Art Magic

General Summary of the Condition and Processes of Magical Practices - The Line Between Ancient Theosophy and Occultism - Application of Theories

We adopt the caption of "Art Magic" for this section, because we desire to draw the line between that vast amount of speculative philosophy, which is inextricably mixed up with ancient Theosophy, and the occult practices which constitute much of that Theosophy in application.

Hitherto we have written chiefly of the theories by which the ancients explained the order of being, and the elements of life power and motion, by which being itself becomes operative. Until the principles thus laid down are thoroughly well digested, our attempts to show their application to the practices of magic will fail.

With the most sincere desire to explain the modes by which artificial means can be induced to evoke the occult powers in nature, or in other words, to practice the art of magic, our efforts will be in vain, if the reader fails to apprehend what nature is; to comprehend the structure of man in his threefold character as a material, magical, and divine being; to follow us in our definitions of the Astral fluid which vitalizes all things in nature, and the Astral spirit, which constitutes the spiritual body of man; of the connecting links between Men, Angels, Spirits, and Deity, and the difference between Prophets and Magicians - the adept who commands spirits, and the medium who is commanded by them.

Without these preparatory steps for acquiring occult knowledge, magic will remain magic in its lowest and most obscure sense, and Magic it will be to the end of the chapter. Magnetism and Psychology are the two pillars that support the Temple of Spiritism.

They are the Herculean columns through which the understanding leads the soul into supernal realms of power; the "Jachim and Boaz" by which the over-arching vault of the heavens is upheld, which canopies the Grand Lodge of Spiritual Masonry.

By magnetism the imponderable, all-pervading life element termed Astral fluid is communicated from one body to another. By psychology the power of one mind subjugates and controls that of another, and it is in these two spheres of operation that all the marvels of magic transpire. The difficulties which oppose the scholar's mastery of this art, as practiced by the ancient and mediaeval philosophers, arise from a concatenation of causes, all combining to darken knowledge rather than to promote it, and tending to obscure whatever light could be thrown upon the subject.

In the first place the Priests of antiquity, who were the chief repositories of occult science, maintained their authority over the populace by reserving its understanding exclusively to their own order. It was not alone that they deemed such knowledge too high for vulgar minds, they felt that their own exclusive possession of its secrets was essential to the continuance of their authority, hence it would have been suicidal to entrust the multitude with that reserved force by virtue of which they held their office.

It has often been alleged by modern writers that the ancient mysteries were the conservatories of all occult science, and that those alone who became Heirophants therein, could arrive at a true understanding of Art Magic. It has lately become a received opinion, too, that a study of the ancient Caballah of the Hebrews and Orientals would supply this much desired information, and initiate any patient student of their pages into the arcanum of magic. Neither of these positions is correct. The mysteries indoctrinated their initiates into those theorems of speculative philosophy of which our former sections have given brief summaries.

The Caballah have been perused and studied with the most unwearied care by many a learned scholar, who at the last has utterly failed to enact one single rite of magic successfully.

Let the facts be plainly stated. In all the writings of true and highly endowed Mystics, whether ancient or modern, it is distinctly stated in the language of Cornelius Agrippa, that "a magician must be born so from his mother's womb," and that unless he is so gifted by nature, the processes by which real physiological changes are to be wrought in his system are slow, painful, and difficult of performance.

We have written to little purpose if we have failed to impress upon our readers that the source of all spiritual powers and functions resides in that mysterious combination of imponderable elements which we have termed the Astral spirit or spiritual body of man; that it is to the original and constitutional structure of that Astral spirit, that prophetic or mediumistic endowments are due, and that when these exist inherently in the organism, man is a prophet, a medium, and can readily exalt his powers into those of a magician. The reader may inquire wherein consists the difference between a medium and a magician? We answer, chiefly in degree. The medium is one through whose Astral spirit, other spirits can manifest, making their presence known by various kinds of phenomena. Whatever these consist in, the medium is only a passive agent in their hands. He can neither command their presence, nor will their absence - can never compel the performance of any special act, nor direct its nature. The magician on the contrary, can summon and dismiss spirits at will; can perform many feats of occult power through his own spirit; can compel the presence and assistance of spirits of lower grades of being than himself, and effect transformations in the realm of nature upon animate and inanimate bodies. He can control his fellow-men physically and mentally by will, irrespective of distance, and even cause changes in the destinies of individuals and societies. These powers seem in rehearsal fabulous, nevertheless they have been achieved, and we know that they are still attainable to man. The first great prerequisite, however, is as above stated, a prophetic or naturally mediumistic organization, and where this exists, culture will do the rest; where it is not bestowed by nature, the next step is to change the physique, and so modify its inherent tendencies, as to afford prepared conditions for the exercise of magical powers, and it is the recital of these conditions that will engage our attention during this and the following few sections.

In the first place let us disabuse the minds of those who have been informed that magical knowledge was to be procured only through initiation into the ancient mysteries, or certain modern branches of those orders that may still be found banded together in the Orient. This is emphatically a mistake, if not a willful perversion of the truth, on the part of those who may be still interested in throwing the halo of mystery around their cherished pursuits. There is absolutely nothing in the initiatory rites of any ancient order which can promote magical powers or spiritual afflatus. It is in the discipline enjoined upon initiates, and the effects of real physiological changes thus wrought in their systems, that the entire virtue of the initiation consists; furthermore, if such neophytes as entered upon the preparatory degrees of their initiation, did not manifest the well-known signs of innate magical power, or if after due preparation, they did not give evidence of the possession of magnetic or mediumistic faculties, they were never permitted to take rank as Hierophants, never elevated to that last degree which constituted them adepts.

To be an "Adept," was to be able to practice magic, and to do this was either to be a natural prophet, cultured to the strength of a magician, or an individual who had acquired this prophetic power and magical strength through discipline. The author has passed many years in India, Arabia, China and other Eastern lands, and has frequently practiced, as well as witnessed the rites of initiation in different societies, formed for the study of Magic.

From these, and opportunities suggested by the history of more remote times, we may confidently allege, that unless in the persons of naturally endowed mediums, or those whose organizations have been changed by long and persistent methods of discipline, magical rites have never successfully been enacted, neither have magical results been obtained by virtue of cabalistic words, fumigations, incantations, or other ceremonies alone. There are those now living, whose opinions are entitled to respect, who take other ground than this, and allege that the mere pronunciation of certain words, superstitiously termed "cabalistic," is sufficient to summon spirits of an inferior order to the speaker's presence, and that the possession of talismans and amulets will effect the same results. The author believes he shall be able to sustain his own fixed opinion to the contrary of these beliefs, by citing the teachings of the most authoritative Mystics of ancient and modern times.

For the present we shall argue from the standpoint assumed above, only adding that from early boyhood, the author has himself been both subject and operator in magical practices, and though often associated with noble minds fully skilled in the speculative philosophy of spiritual subjects, he has failed to find any operators in occult lore who depended upon knowledge alone, or who had not qualified themselves by preparatory discipline, or been prepared by inherent endowments, for the remarkable achievements which constitute the Magician.

Anticipating more detailed illustrations of the subject by a few general definitions, we proceed to say, that the first preparatory step for the elimination of magical power is abstinence. Abstinence not alone in food, but from the indulgence of all animal appetites. If, for instance, the student proposes to essay the performance of magical rites at any given period, he should set apart certain days during several months for total abstinence, and during a set period of probation observe the strictest laws of temperance and chastity. The Priests of antiquity were often married men, but, as we have before stated, they were not always prophetic men - on the other hand, the Prophets were almost invariably ascetics, and that of the strictest order - never indulging in the use of wine, seldom of meat, the society of the female sex, or the enjoyment of social and conjugal relations.

The more utterly ascetic they were, the more exalted became their spiritual powers, but without a certain amount of fasting and asceticism, let none expect to succeed in magical practices, for the physiological effects which fasting and asceticism produce, are unalterably essential alike to the male or female sex, in the development of the power under consideration.

The North American Indians, no less than the Charibs and South American tribes of poor, uneducated aborigines, compel their young men to undergo probationary fasts for a period of some eight or nine days, wandering meanwhile through the forests, and carefully avoiding contact with any of their fellow-men. These ascetic practices antedate their assumption of the duties of manhood, or the positions of power and trust, to which the red men deem their sons may become eligible, and it is claimed that this discipline is necessary to enkindle the noblest fires of manhood, quicken their powers of perception, accustom them to endurance, and above all, stimulate the latent spirituality of their Souls to perceive and commune with invisible Guardian Spirits. During these probationary states it is claimed that their Spirit Guides appear to them, reveal their destiny, instruct them in their choice of a mission, and establish a rapport between the spirit and mortal, which is continued through life.

Thus do these children of nature, these poor savages, as the proud Civilian contemptuously denominates them, instinctively perform those initiatory rites which it was the boast of the highest philosophy of antiquity to have instituted.

Every nation of antiquity practiced this species of discipline, previous to entering on a career of spiritual prowess.

The Sybils of Greece and Rome, the Hebrew prophets, the Indian Ecstatics and Egyptian mystics; the Chaldean soothsayers and Roman augurs, the Medes, Persians, Chinese and Japanese, all taught these necessary modes of preparation for prophetic offices.

All the mystics of the MIddle Ages exalt the practices of abstinence, and insist upon its necessity. Of all classes of religious thinkers, the Christians should be the most faithful in the observance of this rite, since it was charged upon them both by the example and precept of their founder, and prescribed as an essential of spiritual discipline, both in the Old and New Testament, and yet the Roman Catholics alone, of all the sects of Christianity, observe abstinence as a part of their religious duty; and perhaps it is to this cause that we may attribute the greater prevalence of spiritual manifestations amongst them, than with any other religious thinkers of Christendom. Another mode of preparatory exercise for spiritual exaltation is prayer. Prayer, not in the mere routine form of verbal solicitation, but sincere aspiration of soul towards the great Source of all life, light and inspiration. And prayer must be supplemented by solitary communion with the inner consciousness, long periods of seclusion from the external world, and a complete abstraction of the senses from all outward observances; soul musings on the great I Am, and that deep absorption of the reflective powers upon the spirit within which constitutes the triumph of the Soul over matter and its belongings. Ablution, too, is another method of preparing the physique for the flow of the Astral fluid. By frequent ablutions the skin - the organ of the dual functions of evaporation and absorption - is prepared for a free transmission and reception of that Astral fluid which constitutes the magical element. During the intervals of fasting, the food should be very light, consisting chiefly of vegetables and fruits, whilst all stimulants or salacious substances calculated to excite the senses or pamper the appetites, should be carefully avoided. Tea and coffee have not only been deemed admissible, but taken in moderate quantities are recommended by some modern mystics, although the stricter order repudiate their use. It is quite evident that the ancients understood the uses of animal magnetism. The temples of the east are covered with representations of this practice in the treatment of the sick, and the constant allusion to it in ancient and classical writings leaves no doubt but that it was the universal method of therapeutic practice.

Animal magnetism was also the method by which the highest rites of initiation into the sacred mysteries were completed. Using this term in its modern sense, we find it was the special virtue by which both in ancient and modern mysticism the potential powers of the magical element in man is awakened.

