Spiritism; the origin of all religions

SPIRITISM;

THE

Origin of All Religions.

-

BY

J P . DAMERON,

Author of "The Dupuy Papers" " Devil and Hell" and " The Evil Forces

in Nature"

SAX FRANCISCO, CAL.

Published by the Author.
1885.

OP TBB

UNIVERSITY

LVERSIT-

7 a i # /

ClLIFC

PREFACE

In presenting this little book to the public, I must ask the kind indulgence
of the reader, for it has been the work of my leisure hours; a recreation of
the mind from the dry details of law, which teaches us to deal with facts
according to law, and to reason out its relations with the many conflicting,
interests of mankind. In trying to trace out the origin of these laws
customs and usages, it has led me far back into the night of time, when man
emerged from the obscurity of barbarism. Like the explorer of some great
river, as he ascends he beholds the stream branching off into many little
rivers, and they grow less and less, until at last he finds its source in some
far-off mountain, fed by the melting of the snows or springs that gush from
out the granite rocks.

So it is with law and religion, they both come from the invisible source —
the mind of man. One teaches him his relations to his fellow-man, and the
other to his Creator ; one relates to his social nature, the other to his moral
and spiritual nature. They are closely allied and have much to do with
each other, the religious status of a people having had much to do in
shaping their government and civilization. Where a liberal religion has
prevailed the laws have partaken of its nature and the people prospered
and were happy ; when illiberal it has tyrannized over man and made him
a slave to caste and priesthood.

In all religions there are good moral precepts, and if man would live up
to them he would be wiser and better, but his animal nature is so strong
that it often tempts him to violate them ; but they act upon and tend to
restrain him. It is contended by some that man could not be governed
without a religion. It makes but little difference what a man's religion is, if
he be honest and will respect the rights of another. No one should say,
" My religion is orthodox and yours is heterodox ;" we should all be willing
to let every one worship God in accordance with the dictates of his own
conscience, for we are all in the fog and know but little of the life to come.
We now and then catch a stray bit of evidence that goes to confirm us in
the belief of the immortality of the soul. It comes like the whispering

voice of spirits and angels, to tell us that we are immortal and will live
beyond the grave. Is it our imagination ?

Whence come these thoughts ? Did we inherit them from the teaching
of our ancestors ? They had no better evidence of the facts than we see
around us every day. They tell us these things happened thousands of
years ago, in benighted Asia, among people just emerging from savagery,
who had no knowledge of the arts and sciences, geography, astronomy,
geology, chemistry, botany, biology, etc. They believed the world was flat;
that the sun, moon and stars moved around the earth ; that the earth was
created in six days ; that man was made of dust, and that God breathed
the breath of life into him ; that he caused a deep sleep to fall upon him,
and took a rib out of his side and made it into a woman.

These infantile stories of the creation of man and the remarkable revela-
tions made by God, are conflicting and bear upon their face the evidence of
exaggeration and credulity. The evolution theory has swept from us the
myth of Adam and Eve and the eating of the forbidden fruit in the Garden
of Eden, which does away with the necessity of a redeemer and the vicari-
ous atonement and original sin. It has opened our eyes to the knowledge
that there is no one standing between us and our Creator; that every one
must work out his own salvation and be his- own savior, answering for his
sins according to the law of compensation ; that the laws of nature are
unchangeable ; that the same force that shapes a dewdrop will round a
world ; that suns and stars float in space, and are held in their place by the
same law that guides the earth in its course around the sun ; that spring
comes to gladden the earth and make it green ; that winter's frost robes it
in a white winding sheet of snow ; but the vegetable world is not dead, it is
only asleep to blossom again.

Will man live after death ? This is a question that has time and again
been asked by the most learned sages and philosophers of all ages. Men
have sacrificed their lives to prove it, they have been deified and churches
and temples have been reared to honor their sainted names, and a vast mul-
titude of humanity bowed down in their praise. Still it is an open question,
and one that is hard to demonstrate. The only evidence we have is what
Spiritism has been able to give us, but it is so conflicting that men of science
differ as to the value of its evidence, and the only solution to the question
is, each one must investigate for himself, in a spirit of fairness and candor,
and he will find much that will convince him of the fact. I have examined

> 8

the religions of all ages, and I find that it had its origin in the same intelli-
gent force one hears in the mysterious rapping, the tipping of the table, the
invisible pencil writing on a slate, the trance, the clairaudient and clairvoy-
ant mediums, which is the only solution to all the stories we have read about
gods, angels, ghosts and devils, that have ever manifested themselves to
man ; and the object of this book is to show that Spiritism is the origin of
all religions ; that all the knowledge of the life beyond has come to us
through the same channel, whether it purported to be from gods, angels,
saviors, prophets, seers, inspired men, or mediums ; it is one and the same
thing under different forms and different names, in different ages and differ-
ent countries.

The object of the author is not to attack any religion, but to give a fair
and impartial statement of facts, that will remove the veil that, for ages, has
mystified man and shut him out from the knowledge that he is a part of the
divine mind, and if he will but listen to his better nature he can hold con-
verse with those who have preceded him, which will take away all fear of
death and damnation and fill the heart with hope and joy.

J. P. Dameron.

San Francisco, California, April, 1885.

CONTENTS.

Page.

Chapter I — Spiritism 5

It is a New Religion; it is American and

Democratic, and in keeping with the

Progress of the Age in which we Live.

The Leading Scientists are Divided —

Some are Materialists, others are

Avowed Spiritualists 7

Chapter II 10

Occultism — A Hidden Force in Nature
called the Astral Light, the Soul of
the World, the Primum Mobile, the
Grand Arcanum of Transcendental
Magic, the Tetragrammaton of the
Hebrews, the Thot of the Egyptians,
the Azoth of the Alchemist, the Akasa
of the Hindoos, the Secret lost to the
Masonic Fraternity in the Murder of
Grand Master Hiram Abiff, Theopse,
Destiny, Occult Fraternity.

Akasa, or Life Force 16

Wonder-Workers of India 17

Destiny < 22

An Occult Fraternity 22

Chapter III 24

Soul of the Universe (Anima Mundi).
Ether, Psychomancy, Plato and St.
Paul on the Triune, Body, Spirit and
Soul, Transmigration, Hindoo Idea
of a Soul, its Origin and Destiny.

Psychomancy 26

Soul 27

The Soul is Eternal 30

Chapter IV 35

Mediums, Ancient and Modern. Pro-
phets, Seers, Magicians, Soothsayers,
Astrologers, Fortune-Tellers, Materi-
alizations, Raps, Trances.

Mediumship 38

Materialization 42

Chapter V 48

Inspiration and Inspired Men, Saviors,

Mediators and Mediums.
Jesus Christ 49

Page.

Chrisna 52

Gautama Buddha 53

Apollonius of Tyana 55

Pythagoras 55

Esculapius 56

^Eschylus 56

Xenophon 56

Cicero 56

Socrates 57

Zoroaster 57

Sosioch 58

Confucius 58

Chapter VI 60

Religion; its Origin, Growth and Devel-
opment.
Chapter VII 69

Ancestral Worship of the Ancient
Aryans.

Chapter VIII 78

Religion of the Ancient Greeks; their
Gods and Goddesses were only Spirits
of Departed Sages and Heroes. Their
Mediums foretold the Future and the
Past.

Chapter IX 85

The Origin of the Christian Religion.

Christianity 85

Advent of Christ 85

Chapter X 91

All Religions appear to have one Com-
mon Origin. The Origin of the Trin-
ity, Cross, Sacred Rivers, Madonna,
Ark, Deluge, Fish Story.

The Trinity 94

The Holy Communion or Lord's Supper 97
The Deluge 97

Chapter XI 100

The Eight Great Religions of the World.
Brahminism, Buddhism, Zoroaster-
ism, Mosaicism, Christianity, Mo-
hammedanism, Laoteseism and Mod-
ern Spiritualism.

The Rise and Progress of Modern Spiritualism,

CHAPTER I.

It is a New Edition to Old Religions; it is American and Democratic, and in Keeping with the

Progress of the Age in which We Live.

"Rap, rap, rap, on the ceiling and floor,

On the pictures and door;
What is it that makes such a noise ?"

All scientific investigations point to the fact
that the earth was created by fixed laws, and
that it was intended for the express purpose of
developing man. For in him heaven and earth
have contributed all their best material, and
worked it over well for millions upon millions of
years, raising up mountains and eroding them
down into the sea. Mineral, vegetable and ani-
mal life changed often before it was fit to be
worked into man, the last crowning act of crea-
tion. In him enters everything, therefore he is a
microcosm, his physical and intellectual pow-
ers are the perfection of nature and the pride
of the all wise master.

Is it reasonable, yea, is it possible that
all this shoujd be done to make a superior ani-
mal who should eat, drink and use all the
bountiful stores that nature had provided in
building up the globe as a fit habitation for him
that he should die and his body return to dust
from whence it sprang; if so creation is a grand
failure, and should there be no soul survive
death, or was it intended that out of him should
spring another form that would retain the know-
ledge and the individual identity in a more sub-
limated condition, capable of further progress.
I see nothing indicating that mind — intelligence
— can be destroyed or annihilated any more than
that of force and matter, which has produced
him. Then this intelligence must exist in an
individual form, and that form must begin in
another. On the investigation of the phenome-
na of modern Spiritualism I am forced to ad-

mit that there it nothing in it that is contrary
to the fixed laws of evolution — but it throws
new light on the life-forces of the universe called
life, soul and spirit.

There should be no conflict between science
and religion. While science deals in facts that
are demonstrable to the five senses, and is
aided by observation, comparison and deduc-
tion from which a knowledge of phenomena and
of the order of succession is derived. Spiritism
offers to lend its aid and assist science to ex-
plore those hidden realms of metaphysics and
with the higher developed senses of clairaudi-
ence and clairvoyance which the academy of
science at Paris has called the sixth sense, so
with this higher development they will be able
to go farther into the workings of the human
mind and bring to light that hidden force
called spirit, the life force of the universe that
has caused matter to evolve and work out so
many changes and forms in the physical world.
As each atom of matter is accompanied by cer-
tain force or intelligence that cause that particle
of matter to attract or repel other particles of
matter, so that it knows its affinities and re-
pels its dislikes; it forms the minerals in crys-
tals, cubes, cones and prisms, for all matter is
moved and governed by certain laws that are
acting and reacting throughout the visible and
invisible world and the invisible forms of
matter are the most active and numerous; yet
because we can not reach or comprehend these
operations of matter with the five senses we
cannot say it does not exist or move, but reason
aided by observation and comparison is forced
to admit the fact. We cannot see, feel or hear

6

the iron crystalize but we are satisfied that it
does under certain conditions, so there is a si-
lent work ever going on in the secret laboratory
of nature that is beyond the keen perception or
understanding of the man of science, but which
is revealed to the higher developed senses of the
disembodied spirits and to those mediums that
occupy a border land.

So science should cease its hostility and cul-
tivate that intuitional sense of the inner man
(the spirit) which, if properly understood
and trained, would aid it in the great work of
arriving at the truth, which would lead to a
higher civilization and amelioration of the hu-'
man race by expanding the intellect in the di-
rection of the spiritual, for the heart must be cul-
tivated as well as the head, for the inner man
has much to do with the outer man. And un-
til science and Spiritualism, physics and meta-
physics go hand in hand the highest attainments
will not be reached. As Joliet says, "while
the Western Nations have been following the
physical laws, the Hindoo fakirs have been fol-
lowing the metaphysical laws of the spirit, by
which they can control and perform wonderful
things that startle the European with wonder
and amazement, while we can by our know-
ledge perform wonders that are as startling to
them."

That mind and matter, physics and meta-
physics are all united in man and that he should
investigate one as well as the other, that there
is no dividing line; that it is the ignorance of
science of these metaphysical laws that shut
the door in the face of the pursuer of know-
ledge, and all that is required is to knock and
it shall be opened; that man is the beginning
of our individualized intelligence that never
dies but follows the laws of progress through
endless realms; that there is no end or limit to
knowledge in this life or the higher life to come
in the spirit land; that there is no secret in
nature's laws beyond the reach of individu-
alized intelligence of the aspiring mind.

Science, proud of her attainments and justly
so, strong in her foundations of laws and un-
assailable in her primal principles, has never-
theless arrogated to herself more rights than she
actually possesses, and claims not only to dic-
tate to man the essential properties and elements
that constitute the physical body, but here it

shuts the door against any investigation of that
which belongs to his spiritual nature.

The result is that materialism is closely en-
croaching upon the church and is fast under-
mining and destroying the spiritual faith of the
inner man and reducing him down to a piece
of clay, destitute of any spirituality, while the
churches are divided and making war on Mod-
ern Spiritualism, and invoke the aid of science
to demonstrate the fact that it is all a delusion,
at the same time proving to the world that
all religion is nothing but a deception; for if
there are no spirits for the Spiritualists there
can be none for the churches.

The greatest difficulty in describing that
which relates to man's spiritual nature is the
absolute ignorance of humanity concerning its
nature. The spiritual laws have heretofore
been ignored; the power of one mind upon an-
other, the influence of spirit upon spirit, have
scarcely been considered, while that spiritual
power by which Jesus wrought miracles and
spells (and also his disciples), which he promis-
ed should be given to all who believed and fol-
lowed in him, has been wholly blotted out and
tabooed by the church, and any attempt to re-
vive it is denounced as the work of the devil, so
that religion has come to mean a simple state-
ment, a form, a ceremony, a theory, without any
intermediate links connecting it with the world of
causes and human existence, whereas in the time
of Jesus it was a matter of daily life and experi-
ence and was so understood and practiced by
him and his disciples. The spirit was the great
motor power by which these miracles were per-
formed.

The working of spiritual gifts has ceased be-
cause they have been ignored by the church,
and the temporal power and material influence
of civilization, which has encouraged a growth
of materialism. Prosperity, the building up of
states, endowing institutions, the rearing of
splendid structures and churches, goes far to
build up the material welfare of nations and
society; but they take away from the mind those
absolute conditions that are eccential to the ex-
istence of spiritual gifts — simplicity, natural-
ness, dependence upon the unseen and the rec-
ognition of the higher nature of the spirits in
all that belongs to daily life. In following the
material, man has lost much of the spiritual pow-

/

er that the ancients had. Though he has made
great progress in the physical laws of nature
in the discovery of steam and electricity, he has
lost sight of the more subtle psychical force
of mind over matter, which enabled the ancients
to divine the future and tell the past. It has
weU nigh cut humanity off from all religions
and made him a materialist.

The Leading Scientists are Divided — Some are
Materialists, others are Avowed Spri ritualists.

Darwin could not see anything behind blind
matter, forcing up the vegetable and animal
life, but the " survival of the fittest." Herbert
Spencer thinks that matter is impelled by the
active forces in nature to evolve all forms of
life according to its environments; Huxley ad-
mits that there is an "unknowable " force back
of or in the atom that im pells it to assume cer-
tain forms. Agassiz thought all matter was
impelled by an invisible intelligence, but would
not admit that it was done by the spirit forces,
still he believed in a God — a Supreme First
Cause — that caused all matter to evolve under
certain laws. While, on the other hand, we
have the illustrious names of Alexander Aksa-
koff, Robert Chambers.. Hiram Corson, Au-
gustus de Morgan, J. W. Edmonds, Dr. Elliot-
son, I. H. Fichte, Zollner, Prof. Ulriciof Halle,
Camille Flammaron, Herman Goldschmidt,
Dr. Hoffle, Robert Hare, Lord Lyndhurst,
Robert Dale Owen, Victor Hugo, W. M.
Thackeray, T. A. Trollope, Alfred Russel
Wallace (a naturalist and scientist, a cotempo-
rary with Darwin), Nicholas Wagner, Arch-
bishop Whately, Pasteur, the author of the
germ theory, and Professor Crookes, who stand
high in science and learning, all are firm be-
lievers in Spiritism, and that the departed from
this life live, can and do return and hold com-
munication with mortals. These men have
placed the mediums under the strictest test.
Profs. Wallace, Crookes and Zollner took the
mediums to their own homes and placed them
under the strictest test conditions. On one oc-
casion Mr. Varley, the electrician, by means
of a galvanic battery and cable-testing appara-
tus, showed to the satisfaction of all present,
that the medium was inside of the cabinet,
while the supposed spirit form was visible and
moving outside. Prof. Crookes says: " It was

a common thing for the seven or eight of us in
the laboratory to see Miss Cook (the medium)
and M Kate" (the spirit) at the same time un-
der the full blaze of the electric light." Wil-
liam Crookes, after making many tests with
such mediums as D. D. Home, Kate Fox, and
others, says that "the spirits can move heavy
bodies. That they can make sounds and raps;
that they can alter the weight of bodies, and
move bodies when at a distance from the me-
dium; raise tables and chairs off the ground;
the levitation of human beings; luminous ap-
pearances; the appearance of hands writing;
phantom forms and faces."

-SPIRITISM IS AS OLD AS THE HISTORY OF MAN.

It appeared to Adam in the Garden of Eden;
it directed Noah how to build the ark; Moses
saw it in the burning bush; the spirits (angels)
often appeared to Abraham, and at one time
ate veal cutlets with him in his* tent; Saul saw
the spirit (or ghost) of Samuel at the Witch of
Endor; the spirit closed the mouth of the lion
when Daniel was thrown into the lion's den;
Jesus saw Moses and Elias on the mount of
transfiguration, and they talked with him; St.
Paul heard voices and was liberated from prison
by them; St. John had trances and saw the
New Jerusalem. Take the Spiritualism out of
the Bible and it would be a tame, dull history
of the Jews; but read through the light of Spir-
itualism it is full of interest and grandeur.

Spiritism is the basis of all religions and the
only way man has got any knowledge of a fu-
ture existence. It manifested itself in the Del-
phic oracles as well as to the Hebrew prophets,
if we are to believe the Greek authors. Socra-
tes says he received all his knowledge from his
little demon (spirit) that whispered it into his
ears. The Platonic philosophy was but little
different from that of Modern Spiritualism.
Homer is one grand poem of the gods (spirits)
taking a deep interest in the affairs of nations
and individuals. The Greeks lived close to
nature and held communion through the ora-
cles with departed heroes and sages. The Ro-
mans had their sybaline books and vestal vir-
gins, who held communion with the dead.
Cicero was a firm believer in the spirits, and
was a medium; his orations burn with the fire
of inspiration.

8

Every age has had its spiritual manifestations;
every period has witnessed something of the
kind; every fireside has its ghost story, and ev-
ery family has something of its wonders to re-
late. It is nothing new. In the year 364, in
the reign of the Roman emperor Valen=, me-
diums conversed by the means of rappings
and employed the alphabet, as also the spirit
pendulum. It finally passed into disrepute as
a black art and was denounced by the priests
as the doings of the devil. Independent slate
writing was known to the Chinese over a thou-
sand years ago. Trance mediums were known
to the ancient Hindoos, Persians and Greeks;
so was that of healing, clairaudience and clair-
voyance; they saw and heard spirits.

Christ was a medium of the highest order;
he made his appearance to battle against the
materialism of his day; he was invested with
wonderful power to convince the wicked world
that he was serlt from God to teach reforma-
tion, but they would not believe him but cruci-
fied him. Luther had wonderful mediumistic
power. He saw spirits and threw an inkstand
at the head of an evil one. The Rosicrucians
were invested with wonderful power and were
scoffed at by the materialists as fanatics. They
led a most singularly isolated, pure life. The
Huguenots were persecuted on account of their
spiritual dissensions from the Catholic church.
The Quakers, whose leaders were George Fox
and others, claimed a revelation from the di-
vine mind. William Penn, the founder of
Pennsylvania, was one of its followers. The
Shakers, an advanced class of Quakers, so
called from their shaking and nervous twitch-
ing. They were led to follow their peculiar
life of celibacy from the teachings of Ann
Lee.

In the more modern times it manifested it-
self in Caines and Marvels in France in 1686.
Swedenborg alleges that he was in full and open
communication with the spirit world, and daily
conversed with spirits and angels.

In 1829, the Seeress of Prevost startled the
world with what she saw, and mysterious raps
were often heard around her.

In 1830 the French mesmerists Billot and
Deleuze say they saw and felt spirits, and there
was a possibility of communicating with them.

Modern Spiritualism had its origin in the

rappings of the Fox sisters and in the writings
of A. J. Davis, who published " Nature's Di-
vine Revelations; a Voice to Mankind," in
July, 1847, in which he enunciated the doc-
trine of evolution ten years prior to that of
Darwin.

About the same time in the little village of
Hydesville, N. Y., in a small, unpretending
dwelling lived Mr. Fox, his wife and two
daughters. Kate, the youngest, about 9 years
old, was the first medium to detect and recog-
nize the raps, which for some time amazed the
family. With the assistance of her mother
she was she first to establish a system of signals
by raps, though they had been heard often by
different persons.

Rev. John Wesley's daughters were similarly
annoyed by a spirit who answered to the name
of " Old Jeff," but Wesley requested it to
leave and let his children alone; at last it dis-
appeared, and he lost the golden opportunity
to make the discovery. But the manifestation
of the spirit attended his religious revivals in
another form — that of shouting.

It is not a religion covered with moss and
rust of past ages, but one that is fresh and new
in keeping with the progress of the age.

IT IS STRICTLY AMERICAN AND DEMOCRATIC;

It has no synods, conferences or ecumenical
councils, to fix up creeds and dogmas to de-
clare what is the word of God. It has no
priests, bishops or popes, to grant absolutions
and forgive sins. It has no head or leader.
The medium may be a child uneducated; if the
communications don't bear the strictest scruti-
ny and test they are rejected. Every one is
the judge, none being required to believe un-
less they wish; all are at liberty to criticize and
comment whether it is truthful or false. The
spirit is cross-questioned and examined, and if
it don't stand the test it is discarded. It de-
nounces all leadership, all individual man ivor-
shipping, making every believer rely solely on
himselt and seek his own salvation through his
own exertions. It teaches individuality — '*/
am a man and you are another." Every indi-
vidual is his own priest; if he has sins he must
confess them to himself, and he must work out
his own salvation. It believes in good works;
short prayers, for God is not captured by elo-

9

\BRA/?V

<M? T.

UNIVERSITY ]

quent words and long prayers, but is pleased
with a pure hearc and a forgiving disposition.
Good deeds and kind words are worth a thou-
sand prayers.

It is little over a quarter of a century old,
but now numbers over 25,000,000 of believers,
making way amongst the most intelligent and
wealthy classes — emperors, kings and queens.
Though not demonstrative it is undermining all
the older forms of religion that had their ori-
gin in the night of the past. It is a religion
that is making rapid progress with the intelli-
gent and thinking masses, for it is in accord
with science and the laws of evolution. It
carries conviction to all who will investigate it
with candor and honesty of purpose. To the
fair-minded man who is not steeped in preju-
dices of the old theology, there is evidence
given, if he will examine, to convince him that

there is an invisible individual intelligence that
sees and understands him and lets him know
that his departed friends are not dead but pres-
ent and holding converse with him. The se-
verest tests are given, 'that no one can explain
save that it is the spirit of a departedtacquaint-
ance, friend, mother, father, brother, wife or
child.

Man needs not external revelations but an
internal illumination whereby he can under-

j stand the relations he sustains to himself, his
brother man and the physical world. Such an

' illumination is bestowed on, though not per-
ceived by all; that myriad hosts of the angel
world are around us; they mingle in the affairs
of men; their atmosphere is an exhaustless

; fountain from which we draw our thoughts and

j aspirations.

CHAPTER II.

OCCULTISM.

A Hidden Force in Nature called the Astral Light, The Soul of the World, The Primum Mobile, the

Grand Arcanum of Transcendental Magic, The Tetragrammaton of the Hebrews, The

Thot of the Egyptians, The Azoth of the Alchemist, The Akasa of the

Hindoos, The Secret lost to the Masonic Fraternity in the

Murder of Grand Master Hiram Abiff, Theopae,

Destiny, Occult Fraternity.

"The power of thought, the magic of the mind." — Byron.

Cicero was of the opinion that the Chaldeans
were among the oldest magicus, who placed the
basis of all magic in the inner powers of man's
soul, and by the discernment of magic proper-
ties in plants, minerals and animals. By their
aid they performed the most wonderful "mira-
cles." Magic was their religion, and synony-
mous with science.

The influence of magic may be traced in the
legends of Prometheus, Sisyphus, Circle and
Medea. The Greek and Roman mythologies
are full of it, and they had implicit faith in
their oracles, auguries and divinations. The
mythologies of the ancient Germans, Slavs and
Celts were similar. The Druids also possessed
the secret art. The crusaders looked upon
magic as the peculiar ally of the infidels.

In the fourteenth century magic arose into
repute as a lawful art, and sovereigns maintained
magicians at their courts. The most prominent
of these European magicians, adepts and writ-
ers was Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Ar-
noldus de Villanova, Daniel Defoe and Eliphas
Levi, of the present century.

The arts of magic are founded upon the the-
ory that there is an occult force in nature called
the astral light, the soul of the world, and the
primum mobile, which is the grand arcanum of
transcendental magic, the Tetagrammaton of the
Hebrews, the Azoth of the Alchemist, the Thot

of the Egyptians, and the Akasa of the Hindoos.
By this element, which abounds in the celestial
bodies and descends in the rays of the stars,
every occult property is conveyed into herbs,
stones, metals and minerals, making them
solary, lunary, jovial, ethereal, mercurial, etc.,
according to the planetary influences. * *
In it thoughts are realized, and images of past
persons and things are preserved, so that spec-
ters may be evoked from it, and shown to the
world as real objects and things — as sounds
and words are preserved in the audiphone.

The adepts in magic claim that the sorcerer,
or practicer of the black art, differs from the
true magician as the charlatan from the master
of the art; that the former invokes and uses the
evil force or bad spirits, while the true magician
uses the good force or good spirits. According
to the teachings of Cornelius Agrippa, there are
several kinds of magic, but they are generally
reduced to two: white or divine magic, or magic
within its proper province; and black or infer-
nal magic, to which belong chiromancy, the
evil eye, the command of the elements (of evil),
the power of transforming human beings into
animals, etc. In the black, the magician sells
himself to the devil; in the white, the devil
is controlled and obsessed by the magfe ian.

To have command of this element, to direct
its currents and to discern its moving panorama,

11

>

is the highest attainment, ^and the incompre- the Persian religion, and when the Jews returned
hensible secret of the magician. To reveal it from their Babylonian captivity, they brought
is to lose it; to impart it even to a disciple is to I back with them the secrets of the magician,
abdicate in his favor. To command this force and they played an important part, and out of
and its secrets requires the highest and best as them they manufactured their devil, or evil one,
well as the purest intellect, dauntless courage with whom they used to scare the ignorant into
and unbending will, discretion, devotion, and ; submission; for they ruled the people and used
habitual silence, and to be free from tempta- j this art to make them believe it was the work

tions. He must be chaste, sober, disinterested,
inaccessible, free from prejudice and passions,

of Jehovah ; for all the miracies claimed to be
done by them were the same as those performed

and without physical defect. He must live a by the ancient Persian and Egyptian magi-
life of abstinence, having certain hours formed- cians.

itation. He must make physical wants yield i Simon Magus could fly off in the air before
to those of the mind; he must be able to live his disciples and the crowd of witnesses, with-

on the scantiest diet, barely enough to keep soul
and body together, like the Hindoo fakirs.
It is claimed by some that the key to this

out going through any circle-making used by
the jugglers ; nor is this art confined to the
ancients. Mr. Turner, the author of the

magical art was lost to Solomon in the death of ; " Embassy to Thibet," tells some strange sto-

ries, and he corroborates the story of the Abbe
Hue of the reincarnation of Buddha, and that
of Lahma (priests) sending their astral souls oft
to perform missions and carry messages, what
we call mental telegraphy.

The wonderful things done by the magicians

Hiram Abiff, the widow's son, who was the
Grand Master of the Lodge, and since the sub-
stitution of the other word the Masons have lost
the control over this occult force, by which
they were in olden times enabled to work won-
ders, which are recorded in the Bible and on
obelisks and pyramids of Egypt. of Kashmir, Thibet, Mongolia and Great Tar-

It is claimed that Jesus Christ was an adept, I tary are too well known to need comment. If
and through his knowledge he was enabled to j jugglers they be, they have defied all detection
perform so many miracles. To the initiated it j even by the best and most expert necromancer
was not strange, but it was done in accordance of Europe and America. (See Jamblicher's

Mysteries Egypt, 1. 26, Theurgy.)

with natural forces and the fixed laws of occult-
ism.

The trident of Paracelsus was believed to

Epimenides, the Orphikos, was renowned for
his sacred and marvelous nature. He had the

have all the virtues the cabala attributes to the ; faculty of sending his soul out of his body as
words, and which the hierophantsof Alexandria ' long as he pleased.

ascribed to the celebrated word Abracadabra . \ Appollonius could at any time send his soul
It gave a complete knowledge and mastery of out. He was a great magician,
nature, the secrets of the future, and the com- Empedoclesof Agrigenteum, the Pythagorean
mand of the elementary spirits; to heal the sick, thaumaturgist, required no conditions to arrest
to move things around with an invisible hand, a waterspout which had broken over a city,
to call up the spirits of the dead, and do many Neither did he need any to recall a woman to
things that are now done by spiritual mediums, life. He used no dark rooms or cabinets, van-
The tipping of tables, raps and independent ishing suddenly in the air before the eyes of the
slate writing were all known to the ancient Emperor Domitian and a whole crowd of wit-
adepts, nesses (many thousands). He appeared an

In the books of Moses there are many instan- ' hour later in the grotto of Puteoli. He evi-
ces of the magicians performing wonders, and dently did it by sending off his astral body,
the Egyptian magicians could do what Aaron while his own physical body he rendered invis-
and Moses did, only Aaron's rod made the big- ible by the concentration of akasa about it,
gest snake and gobbled up all the rest; so if it then quietly walked out of the crowd to some
is a snake story, Moses' was the biggest. retreat, where he remained until the return of

These magicians played an important part in his double or astral soul.

12

The astral soul scin-lecca (double) is able to
draw itself out of the body while in a profound
sleep, and often travels around and sees places,
so that when the person is awake and comes
across these places he is sometimes impressed
that he has been there before. Some persons'
visions are so clear that they are able to see
these astral bodies, and it has given rise to
spooks and ghosts. Some mediums are able to
withdraw their astral hands, and this accounts
for an extra hand often witnessed at seances.
Little by little the whole astral body may ooze
out like a passing cloud, until two forms appear
where there was only one, the one more shad-
owy than the other.

The trinity of nature is the lock of magic,
the trinity of man the key that fits it. It is
unthinkable and unpronounceable, and yet
every man finds in himself his God. "Who
"art thou, O fair being?" inquired the disem-
bodied soul in the Khordah Avesta, at the gates
of Paradise. "I am, O Soul, thy good and
" purest thoughts, thy works and thy good law,
"* * thy angel ** and thy God." Then
man or soul is reunited with itself, for this
"son of God" is one with him; it is his own
mediator, the God of his human soul and his
justifier. " God not revealing himself immedi-
ately to man, the spirit is his interpreter," says
Plato in the Banquet.

Paracelsus says, "The human spirit is so
"great a thing that no man can express it!
" As God himselt is eternal and unchangeable,
"so also is the mind of man. If we rightly
"understood its powers nothing would be im-
" possible to us on earth. The imagination is
"strengthened and developed through faith in
"our will. Faith must confirm the imagina-
" tion, for faith establishes the will."

Jacolliot, the great writer and translator of
Oriental literature, says that "it is impossible
" for him to give an account of the marvelous
" facts witnessed while among the Hindoos.
" The many strange and startling things done by
"them would, if told, tend to make the Ruro-
" peans look upon me as a Munchausen, or a
"greater liar than Sinbad the Sailor." But
adds with entire truthfulness, " Let it suffice to*
" say, that in regard to magnetism and spiritism
" Europe has yet to stammer over the first let-
" ters of the alphabet, and that the Brahmans

"have reached, in these two departments of
" learning, results in the way of phenomena,
"that are truly stupefying. When one sees
" these strange manifestations, whose power one
"cannot deny, without grasping the laws that
" the Brahmans keep so carefully concealed, the
"mind is overwhelmed with wonder and lost in
"amazement.

"The only explanation we have been able to
" obtain on the subject from a learned Brahman
"with whom we were on terms of the closest
" intimacy was this : ' You have studied phys-
" ical nature, and you have obtained, through
"the laws of nature, marvelous results — steam,
"electricity, etc. For twenty thousand years
"or more we have studied the intellectual
" forces; we have discovered their laws, and we
" obtain, by making them act alone or in con-
" cert with other matter, phenomena still more
"astonishing than your own.

"While there are in the science which the
" Brahmans call occult, phenomena so extraor-
" dinary as to baffle all investigation, theie is
"not one which cannot be explained, and
"which is not subject to natural law, if prop-
" erly understood, which any initiated Brahman
"could if he would explain every phenomena;
" while our ablest physicist is not able to explain
" even the most trivial occult phenomenon
" produced by a fakir pupil of a pagoda, much
"less those performed by an adept."

To comprehend the principles of the natural
law involved in occultism, we must keep in
mind the fundamental proposition of Oriental
philosophy, i. There is no miracle. Every-
thing that happens is the result of law — eternal,
immutable, ever active. (Apparent miracle is
but the operation of forces antagonistic to the
well-ascertained laws of nature, but are un-
known to science.) And what is not known or
understood has always been considered by the
ignorant as a miracle.

2. Nature is triune. There is a visible, objec-
tive nature; an invisible, indwelling, energizing
nature, the external model of the other, and its
vital principle; and above these two, spirit y
source of all forces, alone eternal and inde-
structible. The lower two, consequently,
change; the highest, the third, does not.

3. Man is also triune. He has his physical
body; his vitalizing, astral or spiritual body,

13

the real man; and these two are brooded over
and illuminated by the third — the sovereign,
the immortal soul. When the real man suc-
ceeds in merging himself with the latter, he
becomes an immortal entity.

4. Magic, as a science, is a knowledge of
these principles, and of the way by which the
omniscience and omnipotence of the spirit and
its control over nature's forces may be acquired
by the individual while still in the body.
Magic, as an art, is the application of this
knowledge in practice.

5. Arcane knowledge misapplied is sorcery;
beneficially used, true magic or wisdom.

6. Mediumship is the opposite of adeptship.
The medium is the passive instrument of foreign
influences; the adept actively controls himself
and all inferior potencies.

7. All things that ever were, that now are or
shall be, having their record upon the astral
light, or tablet of the unseen universe, the ini-
tiated adept, by using the vision of his own
spirit, can know all that has known or can be
known.

8. Races of men differ in spiritual gifts, as in
color, stature, or any other external quality.
Among some peoples seership naturally prevails,
among others, mediumship. Some are addict-
ed to sorcery, and transmit its secret rules of
practice from generation to generation, with a
range of psychical phenomena, more or less
wide, as the result.

9. One phase of magical skill is the voluntary
and conscious withdrawal of the inner man
(astral form) from the outer man (physical body).
In the cases of some mediums withdrawal oc-
curs, but it is unconscious and involuntary.
With the latter the body is more or less catalep-
tic at such times; but with the adept the absence
of the astral form would not be noticed, for the
physical senses are alert, and the individual
appears only as though in a fit of abstraction,
" a brown study," as some call it.

The astral form can go anywhere, penetrate
any obstacle, neither time nor space are to be
considered; it moves with the rapidity of thought
and the wings of electricity. The thaumatur-
gist skilled in the occult science, can make his
astral form visible, and assume protean shapes
and appear at different places, and by his wiH-
power can cast a mesmeric hallucination over

his audience so as to make them believe that
what they saw was real, when in reality it was
but a picture in their minds, so impressed by
him; while his physical body seems to disappear
or assume any shape that he may choose. In
this way he quietly slips away and leaves his
astral body, then this astral form suddenly rises
and floats off in the air, which the spectators
mistook* for the real body.

Swedenborgians believe, and arcane science
teaches, that the soul often leaves and abandons
the body, from various causes, as that of over-
powering grief, fright, despair, violent attack of
sickness, or excessive sensuality, and leaves the
vacant carcass, which may be entered and in-
habited by the astral form of an adept sorcerer
or an elementary (an earth-bound disembodied
human soul). In cases of insanity the patient's
astral being is either semi-paralyzed, bewildered
and subject to the influence of every passing
spirit of any sort, or it has departed from the
body forever, and the body is taken possession
of by some vampyrish entity near its own dis-
integration and clinging desperately to earth,
whose sensual pleasures it may enjoy and pro-
long for awhile.

Magic is the knowledge of magnetism and
electricity, their qualities, correlations and
potencies, and their effects on the animal king-
dom and man. It is essential wisdom, nature,
the material ally, pupil and servant of the ma-
gician. As one common vital principle per-
vades all things, and this is controllable by the
perfected human will, the adept by the know-
ledge of its laws can stimulate the movement of
the material forces in plants and animals in a
preternatural degree, by using and controlling
these hidden forces in nature to quicken the
conditions of its nature, and produce more
rapid results; thus, for example, make a plant
mature in a few miuutes which would take
months and years by the slow natural growth.
Many minerals and plants have within them
hidden powers, such as lodestone, opium and
hasheesh. The adept can control the sensitive
and alter the conditions of the physical and
astral bodies of other persons not adepts. He
can also govern and employ as he pleases the
spirits of the elements, but not that of immortal
spirit.

There are two kinds of seership — that of the

14

soul and that of the spirit. The seership of
the ancient Pythoness, or of the modern mes-
merized subject, vary but in the artificial modes
adopted to induce the state of clairvoyance.
But as the vision of both depends upon the
acuteness of the senses of the astral body, they
differ very widely from the perfect, omniscient
spiritual state; for at best the subject can get
but glimpses of truth through the veil * which
physical nature interposes.

The astral principle or mind, called by the
Hindu Yogin Flav-atma, is the sentient soul,
inseparable from our physical brain, which it
holds in subjection, and is in its turn equally
trammeled by it. This is the ego, the intellect-
ual life-principle of man, his conscious entity.
While yet in the material body the correctness
of its spiritual vision depends on its more or
less intimate relation to its higher principle.
When the relation is such as to allow the most
ethereal portions of the soul-essence to act in-
dependently of its grosser particles and of the
brain, it can unerringly comprehend what it sees,
then only is it the pure, rational, supersentient
soul. That state is known in India as the
samaddi ; it is the highest spiritual condition
known to man.

But when the body is in a total catalepsy of
the physical frame, the soul of the clairvoyant
may liberate itself and perceive things subject-
ively; and yet, as the sentient principle of the
brain is alive and active, these pictures of the
past, present and future, will be tinctured with
the terrestrial perceptions of the objective
world; the physical memory and fancy will be
in the way of clear vision. But the seer adept
knows how to suspend the mechanical action of
the brain, by forcing to stop thinking. His
vision will be clear as truth itself, uncolored
and undistorted; whereas the clairvoyant, una-
ble to control the vibrations of the astral waves,
will perceive, more or less, but broken images
through the medium of the brain. The seer
can never take fleeting shadows for realities, for
his memory being as completely subjected to
his will as the rest of the body, he receives im-
pressions directly from his spirit. Between his
subjective and objective selves there are no ob-
structive mediums. This is the real spiritual
seership in which, according to an expression of
Plato, soul is raised above all inferior good.

When we reach " that which is supreme, which
is simple, pure and unchangeable, without form,
color or human qualities , the God — our nous."
This is the state which such seers as Plotinus
and Appollonius termed M union to the Deity,"
which the ancient Yogins called Isvara and the
modern call Samaddi. But this state is as far
above modern clairvoyance as the stars above
the glow-worm. Plotinus, as is well known,
was a clairvoyant-seer during his whole life, and
yet he had been united to his God but six times
during his life, as he confessed to Porphyry.

The Brahmans divide these powers into eight
degrees or powers: i, Anima; 2, Mahima;
3, Layhima; 4, Garima; 5, Prapi; 6, Prakamga;
7, Vasitwa; 8, Isitwa, or divine power. The
fifth predicting future events, understanding
unknown languages, curing diseases, divining
unexpressed thoughts, understanding the lan-
guage of the heart. The sixth is the power of
converting old age into youth. The seventh is
the power of mesmerizing human beings and
beasts and making them obedient; it is the
power of resisting passions and emotions. The
eighth power is the spiritual state, and presup-
poses the absence of the above seven powers,
as in this state the Yogi is full of God.

Subjective communication with the human,
god-like spirits of those who have preceded us
to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided
into three categories. Under the spiritual train-
ing of a Guru or Lanrizasi the vaton (disciple
or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he
not, under the immediate guidance of an adept,
he would be controlled by the invisibles, and
utterly at their mercy, for among these subject-
ive influences he is unable to discern the good
from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure
of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere.

To this subjective consciousness, which is the
first degree is after a time added that of clairau-
dience. This is the second degree or stage of
development. The sensitive — when not natur-
ally made so by psychological training — now
audibly hears but is still unable to discern, and
is incapable of verifying his impressions, and
one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the
air but too often delude with semblances of
voices and speech. But the Guru's influence
is there; it is the most powerful shield against
the intrusions of the Chritwa into the atmos-

15

phere of the vaton, consecrated to the pure,
human and celestial Pitris.

When a Buddhist ascetic has reached the
fourth degree, he is considered a rahat. He
produces every kind of phenomena by the soul
power of his freed spirit. A rahat, says the
Buddhist, is one who has acquired the power of
flying in the air, becoming invisible, command-
ing the elements, and working all manner of
wonders, commonly ^ but erroneously, called
(tneipo) miracles. He is a perfect man, a demi-
god. A god he will become when he reaches
Nervana, for, like the initiates of both testa-
ments, the worshipers of Buddha know that
they " are gods."

The astral soul has only passed from the
visible to the invisible world, and may be per-
ceived by the inner sense of vision, which is
adapted to the things of that Other and more
real universe. The same rule applies to sound,
as the physical ear discerns the vibrations of the
atmosphere up to a certain point, not yet defi-
nitely fixed, but varying with the individual, so
the adept whose interior hearing has been de-
veloped, can take the sound at this vanishing
point and hear its vibrations in the astral light
indefinitely. He needs no wires, helices or
sounding-boards; his will-power is all-sufficient.
Hearing with spirit, time and distance offer no
impediments, and so he may converse with an-
other adept at the antipodes with as great ease
as though they were in the same room.

Spiritual Life is the primordial principle
above Physical Life, it is the primordial prin-
ciple behind; but they are one under their dual
aspect. " As it is above, so it is below; as in
heaven, so on earth." One is the counterpart
of the other; one is spiritual, and the other is
material or terrestrial.

Magic, in ancient times, was considered as
a divine science; wisdom and knowledge of
God. The healing art in the temples of ^Kscu-
lapius, and at the shrines of Egypt and the East,
was always magical, and the secrets intrusted
only to the initiated. Then the priest was the
medical adviser of soul and body, as the former
has much to do with the latter, as it is conceded
that the mind has much influence over the body,
and health depends on that of a sound mind;
therefore to be a successful physician he must
understand both body and mind, and the soul

is embraced in the latter, and has control of it,
which is immortal and becomes more active
after the soul has left the body.

The inner entity of man is more or less divine
according to its proximity to the crown —
christos. The purer and better a man is,
the closer and more serene is his life and freer
from external dangers, and the clearer and bet-
ter are his impressions and his visions into the
future. It is this that has, in all- ages of the
world, convinced man that an immortal spirit
exists within him, which under favorable cir-
cumstances, can converse with angels, who are
nothing but progressed souls that at one time
dwelt in a physical body. This is admitted
often in the Bible, and by the greatest philoso-
phers of antiquity; and if it could then exist,
there is no reason why it cannot now, as the
laws of nature never change. These spirits, or
guardian angels, have often appeared to man
and warned him of danger, and revealed the
future to him, by touch, glance or word, as
Ammonius tells us. Moreover, Lamprius and
others held that if the unembodied spirits, or
souls, could descend on earth and become
guardians of mortal men, " we should not seek
to deprive those souls which are still in the body
of that power by which the former know future
events and are able to announce them. It is
not probable," adds Lamprius, " that the soul
gains a new power of prophecy after separation
from the body which it did not possess before."
We may rather conclude it possessed all these
powers during its union with the body, although
in a lesser perfection. Like the. sun it always
shines bright and clear, but its rays are dimmed
to us when it passes behind a cloud or is ob-
scured by an eclipse; so it is with the soul when
it is confined in the flesh.

Yet some persons are so spiritual that they
are able to hold converse with spirits and an-
gels, by which means they are enabled to get
a glimpse of the spirit world. Those disem-
bodied spirits that have progressed and learned
the laws of the spirit land, are more able to see
and tell what the future results will be, as a man
is better able to judge the future than an inex-
perienced boy is; as knowledge of cause and
effect will enable one to come at the result, as
everything is governed by certain laws, and to
understand these laws is only finding out the

16

secrets of nature that will enable man to use
them and to advance himself in the search of
truth, which is the ultimate end of all research.

Akasa, or Life Force.

It was Ammonius who first taught that every
religion was based on one and the same truth,
which is the wisdom found in the books of
Thoth (Hermese Trismegistus), from which
books Pythagoras and Plato had learned all
their philosophy, and the doctrines of the for-
mer he affirmed to have been identical with the
earliest teachings of the Brahmans, now embod-
ied in the old Vedas. "The name Thoth,"
says Professor Wilder, "means a college or
assembly," and it is not improbable that the
books were so named as being the collected
oracles and doctrines of the sacerdotal frater-
nity of Memphis. Rabbi Wise had suggested
a similar hypothesis in relation to the divine
utterances recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures.
But the Hindoo writers assert that during the
reign of king Kansa Yadus the High Hiero-
phant alone knew how to perform the solemn
operation of infusing his own vital and astral
soul into the adept chosen by him for his suc-
cessor, who thus became endowed with a
double life.

Mrs. Britten, in her " Ghost Land," gives a
strange account how this mystical operation of
the adept to transfer his spiritual entity after the
death of his body into the youth he loves with
all the ardent love of a spiritual parent, and
how he used the organism of the boy in sending
his astral soul to different places and to do cer-
tain things; all of. which is startling, and to the
uninitiated it sounds like the wildest romance,
destitute of truth and in violation of our senses.

"In the remotest ages there has existed a
mysterious, awful science, under the name of
Theopcea. This science taught the art of en-
dowing the various symbols of the gods with
temporary life and intelligence. Statues and
blocks of inert matter became animated un-
der the potential will of the hierophant. The
fire stolen by Prometheus had fallen down in
the struggle to earth; it embraced the lower
regions of the sky, and settled in the waves of
the universal ether, as the potential Akasa of
the Hindoo rites. We breathe and imbibe it
into our organic system at every inhalation.

