still greater number of infidels he had slain on the battlefield.”—Idem 2-14.

When it was proposed to expel from Spain the remnant of Moors remaining, who had turned Christians and were baptized by force, Bleda, the Dominican, said that every Moor in Spain should have his throat cut, because it was impossible to tell which of them were Christians at heart, but God knew his own and he could sort them out. About one million of the most industrious inhabitants of Spain were hunted out like wild beasts. Many were slain as they approached the coast, others were beaten and plundered, and the majority in the most wretched plight sailed for Africa. During the passage the crew in many of the ships butchered the men, ravished the women and threw the children into the sea. From this time Spain began to degenerate. The tyranny of religion was supreme. While every other country was advancing, Spain, numbed into a death-like torpor, spell-bound and entranced by the accursed superstition, presented to Europe a solitary instance of constant decay.“—Idem, 2-53.

“The French Revolution freed the world from ecclesiastical tyranny and opened an unobstructed path to Napoleon, who had given the death blow to the Inquisition, the great slaughter house, where they butchered in the name of the Lamb.”—Isis Unveiled, 2-22.

The Brahmins, the clergy of India, were quite as disreputable as the others. The Institutes of Manu provided that if a common person molested a Brahmin, he was to be put to death. If he sat on the same carpet with a Brahmin, he was to be maimed for life. If he listened to the reading of the sacred books, burning oil was to be poured into his ears, and if he committed them to memory, he was to be killed. If he spoke disrespectfully of a Brahmin, an iron stile ten fingers long was to be thrust red-hot into his mouth. To give to the Brahmins or will them your property was an act of the highest piety.

The laws of the clergy in certain provinces of France, ruled by them in old times, provided that every man that died without bequeathing part of his estate to the church, should be deprived of the Sacrament (and would consequently go to Hell). If he died without making a will, his relatives were obliged to prevail upon the Bishop to appoint arbitrators to determine what sum the deceased should have given to the church in case he had made a will. At one time in France, “married couples could not sleep together the first three nights without purchasing leave of the church.”—Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, 665.

“Pope John XII was assassinated in the arms of his mistress. Crecentious, the illegitimate son of John X, caused Benedict VI to be murdered. His faction elected Boniface VII, and a third faction elected John XV, who was put to death by Boniface. We find shortly after 1044 Benedict IX, a boy of twelve, and Rholeme and Sylvester III all reigning at the same time, and all leading the most profligate and scandalous lives.”—Doubts of Infidels, 95. Bishop Hopkins says that “the great body of the clergy before the seventh century were steeped in licentiousness, avarice, simony, cruelty, violence and blood. They consecrated every vice in the interest of so-called religion, they graduated sins by pecuniary amercement, they commissioned assassins, having pardoned them before the commission of the murder.”

The priests or Magi of Persia, as ecclesiastical bandits, were unexcelled. The people had to give up one tenth of their income to these magical fakirs. Every woman in Babylon was obliged to offer her person for sale one day in the year at the temple of Astarte, and the money went to the priests. The pirates of Babylon ransacked the world and bought or stole the most beautiful women on earth for the use of the priests, who made a pretence of offering them up as human sacrifices to Baal. The god held in his hand the appropriate symbol of the traffic, the circle and the pillar, that may still be seen in nearly all churches. The beautiful sacrifice was placed on the lap of the god in the presence of the audience, to be devoured by the lions that surrounded the god. But after the meeting the priests drove the lions out and stole the sacrifice, as priests always did steal the offerings from god.

The Egyptian priests were the rulers of the whole, and owned one third the land of Egypt. Besides the princely revenue from this immense landed estate, they received, in addition to their salaries, all the offerings and sacrifices that the fools gave up as an atonement for sin. A very large part of their income was derived from the Bethel or Brothel maintained around the temple of the goddess Hathor, the cow, the wife of the god Ammon, which is another name for the Ram god or the lamb of god. Every woman in Egypt was obliged to sell herself for one month at this temple. And then, besides, there were the regular sacred ladies who lived constantly in the temple. The priests chose the most beautiful, then the remainder were turned over to the mob of pious dupes and devotees. The young lady who earned the most money for the priests was, in the after life, assigned by Osiris, alias Yahvah, to a seat beside the Golden Throne. This rotten pagan church subsequently changed its name to Christian.