The chief value of the initiatory rites of all secret societies, lies in the psychological effect they exert on the senses by the fumigations of incense, the presentation of scenic illusions, the performance of delightful music, no less than the effect which the rehearsal of high thoughts and sublime ideas must produce on the already over-wrought mind. When to all this is added the magnetic effect imparted by the presence and manipulations of powerful adepts, whose Astral fluid, charged with magical strength, is infused into the system of the Neophyte, it can hardly be wondered at that the final rites of initiation in such societies as are banded together for the purpose of discovering and practicing the highest and most occult laws of Nature, cannot fail to send forth Hierophants who feel as did Pythagoras when issuing from the crowning rites of Egyptian mysticism, "that he had been in the presence of the Gods, and drank the waters of life anew from divine chalices."

As a special illustration of our subject, we commend the following item of philosophy, extracted from "Ghost Land," to the reader's attention. It refers to the experiences of the most powerful order of magicians now in existence:

"They acknowledged that the realm of spiritual being was ordinarily invisible to the material, and only known through its effects, being the active and controlling principle of matter; but they had discovered, by repeated experiments, that spiritual forms could become visible to the material under certain conditions, the most favorable of which was somnambulism procured through the magnetic sleep. This state, they found, could be induced sometimes by drugs, vapors and aromal essences; sometimes by spells, or through music, intently staring into crystals, the eyes of snakes, running water, or other glittering substances; occasionally by intoxication caused by dancing, spinning around, or distracting clamors; but the best and most efficacious method of exalting the spirit into the superior world, and putting the body to sleep was, as they had proved, through animal magnetism."

After an experience of more than forty years subsequent to the period when the author learned the truth of the above quoted fragments of philosophy, he lives to confirm them in every iota, and especially the last sentence quoted, which, to his apprehension, contains the true gist of all magical experiences.

No methods ever have been found so potent for kindling up the most exalted fires of the soul, or transmuting its latent powers into active operation, as "the laying on of hands," or the magnetic manifestations of powerful, well-intentioned magnetizers, in a word, the infusion of the vital forces of a mighty and highly charged Adept into the organism of a susceptible and receptive subject.

All other modes are merely preparatory, but they can never equal the effect of that last, best magical charge, which can be wrought only by the infusion of the Astral fluid of one organism into another.

This is the last act of initiation in the highest temple rites of old. This is the potent spell by which Hindoo Fakeers obtain from their master minds the seal upon their magical studies. The Patriarchal act of blessing, the initiatory rites of the Jewish Priesthood, the Apostolic law of communicating virtue, was all wrought by "the laying on of hands."

The Pentecostal gatherings of the early Christians were simply means of magnetizing each other by accordance of a common will, and the focalization of ideas to a common subject.

Paracelsus, Van Helmont and most of the middle age mystics, well understood the virtue of magnetic relations, whether between animate or inanimate existences. In the citations we shall have occasion to make concerning their magical formulae and opinions, it will be seen that they recognized "magnetism and psychology as the two grand supports of the Temple of Spiritism."

Assuming that the Neophyte, who desires to exercise magical powers, has faithfully prepared himself by the methods prescribed above, that he has subjected his frame to fastings, ablutions and strict abstinence; observed periods of seclusion, and disciplined his spirit by silent communings with Deity, the spirit of nature, and his own inner consciousness, all that remains for him to do is to seek out a few harmoniously-disposed persons, who, with pure aims and high aspirations, shall join with him in the search for light and knowledge. Let these unite themselves into a select society, and, after the same order of preparation enjoined above, proceed to magnetize each other, selecting for the work the most powerful and well-composed of their number - in fact, the one who most nearly conforms to the Pythagorean type described in the last section as "No. 2." Should there be no chance to form such an association as is above suggested, let the Neophyte seek until he finds a magnetizer who corresponds as nearly as may be to the noble type of manhood required. Let such a one lay his hands, illuminated with the pure, invisible essence of Soul fire, on the Neophyte's head. let manipulations of magnetic power, accompanied by the infusion of strong, aspirational will, be practiced at given periods of time; let these exercises be conducted uninterruptedly, steadily, firmly and with high and noble intentions, and they cannot fail to perform the last best work of converting the Neophyte into the Adept, the passive subject into the active operator.

In the final formulae of evocation, the mind must be concentrated fully on the purpose and presence most desired. Thus, if the object be to summon the attendance of beloved spirit, friends, the ordinary methods of waiting, either alone or in a small harmonious gathering, now so popularly practiced amongst modern Spiritists in Europe and America, may be sufficient to ensure the desired results.

The performance of very good and spiritually inspired music should always precede, or rather form the invocatory process in such circles, the effect of good music producing as great a difference in the atmosphere as on the feelings and sensations of the listeners.

The light on such occasions should always be subdued, as light is motion in the atmosphere, and tends to promote an energy of action which is unfavorable to the influence of the Astral light, in which the spirits live and move and have their being.

Material light and Astral light are as antagonistic to each other as the north poles of separate magnets. They mutually repel each other; hence, avoid as much as possible the action of material light. For obvious reasons the custom of sitting in total darkness should be held equally objectionable, except under stringent test conditions, and where remarkable evidence of physical power is demanded.

The fumigations of aromatic and fragrant essences contribute greatly to promote the conditions under which Elementary Spirits can manifest, but retard the approach of human spirit visitants. "The introduction of streams of ozone into the apartment will be found a highly favorable condition to promote the communion between spirits and mortals and their friends in the form. Besides this, the action of a gentle current of electricity, evolved from an electro-magnetic battery, should be infused into the systems of the investigators, as it not only increases the strength and quantity of the Astral fluid present in each organism, but benefits the health, and prevents the depletion of vital force. The ethereal character of ozone, and the force of electro-magnetism, are also strongly in harmony with the Astral fluid which forms the bodies of spiritual beings, hence their use at spirit circles will be found effective and beneficial.

As the Spiritists of this age have enjoyed an extended experience in the constant intercourse, presence, and counsel of their "household Lares," it is needless for us to offer farther suggestions on this branch of our subject at present, save to add that the methods of intercourse with all spiritual existences will be found reduced to general principles in this volume, and may, therefore, be applied universally to all forms of communion between the invisible and visible worlds.

The means of awakening latent spiritual forces, or the processes of invoking and procuring the presence of spirits, may be conducted through any of the avenues to the material senses. For example: the magnetic sleep on the one hand, and the "mantic frenzy" on the other, may both be produced by appeals to the sense of hearing. The one is induced by soft and delightful strains of music, the other by noise and distracting clamor. Civilized nations are naturally most satisfactorily affected by the former mode; barbarous or semi-civilized peoples by the latter. Dull, monotonous, rhythmical intonations act an intermediate part between these two extremes, and are particularly favorable to the commencement of all magical ceremonials.

Appeals to the spirit can also be successfully made through the eye. The sight of frightful objects causes a revulsion in the entire circulatory system, lowers its tone, and may even suspend its functions to the point of swooning. The reverse of this action is produced by pleasing objects, beautiful colors, charming scenes or persons, all of which sights stimulate and quicken the circulation, tending to diffuse a soothing and healthful glow throughout the whole system.

Another very effective mode of acting upon the sense of vision results from gazing intently on mirrors, crystals, precious stones, shining bodies, or pure fluids. The magnetic rays which are reflected back into the eye from these objects pierce the brain, and charge it with Astral light, whilst the fixidity of the action induces that self-magnetization which is the first step in somnambulism, trance and ecstasy. Still another mode is in the inhalation of stimulating narcotics or aromatic vapors. As before remarked, these processes are essential to the control of Elementary Spirits, and produce no inconsiderable effect upon the senses of the magician.

Nitrous-oxide gas, either and other stimulating and anaesthetic vapors are powerful means of inducing either the trance state or "manic frenzy." For the evolution of the latter condition no method had proved so effective as violent gesticulations, dancing, jumping leaping, spinning around in circles, in a word, emulating the actions of the Oriental Ecstatics, in whom the "mantic frenzy" and the exhibition of the most astounding preternatural powers seem always to require these preparatory processes. And here we must strictly impress on the reader's mind the fact, that in describing these abnormal proceedings, we do not present them as examples for imitation, or commend them, as even possible for the execution of "well-to-do" ladies and gentlemen, moving in the first circles of London, Paris or America. We are simply answering the oft-repeated questions raised by the admires of Art Magic, "What can we do to perfect ourselves in its practice?"

We may have conclusions to draw ere we close this volume, which will induce the aspirants for magical powers to regard with more interest and reverence the pearls of spiritual beauty they are constantly treading under foot, whilst their eager gaze is directed longingly on some glittering bauble far away up the mountain heights, whose rugged paths their daintily slippered feet would essay in vain to climb; but these conclusions can only be understandingly arrived at when our work is done; to the act of present duty, therefore, we must now return.

The use of Hasheesh, Napellus, Opium, the Juice of the Indian Soma, or Egyptian Lotus plant, besides many other narcotics of special virtues, constitute a large portion of the preparatory exercises, by which Oriental Ecstatics produce their abnormal conditions; but when we name the last essential for the due performance of magical rites, we may confidently assure our readers we include all lesser means, and are about to disclose the true secret of the Philosopher's Stone, and the mystic Elixir Vitae, nay, we speak of an element more potent than either, for we point to the source and end of all Deific, no less than human capacity, the all-omnipotent and resistless power of will.

When the great Essenian Teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, assured his Disciples if they had faith as a grain of mustard seed, they could move mountains, and cast them into the sea, he uttered no myth, spoke in no parable, but enunciated a truth which the Adept of every country, and every age, will fully confirm.

The power of faith is the power of will, the essence of Soul, and Soul's action in producing forms and emulating the creative functions of the Divine Will.

Will is the purpose of the Eternal One, outwrought in existence and its operation in the outgrowth of more fully perfected ind ages, will elevate mankind to the functions of Deity by its triumphs.

Every Mystic, Sage, Magician and Psychologist, every student, ancient or modern, ranges the power of the human will in the category of all supreme intelligence, and attributes to its exercise the highest achievement of the true magician. Still it must be borne in mind that our present system of abject subservience to the opinions of our fellowmen, and our slavish dependence on popularity and custom, utterly neutralizes this all triumphant and magical power of will.

In our present condition of modern civilization the complete expansion of will power is simply impossible. We require several generations of culture, and patient experience ere it can attain to its true proportions, and become the executive power it ought to be in human life.

There are some abnormal existences that can subsist without food, and others in whom the processes of education are superseded by direct spirit teaching, so there are a few highly endowed minds who attain to their majority at birth, and who, like Jesus of Nazareth, Plato, or Pythagoras, live in the realm of spirit, from their first entrance upon the sphere of immortality, hence they can exercise spiritual functions with the same ease that others use the external senses; but these rarely-endowed minds form the exception, not the rule of human life.

We must not trust to the possibilities of miraculous changes in our own natures, but work for them, and industriously, scientifically and patiently pave the way for their achievement. The culture of the Will for the execution of abnormal acts of power is to be conducted by a regular series of mental processes, all tending to the subjugation of the senses and the exaltation of the spirit. Some of these have already been explained in this section, others will be elaborated as we proceed. The generalities of the process involve physiological and psychological changes, the methods of which have been briefly glanced at.