But it becomes potential only under the influx
of will and spirit. Left to itself this life-princi-
ple will blindly follow the laws of nature, and,
according to conditions, will produce health
and exuberance of life, or cause death and dis-
solution when withdrawn; but guided by the
will of the adept, it becomes obedient; its cur-
rents restore the equilibrium in organic bodies;
they fill the waste and produce physical and
psychological miracles well known to mesmer-
izers. Infused into inorganic and inert matter,
they create an appearance of life, hence motion.
If to the life an individual intelligence, a per-
sonality, is wanting, then the operator must
either send his scin-lecca, his own astral spirit,
to animate it, or use his power over the region
of native-spirits to force one of them to infuse his
entity into the marble, wood or metal; or again
be helped by human spirits.

The good spirits will not infuse their essence
into these inanimate objects. They leave it to
the lower kinds to produce the similitude of
life, animation and materialization. They send
their influence through the intervening spheres
like a ray of divine light, when the so-called
miracle is required for a good purpose. The
condition — and this is a law of spiritual nature
— is purity of motive, purity of the surround-
ing magnetic atmosphere, and personal purity
of the operator. Thus it is that a pagan mir-
acle may be performad by a fakir of South In-
dia. A naked beggar crouched on the floor,
with no assistance but his magic power, will so
command these hidden forces of nature as to
move furniture in the remotest part of the room,
even the chair or sofa you may be sitting on;
the doors to open or shut, the candle to go out,
birds, flames, the forms of men, women and
animals to flit before your vision in broad day-
light, and many other things too strange and
incredible to mention.

The power to move statues and tables is not
confined to the ancients, but the nineteenth
century is full of such incidents, if we are to
believe what man and the papers say. In the
summer of 1876, the French papers gave an ac-
count of the capers performed by the statue of
the Madonna of Lourdes. This gracious lady,
says the sexton, has run off into the woods several
times, and he was forced to hunt her up and
bring her home. After this began a series of

17

miracles, healing, prophesying, letters dropping
from on high, and many other strange manifest-
ations. These miracles are implicitly accepted
by millions and millions of Catholics, many of
them being of the most intelligent and educated
classes. Then why should we disbelieve the
statements given by the ancient historians?
Titus and Livy say that when the statue of Juno
was asked if she was willing "to abandon the
walls of Veii and change her abode to that of
Rome," consented by nodding her head and
answering, " Yes, I will." And, says the his-
torian, "Furthermore, upon carrying off the
figure, it seemed instantly to lose its immense
weight" and he adds, " the statue seemed rather
to follow than otherwise." (Tite-Livy, v. dec. i,)

Des Mousseau, a devout Catholic writer,
gives many instances of statues of saints and
madonnas walking and moving about. He
admits that magic can do the same, but that
Christianity can beat it; that one is the work of
God, while the other is the doings of the devil;
and says: "The Holy Roman Catholic and
Apostolic Church declares the miracles wrought
by the faithful sons are produced by the will of
God, and all others the work of the spirits of
hell."

The ancients animated statues, and the Her-
mitists called into being, out of the elements,
the shapes of salamanders, gnomes, undines
and sylphs, which they did not pretend to cre-
ate, but simply to make visible by holding open
the door of nature, so that under favoring con-
ditions they might step into view. And if the
Bible can be taken as authority, " Aaron threw
down his rod and it became a serpent. Then
Pharaoh also called his wise men and sorcerers;
now the magicians of Egypt they did also in
like manner, * * and they became serpents,
but Aaron's rod swallowed up their rods,"
Aaron by a wave of his rod brought forth frogs,
and the magicians did the same; so that the
magicians could do almost all things that Aaron
did: yet Aaron could excel, and Pharaoh con-
cluded that the best thing he could do was to
let the children of Israel go.

Now these manifestations of power do not
exceed what the magicians and fakirs claim to
do and have often done in the presence of the
most reliable and skillful scientific Europeans,
and they have been unable to detect any fraud

or delusion; so it is reasonable to suppose that
if the ancient magicians of Egypt could perform
these wonderful feats, they could be done now
under favorable circumstances, and that this
secret is claimed by the Hindoos to be the same
art that has been known in India for thousands
of years.

The Hindoo adepts claim to possess the power
of controlling the akasa (or life-principle), by
means of which they are able to" kill a person
and bring him to life, by directing a current of
this akasa upon the wound and healing it.

The performance of the fakirs are wonderful
and defy all detection of trickery. They have
been known to be buried alive and grain sown
upon the grave, and in thirty days were dug up
alive. They will inflict mortal wounds and
exhibit their bowels to persons present, and
then heal the wounds immediately. Some of
these fakirs exhibited their marvelous power to
the Prince of Wales when in India. One of
the fakirs gave one of his company a vessel to
hold; it soon turned to a cobra, a most poisonous
serpent, and it was examined and found to be
alive and had fangs. If it had bitten any one,
it would have been instant death. They gave
some mango seed to the prince to be selected
by him. It was then placed in a pot of earth;
in a few moments it came up, put forth leaves,
buds and blossoms, and in about four minutes
matured fruit that was pronounced by all pres-
ent to be a fresh mango.

The same thing was done in the presence ot
Dr. J. M. Peebles, in the open air; of which he
gives an account, during his travels in India.
Almost any traveler in that country will cor-
roborate this statement.

Wonder- Workers of India.
Fakirs can be buried for months, as has been
testified by English officers — Lord Napier,
Captain Osborne and Sir Claude Wade. Cap-
tain Osborne says he " saw one of the fakirs
buried for six weeks beneath my floor, and to
prevent any chance of deception a guard of four
soldiers was detailed to watch day and night to
see there was no deception." " On openin-;
it," says Sir Claude, " we saw a figure enclosed
in a bag of white linen fastened by a string over
the head. * * * The servant then began
pouring warm water over the figure. * *

18

The legs and arms of the body were shriveled
and stiff, the face full, the head resting on the
shoulders like a corpse. I then called the med-
ical man who was attending me to come down
and inspect the body, which he did but could
discover no pulsation in the heart, the temples
or the arms. There was, however, a heat about
the region of the brain, but no other part of the
body exhibited any. The body was then taken
and placed in a warm bath, friction was applied,
the removal of wax and cotton pledgets fiom
the nostrils and ears, the rubbing of the eyelids
with ghee and clarified honey. Then they ap-
plied a hot cohesive cake of bread to the top
of his head. After three applications of the
hot cake to his head, the body was convulsed,
the nostrils inflated and respiration begun, the
limbs assumed a natural fullness, the pulsation
was only perceptible. The tongue was anointed
with ghee, and unrolled where the end had been
placed in the gullet to prevent any air entering
the stomach; the eyeballs became dilated and
recovered their natural color, and the fakir rec-
ognized those present and spoke."

This plugging up process was done to keep
the air from entering upon the organic tissues
of the body and prevented decomposition, so
that he was hermetically sealed up. Now if
the fakirs can suspend life in this way and then
restore animation, why should not we give cre-
dence to the fact as stated of Jesus Christ res-
urrecting Lazarus ? and that of Appolonius who
restored to life a girl ? and that one mentioned
by Diogenes Laertius restored to life by Em-
pedocles ? Yet these were pagans and are dis-
carded, while that of Christ is alone believed
to be true. The prodigies of Jesus and Appo-
lonius are so well attested that they appear au-
thentic. Whether in either or both cases life
was simply suspended or not, the important
fact remains that by some power peculiar to
themselves, both the wonder-workers recalled
the seemingly dead to life in an instant. The
books are full of instances where people have
been buried or nearly committed to the tomb
who were only in a cataleptic state.

The many strange stories told by travelers in
the East would fill volumes. One given to a
delegation of the East India Company is thus
related : " A lot of Englishmen who visited the
Indian prince Jehangire, saw two tents erected

about a bow-shot apart. Then the fakir asked
the guests what kind of animals they wished to
see fight ? One said, • Ostriches.' At a signal
given out stalked a couple of those birds, one
from each tent which they had seen erected
with nothing in them ; they fought some time,
the blood ran down their necks where they had
bitten each other. They returned, at a given
word, to the tents. Then another of the com-
pany called for a lion fight. Out of each tent
walked a lion ; after rolling over and biting one
another, roaring and tearing up the ground,
they retired at a given word. Then out came
two wild buffaloes, and they had a pitched bat-
tle. All this was done in the presence of the
whole court. These Bengalese conjurers and
jugglers then took ten mulberry seeds, which
they planted in the earth. In a few minutes
they produced ten trees. The ground parted,
the sprouts came up, pushing out leaves, twigs
and branches, spreading wide out in the air,
budding, blossoming and yielding fruit which
matured on the spot, which they tasted and
pronounced good. Figs, almond, mango and
walnut were planted ; they likewise grew up
rapidly before their eyes. The branches of
these trees were filled with birds of the richest
plumage, flitting among the leaves and singing
sweet notes. The leaves then turned russet,
fell off, branches and twigs withered, and finally
the trunks sank back into the earth. It all
transpired in less than an hour.

"A large cauldron was then produced, and
a quantity of rice was thrown into it. Without
the least sign of fire it began to boil, and out of
this cauldron were taken hundreds of plates of
cooked rice, with a stewed fowl on the top of
each." This trick is performed on a smaller
scale by the most ordinary fakirs of the present
day in India. This was equal to that of Christ
feeding the multitude on a few loaves and fishes.

In the memoirs of the emperor Jehangire
(page 99), there is a strange account given by
an eye-witness: "The performance of the
seven jugglers of Bengal. They took a man
and chopped each limb off and severed his head
from the body. They scattered the mutilated
members around on the ground for some time;
they then threw a sheet over them, and one of
the jugglers crept under it. In a few moments
he came out, followed by the mutilated man

19

that a few moments before had been cut all to
pieces. They then took a chain," says the
writer, " some fifty cubits long, and threw one
end up until it went out of sight, and then it
remained suspended in the air. A dog was
then produced, placed at the lower end of the
chain, when he ran up it out of sight. Next
was a hog, a lion and a tiger, all did the same
thing."

Another account of a fakir, given in the
Franco-American, is ahead of this: " He took
a peg and drove into the ground, threw up a
ball with a cord attached, which went out of
sight ; he then sent up a boy, and as he did not
return he said he would go after him. Soon
down came a hand of the boy, then a leg, then
the body all bloody, then came the head; pres-
ently down came the juggler with a bloody knife
in his hand. He picked up the different parts
of the boy and threw them into a basket, when
out jumped the boy and ran off."

They are known to plant the hilts of their
sharp swords in the ground, then lay down on
the points, while one by one these swords were
removed until he lay in the air without any sup-
port; and an Englishman says he took a stick
and felt under the body and could find no sup-
port. Says Colonel Yule: " They will stick a
live pig to a rock so it can't get away, restore
the dead to life, catch wild beasts with their
hands, read thoughts, make water flow back-
ward, eat tiles, sit in the midair, etc." An old
legend ascribed to Simon Magus precisely the
same power: " He made statues to walk, leaped
into the fire without being burned, flew in the
air, made bread of stones, changed his shape,
assumed two faces at once, converted himself
into a pillar, caused doors to open at will," etc.

Origen writes that the Brahmans always were
famous for their wonderful cures, which they
performed by the utterance of certain words;
and the present travelers in India say it is still
practiced, and that upon pronouncing a certain
word or sentence they are able to perform won-
derful tricks. Some will walk barefooted on
red, burning coals, on the points of sharp knives
stuck in the ground, stand posed on the big toe
on the point of one of them, and lift up another
man from off the ground. I have seen a Jap-
anese juggler do the same, ascend a ladder
bare-footed the rounds of which were very sharp

swords. I have also seen an East India negro,
called the "Fire King," walk on hot bars of
iron, take and bend them under his foot and
up around his leg; the outer skin would smoke
and fry a little, but it did not produce appa-
rently any pain. He took his finger and stirred
up a ladle of molten lead, then took a table-
spoonful of the melted lead and put it into his
mouth, and then spat it out on the floor, which
I undertook to pick up but got my fingers
burned. He also took a dish of alcohol, put a
lot of tow in it, stirred it up and set it on fire,
took a fork and began to eat it, the blaze rising
up over his head. After chewing it awhile, the
fire blazing out whenever he opened his mouth,
then spitting it out on the floor it burned the
wood. He blew the flames out of his mouth
on my hand, and it burned it and singed the
hair. All of this was done in broad daylight,
within a few feet of myself and hundreds of
others. He would stick his hands into the fur-
nace, take up a coal of fire and light his pipe. I
examined his hands and feet; there appeared to
be no foreign substance on them, but the outer
skin appeared a little parched and discolored.
There was no one present who did not believe
that what he did was genuine, as several like
myself got their fingers burned in testing it.
He said that he would not mind to walk into
the hottest furnaces, like that spoken of in the
Bible where the Hebrew children walked
through the fiery furnace, and from appearan-
ces he might have done it.

In Siam, Japan and Great Tartary, it is the
custom to make medallions, statuets and idols
out of the ashes of cremated persons. They
are mixed with water into a paste, and after
being molded into any desired shape, are baked
and then gilded and kept as household gods.
The cremation is done to facilitate the with-
drawal of the astral soul, which lingers more or
less until the bones are decomposed, and there-
fore they cremate the bodies of their departed
friends, and fearing that the astral soul might
remain satisfied for an indefinite period within
the ashes, they resort to the following process:
" The sacred dust is placed in a heap upon a
metallic plate strongly magnetized, of the size
of a man's body. The adept then slowly and
gently fans it with a peculiar fan, and at the
same time making signs and muttering a form

20

of invocation. The ashes then begin to move
and assume the outlines of the body before cre-
mation. Then there gradually arises a sort of
whitish vapor, which after a time forms into an
erect column, and compacting itself is finally
transformed into the ' double ' or ethereal astral
counterpart of the dead, which in its turn dis-
solves away into the air and disappears from
mortal sight." This accounts for the Hindoos
preferring cremation, as it sets the astral body
free from the earthly remains, around which it
lingers until it dissolves back into its original
elements.

This wonderful power has existed in all ages
of the world in some phase or other, to illumin-
ate dark and benighted man, to elevate him
and cause him to look up to a higher and bet-
ter life to come. History, sacred and profane,
is full of it. Whether it came from natural-
born mediums, or learned by association with
those versed in the occult sciences of the Ori-
ental world, where it has been known from time
immemorial and sacredly guarded by the Brah-
mans, Buddhists, fakirs, the ancient Egyp-
tians, heliophants, with whom Moses learned
the art and introduced it among the Jews under
the Order of the Kabalist, and out of which
Freemasonry has sprung, as Solomon sent his
ships to Ophir for gold and frankincense, myrrh
and pea-feathers, which land was no doubt
India.

In India, Malabar, and some places in Cen-
tral Africa, the conjurers will let a person fire
his own musket or revolver at them without
ever touching or interfering in loading it.
Laing, in his travels, gives an instance of it.
Salvert gives a similar instance in his Philoso-
phy of Occult Sciences. In 1568 the Prince of
Orange condemned a Spanish prisoner to be
shot at Juliers. The soldier was tied to a tree
and shot at by a file of soldiers, but the balls
took no effect. It was supposed that he had a
coat of armor on; he was stripped; they found
he only had an amulet on, which was taken off.
Then he was fired at and fell dead. Not many
years ago there lived in Abyssinia a sorcerer
who would let the European travelers fire at
him with their own guns loaded by them with
their own balls, for a trifle. At last they offered
him five francs to let them place the muzzle of
the gun next to the body. After consulting the

spirits by placing his ear to the ground, he con-
sented. The gun bursted and the conjurer was
unhurt. An Indian said that Washington was
not to be killed by a bullet, as he had fired at
him seventeen times within short range without
ever touching him at Braddock's defeat; and it
is remarkable that he never was wounded dur-
ing the whole of his life, yet he was often in
the thickest of the fight. In fact many great
generals have been believed by their soldiers to
have a "charmed life." Prince Emile von
Sayne-Wittgenstein, of the Russian army, is
said to be one possessed of a charmed life.

There are persons who have the power to
psychologize birds and kill them by will power.
Jacques Pelessier, in the province of Le Var,
France, in 1864, made his living by catching
and killing birds by his will power, which was
thoroughly tested by men of science. Fourteen
birds Avere taken in this way in one hour; none
could resist his power. By stretching out his
hand towards them they became powerless. It
at once put them into a cataleptic sleep, and
the phenomena proved to be a magnetic action.
But his power was confined to sparrows, robins,
goldfinches and meadow larks, and he could
not charm other birds.

There are persons in Irdia and Africa that
can charm snakes, crocodiles, and wild animals
like the tiger, which have been known to go up
and lick the hands of a fakir when asleep in the
jungles, and not injure him.

The Buddhists claim that the spirit of Buddha
becomes reincarnated in the flesh after death,
so that he ever lives, passing from out the old
body at death and entering into that of a young
child. The scene of the reincarnation is given
by a Florentine scientist, who visited Thibet in
the early part of this century, having been per-
mitted to penetrate in disguise to the hallowed
precincts of a Buddhist temple, where the most
solemn of all ceremonies takes place, which are
shut out from the gaze of the uninitiated.
" An altar is ready in the temple to receive the
resuscitated Buddha found by the initiated
priesthood, and recognized by certain secret
signs to have reincarnated himself in a new-
born infant. The baby, but a few days old,
is brought into the presence of the people and
reverentially placed upon the altar. Suddenly
rising into a sitting posture, the child begins to

21

utter, in a loud, manly voice, the following
sentences: ' I am Buddha; I am his spirit, and
I, Buddha, your Dolai Lama, have left my old
decrepid body, at the temple of * * * and
selected the body of this young babe as my next
earthly dwelling." He says he was permitted
by the priests to take the baby in his arms and
carry it off some distance, so as to satisfy him-
self that it was no trick of the ventriloquist.
The infant opened his eyes and gave him such
a look that it made his flesh creep, and repeated
the same words, so there could be no mistake
about it.

This account is confirmed by Abbe Hue, a
celebrated Catholic priest who traveled through
this country, and he further states that the child
answers questions and tells those who knew him
in " his past life the most exact details of his
anterior earthly existence." But he was un-
frocked by the church because he was sincere
and stuck to the truth of the assertion.

But this is not the only instance of babies
speaking. Jacques Dubois gives an account of
the Camissard prophets in 1707, among whom
was a boy fifteen months old, who spoke in good
French "as though God were speaking through
his mouth;" and there are the Cevennes babies
whose speaking and prophesying were witnessed
by the first savans of France, which has passed
into history uncontradicted. Lloyd's Weekly
Neivspapbr for March, 1875, contains an ac-
count of the following phenomena: " At Saar-
Louis, France, a child was born; the mother
had just been delivered, and the midwife was
holding the child in her hands, when some one
asked what was the hour. To the astonishment
of all present the new-born babe replied dis-
tinctly, 'Two o'clock.' While they all were
looking at the infant in speechless wonder and
dismay, it opened its eyes and said: 'I have
been sent into the world to tell you that 1875
will be a good year, but that 1876 will be a year
of blood.' Having uttered this prophecy it
turned on its side and expired, aged half an
hour." The truth of this prophecy is too late to
admit of a comment, as 1875 was a year of great
plenty, and 1876 one of bloody scenes on the
Danube, between the Turks and Russians, un-
paralleled except in the butchery of the Indians
in Nortn and South America, and the wading
in blood of the English to the throne of Delhi.

There are many instances of the precocity of
children, but I will only relate one more, that
of a child of H. D. Jencken, M. R. L, barris-
ter at law, London, whose mother was the fa-
mous Kate Fox, of Rochester rapping notoriety.
When the child was only three months old, it
showed evidence of mediumship by raps on the
pillow and cradle, and when five months old
wrote a communication of twenty words.

Prophecy can only be explained by spirits
impressing the person, as spirits of higher intel-
ligence are able to combine causes and effects
and can tell more readily what the result will
be than a man; so can a man foretell events
better than a child; and in this obscure way
certain persons in a peculiar state may have
visions and get a glimpse into the future. But
spirits, like men, are limited in their knowledge,
and some know more than others; so it depends
on the source and the knowledge of the spirit.
The Bible and history are full of prophecy.
Much of it has been fulfilled, and much of it
has not. Governor Talmadge gives an account
of how a distinguished citizen's life was saved
on board of the United States war ship Prince-
ton, by a premonition. Rev. Dr. Wilson, of
Allegheny City, prophecied the great fire of
1845 in Pittsburg, the Mexican war and its
results, tke war between Russia and the West-
ern powers, and the speedy limitation of the
temporal power of the Pope.

Napoleon, while an exile on the island of St.
Helena, made the following prediction about
the United States: " Ere the close of the nine-
teenth century, America will be convulsed with
one of the greatest revolutions the world has
ever witnessed. Should it succeed, her power
and prestige are lost; but should the Govern-
ment maintain her supremacy, she will be on a
firmer basis than ever. The theory of a repub-
lican form of government will be established,
and she will defy the world." History gives
us prophecies of Hannibal and Napoleon,
which were fulfilled. Whether old Mother
Shipley's prophecy will come true remains to be
seen; yet much of it has come to pass, but the
world did not end in 1882.

How the spirits arrive at these facts is un-
known; yet they may, like the astronomer who
by calculation is able to tell when an eclipse of
the sun or moon will take place for hundreds

22

of years to come. To the ignorant this appears
to be impossible. The truth of science, of
all knowledge, is to afford facilities to predict
the unknown, and judge the future by the past
— the cause and effect — will produce certain re-
sults if their relation is properly understood.
But there is much depending on the environ-
ments, and these are forever changing, so that
it is impossible for even the most advanced
minds to see all that may happen or change the
course of things and events. So long as knowl-
edge is limited, so long will prophecies prove
failures.

Destiny.
" Man, therefore, to a certain extent, is a be-
ing of destiny, which is ever weaving thread by
thread around himself, as a spider does his cob-
web; and this destiny is guided either by that
presence termed by some the guardian angel,
or more intimate astral inner man, who is too
often the evil genius of the man of flesh. But
these lead on the outward man, but one of them
must prevail, and from the very beginning of
the invisible affray the stern implacable law of
compensation steps in and takes its course, fol-
lowing faithfully the fluctuations. When the last
strand is woven, and man is seemingly enwrap-
ped in the network of his own doing,' then he
finds himself completely under the empire of
his self-made destiny. It then either fixes him
like the inert shell of an oyster against the im-
movable rock, or like a feather carries him
away in a whirlwind raised by his own actions."

An Occult Fraternity.
"There is an occult fraternity which has ex-
isted from very ancient times, having a hierarchy
of officers, secret signs and passwords, and a
peculiar method of instruction in science, reli-
gion and philosophy. If we may believe those
who at present profess to belong to it, the phi-
losopher's stone, the elixir ot life, the art of
invisibility, and the power of communicating
directly with the ultra-mundane life, are a part
of the inheritance they possess." These adepts
are of a limited number, seldom remain long in
any place, but leave without creating notice.
They all appear to be men from forty to fifty
years old, possessed of vast erudition, and can
speak in many tongues. They are men of mod-

erate means, caring little for wealth, yet always
have enough to supply their wants. They live
pure and blameless lives, are austere in manners
and almost ascetic in their habits.

There is a mystical fraternity now established
in the United States, which claims an intimate
relationship with one of the oldest and most
powerful of Eastern Brotherhoods. It is known
as the Brotherhood of Luxor. It has many
faithful members widely scattered throughout
the West. They have many important secrets
of science which they guard with great jealousy,
but which they are willing to impart to man
when he has advanced enough to receive them.
No one can become a member unless he be a
person endowed with certain intellectual gifts
by birth. No position, rank or money can pro-
cure a membership. Nature places the stamp
by which they are recognized. Its officers and
records are kept in the spirit world, who impart
to the initiate whatever knowledge they see
proper to confer. They never mistake a person
nor his fidelity to keep a secret.

We have a very interesting account of one of
these adepts in the strange and interesting work
of Emma Harding Britten, " The Ghost Land
or Occultism," who, she says, wrote the " Art
Magi," which she had published; and if the
statement therein made be true, it is stranger
than fiction, and well may one exclaim in the
language of Hamlet: "There are more things
in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed
of in your philosophy."

These adepts hold their conclaves in an en-
chanted cave in India, where invisible spirits
reveal themselves to the adept and mingle to-
gether in the human form. They perform won-
ders that no mortal can understand. They
introduce the adept by passing through under-
ground passages, where rocks part to admit their
ingress and egress. The cavern is lit up by a
luminous light that radiates from their heads;
the walls reflect this light like thousands of dia-
monds and crystals. The spirits flit hither and
thither. The brain of the adept becomes be-
wildered, and in a semi-conscious state he is led
forth to the light of day, not knowing whence
he came.

Madame Blavatsky, Secretary of the Theo-
sophical Society and author of " Isis Unvailed,"
has made wonderful progress in the occult sci-

23

ences, so that she has been able to send mes-
sages to the adepts of Kashmir valley, hundreds
of miles off, and receive answers without any
visible means. The messages come, and are
placed wherever she requests. At her com-
mand the invisible power takes it and soon re-
turns with the answer from some of the Yhebian
brothers. Wherever she goes there are persons
impressed to meet her with conveyance or mon-
ey. She has traveled over India in company
with Alcott, another adept.

** The keys to the biblical miracles of old,
and to the phenomena of modern days; the
problems of psychology, physiology, and the
many ■ missing links ' which have so perplexed
scientists of late, are all in the hands of secret
fraternities. This mystery must be unvailed
some day. But till then dark skepticism will
constantly interpose its threatening, ugly shad-
ow between God's truths and the spiritual vision
of mankind; and many are those who, infected
by the moral epidemic of our century — hope-
less materialism — will remain in doubt and mor-
tal agony as to whether when man dies he will
live again, although the question has been solved
by long bygone generations of sages. The an-
swers are there. They may be found in the
time-worn granite pages of caves, temples, on

sphinxes, propylons and obelisks. They have
stood there for untold ages, and neither the
rude assault of time, nor the still ruder assault
of the hands of the religious fanatic, have suc-
ceeded in obliterating the records — all covered
with the problems which were solved — who can
tell ? perhaps by the archaic forefathers of their
builders. The solution follows each question,
and this the Christian could not appropriate,
for except the initiates no one has understood
the mystic writings. The key was in the keep-
ing of those who knew how to commune with
the invisible Presence, and who had received,
from the lips of Mother Nature herself, her
grand truths. And so stands these monuments,
like mute forgotten sentinels on the threshold
of that unseen world, whose gates are thrown
open but to a few elect. Defying the hand of
time, the vain inquiry of profane science, the
insults of rwealcd religion, they will disclose
their riddles to none but the legatees of those
by whom they were intrusted with the mystery.
The cold stony lips of the once vocal Memnon,
and these hardy sphinxes, keep their secrets
well. Who will unseal them ? Who of you
modern materialistic dwarfs and unbelieving
sadducees will dare to lift the Vail of
Isis?"

CHAPTER III.

SOUL OF THE UNIVERSE.

(ANIMA mundi.)

Ether— Psychomacy— Plato and St. Paul on the Triune, Body, Spirit and Soul— Transmigration-
Hindoo Idea of a Soul, its Origin and Destiny.

The soul of the universe, the great magnetic
agent which gives life to all things, is what Sir
Isaac Newton calls the Divine Sensorum. It is,
he says, "a very subtle spirit which penetrates
through all things, even the hardest bodies, and
is concealed in their substance. Through the
strength and activity of this spirit bodies attract
each other and adhere together when brought
into contact. Through it electrical bodies op-
erate at the remotest distance as well as near at
hand, attracting and repelling. Through this
spirit the light also flows, and is refracted and
reflected and warms bodies. All senses are
excited by this spirit, and through it the ani-
mals move their limbs. But these things can-
not be explained in a few words, and we have
not yet sufficient experience to determine fully
the laws by which this universal spirit operates."

It is an independent life-force that actuates
and moves all things. The ancient oracles as-
serted that it was "ether that gave impressions
of thoughts, characters and divine visions to
men, by which they were able to read the past
and the future; that this ether abounded through-
out space in which all intelligence was regis-
tered, and that the future existed in this astral
light in embryo, as the present existed in em-
bryo in the past. While man is free to act as
he pleases, the manner in which he will act
was foreknown from all time; not on the ground
of fatalism or destiny, but simply on the prin-
ciple of universal, unchangeable harmony, and
as it may be foreknown that, when a musical
note is struck, its vibration will not and cannot
change into those of another note. Besides
that, eternity can have neither past nor future,
but only the present, as boundless space, in its

strictly literal sense, can have neither distant
nor proximate places, as there is no beginning
and no end, so that we only catch the reflection
of the past and a glimpse of the future. Pro-
fessor Hitchcock says: "The human spirit,
being of the Divine immortal spirit, appreciates
neither past nor future, but sees all things as in
the present."

Professor J. W. Draper says: "A shadow
never falls upon a wall without leaving thereupon
a permanent trace, a trace which might be made
visible by applying the proper process. * * *
The portraits of our friends, or landscape views,
may be hidden upon the sensitive surface from
the eye, but they are ready to make their ap-
pearance as soon as a proper developer is resort-
ed to. A specter is concealed on a silver or
glassy surface, until by our necromancy we make
it come forth into the visible world. Upon the
walls of our most private apartments, where we
think the eye of intrusion is altogether shut out,
and our retirement can never be profaned,
there exist the vestiges of all our acts, silhou-
ettes of what we have done," so that every
thought, act and deed is registered to condemn
or justify us when the mind is quickened in
death, as is illustrated in the case of a drowning
man, when all the long-forgotten scenes of his
moral life flash across his memory.

And it is a well-known fact that we often re-
cognize familiar places, landscapes and faces
that we have no recollection of ever having seen
before. This is accounted for on the theory that
the spirit has, in its wanderings while the body
was wrapped in slumber, seen these faces and
places. This gave rise to the idea of transmi-
gration, that the soul had previously been in the

25

or TBI

XTNIVERSITY

"

spiritual body, zm3~irhrite "the mere animal por-
tions of him rest, the more spiritual ones know
neither limits nor obstacles. * * * Some
might object on the ground taken by theology,
that dumb brutes have no immortal souls, and
hence can have no spirits. Theologians, as
laymen, labor under the erroneous impression
that the soul and spirit are one and the same
thing. But if we study Plato and other philos-
ophers of old, we may readily . perceive that
while the irrational soul — by which Plato meant
our spiritual body or more ethereal representa-
tive of ourselves — can have at best only a pro-
longed continuity of existence beyond the grave,
(which is only the body of the spirit.)

The deeper the trance, the less signs of life
the body shows, the clearer become the spirit-
ual perceptions and more powerful is the soul's
vision. The soul, disburdened of bodily senses,
shows activity of power in a far greater degree
of intensity than it can in a strong, healthy body.
Brirre de Boismont gives repeated instances of
this fact. 'The organs of sight, smell, taste,
touch and hearing, are proved to become far
acuter in a mesmerized subject deprived of the
possibility of exercising them bodily, than while
he uses them in his normal state." Such facts
alone proved, ought to stand as invincible dem-
onstrations of the continuity of individual life,
at least for a certain period after the body has
been left by us, either . by reason of its being
worn out or by accident. But during its brief
sojourn on earth, our soul may be assimulated
to a light hidden under a bushel; it still shines
more or less bright, and attracts to itself the
influences of kindred spirits, and when a thought
of good or evil import is begotten in our brain,
it draws to it impulses of like nature as irresist-
ibly as a magnet attracts iron filings. This at-
traction is also proportionate to the intensity
with which the thought-impulse makes itself felt
in the ether; and so it will be understood how
one man may impress himself upon his own
epoch so forcibly that the influence may be
carried — through the ever-interchanging cur-
rents of the two worlds, the visible and invis-
ible— from one succeeding age to another,
until it affects a large portion of mankind.

Regard it as you please, there can be no
doubt that the properties of the ether are of a
much higher order in the arena of nature than

body of some one else; and this psychological
phenomena is one of the strongest arguments in
favor of the immortality of the soul. As Eli-
phas Levi beautifully expresses it, "Nature
shuts the door after everything that passes, and
pushes life onward in more perfected forms."
The chrysalis becomes a butterfly; but the latter
never becomes a grub again.

In the stillness of the night hours, when our
bodily senses are fast locked in the fetters of
sleep, and our physical body rests, the astral
form becomes free. It then oozes out of its
earthly prison, and, as Paracelsus has it, " con-
fabulates with the outward world," and M travels
round the visible as well as the invisible worlds."

In sleep, he says, " the astral body (soul) is
in freer motion; then it roams to its parents and
holds converge with the stars. * * * The
more the body is exhausted the freer is the spir-
itual man, and the more vivid the impressions
of our soul's memory." Dreams, forebodings,
prognostications and presentiments are impres-
sions left by our astral spirit on our brain, which
receives them more or less distinctly according
to the proportion of blood with which it is sup-
plied during the hours of sleep.

Heavy and robust persons, whose sleep is
dreamless and uninterrupted, upon awaking to-
ward consciousness, may' sometimes remember
nothing; but impressions of scenes and land-
scapes which the astral body saw in its pere-
grinations are still there, though lying latent
under the pressure of matter. They may be
awakened at any moment, and then, during
such flashes of man's inner memory, there is an
instantaneous interchange of energies between
the visible and the invisible universes. Between
the "micrographs" of the cerebral ganglion
and the photo-scenographic galleries of the
spirit a current is established. Like the audo-
phone of Edison, it only needs the current es-
tablished, and the words come forth through it.
They may have been spoken years before and
stored up.

Blumenbach assures us that " in the state of
sleep all intercourse between mind and body is
suspended." " No man, however gross and
material he may be, can avoid leading a double
existence — one in the visible universe and the
other in the invisible. The life-principle which
animates his physical frame is chiefly in the

26

those of tangible matter, and as even the highest
priests of science still find the latter far beyond
their comprehension, except in numerous but
minute and often isolated particles, it would not
become us to speculate further. It is sufficient
for our purpose to know, from what the ether
certainly does, that it is capable of doing vastly
more than any has yet ventured to say."

It may be what the Chaldean oracles call
ether, for it states that from ether have come
all things, and to it all will return; that the im-
ages of all things are indelibly impressed upon
it, and that it is the storehouse of the germs or
of the remains of all visible forms and even
ideas.

Psychomancy.

It may be to this subtile force that certain
persons, by their sensitive touch against the
forehead, are enabled to read names in a folded
ballot, or the fragment of an ancient building
recall its history and even the scenes which
transpired in and about it. A bit of ore will
carry the soul's vision back to the time when it
was in process of formation. This faculty is
called by its discoverer, Professor J. R. Bu-
chanan, of "Louisville, Kentucky, Psychomancy.
He says, "The mental and physiological influ-
ence imparted to writing appears to be imper-
ishable. The specimens I have investigated
give their impressions with a distinctness and
force little impaired by time. Old manuscripts
requiring an antiquary to decipher their strange
old penmanship, were easily interpreted by the
psychometric power. * * * The property
of retaining the impress of mind is not limited
to writing, drawing, painting. Everything upon
which human contact, thought and volition
have been expended, may become linked with
that thought and life so as to recall them to the
mind of another when in contact."

Many tests have been made. A fragment of
Cicero's house at Tusculum was given to the
psychometer, who placed it to his forehead; he
at once described, without the slightest knowl-
edge where the fragment came from, the place
and the surrounding of the great orator's home;
also, the previous owner of the building, Cor-
nelius Sulla Felix, the dictator, was described.
M A fragment of marble from the ancient Chris-
tian church of Smyrna brought before the psy-

chometer its congregation and its officiating
priests. Specimens from Nineveh, China, Je-
rusalem, Greece, Ararat, and other places all
over the world, brought up scenes in life of va-
rious personages whose ashes had been scattered
thousands of years ago. In many cases Profes-
sor Denton verified the statements by reference
to historical records. A bit of the skeleton or
a fragment of the tooth of some ante-diluvian
animal caused the seeress (who was blindfolded)
to perceive the creature as it was when alive,
and even gave a brief mention of its life and
sensations. The psychometer, by applying the
fragment of a substance to his forehead, brings
his inner life into relations with the inner soul
of the object he handles."

Professor Denton says: " Not a leaf waves,
not an insect crawls, not a ripple moves, but
each motion is recorded by a thousand faithful
scribes in infallible and indelible scripture.
From the dawn of light upon this infant globe,
when round its cradle the starry curtains hung,
to this moment, nature has been busy photo-
graphing everything;" so when the psychometer
examines his specimen he is brought into con-
tact with the current of astral light connected
with that specimen, and which retains pictures
of the event associated with with its history.
These, according to Pr&fessor Denton, pass be-
fore his vision with the swiftness of light, scene
aftei scene crowding upon each other so rapidly
that it is only by the superior exercise of will
that he1 is able to hold any one in the field of
vision long enough to describe it.

The psychometer is clairvoyant, that is, he
sees with the inner eye (of the soul.) Unless
his will-power is strong enough, and he be thor-
oughly trained to that particular phenomena,
and his knowledge of the capabilities of his
sight is profound, his perception of places, per-
sons and events must necessarily be confused.
But in case of mesmerization, in which this same
clairvoyant faculty is developed, the operator,
whose will holds that of the subject under con-
trol, can force him to concentrate his attention
upon a given picture long enough to observe all
its minute details.

There are two kinds of magnetizations. The
first is purely animal; the other transcendant
and depending on the will and knowledge of
the mesmerizer, as well as on the degree of spir-

27

ituality of the subject and his capacity to receive
the impression of the astral light. But now it
is next to ascertain that clairvoyance depends
a great deal more on the former than on the
latter. To the power of an adept, like Du
Potet, the most positive subject has to submit.
If his sight is ably directed by the mesmerizer,
magician or spirit, the light must yield up its j
most sacred records to our scrutiny; for it is a i
book which is ever closed to those " who see
and do not perceive;" on the other hand, it is j
ever open for one who wills to see it opened, i
It 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 very
thoughts rest photographed on its eternal tablets.
It is the book which we see opened by the an-
gel in the " Revelations," which is the book of
life, out of which the dead are judged " accord-
ing to their works." It is, in short, the memory
of God.

Soul.

Plato, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, and the Ele-
atic schools of Greece, as well as the old Chal-
dean sacerdotal colleges, all taught the doctrine
of the dual evolution; the transmigration of
souls referring only to the progress of man from
world to world after death' here. Every philos-
opher worthy of the name taught that the spirit
of man, if not the soul, was pre-existent. "The
Essenes," says Jose phus, "believed that souls
were immortal, and that they descended from
ethereal space to be chained to bodies." Philo
Judaeus says, "the air is full of them (of souls);
those which are nearest the earth descending to
be tied to mortal bodies, and return to other
bodies, being desirous to live in them." Noth-
ing is eternal and unchangeable save the con-
cealed Deity. Everything else must either pro-
gress or recede; it cannot remain stationary.

A spirit which thirsts after a reunion with its
soul, which alone confers upon it immortality,
must purify itself through cyclic transmigrations
onward toward the land of bliss and eternal
rest." According to the Sohar, all souls are
dual, and while the latter is a feminine princi-
ple, the spirit is masculine; that the soul could
not bear this light but for the luminous mantle
which she puts on; for just as the soul, when
sent to this earth, puts on an earthly garment

to present herself here, so she receives above a
shining garment, in order to be able to look,
without injury, into the mirror, whose light pro-
ceeds from the Lord of light. While imprisoned
in the body a man is a trinity, unless his pollu-
tion is such as to have caused his divorce from
the soul, which may desert the spirit for the
crimes and wickedness done when in the body.
1 ' Woe to the spirit which prefers to her divine
husband (soul) the earthly wedlock with her
terrestrial body."

"All souls which have alienated themselves
in heaven from the Holy One, have thrown
themselves into an abyss, at their very existence,
and have anticipated the time when they are to
descend on earth. * * It carries a spark of
the Divine Mind to guide and direct it back to
God. It becomes incarnated in the flesh, and
thereby it forms for itself an individual exist-
ence, to reason and think for itself, which indi-
viduality it ever retains, its intelligence rising
and progressing through countless aeons, periods
and cycles, from sphere to sphere, until at last
it returns to the bosom of the Divine Mind,
whence it came. All the animal soul must of
course be disintegrated of its particles before it
is able to link its pure essence forever with the
Immortal Spirit.

St. Paul makes man a trine — flesh, psychical
existence or spirit,, and the overshadowing and
at the same time interior entity or soul. He
maintains that there is a physical body which is
sown in the corruptible, and a spiritual body
that is raised in incorruptible substance. " The
first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man
from heaven." Plato, speaking of the soul
(psuche), observes that " when she allies herself
to nous (divine substance, a god, as psuche as a
goddess), she does everything aright and felicit-
ously; but the case is otherwise when she
attaches herself to annoia." What Plato calls
nous, Paul terms the spirit; and Jesus makes the
heart what Paul calls the flesh. Pythagoras
makes the soul a self-moving unit, with three
elements: the rous, the phren, and the thumos;
the two latter shared with brutes, the former
only being his essential self. Whether Pythag-
oras borrowed it from Buddha or Buddha from
somebody else it matters not; the esoteric doc-
trine is the same.

" Socrates thought that he had a demon, a spir-

28

itual something, which put him on the road to
wisdom. He himself knew nothing, but this
put him in the way to learn all." This shows
that he was what is now called a clairaudent
medium, speaking from knowledge from within.
So was Plato when he said ' ' there was an Aga-
thon (Supreme God), who produced in his own
mind a paradeigma of all things." He taught
that in man has " the immortal principle of the
soul," a mortal body, and a separate mortal
kind of soul, which was placed in a separate
receptacle of the body from the other! The
immortal part was in the head (Tivueus, xix,
xx), the other in the trunk.

"Plato and Pythagoras," says Plutarch,
"distribute the soul into two parts, the rational
(noetic) and the irrational (agnoia.) That part
of the soul of man which is rational is eternal;
for though it be not God, yet it is the product
of an eternal Deity; but that part of the soul
which is divested of reason (agnoia) dies."

" Man," says Plutarch, " is compound; and
they are mistaken who think him to be com-
pounded of two parts only; for they imagine
that the understanding is a part of the soul; but
they err in this no less than those who make the
soul to be a part of the body, for the under-
standing (nous), which as far exceeds the soul
as the soul is better and diviner than the body.
Now this composition of soul (vous) with the
understanding (nous) makes reason ; and with the
body passion; of which one is the beginning of
the principle of pleasure and pain, and the other
of virtue and vice. Of these three parts, con-
joined and compacted together, the earth has
given the body, the moon the soul, and the sun
the understanding of the generation of man."

" The damonium of Socrates was this vous
mind, spirit or understanding of the divine in it.
This nous of Socrates," says Plutarch, " was
pure, and mixed itself with the body no more
than necessity required. * * * Every soul
hath some portion of vous reason; a man cannot
be a man without it; but as much of each soul
as is mixed with flesh and appetite is changed,
and through pain or pleasure becomes irrational.
Every soul doth not mix herself after one sort.
Some plunge themselves into the body, and so
in this life their whole frame is corrupted by
appetite and passion; others are mixed as to
some part. But the purer part (nous) still re- 1

mains without the body. It is not drawn down
into the body, but swims above and touches
(overshadows) the extremest part of the man's
head. It is like a cord to hold up and direct
the subsiding part of the soul, as long as it
proves obedient and is not overcome by the
appetites of the flesh. The part that is plunged
into the body is called soul. But the incorrup-
tible part is called the nous and the vulgar think
it is within them, as they likewise imagine the
image reflected from a glass to be in the glass.
But the more intelligent, who know it to be
without, call it a da>mon (a god or spirit)."

" The soul, like to a dream, flies quick away,
which it does not immediately as soon as it is
separated from the body, but afterward when
it is alone and divided from the understanding
(nous) * * * The soul being molded and
formed by the understanding (nous), and itself
molding and forming the body by embracing it
on every side, receives from it an impression
and form; so that although it be separated both
from the understanding and the body, it never-
theless so retains still its figure and resemblance
for a long time that it may with good right be
called its image."

Plato (in Laws X) defines soul as "the
motion that is able to move icself. Soul is the
most ancient of all things, and the commence-
ment of motion. Soul was generated prior to
body, and body is posterior and secondary, as
being according to nature, ruled over by the
ruling 'soul. The soul, which administers all
things that move in every way, administers
likewise the heavens.

"Soul, then, leads everything in heaven and
on earth and in the sea, by its movements, the
names of which are, to will, to consider, to take
care of, to consult, to form opinions true and
false, to be in a state of joy, sorrow, confidence,
fear, hate, love, together with all such primary
movements as are allied to these. * * Being
a goddess herself, she ever takes as an ally nous,
a god, and disciplines all things correctly and
happily. But when with annoia, not nous, it
works out everything the contrary."

Pythagoras, Plato, Timaeus of Locris, and
the whole Alexandrian school, derived the soul
from the Universal World Soul; and the latter
was, according to their own teachings, ether
— something of such a fine nature as only to be

29

perceived by our inner sight. Therefore it cannot
be the essence of the monas or cause, because
the anima mundi is but the effect, the objective
emanation, of the former. But the human
spirit and soul are pre-existent; but while the
former exists as a distinct entity, an individuali-
zation, the soul exists as pre-existing matter,
an unscient portion of an intelligent whole.
Both were originally formed from the Eternal
Ocean of Light; but, as the Theosophists ex-
pressed it, there is a visible as well as invisible
spirit. They made a difference between the
anima bruta and the anima dtiina.

Empedocles firmly believed all men and all
animals to possess two souls; Aristotle, we
find, calls one the reasoning soul (rois), and the
other the animal soul (xvxg). According to
these philosophers, the reasoning soul came
from without the Universal Soul, and the other
from within. This divine and superior region,
in which they located the supreme Deity, was
considered by them (by Aristotle himself) as a
fifth element, purely spiritual and divine; where-
as the anima mundi proper was considered as
composed of a fine igneous and ethereal nature
spread throughout the universe, in short, ether.
The Stoics, the greatest materialists of ancient
days, excepted the invisible God and Divine
Soul (spirit) from any such a corporeal nature.
Their modern commentators and admirers,
greedily seizing the opportunity, built on this
ground the supposition that the Stoics believed
in neither God nor soul. But Epicurus, whose
doctrine, militating directly against the agency
of a Supreme Being and gods in the formation
and government of the world, placed him far
above the Stoics in atheism and materialism,
taught, nevertheless, that the soul is of a fine,
tender essence, formed from the smoothest,
roundest and finest atoms, which description
still brings us to the sublimated ether. Arns-
bius, Tertullian, Irengeus and Origen, notwith-
standing their Christianity, believed, with the
more modern Spinoza and Hobbes, that the
soul was corporeal though of a very fine nature,
yet retained the form of the person while living,
and could be so identified in the spirit world.