Calvin, the blood-drenched, the fiend incarnate, one of the founders of the Protestant Churches, compelled his lady parishioners to confess on the rack their indiscretions, and then threw them naked into the lake and drowned them. He hanged a child for cursing its parents, burned old women as witches, and burned alive Michael Servetus for contradicting Moses in asserting that Palestine was a desert that did not flow with milk and honey. Calvin died in convulsions of fear, raving and cursing because he thought he was going to Hell.

Oliver Cromwell, the pious Puritan, the murder demon, the regicide, the usurper, with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other, rode at the head of his army of religious fanatics singing psalms. This sanctified Christian, upon the capture of Drogheda, Ireland, himself reported to Parliament that he massacred two thousand of the garrison. He fired St. Peter’s Church, to which the people had fled, and put a thousand of them to the sword. All the friars were killed but two. And the likes of him settled Boston and robbed and murdered the Indians. One of these Puritan buccaneers, named Will Bartlett, in Boston, in 1637, was sentenced to be set in the stocks, with his tongue in a cleft stick, because he got drunk and cussed and swore and refused to go to church on Sunday.

In those blithesome days a citizen could not vote unless he belonged to the Congregational Church and kissed the big toe of Cotton Mather, the superstitious bigot, the Prosecutor of the New England Protestant Inquisition. Ridpath says that Mather was chiefly responsible for the horrors and crimes of the Salem Witchcraft, and that this massacre, torture and imprisonment of 263 innocent persons was started by a Salem minister for the purpose of revenging himself upon those of his flock who antagonized him.—Ridpath’s Hist. of U. S. 131. The Quakers were perhaps the only decent body of Christians up to that time, and for that reason the Puritan pirates and slave-dealers hung four of them, one woman and three men, on Boston Common.

“Infuse a few different kinds of religious poison into a community of human beings, and they hate each other like tigers. Religious creeds have a worse effect on a man than booze. You can work the booze out of your system and quit the stuff, but when a victim is loaded up on some rotten brand of orthodoxy, it is hard to do anything with him. A Protestant will damn the Catholics, and a Catholic will yell ‘To Hell with the Protestants,’ and both will hate the Jews.”—Roman Religion, 27.

The churches have soaked the earth with the blood of their countless victims. Frederick, the Emperor of Germany, sentenced heretics of all descriptions alive to the flames. Sixty thousand heretics were slaughtered in the city of Beziers. Seventy thousand Huguenots were put to death in France. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew began at midnight, Aug. 23, 1572, and the carnival of death lasted seven days. Medals commemorating the holy event were distributed among the loyal butchers.—Roman Religion, 35.

“When the Crusaders took Jerusalem from the Moslems in 969 A. D., they massacred all the Mussulmans and burned the Jews alive. Seventy thousand persons were put to death in a week to attest the superior morality of the Christians.”—Boston Sun. American.

Dr. Fernald says that Sultan Bejazet wrote to Pope Alexander VI that he would give him 300,000 ducats, several cities and the shirt of Jesus Christ if His Holiness would kill Zimzim, the brother of the Sultan, “and you Most Illustrious Lord will not commit a crime, since by your religion Christians are ordered to exterminate heretics and infidels.” The Ency. Brit. says that “the unfortunate prince was murdered by Alexander, who received 300,000 ducats as the reward of the crime.” Zimzim was held captive by certain bandits in Rhodes, a Commandery of the Knights of St. John, a Christian organization under the domination of Alexander. Alexander was a Borgia, whose children were all illegitimate.

CHAPTER XIX. The Bible.