For the processes by which divination can be evolved, we refer the reader to future sections. All shall be told; but, for the present, we conclude with a tribute to the power of the human Will.

It is the Alpha and Omega of this mortal life, as the Divine Will is the Alpha and Omega of Being. It is the royal power by which matter bends before Spirit, as the leaf bends and sways in the rushing storm.

If the result seems to the student who has advanced thus far worth the cost, let him proceed. If his heart begins to fail him upon these, the first steps of the mystic threshold, how can he hope to succeed in ultimates which cost the sages of antiquity years of study, and half a life-time of faithful self-abnegation to achieve?

The discouragement which arrest the first steps in the path of discovery, are but the first trials of that stupendous will power, upon the full exercise of which the magician's triumphs depend.

Fail now, and you fail forever. Cherish but one spark of hope to light your way through the labyrinthine paths we are destined to trend together, and every mind of ordinary intelligence and indomitable purpose, may by the perusal of these pages become an Adept in Art Magic.

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Spiritual Gifts - Woman as Priestess and Sybil - Classification of Spiritually Endowed Persons - Magnetizers, Mediums, Their Specialties - Power of the Human Spirit.

The chief duties of the ancient Priesthood were first, to find out the points of contact or unity between man and higher existences than himself; next, to discover the laws of man's being, and teach him to adjust his actions to the will of those higher existences; and finally, to invoke or solicit their aid for man in the performance of his earthly mission. These were the duties of the ancient Priest, and should be no less obligatory upon officials of the same order to-day, but whilst we see some attempt in the external rites of ecclesiasticism to perform the third part of these priestly offices, we look in vain to discover any religious body which faithfully emulates the ancient Priest in the performance of the two first named duties.

It is enough for the historian to record that it has been done, and show that it was upon the performance of the solemn offices of spiritual ministry, that the structure of ancient Priesthood was upreared.

Amongst the Hindoos, Egyptians, Chaldeans, Persians and Hebrews, frequent mention is made of the Prophets, as a class distinct from the Priesthood, although at times associated with it. When the Prophets did take part in the temple services, they were esteemed the most honored of the Priestly order, and their dictum was received with unquestioning reverence as the voice of Deity.

Some authoritative writers intimate that it was upon the foundation of true prophetic gifts, that the Priesthood was instituted, and when it was found that Spiritual gifts belonged to special individuals - not to an office or caste - artificial means were resorted to, to supply the deficiency of natural endowments. Nature has studied to find out occult means of including vision, trance, seership and prophecy. The Priests were carefully instructed in astrology, theurgic rites, and the occult virtues of drugs, minerals, plants, words and ceremonial observances, and hence arose the art of magic, an art practiced simply as a substitute for spiritual gifts.

Amongst the Hebrews, the Prophets, as a class, acted independently of the Priesthood. They were often persons outside of the consecrated tribe of Levites, to whom the Priestly office was limited, when they were not only excluded by their birth from temple service, but they frequently acted in opposition to the Priesthood, and included them in their bold and unsparing denunciations against the corruptions of the time. Nothing can be more aggressive than the diatribes of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, against the abominations sanctioned by a corrupt and idolatrous Priesthood. Isaiah particularizes even the ceremonials of the Jewish faith, such as the observance of new moons, Sabbaths, fasts, feasts, times and seasons, as "abominations before the Lord," when they were practiced for impure of unholy purposes.

The contrast between the bigotry and conservatism of the Jewish Priesthood, and the bold, high-toned morality of the Hebrew Prophets, is one of the most remarkable specialties of the books of the Old Testament, and speaks in most significant language of the universal faith in good works inculcated by true Spiritism, and the dependence upon magical rites of mere ceremonial religions.

It will be observed that whilst several of the most renowned of the Greek Philosophers, such as Orpheus, Thales, Solon, Pythagoras, Appolonius, and others, studied in Egypt, or claimed to have obtained their occult knowledge in that land, their biographies prove, that they were naturally endowed with the true prophetic afflatus before they graduated in Egyptian Magic, and this is a comment upon the difference between natural and acquired gifts, which we desire our readers to bear in mind.

The Greeks must have fully recognized the superiority of natural over acquired gifts of the spirit, when they were so constant in selecting women to serve as the oracles between Gods and men. Women made famous the oracles of the Pythian Apollo, and the responses of Dodona. Women's special gifts, of inspiration, have transmitted the fame of the Sybils to all ages, and made their name synonymous with spiritual gifts. Even amongst the conservative Jews, whose contempt of women is one of the chief blots on their national credit, women were perforce admitted to certain prophetic offices in the temple, and several ladies of rank amongst the Romans and Egyptians, including the daughter of the famous Egyptian Monarch, Sesostris, were renowned for their prophetic endowments.

The elevation of woman to conditions of perfect equality with man, is now acknowledged to be the highest evidence of a true and rational civilization, but whether we are treating of ancient or modern conservatism, God in nature has proved through the unbroken lines of history, that spiritual gifts are innate, intuitional, and feminine in quality, and belong to those more rare and precious attributes of being, which particularly distinguish the female sex. If Soul essence is unique, and matter is shaped and determined chiefly by the energy and quantity of the Astral Spirit, it is to that realm of being that we must look, in order to analyze the specialty that constitutes natural prophetic endowments, or spiritual gifts, whether in the male or female sex.

At the very outset of our inquiry, we find two specialties of organism which more commonly belong to the male than the female, the study of which is important to a clear understanding of our subject. The first of these representative physiques, discloses an individual with a compact self-centered, well-knit frame, inclining to the nutritive in temperament, and the adipose in tissue. In manner these individuals are generally straightforward, somewhat authoritative, occasionally egotistic, and fond of display; kind-hearted, benevolent, and especially attracted to sick persons.

They generally have a clear eye, direct glance, and sometimes a piercing expression withal. With such peculiarities of temperament, the Astral fluid exists in excess, endowing the individual with good health, a vigorous frame, a moderately active mind, and a general tendency towards social life and material enjoyment.

These persons are almost always what is popularly termed "good magnetizers," and the excess of Astral fluid which develops itself in the above described idiosyncrasies, ordinarily induces the wish to use their gift, and impels them to magnetize sick people. It was from this class that the ancients selected their Therapeutic healers and the Priests who were employed in the magnetic healing rites of Temple service. The eye as the window of the Soul, and the hand as the prime conductor of the Astral fluid, are always well developed in these natural mesmerizers.

Where the first is full, clear, and luminous, and the second soft and warm, the astral fluid is invariably of a healthful and unifying character.

Where the eye is piercing, brilliant, or distinguished by the long Oriental shape of the almond, and the hand is damp and moist, or hard and dry, look to find a stronger mental than physical impression produced, but in all varieties of this type of man, the person may be esteemed as a good mesmerizer, and the more expansive the frontal region of the brain, the better will be the effects, and the more healthful the power produced.

As the magnet or loadstone only yields up the potency to the direction of skill, so these magnetic structures require the action of well-informed mind, and concentrated will, to render them serviceable; with these mental attributes to guide their powers and direct the projection of the Astral fluid, they may become admirable healers of the sick, or skillful "biologists" over sensitive subjects.

The second individuality to which we would introduce our reader, is a more concentrated and energetic type of the first, and one in whom the intellectual temperament prevails over the nutritive or social.

In the type of man now under consideration, a vast amount of the Astral fluid circulates, but it clusters chiefly about the crowning portions of the cerebrum, elevating the cranial apex in a remarkable degree. The cerebrum and nervous system absorb the surplus of the Astral fluid, rather than the fibrous and muscular tissues. Such persons exhibit many varieties of form and feature; but their specialty is a large and finely developed head. Persons of this type become fine psychologists, or in ancient phraseology, such are "Adepts, Master Spirits, or Priestly Hierophants." In both types described above, it is the abundance of the Astral spirit, infused by inheritance and planetary and solar influence during embryonic life, and at the period of birth, which determines their characteristics; and it is the distribution of this Astral fluid, in that one, throughout the whole system, and in the other, in certain regions of the brain, which constitutes the difference between the mere magnetic healer and the psychologists. Neither of these individuals may technically recognize the peculiarities with which they are endowed, but the one will always bring a powerful and soothing influence to the sick, and the other prove a controlling and masterful mind in whatever spheres of life he may be placed. If these persons understand their soul's capacities, they will know that, by mustering the excess of Astral fluid, permeating their systems, to the dominion of the will, they can induce a self-magnetized condition, in which the body sleeps, and the soul goes forth and traverses space, as in the phenomenon of somnambulism, natural clairvoyance, or in the exit of the spirit from the body when it is seen and termed the "Double," or "Wraith." They can induce these powers in others by magnetic and psychologic contact, and it only needs self-knowledge and the exertion of strong and concentrated will to call them into exercise.

There are no phenomena produced by disembodied spirits, which may not be affected by the still embodied human spirit, provided a correct knowledge of these powers is directed by a strong and powerful will. The conditions will be described in our sections on Art Magic, but the potency of the will can never be too strongly insisted upon in all Spiritualistic operations. In the physique above described as No. 1, the excess of the Astral fluid generally clusters around the epigastric and cardiac regions, rendering the person thus endowed highly powerful in physical magnetization and healing operations, but, as before hinted, the cerebral development is rarely proportionably marked, and the best of physical magnetizers are not the giants of intellect and psychological control.

The reverse of this position obtains in the organisms classed as No. 2. In them, the Astral fluid inheres more closely to the soul than the body; exalts the top of the cranium rather than the front; compels a predominance of the organs of command and ideality; projects its sphere of indomitable influence on all around, and unfolds the intellectual faculties into singular prominence, in whatever direction they exist, rendering the individual remarkable as a Statesman, General, Author, Priest, Physician, or, if devoted to the study, irresistible as an "Adept," Magician and controller of mundane and sub-mundane spirits. Such individuals are generally as eager as they are capable of penetrating into nature's profoundest depths.

We might rank the amiable and highly gifted Anton Mesmer as a type of the organism No. 1, and the noble sages of Greece, Apollonius and Pythagoras, as shining illustrations of the type described as No. 2.

Prophets, or Mediums, are persons in whom, from inherited causes, and Astral influences prevailing at birth, an immense amount of the Astral fluid exists, but who, by the peculiar conformation of the tissues which make up their physical structures, are too ready to part with their super abundant life principle. In powerful psychologists, the Astral fluid is concentrated, the tissues of the body firm and compact, and the efflux of magnetic power is due only to its superabundance. The medium with the same excess of magnetic force is totally lacking in the concentration and solidarity which distinguishes the other class. The one in physique as in character is wholly positive; the other purely negative. The one the operator, the other the subject. The physical structure of the two may present little or no external signs of difference to those who do not study physiological types, rather than surface varieties, but the arrangement of the molecules in the two organisms, are structurally dissimilar, and this dissimilarity exhibits itself thus:

The magnetizer imparts strength from the abundance of his strength. The medium exhales the life principle to depletion, and, in the loss sustained, insensibly draws upon the forces of others. The medium is emphatically a "Sensitive." Every nerve is laid bare, every pore is a conductor of the too rapidly ebbing life fluid. When the brain is small, and the generating power of this life fluid is weak (the brain being its source), the intellectual faculties are limited and dull; the mind, incapable of drawing from the brain, becomes inactive, and the nature is stolid and unimpassioned. it is from such types as these that the superficial remark has arisen, that media should be, or always are, "very passive," unintellectual persons. There, however, are only one type of the class. A great many person, highly charged with the Astral fluid, and losing it in such rapid streams as to constitute them good mediums, are in consequence exceedingly sensitive, restlessly nervous, and susceptible to every influence they come in contact with. The life principle flows off all too rapidly through their tissues, leaving them irritable, weak and despoiled.