As to the human spirit, the notions of the
older philosophers and mediaeval Kabalists,
while differing in some particulars, agreed in the
whole, so that the doctrine of the one is the

doctrine of the other. The most substantial
difference consisted in the location of the im-
mortal or divine spirit of man. While the an-
cient Neoplatonists held that the Angocides
never descended hypostatically into the living
man, but only shed more or less its radiance on
the inner man, the astral soul, the Kabalists of
the middle ages maintained that the spirit, de-
taching itself from the ocean of light and spirit,
entered into man's soul, where it remained
through life, imprisoned in the astral capsules.
This difference was the result of the belief of
Christian Kabalists, more or less, in the dead
letter of the allegory of the fall of man. The
soul, they said, became, through the fall of
Adam, contaminated with the world of matter,
or satan. Before it could appear with its in-
closed divine spirit in the presence of the Eter-
nal, it had to purify itself of the impurities of
darkness. They compared the spirit imprisoned
within the soul to a drop of water inclosed
within a capsule of gelatine and thrown into the
ocean; so long as the capsule remains whole
the drop of water remains isolated; break the
envelope and the drop becomes a part of the
ocean — its individual existence has ceased. So
it is with the spirit. As long as it is inclosed
in its plastic mediator, or soul, it has an indi-
vidual existence. Destroy the capsule, a result
which may occur from the agonies of withered
conscience, crime and moral disease, the spirit
returns back to its original abode: its individu-
ality is gone.

On the other hand, the philosophers who ex-
plained the " fall into generation " in their own
way, viewed spirit as something wholly distinct
from the soul. They allowed its presence in
the astral capsule only so far as the spiritual
emanation or rays of the " shining one" were
concerned. Man and soul had to conquer
their immortality by ascending toward the unity
with which, if successful, they were kindly
linked, and into which they were absorbed, so
to say. The individualization of man after
death depended on the spirit, not on the soul
and body. Although the word " personality,"
in the sense in which it is usually understood,
is an absurdity if applied literally to our immor-
tal essence; still the latter is a distirfct unity,
immortal and natural per se, and, as in the case
of criminals beyond redemption, when the shin-

30

ing thread which links the spirit to the soul from
the moment of the birth of a child, is violently
snapped, and the disembodied entity is left to
share the fate of the lower animals, to gradually
dissolve into ether, and have its individuality
annihilated, even then the spirit remains a dis-
tinct being. It becomes a planetary spirit, an
angel ; for the gods of pagans or the archangels of
Christians, the direct emanations of the First
Cause, notwithstanding the hazardous statement
of Swedenborg, never were or will be men on
our planet at least; while the modern Spiritual-
ist, like A.J. Davis and others, contend that a
soul once born, ever following the law of pro-
gress, goes on ever growing wiser and better
until it ascends to the seventh heaven, when it
has become perfectly divested of all impurity.
This leads us back to the ancient doctrine of
emanation and absorption; yet even then it may
retain its individuality and a remembrance of
the past.

This speculation has been in all ages the
stumbling block of metaphysicians. The whole
esoterism of the Buddhistical philosophy is based
on this mysterious teaching, understood by a
few persons and so totally misunderstood by
many of the most learned scholars. Even met-
aphysicians are inclined to confound the ef-
fect with the cause. A person may have won
his immortal life and remain the same inner self
he was on earth through eternity; but this does
not imply necessarily that he must either remain
the Mr. Brown or Mr. Smith he was on earth or
lose his individuality. Therefore the astial soul
and terrestrial body of man may, in the dark
hereafter, be absorbed into the cosmical ocean
of sublimated elements and cease to feel his
ego, if this ego did not deserve to soar higher,
and the divine spirit still remain an unchanged
entity, though this terrestrial experience of his
emanations, may be totally obliterated at the
instant of separation from the body.

The Soul is Eternal.
If the spirit, or the divine portion of the soul,
is pre-existent as a distinct being, from all eter-
nity, as Origen, Sinesius, and other Christian
fathers and philosophers taught; and if it is the
same, and nothing more, than the metaphysic-
ally-objective soul, how can it be otherwise than
eternal ? And what matters it, in such a case,

whether man leads an animal or pure life, if, do
what he may, he can never lose his individual-
ity ? This doctrine is as pernicious in its con-
sequences as that of vicarious atonement. Had
the latter dogma, in company with the false
idea that we are all immortals, been demon-
strated to the world in its true light, humanity
would have been bettered by its propagation.
Crime and sin would be avoided, not for fear
of earthly punishment or of a ridiculous hell,
but for the sake of that which lies the most
deeply rooted in our inner nature — the desire of
an individual and distinct life hereafter, the
positive assurance that we cannot win it unless
we " take the kingdom of heaven by violence,"
and the conviction that neither human prayers
nor the blood of another man will save us from
individual destruction after death, unless we
firmly link ourselves during our terrestrial life
with our own immortal spirit — our God.

No astral soul (that is, the spiritual body),
even that of a pure, good and virtuous man, is
immortal in the strictest sense. " From ele-
ments it is formed, to elements it must return."
Only while the soul of the wicked vanishes, and
is absorbed beyond redemption, that of every
other person, even- moderately pure, simply
changes its ethereal particles for still more ethe-
real ones; and while there remains in it a speck
of the divine, the individual man, or rather his
personal ego, must die in the endless course of
time. " After death," says Proclus, " the soul
(the spirit) continueth to linger in the aerial
body (astral form) until it is entirely purified
from all angry and voluptuous passions; * *
then doth it put off by a second dying the aerial
body as it did the earthly one." Whereupon
the ancients say that there is a celestial body
always joined with the soul, and which is im-
mortal, luminous and star-like.

The Chaldean magi were the masters in the
secret doctrine, and it was during the Babylon-
ian captivity that the Jews learned its metaphy-
sics as well as the practical tenets, and the im-
mortality of the soul. Before this time the
Jews believed that it was necessary to propitiate
God with burnt offerings, so that they might be
blessed in this life with success, they and their
offspring. The Bible nowhere teaches the im-
mortality of the soul prior to this period. Pliny
mentions three schools of Magi, one that he

31

shows to have been founded at an unknown
antiquity; the other established by Osthanes
and Zoroaster. These different schools, wheth-
er Magian, Egyptian or Jewish, were derived
from India, or rather from both sides of the
Himalayas. Many a lost secret lies buried un-
der wastes of sands in the Gobi desert of East-
ern Turkestan, and the wise men of Khotan
have preserved strange traditions and knowledge
of alchemy.

We must bear in mind the teachings of the
old philosophers: the spirit alone is immortal —
the soul per se is neither eternal nor divine.
When linked too closely with the physical brain
of its terrestrial casket, it gradually becomes a
finite mind, a simple animal and sentient life-
principle (the nephesh of the Hebrew Bible):
" And God created * * * every nephesh (life)
that moveth " (Genesis 1:21), meaning animals,
and (Genesis 11:7) it is said: "And man be-
came a nephesh" (living soul), which shows that
the word nephesh was indifferently applied to
immortal man and mortal beast. So it is evi-
dent that the common people among the He-
brews had not the slightest idea of soul and
spirit, and made no difference between life,
blood, and soul, calling the latter the " breath
of life," using the word soul promiscuously to
express life, blood, spirit and body. The phi-
losophers and most of the modern spiritual
writers make the soul the divine spark, while
Plato and the ancients often make it the spirit..
Baron Bunsen shows that the origin of the
prayers and hymns of the Egyptian Book of the
Dead is anterior to Menes and belongs proba-
bly to the pro-Menite Dynasty of Abydos, be-
tween 3,100 and 4,600 years before Christ.
The learned Egyptologist makes the era of
Menes, or national empire, as not later than
3,056 B. C. and demonstrates that " the system
of Osirian worship and mythology was already
formed before the era." " We find hymns and
lessons of morality identical, or nearly so, in
form and expression with those delivered by
Jesus in his sermon on the mount," says Bunsen.
Extracts from the Hermetic, books are found
on the monuments and in the tombs, such as
these, " To feed the hungry, give drink to the
thirsty, clothe the naked, bury the dead," * *
" formed the first duty of a pious man."

Back of all religions and civilizations there

appears to be another still older, until we are
lost in the gray mist of time that may have ex-
isted twenty or fifty thousand years ago.

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul
is as old as this period (Tablet Brit. Mus.362),
and perhaps far older. It dates from the time
when the soul was an objective being, hence
when it could hardly be denied by itself; when
humanity was a spiritual race and death existed
not. Toward the decline of the cycle of life,
the ethereal man spirit then fell into the sweet
slumber of temporary unconsciousness in one
sphere only to find himself awakening in the
still brighter light of a higher one. But while
the spiritual man is ever striving to ascend higher
and higher toward its source of being, passing
through the cycles and spheres of individual life,
physical man had to descend with the great cy-
cle of universal creation until it found itself
clothed with the terrestrial garments. Thence-
forth the soul was too deeply buried in its phys-
ical clothing to reassert its existence, except in
the cases of those mortal spiritual natures which,
with ever)' cycle, became more rare; but now
and then it cropped out in a bright character,
so pure, wise and good, that they have been
deified and called gods, like Jesus Christ, Zoro-
aster, Buddha, Confucius, etc.

The fall of Adam and Eve in the garden of
Eden, by eating of the forbidden fruit, must
not be looked upon it as a personal transgres-
sion of the law of God, but simply the law of
dual evolution. Adam, or the first man, began
his career of existence by dwelling in the garden
of Eden, dressed in the celestial garment which
is a " garment of heavenly light." (Sohar,
II. 2Q.) But when expelled, he is "clothed"
by God, or the eternal law of evolution, or
necessarianism, with coats of flesh, skin and
hair. It only relates to the time when the di-
vine spark (soul, a corruscation of the spirit)
was to become incarnated in the flesh, which
had evolved by physical laws of progression in
a series of imprisonments, from a stone up
through a long line of animal developments to
the body of a man; and if he will but exercise
his will and call upon his deity to help him, man
can transcend the powers of the angel. " Know
ye not that we shall judge angels?" asked St.
Paul (1 Corinthians, 6:3). "The real man is
the soul (spirit)," teaches the Sohar. "The

32

mystery of the earthly man is after the mystery
of the heavenly man. * * * The wise can
read the mysteries in the human face." (11:76a.)

According to the Chaldean doctrine found in
the Kabala, the Jehovah of the Jews was one of
the emanations of the divine essence, and was
androgynous, being male and female, like all
angels, double-sexed. As Brahma, the deity,
manifested in the mythical Manu, or the first
man born of Sway-ambhvua, or the Self-exist-
ence, is finite, so Jehovah, embodied in Adam
and Eve, is but a human-god, male and female,
or the realization of humanity embodied in the
first man. Like the androgynous man, male and
female, passive and active, created in the im-
age of the Elohim. But these androgynes were
doomed to fall and lose their powers as soon as
the two halves of the duality separated. Hence
we have the fall of man by eating the forbidden
fruit of the tree of knowledge; he thus lost his
spiritual clothing and became clothed in flesh
and skin and was material, so that he could not
rise from the earth. So out of the rib of the
first man, Adam, sprang Eve, the first woman,
by the law of materialization.

This idea is beautifully expressed in the Ori-
ental religion: "When the Central Invisible
(the Lord Ferho) saw the efforts of the divine
Scintilla, unwilling to be dragged lower down
into the degradation of matter, to liberate itself,
he permitted it to shoot out from itself a monad
(an ultimate atom), over which, attached to it
as by the finest thread, the divine scintilla (the
soul) had to watch during its ceaseless peregrin-
ations from one to another. Thus the monad
was shot down into the first form of matter and
became encased in stone; then, in course of
time, through the combined efforts of living fire
and living water, both of which shone by their
reflection upon the stone, the monad crept out
of its prison to sunlight as a lichen, one of the
lowest forms of vegetable life. From change to
change it went higher and higher; the monad,
with every new transformation borrowing more
of the radiance of its parent scintilla, which
approached it nearer at every transmigration.
For " the First Cause had willed it to proceed
in this order," and destined it to creep on high-
er until its physical form became once more the
Adam of dust, shaped in the image of Adam
Kadmon.

Before undergoing its last earthly transform-
ation, the external covering of the monad, from
the moment of its conception as an embryo,
passes in turn once more through the phases of
the several kingdoms. In its fluidic prison it
assumes a vague resemblance at various periods
of its gestation to plant, reptile, bird, and ani-
mal, until it becomes a human embryo. At
the birth of the future man, the monad, radiat-
ing with all the glory of its immortal parent,
which watches it from the seventh sphere, be-
comes senseless. (See Plato's Timceus.) " It
loses all recollection of the past and returns to
consciousness but gradually, when the instinct
of childhood gives way to reason and intelli-
gence. After the separation between the life-
principle (astral spirit) and the body takes place
(i. e. in death), the liberated soul, monad, ex-
ulting rejoins the mother and father spirit, the
glory proportioned to the spiritual purity of the
past earth-life, the Adam who has completed
the circle of necessity and is freed from the last
vestige of his physical encasement. Hence-
forth, growing more and more radiant at each
step of his upward progress, he mounts the
shining path that ends at the point from which
he started around the Grand Cycle.

For each human spirit is a scintilla of the one
all-pervading light, and this is in accordance to
Buddhist doctrine, which is that the individual
human spirits are numberless — collectively they
are one, as every drop of water drawn from out
the ocean is a part of it, and yet, metaphorically
speaking, may have an individual existence, and
still be one with the rest of the drops going to
form that ocean, though it may take millions of
years to find its way back whence it came; yet
during all that time it retained its individuality,
whether in vapor, in sap of plants or trees, or
the blood of animals, until it mingled again
with the waters whence it came; that this di-
vine spirit animates the flower, the particle of
granite on the mountain side, the lion and the
man, when it was individualized into an intelli-
gent, thinking soul, that followed the law of pro-
gress, and ascended higher and higher in wis-
dom and intelligence, until it again returned to
the great sensorum whence it emanated.

In Art Magic, page 27, there is an account
of a remarkable medium, a Hindoo child twelve
years of age, the daughter of a noble Hindoo of

high spiritual and intellectual attainments.
This little child was a great writing medium.
She sits on the floor with her head resting on a
tripod, embracing its support with her little
arms, and in this attitude she generally falls
asleep for an hour, during which time sheet
after sheet is written over with characters of
ancient Sanscrit. The writing is done by an
invisible hand without even the ordinary appli-
ances of pens, pencil or ink. Over four vol-
umes of these writings have been thus produced,
and that in less than a period of three years.
Questions in simple Hindostanee are laid upon
the tripod with a lot of blank paper, and the
questions are answered intelligibly. In answer
to several questions concerning the origin of the
soul, and the doctrine of its transmigration
through the forms of animals, she wrote in San-
scrit the following, which is a translation:

"That the soul is an emanation from the
Deity, and in its original essence is all purity,
truth and wisdom, is an axiom which the dis-
embodied learn, when the powers of the mem-
ory are sufficiently awakened to perceive the
states of existence anterior to mortal birth. In
the paradise of purity and love souls spring up
like blossoms in the All-Father's garden of im-
mortal beauty. It is the tendency of that di-
vine nature, whose chief attributes are love and
wisdom, heat and light, to repeat itself eternally,
and mirror forth its own perfections in scintilla-
tions from itself. These sparks of heavenly fire
become souls, and as the effect must share in
the nature of the cause, the fire which warms
into light also illuminates into light ; hence the
soul emanations from the Divine are all love
and heat, while the illumination of light, which
streams ever from the great central Sun of Be-
ing, irradiates all souls with corresponding
beams of light. Born of love, which corre-
sponds to Divine heat and warmth, and irradi-
ated with light, which is Divine wisdom and
truth, the first and most powerful soul emana-
tions repeated the action of their Supreme Ori-
nator, gave off emanations from their own be-
ing, some higher, some lower, the highest tend-
ing upward into spiritual essences, the lowest
forming particles of matter. These denser em-
anations, following out the creative law, aggre-
gated into suns, satellites and worlds, and each
repeating the story of creation, suns gave birth

to systems, and every member of a system be-
came a theater of subordinate states of spiritual
or material existence.

" Thus do ideas descend into forms and forms
ascend into ideas. Thus is the growth, devel-
opment and progress of creation endless; and
thus must spirit originate and ever create worlds
of matter, for the purpose of its own unfold-
ment."

" Will the mighty march of creation never
cease ? Will the cable anchored in the heart
of the great mystery, Deity, stretch out for-
ever ?"

"Forever! shout the blazing suns, leaping
on in the fiery orbit of their shining life, and
traveling in the glittering pathway ten thousand
satellites and meteoric sparks, whirling and
flashing in their jeweled crowns, all embryonic
germs of new young worlds that shall be. * *

" Earths that have attained to the capacity
to support organic life, necessarily attract it;
earths demand it, heaven supplies it. Whence?
As earths groan for the leadership of superior
beings to rule over them, the spirits in their
distant Edens hear the whispers of the tempting
serpent, the animal principle, the urgent intel-
lect, which, appealing to the blest souls in their
distant paradises, fill them with indescribable
longings for change, for broader vistas of know-
ledge, for mightier powers; they would be as
the gods and know good and evil; and in this
urgent appeal of the earths for man, and this
involuntary yearning of the spirit for intellectual
knowledge, the union is effected between the
two, and the spirit becomes precipitated into
the realms of matter, to undergo a pilgrimage
through the probationary states of the earths,
and only to regain its paradise again by the
fulfillment of that pilgrimage.

" When spirits lived as such in paradise, em-
anations from a spiritual deific source, they
knew no sex nor reproduced their kind. * * *
When they fell, and the earth, like magnetic
tractors, drew them within the vortex of its
grosser elements, they became what the earth
compelled them to be. In the earlier ages of
these growing worlds the conditions of life were
rude and violent; hence the creatures on them
partook of their nature. Then too first obtained
the nature of sex and the law of generation.
To people these earths man, like other living

34

creatures, must reproduce his kind. All things
in matter are male and female; minerals, plants,
animals andmen. Spirit, the creative energy, is
the masculine principle that creates; nature, the
passive recipient, is that which germinates;
hence creation. Man must obey the law;
hence sex and generation. * * *

" Man lives on many earths before he reaches
this. Myriads of worlds swarm in space, where
the soul in rudimental states performs its pil-
grimages ere he reaches the large and shining
planet named Earth, the glorious function of
which is to confer self-consciousness. At this
point only is he man; at every other stage of
his vast, wild journey he is but an embryonic
being; a fleeting, temporary shape of matter; a
creature in which a part, but only a part, of the
high imprisoned soul shines forth; a rudimental
shape, with rudimental functions; ever living,
dying — sustaining a littering spiritual existence
as rudimental as the material shape whence it
emerged; a butterfly springing up from the
chrysalitic shell, but ever, as it onward rushes,
in new births, new deaths, new incarnations,
anon to die and live again, but still stretch up-
ward, still strive onward, still rush on the giddy,
dreadful, toilsome, rugged path, until it awak-
ens once more, once more to live and be a ma-
terial shape, a thing of dust, a creature of flesh
and blood, but now a man.

"It is from the dim memory that the soul
retains first of its original brightness and fall,
next of its countless migrations through the
various undertones of beings that antedate its
appearance on this earth as man, that the belief
in the doctrine of the metempsychosis (transmi-
gration of the souls through the animal king-
doms) has arisen. Yet it is a sin against divine
truth to believe that the exalted soul that has
once reached the dignity and upright stature of
manhood should or could retrograde into the
bodies of creeping things or crouching animals
— not so, not so!

"In the fleeting images which antecedent
states leave on the spiritual brain, in the half
effaced and half-imperfect perceptions of exist-

ence which each new stage of progress and each
successive journey through various lower earths
leave, like an unquiet, ill-remembered dream,
on the spirit's consciousness, the past becomes
confused with the present, and something of
what we have been imposes its shadow across
the path of the future, as a dim possibility of
what we may be.

" After the soul's birth into humanity it ac-
quires self-consciousness, knowledge of its own
individuality, and closing up forever its career
of material transformations with the death of
the mortal body, it gravitates on to a fresh series
of existences in purely spiritual realms of being.
Here the further purifications of the soul com-
mence anew, commences with that sublime at-
tribute of self-knowledge which enables even
the wickedest spirit to enjoy and profit by the
change; for memory supplies him with lessons
which urge him to struggle forward into con-
quest over sin, and prophetic sight stimulates
him to aspire until he shall attain, by well di-
rected effort, the sublime hights of purity and
goodness from which he fell to become a mor-
tal pilgrim.

" The triumphant souls who enter heaven by
effort are God's ministering angels of power,
wisdom, strength and beauty. The dwellers in
primal states of Eden are only spirits. The
first are God-men, heavenly men — strong and
mighty powers — thrones, dominions, world-
builders, glorious hierarchies of sun, bright souls,
who never more can fall. Spirits are but the
breath, the spark, the shadow of a god; angels
are gods in person. * *

" During the various transitional states of the
soul in passing through the myriads of forms and
myriads of earths, whereon their probations are
outwrought, the changes are all effected by a
process analogous to human death. During the
period that subsists ere the soul, expelled from
one material shape, enters another, the drifting
spirit, still enveloped by the magnetic aural
body which binds it to the realm of matter,
becomes for its short term of intermediate spir-
itual existence an elementary spirit."

^^*^H£^?^

CHAPTER IV.

MEDIUMS, ANCIENT AND MODERN.
Prophets, Seers, Magicians, Soothsayers, Astrologers, Fortune-Tellers, Materializations, Raps, Trances.

From the earliest history of man down to the
present time some persons have been possessed
of great psychological powers, and have in all
countries held the position of prophets, seers,
magicians, soothsayers, astrologers, medicine-
men and fortune-tellers. Many of them have
been exposed in their tricks, while others have
stood out in bold relief as possessing a power of
divining the future and telling the past, reveal-
ing facts and incidents that no one could have
known, or were only in possession of the dead.

There appears to be a great variety of gifts
and powers possessed by these persons. Some
are developed in one specialty, and others in
something different; but they all point in one
direction, and claim that man exists after death,
that the spirit or life -principle of man lives be-
yond the grave, whether it be from the teach-
ings of the Bible, Rig- Veda, Heremetic books
of ancient Egypt, the Zend-Avesta of Persia,
the Koran or the Book of Mormon. Their
priests and priestesses are millions, and their
churches, temples and pagodas lift their spires
in every land; and the great majority of all peo-
ple in all nations have a religion and a belief
in the immortality of the soul. Man is a reli-
gious animal, and it arises from a feeling within
that he cannot smother or keep down. It ever
rises up and reaches out and will contemplate
and think of the future, a life in the spirit world.
He sees the dead bodies of his friends and rela-
tions laid in the cold grave; but he cannot rec-
oncile his mind, his reason, to the belief that
that is the last of him. The body will return
to the dust from which it came, but whither has
gone the life, the intelligence that once anim-
ated the cold remains ? He sees the birds fly-
ing through the air, and the smoke rise from
the burning logs that were once living trees;

they are shortly consumed by the fire, there is
only a small pile of ashes left; what has become
of the rest ? The smoke has disappeared in the
skies; so, he says, must the life, the intelligence
of his friends have gone the same way. There
must be some place where all these things have
gone; there must be a great reservoir for all;
there must be an invisible world as well as a
visible world. Where it is, or how it is, we
cannot tell; but it must exist; it cannot be lost;
there is no annihilation of anything; it has only
changed its condition; that is all.

The evidence given by the mediums is over-
whelming, if we can rely on their statements as
true, as they have in all ages been put to the
severest test; but it is something seen, heard
and felt, that is not capable of explanation or
demonstration upon any scientific basis known
to man; and those who have not that pecul-
iar power, which compose the largest number,
are not willing that a thing can be seen, heard
and felt by some and not by all.

And here lies the great difficulty to make
them believe, for they are not willing to admit
that others have higher perception and can see,
hear and see things that they cannot; therefore
they remain incredulous and skeptical. And
there are some whose moral and religious organs
are so low that the question might be, have
they evolved to the condition of spiritual beings,
or are they still man-like apes?

There is something very remarkable about
this psychic force, or spiritual manifestations,
that will not act in the presence of some per-
sons while it will make itself apparent with oth-
ers. With some it derives force and power,
while with others it weakens and will not act.
There is something in their nature or aura that
repels the spirit, like that of the negative pole

;<;

of the magnet; and especially where the mind is
firmly set, in opposition, of a positive nature —
not that of disbelief, but a fixed purpose not to
believe.

Persons who possess this mediumship power
are very sensitive, and have a large amount of
electricity in their bodies, which generate this
force like the electric eel; and some have it so
strong that they are able to give a slight shock
which thrills down the spine, and are able to
light a jet of gas with the end of their fingers.

The mind of the investigator should be kept
untrammeled, free from the influence of men,
authority, prejudice or passion, so that it may
have free scope in the investigation of facts and
laws which exist and are established in nature,
and is the grand antecedent necessity to scien-
tific discovery and permanent progress. And
until men of science can come forth and inves-
tigate the phenomena of spiritualism in that
light, like Hare, De Morgan, Brookes, Wal-
lace, De Gasparin, Thury, Wagner and Butlerof,
etc. they will never succeed. These men had
the manhood to admit the phenomena, and
have struggled to solve the mystery and see if it
has any relation to the existence of men's here-
after; and the only solution they can find is,
that the word comes back that " man lives and
exists beyond the grave," and that intelligence
never dies, that like matter and force it is inde-
structible.

In this age of cold reason and prejudice even
the church has to look to science for help to
support her tottering creeds; when in reality
these manifestations are the same as those in the
Bible, and go to explain it and establish the
fact beyond a doubt of the immortality of the
soul. But the church is so blindly roped up in
her creeds and dogmas that she is not willing to
admit these facts, which come as further evi-
dence and as a new addition to the good old
book, but contend that it is sealed and that the
days of miracles and manifestation of the spirit
are gone by, and that there are to be no more
revelations; that those given in the dim mists of
the past are sufficient, and that it is blasphemy
to pretend to say that there can be anything
more given from on high.

Yet science and reason will tell us that if
those marvelous powers ever existed, they can
be repeated now; that the laws of God, which

are the laws of nature, are unchangeable, and
have always existed and will forever exist. But
these new revelations tend to interfere with
some of the established rules and tenets of the
church and the teachings of modern Christian-
ity, which have widely departed from those
taught by the founders, for her representatives
have poisoned the waters of simple faith, and
now humanity mirrors itself in waters made tur-
bid with all the mud stirred up from the bottom
of the once pure shrine. The anthropomorphic
God of our fathers is replaced by anthropomor-
phic monsters, whose ripples send back the dis-
torted images of truth and facts, as evoked by
its misguided imagination.

Those who are soul-blmd are constitutionally
incapable of distinguishing psychological causes
from material effects, as the color-blind are to
select scarlet from purple. There is often want-
ing a development of that brain matter in cer-
tain things, as to make the person perfectly in-
competent to understand that subject; as with
some persons who have no taste or liking for
mathematics, and no teaching or explanation
can ever make them mathematicians, and it is
a waste of time to try and teach them, though
they may have ability in other branches of sci-
ence. So it is with many men; they have no
development in those organs of the brain that
tend to elevate them above the cold atheist.
They are perfectly destitute of the higher facul-
ties that lift man above the brute creation, as
these organs stand higher and are nearer rela-
ted to wisdom than reason.

Reason being a faculty of our physical brain,
one which is justly defined as that of deducing
inferences from premises, and being wholly de-
pendent on the evidence of other senses, cannot
be a quality pertaining directly to our divine
spirit. Hence all reasoning which implies dis-
cussion and argument would be useless, as rea-
son has been substituted by man for that of in-
tuition or instinct in the lower order of animals,
and has so got control of mind as to discard
anything that cannot be solved by its test.
Therefore it is difficult to reason on religion,
but it must be looked upon with blind faith, as
it will not stand any of the tests known to sci-
ence, so we are forced to accept it as it is re-
vealed to us by those gifted with those divine
powers which belong to prophets, seers and

mediums, whose minds possess that quickness
of perception, sight, hearing and feeling that
belong to the soul.

Logic shows us that as mind as well as matter
had a common origin it must have attributes in
common, and as the vital and divine spark in
man's material body is the causation, so it must
lurk in every subordinate species. The latent
mentality which in the lower kingdoms is recog-
nized as a semi-consciousness, consciousness
and instinct, is largely subdued in man. Rea-
son, the out-growth of the physical brain, de-
velopes at the expense of instinct — the flicker-
ing reminiscence of a once divine omniscience
— spirit. Reason, the badge of the sovereignty
of physical man over all other physical organ-
isms, is often put to shape by the instinct of an
animal. As his brain ignore perfect than that
of any other creature, its emanations most
naturally produce the highest results of mental
action. But reason avails only for the consid-
eration of mental things. It is capable of help-
ing its possessor to a knowledge of spirit.

In losing instinct man loses his intuitional
powers, which are the crown and ultimatum of
instinct. Reason is the clumsy weapon of sci-
ence— intuition the unerring guide of the seer.
Instinct teaches plant and animal their season
for the procreation of their species, and guides
the dumb brute to find its appropriate remedy
in the hour of sickness. Reason, the pride of
man, fails to check the propensities of his nat-
ure, and brooks no restraint upon the unlimited
gratification of his senses. Far from leading
him to be his own physician, its subtile philos-
ophies lead him too often to his own destruc-
tion. Woman possesses less reason than man,
and relies more on her intuition. Her percep-
tion is therefore quicker than man's, and she
lives a purer and better life morally and physic-
ally; therefore she makes the best medium, for
she relies upon intuition rather than reason.

Every human being is born with the rudiment
of the inner sense called intuition, which may
be developed into what the Scotch know as
" second sight." All the great philosophers,
Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblicus, employed
this faculty, and taught the doctrine. "There
is a faculty of the human mind," writes Iam-
blichus, " which is superior to all which is born
or begotten. Through it we are enabled to at-

tain union with the superior intelligences, to
being transported beyond the scenes of this
world, and to partaking the higher life and
peculiar powers of the heavenly ones." All
great mentalities possess that power. It is that
which lifted Homer and Shakespeare above the
common herd of humanity.

To this inner sight or intuition the Jews owe
their Bible and the Christians their New Testa-
ment. For what Moses and Jesus said and
wrote and gave to the world was the fruit of
their intuition or illumination, that bears the
marks of modern Spiritualism, for Christ was
a medium of the highest order. He could
see, hear and talk with spirits. All the spirit
world appeared at his command — the physical,
intellectual and spiritual. He could multiply
the loaves and fishes, see into the hearts of men
as well as into the water to tell the fishermen
where to cast their nets. He could still the
tempest; cure the sick, lame and blind; and cast
out devils — evil spirits that had got possession
of men.

Were it not for this intuition, undying though
often wavering because it is so clogged with
matter, man's life would be a parody and human-
ity a fraud. This ineradicable feeling of the
presence of something outside and inside ourselves
is one that no dogmatic contradictions nor ex-
ternal form of worship can destroy in humanity,
let scientists and clergymen do what they may.
Moved by such thoughts of the boundlessness
and impersonality of the Deity, Gautama-Bud-
dha exclaimed: "As the four rivers which fall
into the Ganges lose their names as soon as they
mingle their waters with the holy river, so all
who believe in Buddha cease to "be Brahmans."
It is the same thing that forced the Psalmist
to cry out," " I know that my Redeemer lives."
It has led men to the stake and supported them
in the most trying hours.

" The gods exist," says Epicurus, " but they
are not what the rabble suppose them to be."
" But neither the First Great Cause, nor its
emanation — human-immortal spirit — have left
themselves without a witness." Mesmerism,
modern Spiritualism and occultism are there to
attest the great truths of the immortality of the
soul. * * * The Pythagorean knowledge
of things and the profound erudition of the
Gnostics, the world and time-honored teachings

OF THE

UNIVERSITY

38

of the great philosophers of antiquity, were all
rejected as doctrines of Antichrist.

The last seven wise men of the Orient, the
remnant group of the Neoplatonic philosophy,
were Hermios, Piscious, Diogenes, Eulalius,
Damoskius, Simplicius and Isidorus, who fled
from the fanatical persecutions of Justinian to
Persia. The reign of wisdom then closed on
Europe for over fifteen centuries. The books
of Thoth (or Hermes Trismagistus), which con-
tain within their sacred pages the spiritual and
physical history of the creation and progress of
our world, were left to mold in oblivion and
contempt for ages. But by the untiring research
of Champollion, Max Muller and others, the
Oriental learning has been resurrected from a
night of oblivion. Though shrouded in mystery
and cabalistic signs, that were intended ever to
keep the secret from the knowledge of the
ignorant rabble.

" Magic, which is based on the existence of a
mixed world of forces placed within not without
us, and with which we can enter into commu-
nication by the use of certain arts and practices;

* * an element existing in nature unknown
to most men; which gets hold of persons and
withers and breaks them down as the fearful
hurricane does a bulrush. It scatters men far
away; it strikes them in a thousand places at
the same time, without their perceiving the in-
visible foe or being able to protect themselves.

* * All this is demonstrated; but that this
element could choose friends and select favor-
ites, obey their thoughts, answer to the human
voice, and understand the meaning of traced
signs — that is what people cannot realize and
what their reason rejects; and that is what I saw.
And I say it here most emphatically, that tome
it is a fact and a truth demonstrated forever."
(Du Potet, Magie Devoilee, pp. 57, 149.)

This power was well known to the ancients.
What is now called nervous fluid or magnetism
the men of old called occult ponver, or the po-
tency of the soul subjection to magic; which
power Christ possessed, as he cast out devils
by it. And it is evident that he must have got
initiated into the mysteries while in Egypt, or
from some of the magicians of Chaldea, who
were great adepts in the art, which is now be-
ginning to be known and revered; and it throws
grea^ light on the miracles of the Bible and

explains away the strange stories of witches,
ghosts, spooks and apparitions, and the mira-
cles that Jesus Christ and his apostles "per-
formed. It is evident from the writings of the
New Testament that these magicians had some-
thing to do with the birth of Christ, for they
were the wise men from the East that followed
the star to Bethlehem.

Professor Dominico Berti, in his life of Bruno,
says: "In common with the Alexandrian Pla-
tonists and the later Kabalists, held that Jesus
Christ was a great magician in the sense given
to this appellation by Porphyry and Cicero,
who called it the divina sapientea (divine know-
ledge); and Philo Judaeus, who described the
Magi as the most wonderful inquirers into the
hidden mysteries of natuie, not in the degrad-
ing senses given now-a-days. The Magi spoken
of in the Bible were holy men, who, setting
themselves apart from everything else on earth,
contemplated the divine virtues and understood
the divine nature of the gods and spirits the
more clearly. So they initiated others into the
same mysteries, which consist in one holding an
interrupted intercourse with those invisible be-
ings during life. Magic in this sense is a higher
order of religion, in which the adept is enabled
to hold converse with spirits and angels, which
are a higher order of spirits who have progressed
in the spirit world."

Mediumship.

There are two classes of mediums. One
class — the high, the holy, the pure, the good — ;
nay be called properly mediators, for they come
between the godlike principle and man. The
other class is composed of those who use this
power for gain, who descend to the low pur-
pose of using this gift to accomplish bad and
wicked deeds — revenge, malice, debauchery,
lust, vice and crime. In either case it is a gift
of nature, at birth or subsequently, modified so
that the person's aura will attract those influ-
ences that so strangely manifest themselves in
the different mediums.

To be a Mediator or good medium, it is
necessary for the persons to be pure and good
men and women, or they will draw to them-
selves bad influences, as " like attracts like;"
and the good spirits gather around the good
mediums who live pure lives, while the bad

39

mediums gather bad spirits. So that it all de-
pends on the medium as to what kind of com-
munications one gets. God-men, like Christ,
Apollonius, Iamblichus, Plotinus and Porphyry,
gathered this heavenly nimbus around them
that sent forth wisdom and goodness like rays
of light, to teach men to be better, to overcome
the temptations of the flesh, and to aspire to a
purer and better life around them, evolved by
the power of their own pure souls. The best
and most exalted spirits were ever ready-
to assist them in all that was good and
noble.

It is asserted that Apollonius, on account of
his abstemious life, could see " the present and
the future in a clear mirror;" while Christ could
read the hearts of men and hold converse with
angels; which would be the condition of all
men if they possessed that high and exalted
nature. A few in all ages of the world have
had that gift; but they have all been men and
women of great purity of soul and the most
abstemious in habits. And the great seventy,
like the fakirs of India, by their self-denial and
torture of the body, and the mortification of
the flesh, were enabled to perform wonders.

Plotinus taught that there is in the soul a liv-
ing principle which attracts it onward and up-
ward to its origin and center, the Eternal God,
and this accounts for the cause why all admire
the pure and good man, for in the lowest and
most depraved there is a divine spark that is
pure; yet it is so loaded down with vile and bad
matter that it is difficult for it to do right; and
for that reason he can comprehend the sub-
lime truth of right and justice which he so much
admires in others, but has not the moral cour-
age to emulate, and is forced by his base pas-
sions, not willing to submit to the self-denial
and discipline that others possess, which elevates
them.

But when a medium defiles the temple in
which dwells the spirit of the living God, the
temple becomes polluted by the admission of
evil passions, thoughts and desires, the medium
falls into the sphere of sorcery. The door is
opened, the pure spirits retire and the evil ones
rush in. They will no more mingle in the
spirit world than they will here. The sorcerer,
like the pure magician, forms his own aura and
subjects to his will congenial yet inferior spirits,

who assist him in his performances and in car-
rying cut his evil designs on man.

There is a class of weak-minded men, women
and children who give themselves up to be
controlled by bad spirits, who so get control of
the person as to make them do as they please.
Ignoring their own individuality they blindly
follow- the promptings of these evil spirits, and
often allow them to guide and so control them
that they commit crimes and do many wicked
things, so they have been called possessed with
devils, or more properly speaking, evil spirits;
and in certain cases they have been obsessed,
as in the case of Mary Magdalen.

This class of mediums is always passive,
whether beneficent or maleficent; and happy
are the pure in heart, who repel unconsciously
by that very clearness of their inner nature the
dark, evil spirits; for verily they have no other
weapon of defense but that inborn goodness
and purity.

Mediumship, as it is often practiced now-a-
days, is a more undesirable gift than the robe
of Nessus; and it is what has brought Spiritual-
ism into disrepute, and caused it to be shunned
by many; for when it descends to that of sorce-
ry, witchcraft, the black arts and voodooism,
it is to be deprecated, and should be punished
with the severity of the law. For it brings
around bad influences that are likely to mislead
weak-minded persons.

True and pure mediums must be properly
tested by the communications given, and all
communications must be closely scrutinized by
the light of reason and justice. As St. John
says (i Epistle, chap, iv): "Believe not every
spirit; but try the spirits, whether they are of
God; many false prophets have gone out into
the world." The ancient witches and familiar
spirits generally turned their gift to a trade; like
the Obeah woman of En-dor, though she may
have killed her fatted calf for Saul, accepted
hire from other visitors.

In India, the jugglers, who by the way are
less avaricious than many modern mediums,
and the Essana, or sorcerer and serpent-charm-
ers, of Asia and Africa, al! exercise their gifts
for money. Not so with the mediators and
hierophants. **. Buddha was a mendicant and
refused his father's throne." "The Son of man
had not where to lay his head." The chosen

40

apostles provided " neither gold nor silver nor
brass in their purses." Apollonius gave one-
half of his fortune to his relatives, the other half
to the poor. Iamblichus and Plotinus were
renowned for charity and self-denial; the fakirs,
or holy mendicants of India, never take pay;
the Pythagoreans, Essenes and Theraputae, be-
lieved their hands would be denied by the touch
of money. When the apostles were offered
money to impart their spiritual powers, refused.
Peter, though a coward and three times denied
his Savior, still indignantly spurned the offer,
saying, "Thy money perish with thee, because
thou hast thought that the gift of God may be
purchased with money." These men were good
mediums or mediators, guided merely by their
own personal spirit or divine soul, and availing
themselves of the help of good spirits, so far as
they directed them in the right path, ever guided
by the prompting arising from a pure heart.

Apollonius spurned the sorcerers and " com-
mon soothsayers," and declared that it was his
peculiar abstemious mode of life which gave
gave him such powers. Professor Wilder be-
lieved with Iamblichus in the attaining of divine
power, "which, overcoming the mundane life,
rendered the individual an organ of the Deity."
Plotinus, when asked to attend the pubUc wor-
ship of the gods, said, "It is for them (the
spirits) to come to me." That the will of the
pure man will command the spirits as well as
other matter, and that our souls can attain
communion with the highest intelligences, with
" natures loftier than itself," and carefully
drive away from his theurgical ceremonies every
inferior spirit or bad demon, which he taught
his disciples to recognize. Jesus declared man
the lord of the sabbath, and at his command
the terrestrial and elementary spirits fled from
their temporary abodes — a power which was
shared by Apollonius and many of the Broth-
erhood of the Essenee ot India and Mount
Carmel.

The ancient Jews in the time of Moses, Da-
vid and Samuel, encouraged prophecy, divina-
tion, astrology and soothsaying, and maintained
schools and colleges in which the natural gifts
were strengthened and developed; while witches
and those who divined by the spirit of Ob were
put to death. Even in Christ's time the poor
physical mediums who were obsessed by evil

spirits were driven to the tombs. It is evident
that the ancierts knew the difference between
the good and bad spirits, and that the latter
brought ruin upon the individual and disaster
upon the community.

Physical manifestations depend on the medi-
um being passive, and spirits never control per-
sons of a positive character, who are determined
to resist all extraneous influences. When they
seize upon the weak and feeble-minded they
often drive their victims to vice. Physical, me-
diums are generally sickly, or inclined to some
abnormal vice; and their influence generally is
of a low order of spirits or elements that are
injurious to the medium; while the higher order
of mediums generally enjoy good health.

A medium is only the vehicle through which
the spirits display their power. The aura that
served them varies day by day, and as it would
appear from Prof. Crookes' experiments, even
hour by hour. It is an external effect resulting
from interior causes. The medium's moral
state determines the kind of spirits that come;
and the spirits come reciprocally, influence the
medium intellectually, physically and morally.
The perfection of the mediumship is in ratio to
his passivity, and the danger he incurs is in
equal degree. When he is fully " developed,"
perfectly passive, his own astral spirit may be
benumbed and even crowded out of his body,
which is then occupied by an elemental, or,
what is worse, by a human fiend of the eighth
sphere, who proceeds to use it as his own organ-
ism, and often drives the medium unconsciously
to commit some diabolical crime, to even sac-
rifice her own child.

The adepts in occultism claim the power to
bring to their aid the occult forces in nature,
which assists them, and without that power
they could do nothing; that they command
these forces to help them, and it is by learning
how to control them that they are enabled to
perform such things; that the invisible intelli-
gences are at their command, and the secret is
to know how to command them; but that these
life-forces or principles can only be used by
certain manipulators. It is different from Spir-
itualism, hence they control the forces, while in
the latter the forces control the medium. It
may be possible, in the case of occultism, that
the adept may be deceived and be controlled

41

by a higher spirit. And that there are two
classes of forces, one which is under the control
of the good, virtuous and wise, which requires
great severity, the observance of rigid rules of
sobriety, abstinence, cleanliness, purity of soul
and body, the observance of fixed times for
meditation or prayer, abstraction, when the
soul can go out into the ether and associate
with those who have long since passed away;
that a mind thus influenced can travel on the
wings of electricity, which is its vehicle, to the
remotest parts of the earth in a few seconds.
The astral soul is a separate and distinct entity
of our ego, and can roam far away from the
body without breaking the thread of life, that
time and space do not enter into its wander-
ings, that it can traverse the earth like an elec-
tric spark.

The adept knows the nature of the soul — a
form composed of nervous fluid and atmospheric
ether — and knows how the vital force can be
made active or passive at will, so long as there
is no final destruction of some necessary organ.
Graffarilus claims that every object in nature
that is not artificial, when once burned to ashes,
still retains that form in the ashes. Kircher,
Digby and Vallemont hold that forms of plants
could be resuscitated from their ashes. At a
meeting of naturalists in 1834, at Stuttgart, a
receipt for producing such experiments was
found in a work of Oetinger. Ashes of burned
plants contained in vials, when heated, exhibit-
ed again their various forms. " A. small obscure
cloud gradually rose in the vial, took a definite
form and presented to the eye the flower or
plant." "The earthly husk," wrote Oetinger,
"remains in the retort, while the volatile es-
ence ascends, like a spirit, perfect in form but
void of substance."

And if the astral form of a plant, when its
body is dead, still lingers in its ashes, as has
been shown by chemists, by the application of
heat, will skeptics persist in saying that the soul
of man, the inner ego, after the death of the
grosser form, is at once dissolved and is no
more ? "At death," says a philosopher, "the
one body exudes from the' other by osmose
through the brain; it is held near its old garment
by a double attraction, physical and spiritual,
until the latter decomposes. And if the proper
conditions are given, the soul can reinhabit it

and resume the suspended life. It does it in
sleep; it does it more thoroughly in trance.
Most surprisingly at the command and with the
assistance of the Heremetic adept, Iamblichus
declared that a person endowed with such re-
suscitating power is 'full of God.' All the
subordinate spirits of the upper spheres are at
his command, for he is no longer a mortal, but
himself a god. In his Epistle to the Corinth-
ians, Paul remarks that "the spirits of the proph-
ets are subject to the prophets."

" If the molecules of the cadaver are imbued
with the physical and chemical forces of the
living organism, what is to prevent them from
being again set in motion, provided we know
the nature of the vital force and how to com-
mand it ? The materialist can certainly offer
no objection, for with him it is no question of
reinfusing a soul. For him the soul has no ex-
istence, and the human body may be regarded
simply as a vital engine, a locomotive which
will start upon the application of heat and force
and stop when they are withdrawn. To the
theologian the case offers greater difficulties,
for, in his view, death cuts asunder the tie that
binds soul and body, and the one can no more
be returned into the other without a miracle
than the born infant can be compelled to resume
its fcetal life."

But the Heremetic philosophers stand be-
tween these two irreconcilable antagonists, and
are masters of the situation. Spirit controls the
body. The life that animates the body, wheth-
er voluntarily or involuntarily, as you term it,
is in reality the result of the existing spirit.
Every molecule, every susceptible atom, each
substance attracted in our bodies, is under the
direct control of our spiritual natures. Do not
mistake this for will; for this is not under the
control of our volition. Do not misiake it for
intellect. The intellect is subtile in its opera
tions; but the spiritual nature is still more sub-
tile, and that it is which voluntarily or invol-
untarily controls every atom of our physical
existence. It attracts to us each substance that
is necessary to make up our bodies, rejecting
such as are not consistent with the form thereof,
and determines the nature of our physical bod-
ies in a great degree.