As the Old Testament was originally written without vowels, the Lord only knows what it meant. The best the copyists could do was to make a good guess at the meaning, or supply whatever vowels suited their purposes.—See Ency. Brit. 3-64.

Moses was a magician, a thief and a murderer according to the Bible, a fakir who foisted upon the Hebrews a magnificent system of priestly plunder. In pursuance of Moses pretence that the world was created in six days, and that their god El or Bel or Baal rested on the seventh, he commanded the people to refrain from labor on that day and go to church, so that he would have frequent opportunities to pick their pockets. The story of Moses’ birth and secretion in an ark of bulrushes was taken from the Babylonians, where it was applied to King Sargon, according to tablets excavated at Babylon.

The great, learned and profound Irenaeus says that there must be four gospels because there are four winds of heaven. This is a fair sample of the logic of theologians. The fact is, there are four gospels because those four jumped from the floor onto the table at the council of Nice. There was at that time so much doubt as to what alleged sacred writings were inspired by God, that the delegates put them all together under the communion table one night at the close of the session, and agreed that those that got up on top of the table during the night should be considered as inspired, and those that were too weak to get up on the table should be stamped as the work of the Devil.

“Many of the bishops in these councils were ruffians and were followed by crowds of vicious supporters, who stood ready on the slightest excuse to maim and kill their opponents.”—Keeler’s Hist. of the Bible. Tichenor says that “they decided all holy questions by a vote or a knock-down fight. It is doubtful if any of them drew a sober breath during the entire proceedings.” Millman says that “they fought in the streets and much blood was shed.”—Millman’s Hist. Christianity. “What these drunken, fighting, ignorant, pagan priests declared to be received from God, that is what is taught as Divine to-day. To this day they cram their abominable lies of devils and damnation into the brains of little children. The miserable, crazy creeds of Christendom were concocted by these brawling pagan priests, and their poison still pollutes the souls of men. Fire all the gods of all the creeds into the melting pot, and out comes the brazen face of Mammon.”—Tichenor.

Another reason why there are four gospels, according to Irenaeus, was because the Cherubim had four faces. But he thus calls attention to the fact that Christianity was spawned in the sties of paganism, as the Jews took the four beasts of the Cherubim, the bull, the lion, the eagle and the man, from the idolatrous Babylonians. And the four Evangelists adopted the four beasts as their totems and placed their beastly images on the four gospels. The Maya Indians and the Mexicans worshipped the same four idols of the four quarters of the heavens.—Ency. Brit. 12-823. The priests of the Ojibways wear the horns of the bull and sacrifice to the dragon or great serpent (Mary) that wears on its head the crescent moon. They also worship the eagle and the Tree of Life. The Ojibway picture writing shows that the Indian Adam and Eve had the same disgraceful scandal in the garden of Eden. See “Indians,” Ency. Americana.

It is claimed that Apollonius of Tyana (alleged to be the original of Paul and Christ) came through a medium and said: “Nine epistles were made a present to me by Pharaotes, a Satrap of Taxila, between Babylon and India. These epistles contained all that is embraced in the present epistles claimed to have been written by Paul. Further, I retired to the Isle of Patmos in 69 and 70 A. D. and wrote in a trance state an almost identical story with that attributed to St. John. The Christian Gospels were all preached by me at Jerusalem, Ephesus, Philippi, Rome, Antioch, Alexandria and Babylon, and in all those countries I healed the sick, cured the blind and raised the dead. The original of the four gospels I obtained at Singapore. They treated of the four stages of the life of Buddha.”—Antiquity Unveiled, 21.

Moses and God were mad at the Midianites because the Jews had entered into the tents of the Midianite ladies and worshipped Baal Poer, from which ensued a plague among the Congregation of the Lord. Num. 31-18. And they warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded, and slew all the males and took all the women and children captive. Moses was wroth because they had saved all the women and children, and ordered all the males among the children to be killed and all the females to be turned over to the soldiers for outrage. And he ordered all the women murdered except the virgins, of whom 16,000 went to the soldiers and 16,000 to the people, but the soldiers and the people were compelled to pay of these into the storehouse of the Lord 3200 in tithes. “And the priests laid with the virgins at the door of the Tabernacle.” Such a monstrosity of iniquity, such a fiend incarnate from the shades of Hell is the senior member of the firm of Moses and the Lamb.