As nature abhors a vacuum, these organisms necessarily attract the Astral spirits of all things and persons around them, hence others in their presence often experience a sensible diminution of strength, whilst the media themselves are frequently affected painfully or pleasurably by the mere approach of certain individuals, realizing also the special influences which attach to scenes, places, houses and garments, which would produce no effect upon less susceptible persons. It is this extreme susceptibility and the negative condition produced by the loss of Astral fluid, which renders such persons fine instruments for the control of spirits.

These beings, clothed with the same Astral element which forms the spiritual body of mortals, readily effect a rapport with the class of organisms we have described. This rapport, however, most generally transpires between the spirits who are in the nearest proximity to earth.

It must be remembered that the atmosphere is as full of spiritual life, as the water is of animalculae. The Astral fluid - the element in which spirits live, and of which their external bodies are composed, permeates this atmosphere, like oceans of light, hence spiritual life is to this planet, what the Soul is to the body, only that the strata of spiritual life nearest the earth are graduated from the spirits of those who are most in rapport with earth, to elementary beings, who in reality constitute no inconsiderable portion of the earth itself, hence it is, that mediumistic persons - susceptible to the influences of varied life that swarms around them - are often moved by nameless and incomprehensible monitions of danger, the presence of evil, or the tendency to actions from which their own better natures and judgment would revolt.

The chief points of difference between the ancient Prophet, the Mediaeval Witch, and the modern Medium, consist in the aims and influences which severally actuated them, and inspired the spirits that surrounded them. The prophetic men and women of old were intensely religious persons. They lived in devotional ages, too, when their exceptional gifts marked them out for a species of reverence which almost amounted to worship. Separated from their fellow men by the peculiar sanctity attached to the prophetic character, their religious aspirations, and the asceticism of their lives, attracted to them beings of a far higher order than those whom we now invoke in the communion with family spirits and kindred ties.

Most of the ancient Prophets, Seers, and Sybils, prepared for the communion with higher intelligences than earth, by methods to be hereafter described, hence their powers were more concentrated, and phenomenally greater than those of the work-a-day trading media of the present time.

As to the Spiritism of the mediaeval ages, unless it existed in the persons of learned mystics, who cultured it after the ancient fashion, or it fell as a mantle of inspiration on poets, painters, musicians, inventors, religious reformers, etc., it degenerated into ugly and often injurious obsession, by ignorant spirits, attracted to media of a character kindred with themselves. Thus the study of different phases of spiritual influx proves how much its representation is determined by the age, spirit of the time, and character of the communicating intelligence.

Europe and America are at present in the heyday flush of materialistic civilization.

Utilitarianism is the genius of the nineteenth century. If religion could be put to some practical use, or reduced to a scientific analysis, it would be as much the fashion now as it was five thousand years ago; but whatever comes in the shape of religious belief, even scientific discoveries concerning the occult side of nature, must conform to the materialistic and utilitarian spirit of the age, or the age will none of it. Such is the crucible of human opinion through which the Spiritism of this century has to pass, and hence mediumship is a trade, an amusement, or a curiosity; Spiritism, a marketable commodity, or a fashionable mode of beguiling an idle hour. As inspiration invariably descends from the same plane to which aspiration ascends, spirit answers spirit from correspondential realms of thought and intelligence.

As it is below, so it is above; in the skies as on the earth.

Having briefly depicted the general characteristics of those through whom spirits communicate, we shall proceed to classify the groups into which prophetic or mediumistic gifts resolve themselves.

Premising that each mediumistic person is so by inheritance, or the awakening of latent but still functional powers, and that we are not now treating of that magic which compensates by art for the lack of natural endowments, we shall render such definitions of our subject, as practical experience suggests.

The Trance state ranges from that of Ecstasy, in which visions of the highest and most transcendental nature are revealed, through all the various stages of Somnambulism, to that semi-conscious sleep-waking condition, in which the ego is not lost, but wherein the origin of the thought, whether from the subject's own mind, or the impression of another's is not clearly discerned.

Inspiration is the addition of higher mentality to that of the subject's own individuality. It does not necessitate any abnegation of self-consciousness; it only stimulates that consciousness to extraordinary exaltation.

In all these states the influence of spirits is more than likely to be the superinducing cause. That influence is exerted in precisely the same fashion as the simply human processes of electro-biology, and by operators, who have either practiced this method of control on earth or been endowed with the power by nature to do so. The spirit projects his Astral spirit in the fashion of the earthly magnetizer upon his mediumistic subject; by this fluid the system becomes charged and the magnetic sleep, semi-conscious trance, or the exaltation of inspiration is induced.

These graduated conditions represent the amount of passivity or mental activity of the subject - total unconsciousness usually falling upon a very receptive and passive mind, and inspiration stimulating rather than subduing the powers of an already highly unfolded intellect. When the system is sufficiently saturated with the spiritual magnetizer's Astral fluid, as to be subject to control, the operator, by strong will, infuses high thought into the subject's mind; but whatever the specialty of thought may be, it becomes shaped, tinctured and not unfrequently marred to a greater or less degree by the idiosyncrasies of the medium's habits of speech and methods of expression. There must always be an adaptation between the subject on earth and the operator of the spheres. A spirit of a totally foreign and unsympathetic nature to the medium could not obtain control, except in the case of obsession, and that transpires through the brutal and resistless power of a gross, strong, earth-bound spirit, acting upon a generally frail, susceptible and most probably sickly organism.

In the ordinary exercise of spirit control, the spirit acting as a good magnetizer, chooses a well-adapted subject, whose mind and physique are calculated to assimilate with his own, and thus presents his ideas through the aid of a borrowed vehicle of thought. This mode of influence corresponds in many respects to the vaticinations of the Sybils and Prophetesses of old, only that the utterance of the Spirits termed Gods, or Demons, commonly took place in bodies which had previously been prepared by fastings, ablutions and sometimes by the inhalations of vapors, which subdued the senses, stimulated them to "mantic frenzy," or prepared the system for the infusion of a superior consciousness to their own.

These modes of control by spirits, speaking through the lips of entranced or inspired media, are not limited in their effects to the exhibition of merely curious mental transformations. In ancient, as in modern times, these oracular utterances have been productive of a far wider range of good and revolutionary thought than is dreamed of by those who listen, go hence, and deem they have simply been interested for the moment, and will certainly forget the ideas they have heard.

The Soul never forgets. The over-laden brain of humanity retains the impression of every image presented to it. As each fresh succession of images photographs itself on the mind's tablets, the last seem to crowd out and efface the impress of the earlier ones. They vanish from sight truly, but they are still there, and there they remain forever. Unconsciously to their possessors, they enter into every phase of character. They linger like a subtle perfume in the sphere of unconscious cerebration, pervade the sentiments, enter into the mental structure, shape the motives, externalize themselves in words which linger in others' ears, in deeds which affect others' destinies, and silently interweave themselves into invisible but indestructible images, reflected upon the Astral light of the Universe. Could this most subtle, but most potential realm of being be thoroughly explored, all the thoughts, words, and deeds, that have ever moved the race would be found in ineffaceable pictures engraved upon the billows of Astral light that heave and swell through the oceans of infinity. Nothing is lost in nature, nothing blotted out in eternity, and future generations, living, moving and breathing in the Astral realms of life imprinted with the Soul images of vanished ages, inhale them, grow in them, re-combine them into the elements of their own characters, and thus live over again, in ever rolling, but ever ascending cycles of time, every sand-grain of ideality that has ever been launched into space. hence, too, the universality of ideas; the spontaneous affection of two kindred minds unknown to each other, and removed apart by long intervals of distance, and yet how often are such at the same moment of time inspired by the same thought, moved to execute the same work, and even construct the same, yet apparently original, piece of mechanism; write the same stanzas of poetry, or arrange the same strains of melody into duplicate forms! This is the source of thought epidemics, mental contagions and infectious opinions.

The gross atmosphere of earth traversed by the seas of Astral light cannot but become charged with the images they bear, and whenever two waves of this Astral fluid unite to form an idea, some receptive mind seizes upon it. The wave flows on, the idea strikes another, and yet another mind, until the force of one leading thought sweeps on its grand career of influence, from pole to poke, and traverses the mental girth of an age, although, perchance, none but the constructive genius of a few can assimilate and utilize it. Trance mediums of the New Dispensation - Prophets of the old! Nothing is lost in Nature. Fear not for the results of they labors! Whatever is false or worthless will fade and perish - the beautiful and true never die!

The next class of media who represent the power of spirits to communicate with earth, are those impressed with artistic and intellectual ideas. They are moved to draw strange patterns, groups of flowers, portraits of deceased persons, symbolical or emblematical pictures, to write messages, words of love, poems, often containing tokens of memory which identify the controlling power with some individual who once inhabited a mortal body. Music totally foreign to the medium's mind or capacity has been thus given; foreign languages spoken and written by those unacquainted with them; pantomimic representations have been made, depicting the peculiarities of some deceased friend; and thus every sense is used, and every faculty brought into play, to prove the presence and influence of a world of being rising up like immortal blossoms from the ashes of the vanished dead.

Spirits making use of the Astral light which permeates all space, sometimes impress upon it visionary pictures of future events; sometimes shadowy representations of their own forms, and always in such shape as will identify them with those who have been deemed dead, and laid away in the quiet grave.

Spirits are full of ingenious resource, highly constructive and far more widely informed upon the arcanum of nature than mortals, hence can produce a greater variety of effects, and in much shorter period of time than we can conceive of, hence their methods of representation strike us as abnormal and magical. They are simply due to magnetization of the medium's spirits by the invisible operator, and psychological impressions produced through will upon the medium's spiritual consciousness.

The third order of media who specially distinguish themselves in the modern spiritual movement are those through, whom strong, powerful, earthbound spirits can act upon material bodies, and cause them to become telegraphic signs of their presence.

The persons through whom these theurgic signals are made, for the most part absorb the Astral fluid which is their life, through the cerebellum, the epigastric nerves, and the great solar plexus. Though not necessarily deficient in cerebral development, they are rarely distinguished in this region, and, in some instances, the preponderance of nervous force in the ganglionic or sympathetic system is greatly in excess of the cerebro-spinal, thus stimulating the instinctive appetites, especially those which correspond to animal tendencies.