Every embodied mind possesses in embryo
every germ and power that is possessed by the

42

disembodied mind, and the disembodied mind
possesses every power that is possessed by the
embodied mind, with this difference, they have
a physical organixation of their own, like our-
selves, and, are obliged to act upon physical
organisms here, in order to work out the mani-
festations of their presence and intelligence.
They have the advantage of possessing greater
elasticity of will, of acting upon more minute
particles of matter- than you can govern,
because your actions, in connection with mat-
ter, must be directed exclusively by the motions
of your physical body. The spirit, on the
other hand, has a more subtle will, and, being
constrained by no physical body, can act upon
more nearly ultimated particles of matter, and
thereby produce effects which defy physical
science, and which scientific men fail to under-
stand, for they do not understand the laws by
which they exist; they cannot explain by what
power the muscles are contracted, by which
the hand is moved, and as to how a table can
be moved by an invisible force, is impossible —
yet it is the same hidden force, the same will-
power of the spirit that accomplishes both;
still, there has been a thought conveyed over
the nerves that sets the muscles to work, and
the brain is moved by the spirit that has set it
to work to send out the thought that travels
over the nerves that causes the muscles to
move.

The spirits see the aura around physical bod-
ies that you do not. They see the action of
the nervous fluids, and know from its sight
that these nervous fluids are composed of in-
finitesimal globules, each one corresponding to
its particular function, which the spirit employs
when it raps on the table, or produces vibra-
tions of the atmosphere. The infinitesimal
molecules that are thus employed might be
called vacuums; and in these minute globules
of atmosphere or aura resides the power, not
only of communications, but to lift tables ard
project bodies through the atmosphere. And
it is owing to this atmosphere or aura that sur-
rounds the person or thing that enables the
spirit to communicate to mortal beings.

Materialization.
The materialization of a spirit is only gather-
ing around it the atoms that are in the aura and

atmosphere around the medium, from whom it
draws the material to render its form visible to
embodied souls or living human beings. The
spirit having the form and the intelligence is
soon able, under proper conditions, to make
itself visible. As the red and yellow rays are
strong and antagonistic they have a tendency to
scatter the atoms of matter, so materialization
has to be done in the dark or in blue rays of
light where all other rays but the blue are ex-
cluded. So when spirits wish to materialize
they draw from the air, which is the great res-
ervoir of inorganic matter, such material as
light will not show in a clear sun light but in
the dark it gives off a pale light. When all the
rays of light are reflected the object is white,
when all are absorbed the object is black.

Myrids of animals exist that can not be seen
with the naked eye because they are too small
or have not the coloring matter to reflect the
rays of light.

The body generates an aura through the
pores of the skin by a process of endosmose ac-
tion, is then thrown off by an exosmose action
in the form of carbonic acid gas, which is poi-
sonous if again returned to the human system,
but under the manifestations of the spirit there
is, accompanying this carbonic acid gas, a cer-
tain force or power, whieh, for the lack of a
better term, we call nerve-aura. It is a similar
force that vibrates along the nervous system of
the human body, and it is upon this substance
that the spirit acts to produce a sound. Nitro-
gen is the most subtle of all elemental proper-
ties of the atmosphere. Carbonic acid gas,
mingled with nitrogen in atomic proportions,
becomes the material whereby spirit-lights and
vibrations are produced, by the aid of electric-
ity. These vibrations occur in direct connec-
tion with certain conditions known to the spirits
but which is unknown to science, because it has
no instruments fine enough to make an analysis
of these powers; and the best physical manifest-
ations are when the medium is confined in a
room where the air is foul with carbonic acid
gas, though it may be injurious to the health of
those living in the body; but out of this foul air
the spirits can find the best materializing mat-
ter to build up visible forms; and it has been
discovered by photographing that blue and
violet light is the best for taking pictures, as it

43

is the most harmonious and slowest, as it fills
all space and gives color to the sky and a fine
effect on the picture, and has none of the an-
tagonistic properties of the red and yellow rays
which impede the action of the spirits; so all se-
ances should be held in rooms lit up by blue
or violet rays of light. The artist requires the
same kind of rays so that it will fix the picture
on the plate, from which he is able, by chemic-
als, to transfer to another. And all the spirit
requires is the proper conditions and similar
lights to form a body that is visible to the
natural eye. The picture is there and the spirit
is there; but it requires the proper materials to
bring them out, so that they become visible to
the mortal eye. And in this way spiritual pict-
ures are taken, as well as those of living per-
sons. And if pictures can be taken by one
kind of light and not another, why not materi-
alization be effected likewise?

All light has a dematerializing effect. Spirits
find it much easier to form in the dark, as all
plating and impressions of the photographer
have first to be set in the dark. The picture
is given by the light shaded with blue screens
and skylight; and, as the photographer has to
use his dark cabinet to set the image in the
glass, so has the medium to use the dark cabi-
net to enable the spirit chemist to build up and
plate anew the spirit with visible matter before
it can appear in the light.

The spirit, having once lived in the flesh,
has learned the laws of the flesh, and knows
how to control even the organisms of other and
living bodies. The spirit is the life principle of
the body. It is what steam is to the engine —
which is dead matter; but, as soon as the steam
is turned on the piston moves backward and
forward, giving life to the whole: so, when the
spirit leaves the body, it is cold, dead matter;
but when the spirit enters, it at once gives life
and animation. The spirit and the body are
nucleus around which all matter clings, so that
when a spirit wishes to materialize it has but
little to do but draw the required matter from
others and the air, and in that way it makes
itself a visible body.

The human body is always giving off atoms
of matter through the pores of the skin so that
every seven years, and some say, every nine
months, the whole of the body has passed away

and has been replaced by new matter. "We
live," says Herbert Spencer, " by constantly
dieing." These atoms given from the body,
especially from the medium's, is used by the
spirits, who understand their chemical nature,
and recompose them around the spirit which is
a perfect form to build upon. Like copper and
zinc, under a strong current power or a circle
of spirits, which induces them to yield those
atoms, which the spirit chemist employs to ma-
terialize forms by the use of elements in the air
which are as simple and well understood by the
spirits as electrotyping is by mortals, so that the
spirit can accomplish in a few minutes what in
the flesh requires years to build up, the differ-
ence being one of time and of permanency.
It is a process of galvanizing over the spiritual
body with visible matter, that enables them to
show themselves to us in the flesh. As the
spiritual body is invisible to the natural sight,
but can be seen only by the clairvoyant, who
sees with the vision of the soul, to enable the
spirit to be seen by the mortal eye it must clothe
itself in material matter that reflects light.

The hand being full of nerves more readily
materializes than any other part of the body,
and this accounts for the many hands often
seen at a seance, and is generally the first part
of the bocby that materializes.

Materialization is the highest realization of
modern Spiritualism. It brings the living face
to face with those who were supposed to be
dead. They tell us that they still live, and
have only shed off the outward husk, the mor-
tal body. It is the strongest evidence of the
immortality of the soul. The body is only one of
the stages of development of the embryotic con-
ditions of the soul, which had passed through the
lower forms of life during gestation, that, like
the eagle and the butterfly, has broken through
the shell of mortality and mounts on wings into
the sky, no longer feeding on the gross things
of the earth, but draws its life and vitality from
the ether.

The same knowledge and control of occult
forces, including the vital forces which enable
a fakir temporarily to leave and then re-enter
his body. Jesus, Apollonius and Elijah were
able to recall their several subjects to life; made
it possible for the ancient hierophants to ani-
mate statues and cause them to act and speak.

44

It is the same knowledge and power which
made it possible for Paracelsus to create his hu-
munculi; for Aaron to change his rod into a ser-
pent and a budding branch; for Moses to cover
Egypt with frogs and other pests, and the same
Egyptian theurgist of our day to vivify his pig-
my mandragora, which has physical life but no
soul. It is no more wonderful that upon present-
ing the necessary conditions Moses should call
into life large reptiles and insects than that, un-
der like favoring conditions, the physical scien-
tists should call out the small ones which he
names bacteria.

Nearly all the forms of phenomena of the an-
cients wonder-workers, recorded in sacred and
profane histories, are produced now by spiritu-
al mediums. . I have seen bodies moved, hang
suspended in the mid air; instruments play by
laying in the hands of the medium ; have felt
the weight of invisible hands; heard voices in
the air over my head; musical instruments flying
around in the room; flowers fresh with the dew
on them, handed out of a cabinet in a well lit
room; have had deceased friends and relatives
described to me, so perfect, and their names
given so that there could be no mistake; I have
been tilted out of a chair by the touch of the
hand of a little cousin; I have seen a dozen
ghosts or spirits walk out of a room, that I had
sealed up; I have seen them in the broad day-
light rise up, come to me, and have felt their
pulse — sometimes they had pulse and at other
times they had none; I have conversed with
them, they told me who they were and where
they had departed this life, but they would not
admit that they were dead, but said they had
passed to a higher life.

I have had communications from my dear
departed friends, written on a slate, held in my
own hand under the table, the medium only
touching it. The signature of my mother was
so perfect that, had I not known she was dead,
I would have been willing to swear to its genu-
ineness in a court of justice.

I once called upon Dr. Slade, the celebrated
medium, to see if I could get some new light,
and on reading an article to him on " Evolu-
tion," it met the approbation of a spirit present
expressed by rapping on the table; but, when I
read where Darwin says, "Young birds do not
make as good nests as old ones," it rapped

" no," and so it differed with him on that sub-
ject. Every now and then it would pat me on
the thighs, which were under the table, approv-
ing the article. It was in broad daylight, and I
am certain it was not done by any visible per-
son, as the medium was the only person in the
room. He then placed one hand in mine on
the table, and took a slate, wiped it clean,
placed a piece of pencil on it, and took another
slate and laid it over it, then held the two slates
up to the side of my ear. I could hear the
pencil scratching like it was writing; soon it
gave three taps, and then he opened the slate,
and one whole side was written over in a plain,
legible manner. The following is a correct
copy:

Dear Sir: Your subject is one that is little
understood. Man has an intellectual nature,
and also intuition, so have animals; but, un-
less these two are wedded, he is not a success-
ful man. Often intellect has taken on the aid of
intuition; and, again, intuition has controlled
man with the guardiance of intellect. Some
men fail when animals do not, he by throwing
his intuition aside and glories in his intellect,
and he often makes great mistakes in life. An-
imals have no pride in intellect, and trust more
to intuition and do not fail.

A. VV. Slade.

The signature was that of his deceased wife.

The wonderful test given by Mr. Slade con-
vinced the honest German scientist, Zollner,
that there were forces unknown to the scientist,
which he called transcendental physics.

Mr. Zollner, professor of physical astronomy
at the University of Leipsic, one of the most
renowned schools of learning in Europe, made
many tests in a scientific way in broad day-
light, in the presence of other professors, with
the physical manifestations of Henry Slade,
forced him to the conclusion that these wonder-
ful manifestations could not be explained by the
ordinary laws of physics. That the tying of
knots in a string, with both ends fastened and
sealed and held in his and Slade's hands on the
table, while the other part of the string hung
under the table. Communications were written
on a book slate which they had purchased, and
had been sealed up by them. They heard the
slate-pencil scratching like a thing of life be-

45

tween the slates. After giving three raps they
removed the seals, opened the slate and both
sides were written all over and signed. Fear-
ing there might be something wrong they then
prepared other slates of a similar kind, and
when Mr. Slade put his hands on them, the pencil
began to scratch, and when it rapped three
times they took the same slates and carried them
home and opened them, and there were other
messages written to them.

Wooden rings tied together with a string and
placed under the table were carried and placed
around the upright part of the candle-stand,
which no mortal could do without taking off
the tops of the stand.

Coin was passed down through the table and
fell on the slate, while the pencil passed up and
entered into the box in which the money had
been placed and sealed up. A candle-stand
rose up and disappeared, presently it descended
from the ceiling and rested upon the table
around which they weie sitting.

A bowl of flour was placed on the floor un-
der the table and they felt hands touching them
on their legs. On inspection there were the
marks of hand prints in the bowl of flour and
the same finger marks on their pants. They
were certain that Mr. Slade did not do it, as
his hands rested on the table all the time, and
there was no flour in them.

That hand and foot prints on prepared paper
were made through the slate, though it was
locked up in a box. That a screen that was
made ot strong wood that would require a dy-
namic force of two hundred and ninety-eight
hundred weight, or more than the combined
strength of three hundred giants to rupture, was
torn apart by an invisible power. That lights
appeared and disappeared; that it rained on
them and wet their clothes in the room; and
many other strange things that could not be ex-
plained by any known law of physics. These
tests were through and beyond any trickery.
They called in the king's juggler to assist them,
and he was unable to detect any fraud or trick,
or make any explanation how it was done.

All of which goes to prove the apparent pen-
etration of matter, and also of the existence of
the fourth dimension, by which this invisible
power can produce these strange phenomena.
So these learned savans of the renowned school

of Leipsic were forced to the conclusion that
there was an intelligent power that could do
those things which were beyond their knowl-
edge of physical forces. That there were such
things in existence that did not come within
the known laws of length, breadth and thick-
ness, which is all that we can possibly know of
matter, and in these dimensions it includes all
its possibilities. But in the fourth dimension,
says Zollner, " we have another aspect of the
case; one in which our system of geometry is
at fault, and its axioms cease to apply there;
matter is subjected to transcendental laws and
conditions are apparently reversed."

Professor Zollner, in a letter to Mr. William
Crookes, who had also investigated the phe-
nomena of Spiritualism, said: "By a strange
conjunction our scientific endeavors have met
in the same field of light and of a new class of
physical phenomena, which proclaim to the
astonished mankind, with assurance no longer
doubtful, the existence of another material and
intelligent world. As two solitary wanderers
on high mountains joyfully greet one another at
their encounter, when passing storm and clouds
veil the summit to which they aspire, so I
rejoice to have met you, undismayed cham-
pion, upon this new province of science. To
you, also, ingratitude and scorn have been
abundantly dealt out by the blind representa-
tives of modern science and by the multitude
befooled through their erroneous teachings.
May you be consoled by the consciousness
that the undying splendor with which the names
of a Newton and a Faraday have illustrated the
history of English people can be obscured by-
nothing; not even by the political decline of
this great nation; even so will your name sur-
vive in the history of culture, adding a new or-
nament to those with which the English nation
has endowed the human race." (Transcenden-
tal Physics, page 27.)

The late exhibitions of physical force by
Miss Lulu Hurst throughout the United States,
is enough to convince all fair-minded people
that there is an invisible force, produced by the
laying of her hands upon a chair that defies
the strength of a dozen strong men. It flung
men around as though they were feathers. I
found it impossible to hold an umbrella over
mv head while she had but one finger touching

4ti

the handle. Her manager announced that she
disclaimed any knowledge of the power that
produced the force. Her father informed me
that the power was spiritual force, as he had
been so informed by the spirits, but that it was
not policy to so announce it from the stage,
owing to the credulity of a great many people
who are prejudiced against the spiritualistic
theory. I was satisfied as soon as I took hold
of the umbrella that it was the same force that
could enable my little cousin to hurl me from
a chair twenty-five years ago. And here let me
state, that not long since I saw the same cousin
— now married and the mother of several child-
ren— and she informed me that she had long
since lost that power.

I know of several other mediums who have
lost the power to produce manifestations, hav-
ing been pursuaded by the church that it was
the work of the devil. My little cousin, Lillie
Dobbins, was a strong physical medium, and
could make a dining-room table follow her
around like a dog by touching it with the tip of
her finger, and make it stand on one leg and
flap the folding leaves, like the wings of a
bird. I asked what spirit it was moving the
table ? It called for the alphabet, and as the
letters were repeated, the name of Samson was
rapped. I then asked it to turn the house over.
It replied, in the same way, that it might kill
us. I then said, " Throw me out of the chair."
and immediately I felt myself moved by an in-
visible force, that hurled me out without an ef-
fort.

I had another cousin, Carrie Dameron, who
was a rapping medium, and I tested her in every
way I could, to solve the mystery. It invaria-
bly rapped out the name of departed relative
or friend, who would not admit that they were
dead, but only passed to a higher state of ex-
istence.

One of the most peculiar tests I had occurred
one night, when the negro boy, who made fires
in the dwelling, being anxious to see the mani-
festations, had crawled under the bed, after
making the fire, and unknown to any of us;
but the fact of his presence was revealed by
the attendant spirit rapping out the words,
"Dick is under the bed." The poor boy
came out affrighted, saying, " That is the devil,
sure, for no one know'd I was dar."

Here let me state that that dear cousin has
long since passed to the spirit land; and she
often comes to me and gives me assurance that
what transpired while living is more than real,
and that spiritualism is true.

It is evident that this is a force that has intel-
ligence; that can come when desired and depart
when not wanted, and is capable of com-
municating with man through raps, tipping
of tables, independent slate writing and in
other ways. It can give names and incidents,
of which no person present has any thought or
knowledge. While some of these com-
munications may be erroneous, on the whole
they are generally truthful; but it is not safe to
place too much reliance in their knowledge of
the future, for they, like mortals, are fallible,
and they make many statements that are false,
for they have only advanced intelligence, and
many are not so wise as those living in the
flesh; and it is hard to say who is at the other
end communicating. It may be the spirit's
true name or it may be some mischievous boy's
spirit or some lying spirit imposing on human-
ity. They are there as they were here — no
wiser, no better; as they depart this life, so they
wake up over there in the spirit land.

Saint Paul said: "We must try the spirits
before we believe them." So nothing should
be taken for granted, until it shall have been
thoroughly tested; even then it must be taken
with a great deal of allowance, for we little un-
derstand this mode of communicating. Even
the telegrapher requires us to repeat the mes-
sage before he will stand responsible for the
correctness of its transfer.

This mode of communication, like telegraph-
ing, requires time to investigate and under-
stand. We are not able to go over to the other
side to compare notes and then return. We
have to take it for granted that what words they
send back are correct; and, so far, these state-
ments have been of so confused and uncertain
a nature that many have been led to the belief
that it must be something other than the spirit
of our departed friends; at best it is hard for us
to understand how anything, or any intelligence
can exist without a physical body, capable of
making itself manifest to our five senses; yet,
we hear the raps and the scratching of the pen-
cil, but wc cannot see the power that moves it.

47

There are so many frauds and deceptions in
the world that it becomes all to be very careful
that they are not imposed upon. It may be
a question whether it is best for ignorant masses
of humanity to investigate it, as they are liable
to be misled and placed under the control of
evil rather than good influences, but as man-
kind grow wiser and better they will learn to
look upon it as their future existence, and will
prepare and fit themselves for that advanced
stage of development. It will rob the grave
of its terrors and make death only the gateway
to a higher and better existence in the vast un-
seen universe that encompasses us. When it

is understood that this planet is only a germi-
nating world, and that our future happiness de-
pends on how we live here, and that it has
much to do in fitting us for the life to come,
that is eternal; that we can not escape the
burden of our own sins or shift them on the
shoulders of another, it will make us more care-
ful how we act and treat our fellow-man, for
we are all brothers on the same road to the
spirit land, where we will have to make repara-
tion for all the wrongs that we have done to
each other. There the law of compensation
and restoration is beyond a technicality or
doubt of court or jury.

CHAPTER V.

INSPIRATION AND INSPIRED MEN, SAVIORS, MEDIATORS AND MEDIUMS.

Inspiration is the natural influx of the divine
truth into the human soul, and its degree is
determined by character and capacity, and
it is not confined to the teachings of any reli-
gious truth. Even the old Testament teaches
that certain men were inspired of God to work
in linen and brass and cedar and gold. Shake-
speare, Angelo, Socrates and Epicteus have
just as good a claim to be inspired of God as
any of the Jewish prophets or writers in the old
or new Testament.

All light is from the sun, whether it shines
from moon or planet; whether it be reflected
by brook or mirror; whether it be a stray, bro-
ken beam to prison-cell; whether it flare in the
gaslight or glow in the coal of our grate, all
light is first or last just so much sunlight; so all
truth, of whatsoever kind or degree, is from
God.

" Pure inspiration is confined to no particu-
lar person, age or nation; it is as common and
universal as the spirit of God. Everything that
possesses life, no matter in what kingdom or
stage of development, is to the same degree
the recipient, exponent, prophet and beneficiary
of the universal spirit of the Supreme Being.
Everything that moves anywhere in the illimita-
ble territory of Nature sustains a relation more
or less intimate to the spirit which animates the
world. Every creature enjoys a living commu-
nion with the all-animating principle; and the
relations which subsist between the little worm
and the creation of worlds are just as intimate
in principle as those enjoyed by man. Hence,
all things receive the spirit of God and bathe
in it, and express it in the external in exact pro-
portion to their capacity and absolute require-
ments. The human soul is a far richer soil for
the growth and nurture of heavenly sentiments

than any ground around Jerusalem, which may
have been blessed and sanctified by the tread
of Christ and the prophets."

Man's eternal organism is closely joined to
the material world, but far more closely is his
spiritual nature joined to that principle which
enlivens and energizes the universal whole.
There is nothing between man and the bending
heavens. He can bare his head beneath the
dome of the living temple, and there is no ob-
struction intervening which can shut him from
a contemplation of the gorgeous creation, and
if he will but bare his spirit by removing
his pride, selfishness, ignorance and seusuality,
which circumscribe and entomb its fair pro-
portions, he will find nothing between him and
the enjoyment of true inspiration.

The flower is truly impressed by the light and
warmth of the sun, because it possesses within
itself the essential qualities and properties of
beauty and development, rand hence incorpo-.
rates the descending elements of vitality in its
own minute structures. It is not merely a ves-
sel for the immediate reception and imputation
of light and warmth, but it receives those ele-
ments, subjects them to a chemical' analysis,
and distributes the various properties to the
elaboration, development and sustenance of
its own particular individuality; and then in
accordance with the immutable principles of
distributive justice and harmony, the flower
breathes forth its precious odors with which it
loads the passing breeze, and thus imparts pleas-
ure to many loving beings, while it reflects back
the rays of the sun in beautiful colors that
adorn Nature with their richest hues. So it is
with man; like every flower he is a recipient of
this kind of inspiration. That is to say, the
influx of thoughts, facts and principles into the

49

soul, which that particular mind may appropri-
ate; first to its own welfare and enlightenment
and then shedding it abroad, as the sun spreads
its rays over the earth for the benefit and in-
formation of those who next require the pab-
ulum.

In all ages of the world revelations of various
kinds, and of different degrees of importance,
have been given to mankind, through the in-
spiration of prophets, sages, philosophers, seers
and mediums. It all comes from" the same
source; it all bears the same earmarks, and it
all tells us to be good and virtuous, if we wish
to be happy. The Bible is full of it — begin-
ning with Moses and the burning bush, and
ending with Saint John in a trance on the Isle
of Patmos. Nor was it confined to the Jews
alone, but was taught to the Hindoos, Persians,
and Chinese, by Brahma, Zoroaster and Con-
fucius, long before the Jews were a nation.
The writings and teachings of these men to the
whole Eastern world was that sin would ulti-
mately be abolished, that everlasting right-
eousness would be brought in, and that then
the good deity, Ormuzd, would rejoice with joy
unspeakable forever and ever, for having tri-
umphed over his evil brother, Ahnman (the
devil).

These pure men and women of all ages and
nations seemed to breathe this inspiration from
on high. They have spent their lives, and may
have died in the cause of lifting up man from
.his low animal nature and pointing him to a
purer and better life beyond the grave. They
have been scoffed at and spat upon by those
in high places, and many have been put to
death; yet, afterwards they have been deified,
and churches and temples have sent up their
spires to honor their sainted names.

There are many men and women of modern
times that have acted and been controlled by
this divine influence, who, had they lived in
past ages, would have been deified for their
works; Luther, Calvin, Joan of Arc, the Seer-
ess of Provost, A. J. Davis, and others, who
have revealed many truths concerning the con-
nection between the natural and spiritual world,
and between soul and body. And there are
the names of Baron d'Holbach, Charles Fou-
rier and Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish
philosopher and psychologist, who>e writings

'mpress us with that inspiration. Sweden-
borg claimed to have seen and conversed with
angels, as did Abraham and the patriarchs of
old; and if there is any truth in the one, why
not believe the other, for it is more recent and
better authenticated.

In the writings of Plato we see the spiritual
identity of man and a future life, and his phi-
losophy reveals some very important laws of
Nature, and many psychological truths; but it
is mixed up with a vast amount of heredi-
tary superstition and absurdity. In Xeno-
phon we find a higher degree of beauty, truth
and profitableness, for no mind was ever more
deeply impressed with the truths of immor-
tality than his, because his convictions came
from the gushing aspirations of the living prin-
ciple within; and his philosophy contains more
substantial reasons for the immortality of the
soul than can be found in any portion of the
old or new Testament.

Jesus Christ.

Of the teachings of Jesus Christ in the new-
Testament, the sermon on the mount is the
most sublime ever spoken by mortal man. His
whole acts seem to flow from a pure heart and
a refined and spiritual elevation that has caused
the whole Christian world to deify him as a
son of God, sent into the world to redeem sin-
ners.

In him Nature worked her best and purest
material, and the influx of the divine spirit was
so great that he possessed the highest develop-
ment of physical and mental powers, and he
stood forth a model of form, purity and good-
ness. But the beauty of his natural principles
and the simplicity and purity of his life and its
teachings have been obscured by the darkening
influence of theological interpretations, which
have engrafted it on Roman paganism and
shrouded his life and acts in a halo ot supersti-
tion, and invested him with power that he
never claimed to possess. Though possessed of
great healing and clairvoyant powers, he only
used them for the purpose of doing good, and
the many useful and beautiful moral precepts
taught by him in the new Testament should
cause us to regard him with deep veneration, as
one of the greatest reformers of the world, and
to ascribe any higher powers would be doing

50

him injustice, for he did not profess to be a son
of God in any other sense than that he was a
branch on the great -tree of hvmanity; and he
did not profess to be directed and impelled by
any other spirit than the divine love, the germ
of which dwells in the heart of every being,
undeveloped. And to this divine principle ex-
isting in others, but not so fully developed, he
appealed so feelingly, in order that its qualities
might advance to that degree of refinement in
love and wisdom which he possessed. For he
was a perfect type of a man, but anything more
than that tends to injure and detract from
his goodness and greatness, as it is reasonable
to suppose that if the birth and life of Christ
had been of such a miraculous character as
some wish us to believe, other profane histori-
ans than Josephus would have mentioned it,
and he would have given an account of the
so-called miraculous manifestations; therefore
it is evident that much that has been written on
this subject was the work of over-zealous or
designing priestcraft.

But in this age of enlightenment and reason
it is full time that these vile superstitious false-
hoods were swept away and Christ be allowed
to stand forth in the true light of a great re-
former who has founded a church that has done
more to elevate down-trodden humanity than
any other; therefore he stands at the head of
all others as a great and good man, possessed
of that divine power of looking into minds and
reading the hearts of men; and, like all great
and true men, willing to suffer crucifixion and
death for principles that would embalm his
memory in the hearts of millions to come after
him, and raise mankind from an animal plane
of existence to a happier and better home be-
yond the grave in heaven.

St. Paul says that God made Jesus "a little
lower than the angel," Hebrews, iii, 3 and 9,
"and a little higher than Moses;" "For this
man was counted worthy of more glory than
Moses." It is evident that St. Paul never con-
sidered Christ more than a man "full of the
spirit of God." Being all good-man he was
therefore a god-man, as good and god are sy-
nonyms in the old Saxon language. It is evi-
dent that he was filled with the divine substance
that elevates man above the low, groveling ideas
of animal existence. It is evident that he was

mortal and preferred to live. He died because
he could not help it, and only, when betrayed,
he prayed with fervor, until " his sweat was as
it were great drops of blood," that the bitter
cup might he removed from him. He might
have made himself invisible by the use of his
mesmeric power over the bystanders, as he had
done before when threatened with violence, as
is claimed by Eastern adepts, and made his
escape; but, seeing that his hour had come, he
said, " Not my will but thine be done." Luke
xxiv, 34.

It is evident that Jesus was initiated into all
their mysteries. In King's "Gnostics," page
145, " there is an account of a sarcophagus,
the panels of which were bas-reliefs represent-
ing the miracles of Christ; one, the resurrec-
tion of Lazarus, in which Christ appears beard-
less and possessed of a wand, in the guise of a
necromancer, whilst the corpse of Lazarus is
swathed in bandages exactly as an Egyptian
mummy." And Jesus is always represented
with long, waving and curling hair parted in
the middle, after the fashion of the Naza-
renes.

The Talmud, speaking of the " Nazaria, or
Nazarenes" (who had abandoned the world
like the Hindoo Yogis or hermit), " calls them
a sect of physicians or wandering exorcists.
They went about the country, living on alms
and performing cures," fasting and praying
and performing miracles, like Christ and his
disciples.

The first Christians were, doubtless the Ebi-
onites, and in this we follow the authority of
the best critics. " There can be little doubt
that the author (of the Clementine Manilas) was
a representative of Ebionitic Gnosticism, which
had once been the purest form of primitive
Christianity. * * * And who were the
Ebionites? The pupils and followers of the
early Nazarenes — the Kabalistic Gnostics who
derived their doctrine from the oriental philos-
ophy. These Nazarenes were a despised sect,
on account of their different religion to that of
the Jews (Codex JVazarojns)."

Kenan shows the Ebionites numbered among
their sect all the surviving relatives of Jesus,
and some of whom denounced him. John the
Baptist was his cousin and precursor, and was
the accepted savior of the Nazarenes and their

51

prophets. They lived over and beyond the
Jordan.

There is not a word in the new Testament
that goes to show that Jesus was ever actually
regarded by his disciples as God. Neither be-
fore or after his death did they pay him divine
honors. Their relation to him was that of dis-
ciple, and " Master" was the name by which
they addressed him, as did the followers of Py-
thagoras and Plato. He never claimed he was
"God," but said he was the "son of man,"
the son of God meaning that all men were sons
of God ; and when he spoke to Mary Magdalen
at the tomb, "Jesus saith unto her, 'Touch
me not; I am not yet ascended to my father;
but go to my brethren and say unto them I
ascend to my father and your Father, and to
my God and your God,'" John xx, 17, which
implied on his part a desire to be considered on
a perfect equality with his brethren, nothing
more; that it was his astral soul or spiritual
body that she beheld and that he did not wish
her to touch him.

They looked upon him as a great prophet, a
holy, inspired man, a vehicle used by Christos
(messenger), through which the spirit of God
made himself manifest to man; and in Luke
Hi, 22, "And the Holy Ghost (spirit) descended
in a body shaped like a dove upon him, and
voices came from heaver, which said, Thou
art my beloved son, and in thee I am well
pleased." In another place it says, "Jesus,
full of sacred spirit, returned from Jordan and
the spirit led him into the desert." These pas-
sages are enough of themselves to convince any
unprejudiced mind that he was a great medium
and seer, through whom the spirits manifested.

It is evident that Christ understood the
magic art, when he says, "Go ye, therefore,
and teach all nations, *. * * and lo, lam
with you always, even to the end of the world,"
(that is, his spirit) and the apostles performed
miracles in his name after he was crucified.
The prison doors were opened to Peter and
the jailor was affrighted. It is claimed that the
keys of heaven were left with St. Peter. Baron
Bronson shows that the word Patar or Peter
was a mystic word which " locates both master
and disciple in the circle of initiations, and
connects them with the secret doctrines as they
were taught by the hierophants of ancient

Egypt," and that the ancient " Book of the
Dead," found in the tombs, dating back 4,500
years B. C, had this word written in hierogly-
phics, and Jesus knew the secret meaning of
the word bestowed by him on Simon, who was
thereafter called Peter, whom he initiated into
all the mysteries, who continued to perform
miracles and wonderful things, and this power
is still claimed by the Church of Rome.

Christ said, "Why callest thou me good?
There is none good but one; that is God."
"And whosoever shall speak a word against the
son of man shall be forgiven him; but unto
him that blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost
it shall not be forgiven." Luke xxii, 10. Is this
the language of a God, of the second person in
the trinity who is identical with the first ?

Say the Hermes, " No one of the gods, no
man or lord can be good but God alone."
Christ made use of the same expression. "To
be a good man is impossible, God alone pos-
sesses this privilege," says Plato. John the
Baptist did not consider Christ a god, when he
baptized him (John i, 6 and 30), " This is he
of whom I said, After me cometh a man"
Speaking of himself Jesus says, " You seek to
kill me, a man that hath told you the truth
which I have heard of God" John viii, 40.
And even the blind man of Jerusalem, when
speaking of who had healed him, said, " A
man that is called Jesus made clay and anoint-
ed mine eyes." John ix, n.

Christ in all his sayings is in a Pythagorian
spirit. When not verbatim repetitions, his
code of ethics is purely Buddhistic; his mode
of action and walk of life Essenian; and his
mystical mode of expression, his parables and
his ways those of an initiate,, whether Grecian,
Chaldean or Magian (for the " perfect," who
spoke the hidden wisdom, were of the same
school of Archaic learning the world over); it
is difficult to escape from the logical conclusion
that he belonged to the same body of initiates.
Secret societies and sects extended all over the
East at that time, and there is no doubt that
Jesus Christ was an initiate.

The learned philologists have been able to
trace this coming messiah far back in the sacred
books of the ancient Hindoos, written in the
Sanscrit; which is the mother language of the
Aryan race. They had their trinity and they

52

had their savior; so did the Persians and so did
the ancient inhabitants of Mexico. When the
latter country was invaded by Cortez, the priest
said, "The devil was ahead of us; how could
these people know of Christ and the Virgin
Mary unless the devil had told them of it."

The Christian Adventist undoubtedly got his
idea from the Hindoo, for it says in their sa-
cred book, *' When Vishnu appears for the last
time he will come as a savior." According to
the opinion of the Brahmans he will appear
in the form of a horse, Kalki. Others claim
he will be mounting it. This horse is the en-
velope of the evil spirit, and Vishnu will mount
it, invisible to all, until he has conquered it,
for the last time, then he will become visible
and all mankind will become good and then
comes the millenium." The Bible speaks of
Christ coming again on a white horse.

The Christian virtues inculcated by Jesus in
the sermon on the mount are nowhere exempli-
fied in the Christian world. The Buddhist as-
cetics and Indian fakirs seem almost the only
ones that inculcate and practice them, and
these the Christians call heathen and send mis-
sionaries to teach them morals that they have
derived from them, revamped, and under new
names given to their gods, they try to teach
that which they do not practice.

In the history of man, there appears to have
been many saviors, who died to redeem him
from sin, to teach him higher and nobler aspi-
rations and fit him for the life to come. There
are three that stand out more prominent than
all the rest who have a history; they are the
founders of churches that have millions of
members who bow down and bless their names
and through them seek to gain admission into
heaven — Chrisna, Gautama Buddha and Jesus
of Nazareth.

Chrisna,

The savior of the Hindoos, is the oldest. His
ej)och, on which European science fears to
commit itself, is uncertain; but the Brahmanical
calculations fix it at about 6,877 years ago. He
descended of a royal family, but was brought
up by shepherds. Man had, perhaps, advanced
in civilization to the stage of shepherds; he is,
theiefore called the shepherd's god.

His birth and divine descent are kept secret

from Kansa, an incarnation of Vishnu, the
second person of the trinity. Chrisna was
worshiped at Mathura, on the river Jumna.
(See Strabo, Arrian and Bampton.)

Chrisna is persecuted by Kansa, tyrant of
Madura, but miraculously escapes. In the
hope of destroying the child, the king has thou-
sands of male innocents slaughtered. Chris-
na's mother was Devaki or Devanagui, an im-
maculate virgin, who had given birth to eight
sons before Chrisna. He is endowed with
beauty, omniscience and omnipresence from
the time of his birth; produces mimcles, cures
the lame and the blind, casts out demons,
washed the feet of the Brahmans, and, descend-
ing into the lower regions, hell, liberates the
dead, and returns to Vaicontha, the paradise
of Vishnu. Chrisna was the god Vishnu in
human form — he crushes the serpent's head.

Chrisna is unitarian. He charges the clergy
with ambition and hypocrisy to their face, di-
vulges the great secrets of the sanctuary — the
unity of god and the immortality of the soul.
Tradition says he fell a victim to the vengeance
of the clergy. His favorite disciple, Ajuna,
never deserts him to the last. There are cred-
ible traditions that he died on a cross (a tree)
nailed to it with arrows. The best scholars
agree that the Irish cross at Taum, erected long
before the Christian era. is Asiatic. (See
Round Towers, p. 296.) Chrisna ascends to
Swarga and becomes Nirguna.

Chrisna stands at the head of the Brahman
religion. It is spread over India and has about
sixty millions of believers, who have degenera-
ted into caste, leaving to the Brahma 01 the
highest class, full control of all religious teach-
ing in the vedas. And these lower caste, like
the ignorant and superstitious of all countries,
have degenerated or never rose to that intelli-
gence, so they were unable to understand the
symbols and sublime truths that were taught in
the mythical figures of the vedas, but became
worshipers of the idols that were used to rep-
resent the true religion.

Krishna or Chrisna was worshiped as an
avotard of Vishnu, who was one of the sun
gods of the ancient Hindoos, and by his reincar-
nation in Chrisna he became a redeemer, who
would listen to the prayer of man; and that
the gods, to execute anything for the benefit ol

53

man, he had to become incarnated in some
animal or man. Vishnu, it is said, became in-
carnated ten times; the first time in a fish, the
second time in a tortoise, the third time in a
boar, and the remaining seven times were in
human forms.

If we will only search for the true essence of
the philosophy in both Manu and the Kabala,
we will find that Vishnu is the Adam Kadmon,
the expression of the universe itself; and that
his incarnations are the concrete and various
embodiments of the manifestations of the
" Stupendous Whole." " I am the soul which
exists in the hearts of all things, and I am the
beginning and the middle and also the end of
existing things," says Vishnu to his disciple in
Baghavad-Ghita, chapter Xt page 71.

" I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and
the end. * * * I am the first and the
last," says Jesus to John, in Rev. 1-6: 17.
And if we will closely examine the new Testa-
ment we can see the ear-marks of the reincar-
nation of Chrisna in Jesus Christ, who has been
made another avatar of the same reincarnation
of Vishnu, the redeemer of the Hindoos.

It is thought by some of the Oriental writers
that the wise men spoken of in the new Testa-
ment that came from the East, guided by the
star to Bethlehem, were Brahmin priests.

Gautama Buddha.

Gautama Buddha, the savior of the Buddists,
Tartars and Chinese, according to European
science and the Ceylonese calculations, lived
about 2,540 years ago. He was the son of a
king. His first disciples were also shepherds
and mendicants, and when he dies his spirit
reincarnates into that of a new-born babe. His
mother was Maya, or Maya deva (great Mary),
married to her husband, yet an immaculate vir-
gin. He is endowed with the same powers and
performs wonders like that of Chrisna, and he
also crushes the serpent's head, /'. e., abolishes
the Naga woiship as fetishism; but, like Jesus,
makes the serpent the emblem of divine wis-
dom. He abolishes idolatry, divulges the mys-
teries of the unity of God and Nirvana, and is
persecuted and driven out of the country, gath-
ers thousands of believers around him and dies
with his faithful and beloved disciple and
cousin, Ananda. He escaped crucifixion. At

the hour of his birth there were thirty-two
thousand wonders performed; the clouds were
stopped in the sky, rivers ceased to flow, flow-
ers ceased to bear, the birds remained silent
and full of wonder, the animals stopped eating,
the blind saw, the lame and dumb were cured,
and all nature remained suspended.

He is represented in many temples as sitting
under a cruciform tree, which is the " Tree of
Life." In another image he is sitting on Naga,
the Raga of serpents, with a cross on his breast.
Buddha ascends to Nirvana (heaven), while
Jesus ascends to paradise.

In the two preceding characters we can see
that they are much alike to that of Jesus, and
would naturally come to the conclusion that one
was taken from the other, though the two former
were born of royal parentage, which they for-
sook to become teachers of the humble and
low born. That their mothers were immacu-
late and had holy conceptions; that the king
sought to slay them; that the child was en-
dowed with wonderful powers and great intelli-
gence. They all performed miracles, cured the
lame and the blind, cast out demons, washed
their disciples' feet, descended into hell and
liberated the dead.

That Chrisna and Jesus both died on the
cross; one transfixed by arrows to a tree
and the other was nailed to a cross; that
they arose and ascended to heaven. So strik-
ing and alike are these three characters that one
is forced to the conclusion that they are the
same, and out of the dim rays of the past that
reflect Chrisna comes the mythical outlines of
the mythical Jesus, from whose teachings were
drawn those of the historical Christos; for we
find that under one identical garment of poetical
legend lived and breathed three real human fig-
ures. The individual merit of each of them is
brought out in rather stronger relief than oth-
erwise by the same mythical coloring, for no
unworthy character could have been selected
for deification by the popular instinct, so uner-
erring and just when left untrammeled.

If they were three distinct personages the
similarity would impress us with the truth of
the Buddhist faith: the reincarnation of the
same spirit in three distinct forms, and differ-
ent periods of the world's history. It may be
contended that Chrisna and Buddha were char*

54

acters taken from that of Jesus of Nazareth.
But ample proof is at hand to show that either
of these religions extends far back into the night
of time beyond the birth of Christ or the be-
ginning of the Christian era.

They all taught a spiritual religion involving
about the same principles, but their followers
have perverted their sublime teachings and
turned them to suit their own interest, to en-
slave man and load his mind down with ignor-
ance and superstition, and teach him to worship
idols and symbols instead of the one living
God.

The tendency in all ages has been to deify
their great and good men when dead, and to
make saints out of them, which has, no doubt,
given rise to a multiplicity of gods and demi-
gods, similar to those of the old Greek and Ro-
man mythology, who at one time were men,
and these sages, statesmen and warriors became
the tutelar deities of their country, to whom
the people made offering as a mark of rever-
ence and to get them to use their influence in
their behalf, which has tended to confuse the
idea of one universal God, and to give to that
God a human form, as these tutelar deities and
guardian spirits and administering angels were
once human beings and have evolved under the
law of progress and development to higher
spheres. And as they still retain their form
when seen by seers, prophets and mediums, it
is natural to conclude that the supreme God,
the first prime cause, was an anthropomorphous
being — a man-like god — and as the Bible says
God made man in his own image, therefore
man was like unto God, when in reality the
Jehovah of the Jews or old Bible was only the
tutelar deity of that race of people, and not
the supreme God, as it is time and again said in
the same book that no man had ever seen the
face of God.

The three personalities, Chrisna, Gautama
and Jesus, were so far above the common herd
of mankind that they appeared to be true gods,
each in his epoch, and they have left to human-
ity three religions, built upon the imperishable
rock of ages, that have withstood the assaults
of time and the attacks of skepticism, for man,
being a religious animal, must have some God
to worship, some one to pray to and do hom-
age, and not having a conception of the sublime

truths, readily mistakes the symbols or the idols
for the real person whom it is intended to rep-
resent, falls into idolatry and superstition.
Thus the sublime teachings of these three great
and good men have become adulterated so that
it is hard to recognize them as they are now
taught by their disciples and priests. But
through the skill and learning of Max Muller
and other philologists who have been able to
trace them back to their origin in the Sanscrit
language, we can see that they all had one com-
mon origin in the teachings of Christos, who is
the founder of the spiritual faith of the Aryan
race. " Yet," says Muller, "we find the his-
ry of Gautama copied word for word from the
Buddhist sacred books into the golden legend,
names of individuals are changed, the place of
action — India — remains the same in the Chris-
tian as in the Buddhist legends."

" The sacred scriptures of Hindoo stole
Brahma, the sacrificer, who is at once both
sacrificer and victim;" it is Brahma, victim in '
his own son Chrisna, who came to die on earth
for our salvation, who himself accomplishes the
solemn sacrifice (of the Sarvameda), and yet it
is the man Jesus as well as the man Chrisna,
for both were united to their Christos; they are
theiefore the same, identical persons, or two
reincarnations of the same spirit, which is in
accordance with the Buddhist faith. The rein-
carnation of the Llama of Thibet, an adept of
the highest order, may live indefinitely. When
the mortal casket wears out he reincarnates
himself (the Ego) in the body of a new-born
babe, and he begins his existence in a new
body. This may appear strange, yet Jesus
sj)eaks of the second birth, after the natural
birth — born in the spirit. This might have ref-
erence to the will force freeing its astral soul
so that it might communicate with spirits in the
spirit land.

Jesus Christ tries to imbue the hearts of his
audience with scorn for wordly wealth, fakir-
like unconcern for mammon, love of humanity,
poverty and chastity. He blesses the poor in
spirit, the meek, the hungry and the thirsting
after righteousness, the merciful and peace-
makers, and, like Buddha, leaves but a poor
chance for the proud caste to enter into the
kingdom of heaven. Kvery word of his ser-
mon is an echo of the essential principles of

monotheistic Buddhism. The ten command
ments of Buddha are found in an appendix to
the Pratimoksha Sutra (Pali-Burman text) and
are elaborated to their full extent, as in
Matthew.

So great is the similarity of the teachings of
these two great reformers that the Orientalist
will not admit that they are different persons,
but say that they are the teachings of Buddha.
And so much alike are some of the religious
services that a Portuguese Catholic missionary,
who was sent to Cochin China in the sixteenth
century, wrote back home saying that the devil
had been ahead of him and introduced the
Catholic service among them.

Apollonius of Tyana.

Apollonius of Tyana, a contemporary of
Jesus of Nazareth, was, like him, a religious
enthusiast and founder of a new spiritual school.
He was less metaphysical and more practical,
yet less tender and perfect in his nature, and he
inculcated the same quintessence of spiritual-
ity and the same high moral truths. He con-
fined himself to the society of the rich while
Christ confined himself to that of the poor.
He was the friend of kings and moved among
the aristocracy, and he was born rich. Never-
theless they were both miracle-workers, healing
the sick, raising the dead, etc., yet his miracles
are more wonderful and varied and better at-
tested. Materialism denies the fact in both
cases, but history affirms it. Apollonius, who
is represented as one of the sixteen saviors that
mankind has had, is claimed by some to have
been like Christ, crucified and rose from the
dead, and appeared to his disciples, but history
does not bear out the assertion.

He performed supernatural cures and, like
the Spiritualist of the present day, proclaimed
to the people that he was heaven-ordained. He
confounded the most learned scholars of Rome
and Greece. He ate no animal food, discarded
woollen clothes, wore his hair long and well
combed, washed his face, kept his body sweet
and clean, refused to associate with women,
lived single like Jesus, the Shakers and Catho-
lic piiests; was opposed to offering up sacrifi-
ces, did not think much of oral prayer, believed
in free speech, taught a new religion, honor,
equity, personal purity and universal education,

and performed miracles like Pythagoras, who
was a bright medium and claimed to get his
wonderful powers and knowledge from on high.
He could perform a magnetic or psychologic
cure, and was believed to be a god or a son of
a god, or else a veritable Beelzebub, the prince
of devils.