The history of Moses is copied from the history of Bacchus, who was called Mises by the Egyptians. Like Moses, Bacchus was born in Egypt, he sojourned on Mt. Sinai, he passed through the Red Sea on dry land, he was a lawgiver and wrote the laws on two tables, he was found in a box that floated on the water, he smote a rock and wine gushed forth, and Bacchus was worshipped and these deeds of his sung in Egypt, Phenicia, Syria, Arabia and Greece before Abraham’s day.—Doubts of Infidels, 31.

The account of creation as given in the Bible has been found on tablets in the ruins of Nineveh, written in a language that was dead and buried before the Jews ever existed. In this Persian cosmogony the name of the first man was Adomah, and of the woman Hevah.

The Greeks said miracles for fools. Paul boasts of lying for the glory of God and catching converts with guile. Chrysostom said: “Great is the force of deceit.” St. Hermas, an Apostolic Father, said that he always lived in dissimulation and affirmed a lie for truth to all men.— Doubts of Infidels, 78.

You will see that the Bible is dedicated to King James, and that he is canonized in the dedication, probably because he kept fifty mistresses and was in the habit of becoming beastly intoxicated without provocation.

The only real revelations received by the priests and prophets of any religion were spirit messages, and the Lord only knows whether these were from God or the Devil, from good or bad spirits. In fact it is claimed by some spiritualists that all the good spirits are in Heaven with God and can’t get out. In other words, they are in limbo, while those that were not so good are at liberty to visit the loved spots and fond friends of earth and indulge on the astral in their favorite pastimes, whether it be a prayer meeting or a poker game. This is purgatory, the next story above Hell, which is the earth.

Gibbon said that Eusebius was a consummate liar. The Gospel of Matthew and the Epistle to the Hebrews were his work, taken from the lives of Christna and Apollonius and the records of the Essenes and some of the Jewish and Phenician legends.

A Coptic version of the life of Apollonius in the possession of the monks of Seville, Spain, about 1458, was placed in the hands of Juan Hermonez for translation. In the margin was a Latin translation, in which the name of Apollonius had been changed to John among many other falsifications. The Latin translation was almost identical with the Gospel of St. John. When Hermonez called the attention of the Superior to these changes, he was seized and thrown into a dungeon, in which he was allowed to starve and rot.

The Bible has been too much neglected, due, no doubt, to the general impression that, being religious, it must be dry. Far from it. For instance: Elohim, the gods, made the light and days and nights four days before they made the sun. They made a firmament, probably of metal, to divide the ocean above from the ocean below, and had windows in it, so that they could open them and drown the inhabitants of the earth whenever they got drunk and needed a little diversion. And they stuck the sun, moon and stars in the metal firmament, which revolved around the earth.

When the serpent was not working, he was coiled around the Tree of Life telling Eve in snake language what luscious fruit the tree bore. For this interference with the plans of the gods, they made the serpent crawl on his belly. He had been crawling on his back.

Moses and his first assistant fakir, Aaron, destroyed all the horses and cattle in Egypt by a murrain, and then, as Pharaoh still had a stiff neck, they destroyed them all again by hail. Then, as Pharaoh still had trouble with his neck, they killed all the first-born of Egypt, both men and cattle. Then the Israelites fled, and Pharaoh hitched up his horses, that had been killed three times, to his six hundred chariots and pursued the chosen of God, who had pinched all the jewelry of the Egyptians. The Bible is full of these delightful stories from beginning to end. If you have conscientious scruples against reading the Bible, you will find them attractively set forth in Le Brun’s Doubts of Infidels.

CHAPTER XX. Heaven.

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