This is not invariably the case, but it has and does characterize much mediumship of this order. It is also a significant fact, and one which should commend itself in the attention alike of the physiologist and psychologist, that persons afflicted with scrofula and glandular enlargements, often seem to supply the pabulum which enables spirits to produce ponderous manifestations of physical power.

Frail, delicate women - person, too, whose natures are refined, innocent and pure, but whose glandular system has been attacked by the demon of Scrofula, have frequently been found susceptible of becoming the most remarkable instruments for physical demonstrations by spirits. In some instances mediums for this class of phenomena are persons in the enjoyment of rude health and vigorous constitutions. The author has witnessed manifestations of the most astounding character eliminated through the mediumship of rugged country girls and stout men, especially the natives of Ireland and Northern Germany; but a close and careful scrutiny of those remarkably endowed media, will often reveal a tendency to epilepsy, chorea and functional derangements of the pelvic apparatus, which proves that the cerebellum and the ganglionic system of nerves are unduly charged, and that the magnetism of spirits of a similar temperament to their own may exaggerate these constitutional tendencies into excess and disease. It is a fact, which we may try to mask, or the acknowledgment of which we may indignantly protest against, yet it is a fact nonetheless, that the existence of remarkable medium powers, argues a want of balance in the system; and whilst the theory of too rapid ebb of the life forces and their excess, and unequal distribution, renders physical and scientific causes for this structural inharmony, it also proves what is the character of the pabulum which spirits use to produce the magnetic, psychologic and physical effects which are rendered through these unevenly balanced organisms.

It has frequently been asked whether there is any philosophy to explain these aberrations of nature, to which we reply, assuredly there is. The Astral fluid becomes characterized by every material atom through which it passes. It is at once the cause and effect of all varieties in nature. Its abundance, and the energy of its action, is determined by the quantity and quality of the atoms through which it flows; but once incorporated in organic bodies as their attribute, its own quality becomes materially affected by the quality of the particles it vitalizes; and here it is proper to recur to the opinion of many illuminated Seers, namely that there are several layers, or strata, of these Astral currents, forming as a totality one spiritual body. Those nearest the Soul are the finest in quality and represent the spheres related to the Solar and Astral systems. Those layers on the outer surface of the spiritual body, most nearly inhering to the material atoms, form the life spheres, permeate the body, partake of its quality, deteriorate or improve with it, are gross, coarse or dense, as the body's habits or mind's tendencies characterize it; in a word, it is this portion of the Astral spirit, which streams forth from the medium in a flood of emanation, and hence becomes the exact gauge of the medium's physical and mental state. It is particles of this latter description which form the life principle of plants and minerals.

It is these fiery elements of universal life force, which are struck out in radiant sparks from the hard flinty rock, or crystalline iron. Violent action will drive forth the lambent flames of life from every solid body, and cause them to quiver between the strokes of every concussion. They stream forth in odic lights from shells, crystals, magnets, and all magnetic bodies. They reach out their fingers of latent fiery force, to gather up kindred particles around the loadstone. They stream up in pencilled rays of many colored glory, painting over the northern skies with gorgeous illuminations in the wonderful Aurora Borealis. They form the electric paths in which rolling worlds, suns and systems are held in innumerable lines of force. They flash in the wild fires of contending cloud armies. They discharge solemn peals of heavenly artillery in the roar of the battling tempest.

They shout their anthems of power in the heaving billows, and sob away the last echos of sound in the murmur of the half slumbering waves. These invisible, latent, all-pervading flames of life, these direct emanations from the Central Sun of all being, connect suns and planets, earths and satellites by the stupendous chains of force, and fill all space with oceans of invisible, but ever living fires. They fill all creation with life, but take on the protean forms of every atom through which their living currents are forever ebbing and flowing.

Then need we not marvel that the Astral fluid which flows through the refined particles of a pure and healthful human organism, might afford intellectual spirits an opportunity of impressing the brain with high inspirational ideas, yet fail to give off that superabundance of quantity or denseness of quality, which is requisite to produce manifestations of a ponderable character - on the other hand, remembering the almost infinite varieties of exhibition which the Astral fluid assumes in accordance with the variousness of the particles through which it flows, we need not feel surprised that a human body abundantly endowed with this same life fluid, so constituted as to eliminate it through every pore, but giving off a quality which is especially redolent of influences generated in the vital and nutritive system of nerves, should furnish that pabulum which enables spirits to construct forms, and produce manifestations of a purely physical character.

In this scheme of natural order, disease must impress itself upon every imponderable particle of the Astral sphere, and since the body laboring under disease is really being disintegrated, and parts too rapidly and freely with its life principle, so do sick persons give off in the most abundance, and of the most dense quality, the element which spirits can use for the production of strong physical manifestations.

The same philosophy with certain modifications, applies to the mediumship of little children.

Endowed with a superabundance of that vital force which is necessary for the purposes of growth, young children disprove of this excess in general by violent exercise, exercise which would exhaust more mature bodies, but which nature impresses them to undertake as a safety-valve, for the escape of the vital currents, with which their young fresh frames are charged to repletion. Unscrupulous spirits who perceive the powerful aromal essences which flow forth so freely from the young, take advantage of its existence, to produce manifestations of their presence, and thus, it so often happens, that children, like sick persons, become potent media for spirits. It should be added that the practice of permitting children thus to be exercised as mediums, should only be indulged in to a very limited extent, the excessive draught procured from their tender and susceptible frames, rendering them liable to lose health, strength, and perhaps life itself, under its action.

We do not now enlarge upon the good or evil results of this kind of rapport between spirits and mortals, we simply write of its modes, and the means of ready access which spirits find for its performance.

The physical force medium is often endowed with a great variety of gifts, because the Astral fluid, charging the whole body to excess, and flowering through every pore with a profuse expenditure of the life principle, constitutes all the organs mediums. The skin is charged, rendering it liable to be impressed with fleshy letters. The eye becomes a ready conductor to the spiritual eye beneath, imparting the faculty of clairvoyance. The entire of the spiritual senses find ready expression through a physique which is all mediumistic, and a complete battery for the action of controlling spirits. Let it be remembered that in all magnetic operations every particle of the life fluid represents the whole; thus a sensitive by coming in contact with a lock of hair, a handkerchief, or the smallest piece of fabric touched by another, can psychometrically discover the entire of that other's nature. This alone would prove (were there other facts wanting), that one particle of the subtle fluid of life represents the whole, and this can only be accounted for by acknowledging the truth of a curious hypothesis, presented to the world by a celebrated physiologist, who says:

"Through the perspiratory ducts, and all the other methods by which nature supplies to the organism an apparatus for the dual functions of absorption and evaporation, the human body exhales the imponderable portions of blood, bone, nervous and muscular tissue, even the effete exhalations of hair and nails which go to make up the totality of the structure.

"All those vaporized elements are in the atmosphere, carried by the gasses, exhaled from the lungs, and swept off from the photosphere of the human body, into the atmosphere that surrounds it. If we could arrive at any method of separating the organic from the inorganic particles that fill the air, and charge the atmosphere with living emanations, where human life abounds, we might crystallize them back again into human bodies, and hence the claim of the Spiritualists to have found in spiritual magnetism that crystallizing element by which they can re-clothe the spirit with a material body, gathered up from the atmosphere which surrounds a circle of investigators, is neither so wild or improbable after all."

It would be a fact in spiritual phenomena, even if it were "wild and improbable" in hypothesis; but to those who are acquainted with the nature of the Astral fluid - its identity with the universal element we call force - its existence in man as a spiritual body, in the spirit's organism as an external body, and in the atmosphere as force per se; it only needs an appreciation of the physiological idea above suggested, as to the character of our emanations, to understand why spirits, having at command a dense and powerful stream of the Astral fluid exhaled from peculiar organisms, can easily use that as a force for crystallizing the imponderable elements, which abound in the atmosphere, into a temporary physical covering for themselves.

The medium's very flesh, and all the fluids and solids of his physique, are given off by exhalations, and remain in the atmosphere. These exhalations from the physical medium are abundant in quantity, powerful and magnetic in quality, and so long as they can be extracted by the magnetism of attendant spirits, and sustained by the combined magnetisms of other human beings, their crystallization by the aid of spiritual chemistry, can be readily effected, and spirits can thus temporarily re-clothe themselves in atoms of actual flesh and blood. They pass sparks of electricity through these imponderable exhalations, just as chemists can crystallize gases into fluids, and fluids into solids, by the same process. By aid of strong will, and having all the elements held in solution in the atmosphere, spirits can even communicate objective solidity to the images in their minds, and thus present again the ponderable semblances of ornaments, clothes, and other physical fabrics; nay more, by imparting to these temporarily formed substances a sufficient amount of the Astral fluid to produce cohesion, they can be kept in being for a considerable time after the first formative process has been effected.

There is no witchcraft or sorcery in these transformations, although they may with propriety take rank as spiritual magic; the Spirit is the Man, the Soul the designer; the Astral body the force, the mover, the motion, the executant.

The material body is only a vehicle, enabling the Soul through the Astral body or spirit to come into contact with matter. In the above necessarily brief description of spiritual phenomena, we only touch on the results of communion effected between spirits and mortals, where the former find conditions spontaneously prepared by nature for their use. We shall conclude this section by reviewing the possibilities which exist in every human being for producing extra-mundane effects through the application of natural laws to spiritual forces.

The gifts of the spirit are spiritual sight - hearing, taste, smell and touch, wholly independent of the material avenues of sense. The power of projecting the Astral fluid from one individual to another, through magnetic manipulations, contact or will, and the power of impressing the will of one individual by the superior force of another. The soul also possesses the power of so concentrating its own astral spirit, as to temporarily subjugate the other senses, steep them in forgetfulness, and then withdraw from the body, wander forth at will, preserve the body from death by leaving a sufficient portion of the Astral fluid to maintain its integrity, and subsequently return to and resume its occupancy of the body. There are still other powers of the embodied human Soul of which we shall yet speak more in detail, suffice it for the present to sum up by saying the Soul cannot only perform all the phenomena now executed by the aid of disembodied spirits, but it can command the assistance of inferior grades to man, and compel their aid in subjugating the forces of matter.

Man can read the hidden things of another's mind, and even temporarily obsess it, and by aid of inferior spirits, psychologize many persons at once, compelling them to see, hear, taste or feel the subjective images of his creation.

He can envelope some objects in the Astral fluid, rendering them invisible to the material eye; create disturbances in the atmosphere, or calm them by the same means; promote rapid and spontaneous growth in the vegetable world; wound the body and heal it in the same minute of time; render himself insensible to pain, fire, and the effects of gravitation, and so float in mid-air; cause himself to be buried alive during entrancement, and resume the functions of life when disinterred.

All these things we positively affirm men can do, through the operation of his own will, and the aid of powerful spirits, and all those things the author positively affirms he has witnessed, and proposes in the forthcoming sections to give the philosophy of, as gathered from personal experience, and the descriptions of Fakeers, Yogees, Dervishes, Bramins, and the adepts of Oriental systems of magic.

Whether our readers will observe the conditions necessary for the performance of these extra-mundane acts of spiritual power, is a question which we do not propose to decide upon; but we commend our closing remarks to special consideration.