When Apollonius desired to hear the " small
voice " (the spirits), he would wrap himself up
in a fine woollen mantle, on \yhich he stood
upon both feet, after making certain magnetic
passes and offering an invocation well known to
the adept. Then he drew the mantle over his
head and face and his translucid or astral spirit
was free, which was similar to the account the
Bible gives of Elijah: " When Elijah heard it
he wrapped his face in his mantle and stood in
the entering of the cave, and behold there came
the voice."

Apollonius went to Hindostan in search of
the wisdom of the Brahmins. He was brought
into the presence of the chief sage of the East,
who addressed him in the following language:
"It is the custom of others to inquire of those
who visit them who they are and for what pur-
pose they come; but with us the first evidence
of wisdom is that we are not ignorant of those
who come to us." Thereupon this clairvoyant
recounted to Apollonius the most notable events
of his life, also his father and mother, and the
incidents of his journey and who were his com-
panions and all about him. He was awed by
the knowledge they possessed and earnestly
sought to be admitted into their secrets.
After the usual length of waiting he became
duly illuminated and returned and astonished
Europe with his piercing clairvoyance and won-
derful powers in healing and knowledge of the
occult force.

His power of divining the future was won-
derful. While lecturing at Ephesus he sudden-
ly stopped and exclaimed, " Strike! stiike the
tyrant! Domitian is no more; the world is de-
livered of its bitterest oppressor!" At that day
and hour Emperor Domitian was assassinated
at Rome, and he saw it though hundreds of
miles distant.

Pythagoras.

" Pythais, the mother of Pythagoras, was
overshadowed by the specter or ghost of the

56

god Apollo, who afterwards appeared to the
husband and informed him of the divine origin
of the child about to be born."

'* Hercules, or Alcide* as he was called by
the Greeks, was always claimed to be the son
of the god Jupiter by a human mother Alemena,
the wife of a Theban king."

" Apollo, Mercury and Adonis were all
claimed to be incarnations, each being ' sons
of God ' born of mortal woman; each being
for a time incarnate on earth for the benefit of
mankind; each destroyed and received up into
heaven again, as mediators between the Most
High Zeus, the Great Unknown and Unknow-
able, and sinful men."

Parkhurst, in his Greek Lexicon, says: " It
is well known that by Hercules was meant the
sun or solar light, and his twelve famous labors
referred to his passage through the zodiacal
signs." And that the Garden of the Hesperi-
des was the Garden of Eden, and the serpent's
head was crushed beneath the heel of Her-
cules; all of which goes to show that the an-
cient theology taught by Moses was the same
as that which existed in India, Egypt, China,
Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Arabia, Asia Minor
and Palestine; with the Greeks, Romans, Celts,
Gauls, modern Europeans, Australians, ancient
Mexicans and Peruvians, which had its origin
with the pre-historic man long before the conti-
nents took their present shape. The legends
among the savage as well as the civilized man,
point to the antique garb, with its shreds and
patches of ever increasing theological compli-
cations, for the benefit of modern fanaticism,
and the edification of those who are content to
take the word of priestcraft, instead of think-
ing and investigating for themselves.

Esculapius.

There is a splendid description given of the
great savior, Esculapius, in Ovid's Metamor-
phoses:

" Once as the sacred infant she surveyed,
The god was kindled in the raving maid,*
And thus she uttered her prophetic tale:
' Hail, great physician of the world, all hail!
Shall heal the nations and defraud the tomb;
Swift be thy growth, thy triumph's unconfined;
Make kingdoms thicker and increase mankind;

* Pythoness or sybil.

Thy daring acts shall animate the dead,
And rouse the thunder on thy guilty head;
Then shalt thou die, but from the dark abode
Shall rise victorious and be twice a god.' "

" Strabo informs us that the temples of Es-
culapius were constantly filled with the sick,
and that tablets were hung all over the walls,
describing the cures effected by The Savior"
There is still a remarkable fragment of one of
these tablets extant, and exhibited by Greuter
in his collection. It was found in the ruins of
a temple of Esculapius, which gives an account
of two blind men restored to sight by Escula-
pius in the open view, and with the loud accla-
mations of the people acknowledging the power
of the god."

Aischylus.

Of /Eschylus, under the name of Prome-
theus, "Seneca and Hesiod say that he was
nailed to an upright beam of timber, to which
were affixed extended arms of wood, and this
cross was situated near the Caspian Straits."
" At the final exit of this god the whole frame
of nature became convulsed; the earth shook,
the rocks were rent, the graves were opened,
and in a storm which seemed to threaten the
dissolution of the universe, the solemn scene
closed, and the savior gavcup the ghost."

Xenophon.

There can be no doubt that Xenophon was
a man of noble aspirations and a believer in the
immortality of the soul. Speaking of sleep,
he says: "Nothing so nearly resembles death
as sleep, and nothing so strongly intimates the
divinity of the soul as what passes in the mind
on that occasion, for the intellectual principle
in man, during this state of relaxation and free-
dom from external impressions, frequently looks
forward into futurity and discerns events before
time has yet brought them forth, a plain indica-
tion of what the power of the soul will here-
after be, when the soul shall be delivered from
the restraints of its present bondage."
Cicero.

Cicero, the great orator and statesman, was
also a defender of those unvarying principles
that govern the universe and was endowed with
a consciousness of the truth, which caused him
to discard superficial theories that then shroud-

57

ed the public mind in the form of heathen my-
thology. He was a great lover of nature, and
his mind was lifted far above the herd of ignor-
ant, superstitious humanity, which in all ages
of the world is ready to put to death those no-
ble defenders of truth and justice who teach a
doctrine in opposition to that which they pro-
fess.

Cicero says: " For my own part, I feel my-
self transported with the most ardent impa-
tience to join the society of my departed
friends. I ardently wish, also, to visit those
celestial worthies of whose honorable conduct
I have heard and read much, or whose virtues
I have myself commemorated in some of my
writings. To this glorious assembly I am speed-
ily advancing, and I would not turn back in
my journey, even on assured condition that
youth like that of Pelius should again be re-
stored. * * * And after all, should this,
my persuasion of the soul's immortality prove
to be a mere delusion, it is at least a pleasing
delusion, and I will cherish it to my last
breath. I am well convinced, then, that my
dear departed friends are so far from having
ceased to live, that the state they now enjoy
can alone with propriety be called life."

Socrates.

Socrates is as much, if not more, of an au-
thority in the scientific and literary world than
many of the Christian and so-called sacred
writers. He testified in the midst of all his
wisdom and learning to the continued presence
of his daemon or guardian angel, who warns
him of danger, predicts to him events that are
coming, reveals to him the state of the future
life and makes the gateway of death one of
glory and grandeur.

Some of the ancient writers of the church
claim that Socrates, the Athenian philosopher,
was a good man. As Christ was a teacher to
the Jews, so Socrates was a teacher of the true
philosophy to the Gentiles. ** And those who
lived according to the Logos," says Clemens
Alexandrinus, " were really Christians, though
they have been thought to be Atheists, as Soc-
rates and Heraclitus were among the Greeks,
and such as resembled them;" " for God," says
Origen, "revealed these things to them and
whatever things have been well spoken."

In Socrates we find those sublime truths that
removed the fear of death, and in his conversa-
tions we have the best reasons ever given by
man of the immortality of the soul. The man-
ner of his death and the composure with which
he swallowed the poison is only equaled by the
tragic end of Jesus of Nazareth.

Zoroaster.

Zoroaster, the founder of the fire-worshipers
of Persia, was born under somewhat similar
circumstances to those of Christ, though his
parents descended from kings. "His mother,
when pregnant, saw in a vision a being glorious
as Djemschid, who assailed the Deves (the
Persian evil spirits) with a sacred writing, before
which they fled in terror. The interpretation
given by the magician was that she should be
favored among women by bearing a son to
whom Ormuzd (good — god) would make known
his laws and who should spread them through
all the East. Against this son every power of
evil would be in arms." That after many trials
and much persecution he should triumph, and
at last should ascend to the side Of Ormuzd in
the highest heaven, and his foe sink into Ahri-
mana and hell.

King Darius sought like Herod to kill him,
and on lifting up his sword to hew the child in
pieces, his arm was grasped by some unseen
power and was withered to the shoulder, which
so frightened the king that he dropped the
sword and fled in terror. They then stole the
child from his mother and cast him into the
flames; there he lay peacefully on his fiery
couch as if in his cradle; where he was found by
his mother (Dogdo), who carried him home un-
harmed. Many efforts were made to kill him
but he always escaped unharmed. #He was
placed in the way of wild bulls and wolves and
fed on poisoned food, yet he escaped without
injury.

At thirty years of age his mission began. He
left his native home and visited the court of
Iran. Being warned in a vision he turned aside
into the mountains of Albordi, where he re-
ceived many revelations and was lifted up into
the highest heaven, where he beheld Ormuzd in
all his glory encircled by a host of angels. He
was there fed on food as sweet as honey, which
opened his eyes so he saw all that was passing

in the heavens and on the earth. The dark-
ness of the future was made to him as day, and
he learned the inmost secrets of nature — the
revolution of worlds, the influence of stars, the
greatness of the six chief angels of God, the
felicity of the beatified, and the terrible condi-
tion of the sinful. He descended into hell,
and there looked on the evil one face to face.
Finally he received from God the divine gospel
(Zend-Avesta) and by repeating a few verses of
it he would put his enemies to flight.

Celestial fire was also given him to be kept
continually burning, and he at last overcame
his enemies, and the king became a convert to
his doctrines. Their moral teachings are pure
and beautiful, and his ideal of the Divine One
high and just; but in the course of centuries
his followers became idolatrous and the sacred
fire became more and more an object of vener-
ation, and the sun, the loving emblem of their
sacred fire, was their object of worship. They
finally degenerated into what is known as fire-
worshipers; licentiousness desecrated the tem-
ples and human sacrifices were at last offered.
This religion lasted for over twelve centuries,
when it was displaced by that of the Koran,
with the exception of some Porsees or sun-wor-
shipers in India.

He says, speaking of overcoming evil, " But
though he has been brave in battle, killed wild
beasts and fought with all manner of external
evils, if he neglect to combat evil within him-
self, he has reason to fear that Ahriman and
his deves will seize him."

Sosioch.

Sosioch, the Persian savior, is also born of a
virgin, and at the end of time he will come as
a redeemer to regenerate the world, but he will
be preceded by two prophets, who will come to
announce him (see King's translation of the
"Zend-Avesta" in his " Gnostics," page 9).
Then comes the general resurrection, when the
good will immediately enter into this happy
abode — the regenerated earth — and Ahriman
and his angels (the devils) and the wicked will
be purified by immersion in a lake of molten
metal. * * * Henceforward all will enjoy
unchangeable happiness and, headed by Sosi-
och, ever sing the praises of the Eternal One."

The above is a perfect repetition of Vishnu

in his tenth avatar, for he will throw the wick-
ed into the inferrud abodes, in which, after
purifying themselves, they will be pardoned,
even those devils which rebelled.

"This Sosioch, or mediator, is much like
the Messiah of the Jews, and here was the deep
and real point of unison between the two reli-
gions, and this explains the meaning of the star
which was seen in the East and which guided
the magi of Zoroaster to the cradle of Christ."
(See "Ten Great Religions," page 209.)

Confucius.

Six hundred years before the birth of Christ
the Chinese philosopher Confucius, in his book
" Lun-Yu," chapter V, 15, enunciated the
Golden Rule: " Master consists in having an
invariable correctness of heart; and in doing
towards others as we would that they should do
to us."

And in this noble character we find the same
lofty spirit that rose above the groveling herd
of humanity, whose time is absorbed in getting
food to support a starving body. Though he
has not been deified he has left a deep impres-
sion on the morals of his people, so that he
is as much an object of veneration as a savior
who might have died upon a cross for a reli-
gious idea. He has received the title of phi-
losopher, a term far more appropriate than that
of savior.

Mr. Kersey Graves, in his work entitled
"Sixteen Crucified Saviors," says there have
been at least thirty-four avatars or god-men.
The following is a list:

1. Krishna or Chrisna, of Hindostan.

2. Buddha Sakia, of India.

3. Salivahana, of Bermuda.

4. Zulis, also Osiris and Horus, of Egypt.

5. Odin, of the Scandinavians.

6. Crita, of Chaldea.

7. Zoroaster and Mithra, of IVrsi.i.

8. Baal and Taut, of Phoenicia.

9. India, of Thibet.

10. Bali, of Afghanistan.

1 1. Iao, of Nepaul.

12. Wittoba, of Billongonese.

13. Thammuz, of Syria.

14. Atys, of Phrygia.

15. Xamotis, of Thrace.

16. Zoar, of the Bowzes.

17. Adad, of Assyria.

59

i8. Deva, Tat, and others, of Siam.

19. Alcides, of Thebes.

20. Mikado, of the Sintoos.

21. Beddru, of Japan.

22. Hesus, or Esos and Bremilla, of the
Druids.

23. Thor, son of Odin, of the Gauls.

24. Cadmus, of Greece.

25. Hil and Teta, of Mandaites.

26. Gentaut and Quaxalcote, of Mexico.

27. Universal Monarch, of the Sibyls.

28. Tschy, of Formosa.

29. The Logos, of Plato (The Word).

30. Holy One, of Xaca.

31. To and Tien, of China.

32. Adonis, of Greece.

33. Ixion and Quirinius, of Rome.

34. Prometheus, of Caucasus.

" Each of these saviors was born at mid-
winter and their births have excited the jeal-
ousy of some kingly tyrant, and, though them-
selves of royal descent, were born in caves or
mangers, forced to pass their infancy in obscur-
ity and not unfrequently cause the ' massacre of
all the innocents' in the district in which they
are born. They are all miracle- workers, and
are generally connected with some snake story,
in which is represented the evil power which is
adverse to them. They generally perform
about the same class of miracles, preach the
highest morals of the age in which they appear,
and are benevolent and act the part of great
reformers, and oppose the abuses of the times.
They feed multitudes, cast out devils, heal the
sick; finally they succumb to the powers of
evil that oppose them; die a violent death, very
often by crucifixion, descend to the lower re-
gions to rescue lost souls, reascend to heaven
and thenceforth become judges of the dead,
mediators and redeemers of men, who offer up
vicarious sacrifices to God for the sins of the
people."

"These good-men or god-men," says Mr.
Graves, " all appear to point to one origin in
India." " How the ancient Mexican could
have conceived the idea of a savior," says the
priest who accompanied Cortez in his conquest
of the country, " I cannot imagine unless the
devil gave them the information."

So all nations have had their saviors; they
make him comply with their ideal and color
them black, red or white, as may chance to

be the color of the race to which they be-
long.

"Many of the ancient statues of the god
Buddha in India, have crisp, curly hair, with
flat noses and thick lips; nor can it be reasona-
bly doubted that a race of negroes formerly
had pre-eminence in India." It was the opin-
ion of Sir William Jones that a great nation of
blacks (not certainly, though possibly, negroes)
formerly possessed the dominion of Asia, and
held the seat of empire at Sidon (more proba-
bly Babylon). These must have been the peo-
ple called by Mr. Maurice, Cushites or Cuthites,
described in Genesis, and the opinion that they
were blacks is corroborated by the translators
of the Pentateuch, who constantly render the
word Cush by Ethiopia. The figures of the
aneient Hindoo gods found in cave temples is
very different from the present .race. This
points back to the remote age when all man-
kind were black, as is claimed by some ethnol-
ogists. The color of the first human beings
was black.

To comprehend these saviors we must look
upon them as great and good men who breathed
the divine breath of inspiration, who by their
pure lives lived in harmony with the spirit world
and drew their wisdom from the soul of the
universe, which is overflowing with truth and
goodness. These saviors were sensitives and
were able to connect themselves with it, and to
draw from it some of its secrets and divine
truths.

Each wave of thought, whether of good or
evil, that vibrates from the heart or mind goes
out by the silent system of spiritual laws, and
inflluences all minds within the radius of its
control. The spiritual beings around us are
moved and affected. It reaches out wave after
wave, and is met by a response from the spirit-
ual agencies that come down from the great
central mind (God). There is no limit to the
light and knowledge that is locked up in the
spirit world, if man would place himself en
rapport with it. It only requires that he should
seek it earnestly; it only requires that he should
trust it; it only requires that he should submit
and have faith and live in harmony with nature,
and do right and good will follow his earnest
wishes and prayers.

CHAPTER VI.

RELIGION; ITS ORIGIN, GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT.

As the savage slowly evolved from the ape-
like man, his brain became larger and more
developed in the region of the moral and
reflective organs. His forehead assumed a
higher and broader proportion, the crown rose
in the region of the organs of benevolence and
veneration. Man alone has this prominence on
the crown of the head; all other animals are
deficient. While many animals possess a back
skull largely developed, man alone has a fore-
head and a highly curved crown, and in the
lowest there is but a slight elevation. The
prominence in this region of the head is the
most marked feature between the benevolent,
pious and good man and the low and bad man.
Therefore religion is dependent on the brain
development in the region of the crown of the
skull.

The moral and intellectual brain was the last
to evolve; as man was forced to think and rea-
son these organs expanded and by slow degrees
man became a reasoning, thinking animal.
Man's religion is high or low as he recedes or
approaches the lower animals; low and de-
graded races have a low and degraded religion,
and as man ascends in the scale of intelligence
his religion becomes broader and more liberal.
It is the ignorant and narrow-minded that con-
stitute the over-devout fanatic and the religions
tyrant and bigot who is always a great stickler
for creeds and dogmas. God, creation and
religion are things too broad, too high and too
noble to quarrel about or to burn men, women
and children because they entertain other ideas
than those entertained by the orthodox believ-
ers of the time.

The most of the animals know the difference
between day and night. Some know the sea-
sons of the year; the squirrel, for instance,

6P

lays up its store of nuts for the long winter,
and many birds migrate south every fall. All
animated nature is governed by instinct, while
man is governed by reason and intuition — the
latter in animals is called instinct. In man it
is elevated and guided by reason. What we
call our first impression is this feeling of intui-
tion that makes us religious, because it is the
inner whispering of our nature that admonishes
and forces us to admit that there is a future
state, that the life principle never dies. Ani-
mals may have it, but they have not developed
a reason or an intelligence so that they can ex-
press it, or perhaps feel it; yet they all cling to
life and dread to die, they know this life but
not the life to come.

All strange phenomena that man cannot un-
derstand, he is ready to believe is produced by
some supernatural power; it is a mystery and
he is ready to ascribe it to some marvelous
cause. The mind that is ignorant of these
causes has a vague and indefinite idea of it;
therefore he is ready to believe it is produced
by some unseen being, and as he has learned
from experience there are good and bad results,
so is he ready to ascribe it to good or bad
sprits.

So by degrees he became a superstitious ani-
mal and was ready lo conclude that all phe-
nomena that he could not understand was the
work of some good or evil spirit, according to
the manner of its visit and its interest for good
or evil. This idea gave rise to good and evil
spirits, gods and demons; all of which tended
to create a religious feeling within his nature.
As he receded from the beast this feeling was
increased by the development of those organs
that tended to make him a social, moral being,
grateful for the blessings conferred upon him by

61

the bountiful hand of nature, which is ever
ready to assist him to rise.

No other animal has a religion. It may be
said to be one of the marked distinctions that
place man above the brute creation. No mon-
keys or apes have any reverence for a supreme
being. " Man is the first animal," says Pro-
fessor Fowler, " that has the organ of venera-
tion," which he places at the crown of the
skull. Some men have little or no reverence,
and the want of this development makes them
atheists and disbelievers in a supreme being
and a future existence.

The moral and Religious organs are the last
that develop in the child, and over them the
skull is last to harden. Man alone possesses
this craniological development, and the lower
the man or the lower the race the less the brain
is developed, and the harder is the infant's
skiill on the crown of the head, as in the case
of the negro child and the inferior races and
apes. The phrenologist and ethnologist can
almost tell the moral and intelligent status of
the man by the shape of his skull and to what
race of people he belongs. All prehistoric
skulls of man and the lower order of animals
possess less brain capacity than those ot more
recent periods. The mammoth elephantus pri-
mogenitus of the tertiary period, though twice
as large as that of the modern elephant, pos-
sessed a less brain capacity. As the world has
grown older animals have grown less and their
brain larger.

So religion is a matter of growth and devel-
opment as well as of muscle and brain, and
is dependent on the brain for its existence,
so this will account for the universal idea that
man has of a future state of spirits, angels and
gods. As his brain increases he has a higher
standard for his god. He first makes himself
an image out of stone, mud or wood; then he
gives it the form of a man, which is the highest
conception of a form that he can conceive, and
here he generally stops and becomes a man-
worshiper.

It is this indwelling principle that forces up
the savage to that of the civilized, monal, social
and intellectual man, and as these faculties are
developed man ascends and progresses, and the
higher the condition on earth the higher will be
his condition in spirit life, for it follows the

law of progress, and as spirits progress so will
man, for they are only higher beings of intelli-
| gence, and are only freed from the body, while
man is the undeveloped spirit, chained to the
body, only to be freed at death; therefore they
act and react upon each other, and spirits attract
like spirits, whether in or out of the body,
so that spirits are attracted to earth and spirits
of mortals ascend to the spirit spheres, when in
proper condition, and this interchange is ever
going on between them, ascending and de-
scending. The spirit of the savage descends
to the savage on the earth and the spirit of the
savage on earth ascends to their spiritual sphere.
So they learn of a spirit land, and this is their
religion. So it is with the Hindoo or with the
Christian, and whatsoever the condition of man
is on earth, he has his spiritual sphere and the
spirits from that sphere communicate with him,
for spirits that are not in harmony cannot min-
gle. " Like attracts like, whether on earth or
in the spiritual world."

In this way all nations have their religion,
and they get it through kindred spirits, so that
Spiritualism is the origin of all religions, as it
is the only way man can get a knowledge of the
spirit world, for all religions are full of spirit-
ism, and when carefully compared we are forced
to admit that it has all come through the same
channel, and its standard depends on the me-
diums and the spirits that communicate and the
race to which they belonged. Some men are
more progressed on earth than some spirits who
have been in the spirit land thousands of years.

Religion, therefore, should be progressive; as
men, spirits and angels progress, their knowledge
of nature and God becomes enlarged and their
intelligence becomes expanded, and so should
religion become more liberal. While science
has found out many of the secrets of the phys-
ical laws and benefited mankind, it has refused
to look into the metaphysical laws that relate to
mind, soul or spirit, and still allows man to
bow down and worship the religions of Moses
and Christ, who had no idea of steam or elec-
tricity, but who traveled about in dugouts or
on a camel's back. \Yhat we want is a religion
in keeping with the age, ancl the spirits demand
it, for they have progressed.

Religion has its origin in the mind, like that of
thought and perception. As soon as man had

62

evolved to such a condition of intel'igence that
he could connect a train of thought and had
language to express his ideas, he became a reli-
gious animal, and had higher aspirations than
his animal desires. He looks forth into the fu-
ture and believes that there is something within
him that will exist forever; that he will live in
the spirit long after the body has decayed and
returned to the dust. This thought is peculiar
to man and has tended to elevate him and force
him to overcome his animal nature and aspire
to reach a higher moral condition. As his
moral and intellectual organs push up the front
and crown of the head he becomes more hu-
mane and intelligent, he has more respect for
the rights of others, and he tries to subdue his
animal passions, which in time he is able to
place under the control of the moral, reasoning
faculties of the mind; but to arrive at that con-
dition it costs every one a struggle. Some in-
herit more of the vicious animal nature than
others, while it is natural for some to be good,
for they are born so; but the great mass of man-
kind inherits so much of the animal nature that
it takes a lifetime to get it under control, and
it may never be done.

A Hindoo maxim says: " Brahma inscribes
the destiny of every mortal on his skull, and the
gods themselves cannot avert it." That is,
everybody has their destiny in their skulls and
if he has not the moral and intellectual nature
given to him by birth, he cannot make a wise
and moral man out of himself; but that he can
improve himself and his condition, and his
brain will develop in that direction by use;
that brain grows and expands like the muscles
of the legs and arms by use; that there was
never a mind, however great or small, but by
proper study and training might have learned
more. It is a bottomless well that can never
be pumped dry. The mind is a battery con-
nected with infinity; the more perfect the bat-
tery the greater is its capacity to draw from
anima mundi (the mind or soul of the universe),
which is inexhaustible, it is a part of the deity,
a spark, a divine scintilla that has gone out
from the universal mind, which is called God.
Therefore all well balanced minds have a high
regard for truth, justice, love and virtue, and
hate vice.

This love of virtue and truth struggles to

elevate mankind and better the condition of all;
it stands out prominently in the patriot and the
philanthropist, they who in all ages of the world
have struggled to overcome ignorance and prej-
udice. They have been defeated time and
time again, but their influence is felt for ages.
It will take many generations to remove the
patriotic feeling of a Washington from the
hearts of the American people, for all love a
pure, good and patriotic man, though they may
not have manhood to imitate his virtues. Still
it all has its effect on society and slowly pushes
up the masses from their low, animal natures
and selfish desires.

When we examine the reHgion of the savage
and that of civilized man, we see much simi-
larity and traces of one mingled in the other.

When the Zulu sacrifices a bullock and offers
up his prayer he says: " There is your bullock,
ye spirit of my ancestors; I pray for healthy
body that I may live comfortably, and thou
treat me with mercy," (mentioning the name of
his dead ancestor).

A Khond, when offering a sacrifice to the
earth goddess, says: " By our castle, our flocks,
our pigs and our grain, we procured a victim
and offered a sacrifice; do you enrich us; let
our herds be so numerous that they cannot be
housed; let children so abound that the care of
them shall be too much for their parents.
* * * We are ignorant of what is good for
us; give it to us, what is best."

The Zulu says the spirit of a dead man de
parts from his body and becomes an ancestral
ghost. The widow will tell how the spirit of
her husband came back in her sleep and up-
braided her for not taking care of the children.
The son will describe how his father's ghost
stood before him in his dreams.

The Mandan Indian woman will talk for
hours to her dead husband or child.

A Chinaman is bound to announce any fam-
ily event, such as a wedding, to the spirits of
his ancestors. They not only talk to the ghost
of their dead kinsfolk, but offer them food.

A Russian peasant will often put crumbs of
cake behind the pictures of the saints, belic\ -nig
that the souls of their forefathers are creeping
around behind it.

The feeding of the dead is still kept up in
Brittany; on All Souls' Day they will put cake

63

and sweetmeats on the graves, and will leave
fragments on the supper table all night for the
souls of the dead of the family, who will come
to visit them. Flowers are now left on the
graves as a substitute.

John Chinaman believes, when he offers
a sacrifice to his dead ancestors, of roast pig
and rice, that the flavor or essence of the viands
ascends and the spirit of his departed father
sniffs up the odors as they rise, which pleases
him and he will shower blessings down on
his dutiful son, while he is at liberty to take
home the cold food, the gross and material that
cannot be eaten by the immortal spirit, but
which is good for himself and his family to
make a feast upon.

Classic literature abounds in instances where
the horse and clothing were burned with the
owner. The burning of Patroklas with the
Trojan captives and their horses and hounds, is
an instance; and when he came back to the
sleeping Achilles, he tried to grasp him with
loving hands; but the soul, like smoke, flits
away below the earth.

Hermotinos, the seer, used to go out of his
body, until at last coming back from a spirit
journey, found that his wife had burned his
corpse on a funeral pile, and that he had to
become a bodyless ghost.

Herodotus tells us about Scythian funerals,
and how Melissa's ghost came back shivering
because her clothes had not been burned with
her.

To the present day the good wife of the Hin-
doo mounts the funeral pile, believing that her
spirit will accompany her husband to the other
world.

Among the ancient Peruvians the wife of the
dead prince would hang herself in order that
she might continue in his service.

The leading of the dead general's horse in
the funeral procession had its origin in the an-
cient custom of killing the horse at his grave
and burying it with him, so that its spirit would
accompany him to the spirit world and there be
his war horse. As late as in 1 781, at Treves,
when General Friedrich Kasimir was buried
according to the rites of the Teutonic order,
his war horse was killed at his grave and buried
with him. This custom is still kept up by the
savages, and the King of Dahomey decapitates

the head of a slave when he wishes to send a-
message to some departed friend, and a heca-
tomb of wives and women are slaughtered on
his grave when he dies, to accompany him to
the spirit land.

Religion has its origin in the heart; it is a
part of man's intuitional nature; it comes from!
the spiritual rather than the rational, yet it
must have reason as well as faith to give it sup-
port; it must have works as well as belief, and
belief cannot stand long with reason and facts*
The want of positive facts, such as can be de^
monstrated by a scientific test, is one cause of
the growth of materialism. To some the test
of Spiritualism is sufficient, but to others it is
not. The positive materialist rejects that evi-
dence and disturbs the subtle currents that
bring those facts, which are given by a class of
sensitives. Scientific minds, such as Profes-
sors Wallace, Crookes and Zollner, are able
to appreciate them; but the cold materialist,
like Tyndal and Spencer, reject all spiritual
manifestations.

There are two classes of religious persons:
one moved by love may be called amo, the
other the credo. The latter are interested only
in creeds and forms and outward show, who
are narrow-minded and fanatical and have in
all ages filled the world with strife, war and dis-
sensions. They are prompt to go to church on
Sunday, when they appear very devout. They
may be called Sunday Christians. The atnos,
on the other hand, make religion consist of
doing good; they care little about creeds and
dogmas, and they try to promote peace and
happiness. They use their belief as a means,
while the credos stand firm on it as a finality
that is to take them to heaven.

• Of the credo Morris says: "It is possible to
be delighted with a doctrine and yet have no
just conception of its practical bearings; to
revel in the thought of a blessing, and yet not
discern its force as a moral motive; to have an
intense admiration of the principles of equity
and love, and yet be a stranger to both the
theory and practice of them in varied relations
of life and the world."

The highest idea of a religious man is to do
good and to have a regard for what is right and
just between himself and his fellow man. The
observance of the Golden Rule is bis standard;

64

a just appreciation of the bountiful gifts of na-
ture which are given to him to use and enjoy.
Pleasure in every form is good in itself; it is
the great allurement that God has given to his
children to enjoy and not to abuse.

All wisdom and philosophy are resolved into
one simple principle: that happiness and intel-
ligence depend upon the moral development of
our religious nature; without it man is but a
little above a brute. An immoral genius is no
genius, simply a man of talent, such as Lord
Byron; but in Shakespeare and Milton we have
the highest moral purity, one capable of giving
a full expression of the soul.

Two men may stand on the same spot, to
one everything is beautiful and lovely, while to
the other it may all appear a barren waste.
One looks on the bright side of the picture,
while the other looks on the dark side of it.
One has hope, the other despair; one is an op-
timist, the other a pessimist, who sees evil in
everything, " that this is a vile world of sin
and sorrow."

Light and heat come together in the sun-
beam, and so does law with virtue of desire
and deed. In becoming religious one loses
nothing but often gains when least it is expect-
ed. No one can perceive its beauties unless his
heart is morally good. " To know nature then,
one must be true to nature. To be true to na-
ture then, one must live looking forever to the
mighty spirit who presides. Nature has been
said to have an exhaustless meaning, but it is a
meaning to be rightly seen and heard only by
him who strives ceaselessly and prayerfully to
become all that the divine image and likeness
is capable of becoming, which is in fact to be-
come humane and religious, and as we become
more humane the world becomes to us more di-
vine and man a better Christian."

Religion may be divided into two parts; that
which relates to its historical forms is called
comparative theology; the other is that which
explains the conditions under which, in the
highest or lowest form it is possible, is called
theoretic theology.

Comparative theology is like that of compar-
ative philology and can be traced back to the
early races of mankind in Asia. It shows that
it has taken many forms and has much to do in
shaping the public mind, laws and institutions

of every country, and all religions may be said
to be the groundwork of every government ex-
cept that of the United States, in which a new
departure was taken and God and religion were
for the first time left out.

There are two modes by which man gets his
religious knowledge: natural and revealed.
The natural is the knowledge man gets by the
light of nature and reason; the revealed religion
is that which comes by revelations from God,
angels and spirits, and the inspiration of pro-
phets, seers and mediums. It manifested itself
to Moses in the burning bush, and he heard it
on Mount Sinai. Therefore all religious knowl-
edge we have on this subject is through revela-
tion, and this revelation has been made to man
through the mediumship of some person who
has been inspired or who has held converse
with angels or spirits. The record of these
facts are called a Bible in the Christian reli-
gion; with the Hindoos it is called the Vedas;
with the sun-worshippers the Zend-Avesta; with
the Mohammedans the Koran.

" True religion is that which embraces the
universe, reveals perfect justice to all, breathes
boundless goodness, fills the reason with lights
the affection with love, the sorrowing with co?i-
sola/ion, the down-trodden with courage, and
the despairing with the golden beams of eternal
hope and happiness. It is responsive to every
real human need, the infinite sources of love
and wisdom perpetually flow into and flood the
individual receptive spirit; and the innumera-
ble host of the heavenly spheres freely shower
their fondest affections and their most resplend-
ent thoughts into the common life of the terres-
trial millions of human beings. There is no
one utterly forsaken, all are a part of the whole
in the great plan of creation; no bleeding heart
that either lives or dies wholly alone and un-
known; there are ministering spirits and guar-
dian angels watching over every human being;
no unrequited life in this universe of love; no
possible estrangement from the redemptive
power of the universal presence."

All humanity moves within the orbit of the
spiritual Sun according to certain and fixed
laws of the spirit world. There is no gravita-
tion equal or superior to the attraction of heav-
en, while our feet and our animal nature (lint;
to the earth, yet our heads point towards the

(JD

heavens. That our bodies will return to the
earth from whence they came and the self, the
ego, the soul, will ascend to the mansion in the
skies, where it will follow the laws of progress
and grow wiser, purer and better until it reaches
the divine sensorium whence it came.

The supreme Power whom we reverence is
the boundless and endless one — the grand
"Central Spiritual Sun" — by whose attributes
and the visible effects of whose inaudible will
we are surrounded — the God of the ancients
and the God of modern seers. His nature can
be studied only in the worlds called forth by
his mighty fiat. His revelation is traced with
His own finger in the rocks, in imperishable fig-
ures upon the face of the cosmos, and the same
forces are at work and the same laws that gov-
ern matter are now in operation as were in the
days of Moses, David and Jesus Christ and
the apostles. It is the only infallible gospel
we can recognize. The earth is God's Bible,
for it His is work, and He has written on the
rocks characters that the geologist can read.
"Therefore," says Agassiz, "to understand
God we must study His works in nature, and
the more we learn of it the more we will know
of Him."

The materialist says there is no God except
the gray matter in our brain, yet there is an
inward whispering that says " No." The ego,
which lives and thinks and feels independently
of us in our mortal casket, does more than be-
lieve; it knoivs that there exists a God in nature,
for the sole and invincible Artificer of all lives
in us, as we live in Him. No dogmatic faith
or exact science is able to uproot that intui-
tional feeling inherent in man, when he has
once fully realized it in himself. Human na-
ture is like universal nature in its abhorrence of
a vacuum. It feels an immortal yearning for a
supreme power; without a God the cosmos
would seem like a soulless corpse. Being for-
bidden to search for Him where alone His
traces would be found, man has filled the ach-
ing void with a personal God, whom his spirit-
ual teachers have created for him to worship
out of the heathen myths.

Religion places the human soul in the pres-
ence of its highest ideal; it lifts it above the
level of ordinary goodness and produces, at

least, a yearning after a higher and better life —
a life in the light of God.

Religion is that which distinguishes man
from the animals. We do not mean the Chris-
tian or Jewish religions only, but all religions —
a faculty which, in spite of sense or reason, en-
ables man to apprehend the Infinite, under any
varying disguises. For all religions have in
them a spark of good. Without this faculty,
there could be no controlling of governing
man; for all religions are nothing but the groan-
ing of the spirit, struggling and longing after the
Infinite.

This yearning after immortality has, in all
ages of the world, made him a slave to priests
and fanatics, to be humbugged and imposed
upon, instead of being his own priest and con-
sulting the inner prompting of his better nature.
He has suffered others to think for him and
intercede in his behalf.

All men are mediumistic, if they would only
consult and listen to their better promptings,
which are ever whispering in their ears what is
right and what is wrong. But, blinded by prej-
udice and superstition, they shut their ears to
those inward whisperings, and follows the
teachings of some selfish, scheming man, who,
to furthei his ends and ambition, has, in all
ages of the world, seized upon this religious
sentiment in man to rule, control and govern
him.

"The king is at the head of state and
church. The king never dies and the church
never does wrong." This idea has kept the
masses in slavery and ignorance. They have
been taught to obey and pay the priest to pray
for them. The king and the priest have preyed
upon their earnings, and it was to their interest
to keep them in ignorance, so they could con-
tinue to prey upon them. "This unnatural
and unjust religion," says Draper, " has retard-
ed civilization a thousand years." They have
used it to control man and govern him to suit
their interest and not his. The moment a man
begins to investigate he becomes skeptical, and
then he is in a fair way to learn the truth and
think for himself, and worship God in accord-
ance to the dictates of his conscience.

Religion has led to endless wars that have
devastated whole countries, and reduced the
inhabitants to the condition of slaves, and

r><;

forced them to accept the religion of some am-
bitious general, or fanatical priest, who had no
Other idea of God than that which his narrow,
bigoted brain would allow him to create. So
they have made gods and religions to suit their
fancy, and not in accordance with the grand
idea and plan of nature and creation. Said a
native to a missionary:

" Your soldiers seduce our women. * * *
You come to rob us of our land, pillage the
country and make war upon us, and you wish
to force your God upon us, saying that He for-
bids robbery, pillage and war. You are white
on one side, and black on the other, and if we
were to cross the river, it would not be us that
the devil would take."

Among Christians there is nothing but dis-
sensions— a contest about creeds and ceremo-
nies; they are intolerant and tyrannical if left
to them to govern man and control his con-
science. Each claims to be right and all oth-
ers wrong. Its dogmas are orthodox, but all
other churches are heterodox, and are ready to
go to war and cut each other's throats about
something in which all may be wrong or know
nothing about.

There is nothing more incomprehensible to
the heathen than the trinity — Father, Son and
Holy Ghost, and these three in one; all equal in
the God-head — and the divinity of Christ; that
he was born of a woman and still he was God.
There is but one God and yet there are three;
how can this be ? Some worship the Father,
some the Son, and others the virgin Mary, who
was the mother.

The abstract fictions of antiquity, which for
ages had filled the popular fancy with but flick-
ering shadows and uncertain images, have in
Christianity assumed the shapes of real person-
ages and become accomplished facts. Alle-
gory, metamorphosed, becomes sacred history,
and pagan myth is taught to the people as a
revealed narrative of God's intercourse with his
chosen people, while thousands of books, con-
taining as much sacred history and as strong
evidence that they were written by divine hands,
have been committed to the flames and their
believers have been put to the torture.

The theology of Christendom has been
rubbed threadbare by the investigations of
science and the research of the philologist and

the archaeologist. It is found to be, on the
whole, subversive, rather than progressive, of
spirituality and good morals. Instead of ex-
panding the rule of divine law and justice, it
leaves us in doubt and dread of damnation. It
fills the mind with doubt as to what course to
pursue. It makes cowards of all; every one
dreads death, instead of looking on it as a
transition into a higher sphere and a better ex-
istence.

The Jewish religion teaches us of an an-
gry and revengeful God (which is an absurdity),
who will condemn the spirits of the wicked to
hell-fire and the devil, there to be roasted for-
ever. That part of the Lord's Prayer, that
says, " Dead us not into temptation," is an in-
sult to God and common sense. The absurd-
ity of the thought that God, the embodiment of
goodness and purity, would or could, for a mo-
ment, entertain the idea of leading any mortal
into temptation of any kind ! No, this part of
the Lord's Prayer is directed to Satan, the tute-
lar genius who hardened the heart of Pharaoh,
put an evil spirit in Saul, sent lying messengers
to the prophets and tempted David to sin; such
is the God of Israel, as described in the Bible.

The various religions are like the pure while
ray, broken up and scattered by the prism.
Red, which represents blood, is the stronger;
it has been the most prominent in all the West-
ern religions; it has caused more wars and
bloodshed than any other, while that taught by
the Brahmins and the Buddhist has been like
that of the blue rays; it is the slowest and it
lingers 'longest in the atmosphere, which gives
it the cerulean hue. So each ray of the spec-
trum, by imperceptible shadings, merges into
each other, and so all the great theologies that
have appeared at different times, have diverged
from each other until they form thousands of
religious creeds and sects, when all combined
represent only one Eternal Truth.

" Truly," says Bishop Kidder, " were a wise
man to choose his religion from those who pro-
fess it, perhaps Christianity would be the last
religion he would choose, for they preach one
thing and practice another." Their ministers
claim to be followers of the disciples, but in no
instance do they do as the disciples did, "Care
not for food or raiment or gold or wealth; heal
the sick or console the distressed;" but always

67

keep an eye to the good things of this earth
and a fat parsonage. They tell the people the
days of miracles are closed, and that the door
to heaven is shut, to be entered only through
and by the church; that man must look to Jesus
and the cross and the virgin Mary, and not to
God himself. It is evident that they have be-
come degenerate and do not understand the
true workings of the spirit through the occult
powers that are ever ready to be invoked to
assist and instruct man how to become wiser
and better. In their ignorance they have dei-
fied a great medium, who understood these
forces and used them to reform man and purify
the church. But instead of following out his
directions they have used his name to mislead
mankind, and they have so clouded man's in-
tellect with dogmas that it has caused him to
lose sight of his individual relation and account-
ability to God.

The Christian religion is repulsive to the
Chinese, because Jesus had so little respect for
his father and mother, and his disrespect for
the dead, when he said to the young man, "Let
the dead bury the dead."

As a Khan said to Marco Polo: " You see
the Christians are ignorant. They can't get
their gods to do anything; while these idolaters
can get their gods to do anything that is wanted
of them, insomuch, that when I sit at table the
cups from the middle of the hall come to me
filled with wine or other liquor, without being
touched by anybody, and I drink from them.
They control storms, causing them to pass in
whatever direction is indicated they should
take, and do many other marvels; while, as
you know, their idols speak, and give them
predictions on whatever subjects are chosen,
which you Christians cannot do. Why should
we change our religion for one that is infe-
rior? "

Why should the Christian sneer at the mirac-
ulous power of fakir adepts and mediums,
when they only do what prophets and Christ
and his apostles did — unbolt prison doors, and
strike sinners blind ? Why should the devout
Catholic turn from the performances of medi-
ums and adepts, when their priest claims to do
the same thing, by making the coagulated blood
of a martyred saint boil and fume in a crystal
bottle. A Hindoo priest can plunge an arm

into the heart of his idol and out gushes a stream
of blood, and he can change water into blood.
Indeed, there is no difference. Both have the
same power; both do or practice deception on
the people; one is no better than the other;
both are idol-worshipers, and of those mystic
systems which precede by far the Brahmanism
and even the primitive monotheism of ancient
Chaldea.

The difference between ancient and modern
religion is only the difference in their civiliza-
tion. The Christian religion is but a similar
force like all others, and equal in its line of
development. Civilization is not dependent on
any form of religion, but is traceable to a great
variety of influences; among which that of the
mingling of races is most prominent, which
infuses more energy and expands the races,
while freedom and science are the motive pow-
ers which -the church has often crushed or re-
tarded. The leaf needs no miracle to produce
a flower, nor does the child become a man
through the agency of any miraculous power;
it is but the result of natural growth and devel-
opment.

Meanwhile, we must remember the direct ef-
fects of the revealed mystery. The only way
the priest of old could impress the masses with
the belief in the divine power was by the per-
forming of " miracles," by the animation of
matter, by their will-power, which convinced
the skeptical mind that there was an invisible
power that was capable of moving matter.
And to teach them that there was an omnipo-
tent and omnipresent power, a great first cause
that governed all things for a fixed purpose,
with which they had an influence.

The world needs no sectarian church, whether
of Buddha, Jesus, Mahomet, Sweden borg, Cal-
vin or any other. There being but one truth,
man requires but one church — knoivledge — the
temple of God within, walled in by matter, but
penetrable by any who wish to find the way.
" The pure in heart see God" Nature is God's
temple, and aspiration is his worship; and to
understand these laws, is to make gods of our-
selves, for each and every man has, within him,
a spark, which, if cultivated by living a pure,
good life, will always keep him in the right
path, and, finally, make him a demi-god, for all
angels and arch-angels have followed the law of

68

evolution and progress, and once were dwell-
ers in the flesh.

Man needs no savior or priest to direct him
to heaven, if he will follow the inner prompt-
ings of his better nature. He will find his way,
for death is as much a fixed law as that of
birth, and is in harmony with the laws of na-
ture; and the same intelligence and force that
brought him into existence, will carry him
through the ordeal of death, and if he has lived
n harmony with these laws, he has nothing to
fear, whether he be pagan or Christian.

All progress is natural, and is divine. It
proceeds by laws inherent and immanent in
humanity. Laws whose absoluteness affirm
infinite mind, as implicated in this finite ad-
vance up to mind. The laws that govern this
onward movement are inspiration — drawn
from the infinite mind, whether it be pagan or
Christian, whether it believes in Christ or
Buddha.

The religion of the savage is not the religion
of the civilized man. One is that of fear, super-
stition and ignorance, a fetishism; while
the other should be that of science, of truth
and knowledge, of reason and love. For the
growing belief that the stability of law is the
guarantee of universal good; or, to translate it
into the language of the spirit, that law means
love, is the sign of love in its practical and
universal sense, is itself becoming the all-ab-

sorbing calculus, and all-analyzing prism of our
spiritual astronomy — the preserver, the divine
interpreter of law. The stoic, Aurelius, said:
" Whatever happens to us is from nature,
because that only can happen by nature which
is suitable, and it is enough to remember that
law rules all."

The world of religion is broader than Chris-
tendom has apprehended, and it is destined to
widen in the sight of man as he progresses in
knowledge. The opening of China to the
Western nations, and their immigration and
labor, are events as momentous to the religious
as to the commercial and political world. India
and China are full of "lights," of which the
Christian has never dreamed, that have been
kept in the dark and denounced as the work of
sorcery and jugglery.

Let us rest assured that liberty, democracy,
labor, reform, popular progress, are not empty
words; they will reach beyond the assertion of
exclusive rights or selfish claims into full recog-
nition of universal duties : that liberty is not to
stop in license, nor democracy in greed
and aggression, nor progress to be earned
through bloody retribution alone; civilization
will not be retarded in its onward march by the
exposure of the falsehood of any creed or
church, for there is nothing can stay the hand
of the Infinite.

CHAPTER VII.