The Soul is an emanation from Deity; therefore Deific in power and attributes. The Astral spirit which clothes the Soul and vitalizes the body, is a part of all the great motor power of the Universe, the source and cause of all motion.

The two combined, though temporarily shrouded in matter, and limited by the encasements of a material body, still form a Deific, and therefore all-powerful existence, which only requires the light of spiritual science to render its functions as Deific as its source. Something of this is shown, then the soul is emancipated from the body and returns to earth manifesting its astonishing and extended powers through what is called "spiritual phenomena."

Other glimpses of these powers shine forth, through the lives of ecstatics, seers, and magians; but what illimitable possibilities yet remain unfathomed and unheard of?

Who can say where the terminal line is drawn between God and His creatures, or why man should not manifest as a microcosm, all the creative attributes which belong to the Divine Author, the Macrocosm?

The superiority of ancient over modern Theosophy, does not arise from any retrogression in man or his planet. It is no arrest or backward step in the march of intellect; but it results from the profound devotion with which the ancient man regarded spiritual things, and the cold materialism of the present day; from the unceasing aspiration of our forefathers towards spiritual light and knowledge, and the universal contempt or indifference with which such subjects are regarded now.

The people of antiquity generally, and the priesthood in particular studied into the laws of spiritual forces, and spent generation after generation in analyzing their principles, and the relations they bear to visible nature.

Those thinkers of the nineteenth century, who strive to master the occult in nature at all, aim at doing so, by seeking for the spiritual through the laws of the material and expect to push their way upward, from the known, to the unknown, from matter to spirit.

Let those who would emulate the Divine plan, and work from the center to the circumference, from Deity to His creatures, and from Soul essence to created forms, despise not the results of human experience, and the strivings of the human mind for light and knowledge in any age, ancient or modern. Regarding the past as a stepping-stone to the present, and the lower chambers and galleries of the great Temple of humanity as the foundations upon which the integrity of the superstructure depends, let us with humble and reverent spirits avail ourselves of the successes and failures of our ancestors, as the warnings and encouragements by which our own steps may be safely guided, and boldly push on in those transcendent paths of research, in which Angels are our guides, ministering spirits our strength, the elevation and culture of the Divine Spirit within us our goal, and God the Spirit, the quenchless beacon-light by which our faltering footsteps will be ever illuminated, until we find our rest at last in Him.

Posted by mikki at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The way that man becomes aware of influences outside his physical world depend on two things - one internal to the person, and one external.

Man is too stupid to be able to figure things out if the operating principles were too terribly alien to what he is used to. However, there are definitely some things that are still too deep for mere mortals to figure out. Luckily, some spirits have been able to overcome Man's ignorance, and show up anyway.
We're going to ignore the petty wars between factions of spiritists and examine how people communicate with spirits.

Spirits travel by means not applicable to humans. Anyone who disagrees with the book, or who merely professes opinions, rather than the facts you'll find in this book, is wasting your time. Because of the huge numbers of people in the late 1800s, professing to see, speak to, hear, etc. with regard to ghosts or spirits, it wasn't as scary then as it was before. People used to think of these appearances as miracles, but we're far more scientific now, and understand things a lot better.

We know these things happen because they happen so often. Even though some people have been frauds in this arena, and have likely made a mint off of spiritism, there's still something to be learned here. So we will present information without attribution to higher philosophers, and let the work stand for itself.

Man is a microcosm of the universe as a whole. He is made up of body, spirit and soul. The soul is the center of his being, which corresponds to the element of Fire, which comes directly from Deity. There are many layers to this soul, called Astral Spirit, which is often misidentified as electricity, magnetism, etc.

[I have deliberately left out the attempted use of physics to bolster the author's ideas, given the author's previous confusion...]

Ancient man, and the Rosicrucians, as well as others, have been fascinated by fire, and have often likened it to God. And the element of Fire permeates the universe, and as such should be known as Celestial Fire. The combination of Celestial Fire and Astral Light makes up the soul of the universe, and as such the soul of man. The Rosicrucians were really cool and people shouldn't listen to the really awful things that were said about them. So there.

Anyway, the body is a conglomeration of bits of atoms that is powered by the Astral Spirit. Inside this Astral Spirit is the essence of whatever it is that allows a spirit to be seen by humans. It goes off with the soul at death, and the combination of the two form the spirit. The not so great layers stay on the outside and make up the manifestation or ghost that we can see.

This Astral Spirit also exists in rocks, plants, minerals, gasses, etc., as well as in space.

We get our Astral Spirit chiefly from the sun and other planets. It also comes from all organic and inorganic life. All of this combines to make the Astral Spirit of a single man. This is why astrology is so important. The sun and planetary essence that creates your Astral Spirit at birth will have great influence on your life. And because all of these entities are moving around, as they change, they continue to have influence.

This is why so many people over time have devoted themselves to study of nature for occult influences. The best people for generations dedicated themselves to studying nature. However, during the author's time, people became priests but didn't dedicate themselves properly to their priestly office. If they can't answer questions about the mysteries, they don't deserve to be priests. They are self indulgent, selfish people who look down their noses at those who actually dedicated themselves properly like ancient priests did. People who study nature solely through science will miss the big picture. Priests who gain their priesthood through "book learning" aren't real priests. You can't gain the knowledge without doing the work it takes to learn it. That includes the spiritual side as well as the book side. And while we're searching we should certainly not forget or ignore the work of the ancients.

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Man the Trinity of Elements; Soul, Spirit, Matter - Rosicrucianism - The Astral Spirit, Astral Light - The Ancient and Modern Priest.

The modus operandi by which the worlds invisible to the outer senses of man can become so manifest as to convince him of their existence, must depend first on some element resident in the human organism, and next upon correspondential means operating upon man, from the invisible realms of being.

Were there not such operations mutually subsisting between the worlds of spirit and matter, all man's imaginings however sublime, all his intuitive faculties, however penetrating, and even the witness of his own interior nature, would never be susceptible of demonstrating God in the light of reason, never bring him face to face with Spirit as the absolute esse of being, never enable him to construct such a religious belief as the Father could communicate to the child, or the Priest impart to the People. There can be no doubt that the Soul's deepest and most intuitive perceptions of truth, are its own most acceptable witnesses, still these are incommunicable, and the spirit's witness of itself, its Deity, and its faith in immortality, can never ben fully translated into human speech. Happily, however, for those blunted natures which are not developed up to the transcendent heights of spiritual truth, the realms of invisible being approximate to earth, have found means to establish processes of communion which place their existence, varies offices of ministry, even their very natures beyond all shadow of doubt or denial to those who care to consult the occult, as well as the material side of human history.

Setting the question of evidence aside, however, or leaving it only as a subject of warfare between contentious factions of materialists and creedists, our part is to examine into the methods by which the communion between man and the invisible worlds of being transpire.

Mere opinions concerning the facts of the phenomena, furnish no clue to their means of occurrence.

Spirits come and go, apparently by no law analogous to those which govern human action.

Beings of an order wholly different in their essential nature, and similar only in form and intelligence to man, interpenetrate his atmosphere like the magical appearance of the lightning's flash, and disappear in the same inexplicable mystery.

Sounds, sight, movements, impressions, sometimes appealing to man with the subtle semblance of a vision, sometimes compelling him by a force he cannot resist, all captivate his senses, sway his soul, and fill him with awe and wonder.

The commonplace and secularizing modes of spiritual intercourse that have prevailed throughout the second half of our present century, have doubtless tended to strip the world of supernaturalism of its terrors, as well as much of its exaltation and spiritual beauty, still it has effected a wonderful revolution in man's intellectual appreciation of spiritual existence, confirming him in knowledge upon subjects that were before divided between myth and superstitious credulity, and bringing under the dominion of reason and judgement problems that were deemed heretofore insoluble upon any other ground than the assumption of miracle.

In treating of nature as of the visible and sensuous universe, and super-nature as of the invisible and spiritual, we are no longer driven to the necessity of premising our philosophy with an if, and such events really transpired, or leaning upon the authority of some great Sage or world-renowned Pundit, before we can demand acceptance for our facts.

However commonplace or even puerile many of the phases of modern Spiritual communion may be, however foolishly that communion may have been abused, by making it the shibboleth for the introduction of all sorts of subversive ideas into social, religious, and even political life, the immense flood of light it has diffused upon the great problems of life, death, immortality and the nature of the human spirit, rank it as one of the most revolutionary and powerful revelations that have been vouchsafed to man since the closing up of the Oriental and Mythological Dynasties.

It is as much by the positive, sensuous demonstrations afforded to us in this great modern Spiritual outpouring, as through a study of ancient or mediaeval records, that we are enabled to present the composite but absolute philosophy of Spiritism recited in this Section; but here let us premise, that we do not propose to pause in our definitions to say - this is Artephius, and that is Plato; thus argued the Fire Philosophers of the middle ages, and thus mused the Cabbalists of antiquity. Now as heretofore, our reference to authority must be sought for in the context of the work, rather than in the list of names cited.

Man is a Microcosm or Universe in little - as such, he is the conservator of all forces, the image of all objective forms, the embodiment of all subjective ideas, and the connecting link between all existences, higher and lower than himself.

In himself, taken to pieces by chemistry and analyzed by the display of his powers and relations to the invisible world, he is a trinity of elements, namely: Body, spirit and soul. His body is a conservator of all the powers and functions of matter; his spirit, the animating principle, is made up of all the forces we vaguely call life; his soul is the pure Deific, and immortal essence whose attribute is Will or Intelligence. It is the attempt to analyze these three elements, which has formed a groundwork of philosophy, and a theme of learned speculation, for thousands of years.

Judging from effects rather than assumed causes, may we not believe with the "Fire Philosophers" of the middle ages, that the soul is like its source - the Central Sun of being - in its nature and essence pure, unalloyed, Spiritual Light?

That it is the invisible and infinitely sublimated Spirit of Fire - not the gross visible element that can be seen, felt, and apprehended by the senses - but that wonderful innermost light, which, whilst it reveals and proves all things in its own manifestation, is itself invisible, unknown, and uncomprehended?

It is this essential, innermost and divine principle of soul which survives all change, which is neither subject to decay nor disintegration; which is the spark derived from Deity - the Alpha and Omega of being - and the link which unites the Creature to the Creator.

Encompassing this divine essence of soul, and clothing it as a spiritual body, is the subtle and refined element which, in its effects, is force; in its action, through organic bodies, is life; and in its all-pervading influence throughout the realms of space, is vaguely termed magnetism and electricity.

It is the second of that grand trinity of principles, whose union constitutes man a living being.

It is this element which we described in our first section, as recognized throughout the Universe, by the apparent duality of its modes, called attraction and repulsion, or centrifugal and centripetal force. As it is in the realm of this all-pervading life principle that we find our sole explanation of the various magical operations of a spirit power, we must dwell somewhat at length upon a description of its character and functions.