ANCESTRAL WORSHIP OF THE ANCIENT ARYANS.

The science of religion is to sift and classify
it, and thus try to discover the necessary ante-
cedents of all faith and the laws which govern
the growth and decay of human religion, and
the goal to which all religion tends. Whether
there ever can be one perfect universal religion
is a question as difficult to answer as whether
there ever can be one perfect universal lan-
guage.

A perfect religion, like a perfect language, is
something beyond all conception. All reli-
gions, like languages, must have passed through
many changes. Religion is a thing of growth
and development; it has its roots deep down
in our spiritual nature, which are ever urging us
on to a higher state, to reach out and grasp the
infinite and to comprehend our creator.

The lime for a belief in the supernatural in
religion is past; that faith is a hallucination
or an infantile disease; that all the stories told
about the gods and saviors have at last been
found out and exploded; that there is no possi-
ble knowledge except that which comes to us
through our senses; that we must be satisfied
with facts and finite things that are made mani-
fest to us.

It is our ignorance of these laws that makes
us superstitious and creates a belief in the su-
pernatural. As we advance in the light of
knowledge the mysterious recedes in the dark-
ness of ignorance.

The Archaic man supposed that every force
to which his attention was directed was similar
to that which he recognized in himself, and
either was, or implied, a like being. He was
conscious, or thought he was conscious, that he
(himself) consisted of a soul and a body — of
something substantial and of something insub-

stantial. And he concluded that, in like man-
ner, there were souls in all things. He saw
that there were forces in nature more powerful
than he and which he could not control, and
were capable of doing him good or evil; there-
fore they appeared to him fit objects of suppli-
cation— beings whose favor he might procure
or whose wrath he might avert by offerings,
prayer and supplication. Hence arose the
whole system of manes-worship, and all the
myths of the sun and of the moon; of the
dawn, the twilight and the night; of the wind
and the storm; of the earth and sea and sky.

" The uncultivated man, indeed, worshiped
every force" (see "Village Communities")
" that assists or obstructs him in his daily work.
That worship is his recognition of the existence
of such a force and of its connection, or, at
least, its possible connection, with his own wel-
fare. It was by this method he accounts for
all phenomena which have attracted his atten-
tion, which his unlettered brain could not ex-
plain. In other words, mythology was the
natural ph'ilosophy of the early world, and out
of which has evolved the multiplicity of heathen
gods and goddesses, who were special divini-
ties to assist and direct nature, which presided
over birth, life, death, dreams, trances and
visions."

From these facts it was almost inevitable
that the untrained intellect should come to the
conclusion that the disembodied spirits bore an
important part in the economy of nature. The
forces that assisted him were good, those that
obstructed him were bad. He was forced to
acknowledge the -presence of these forces, and
they produced all the changes and phenomena
that came under his observation, and the only

69

70

way he could explain them was to ascribe them
to some supernatural power.

Manes-worship, therefore, stands at the base
of mythology. Man sought to conciliate the
spirits of their distinguished heroes and states-
men. Thus the Thebans and Athenians dis-
puted over the body of (Edipus, and the Ar-
gives and Trojans fought for the bones of Ores-
tes. The Acanthians offered sacrifice to the
gigantic Persian engineer who died in their
midst, and the people of Amphipolis to the
gallant Brasidas. The Hindoo of the present
day adores the manes of the prominent English
officials who happen to be buried in their vil-
lages.

So the Archaic mind was governed by a vast
variety of gods, acting each on his own princi-
ples, and each seeking the exclusive interest of
his worshipers. Every assembly of men had
their own god and regarded that god as their
exclusive property. Each nation had its pe-
culiar tutelar deity and pantheon of gods.

When primitive man had arrived at a stage of
intellectual development so that he had a con-
ception of a divine being — one greater and
higher than himself — he had accomblished
much. How he arrived at that conclusion the
most learned differ.

One of the first impulses to religion proceed-
ed from an incipient perception of the infinite
pressing upon man through the great phenom-
ena of nature, and not from sentiments of sur-
prise or fear, called forth by such finite things
as shells, stones, bones, trees or animals; that
is to say, by fetishes.

Though the prehistoric and quaternary man
may and did use such things, they were but
rude emblems and symbols to give ah expres-
sion to the belief that therewas an invisible
power which controlled and could render them
assistance if it saw proper to so act; while
others claim that it came from ancestral wor-
ship of the images of the departed dead that
they saw in their dreams, whom they worked
up into ghosts and spirits, who still lived in the
air and could render them assistance, and that
it was the natural affection of the parent that
drew him near to his children, and who was
ever ready to assist them in their troubles. So
the son looked upon his dead father as a kind
of god to whom he owed his existence. In

childhood he looked up to him for protection
and support, and when he had grown into man-
hood these ideas still lingered in his memory,
and the love and affection he had for him while
living ripened at his death into a feeling of
reverence that is closely allied to that of ven-
eration, so to propitiate his spirit he is led to
do homage to his grave and confer on him
divine rights; indeed, the ancient Aryan be-
lieved that it was necessary to make sacrifices
on his father's tomb, and the Chinese still fol-
low this kind of worship.

Periodically they have a feast of the dead.
While the odor rises to satisfy the hunger of the
departed spirits of the dead, they are practical
enough to think that it does not injure the ma-
terial carcass of the hog to take it home in the
evening and make a feast for the mortal man.
While the more cultivated Aryan does not offer
the viands to his dead, there still lingers the
idea of strewing flowers over the graves of their
departed loved ones.

The Chinese bride at the present day wor-
ships in company with her husband his an-
cestors; so the Aryan bride thousands of years
ago did homage to the gods of the house to
which she was introduced, and entered into
formal communion with them. She was pre-
sented upon her entrance into the house with
the holy fire and lustral water, and partook
along with her husband in the presence of the
lares of the symbolic meal. She was robed in
white, the emblem of purity and the robe of a
priestess. She ceased to be a member of her
father's house and to worship her father's gods,
but became the priestess to her adopted house
spirit. Hence comes the modern custom of
robing the bride in white, and the eating of the
wedding cake and the drinking of the wine,
that the ancient Aryan and his bride of-
fered up to the house spirit of his departed
ancestors.

The ancient Aryans worshiped dead ances-
tors long before they emigrated from the plains
of Bokhara, in Central Asia, into Europe, be-
fore they had a Zeus, Jupiter or Indra. The
common progenitors of our race did homage to
the dwellers in the spirit world, and above all,
offered their daily orisons to their own fathers
upon the holy hearth and at the commence-
ment of every meal, which was, in effect, a

71

sacrifice. Libations and offerings were made
as tokens and pledges of honor and affection to
their departed ancestors, which custom still
lingers in the form of saying grace before the
commencement of the evening meal, while
some families still set the empty chair of the
deceased up to the table. The spirits were not
supposed to come unbidden, the offering must
be made to them, their presence invited, and
their share set apart. The common meal was
closely connected with their family worship.
Meals are an essential part of all religious wor-
ship. "The earliest religious acts seem to
have been the eating of a meal prepared on an
altar." (See M. De Coulange's " Ancient
Cities," page 182.)

They thought every object consisted of two
parts: of a substance and of a shadow; of a
soul and of a body: of something immaterial
as well as of something material; that articles
of food and of drink possessed this nature. It
was upon the immaterial part of the offerings
that the spirits fed, while the earthly parts were
left for man. That which supported and
strengthened after its kind the human body
supported and strengthened by its spiritual
force the spirit to whom it was presented; nor
did the worshipers doubt that at every such
meal their divine head sat present, though un-
seen, among them.

All religious festivals with the native of Aus-
tralia, Africa, America, Europe and A.sia,
whether he be Pagan, Mohammedan, Bud-
dhist, Brahmin, Jew or Christian, are of a
spiritual nature and owe their origin to a belief
of a future existence after death. The Irish
wake is only the lingering custom of the an-
cient Celt feast to the dead.

Early philosophy, then, and religion were at
first one, and such a union in later times tended
to produce, in the words of Lord Bacon, "a
heretical religion and a fantastic philosophy."
But in an early stage of mental development,
the combination is one which we might expect.
In their philosophical aspect these forms repre-
sented two theories: the one the natural phi-
losophy, the other the biology of our fore-
fathers. In their religious aspect the one was
the mythical, or heroic, or Olympian religion;
the other was the domestic religion, the reli-
gion of the hearth, the worship of deceased

ancestors. " The worship of the house-spirits,"
says Hearn in his work on "Aryan House-
holds," " was a reverential religion, * * *
and every meal was in effect a sacrifice, and
the Aryan housefather, when he reverentially
asked a blessing upon his humble abode, felt
that he was not only seeking a continuance of
the diviue protection, but that he was securing
the happiness of the spirits of his fathers and
his gods."

Each household had a house-spirit which
was the spirit of the deceased ancestor that
still dwelt at and protected the holy hearth on
which the ever-burning fire was the emblem of
the comfortable element, and the origin of
communication between the spirit of the de-
parted and those living in the flesh; and it was
in the olden days of our Aryan ancestors their
mode of worship. The husband and wife
made their own offerings; he was the priest and
she was the priestess, and it was the center of
the spiritual life. •

The Aryan language contains an abundance
of terms expressive of a religious sentiment of
adoration, of piety, of faith, of prayer, and of
sacrifice; but there is not any word suggestive
of public worship — priests, idols or of temples
or of altars, or that they had any middle-men
who could act as go-between from God to man
to forgive his sins and give him a free pass to
heaven.

The house-spirits were directly charged with
the preservation of the properly of the house-
hold, as Horace tells us, "The guardians
against thieves." "They repelled the thief,"
Ovid assures us in "Fasti," v. 141.

He is known to the Greeks by the name of
the "Hero of the House," "Man of the
Household;' by the Romans, "The Husting
of the Teutons;" and "The Damovoy, or
Angel in the House," of the Russian peasant
of the present day. The hearth was the altar;
there the holy fire ever burned, and there the
gross corporeal substance of the food was
purged away and its spiritual essence rendered
fit for the acceptance of the spirit. On this
hearth where in his lifetime he had so often
sacrificed, the departed house-father received
at the hands of his successor his share of every
meal and heard from his lips in his own honor
those words of prayer and praise.

72

The first step in the formation of a house-
hold was marriage. Then he was a finished
man, according to the Greeks, and what we
call a family man. "Then only," says Menu,
" is a man perfect when he consists of three
persons, united: his wife, himself and his son."
Our remote ancestors sought marriage for the
purpose of raising a son, for it was to the son
that the father could look to perpetuate the
household. It was by the son, according to
the teachings of Menu, that the father dis-
charges his duty to his progenitors and by
whom he attains immortality. It is the son
who, in the words of /Kschylus, is the savior of
the hearth of his fathers. The son must be
born in lawful wedlock; an illegitimate son was
not only not acknowledged, but was excluded
from the household.

It was of little importance what befel a man
after he had raised a son. The ancient Hin-
doo father, after he had raised his family, left
home and lived in the forest, where he might
be free from care and to study and philoso-
phize. Solon prohibited celibacy; criminal
proceedings might be taken at Athens and
Sparta against one who did not marry at all.
Cicero says it is a part of the duty of the cen-
sors to impose a tax upon unmarried men. It
was considered a crime not to get married and
have no son to offer sacrifice upon his father's
grave, and to inherit and keep up the house-
hold, which could not be mortgaged and sold —
the land was not regarded as an asset in the
way of payment of debts. The son, therefore,
was the person who continued upon earth his
father's existence after that father had joined
the house-spirits, so when a father had begotten
a son he had discharged his duty to his progen-
itors.

"Those animals," says Menu, " begotten by
adulterers destroy, both in this world and the
next, the food presented to them by such as
make oblations to the gods and to the manes."
The rule of the Attic law was that a bastard
had no place in the worship, nor in the house-
hold, nor in the property of the parent, and it
was the same in Roman, German and Norse
law. A man married for duty and not for
pleasure. " Mistresses," says Demosthenes,
"we keep for pleasure; concubines for daily
attendance upon our persons; wives to bear us

legitimate children and to be faithful house-
keepers." Isais said, " No man who knows he
must die can have so little regard for himself
as to leave his family without descendants, for
then there would be no one to render him the
worship due to the dead." When Leonidas
selected the three hundred braves to defend
Thermopylae, he took only fathers that had
sons living at home.

Cato the elder tells us that it was the first
duty of the house-father on his return home,
to pay devotions at the altar of the lares. See
Mommsen's History of Rome, volume I, page

173-

Plato, speaking of the worship of the gods,
who were only the spirits of good and great
men who had progressed high in the spirit
world, says, " After these gods a prudent per-
son will celebrate the holy rites of daemons —
spirits — and after them of heroes, and after
them follow the statues of the household gods,
held holy according to law, and after them are
the honors paid to living parents; since it is
just for a person to pay to living parents; since
it is just for a person who owes the first and
the greatest of debts to pay those that are of
the longest standing, and to think that all the
things he has acquired and holds he owes to
those who begot him and brought him up, for
supplying what is required for their service to
the utmost of his power, bringing from his sub-
stance first, and in the second place from his
body, and third from his soul, by paying off the
debts for their care of him, and in the favor of
those who gave the pangs of labor as a loan to
the young, and by returning what has been due
a long time to those who in old age are greatly
in want. It is requisite, likewise, to hold pre-
eminently a kind language towards his parents,
because there is for light and wicked words of
punishment most heavy, for Nemesis, the mes-
senger of justice, has been appointed an in-
spector over all persons in matters of this
kind."

" For as something is always flowing away
from us, it is necessary for something, on the
contrary, to be flowing to us. Now recollec-
tion is the influx of thoughts which had left us.
* * * Each person while his daemon (spirit)
is standing steadily, going on successfully or
unsuccessfully to places as high and steep,

while daemons (spirits) are opposing with cer-
tain disturbances; and that it is meet ever to
hope that the deity will, when troubled, fall
upon the good state which he has given, makes
them less instead of greater and causes a change
from the present state to a better one with
respect to the good things, the contraries of
these, that they will always be present to them
with good fortune." Plato, volume V, page
161.

The respect for another's property was due
to the respect or fear for the spirits that guarded
that property. It is still a custom among the
nomads of Central Asia if a horse is stolen for
the owner to go to the grave of the father of
the suspected horse thief and stick a spear into
the grave. This proceeding is understood by
the thief to be a complaint made to his de-
ceased house-father's spirit, and if the suspi-
cion be well founded the horse is found the
next morning tied to the spear.

Word, in his book, " Journey to the Source
of Oxus," gives an instance where the grain
was piled up around a graveyard. He inquired
of a chief, Agha Maheide, the cause. "The
old man put the forefinger of his right hand to
his lips and looking at me said, ' God forbid;
bad as men are they will not pilfer in the pres-
ence of the dead.' " The natives prefer to
trust their valuables to the sacred guardianship
of such a place rather than to a weak and fail-
ing brother.

There are many people who will not dese-
crate a graveyard, and who believe that the
spirit will avenge the wrongs done to it when in
the flesh. Mr. Taylor, in his book, M Primi-
tive Culture," gives an instance of where a
Brahmin cut off the head of his mother, with
her consent and request, so that her spirit
might punish a neighbor who had repudiated
some small debt which he owed to the house-
hold. The remarkable custom of setting
dharna, which once existed in Ireland, and of
late years has been prohibited by the penal
code in India, traces of which, perhaps, may
be found in the Twelve Tables. The religious
sentiment of the Archaic society of the Aryan
race was a force which recognized property in
the household which was guarded by the house
spirits.

The Chinese still carry the bones of the dead

back to China to be interred. Such worship
was natural, according to the Archaic ideas;
but far more natural, by the same standard,
was the belief that the spirits of those whom
men loved and honored in their life, continued
after death their vigilance and their aid. The
interests of men in the flesh were also their
interests in the spirit, and the lives and the
hates of this world followed the deceased to
that world which lay beyond the grave.
Manes-worship, therefore, stands on the same
base as the more picturesque worship of Olym-
pus. Thus primitive worship and that great
train of consequences that has been transmitted
to us, depends, like primitive mythology, upon
the state of our intelligence. It is, after all,
the intellect that ultimately directs and deter-
mines the main current of the varying and tor-
tuous stream of the world's history.

"The Locan gods," says Mr. Taylor in his
"Primitive Culture," volume II, page no,
"the patron gods of particular ranks and crafts,
the gods from whom men sought special help
in special needs, were too near and dear to the
inmost heart of pre-Christian Europe to be
done away without substitutes, so they substi-
tuted saints who could answer their prayers.
Some have St. Cecilia, the patroness of music;
St. Luke, patron of painters; St. Peter, of fish-
mongers; St. Valentine, of lovers; St. Sebas-
tian, of archers; St. Crispin, of cobblers; St.
Hubert, who cures the bite of mad dogs; St.
Vitus, of vitus dance; and St. Fiacre, of the
hackney coaches.

As a rule every trade, every profession, every
guild, every tribe, every clan is also a caste,
and the members of a caste not only have their
own special objects of worship, but the princi-
pal deities likewise. So in the nineteenth cen-
tury we still have St. Valentine's day on the
fourteenth day of February for making merry.
On this day it was supposed by the ancients the
birds of the air made choice of their mates,
and that it was a favorite day with this merry
goddess to be around and aid the boys and girls
in their courtships.

There is no evidence that the Aryans were a
polytheistic people. Pictet is of the opinion
that their original belief was one true God,
while Hearn in his work, "Aryan Households,"
•hinks that the polytheistic pantheon was not

74

of a religious origin, but only scientific, and
was designed merely to explain in the rude
fashion of an early time the ordinary phenom-
ena of nature. They had a word which cor-
responded with that of Vesta, which goes to
prove that the Aryans recognized the hearth.
It does not indicate how far in their eyes the
hearth was holy.

The Hindoo, Greek and Roman pantheons
had their origin not so much as distinctive reli-
gions, as they were a professional class or a lit-
erary clan.

The magi of the ancient Persians, the Brah-
mins, the Hierophants of ancient Egypt, and
the Levites of the Jews, were all a privileged
caste, and used their knowledge to control their
ignorant masses through their religious feelings
and dread of a future punishment or in hope of
a reward for doing good. So they manufact-
ured gods to suit their wants, and these gods
made such revelations as suited the interest and
wishes of this favored class.

Gladstone said, " that the pagan deities
represented deified men. Honest gods were
heroes deified a little above mortal man, in-
vested with passions of love and hate, courage
and cowardice, united with noble sentiments,
base and vulgar thoughts, with lofty and sub-
lime ideas, all wrought up by fancy so as to
work upon the minds of the people."

It is the opinion of Herbert Spencer that
"the rudimentary form of all religion is the
propitiation of dead ancestors, who are sup-
posed to be still existing and to be capable of
working good or evil to their descendants."
In order to better propitiate the favor of his
dead ancestor he sometimes carves his image in
wood or stone, which sentiment in time lapses
into idolatry. Every object which strikes the
rude fancy as analagous to the character of an
individual may become an object of worship.
The savage molds his deity according to the
caliber of his mind, out of mud or carved from
wood or stone.

Deep down in the human breast is implanted
a religious belief that l>ehind all visible appear-
ances is an invisible power; underlying all con-
ception is an instinct or intuition from which
there is no escape; that beyond material actual-
ities potential agencies are at work, and through
all belief, from the stupid fetishism to the most

exalted monotheism as a part of these instinct-
ive convictions, it is held that there is a being
(or beings) who rules man's destiny, and that it
may be propitiated, to which all turn their eyes
and lift up their prayers when in distress and
danger, that cannot be averted by the power of
man.

The word mythology is derived from mythos,
fable, and logos, speech. It relates to the
genesis of gods and their nature. It is a mass
of fragmentary truth mixed up with fiction,
built up of dead facts cemented with wild fan-
cies. It is the effort of the untutored man to
explain the origin of things. In the black
clouds he sees evil, in the flowing brook, in the
rustling branches he feels the breathing of gods,
goblins dance in the twilight and demons howl
in the darkness of night. When evil comes
God is angry, when fortune smiles God is
pleased .

"Myths," says Bancroft in his "Native
Races," volume III, page i6, " were the ora-
cles of our savage ancestors; their creeds, the
rule of their life, prized by them as men now
prize their faith; and by whatever savage phi-
losophy these strange conceits were eliminated,
their effect upon the popular mind was vital.
Anaxagoras, Socrates, Protagoras and Epicurus
well knew and boldly proclaimed that the gods
of Grecians were disreputable characters, not
the kind of deities to make and govern
worlds."

" Everywhere," says Herbert Spencer, "we
find expressed or implied the belief that each
person is double; that when he dies his other
self, whether remaining near at hand or gone
far away, may return and continue capable of
injuring his enemies and aiding his friends."
This idea of duality, he is of the opinion,
had its origin with the savage, whose image is
reflected in the brook, or his shadow which fol-
lows him everywhere, moving as he moves. In
the dream the images are as perfect as in life,
and this has led man to believe in the existence
of a spiritual body.

All religion believes in prayers and sacrifices,
and there has never been found a race of
human beings but they had some kind of reli-
gion. Says Max Muller, in his lectures on
"The Growth of Religion," " it is an inherent
characteristic of man." The Fiji believes the

75

shooting stars are gods and the small ones the
departing souls of men. The Benin negroes
regard shadows as their souls. The Maori
word nwta, a soul, meant a shadow, while the
idea of God being everywhere sprang from a
spirit, and the idea of a spirit from that of a
shadow.

Tacitus informs us that the ancient Germans
count those only as gods whom they can per-
ceive, and by whose gifts they are clearly bene-
fited, such as the moon, sun and fire. The
savage has no fixed ideas about religion; he has
no bible or catecb'sm, only some sacred songs
and customs taught to him by his mother.
His religion floats in the air, and each man
takes as much or as little of it as he likes.

A negro was worshiping a tree, supposed to
be his fetish, with an offering of food, when an
European asked him whether he thought that
the tree could eat. The negro replied, " Oh,
the tree is not the fetish; the fetish is a spirit
and is invisible, but he has descended into the
tree. Certainly he cannot devour our bodily
food, but he enjoys its spiritual part and leaves
behind the bodily part, which we see."

The stone on which all the kings of England
have been crowned is an old fetish, and the
coronation of Queen Victoria is only a survival
of an old Anglo-Saxon fetishism. So is the
counting of the beads in the rosary, or kissing
the cross, an act of fetishism. Portuguese
sailors fasten the image of St. Anthony to the
bowsprit of the ship, and kneeling, address it
in the following words: "St. Anthony, be
pleased to stay there till thou hast given us a
fair wind for our voyage." A Spanish captain
tied a small image of the Virgin Mary to the
mast of his ship and declared that it shall hang
there until a favorable wind is granted him.
This is his fetish.

Every religion is a compromise between the
wise and the foolish, the old and the new, and
the higher the human mind soars in its search
after divine ideals, the more it becomes neces-
sary to have symbols to convey to the untutored
mind of the childlike majority of people who
are not capable of realizing sublime and subtle
abstractions. Therefore they worship the thing
rather than what it was intended to represent.
While we laugh at the fetish worship of the
negro, if we would only look around in our i

own churches we would see many fetish objects
or idols. The Portuguese sailor saw the poor
negro fetish and made fun of it, yet he wore
around his neck a like fetish in the form of a
cross. So there is no religion entirely free
from fetishism; nor is there any religion which
consists entirely of fetishism, for back of all
religion there is a spirit in some form which
relates to the great creative cause.

When religions were founded nothing was
known of science, of astronomy, of geology, or
, of the universe. The earth was the great cen-
ter around which the sun, moon and stars rose
! and set, like little lamps hung up in the heav-
enly vaults to light up the firmament. The
invention of the telescope by Galileo in 1610,
startled the religious world. The Roman
\ Church saw that it would lead to new discov-
ieries in astronomy which would shake the foun-
; dation and then throw down the edifices of
their religion, which was based upon the bible
land the stability of the earth, the littleness of
the sun, moon and stars. The church burned
! in effigy Pierre d'Albano, the author of a work
on astronomy, in 1327, and in the same year
burned Cecco d'Astoli, of Florence, for pro-
claiming that the earth moved. In 1600 the
church burned Brieno at Rome, tor professing
the same belief, and imprisoned Campanella
for twenty-five years because he assented to the
philosophy of Galileo. They made Galileo
retract in 1630. It put a close guard on the
words of Ciampoli in 161 5, and in 1625 it
burned Antonio de Domines, and no one dared
to express the idea that the earth was round or
that it revolved around the sun. Copernicus
dared not publish his work until his death.
Kepler, the legi lator of the skies, a Protestant,
dared not quit England and was persecuted by
the church and accused of heresy. His aunt
was burned for sorcery at Weil. His mother
was accused of sorcery and imprisoned at Stutt-
gardt in 1615. Roger Bacon, a learned friar
of Oxford, was thrown into prison because he
studied physics and astronomy and taught
magic.

In France the illustrious Descartes was a
wanderer and an exile through life. He was
pursued everywhere by the hate of bigots. He
was a scientist and an astronomer, and for that
reason was deemed an enemy to the church

76

and to God. A learned Jesuit, Fabri, was im-
prisoned in Rome for saying, in a sermon, that
" the motion ot the earth once demonstrated,
the church must interpret in a figurative sense
those passages of the scripture that are opposed
to that principle." For they inserted Joshua
commanding the sun to stand still, a* it was so
written in the word of God, the bible.

To-day mankind is governed by reason, and
the ancient religions must be ignored, for they
are founded on blind faith in what they are
told. The idea of this earth being the center
of all objective nature, when in reality it is
only one of the particles; a grain of sand in the
vast oceans of worlds that are spread out
through the skies. Far from affirming that
everything was made for man, it should be pro-
claimed that the universe is a continuous whole,
an unbroken chain, of which mankind is but a
link; and that he, like all other things, must
move on to a higher state of existence; that
there is no retrogression; that on and upward
is the watchword of all nature, which is moved
by the laws of evolution and progress, which is
now an admitted fact by the more intelligent
thinkers.

The religion of the twentieth century must
be a religion of science and not repulsive to
reason. While old religions have grown great
in blood and tears, by persecutions and tor-
ments, amid the suffering of martyrs and cruel
expressions of the adherents to old doctrines,
the religion of the future must be prepared by
the unanimous consent, by universal conver-
sion, which will rise without the cost of a tear or
a drop of blood. It will be founded on rea-
son and justice, and will spread over the whole
earth as fast as science can beat back ignor-
ance and superstition. Steam, electricity and
the printing press are now doing the work and
laying the foundation of the future religion.

" Religion may transcend phenomena and
rise to a region which mortal science may not
enter; indeed, it must do so; the more it
ascends to the height of its great argument, the
more it expands and draws nearer to the infin-
ite; but if it have no basis than emotions, and
reject all that intuition, science and reason
may offer for its justification, it may not soar
to that ' purer ether, that diviner air,' where
faith is merged in knowledge." According to

Quatrefages, "religion is a belief in beings
superior to man, and capable of exercising
good or evil influence upon his destiny; and
the conviction that the existence of man is not
limited to the present life, but that there
remains for him a future beyond the grave."
True reason and religion have an eye for
earth as well as heaven. Like the tall sequoia
of California, their branches are in the sky,
but their roots are deeply imbedded in the
earth.

So it is necessary to look to the physical
wants of man as well as his spiritual nature; a
man can be a better Christian on a full stom-
ach than on an empty one. It is just as nec-
essary to send to the heathen the plow and
the schoolmaster as it is to send the bible and
the minister.

All religions aie good and worthy of respect,
because they enable us to render to God the
homage of grateful and submissive hearts. It
brings man into communion with the divine
mind, and by prayer we link ourselves with
Him; it elevates us and lifts us up to the im-
mortal; it makes us better, whether God hears
our prayer or not, and we know and feel that it
makes us better.

But the doctrine of a religion is another
thing, one that cannot bear or endure the scru-
tiny of reason. The doctrine of the Buddhist,
which restricts human life to the earthly exist-
ence, which denies personal immortality to
man, absorbing the individual at his death into
the bosom of the Great All, in Nirvana, is
revolting pantheism. The doctrine of Mo-
hammedanism, which has no basis but the
words of its founder, gathered under the title
of Koran, and regarded as a divine revelation,
is not taken in earnest by the Mussulmen them-
selves, but held as a kind of political power
which they enforce with the sword and torch.
The doctrine of Judaism, which rests on the
advent, always vainly expecting a savior, a
messiah, who never comes, the need of whom
is in no wise apparent, is almost ridiculous and
absurd.

The doctrine of original sin, which lies at
the foundation of Christianity, is illogical and
unjust. To hold all mankind — the past, pres-
ent and future — responsible for the indiscretion
of Eve for eating an apple that was placed on

77

a tree to tempt her, an event supposed to have
occurred some six thousand years ago in an
obscure corner of Asia, and that, to atone for
this original sin, besides being driven out of the
Garden of Eden, which science has shown to
be a myth, God had to send His only son
Jesus to be crucified between two thieves, to
ransom all men, condemned and lost in conse-
quence of the indiscretion of Adam and Eve,
who did a good thing by eating the apple that
opened their eyes to their ignorance and na-
kedness, is contrary to all reason and common
sense.

No one can be honest with himself and say
that his religious views have never changed
from childhood to old age. The older we
grow the more we learn to understand the wis-
dom of a childlike faith, when we are ready to
believe anything our parents teach us, until we
have advanced and learned to think and act
for ourselves. So the idea of God in childhood
is different from that of manhood, and that
idea of religion changes with our intellectual
development. No two persons have and en-
tertain the exact ideas of a religious belief. So
all religion should be progressive and in full
accord with the prevailing ideas of science and

the knowledge of things. The religion of the
ancient Hindoo, Egyptian, Greek, Roman or
Hebrew is not suited to our present state of
civilization and enlightenment. A religion that
is not able to grow and live with us as' we grow
and live, is dead and will not admit of pro-
gress. A religion that is definite and unvary-
ing in its uniformity, so far from being a sign of
honesty and life is always a sign of dishonesty
and death. Every religion that is to be a
bond of union between the wise and foolish,
the old and the young, must be pliant, must be
high and deep and broad, bearing all things,
believing all things, possessing all things, and
enduring all things. The more it is so, the
greater its vitality, the greater its strength and
the warmer its embrace.

If religion refuses to accompany science it
will be left alone: scientific truths are only de-
structive to that which opposes them. A reli-
gion which is not contradictory to the laws of
nature has nothing to fear from science, and
will progress hand in hand with it. While
science is limited in research by laws which
govern rhatter, that of the spiritual relates
to the intelligence that directs to the fountain
from which all knowledge flows.

CHAPTER VIII.

RELIGION OF THE ANCIENT GREEKS; THEIR GODS AND GODDESSES WERE ONLY

SPIRITS OF DEPARTED SAGES AND HEROES. THEIR MEDIUMS

FORETOLD THE FUTURE AND THE PAST.

The Greeks were truly a medium istic race of
people; they were great lovers of the beautiful
and lived close to nature, and followed her
laws and took their models from her, and in
so following her they succeeded in rising to an
e'egance of refinement and a perfection of
beauty that has never been excelled. Her
poets, orators, statesmen, warriors, philoso-
phers, painters and sculptors are the masters
of all ages, whom all try to emulate but none
claim to excel.

Her religion was natural, and her gods and
goddesses were only progressed human beings
who had cast off the outer coil, and had be-
come more perfect, wiser and better, but who
still retained mortal feelings and passions, that
made them still linger and take a deep interest
in the affairs of mortal man.

The Greek religion differs from all the other
religions in this: the human character of its
gods. The gods of Greece are men and wo-
men idolized and on a large scale, but still
they are intensely human and but little above
mortals. The gods of India were vast ab-
stractions and, as they appear in sculpture, are
hideous and grotesque idols. The gods of
Egypt seem to pass away into mere symbols
and intellectual generalizations; but the gods
of Greece are persons, warm with life, radiant
with love and beauty, having their human adven-
tures, wars and love scrapes. The symbolical
meaning of each god disappears in his personal
character. They were not confined to any
particular sphere, but like mortals mingled to-
gether, having different interests and occupa-
tions, like a number of human beings, young,
healthy, wise and beautiful and endowed with
immortality.

They are not trying to save souls by any
ascetic means; no intention or bother about
making progress through the universe by obey-
ing the laws of nature; but were bent on pleas-
ure, on having a good time. Fighting, feast-
ing and making love were their usual occupa-
tions. If it can be said they cared for govern-
ing the world, it was in a loose sort of a way,
with no regular system or laws. They inter-
fered with human affairs only from time to time
as it suited their whim or passion. They an-
nounced no moral law, and they gave no pre-
cept or example to guide men's consciences.

According to the Jewish religion man was
made in the image of God, but according to
the Greek religion the gods were made in the
image of man. Heraclitus says, " Men are
mortal gods and the gods immortal men."
The Greeks, like the modern 'Spiritualist, be-
lieved that the gods were close to him and in
his midst; on the summit of the mountain,
among the clouds, often mingling in disguise,
and they made themselves visible or invisible
at their option. They were only advanced
Greeks, a little higher, but not very much
wiser or better. They beheld themselves re-
flected in their deities, and they conjectured
themselves up in the heavens, and saw with
pleasure a race of divine Greeks in the skies
above, corresponding with the race of Greeks
below.

The Greek religion, like that of modern
Spiritualism, was delicious and calculated to
make men happy and take away the fear of
death. It was without austerity, asceticism or
terror; a religion filled with forms of beauty
and nobleness, kindred to their own, with gods
who were capricious, indeed, but never stern,

78

79

and seldom jealous or cruel. It was a heaven
peopled with such a variety of noble forms
that they could choose from among them as
their protector the one whom they liked best,
and possibly themselves be selected as favorites.
Each person had his guardian deity or spirit;
the hunter, on a moonlight night, might chance
to behold the graceful figure of Diana gliding
through the woods in pursuit of game, while
the happy inhabitants of Cyprus might come
suddenly on the fair form of Venus resting in
a laurel grove. The Dryads could be seen
glancing among the trees, and the Oriads heard
shouting in the mountains, and the Naiads
found asleep by the side of their streams. If
the Greek chose to do so he might take his
gods as the subject for a poem, the model for a
statue or a picture.

The Greek religion did not guide or restrain,
it only stimulated man. Nowhere on earth,
before or since, has the human being been
educated into such a wonderful state of perfec-
tion or such an entire and perfect unfoldment
of itself as in ancient Greece. There every
human tendency and faculty of soul and body
opened into symmetrical proportions. That
small country, not larger than the State of
Maine, carried to perfection in a few centuries
every human art.

Everything in Greece was artistic, because
everything was finished, was done perfectly.
On that little peninsula ripened the master-
pieces of epic, tragic, comic, lyric and didac-
tic poetry; the perfection in every school of
philosophy, history, oratory, mathematics,
sculpture and painting. She developed every
form of government and gave us our model for
a republic, and she fought and won the great
battle of the world. Before her time every-
thing in human literature and art were rude
and imperfect attempts; since then everything
has been a rude and imperfect imitation, and it
was all owing, in a great measure, to her liberal
spiritual religion.

The gods of the Greeks were men and wo-
men; they were not abstract ideas, concealing
natural powers and laws. They were open as
sunshine, bright as the moon, and a fair com-
panion of men and women, idolized and gra-
cious; just a little way off, just a little way up
in the air. It was humanity projected up into

the skies, a divine creature of more than mor-
tal beauty, but thrilling with human life and
human sympathies.

They had gods and goddesses, muses, fates
and furies without number. Every woodland,
lake and stream had its nymphs. Mount
Olympus swarmed with them; here they assem-
bled and discussed the affairs of nations and
men. They h.nd Jupiter or Jove, the supreme
god, and Juno, his wife, who sometimes took
offense at her husband, for his flirtations with
the other goddesses and sometimes with a beau-
tiful mortal maid. His attendants were the
beautiful Hebe and Ganymede. They had a
brave Mars, the god of war; the wise Minerva,
who sprang from the brain of Jove, and who
espoused the cause of Troy; the beautiful
Venus, that came from the sea-foam, typical of
the fact that life first had its origin in the sea.
She warmed the hearts of men with love, and
her mischievous boy, Cupid, was always shoot-
ing arrows into the hearts of the unsuspecting
youths, and for a joke he would let a stray
arrow fly at the heart of some old bachelor or
widower that would send him around among
the fair maids in search of a wife. And there
was Diana, the goddess of hunting, with her
fleet greyhounds, to whom all the sporting fra-
ternity paid reverence; and the wing-heeled
Mercury, who flew through the air to carry
messages from one god to the other.

They were all live gods and goddesses and
endowed with passions like mortals. They
were only a little above man and were invested
with the power of going where they wished un-
seen and under no restraint to mortal man; in-
deed, they were only the spirits of mortals, for
they claimed that they all had been men and
women once, but had cast off the mortal coil
and assumed the robes of immortal gods.
Even when great men died they were often
deified and called gods or demi-gods.

Such a religion was calculated to make a
people brave and polite and to inspire them
with a love for the beautiful and grand. With
the belief that these were gods and goddesses,
ever ready to commend them in that which
was good, noble and brave, and condemn them
in cowardice and infidelity to state, and who
took an interest in their welfare and rejoiced in
their valor and success at arms. " To-night,"

80

said Leonidas to the three hundred brave Spar-
tans at Thermopylse, " we shall sup with the
immortal gods!" "On! sons of the Greeks!"
was the battle-cry of Marathon; "above you
the spirits of your fathers watch the blows
which, to preserve their tombs from desecra-
tion, you strike to-day."

It was this belief in immortality that inspired
Homer to write the great heroic poem that in
time became the bible of the Greeks. The
gods and goddesses therein pictured are noth-
ing but tutelary deities that had espoused the
cause of certain men and nations. They were
nothing but patron saints that had ascended to
the spirit land, yet they still lingered around
their favorite abodes and took an interest in
mortals.

" The gods," says Homer in XVII Odyssey,
page 475, "like strangers from some foreign
land, assuming different forms, wander through
cities, watching the justice and injustice of
man. There were avenging demons and furies
who haunt the ill-disposed, as there are gods
who are the protectors of the poor."

In the twentieth book, Homer puts into the
mouth of Achilles, after the death of his be-
loyed Patrocles, these words:

" 'Tis true, 'tis certain, man, though dead, re-
tains
Part of himself; the immortal mind remains;
The form subsists without a body's aid,
Aerial semblance and empty shade.

"This night my friend, so late in battle lost,
Stood at my side, a pensive, plaintive ghost;
Even now familiar, as in life he came,
Alas! how different! yet how like the same."

The fiery imagination and the subtle and
vigorous intellect of the Greeks peculiarly fit-
ted them for the reception of the impressions
from the spiritual, invisible world, as we see
in the writings of Homer, /Kschylus, Sophocles,
Xenophon and others. The following is an
extract from Hesiod:

" Invisible the gods are ever nigh,

Pass through the mist and bend the all-seeing

eye;
The men who grind the poor, who wrest the

right,

Awless of heaven's revenge, stand naked to

their sight,
For thrice ten thousand holy demons rove
This breathing world, the delegates of Jove;
Guardians of men, their glance alike surveys
The upright judgments and the unrighteous

ways."

The Greeks saw gods everywhere; the eternal
snows of Parnassus, the marble temples of
Athens glistening in the sun, the thousand isles
nestling in the ^Egean sea, the fragrant groves
where the philosophers disputed, the fountains
shadowed by plane trees, the solemn fields of
Platrea and Marathon; each and all of these
had their attendant spirits. A thousand deities
received homage in a thousand temples, and
for fear they might have offended some one of
the many gods, they erected one to the '• Un-
known God." "That one," St. Paul said,
"that he worshiped." The Greeks believed
that the spirits controlled the destinies of men
and nations, and took part in their affairs;
were ever present, though everywhere unseen;
knowing all things yet known to none; eternal,
invisible and incomprehensible. Gods who
mingled visibly in the actions of men, who
clothed themselves with material forms and
lead them on to victory; who shared the pas-
sions of humanity and sympathized with their
infirmities, who controlled the present and gave
omens of the future, were the beings that the
Greeks loved or feared, and bowed down to
to do homage and erect temples.

Their poetry is full of sublimity, represent-
ing one god as appearing in the clouds and
hurling down thunderbolts into the midst of the
contending armies of earth. At times the
gods get angry and take sides in the affairs of
men, as in the case of the siege of Troy. A
god is often represented as wandering through
the country in the form of a beardless youth,
challenging men to play with him on the lyre.
A goddess snatches from out the midst of bat-
tle an endangered warrior, whose noble form
she has become enamored of, and thus saves
his life by enveloping him in a mist and remov-
ing him from sight. Another goddess, mounted
on her celestial steed, rushing through the air
from capital to capital, arousing surrounding
nations to take up arms in the defense of some

81

common cause that she has espoused. They
filled the earth and skies with beings of inter-
est, and made life a romance, and it was a
pleasure to die in the defense of country and
the right. It infused into the heart a love of
country, bravery and devotion that has never
been equaled, a refinement and a culture that
has never been excelled, and a faultless phy-
sique and loveliness and beauty that has in all
ages of the world been the model of every
artist and the pride of every master to imi-
tate.

They worshiped the beautiful, and her artists
and painters strove to make their pictures and
statues perfect. Through this beautiful my-
thology constantly breaks the radiance of the
spiritual world, which informs us that these
myths are only the representatives of beings in
the spirit land that take an interest in the affairs
oi man, but were so clouded in mystic lore
that they were taken for heathen rites — an
abominable absurdity— until its true meaning
was interpreted in the light of modern Spirit-
ualism, and proven that these gods and god-
desses were merely progressed human beings in
a higher state of development.

The Greeks had their mediums through whom
they communicated with the different tutelary
gods and goddesses, patron saints and spirits.
They never went to war or did any important
act without consulting their oracles, and their
wonderful predictions, according to the histo-
rians have been fulfilled. The most renowned
of the oracles was at Delphi, where the Pytho-
ness, a priestess or medium, sat upon a tripod
over a fissure in the rocks, from which arose a
vapor that had an inspiring effect on the me-
dium. Soon she would go into a trance, like
some of our modern mediums, and then, gen-
erally in poetry or doggerel verse, she would
utter some statement of a prophetic nature,
which would run about as follows:
" See I number the sands; I fathom the depths

of the oceans —
Hear even the dumb; comprehend, too, the

thoughts of the silent;
Now, perceive I am an odor, an odor it seem-

eth of lambs' flesh;
As boiling it seemeth, commixed with the flesh

of a tortoise;
Brass is beneath and with brass is it covered."

This was given in response to a question of
Crcesus, of Lydia, who had sent an embassa-
dor to Delphi to test its truthfulness. He had
at that hour gone into the kitchen of his palace
and cut in pieces a lamb and a tortoise, and
placed it in a brass vessel and covered it with
a brass cover and commenced to cook it. This
was a satisfactory test, so he sent back his em-
bassador with three thousand oxen, numerous
gold and silver vessels, a gold lion, one hundred
and seventy ingots of the same metal, with a
girdle and a necklace of incredible value. De-
positing them before the shrine of the goddess,
the embassador of Crcesus demanded whether
he should go to war against the Persians. The
oracle replied, "When a mule becomes the
ruler of the Persian people, then, O tender-
footed Lydian, flee to the rocky banks of Her-
mos, make no halt, and care not to blush for
thy cowardice." This Crcesus misunderstood,
not aware that Cyprus was the son of a Median
princess and a Persian of humble condition,
and was the ruler prefigured under the type of
the mule king. He made war upon the Per-
sians and soon he was forced to flee, as the
oracle had predicted.

These oracles became the recipient of vast
gifts from kings and rich people that consulted
them, and they were consulted by a far greater
number of people than now-a-days consult our
mediums; while then, as now, they made many
mistakes, and there were impostors then as
now, who humbugged and imposed upon the
credulous. The belief in their predictions was
then universal, and no general would go to war
without consulting them. Even Alexander the
Great consulted the oracle at Delphi, but the
medium said that she was not ready; the spirit
did not move her. Alexander took her by the
arm and said she must give him a sitting.
While leading her to the tripod, she said, " Al-
exander, thou art irresistible." He at once let
her go and started off. She called him back,
and said that she did not mean that, but to
wait, she had something more to say. " No,"
said Alexander, "that is enough." He imme-
diately returned to his army and told them
what the oracle had said, *' that he was irre-
sistible," and it was the battle-cry of the army
which ever lead his cohorts to victory. He
was warned by the magi not to enter Babylon,

82

"that once within her walls he must assuredly
die." For a while he encamped outside of its
walls, but being over-persuaded by the doubt-
ing philosophers of Anaxagoras, he entered the
city, and in a few months he died in a de-
bauch. It is evident that Alexander had much
faith in the oracles, as he visited Jupiter Am-
nion in the Libyan desert, and left many valua-
ble presents.

Plutarch, in writing about the oracles, says:
"It would be impossible to enumerate all the
instances in which the Pythia proved her power
of foretelling events, and the facts of them-
selves are so well and generally known that it
would be useless to bring forth new evidence.
Her answers, though submitted to the severest
scrutiny, have never proved false or incorrect."
And then he cites many instances, among them
the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which over-
whelmed the cities of Pompeii and Herculane-
um; the defeat of Xerxes' army at Marathon
and his navy at Salamis, etc.

Lycurgus, the great Spartan law-giver, con-
sulted the oracle of Delphi. Being satisfied
of the correctness of the answer he received,
he left his native land never to return.

The most renowned of these oracles were
those of Phocis, at Claros in Ionia, at Delos,
at Delphi, at Didyma on Mount Ismenus in
Boetia, at Larissa among the Argives, and at
Heliopolis in Egypt. The pythonesses or me-
diums were selected for their great mediumistic
power. They were females, virgins of great
purity, and they were never allowed to marry.
Then, as now, it was a gift confined to the
few, and they divined the future and told the
past, in many instances, with great accuracy,
according to the writings of the ancient his'o-
rians.

Herodotus and Plutarch give many instances
of the truthfulness of these oracles, and relate
how the spirits defended the temple at Delphi
from the Persians, who went there to pillage it
of its vast wealth. " At first the temple was
as silent as^the grave, then all at once a deaf-
ening roar of thunder and flashes of lightning
burst forth, and superhuman voices were heard
to come forth from the shrine; huge rocks
were loosened upon the summit of Parnassus
and rolled down amongst the invaders and lev-
eled them like grass. The rest were affrighted

and fled in dismay." And this story is as well
authenticated as many which are related in the
bible of the invisible arm aiding the children of
Israel in battle.

Socrates was a clairvoyant medium from his
youth. He had unearthly monitions, a "di-
vine voice," as he termed it, attended him; not
to urge him to do good, but to restrain from
evil. It was equally busy in the most momen-
tous and the most trifling actions of life — at
Athens and at Corinth, when he lifted his
spear against the enemies of his country; when
he bore with meekness the revilings of the
shrewish Xantippe; when, in the height of
his success, he stood surrounded by Plato,
Alcibiades and others of the most noble youths
of Greece; and, finally, when he became old
and feeble and was persecuted, and he calmly
prepared himself to die, this "divine voice"
whispered to him sweet words of hope and
consolation.