It has often been stated by Seers and illuminated "Sensitives," that there were many layers or strata of this spiritual body, of more of less attenuation, in proportion to their distance from the soul, or nearness to the physical body. These rings, or spheres, are called, collectively, the Astral Spirit, from the fact that the element itself is derived, like the pure essence of the soul, from the great Spiritual Sun of the Universe, from whom emanate, and to whom return all rays of light, heat, force, motion, power and being that fill the Universe of forms. This Astral Spirit is often mis-called in modern phraseology, the "magnetic body," the "nerve aura," "magnetism," "electricity," etc. Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, who writes equally in the spirit of ancient Cabbalism, and still later Gnosticism, terms this element in man, "The Spiritual body," a phase which corresponds well to the still more correct expression of "The Astral Spirit." In organic bodies we shall continue thus to term it; in the realms of space it is more proper to speak of it as the "Astral light." It is to the Universe of inorganic forms, what the Soul is to the body, its spirit - life or animating principle.

The Rosicrucians - a sect who obtained much notoriety about the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but of whose actual origin, tenets and very existence, no reliable information has ever been generally circulated - maintained that the last analysis of the Supreme Being would fail to discover any other existence than that of a Central Spiritual Sun - an Infinite, Eternal, uncreated and incomprehensible One alone, whose attributes were light and heat, whose manifestation was the Universe, revealed by light, energized into forms, suns, systems, worlds, men and things, by that spiritual heat whose last gross external exhibition is fire.

In this sense, the term repulsion, which has been treated as an attribute of matter, is accounted for by the energy with which heat burns, consumes, disintegrates, and drives off one particle from another; whilst attraction, also supposed to be an attribute of matter, is but the natural cohesion of particles, upon which the restless energy of heat either does not act, or becomes modified by the solidarity of the masses acted upon. Thus then, repulsion is the one universal law of motion, which itself is produced by heat; and attraction is only the absence of heat, not a true force.

Inertia is the only property of matter in this category - heat or repulsion its counteracting force attraction, the exhibition of the vis inertia of atoms.

We do not care to dismiss these propositions without a farther elaboration of their basic idea, and for this purpose we propose to offer a few excerpts from one of those writers who has assumed the office of describing the principles of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. As far as the opinions of this remarkable association can be defined in language, the quotations selected will give a fair idea of their views on the subject under discussion:

"If the above abstractions are caught by the thinker, it will appear no wonder that the ancient people considered that they saw God, that is, with all their innermost possibility of thought - in Fire - which Fire is not our vulgar, gross Fire, neither is it even the purest material or electric fire, which has still something of the base, bright light of the world about it; but it is an occult, mysterious, supernatural Fire - not magnetic - and yet a real, sensible mind. It is the inner Light, the God, containing all things, the soul of all things, into whose inexpressibly intense, all-consuming, all-creating, divine, though fiery essence, and all the worlds in succession will fall back into whose arms of Immortal Light on the other side, as again receiving them, the worlds driven off into space and being heretofore, by the Divine energy will again rush back to him." ......

"The hollow world, in which that essence of things called Fire, plays, in its escape in violent agitation - to us combustion - is deep down within us, deep sunken inside of the time stages of which we are, in the flesh, rings of being, subsidence of spirit."

......"Narrowly considered, it will be found that all religions transcend up in to this spiritual Fire-floor, on which, so to speak, the phases of time were laid. Material Fire, which is brightness, as the matter upon which it preys is darkness - is the shadow of the true Spirit Light, which invests itself in fire as a mask, in which alone it can act possibly on matter. Thus material light being the opposite rather than the expression of God, the Egyptians - who were undoubtedly acquainted with the Fire revelation - could not represent God as light - material light. They therefore expressed their idea of Deity by darkness. Their adoration was paid to darkness, for in this they bodied forth the image of the Eternal." ......"Though fire is an element in which everything inheres, and of which it is the life, still it is itself an element existing in a second non-terrestrial, non-physical, ethereal fire, in which the first, or terrestrial coarse fire, flickers, waves, brandishes, consumes, destroys. The first is natural, material, gross; but this familiar element, seen and known in the natural world as fire, is contained in a celestial unparticled, infinitely extended medium - which celestial fire is its matrix, and of which, in this human body, we know nothing."

We here interrupt these excerpts - rendered chiefly as fragmentary representations of Rosicrucian ideas on the Deity - to interpret the obscure language of the writer, and state that the celestial fire referred to in the above passage, is the all-pervading element we have described, which, in its action through space, is termed the Astral Light, and in its investiture of the soul as a spiritual body, is termed the Astral Spirit. The innermost of the Rosicrucian Celestial Fire, like that of the human spirit, is the incomprehensible essence of light, not its substance, Soul. Robert Fludd, a Rosicrucian mystic of the middle ages, teaches that the Macrocosmos, or great Universe of intelligible and intelligent forms, is divided into three principal regions, which are denominated the Empyreum, the Aethereum, and the Elementary region. Each are filled with Celestial Fire, and traversed by innumerable oceans of Astral Light, but the quantity and quality of these divine elements diminishes as these subdivisions of space recede farther from the Central Source of all.

It is the union of the Celestial Fire and astral Light which constitutes the Soul of the Universe.

The Rosicrucian biographer proceeds to say:

"There are three ascending Hierarchies of beneficent Angels whose nature is of the purer portion of the Celestial Fire, and these are divided into nine orders. - These threefold Angelic Hierarchies are: The Teraphim, the Cherubim, and Seraphim; also, there is a correspondential realm of darkness, divided into nine spheres- the residuum of being, peopled with mighty but adverse Angels, who boast still, of the relics of their lost or eclipsed condition, once all light and heavenly glory." ......"The Elementary region includes the earth, man, and his belongings, also the lower creatures. This sphere is the flu, subsidence, ashes of the ethereal fire, and man himself is the microcosm or indescribably small copy of the macrocosm, or the great world. This earth having been produced by the contention of light and darkness, has denseness in its innumerable heavy concomitants, which contain less and less of the original divine light and heat, and thicken and solidify, until it is rent apart, torn, disintegrated and distributed into forms, by the still prevalent action of the Divine element of invisible fire.

"The inner jewel of light is never absent, even from the grossest atom, and though it may take ages to evolve, still will this divine light, ever tending to purify, refine, and elevate, alchemically convert base things into fine, gross matter into ethereal, and the earth itself into a radiant and gloriously spiritualized planet. Unseen and unsuspected, there is a divine ethereal spirit, an eager fire, confined as in prison, struggling through all solid objects, which are imbued with more or less of this sensitive life, as they are more or less refined, through the changing purgations of fire. Thus all minerals in this spark of light have the rudimentary possibility of plants, and growing organisms; plants have rudimentary sensibilities, which might in distant ages transmute them into locomotive creatures, and all vegetation might pass off, into new and independent highways of being, as their original spark of life-light, thrills, expands, and urges nature forward with more informed force, and directed by the unseen Angelic Ministers of the Great Original Architect."......"it is with terrestrial fire that the Alchemist breaks asunder the atomic thickness of visible nature, which, yielding up its secret destiny, of unlimited progress, sinks into the fiery furnace, in its basest proportions, to arise thrice purified, and forced upwards on the pathway of a higher round of the ladder.

"It is with the celestial fire that the Rosicrucian bursts asunder the bonds of error and darkness that hold the soul in a material prison-house. He becomes the Pontifex (bridge maker), which conducts the Soul across the dark waters of ignorance from the realms of the known to the unknown, from the gates of matter to the bright roads of Spirit; from earthly blackness to celestial light, from the visible fires of purgation to the invisible soul light of eternity."

Our readers may pardon us for interblending so many fragments of Rosicrucian musings with the practicalities which we profess to aim at, but to the genuine student of the occult sciences, it may not be uninteresting to learn something of the real opinions of a sect to whom so much that is false and mythical has been attributed. As God is the solvent for all the problems of pious ignorance, so electricity plays the same part in the realm of unexplained phenomena. The name of the Rosicrucians seems to have been borrowed in the same sense, and applied by superstitious and utterly misinformed babblers to cover up all the occult mysteries which science could not explain, and bigotry feared to tamper with.

It is something to know ourselves - not less to be truly known by others.

We do not press these fragments of Rosicrucianism on the reader's attention for the mere purpose of citing abstract opinions with which we have especial sympathy, but we feel that, to the interior sense of the profound thinker, they have a deeper significance than any other theories that have yet been advanced concerning the wonderful phenomena of Deity, life and being. Allowing for the varied modes of expression which prevail in different countries, and at various epochs of time, these opinions present a very fair, though necessarily condensed abstract, of the philosophies of the Cabbalists, Gnostics, Pythagoreans, Platonists, and many of the most enlightened of the Greeks, Romans and early Christians.

In giving a brief and practical summary of these theories, we find that, whilst the soul or innermost of the man is a Divine emanation from Deity, the body or outermost is an aggregation of material atoms, vitalized by the Astral Spirit, which serves as the life principle to the body, the ethereal body of the soul, and forms the connecting link between the soul and the body. This Astral Spirit accompanies the soul at Death, when the union of the two forms the spirit. The more sublimated portions of this Astral body adhere to the soul, and grosser and coarser layers form the outer covering or body of the spirit.

It is in this luminous Astral Spirit, this concentration of all force, life, heat, motion and imponderable essence, this invisible, "supernatural fire," as the ancient Theosophists termed it, that the power resides to make spirits visible to mortal eyes, to exhale force, so that they can lift bodies, make sounds, and produce all the manifestations by which spirits and mortals commune with each other. The heat generated in this Astral Spirit gives life and motion to the body; the light, which is its substance, colors the various tissues and fluids, and causes them to reflect the grosser rays of light in the atmosphere, so that they can become visible.

Once more we will suggest, that the Astral Spirit in the human structure is analogous, though differing in degrees of attenuation and force, to the Astral light in the realms of space. It is the spiritual principle of the earth, galvanism, magnetism, motion throughout its rocks, plants, minerals, waters, and gases.

It is the restless, ethereal fire that forces asunder the most mobile particles of fluid, and disperses them into gases; it separates the still finer particles of gases, and distributes matter into ether. it is not, as some have asserted, ether per se, but it is the principle of motion which rolls oceans of ether into undulatory waves, and causes it to become the carrier of light and heat. When its swift winged rays encounter opposite currents, when moving with inconceivable energy through one body it meets with its counterpart in opposing motion, the fierce concussion results in combustion; this mighty shock eliminates flame or lightning, and in the all-devouring action of the material fire, the surrounding particles are consumed. Destruction by fire, or what is called electricity then, is the material exhibition of two contending bodies, moving in opposite directions under the energetic action of the spiritual fire. In its primal condition, the Astral light of the Universe is like that of the Spiritual body in man, invisible, latent, inscrutable, unknown, except by its effects in life, warmth, and motion. In its external and last analysis, it is the consuming fire, and its action is to reduce all things back again into their own invisible essence; thus it is the Alpha and Omega of being, the first and the last; Deity.