Xenophon said of him, "The little voice"
imparted to Socrates a knowledge of the perils
that awaited him and of the life to come,
which so inspired him that he calmly awaited
death as a pleasure that would free him from
the mortal body and enable him to assume one
of eternal glory.

Plato relates many instances where Socrates
gave warnings to his friends of danger, and
thereby saved their lives. One he gives of a
noble Athenian, Timarchus, "for," said Soc-
rates, " the spirit has just given me the accus-
tomed sign that some danger menaces you."
And no one can read of this great philosopher
and not be impressed with the idea that he
was not in communion with spirits who placed
so much wisdom in his mouth.

Gibbon, speaking of Julian, says: " We
may learn from his faithful friend, the orator
Libanus, that he lived in a perpetual inter-
course with the gods and goddesses (the spirits),
that they descended upon earth to enjoy the
conversation of their favorite hero, that they
gently interrupted his slumbers by touching
his hands or his hair, that they warned him of
every impending danger, and conducted him
by their infallible wisdom in every action of
his life."

The present forms of communication with
the spirits by table-tipping and slate-writing

83

were also well known to the ancients. Am-
mianus Marcellinus says that in the reign of
the Emperor Valens, A. D., 371, some Greeks,
skilled in theurgy, were brought to trial for
attempting to ascertain, by magic arts, who
would succeed to the throne [see page 83].
This mode was similar to that now adopted
by many investigators of modern Spiritualism.
And Tertullian says, in reproaching some of
the Christian fathers: " Do not you, magicians,
call ghosts and departed souls from the shades
below, and by their infernal charms represent
an infinite number of delusions. And how do
they perform all this but by the assistance of
evil angels and spirits, by which they are able
to make stools and tables prophecy." Conse-
quently it is self-evident, whether we take inco
consideration that evil or good spirits were
concerned, that this fact goes to show that
seances were held and tables tipped over fifteen
centuries ago.

Ancient history is full of instances that go
to establish the fact that man had communica-
tions with spirits of the departed. The omens
that attended the assassination of Caesar, the
apparition of Brutus, at Philippi, and Sylea, the
night before he died, saw in a vision the manner
of his end. Pliny, the younger, gives an ac-
count of a remarkably haunted house that was
purchased by the philosopher Athenodorus, on
his arrival at Athens. He was struck with its
remarkable cheapness, and was informed that
no one would live in it. " He said he had
nothing to fear." At midnight a noise was
heard and the ghastly figure of a skeleton passed
through the apartments, dragging a rusty chain,
and motioned him to follow. He arose from
his table, where he sat writing and followed.
The spirit preceded him to an inner court of
the mansion and then vanished. He marked
the spot by laying some leaves where the appa-
rition designated, and returned to his study.
The next morning he sought the magistrates of
the city. A search was made and a skeleton
loaded with a rusty chain was dug up at the
spot that he had marked. He had the skeleton
removed and properly interred, and it never
appeared again; so it proved a lucky invest-
ment.

Macrobius says that Trajan, previous to his
invasion of Parthia, consulted the oracle of

Heliopolis. It returned a blank sealed paper.
At this he laughed and said that as he did not
believe in the oracle that they had sent him a
proper answer. He sent again, this time the
oracle returned a vine cut in pieces and wrapped
in a linen cloth, as a symbol that he in like
manner should be, should he return. He died
in the East and his body was returned, cut up
and wrapped in cloth.

Strabo and Pliny assure us that in the reign
of Augustus, the priests of a temple at the foot
of Mount Loracti, dedicated to the goddess
Feronia, had been known to walk barefooted
over great quantities of glowing embers; and
Strabo says, "The same ordeal was practiced
by the priestesses of the goddess Astabores in
Cappadocia."

In speaking of mediums among the ancients,
a writer in the London Examiner says:

" How many persons who practice, or who
discredit the fashionable exercise of table-turn-
ing and spirit -invoking are aware that, ages ago,
before our ancestors had tables to turn, the
process was a well recognized one in Imperial
Rome and Constantinople? Of abnormal
manifestations of disturbance in the ordinary
range of nobility among human beings, we hear
nothing in ancient history, but we hear enough
of the manner in which the Greeks and Romans
in early Christian ages endeavored by assumed
spiritual agency, to influence the movements of
the legs of tables, to make us sensible that
modern processes for effecting the same end
are inferior in point of elegance and awe-in-
spiring effect. This, we think, will scarcely be
denied by those best acquainted with the
present method of conducting a seance when
they learn the Roman method of operation,
which was as follows: When a family or an
individual desired to obtain information in re-
gard to some friend beyond the pale of human
knowledge, recourse was had to a priest, that is,
a professor practiced in the arts of superhuman
intelligence. Accordingly, when the appointed
day came, the officiating medium appeared in
white, and bearing in his hands a small table
standing on a tripod base. Pausing at the
entrance door he waited till the threshold and
the atrium -had been sprinkled with aromatic
and symbolic fluids before he passed on into
the principal apartment of the house, and de-

84

posited his tripod over the center of the floor.
This table, which, as we are informed, must be
made of laurel-wood, cut under awe-inspiring
auspices, had attached to its base a metallic
hoop encircjing it, on which the letters of the
Greek alphabet were graven, while its upper
rim bore a number of catgut strings, to which
a silvered leaden ball was suspended. When,
after due course of prayers, incantations and
various gentle aids to motion, the table
began to rotate, the priest and his attendants,
who sat on the floor, forming a circle round
it, noted down each letter that was in turn
touched by the extending strings of the rotating
tripod. These letters were put together, and
the words they formed accepted as the answer
of the oracle. In the case of table-turning in
the latter days of the Empire, which has been
trasmitted to us, we find that a body of con-
spirators, being desirous of ascertaining if the
pretender Theodorus, whose cause they ad-
vocated, would be the successor of the Emperor
Valens, tested the question by this interdicted
mode of divination; and conceiving that the
letters Th E O D had been struck, there could
be no doubt of the fulfillment of their wishes,
they hastily overthrew the table, hurried the
priests out of the house, and dispersed, lest
their evil deeds might be detected by the Im-

perial officers appointed to enforce the penal-
ties incurred by dealers in magic. Fate, how-
ever, was too strong for them, for Theodorus
was seized and put to death, as history can
testify, while Theodpsius succeeded to Valens,
and thus relieved the oracle from the charge ol
mendacity."

But we need not marvel at these strange
stories of profane history, for the Holy Bible is
filled with it, from Genesis to Revelations.
Aaron's rod was turned into a serpent and
swallowed up the rods transformed into ser-
pents by the Egyptian magicians. The He-
brew children walked through the fiery furnace;
Jacob wrestled with an angel; the walls of Jer-
icho were overthrown at the sound of a ram's
horn; Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of
salt; the witch of Endor raised the spirit of
Samuel; Abraham conversed with angels and
ate veal cutlets with them in his tent; and a
voice cried out to Abraham and told him of a
ram entangled in the vines, which he could
offer on his altar as a sacrifice, instead of his
son Isaac; Elijah was fed by the ravens; the
children of Israel were fed with manna; Christ
on the mount of Transfiguration saw and talked
with Moses and Elias; Peter was let out of
prison; and Christ rose from the dead.

CHAPTER IX.

THE ORIGIN OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.

Christianity.

Christianity comes ^omjthe Greek word
Christos which signifies 7emJu&over or anointed,
and is the same as the translation of the Hebrew-
word Messiah, Messias, or Mashiach. These
words alike mean the anointed one. Kings and
high-priests were consecrated to their office by
being anointed. The anointed one, therefore,
means the chosen, ordained, crowned or conse-
crated to a high office; christuomai signifies to
be good, kind and merciful; christotheia signifies
goodness of heart, chresteriso signifies to proph-
esy, chresies means a prophet, chresmos is the
oracle or the divine response and chrisma is the
anointing oil which was anciently freely used on
Christian converts and still continues in the unc-
tion of the Catholic church . Thus chres or chris
is the Greek expression for that which is good
and beautiful, or which comes from heaven.
The word christos was so closely associated
with divinity that it was often applied by the
Greeks to Apollo and other gods. The world
has had many christos or saviors, and all
nations have had their christos or christs.
Therefore Jesus Christ is the name applied to
the Hebrew christos, the anointed prophet.
Mary used oil to anoint Christ, and wiped his
feet with her hair to show her profound vener-
ation for him.

Christianity is a name full of power and
eloquent meaning, a divine and inspired
religion, full ol love and heroism. It cannot be
monopolized by the believers in Jesus Christ,
but includes all who embrace and follow the
instructions of Jesus Christ and imitate his
purity of life, and who attempt to live in
perfect accord with the divine law, so as to
embody in themselves the highest inspiration of
which he is capable.

It allows a large range of belief and worship.
One may be a Christian and believe that Christ
was only a good man; another may believe
Christ a god equal to the father in heaven, and
he can be a Christian; another can worship the
Virgin Mary, his mother, and be a Christian.
Anyone may be a Christian if he goes to church
and contributes to the support of the gospel;
in a word all who belong to the Christian
nations, whether he be a Jew or Gentile,
Atheist or Infidel, is according to the definition
of the term, a Christian. It represents and
expresses a civilization.

Advent of Christ.

The time was propitious for the introduction
of a new religion. Paganism was in its last
throes; Jupiter's, Manu's and Moses' altars had
no longer believers, and the intelligent people
had discarded the myth, and the masses were
ready to swallow any new religion offered.
Pythagoras, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato and
Cicero had evicted the myth of the Olympian
gods from the minds of the intelligent thinking
people. Their writings, like that of modern
science, had undermined the dogmas of the
fabulous mythology. Cicero wondered that
two priests could look into each other's faces
and not laugh at the trick. For two ages past,
Pyrrha, Cimon, Sextus, Empiricus and Enesidius
no longer believed in anything and Lucretius
had just written his book on nature.

On the other side, those old and decaying
theologies of Moses left in the spirit of the
multitude the idea of a Redeemer, which
ancient India had bequeathed to all the
nations; and the wearied people waited for
something new to replace their extinct beliefs,
to nourish their energy, paralyzed by doubt,
and in great need of hope.

85

86

It was then that a poor Jew, born of the
lower class, appeared, possessed of remarkable
mediumistic power, and started on the mission
of reforming man and checking the growth of
materialism. He soon gathered around him
many followers, and persecution did its work
"and the blood of martyrs became the seed
of the church."

Primitive Christianity had its origin in small
scattered groups, organized into secret soci-
eties with passwords, grips and signs, which
enabled the initiated to recognize each other.
To avoid the unrelenting persecutions of their
enemies they were obliged to meet in the night
in secret places; in caves, deserted catacombs,
woods and mountain fastnesses. From the first
appearance of Jesus and his twelve disciples,
they sought refuge in quiet places, in the
wilderness and among their friends in Bethany.
It is evident that they were rather quiet and
did not attract much attention among the
profane writers. Renan shows that Philo,
who lived in Palestine while the "glad tidings"
were being preached, never heard of him.
Josephus, the Hebrew historian, who was born
three years after the crucifixion of Christ, only
makes a short mention of him, and even that
bears the marks of interpolation.

Suetonius, the secretary of Adrian, who
wrote the history of the Emperor Claudius in
the second century, says that he (Claudius)
banished all the Jews, who were continually
making disturbances at the instigation of one
Crestus, evidently meaning Christ.

The Emperor Adrian, in a letter to Servia-
nus, says, "That he believes the new sect
(Christians) were worshipers of Serapis, an
Egyptian deity; and Christ is represented as
Serapis, wearing long hair, turned back, falling
down on his back and shoulders like a woman,
his whole person enveloped in drapery, reach-
ing his feet." [See "Gnostics and their Re-
mains," page 68.] " There can be no doubt,"
remarks the same author, " that the head of
Serapis, marked, as the face is, by a grave and
pensive majesty, supplied the first idea for the
conventional portraits of the Savior."

The Gnosis, or Gnosticism, comprehended
the doctrine of the magi — the wise men of the
East who followed the star to Bethlehem — and
they were in direct communication with the

Divine mind, which revealed to them these
facts, through some of the modes of spiritual
manifestation. They were not Jews, they were
heathen who had come from the East, and
were skilled in the arts of nature and knew by
certain signs they were to know him, and so
informed Herod of his whereabouts.

Christ said, " God is a spirit and they who
worship him worship in spirit and truth." Those
who follow Christ's teachings embrace the doc-
trines of Spiritualism, and consequently there
should be no antagonism between Spiritualism
and the other Christian religions, as they are
all derived from the same source. Christ said,
"I will be with you even to the end of the
world." He evidently meant that his spirit
would be with them. And the idea that Christ
would come again and reign on earth was taken
from the mistaken idea that he should be rein-
carnated in the flesh again, which is the belief
of the Buddhists that Buddha is ever reincar-
nating in the person of a child.

Christ and his apostles were possessed of
wonderful mediumistic powers, but in time this
mediumistic power was lost in the cold em-
brace of the Christian churches, who did not
follow his sublime teachings and preach his
gospel to the whole world. In losing this me-
diumistic power the churches have become ma-
terialistic, and for that reason they oppose the
doctrine of modern Spiritualism, which is in-
tended to take man back to the pure stream of
religion that he taught in his sermon on the
mount. Christ received his messages direct
from the Divine mind, and there is no reason
why it cannot be done by others as well as by
him.

The laws of the natural and spirit world are
always the same. Philo and other contempo-
rary historians say the Essenes were a sect of
pure and holy men, which arose about one
hundred years before the advent of Jesus of
Nazareth; and it is supposed by some that, he
belonged to that order. The doctrines, man-
ners and customs of this sect resembled that ot
Jesus and his disciples, and his sermon on the
mount is full of their aphorisms. This pure
and simple spiritual religion taught by the early
Christians perished about the time that Con-
stantine the Great usurped its name and fame
in order to justify his own iniquitous and atro-

87

cious murders, and to give him strength by
enlisting the Christians under his banner; and
it then became engrafted on Roman paganism.
The shaved headed augurs were changed into
monks and priests, and the vestal virgins into
nuns and sisters of charity; and the burning
of incense, is a vestige of the fire-worship-
ers, who always kept a fire burning in a lamp
suspended near or on the altar. After it be-
came the state religion, with the Emperor Con-
stantine at its head, it assumed a power that
enforced its creeds upon the unbelievers, that
made the name of Jesus known to the whole
Roman empire, which at that time governed
the civilized world.

Ammonius Sacchas, the great Alexandrian
teacher and philosopher, the theodiaoktis , in his
numerous works a century and a half before
St. Augustine, acknowledged Jesus as "an
excellent man, and the friend of God." He
always maintained that the ultimate design of
Jesus was not to abolish the intercourse with
gods and demons (spirits), but simply to purify
the ancient religion; that " the religion of the
multitude went hand in hand with philosophy,
and with her had shared the fate of being by
degrees corrupted and obscured with mere hu-
man conceits, superstitions and lies; that it
ought, therefore, to be brought back to its
original purity, by purging it of this dross and
expounding it upon philosophical principles;
and that all Christ had in view was to
reinstate and restore to its primitive integrity
and purity the wisdom of the ancients."

All great religious reformers were pure at the
beginning. The first followers of Buddha as
well as the disciples of Jesus were men of great
austerity and the highest morality, as in the
case of Sakya-Muni, Pythagoras, Plato, Jesus,
St. Paul, Ammonius and Sakkas. The great
Gnostic leaders, if less successful, were not
less virtuous in practice nor less morally pure.
Marcion, Basilidesand Valentinus were renown-
ed for their ascetic lives. The Nicolaitanes,
if they did not belong to the great body of the
Ophites, were numbered among the small sects
which were absorbed in it at the beginning of
the second century. The Gnostics were a sect
of philosophers that arose in the first century
of Christianity, and they formed a system of
theology agreeable to that of Pythagoras and

Plato, and in conformity to that of the script-
ures. They held that all religions had their
origin in secret societies.

The innumerable gems and amulets are a
proof of this. They had their symbols, signs
and secret workings that the outside world
knew nothing of, by which means they were
able to know each other. The Kabalists were
the first to embellish the universal Logos with
such terms as " Light of Light,'' the messenger
of life and light (see John i), and we find these
expressions adopted in toto by the Christians,
with the addition of nearly all the Gnostic
terms, such as Pleroma (fullness), Archons,
.■Eons, etc., as to the ''first born," the first
and the " only begotten." These terms are as
old as the world. Origen shows the word
"Logos," as existing among the Brahmins.
The Brahmins say that the God is light, not
such as one sees, nor such as sun and fire; but
they have the God Logos, not articulate, the
Logos of the Gnosis, through whom the high-
est mysteries of the Gnosis are seen by the
wise — those of clairvoyant sight. The Acts
and the fourth Gospel are full of Gnostic ex-
pressions. The Kabalistic terms " God's first-
born emanated from the Most High," together
with that which is the u spirit of the anointed ;"
and again, " they called Him the anointed of
the highest," are reproduced in spirit and sub-
stance by the author of the Gospel of St. John.
" That was the true light, and the light shineth
in darkness." "And the word was made
flesh."

The " Christ " and the " Logos" are terms
which existed ages before Christianity. The
Oriental Gnosis was studied long before the
days of Moses, and we have to seek for the
origin of all these words in the Archaic periods
of the primeval Asiatic philosophy. Peter's
second epistle and Jude's fragment, preserved
in the new Testament, show by their phraseol-
ogy that they belonged to the Kabalistic Orien-
tal order, for they use the same expressions as
did the Christian Gnostics, who built or took
a part of their system from the Oriental Kab-
ala, and that it was grafted on it. " Presump-
tuous are they [the Ophites], self-willed, they
are not afraid to speak evil of dignities," says
Peter in Second Epistle, ii: 10. The original
model for the latter is the abusive Tertullian

OF THK

MIVERSITY

and Irenseus. " Likewise (even as Sodom and
Gomorrah) also, these filthy dreamers defile
the flesh, despise dominion and speak evil
of dignities" says Jude, repeating the very
words of Peter and thereby using expressions
consecrated in the Kabala. Dominion is the
"empire," the tenth of the Kabalistic sephiron.
They held that the types of the creation, or
the attributes of the Supreme Being, are
through the emanations of Adam Kadmon.

Thus, when the Nazarenes and other Gnostics
of the more Platonic tendency twitted the
Jews as " abortions who worship their god
Qurbo, Adonai," we need not wonder at the
wrath of those who had accepted the old Mo-
saic system, but at that of Peter and Jude, who
claimed to be followers of Jesus, and dissent
from the views of him who also was a Nazarene.
The dispersed Nazarenes were a secret sect that
had no affiliation with the Jews, and they were
a remnant of the ancient Phoenicians, that still
lived on the other side of the Jordan and ex-
tended far into the interior.

According to the Kabala, the empire of
dominion is "the consuming fire and his wife
is the temple or church, and powers and digni-
ties (spirits) are subordinate genii of the arch-
angels and angels of the Sohar." These ema-
nations are the very life and soul of the Kab-
ala and Zoroasterism. And the Talmud, the
sacred book of the Jews, is borrowed from the
Zend-Avesta, the sacred book or bible of the
Persians and fire-worshipers; therefore, by
adopting the views of Peter, Jude and other
apostles, the Christians have become but a dis-
senting sect of the Persians, for they do not
even interpret the meaning of all such powers
as the true Kabalists do.

St. Paul, warning his converts against the
worshiping of angels, showed how well he ap-
preciated, even so early as his period, the dan-
gers of borrowing from a mythical doctrine, the
philosophy of which could be rightly interpre-
ted but by its well-learned adherents, the Magi
and the Jewish Tanaim. In Colossians ii: 18,
he says, " Let no man beguile you of your
reward in a voluntary humanity and worshiping
of angels, intruding into those things which he
hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly
mind," is a sentence laid right at the door of
Peter and his companions.

In the Talmud Michael is prince of water,
who has seven inferior spirits subordinate to
him. He is the patron, the guardian angel of
the Jews, as Daniel informs us. And the
Greek Ophites, who identified him with their
Ophimorphous, the personified creation of en-
vy and malice, of Ilda-Baoth, thet Demiurgus
(creator of the material world), and undertook
to prove that he, Samuel, the Hebrew prince
of the evil spirits or Persian deos, were natur-
ally regarded by the Jews as blasphemers.

In all ages and among all nations there is a
tendency of the ignorant and designing to
create gods out of ministering spirits and angels
that come in contact with mediums, seers and
prophets, which soon corrupts the pure and
monotheistic belief in one God, out of whose
divine will and power all things have evolved.

It is evident that Jesus was a pure and good
man, endowed with a great love of the pure
and simple religion, and it is clearly apparent
that he struggled hard to reform the Jews; but
they did not understand and appreciate him,
and they therefore crucified him; and after the
elapse of three hundred years he was deified as
one of the godhead, and from his teachings
and those of his disciples, has arisen the
Christian church, and over the question of his
divinity rivers of blood have been shed to
make him a god, and to enforce the creeds and
dogmas of the church.

St. Paul was the true founder of Christian
theology. This indomitable disciple was a man
of learning, well versed in the mysterious doc-
trines of the Gnostics, and wrote in the true
Kabalistic spirit of the masters of the Lord
Jesus Christ; and the manner of his conversion
is one of the best physical manifestations of
the spirits on record. It is evident that St.
Paul, believing in occult powers in the world,
" unseen," but ever " present," says, " Ye
walked according to the <con of this world, ac-
cording to Archon (//da Jiaot/i, the Jh-minr^),
that has the domination of the air" and " we
wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against
the dominations, the powers, the lords of dark-
ness, the mischievousness of spirits in the upper
regions." This sentence " ye were dead in sin
and error," for "ye walked according to the
Archon," or (Ilda-Baoth,) the god and creator
and master of the Ophites, shows unequivo-

89

cally that, ist, Paul, notwithstanding some
dissensions with the more important doctrines
of the Gnostics, shared more or less their cos-
mogonical views on the emanations; 2d, that
he was fully aware that this Demiurg, whose
Jewish name was Jehovah, was not the God
preached by Jesus; and now, if we compare
the doctrine of St. Paul with the religious
views of Peter and Jude, we find that not only
did they worship Michael, the archangel, but
that they also reverenced Satan, because the
latter was also an angel before his fall. This
they do quite openly, and abuse the Gnostics
for speaking "evil " of him. (See Peter's Sec-
ond Epistle).

No one can deny the following: Peter, when
denouncing those who are not afraid to speak
evil of "dignities," adds immediately, " where-
as angels which are greater in power and might
bring not railing accusations against them (the
dignities) before the Lord." Who are the
"dignities" referred to? Jude, in his general
epistle, makes the meaning of the word as clear
as day. The "dignities" are the devils, and
the devils are evil spirits. Jude when com-
plaining of the disrespect shown by the Gnos-
tics to paivers and dominions, uses the very
words of Peter: " And yet Michael, the arch-
angel, when contending with the devil (evil
spirit) he disputed about the body of Moses,
durst not bring against him a railing accusation,
but said, ' the Lord rebuke thee.' " Is this
not plain enough to show that they did? if not
then we have the Kabala to prove who were
the dignities.

In Deuteronomy xxxiv: 6, we find that the
" Lord Himself buried Moses in a valley of
Moab, and no man knoweth of his sepulchre
unto this day." This biblical lapsus lingua of
Jude gives a strong coloring to the assertions of
some of the Gnostics. They claimed only
what was secretly taught by the Jewish Kaba-
lists themselves, to-wit: that the highest su-
preme God was unknown and invisible, " the
king of light is a closed eye;" that Ilda-Baoth,
the Jewish second Adam, was the real Demi-
urg; and that Iao, Adonai, Saboth and Eloi
were the quaternary emanations which formed
the unity of the God of the Hebrews — Je-
hovah. Moreover, the latter was also called
Michael, the archangel, by Samuel, and re-

garded as an angel several degrees removed
from the godhead. The disciples were unedu-
cated, except St. Paul, and they drew their
knowledge from the unseen world like many of
the mediums of modern Spiritualism, who often
confound the most learned doctors and men of
science.

The Chaldean version of the Pentateuch,
made by the well-known Babylonian divine
Onkelos, was regarded as the most authoritive
of all; and it is according to this learned rabbi
that Hillel, and and other tanaim after him,
held that the being who appeared to Moses in
the burning bush, on Mount Sinai, and who
finally buried him, was the angel of the Lord,
Memro, and not the Lord himself, and that he
whom the Hebrews of the old Testament mis-
took for Iahoh, was his messenger, one of his
sons or emanations. All this goes to establish
but one logical conclusion, merely that the
Gnostics were far superior to the disciples in
knowledge, learning and the religious doctrines
of the Jews.

There have existed in all ages men who be-
longed to secret societies under different names
— Esoteric, Brahminical, Buddhistical, Chal-
dean, Hermetic, Ophite, Gymnosophites and
Magi philosophers. The Sufis and Rashees, of
Kashmere, instituted a kind of international
and universal Freemasonry among the Esoteric
societies; and says Higgins, "These Rashees
are the Essenians, Carmelites or Nazarites of the
Temple, and it was from the latter Christ de-
rived his knowledge, as he was a Nazarene, and
the priest or masters understood the occult sci-
ence, under the name of Regenerating Fire.
This science for more than three thousand
years was the peculiar possession of the Indian
and Egyptian priesthood, into the knowledge
of which Moses was initiated at Heliopolis,
where he was educated; and Jesus was educated
among the Essenian priests of Egypt or Judea,
and by the knowledge thus gained these two
great reformers, particularly the latter, wrought
many of the miracles mentioned in the script-
ures."

"The Christian Gnostics sprang into exist-
ence towards the beginning of the second cen-
tury, and just at the time when the Essenes
most mysteriously faded away, which indicates
that they were the identical Essenes, and, more-

90

over, pure Christists, viz: they believed, and
were those who best understood what one of
their own brethren had preached. In insisting
that the letter Iota, mentioned by Jesus, (Mat.
v:i8,) indicated a secret doctrine in relation to
the ten aeons, is sufficient to demonstrate to
a Kabalist that Jesus belonged to the Free-
masonry of those days; for I, which is iota in
Greek, has no other name in other languages,
and is, as it was among the Gnostics of those
days, a pass-word, meaning the ' Scripture of
the Father,' in Eastern brotherhoods which
exist to this day."

" It comes to this," writes Irenaeus, com-
plaining of the Gnostics, "they neither con-
sent to the scriptures nor tradition;" and why
should we wonder at that, when even the com-
mentators of the nineteenth century, with noth-
ing but fragments of Gnostic manuscripts to
compare with the voluminous writings of their
calumniators, have been enabled to detect
fraud on every page ? How much more must
the polished and learned Gnostics, with all
their advantages of personal observation and
knowledge of the facts, have realized the stu-
pendous scheme of fraud that was being con-
summated before their very eyes ? Why should
they accuse Celsus of maintaining that their re-
ligion was all based on the speculations of
Plato, with the difference that his doctrines
were far more pure and rational than theirs,
when we find Sprengell, seventeen centuries
later, writing the following: "Not only did
they (the Christians) think to discover the dog-
mas of Plato in the books of Moses, but, more-
over, they fancied that by introducing Platon-
ism into Christianity they would elevate the
dignify of this religion and make it more popu-
lar among the nations."

"They introduced it so well that not only
was the Platonic philosophy selected as a basis
for the trinity, but even the legends and my-
thical stories which had been current among
the admirers of the great philosopher, as a
time-honored custom required in the eyes of
his posterity such an allegorical homage to
every hero worthy of deification, were revamp-

ed and used by the Christians. Without going
so far as India, did they not have a ready
model for the ■ miraculous conception ' in the
legend about Periktione, Plato's mother? In
her case it was also maintained by popular tra-
dition that she had immaculately conceived
him, and that the god Apollo was his father.
Even the annunciation by an angel to Joseph,
in a dream, the Christians copied from the
message of Apollo to Aristow, Periktione's
husband, that the child to be born from her
was the offspring of that god. So, too, Romu-
lus, one of the founders of Rome, was said to
be the son of Mars by the virgin Rhea Sylvia,
and he was suckled and nurtured by a wolf and
was afterwards deified."

The birth and the wonderful manifestations
that are related of Christ, was one of the leg-
ends peculiar to that age. To enshroud it in
mystery and to make it miraculous was to give
to him the prestige of a god, when in reality he
only claimed to be the son of man; and
when we make due allowance for it we are
left to wonder how it was ever possible that
any one should look upon him otherwise than
as a good man, who was conceived, born, lived
and died as other men. How he could be
held as other than a man surpasses my compre-
hension, and how the intelligent, thinking peo-
ple of the nineteenth century can think he was
a god is evidence of credulity, stupidity and
ignorance.

It is evident that the Gnostics had a better
and more correct knowledge of the teachings
of Christ and his disciples than those who
claim to be founders of the modern Christian-
ity, which did not have its rise until in the
third century; and we should be willing to give
to them the credit of being as honest as any
other sect. And if we can believe Nicholas of
Antioch, a man of honest repute, full of the
holy ghost and wisdom, we must come to the
conclusion that Christ was simply a good man
with lofty thoughts, a great love of humanity,
and clear perception of right, added to his
great mediumistic powers.

CHAPTER X.

ALL RELIGIONS APPEAR TO HAVE ONE COMMON ORIGIN. THE ORIGIN OF THE
TRINITY, CROSS, SACRED RIVERS, MADONNA, ARK, DELUGE, FISH STORY.

The Olympus of the Greeks is but a repro-
duction of the Hindoo Olympus. The legend
of Jason and the Golden Fleece is still in the
mouth of every one in India, and the Iliad of
Homer is nothing but an echo and enfabled
souvenir of the Ramayana, a Hindoo poem, in
which Rama goes at the head of his allies to
recover his wife, Sita, who had been carried
off by the King of Ceylon; while the Greeks
immortalized it in Homer, where Paris carried
off the fair Helen to Troy.

yEsop and Babrias copied Hindoo fables
that reached them through Russia, Syria and
Egypt. Babrias, though a Greek, says at the
commencement of his second proem that it
came from the East; and Jacolliot says that no
one can read the fables of the Hindoo Pilpay,
or the Brahmin Ramdamyayer, without being
impressed with the idea that they are the orig-
inal, and that ^Esop, Babrias and La Fontaine
are plagiarists, and that the Greek and modern
fabulists have not taken the trouble to change
the action of these little dramas.

One nation copies from another like individ-
uals, and the succeeding generations retain the
history and traditions of their ancestors. The
Greek language and religion has been taken
from the Hindoo. As the Sanscrit is the mother
of the Greek language, so the Brahmin religion
and laws are more or less copied into the
Greek and Roman religion and laws. Homer
and Virgil, Sophocles and Euripides, Plautus
and Terence, copied, altered and modified the
poetry of the Brahmins; while Socrates, Py-
thagoras, Plato and Aristotle have drawn their
inspiration from an older and a more ancient
philosophy of the Brahmins, Egyptians and
Persians. Titus, Livius, Sallust, Herodotus

and Tacitus are our models as historians, and
they only copied from others still older, dating
farther back in time. The Justinian code has
been taken from the Hindoo code of Manu,
as it bears the ear-marks of legislation, mar-
riage, filiation, parental authority, tutelage,
adoption, property, the laws of contract, de-
posit, loan, sale, partnership, donations and
testaments.

Manu, Manes, Minos and Moses were all
great law-givers and legislators. These four
names overshadow the entire ancient world.
They appear at the beginning of the four dif-
ferent nations, and they play the same role,
surrounded by the same mysterious halo. All
of the four were legislators and high-priests,
and all four founded theocratic and sacerdotal
societies. That they stand in relation to each
other as predecessor and successor, however
distant, seems proven by the similitude of name
and identity of the institutions they created.
" In Sanscrit Manu signifies the man par excel-
lence, the legislator. Manes, Minos and Moses,
do they not betray an incontestible unity of
derivation from the Sanscrit with the slight va-
riations of different periods, and the different
languages in which they are written, Egyptian,
Greek and Hebrew?"

Manu, the philosopher and law-giver of In-
dia, and Manes, the Egyptian legislator, are ex-
tensively copied. A Cretan visits Egypt to
study her institutions, which he introduces into
his own country, and history preserves his
memory under the name of Minos. Moses is
the liberator of the servile caste of Hebrews
from out of bondage in Egypt. These laws
are all claimed to have been given to them by
God, out of which they have created caste,

92

which in India has crushed the masses down
in ignorance and superstition, and it made all
subservient to the Brahmins, who really were
the governing class. Moses created the order
of Levi, the priests who claimed that God
governed them; but they ate the offerings, col-
lected the tithes and ruled the people. The
Roman people were divided up into castes —
priests, senators, patricians and plebeians —
which was a feebler imitation of the Hindoo
society. Such has ever been the laws and reli-
gions, "Divide, corrumpe ei imperal" divide,
demoralize and govern.

The Vedic civilization, under the Hindoo
priests (the Brahmins), like that of Egypt un-
der Manes, crushed the masses into a nation of
slaves, which deprived them of all social and
political rights, making them mere machines to
produce, that the privileged classes may live
in luxury and splendor. The Roman hierarchy
for ages has kept the masses in ignorance, that
they might govern them, and at one time their
power was so great that they even scourged
kings and forced them to do penance.

"Excommunication was nothing else than a
weapon of despotism, picked up in the pagodas
of Brahma, for the subjugation of people and
for the triumph of the priests. We have seen
Savonarola die at the stake for having exposed
the disorders of Alexander VI; and the pious
Robert of France, abandoned by his friends
and his faithful servants, obliged to bend the
knee under the hand of a religious fanatic.
Human hecatombs have been burning on the
piles of faith and the altar reddened with blood.
Ages have passed away; we are but wakening
to progress and freethought. But let us expect
struggles without end until the day shall come
when we shall have courage to arraign all sa-
cerdotalism at the bar of liberty."

The Hindoos, in their primitive times, had
their virgins attached to the service of the pa-
godas; some tended the sacred fire, which
burned day and night before the holy trinity,
and never was allowed to go out; others, on
days of procession, danced before the car or
ark as it was carried through the villages; oth-
ers, under the delirium produced by an excit-
ing beverage which is known to the Brahmins,
uttered oracles in the sanctuaries to fakirs and
sunniassys (holy mendicants), or to extort from

the amazed people, abundant offering of fruit
rice, cattle and money; others sung sacred
hymns at the sacrifices and festivals and at fun-
erals, religion requiring each son to make offer-
ings on the recurring anniversary of his father's
and mother's deaths, and, as no man could be
admitted into heaven who had not a son to
make this offering, so this accounts for the
great desire of men of the Aryan race to have a
son to inherit his name. The consecrated vir-
gins of Egypt danced before the statues of the
gods; the pythonesses of Delphi, the priestesses
of Ceres, who delivered oracles, the vestal vir-
gins of Rome who tended the sacred fire, and
the sisters of charity, were but heirs to the
devadassa of India. This tradition of the
woman, virgin and priestess is so much of an
oriental inspiration that we see all the nations
of antiquity reject it as they gradually emanci-
pated themselves from superstition and mystery.
If, then, it appears but a legacy from the prim-
itive cradle, nothing is more natural than to
trace it to the country whence departed the
colonizing tribes.

Jesus is a Sancrit word signifying pure es-
sence, which is the root, the radical origin
of a large number of ancient names used
alike for gods and distinguished men, such as
Isis, the mother of Horus, the female principle
in nature, the Earth, the Egyptian goddess;
Josue, in Hebrew; Joshua the successor of
Moses; Josias, king of the Hebrews; and Jeseus
or Jesus, in Hebrew. Jeosuah, which name
is very common with the Hebrews, was in
ancient India the tiller, the consecrated epithet
assigned to all incarnations. " The officiating
Bohemians in temples and pagodas now accord
this title of Jeseus, or pure essence, or divine
emanation, only to Chrisna, who is alone recog-
nized as the word, the true incarnation by the
Vishnuites and freethinkers of Brahminism."
(See "India Bible," by Jacolliot, page 108.)
Hence comes the word Jesus Christ, from
Jezeus — Chrisna — of the Sanscrit.

Chrisna, Buddha, Zoroaster, Christ and Mo-
hammed have all played a human role, and
God has judged them as he has all the rest of
mankind, according to the good they have
accomplished. These great and good men
started out for a high and noble purpose, but
their successors, more cunning than their mas-

93

ters, having made them gods to smooth their
own way, present themselves to the people as
celestial messengers, and thus sanctify their
ambitious purposes, and rule and govern man.
On a careful and critical examination they all
teach the same thing; all tell about the same
story. It is the same, revamped to suit the
age and the nation in which they lived.

The Egyptian god Bacchus was brought up at
Mysa, and is famous as having been the con-
queror of India. In Egypt he was called Osi-
ris; in India Dionysius, and not improbably
Krishna or Chrisna, which means a savior, as
he was called Adoneus, which signifies the Lord
of heaven, or the Lord and giver of light in
Arabia, and liber throughout the Roman do-
minions, from whence is derived our term lib-
eral for everything that is generous, frank and
amiable. He manifested his glory in the
wine, therefore he is sometimes called the god
of wine. It is evident that he was one of the
sun-gods of some of the ancients, as we find
expressions like these used in his worship: Io
Terombe, let us cry unto the Lord; Io or la
Baccoth, God sees our tears; Jehovah Evan!
Hevoe! and Eloah, the author of our existence,
the mighty God; Hu Esh, thou art the fire;
Elta Esh, thou art the life; and Io Nissi, O
Lord, direct us; which last is the literal English
of the Latin motto in the arms of the city of
London, retained to this day, " Domine dirige
nos." The Romans, out of all these terms,
preferred the name of Baccoth, out of which
they composed Bacchus. The more delicate
ear of the Greeks was better pleased with the
words Io Nissi, out of which they formed Dio-
nysius.

The three letters I H S, surrounded with
rays of glory, that are so often seen hanging in
the Catholic churches and burying grounds,
which are supposed to stand for Jesus Homine-
um Salvator, is none other than the identical
name of Bacchus, Yes, exhibited in Greek
letters, V H E, (see Hesychius on the word
V H E, i.e., Yes, Bacchus, Sol, the Sun).
And the feast of Bacchus was always celebrated
by drinking wine and eating bread, from which
the Christians derived the idea of the sacra-
ment. One of the odes of Anacreon, trans-
lated, reads thus: "To arms! But I shall

drink; boy, bring me the goblet, for I would
rather lie dead drunk than dead."

In the ancient Orphic verses, sung in the
orgies of Bacchus, as celebrated throughout
Egypt, Phoenicia, Syria, Arabia, Asia Minor,
Greece, and ultimately in Italy, it is related
how that god, who had been born in Arabia,
was picked up in a box that floated on the
water, and took his name Mises, in signification
ot his having been saved from the water, and
Bimater from his having had two mothers; that
is, one by nature and another who had adopted
him. He had a rod with which he performed
miracles, and which he could change into a
serpent at pleasure. He passed the Red Sea
dry-shod at the head of his army; he divided
the waters of the rivers Orontes and Hydraspus
by the touch of his rod and passed through
them dry-shod. By the same mighty rod he
drew water from the rock, and wherever he
marched the land flowed with milk and honey.
And the similarity of these verses shows that
Moses copied them or that they were taken
from him.

The Egyptian tau or cross (T) was in use
many centuries earlier than the period assigned
to Abraham, the alleged forefather of the
Israelites, for Moses directed the children of
Israel to mark their door-posts and lintels with
blood, lest the " Lord God " might make a
mistake and kill them instead of the Egyptians,
and this mark is a tau, the identical Egyp-
tian handle-cross, with the half of which tal-
isman Horus raised the dead, as is shown on a
sculptured ruin at Philae. And it is asserted
that the rod of Moses, which he used to per-
form his miracles before Pharaoh, was no doubt
a crux ansata, or something like it, as used by
the Egyptian priests. In the ancient Hebrew
the sign of the cross was formed thus X, but
in the original Egyptian hieroglyphics it is the
the same as a perfect Christian cross -j-.

According to King and other numismatists
and archaeologists, the cross was a symbol of
eternal life. A tau or Egyptian cross was used
in the mysteries of Bacchus and Eleusinia. It
was laid on the breast of the initiate, as a sym-
bol of the "new birth;" that his spiritual birth
had regenerated and united his astral soul with
his divine spirit, and that he was ready to as-
cend in spirit to the blessed abodes of light and

94

gory. The tau is a magic talisman and at the
same time is a religious emblem. It was
adopted by the Christians, through the Gnos-
tics and Kabalists, who used it largely, as their
numerous gems testify. They took the tau, or
handle-cross, from the Egyptians, and the
Latin cross from the Buddhist museums, who
brought it from India, where it can be found
to have been in use for two or three centuries
before Christ. The cross was known to the
ancient Assyrians, Egyptians, Armenians, Hin-
doos and Romans, long before the crucifixion
of Christ.

The Brah-matma, the chief of the Hindoo
initiates, had on his head-gear two keys, which
were symbols of the revealed mystery of life
and death, and were placed cross-wise; and in
some of the Buddhist pagodas of Tartary and
Mongolia, the entrance to a chamber within
the temple is generally ornamented with a
cross, formed of two fishes, and so are the
zodiacs of the ancient Chaldeans and Buddhists
represented with crossed fishes. And even
Solomon's temple was built on these founda-
tions, forming the "triple tau" or three
crosses, according to one of the traditions of
ancient Masonry.

In its mystical sense the Egyptian cross de-
rives its origin from its former use as an em-
blem of the realization by the earliest philoso-
phers of an androgynous dualism in every man-
ifestation of nature, which proceeds from the
abstract idea of a likewise androgynous or
double-sexed (male and female) deity. rIhe
tau or Egyptian cross, in its mystical sense as
well as the crux ansatcc, represents the " tree of
life" while the Roman cross, on which Christ
was crucified, was called the "tree of infamy."
The crucifix was an instrument of torture, and
was common among the Romans, for it was
unknown among Semitic nations until con-
quered by the Romans, and during the first
two decades after the crucifixion of Christ, the
a|K>stles looked upon it with horror. It is cer-
tainly not the Christian cross that John had in
mind, when speaking of the signet of the
" living God," but the mystic tau.

Many customs found in Christendom may
be traced back to Egypt. The Egyptian at
his marriage put a gold ring on his wife's finger
as a token that he entrusted her with all his

property, just as in a Church of England mar-
riage service the bridegroom does the same
thing, saying, " with all my worldly goods I
thee endow." The feast of candles at Isis is
still marked in the Christian calendar as Can-
dlemas-day. The Catholic priests shave their
heads as the ancient Egyptian priests did sev-
eral thousand years ago. The surplice of the
Episcopal minister, which he wears when read-
ing the liturgy is the same as that worn by the
ancient Egyptian priest. The Pope assuming to
hold the keys, was taken from an Egyptian
priest at Thebes whose " title was keeper of the
two doors of heaven," (see Sharpe's " Egyp-
tian Mythology.") All the forms and ceremo-
nies of the Jews bear ear-marks of having been
borrowed by Moses from the Egyptians; " the
ark," "the holy of holies," the scapegoat, the
cherubim, were derived from the sphynx. Also
the rite of circumcision was practiced in Egypt
as early as the fourth dynasty, says Wilkinson,
long before the time of Abraham.

The Trinity.

In the Book of Hermes, the origin of which
is lost in the colonization of Egypt, there is a
reference made to the Hindoo Chrisna, accord-
ing to the Brahmins, and it enunciates in dis-
tinct terms the trinitarian dogma. "The light
is me," says Pimander; "the Divine thought; I
am the nous, or intelligence, and I am thy God
and am far older than the human principle,
which escapes from the shadow. I am the
germ of thought; the resplendent word; the
Son of God. Think that what thou seest and
hearest is the verbum of the master; it is the
thought which is God, the Father. The celes-
tial ocean, the ether, which flows from east to
west, is the breath of the Father, the life-giving
principle, the Holy Ghost, for they are not
separated and their union is life."

The trinity of the Egyptians was a triangle.
Plutarch says that the Egyptians worshiped
Osiris, Isis and Horus, under the form of a
triangle. He adds that they considered every-
thing perfect to have three parts, and therefore
their good god made himself three-fold, while
their god of evil remained single.

The ancient Hindoos had a Christ, a virgin
" mother of God," queen of heaven, though
Isis is also by right the queen of heaven, and

95

is generally represented carrying in her hand
the crux ansata (-f ) or cross. In one of the
ancient tombs of the Pharaohs there is a figure
of the birth of the sun in the form of a little
child issuing from the bosom of its divine
mother, the resplendent golden rays darting
forth from its head, which was intended to rep-
resent the rays of the sun-god. The mono-
gram or symbol of the god Saturn was the sign
of the cross with a ram's horn in indication of
the lamb of God. Jupiter also bore a cross
with a horn, and Venus a cross with a circle.

Among the Semitic nations we can trace the
trinity to the prehistoric days of the fabled Se-
sostris, who is identified by more than one critic
with Nimrod the "mighty hunter." "Tell me,
O, thou strong in fire, who, before me, could
subjugate all things? and who shall after me?"
And the oracle saith thus: "First, God, then
the Word and then the Spirit." (See " Ap
Malal," liber i, cap. iv.)

Then there was the trinity of God, earth, at-
mosphere; earth, fire and water; and this three-
fold function of the Divinity evidently gave rise
to the Hebrew Jehovah, or Ye-ho-vah, repre-
senting the Future, the Present and the Past,
and from this idea of the three united in one
has given us the trinity — Father, Son and Holy
Ghost — which was taken from the three-fold
deity of the Hindoos, which antedates that of
the Jews, who understood the powers of the
prism and the breaking of the rays of light into
red, yellow and blue, by the means of which
they were able to calculate and make astronom-
ical calculations, and with the aid of the trian-
gle, with its three sides in one, they described
a part of a circle which represents the infinite
and is an important figure in geometry, next
in importance to the circle that encloses a
globe, which is the most perfect form ot all
bodies and figures, and represents the whole.

There is no doubt of the great antiquity of
the trinity in India, as it is written in books, in
a language that has ceased to be spoken for
thousands of years, long before the birth of
Christ, while in their temples and ruins, in the
old cavern of Elephanta, hewn into the solid
rock at a time so remote that it is not known
in history. Here the traveler beholds with awe
and astonishment, in the most conspicuous part
of the most ancient and venerable temple of the

world, a bust expanding in breadth nearly twen-
ty feet, and no less than eighteen feet in alti-
tude— a bust composed of three heads united
to one body, adorned with the oldest symbols
of Indian theology, and thus expressly fabricat-
ed to indicate the one God in his triune char-
acter of the Creator, Preserver and Regener-
tor of mankind.

The Zoroastrians or sun-worshipers had a
trinity in the sun, light, fire, flame, three mani-
festations of the sun, which gave rise to the all-
seeing eye, which is synonymous to that of
sun-worship, which Solomon introduced into
the order of Freemasonry, which he took from
the Egyptians and Assyrians.

The Persian triplicate deity was also composed
of three persons — Ormuzd, Mithra and Ahri-
man.

The Hindoos had three in their trinity, Brah-
ma, Vishnu and Siva, corresponding to power,
wisdom and justice, or creator, preserver and
destroyer of life, which in their turn answered to
spirit, force and matter, and the past, present
and future.

The Chinese idol Sampao, consisted of three,
equal in all respects.

The ancient Egyptians had their triplet,
Emepht, Eicton and Phta; and this triple god,
seated on the lotus, one of the images, can
now be seen in the St. Petersburg museum.

The Peruvians supposed their god, Tanga-
Tanga, to be one in three and three in one.

The ancient Mexicans had also a trinity —
Yzona (Father), Bacah (Son) and Echvah (Ho-
ly Ghost) and they said they received the doc-
trine from their ancestors. (See Lord Kings-
borough's "Anct. Mex.," page 165.) And
these ancient Mexicans or Aztecs had a Christ
and a virgin mother; and one of the priests
that were with Cortez said that the devil had
evidently informed them of these facts, for who
else could have given them that information.

All these facts carry us back long anterior to
the time mentioned in the old Bible, which was
taken by the Egyptians from India, and by the
Israelites carried from Egypt to Palestine.
Moses and Aaron learned it in the temples from
the hierophants or priests, who were learned
in all the religious matters, and who guarded
their secrets with most sacred vigilance. For
centuries the Egyptians were a secluded people

96

like the Chinese, says Herodotus, and the
Greeks by stealth drew all their information
from them; that the Egyptians were, at an early
date, undoubtedly a colony from India, as their
religion and civilization bear its ear-marks.

Modern Christanity is nothing but the pure
and spiritual doctrines taught by Christ, defiled
by paganism and superstition which have been
engrafted on it. All the forms and ceremo-
nies that were condemned by Christ had their
origin in the old pagan worship of idolatry.
The burning of the fire on the altar and the
burning of the incense had their origin in the
heathen temples thousands of years before the
birth of Christ. The nuns of the Roman
Catholic church are taken from the vestal
virgins, and the monks took the place of the
Roman augurs. The forms of churches and
cathredals were taken from those of the ancient
temples of the heathen gods. These temples
were first constructed for tombs, hence the idea
is still prevalent of burying the dead in the
churchyard or under the church floor or altar.

The Papal tiara, which is the crown worn by
the Popes of Rome, the so-called successors of
St. Peter, is the same as that worn by the gods
of ancient Assyria; so also are the tonsure and
surplice of the priests copied from the same
source, and the tinkling bells were used before
the altar of Jupiter Ammon, around the hem of
the robe of the high-priest of the Mosaic Jews;
and bells were also suspended in the pagodas,
and on the sacred table of the Buddhist. The
beads and rosaries were used by the Buddhist
monks for over five hundred years before the
birth of Christ, and the cross was in use for
many centuries before it was adopted as a
symbol of the Christian church, as a secret
sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts
of occultism. It is a Kabalistic sign, and
represents the oppositions and quaternary equi-
librium of the elements. It is also found in
the caves and ruins of the prehistoric man of
Europe, Asia and America.

The cross, the miter, the dalmatica, the cope
which the grand lamas (priests) wear while
performing certain ceremonies out of the
temple, the service with double choirs, the
psalmody, the exorcism, the censer suspended
from five chains and which can be opened or
closed at pleasure, the benedictions given by

the lamas by extending the right hand over the
heads of the faithful; the chaplet, ecclesiastical
celibacy, religions retirement, the worship of
saints, the fasts, the processions, the litanies,
the holy water, are all striking analogies that
are difficult to explain.

Father Bury, a Portuguese missionary, when
he beheld the Chinese bonzes (priests) using
rosaries, praying in an unknown tongue and
kneeling before images, exclaimed in astonish-
ment, "There is not a piece of dress, not a
sacerdotal function, not a ceremony of the
courts of Rome which the devil has not copied
in this country." (See Kesson, "The Cross
and Dragon," also Father Hue's " Recollections
of a Journey in Tartary, Thibet and China.")

The question at once rises, which was the
original? Did the Christian Catholics copy the
Buddhists, or did the Buddhists borrow from
them? The rock-cut monasteries and temples
in India, the records of China and .Ceylon, all
agree in placing it in favor of the Buddhists,
who existed not less than five hundred years
before Christ. Says Mr. Hardwicke, " It may
have been possible to have two spontaneous
growths, but more probable that the one is
copied from the other."

The Hindoos had their sacred river in the
Ganges, where they bathed and purified them-
selves; so the Jews had theirs in the river
Jordan. The Jews plagiarized their religion
from the Hindoos, as the Greeks did from the
Egyptians, and the Romans from the Greeks,
so that upon a careful scrutiny of all the ancient
religions, they bear the ear-marks of one origin in
India. And the similiarity of these religions
is so great that the modern Hindoos found
fault with the British government for allowing a
temple of Vishnu to fall to ruins, as they claim
that Chrisna and Christ are one and the same
person.

Religions, like thoughts, have one common
origin in the brain, and in both cases the ideas
are more borrowed than original. Symbolism
is often used to convey to the untutored mind
the idea of some great truth; but frequently the
mind cannot yet entirely comprehend it, so
that the common mind falls down and worships
the image instead of the true being which it is
intended to represent. As the mind becomes
more enlightened it sees and comprehends

97

these truths and then discards the idols and
images and looks up to and feels the great
truths in his own mind.

The Madonna is only the reproduction of
Isis under a new name, standing on the crescent
of the moon, holding her infant Horus in her
arms, which represented to the ancient Egyp-
tians that the moon followed the sun, and that
Iris, the Earth, with her child Horus, who was
the son of Osiris, the sun-god, the ruler of the
day, and the son followed the father; that night
preceded the day. Juvenal says, "That the
painters of Egypt made their living by paint-
ing the goddess Isis and her son Horus, and
exporting them to Italy, which was a very pop-
ular picture at the time of the introduction of
Christianity into Rome, and was by the priests
substituted for and called the Madonna, the
virgin Mary and child." (See "Ten Great
Religions," page 254 )

In the explorations of the ancient ruins at
Philae, Upper Egypt, which antedated the birth
of Christ, there has been found what was sup-
posed to be the holy family, when in reality it
proved to be Osiris, Isis and Horus, instead of
being Joseph, Mary and Jesus; and what is
still more remarkable, that in the old temples
of India they are represented as black, while
many of the ancient statues of Buddha are
represented with crisp, curly hair, with flat
noses and thick lips; nor can it be reasonably
doubted that a negro race once held pre-emi-
nence in India. Higgins writes, " There is
scarcely an old church in Italy where some
remains of the worship of the black virgin and
child are not to be met with." This is strong
evidence that they were taken either from India
or Egypt.

The Holy Communion or Lord's Supper.

The Holy Communion or Lord's Supper had
its commencement in the Bacchic mysteries,
where a communion cup was handed around
after supper, out of which all took a sip of
wine. It was called the cup of Agathoda^mon.
The Orphite rites were similar, where the com-
munion consisted of bread and wine in the
worship of nearly every deity of any import-
ance. Epiphanius tells a strange story about a
Gnostic sect that celebrated their eucharist,
having three vases of the finest and clearest

crystal which were filled with white wine, and
while the ceremony was going on, in the pres-
ence of all, it changed to a blood-red, then a
purple, and finally into an azure-blue color.
Then the magus handed the vases of wine to a
woman of the congregation, asking her to bless
it. Then it was poured into a larger vase, and
after much prayer and devotion it began to boil
and rise in the vase until it ran over.

During the mysteries wine which represented
Bacchus was used, he being of Indian origin.
Cicero mentioned him as a son of Thyone and
Nisus, and consequently Bacchus crowned with
ivy or kissos, is Chrisna, one of whose names
was Kissen, or Christ. The ancient Greeks
and Romans in the mysteries used wine to rep-
resent Bacchus and bread for Ceres.

The Deluge.

The ancient Chaldeans and Hindoos had
their Adam and Eve, their Noah and the flood,
while the Bible would lead us to believe that
the Garden of Eden was located on the
Euphrates, and that the ark rested on Mount
Ararat, while the Hindoo tradition places it on
the Himalayas. It cannot be denied that man
must have had a beginning, and that there has
been a deluge in Central Asia there can be no
doubt, the tradition of which can be traced to
every country, and which, according to Bunsen,
happened about the year 10,000 B. C, and had
nought to do with the mythical Noah or Nuah.
A partial cataclysm occurs at the close of every
geological "age" of the world, which does not
destroy it, but only changes its general appear-
ance. While some portions are submerged,
others are elevated. And the fossils found
lead us to believe that new races of men, new
animals and a new flora evolve from the disso-
lution of the preceding ones.

The Hindoo tradition says that Vaivasvata,
who in the Bible becomes Noah, was saved by
a little fish, which turned out to be an avater
of Vishnu. The fish warns that just man that
the globe is about to be submerged, that all the
inhabitants must perish, and orders him to con-
struct a vessel in which he shall embark with
all his family. When the ship is finished he
goes on board with his entire family, taking
with him the seeds of all plants and a pair of
every kind of animal; then the heavens open

98

and the rains fall and the entire surface of the
earth is covered with water. A gigantic fish,
armed with a horn, places itself at the head of
the ark, and the holy man, following its orders,
attaches a cable to its horn, and the fish guides
the ship for forty days and nights through the
raging elements, and finally landed the ark on
the summit of the Himalayas; yet among all
the ancient Egyptian writings there is no men-
tion of a deluge, therefore it is evident that it
was confined to Central Asia, if it ever oc-
curred at all; and as the writings of the ancient
Hindoos are much older than those of the
Bible, it most probably was taken from the
Hindoo by the Chaldeans, and from them by
the Jews. But it is, in all probability, an alle-
gory representing the incarnation of the spirit
in the flesh.

Noah is the Chaldean for Nuah, who is the
king of the humid principle, the spirit moving
or floating on the waters in his ark, the latter
being the emblem of the argha or moon, the
feminine principle. Noah is the "spirit " fall-
ing into matter, so we find him as soon as he
descended to the earth, planting a vineyard,
drinking wine and getting drunk on it; /'. e., the
pure spirit becoming intoxicated as soon as it is
finally imprisoned in matter.

The dagon or fish-man, found engraven in
stone and metal of the ancients, had its origin
in the idea that man sprang from fish. The
Japanese have a singular idol formed out of the
body and tail of a fish, fastened upon the head
and shoulders of a monkey, which gave rise to
the idea of mermaids. "The Hindoo god,
Vishnu, assumed the form of a fish with a hu-
man head, in order to reclaim the Vedas, lost
during the deluge. Having enabled Visvami-
tra to escape with all his tribe in the ark, but,
pitying weak and erring humanity, he remained
with them for some time, taught them how to
build houses and cultivate the land. He re-
mained on land in the day-time and went to
the ocean to pass his nights. "One day he
plunged into the water and returned no more,
for the earth had covered itself with vegetation,
fruit and cattle."

This fable of Vishnu disguised as a fish gives
weight to the sacred books of the Hindoos, es-
pecially in view of the fact that the Vedas and
Manu reckon more than twenty-five thousand

years of existence, as proved by the most serious
as well as the most authentic documents. Few
people, says the learned Halhed, have their
annals more authentic or more serious than the
Hindoos.

The big story of Jonah and the whale had its
origin in the same idea, that man sprang from
out of the fish. Vishnu is evidently the Adam
Kadmon of the Kabalists, for Adam is the Lo-
gos, or the first anointed, as Adam second is
the King Messiah; Adam Kadmon was an ema-
nation of Jehovah; and Adam the first man was
the first materialized spirit of man clothed in
flesh; having lost the power to dematerialize
was forced to live in the flesh on the earth. Be-
ing androgynous, as all angels are, and falling into
deep sleep or trance, the female principle was
separated by drawing her life principle out of
his side and materialized in the material form
of a woman, called Eve in the Bible.

Lakmy, or Lakshmi, the passive or female
counterpart of Vishnu, the creator and pre-
server, is also called Ada Maya. She is the
"mother of the world," Damatri, the Venus
aphrodite of the Greeks; she is also called Isis
and Eve. While Venus was born from the sea-
foam, Lakmy springs out from the water at the
churning of the sea. When born she is so
beautiful that all the gods fall in love with her.
The Jews, borrowing their types wherever they
could get them, made their first woman after
the pattern of Lakmy. It is a curious coinci-
dence that Viracocha, the Supreme Being of
ancient Peru, means, when literally translated,
" foam of the sea."

In the oldest Hindoo book, Manu, there is
a passage that says, "That this world issued
out of darkness; the subtle elementary princi-
ples produced the vegetable seed, which ani-
mated first the plants. From plants, life passed
into fantastical bodies, which were born in the
waters; then, through a series of forms of
plants, worms, insects, fish, serpents, tortoises,
cattle and wild animals, until finally man was
evolved. This is in accordauce with the laws
of evolution, as laid down by Darwin and
Huxley.

"The object of all religions," says the Per-
sian Hafiz, "is alike." All men seek their
beloved, and is not all the world love's dwell-
ing ? Why talk of a mosque or a church ?

99

Hindoo teachers say, " The creed of the lover
differs from other creeds. God is the creed of
those who love Him, and to do good is best
with the followers of every faith." He alone
is a true Hindoo whose heart is just, and he ;
only is a good Mussulman whose life is pure. '
"Remember Him who has seen numberless
Mahomets, Vishnus, Vivas, come and go, and
who is not found by one who forgets or turns

from the poor." "The common standpoint
of the three religions," says the Chinese, "is
that they insist on the banishment of evil de-
sire and do good."

So we see in all religious beliefs a commin-
gling of their forms and ceremonies, which
goes far to establish the fact that all religions
must have had their origin from a belief in a
state of future existence.

CHAPTER XI.

THE EIGHT GREAT RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD. BRAHMINISM, BUDDHISM, ZORO-

ASTERISM, MOSAICISM, CHRISTIANITY. MOHAMMEDANISM,

LAOTESEISM AND MODERM SPIRITUALISM.

Comparative Theology, like comparative
anatomy, comparative geography, and compar-
ative philology, is yet in its infancy. It is a
science which consists in the study of the facts
of human history and their relation to each
other. It does not dogmatize; it observes,
and it deals only with phenomena and facts
that relate to the spiritual nature in man.

By comparing the various religions of man-
kind we see wherein they differ, wherein they
agree, and what appears true and what false.
It shows both sides of religion and that as it
has advanced with civilization, it has lost much
of its severity, and that a higher religion and
better morals must find root in the decaying
soils of past religious beliefs and traditions of
God, duty and immortality of the soul.

The duty of comparative theology is to do
justice to all the religions of mankind, to strike
out all debasing superstitions and arrive at the
truth. All religions teach the immortality of
the soul, future rewards and punishments, a
hell and a heaven. The basis of all religions
is spiritism; that the spirit of the departed lives
and has its existence in the atmosphere sur-
rounding us.

The ablest writers on comparative theology
are Max Muller, Bunsen, Burnouf, Dollinger,
Hardwicke, St. Hilaire, Duncker, Baur, Renan,
Cox, and J. F. Clarke, author of the "Ten
Great Religions." These writers show great
learning and have stripped mythology and the-
ology of its outward forms and sacred robes,
showing, beyond a doubt, that religions, like
civilizations, are the outgrowth of older reli-
gions and civilizations; that it comes from
within; that it is a part of man's nature to be
religious, so that he has often been called a

religious animal, as no other animal offers up
prayers or supplications to the Great Spirit of
the unseen universe.

All the principal religions, like the human
race, appear to have had their origin in Asia,
and have spread thence over the whole civilized
world. Each race has adopted a certain relig-
ion that has had much to do in shaping its civ-
ilization. Research has shown that India is the
mother of civilization and religion; that, far
back in the night of time, the songs of the Reg-
Veda were written in Sanscrit. It is the oldest
written language, and is the mother of the
Greek language, which, from its perfection, was
claimed by the Greeks as the language of the
gods — while the modern Christians, adhering to
the idea of Moses and creation, make the He-
brew the language of God as given to Adam
and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

There appears to be a material connection
between language and religion. As language is
the medium through which the soul communi-
cates its thoughts and feelings to its fellow-
man, so, in the growth and development of
language, we are enabled to trace the early
ideas and views of primitive man far back in
the past, long before there was ever a written
language, for words were used long before they
were reduced to writing, so that the philologist
is enabled to trace back the Aryan religion to a
period long before it separated into different
races. So that by the use of words, generic in
their nature, that are to be found in common
use, by different races speaking different lan-
guages— the same or similar words are used to
express the same thing or ideas — it is evident
that far back in the past these different races
spoke a common language; and when the gen-

101

eric words relate to God or religion, then it fs
evidence that their religion was about the same.
So in this way the human family has been
traced back to the different origins and centers
from which it diverged. Each of these diverg-
ing races carries with them these generic words,
with their meaning about the same, though
they may and often do change the nomencla-
ture of these generic words, as the dialects and
provincialisms tend to give the phonetic sounds
to them.

"If," says Max Muller, " we would learn to
be charitable in the interpretation of the lan-
guage of other religions, we shall more easily
learn to be charitable in the interpretation of
our own language. We shall no longer try to
force a literal interpretation on words and sen-
tences in our sacred books, which, if interpre-
ted literally, must lose their original purport
and their spiritual truth." If we can make
allowance for mouth and lips and breath, we
can surely make the same allowance for words
and their utterance, for all languages have their
dialects. There is a high and there is a low
dialect; there is a broad and there is a narrow
dialect; there are dialects for men and for wo-
men and for children; for clergy and for laity;
for the noisy streets and for the still and quiet
life of the closets of students; and as the child
advances to manhood it has to learn its lan-
guage and its religion.

The religion of the nursery, with baby talk,
ghost and witch stories, implants a supersti-
tious religion which requires a severe mental
struggle to outgrow, and some are so effemin-
ate that they never are able to throw it off.
Therefore the mass of mankind speak the lan-
guage of their fathers and adopt their ideas of
politics and business, and cling to the religion
of their mother; therefore the masses move
slowly in politics and still slower in religion.
The early expressions of religion were no doubt
frequently childish and mythical, which has
tended to confuse the scholar in arriving at
what was the real religious sentiment. It is
impossible to express abstract ideas except by
metaphor, and it is not too much to say that
the whole dictionary of ancient religion is
made up of metaphors, and consequently there
is a constant struggle in the mind to free the
material from the spiritual.

By the aid of comparative philology man
has been enabled to trace the leading races and
religions back to three centers in Asia — the
Aryan, the Semitic and the Turanic. The
Aryan includes the Hindoo and the European
races, for that reason they are called Indo-
European, and some call them the Indo-Ger-
manic. I am inclined to believe Indo-Euro-
pean is, perhaps, the best term, as it leads to
less confusion. This race at a very early date
broke up into four parts. The Indians or Hin-
doos went southeast into India by the way of
the Punjaub, while the Iranians settled in Per-
sia, and reach through Hindoo Koos mountains
east to the country now known as Afghanistan,
and to the Himalaya mountains, and west into
the Caucasus mountains, which was at one
time supposed to be the home of the white
race, who are often called the Caucausian race.
The Greeks and Romans entered Europe by
crossing the Hellespont. ./Eneas fled from
Troy and settled in Italy. The Celts, Teutons
and Sclavs entered Europe from the north side
of the Black Sea.

The Hindoo branch of the Aryan family still
adheres to its old religion, and in the belief of
spirits and of the spirituality of God in the
shape of a Divine mind or Sensorium, from
whence all divine intelligence is drawn. And
their religion is that of Brahminism and Bud-
dhism. Their sacred books or bible is the
Vedas, written in the Sanscrit, and from this
language the philologist is enabled to trace the
origin of the Greek, Latin, and the German
and Anglo-Saxon and Engiish languages.

It is evident that the Semitic religion of
Abraham dates far back into the past, long
before the flood, which was the submerging of
some portion of the Eastern hemisphere, per-
haps a submerged continent which is now called
Lemuria. It lies to the south of India, and is
where some writers locate the origin of man on
earth.

The Bible says, "And Joshua said unto
all the people; thus saith the Lord God of
Israel : your fathers dwelt on the other side of
the flood in old times, even Terah, the father
of Abraham and the father of Nachor, and
they served other gods. * * * Now, there-
fore, fear the Lord and serve Him in sincerity
and truth; and put away the gods which your

102

fathers served on the other side of the flood
and in Egypt and serve ye the Lord/'

And it is evident from this declaration of
Joshua that before the flood they had other
gods, and it might have been that they belong-
ed to the same stock or root as the Aryan
races, who had many gods. The Brahmins
claim that they got their knowledge of God
from the Pitri, who lived before the flood.
They were spirits who returned to earth to teach
man after the flood. Here we get a glimpse of
the remoteness of man "and his religion, and
here was the beginning of the Hebrew race and
religion; the idea of a Jehovah and a jealous,
revengeful God, a monotheisthic God without
wife or children, to whom Christianity has given
a son equal to the father, and Mohammedan-
ism has given Him a prophet who has charge
of His earthly affairs and of the admission into
Paradise.

The Semitic nations have, on the contrary, a
different word for their deity, El, which means
strong, and throughout all the Semitic races it
is a term applied to their deity. In the He-
brew we have the word Beth-El, the house of
God; ha-El, the strong one.

" El was the name for God in Babylon, and
was worshiped at Byblis by the Phoenicians,
and he was called the sun of heaven and earth.
His father was the son of Elium, the most high
God, who had been killed by wild animals.
The son of Elium, who succeeded him, was
dethroned and at last slain by his own son El,
whom Philo identified with the Greek Kronos,
and is represented as the presiding deity of the
planet Saturn, with the name of El. Philo
connected the name with Elohim, the plural of
Eloah. In the battle between El and his
father, the aliens of El, he says, ' were called
Elohim, as those who were with Kronos were
called Kronivi.' "

Eloah is used in the Bible synonymous with
El. It means gods in general or false gods,
while in Arabic ilah without the article means
a god in general, with the article Al-ilah or
Allah becomes the name of the God of Moham-
med. Hence we find through all the Semitic
races different terms for God, which have bfcen
changed but little from El, the ibylonian
name for God.

The majority of the writers 01 philology

claim that the Semitic language had its origin
in a different root. That it sprang from some
wild, ape-like man family or group, far differ-
ent from that of the Aryan.

Elyon. which in Greek means the highest, is
used in the old Testament as a predicate of
God. It occurs also by itself as a name of
Jehovah. Melchizedek is called emphatically
the priest of El-Elyon — the priest of the Most
High God. It is evidently derived from a
Phoenician word, Elium, the High God, the
Father of Heaven, who was the father of El.
The word Jehovah or Jahveh is supposed to be
derived from a Chaldean word, Ido, God. It
is claimed by Sir Henry Rawlinson to be found
on inscriptions in the ruins of Babylon. Yet it
may be of Hebrew origin — after their separation
from the main branch of the Semitic race — and,
therefore was a local word, which the Jews used,
in the sense of the one true God. Abraham
worshiped God as Jehovah, a«d philologists
differ as to whether it is of Hebrew origin.

The Semitic nations, Assyrians, Babylonians,
Phoenicians, Carthagenians, the Moabites, Phil-
istians, and, sometimes, the Jews, called their
great or supreme God, Bel, or Baal. Before
the flood, he was called Bel. Though origin-
ally one Baal, he became divided into many
divine personalities through the influence of
local worship. So we hear of a Baal-tsur,
Baal-tsidon, Baal-tare, originally the Baal of
Tyre, of Sidon, and of Tarsus. At Shechem.
Baal was worshiped as Baal barith, supposed to
mean the God of treaties. At Ekron, the Phil-
istians worshiped him as Baal-zebub, the lord
of flies (hence comes our Beelzebub); while the
Moabites, and the Jews, too, knew him also
by the name of Baal-peor. On the Phoenician
coins, Baal is called Baal-shamayim, the Baal
of heaven, which is the Beelsamen of Philo,
identified by him with the sun, and makes him
a sun- god.

When the ancient Babylonians spoke of
Belus, the Supreme God, cutting off his own
head, that the blood flowing from it might be
mixed with the dust out of which men were
formed, sounds horrible and absurd; but, by
this myth, they only convey the idea that there
is in man an element of divine life — that we
are also his offspring. The ancient Egyptians
convey about the same idea in the seventeenth

103

chapter of thier "ritual," that the sun mutilated
himself, and that from the stream of his blood
he created beings. And Moses conveys the
same idea in Genesis when he says that, "God
formed man from the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life."

The Assyrians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, ;
Hebrews, Syrian tribes, Arabs and Carthage-
nians all belonged to the Semitic race. It is
the only race that was ever a rival of the Aryan
race. The Semitic race has been great on land
and sea. From the valley of the Euphrates
and that of the Tigris, its sons carried their
peculiar civilization west to the Mediterranean
sea, whose commerce at one time was under
the control of the Phoenicians, whose ships ex-
plored the coast and made settlements at Car-
thage and Cadiz, and sailed as far north as
Great Britain, and circumnavigated Africa two
thousand years before Vasco de Gama.

The languages of the Semitic nations is very
closely related, being almost the dialects of a
single tongue, the difference between them be-
ing hardly greater than between the different
dialects of the German race.

The Phoenician language is almost identical
with that of the Hebrew, and the Phoenicians
had the Jewish love of commerce, trade, and
making money. By some historians they have
been called the ancient Jews of the Mediterra-
nean. This race has given to man the alpha-
bet, the Bible, the Koran, commerce, and the
greatest military genius of the past, Hannibal.

The peculiarities of these races have been in
the structure of their language and the forms of
their religion, which consisted mainly of mono-
theism— a belief in the existence of one per-
sonal God only — while the belief of the Aryan
races was that of polytheism — a belief in the
plurality of the gods or invisible beings supe-
rior to man, and having an agency in the gov-
ernment of the world, and who could assist
mortals, a kind of ancestral worship of the
spirits of ancestors, friends, heroes and states-
men, who became gods.

• ' The highest God [of the Aryans] received
the same name in the ancient mythology of India,
Greece, Italy and Germany, and they retained
that name, whether worshiped on the Hima-
layan mountains (Olympus) or among the oaks
of Dodona, on the Capitol, or in the forest of

Germany. * * * We have in the Yedas
the invocation Dyans-pitar, the Greek,
i iarep, the Latin Jupiter, which means in all
three languages what it meant before these
languages were torn asunder — it means Heav-
enly Father. It did not mean idolatry, or
nature-worship, but the Great Spirit that dwelt
in the sky, the source of all life and light, from
which all intelligence and good has emana-
ted." (See Max Muller's " Science of Reli-
gion.")

The ancient Greek and Roman religion is
evidently of Aryan origin, as it is illustrated in
Homer, Hesiod and Virgil. They believed in
tutelary and ancestral spirits, though their
religion had become much mixed with that of
Egypt and with the Semitic religion, which
they introduced into their mythology.

There have been two streams of religion
flowing through two channels; one the Aryan
and the other the Semitic; one from the plains
of the Euphrates to the Jordan and to the
Mediterranean, while the other has flown from
the Indus to the Thames, through the middle
of Europe, among the blonde race, while the
former has been engrafted in the dark races in
the south of Europe, in a modified form of the
monotheistic Semitic religion — the Roman
Catholic religion.

While, in a still more modified form, it has
spread over the whole of middle and northern
Europe, where it is known as Protestantism,
which is more liberal in its views and loses
much of its monotheistic nature and becomes
more spiritual. The anthropomorphic idea of
an individual God meets with but little favor
from the Indo-Germanic races, who are fast
falling into the spiritual belief, which was the
original religion of the Aryan race, before it
became engrafted on Christianity, which was a
departure from the monotheistic belief of the
Semitic races. As the Christian religion is
more Brahminical than Mosaical, it is a rein-
carnation of Chrisna or Buddha, and it is more
humane and not tyrannical, like that of the
Mosaic.

The Hindoo branch of the Aryan family,
like the Hebrew branch of the Semitic family,
has produced two religious books, or two reli-
gions, one being the outgrowth of the other.
The Hindoos have given rise to Brahminism,

104

and Buddhism is its outgrowth. The He-
brew religion had its origin in Mosaicism, and
its outgrowth is Christianity. The Ira-
nians— the ancient Persians — a branch of the
Aryan race, had another religion known as Zo-
roasterism, which is found in the Zend-Avesta,
and draws much from the old Vedas, the sacred
books of the Brahmins. There is still another
branch of the Semitic race, the Arabs, which
has given to the world another religion known
as Mohammedanism, the outgrowth of the
old Bible, or rather the old Testament, which
has respect for Christ as a prophet, but differs
with Christianity as to his divine origin.

The old monotheisthic doctrine of Moses,
taught in the old Testament, that there is but
one God and Moses is his prophet, is now em-
braced by the entire Semitic race, so that prac-
tically this race has again returned to its orig-
inal belief in one God — a man-like God, as
Moses says, "God created man in his own
image," and it can therefore be claimed that
he is in the shape and form of a man, and this
man-like God punishes as well as offers rewards
and grants forgiveness of sin through the influ-
ence of the Prophet. So thousands flock to
Mecca, as Christians do to Jerusalem, to do
homage to these sacred places.

Christianity was an improvement on Mosaic-
ism; so was Buddhism an improvement on
Brahminism; and both tended to purify and
better the condition of the religious sentiment
of the people. Christ, though a Jew, was
rejected by the Jews, but his religious senti-
ment found lodgment among the gentiles — the
Indo-European races — but never was very pala-
table to the Semitic races, which clung to the
monotheistic idea of a man-like God. The
doctrine of the trinity was something they
could never comprehend, and so they readily
fell into the Mohammedan religion, as enun-
ciated by its great prophet, who said, "There
is but one God and Mohammed is his prophet,"
while the Jews claim there is but one God and
Moses is his prophet.

The Assyrians, Babylonians, Phoenicians and
Carthagenians had a similar religion. They
believed in a Supreme God, called by different
names — Ira, Bel, Set, Hadad, Moloch, Che-
mosh, Jaoh El, Adon and Asshur. All be-
lieved in subordinate and secondary beings

emanating from this Supreme Being, who were
his manifestations to the world, and who were
the rulers of the planets. Like other panthe-
istic religions, the custom prevailed among the
Semitic nations of promoting first one and then
the other deity to be the supreme object of
worship. Among the Assyrians, as among the
Egyptians, the gods were often arranged in
triads, as that of Anu, Bel and Ao. Anu or
Aannes wore the head of a fish, Bel wore the
horns of a bull, and Ao was represented by a
serpent. Moses is frequently represented as
having a ram's horn on the side of his head.

Brahminism, like the Church of Rome, es-
tablished a system of sacramental salvation in
the hands of a sacred order. Buddhism, like Pro-
testantism, revolted and established a doctrine
of individual salvation, based on personal char-
acter. Brahminism, like the Church of Rome,
teaches an exclusive Spiritualism, glorifying pe-
nances and martyrdom, and considers the body
the enemy of the soul. But Buddhism and
Protestantism accept nature and its laws, and
make it a religion of humanity as well as of
devotion. There may be some exceptions, but
the rule generally applies.

The Roman Catholic Church and Brahmin-
ism place the essence of religion in sacrifices.
The daily sacrifice of mass is the central fea-
ture of the former, while Protestantism and
Buddhism save the soul by teaching. In the
Roman Church the sermon is subordinate to
mass, while in Protestantism and Buddhism
sermons are the main instruments by which
souls are saved.

Brahminism is a system of inflexible castes;
the priestly order is made distinct and supreme.
So in Romanism the priesthood alone consti-
tute the church, while in Buddhism and Pro-
testantism the laity regain their rights. Bud-
dhism in Asia, like Protestantism in Europe
and America, is a revolt of nature against spirit,
of humanity against caste, of individual free-
dom against the despotism of an order, of sal-
vation by faith against salvation by sacrament.

While Buddhism is often called the Protest-
antism of the East, it has many of the forms
and ceremonies of Romanism. The chanting
of prayers, counting of beads, burning of in-
cense and candles before the image of the vir-
gin Mary, called the queen of heaven, having

105

an infant in her arms and holding a cross.
While Buddhism makes God or the good and
heaven to be equivalent to nothing or repose,
it intensifies and exaggerates evil. Though
heaven is a blank, hell is a very solid reality.
It is present and future too; everything in the
thousand hells of Buddhism is painted as viv-
idly as in the hell of Dantes. God has disap-
peared from the universe and in his place is'
only the inexorable law, which grinds on for-
ever. It punishes and rewards, but has no
love in it. It is only dead, cold, hard, cruel,
unrelenting law. Yet Buddhists are not athe-
ists any more than a child who has never heard
of God. A child cannot be either deist or
atheist, because it has no theology.

The platonic philosophy was able to grasp
and hold the idea of God and man, the infinite
and finite, the eternal and the temporal.
Christianity recognizes God as the infinite and
eternal, but recognizes also the world of time
and space as real. Man exists as well as God;
we love God, we must love man too. Brahmin-
ism loves God, but not man; it has piety, but
no humanity. Buddhism loves man, but not
God; it has humanity, no piety; if it has piety
it is by a beautiful want of logic, its heart being
wiser than its head.

Christianity takes all the good there is in the
Buddhist doctrine and gives man a live God,
a soul, a heaven, and a hereafter. Buddhism
makes man struggle up to God, while Christian-
ity makes God come down to man, and unites
all in one vast brotherhood.

For further information I refer you to the
"Esoteric Buddhism," by Sinnett:

"The one universal spirit comprehending
eternal matter, motion, space and duration,
evolves the boundless cosmos, comprising
countless solar systems, each consisting of seven
planetary chains of seven planets each.

"Evolution takes a like course through each
planetary chain, the members of which are
intimately bound together by subtile currents
and forces. The passage of individual spiritual
entities round this chain constitutes the evolu-
tion of man, which is still in progress. There
are seven kingdoms of nature. Of the three
lowest Western science knows nothing. The
mineral, vegetable, animal and man complete
the list, the latter including beings of higher

organization than we are yet familiar with.
The wave of existence makes seven rounds
through the planetary chain, each sphere being
fitted for a different phase of progress, regarding
both animate and inanimate nature. Darwin's
c Missing Link ' is picked up here. Man,
whose destiny is the principal object of inquiry,
on each round develops in each sphere seven
great root races, each producing seven sub-
races, again divided into seven branches, and it
is well enough to know that we are of the
fourth round, fifth race and seventh sub-race;
or, in other words, just beyond the middle
point of our cyclic career. Considering that
the individual nomad makes its progress by
successive incarnations of not less than two to
each branch race, and that the evolution of our
present root-race began about one million years
ago, the magnitude and duration of the scheme
begins to dawn upon the mind, and on learning
that beyond the seven rounds of each planetary
chain lies the solar, and beyond that universal
cycle, imagination retires baffled from the at-
tempt to realize the plan.

"Seven distinct principles enter into the
constitution of man; the body, vitality, the
astral body, the animal soul, the human soul,
the spiritual soul, and spirit. The first needs
no explanation. The second is matter in its
aspect as force. Though immaterial, its affinity
for gross matter prevents its separation from it
except by instant translation to some other
particle or mass. We get the idea in the
modern theory of the ' Persistence of Force.'
The astral body is the eternal duplicate of the
physical body — its original design. It guides
vitality in its work on the physical particles,
and causes it to build up the shape which these
assume. Query: Has this any bearing on
that stumbling block of modern biology, the
subsequent determination of apparently identi-
cal embryos? These three lower principles are
of the earth earthy, perishable in their nature
as a single entity, and done with by man at his
death. The animal soul is the first of the
principles which attaches to man's higher
nature. It is the seat of the desires and the
vehicle of will, influencing, and influenced by
the fifth principle, the human soul. This is
the seat of reason and memory, and in the
majority of mankind is not yet fully developed.

o» -nre
UNIVERSITY

106

It follows as a matter of course that the sixth
principle, the spiritual soul, is yet in embyro.
Yet the sixth and also the seventh principle, or
pure spirit, inheres in man's nature, and the
human soul is capable of assimilating them in
its progress to perfection. This seven-fold
nature of man is the key to his destiny. At
death the three lower principles are finally
abandoned by that which is really man himself,
the Ego, and the remaining principles escape
to Devachan, the world of spirits. A contest
ensues, the fourth principle drawing the fifth
earthward, while the sixth and seventh attract
it upward. The lower instincts, impulses and
recollections of the fifth adhere to the fourth,
while its most elevated and spiritual portions
cling to the sixth and seventh. Devachan is a
state, not a locality, in which the soul experi-
ences a subjective existence. The karma of
physical existence, that is, the affinities for good
and evil, generated by man during objective
life, determine the duration and character of the
subjective life. Like earthly existence it has
its season of infancy, prime and exhaustion,
passing through oblivion, not into death, but
birth, reincarnation and the resumption of
action which begets a new karma, to be worked
out in another term of devachan. So the
process goes on from race to race, from sphere
to sphere, from round to round, until perfected
humanity attains its destiny in the repose of
Nirvana; not the Nirvana of popular miscon-
ception— annihilation — but the sublime state of
conscious rest in Omniscience. 'The dew-
drop slips into the shining sea.'

"Fantastic and absurd as much of this
' Theory of Nature' may appear, it cannot fail
in some respects to arouse earnest attention.
Is it nothing that ancient religion and modern
science clasp hands across the interval of thirty
centuries ?

"The most prominent and yet unsettled
theories of modern thought, the nebular
hypothesis, evolution, the descent of man, du-
bious problems in biology, ethnology and kin-
dred sciences are incorporated with and made
a part of an ancient religo-philosophic system,
and besides the grand sweep of these Oriental
generalizations, the speculations of modern
science seems timid, tentative and feeble.

"Is it possible that our Western civilization

does not embrace all that is known of nature
and man ? That along other lines of inquiry,
and following methods strange and unsatisfactory
to us, other men have through centuries pushed
their investigations and stored up the results in
the archives of secret associations; and that
now, when modern thought, released • from
mediaeval fetters, is preparing the way for the
^recognition of truths in nature, hitherto un-
known or denounced, these stores are to be
opened to our view to prove the coherence of
all truth?"

The religions of Persia, Egypt, Greece and
Rome have come to an end, having shared the
fate of their civilization, and while Brahma,
Buddha, India and Islam have been arrested,
Christianity has taken a milder form, and a
new religion called modern Spiritualism has
sprung up, which in the last quarter of a century
has spread over the whole civilized world, mak-
ing inroads upon all other religions. It now
numbers not less than twenty-five millions, of
the most intelligent advanced thinkers of the
age, while the Christian religions vary from one
hundred and twenty to one hundred and seventy
millions, the Buddhist from two hundred and
twenty-two to three hundred and twenty mill-
ions, the Mohammedans from one hundred and
ten to one hundred and sixty millions, the
Brahmins from one hundred and eleven to one
hundred and thirty millions, the Jews from
four to six millions. That of the Chinese re-
ligions we have no figures to go by.

M. Hubner gives the following religious sta-
tistics, comprising the leading religions of the
world:

christians, 400,000,000.

Roman Catholics 200,000,000

Protestants 1 10,000,000

Greeks 80,000,000

Various other sects 10,000,000

NON-CHRISTIANS, 992,500,000.

Buddhists 500,000,000

Brahmins 150,000,000

Mohammedans 80,000,000

Israelites 6,500,000

Unknown different religions.... 240,000,000

Unknown religions 16,000,000

Total 1,392,500,000

107

CALlf

It is generally conceded that the teachings
of Confucius, which are rather a philosophy
than a religion, are among the oldest we have
record of, while that of Lao-tse and Tao-ism,
its contemporary, was founded on that of spir-
itism. Herodotus, who traveled in Egypt 450
B. C, gives us an account of the monuments
in that country, in which were found China
ware, with Chinese mottos, which Rosellini
believes to have been imported from China by
kings contemporary with or before the time of
Moses. There have been similar vases found
in the ruins of Troy, that go to prove that
China was a highly civilized nation long before
the siege of Troy, and if Chinese history is to
be relied on, it will take us back into the gray
mist of the past some twenty-five thousand
years, and it is now generally admitted that
Confucius lived at least five hundred and fifty
hears before the Christian era.

Chronologists differ as to which is the oldest
civilization, Egypt or India. The. Greeks and
Romans trace back to Egypt, and for a long
period of time it was thought that Egypt was
the cradle of civilization. But learned philol-
ogists and ethnologists contend that India is
the oldest in the arts and has the oldest reli-
gions. Others again claim that they are differ-
ent and, perhaps, spontaneous developments.
Plato gives us an intimation that the Egyptians
had knowledge of the submerged continent of
Atlantis. And from the similarity of the tem-
ples and pyramids in Central America it might
have been possible, at a very remote period,
that these countries had intercourse with each
other.

Every religion has been an outgrowth of pre-
ceding religious faiths. Back of all religions
and civilizations there is an older religion and
civilization. Palestine had been colonized by
Arab tribes from Idumea and Phoenicia long
before it was invaded by the children of Israel
under the leadership of Joshua and Moses.
Eventually they became more or less consoli-
dated as the kingdoms of Samaria and Judea.
Their fables, legends, traditions and family
religions were more or less amalgamated and
nationalized under the name of Judea.

" The greater part of the gods of all nations
were ancient heroes, famous for their achieve-
ments and their worthy deeds, and were such

as kings, generals and founders of cities. To
these some added the splendid and useful ob-
jects in the natural world, as the sun, moon
and stars, and some were not ashamed to pay
divine honors to mountains, rivers, trees, etc.
The worship of these deities consisted in cere-
monies, sacrifices and prayers. The ceremo-
nies were for the most part absurd and ridicu-
lous, and thoroughly debasing, obscene and
cruel. The prayers were truly insipid and void
of piety, both in form and matter. The priests
who presided over this worship basely abused
their authority to impose on the people. The
whole pagan system had not the least efficacy
to produce and cherish virtuous emotions in the
soul, because the gods and goddesses were pat-
terns of vice, and the priests bad men, and the
doctrines false." (See Mosheim's "Church
History.")

The narrow creeds excluding God, the Fath-
er, from any communication with the great
majority of human beings, is revolting to com-
mon sense and humanity. Selecting a few of his
chosen children to be saved and leaving the
rest to perish in their ignorance, is an extremely
selfish view of an intelligent God. He caused
some to be born in India, some in China, and
others in Europe, Africa, America, and in the
far-distant islands of the sea; they are all
His children and they are all as dear to him as
are the Jews. He speaks to each of them
through the same channel, whether he be a
Brahmin, Buddhist, Chinese, Mohammedan,
Christian, pagan or heathen; " In Him we live
and move and have our being." He is above
all, and through all, and in all.

"Abraham," says Max Muller, "was the
first we have any record of who could raise his
soul to the contemplation of a Perfect Being
above all, and the source of all. With pas-
sionate love he adored this Most High God,
maker of heaven and earth." The mind of
Abraham rose to a clear conception of the
unity of God as excluding all other divine be-
ings; yet if we will examine the expressions of
this great Arab chief, as described in the book
of Genesis, we can see at once that he was a
great medium and a theosophist, who held con-
verse with the spirits, the same as our modern
mediums. When they told him to sacrifice
his^on Isaac he was ready to do it under the

108

firm belief that it was the voice of God, when
he heard another voice that told him not to
kill Isaac, that there was a ram tangled in the
vines near by. This was a clear case of clair-
audience.

Mr. Renan says the Indo-European race,
distracted by the variety of the universe, never
by itself arrived at monotheism. The Semitic
race, on the other hand, guided by its firm
and sure sight, instantly unmasked divinity,
and without reflection or reasoning attained the
purest form of religion that humanity has ever
known. The Hebrews, like the Assyrians and
Babylonians, were divided between monothe-
ism and sabacism or star-worship. The Se-
mitic, like the Aryan races, had a confused
idea of one Supreme God behind all the sec-
ondary deities.

Pure monotheism appears to be a direct reve-
lation to Moses; and even in Jehovah we are
led to believe that Moses gave him more of the
attributes of a big Moses or man than that of
an All Wise and Supreme God.

Christianity, as soon as it became the reli-
gion of a no-Semitic race, lost much of its mo-
notheism and tended to pantheism. They
added to God "all above," and the God
"with all," the God "in us all." The new
Testament is full of this kind of pantheism,
God in man as well as God with man. Jesus
made the step forward from God with man to
God in man; " I am in them, thou in me."
The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is this idea of
God, who is not only will and power, not only
wisdom and law, but love of God, who desires
communion and intercourse with his children,
and who, therefore, comes and dwells with
them. Mohammed teaches a God above us;
Moses teaches a God above us and yet with us;
Jesus teaches God above us, God with us and
God in us.

Christianity teaches of a Supreme Being who
is a pure spirit. It is a more spiritual religion
than Brahminism, for the latter has passed on
into polytheism and idolatry. Christianity is

more flexible and is more capable of becoming
able to supply the religious wants of all races
of men, therefore it is fitted to become the
universal religion of man, it being a composite
made up of all the previous religions; and con-
sequently it is an improvement on all the other
religions.

Jesus Christ was a man born a seer, a pro-
phet and endowed with remarkable mediumis-
tic gifts, which were improved by development
by the assistance of the spirits. He was mis-
understood by his immediate followers, and
was imputed to be something superior to man,
and his deeds were exaggerated by their unrea-
soning credulity. Elevated above the multi-
tude by his superior spirituality, he was quali-
fied to be a teacher of the sublime inspirations
which flowed into his receptive mind from wise
and pure spirits, who made him their mouth-
piece to the masses. Pure and spiritual in his
life, he was prepared for rapid progress as a
spirit; and now, with other ancient prophets
and exalted men, he holds a place among celes-
tial spirits, having experienced his second spir-
itual birth and become a dweller in the third
sphere.

Peter, in Acts ii: 22, says: "I see in Jesus
of Nazareth a man approved of by God among
you by miracles, wonders and signs that God
did in him." " I and my father are one;" one
in purpose, one in spirit. He worshiped in
spirit, and he never lost sight of the spiritual
world. God did not speak to him from with-
out. He feels that God is in him. He needed
no sound of thunder, like Moses; no revealing
tempest, like Job; no familiar oracle, like the
Grecian sage; but he consciously lived in and
with the Father in the spiritual, as he was en
rapport with the Divine mind, which permeated
all the whole universe. If man would live as
Christ directed, and in harmony with natural
laws, he could converse with angels (spirits) as
they did in the days of Abraham, Christ and
the apostles.

OF THK

UNIVERSITY

J*

* ^ -