The Astral Spirit in man is not a single original element, like the Soul, it is a combination of all the imponderables of the Universe. its first derivation or original essence is from the Sun and planetary system. Ether, air, atmosphere, earth, with all its freight of organic and inorganic life, combine to send off emanations which make up the sum of the wonderful structure called the Astral Spirit in man. It is a true cosmos of the Universe, and upon its exterior form is engraved all the sand grains of character, motives, powers, functions, vices, virtues, hopes, and memories, which the Soul has gathered up in its process of growth through the material body; hence it is as much a perfect microcosm of the individual's mind within, as of the visible and invisible Universe without. Not a deed, word, or thought which has helped to make up the sum of a human life, but what is photographed upon the spiritual body of the man, with as much fidelity as the mind of the Creator is written, in starry hieroglyphics upon the glittering skies. it keeps as faithful a record, as true a doomsday book, and pronounces as sure a judgment upon human life and conduct as ever the Egyptian Osiris could have done, in his sternest moods of God-like justice.

In many layers of graduated ethereal essence are felt by Sensitives as rings, or spheres. Those nearest the body are perceived as life spheres, and these change with the body's changes, and in its decay and death, recede, and become the outermost of the new born Soul's envelope. Those most interior to the body, and nearest the Soul, are the Sun spheres, and connect the Soul with the Solar and Astral influences, under which the individual was launched into being.

These interior spheres, too, change in response to Solar and planetary changes, and thence they affect the mind, influence the character, and constitute the links of connection by which the stars act upon the individual's destiny. As man's Astral Spirit is aggregated from so many forces in the Universe, so it is subject to the influence of changes occurring in every department of Nature.

The state of the earth, atmosphere, and aromal emanations given off in different seasons of the year - all these, with their changing influences, contribute to form the essence of the embryonic being ere it sees the light. The inherited tendencies of mind, body and spirit imposed by parental law, impart to the life germs their own peculiar idiosyncrasies. The physical sustenance, mental temperament, the very employments and thoughts of every mother, combine, also, to impress, with fateful images, their unborn offspring; but above all, the order of the planetary scheme, and the conjunction with every star sustains, first to the Sun, next to the earth, and finally to each other at the moment of mortal birth, must determine the nature of every spirit, and shape the springs upon which hinge the framework of human character.

Admitting then, the Soul's origin in Deity, and the Astral spirit's origin in the solar system, how vastly momentous upon the newly-born being's character and organization must be the solar and planetary influences which prevail in the hour of the germ's inception, through every stage of embryonic life, and at the very moment when, drawn by solar and planetary influence from the darkness of its embryonic prison, it is launched in space as a living creature!

Ages ago, the ancient astronomer discovered that all the vast crystal vault of the skies, the illimitable fields of space dotted over with millions of fiery blossoms, seemingly so fixed, so calm, so immobile in their solemn silence and mysterious beauty, were all moving! Moving on in constant but still ever-changing orbits. The certainty of these stupendous changes was absolutely determined by the discovery of that remarkable motion called "the precession of the equinoxes," a motion which, in a given period of time, varying between two and three thousand years, swept the blazing sun of the solar system, with all its planetary hosts, from one sign of the Zodiac to another. Later on - in fact, up to our own time - astronomical observations have determined that all the stars of the sidereal heavens, gorgeous field of space, filled with the march of suns and systems, speed on with a momentum so tremendous, that the mind of man shrinks back, awestruck, at the attempt to trace, those footprints of fire through spaces, wherein millions of miles are measured by hours and minutes. Whilst the external aspect of these spangled heavens changes but little to the eye of the observer during many centuries of time, the real permanence of the scheme is only apparent. "Only constant in eternal unrest," might be traced in every glittering point of the sideral heavens. Ever the same in the fixidity of matchless order, ever changing in the spiral circles of ascending progress. If this be so, as Science proves it is, how inevitably must the endless changes of the Macrocosm affect the nature of the Microcosm, and man, the world in little, partake of the infinite variousness which discourses so eloquently through the epic of the starry skies!

There cannot be two planetary conjunctions in the field of space which, in all respects, exactly duplicate each other; and this is the reason why those creatures, launched every second into human life, under the influence of ever-varying astral changes, must differ so widely from each other in all the essentials of physical, mental, intellectual and spiritual states. As the planets seem to return to stated points, and re-enact their mystic conjunctions in the shining pathway of the Zodiac, so there seem to be recurrences of certain types of character, and duplicates of certain facial lineaments.

Viewing the valley of the then from the mountain heights of the now, we are fain to give up this stereotyped opinion, and own that history only repeats itself in generalities, not in particulars, and that there is not a wave which beats on the shores of earth that ever returns with just the same force as those that have gone before - no never! And all this change in the planetary order is effected by the unceasing energy of the life that is throbbing, and burning, and blazing on in its mad career of eternal unrest, in the midst of every starry road, and thrilling down and pulsating through the very central heart of every starry world; and all this ceaseless movement, heard in the echoing feet of the tramping ages, is due to that same life spirit, burning up, shriveling into ashes, and scattering into dust the forms of the past, in order that their liberated spirits may become incarnate in all the fresher, fairer forms of the ages that are to be!

The consideration of these diffusive generalities are not irrelevant to our subject; on the contrary, they need to be thought out and appreciated ere the unaccustomed thinker can apprehend why the motions of a single point of fire, gleaming through the immensity of space, can affect the character and destiny of an individual removed from its orbit by incalculable sums of distance; why all nature, animate and inanimate, moves, acts and speaks with an universal chord of sympathy connecting the whole' why flights of birds, wheeling high in air, the motions of a dancing butterfly, a quivering sunbeam, a crawling worm, humming insect, or even the falling of a leaf, or the murmur of a wave, may discourse deep meanings in the ear of a true student of nature, and utter portents of immutable fate to illuminated scholars who have learned to interpret all the undertones of creations, and spell out its hieroglyphical inscriptions.

When we hear how Chaldean Soothsayers perceived the destines of nations, in the smoking ashes of the burnt offering; how Roman Augurs interpreted the issues of life and death from the flight of birds; how Persian Magi read the words of fate inscribed on the starry pages of the skies; or Hebrew priests discovered mystic meanings in the glittering luster of Urim and Thummim; we know that these men were simply natural philosophers, and had studied the occult side of nature with as much understanding, and perhaps more devotion, than the nineteenth century Scientists accord to the mastery of the known and the visible.

For thousands, perhaps for tens of thousands of years, it was the office of the best and wisest men of every succeeding generation, to devote a lifetime to the study of nature, and that in her profoundest depths, and through all the mazes and windings of her supernatural relations with the visible and invisible spheres of being around her. Ever let it be remembered, too, that the ancient philosopher brought to this sublime study a body as thoroughly prepared as a mind; a physique fitted by temperances, chastity and purity to allow full sway to the mind which inhabited it, and is so often cramped by inharmonious physical states.

When we come to lay down the conditions under which alone magical rites can become effective, and describe the life-long discipline which the powerful magian must pursue, in order to become one, we shall put to shame the self-indulgent, intemperate, and too often dissolute habits of the present age - habits which not even the sacred assumption of Priestly office seems always to impose restraint upon. And yet this same self-indulgent and luxuriant age, looks back with contempt on the asceticism of the ancient Priest, whilst those who profess to believe in all the miraculous records of Jewish history, treat those of every other nation of antiquity with scornful denial. As to Magic, why as something which can be taught, "it may be true," and perhaps even become a fashionable amusement, provided always that book-learning, and a superficial digest of the opinions of others, can point out the royal road to power, and convert tinsel drawing-rooms into the halls of Walhalla, wine and cigars into the Alembic of Alfarabi, gilded mirrors into the divining crystal of Dee, and extrait de bouquet into the elixir vitae of St. Germain. A few pages of Cornelius Agrippa, which no modern "Exquisite" would take the trouble to translate himself, ought, in modern estimation, to be quite sufficient to make a magician, and teach fine ladies to summon Slyphs and Undines for the amusement of an idle hour, just as a few pigments of Latin, an essay done into bad Greek, and worse Hebrew, by a professional college drudge, for the benefit of his rich paying patron, is sufficient passport to those holy orders of our modern priesthood in which God, Angels, Spirits, the immortal soul's origin, destiny, and powers, together with all the glories, marvels and mysteries of the boundless and eternal Universe, are the themes which demand interpretation.

The most supervidial retrospect of the lives, education and preparatory methods of discipline enforced upon the ancient priesthood, invest that body with the true dignity of men in "holy order;" but how do these compare with the careless, laxy system of mere book-learning, which in our own time is deemed all-sufficient to grind out a priest, the man who, of all others, should be bound by his sacred office to interpret the mysteries of being, nay, who should be deemed unworthy of that office, so long as mysteries remain unsolved.

Nature has not secrets from her true votaries. She sternly veils spiritual entities from the rude gaze of materialism, and refuses to render up any knowledge beyond the plane from which the inquiry originates. The Chemist, Geologist, Astronomer, and other disciples of the natural sciences, coldly set to work to examine Nature through her known formulae of physical laws; aught that transcends these they will none of, hence the occult side of Nature is an unexplored realm to them, and yet they are prompt enough to acknowledge that that occult side exists, through their sneer is loud and long against those who claim to have mastered its mysteries.

It is because the experience of past ages, conducted through thousands of years of study, by aid of carefully prepared conditions, has been devoted to the occult in Nature, that the ancients transcend the moderns in this respect, as much as modern science, in the direction of utilitarianism, transcends the colossal but cumbrous grandeur of antique civilization. There lives not now upon the face of the earth, one human being, save perchance, a solitary adept of the old order, or a very pure and highly endowed spirit medium, who, in respect to the understanding of true Theosophy, Theurgy, and every department of spiritual science, is fit to hold the office of Priest to the people, or instruct humanity in those grand truths which lie beyond the ken of physical science. It is to show the results of opinions which arise from countless ages of research into occult truths, that this section has been written. It is to present to the candid and bold thinker, the fruits of that knowledge which was gathered in through the discipline of asceticism, fasting, and prayer, and the study of the whole Universe, not less in the realm of soul and spirit, than in body and function, that we now write. Despite these treasures of mind, garnered up through thousands of years, if ye will, but it is thus alone that the Universe has ever yielded an answer to the soul's urgent questioning; thus alone can man ever solve the mystery of his being, and that of his planet.

To point the way, we have written; to show the kernel of the mighty fruit of the tree of occult knowledge, will these pages be devoted. But he who would eat of that fruit understandingly, must first plant the tree with his own hands, tend and culture it with a philosopher's patience, and then, and then alone, will it yield to his taste the true knowledge of good and evil, then only will he eat for himself, and not through the senses of another.

We shall conclude this section by another brief excerpt from the pages of the author whose definitions of Rosicrucianism we have given above:

"It is reasonable to conclude, at a period when knowledge was at the highest, and when human powers were, in comparison with ours at the present time, prodigious, that all these indomitable physical efforts - such gigantic achievements as those of the Egyptians, were devoted to a mistake? That the myriads of the Nile were fools, laboring in the dark, and that all the magic of their great men was forgery? or that we, in despising that which we call their superstitious and wasted power, are alone the wise? Not so. There is much more in these old religions than in the audacity of modern denial, in the confidence of these superficial science times and in the derision of these days without faith, we can in the least degree suppose.

"We do not understand; then why should we venture to deride these ancient times?"

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Spiritism and Magic - Mundane, Sub-Mundane and Super-Mundane Spiritism - The Mystic Ladder - An Interminable Chain of Love and Harmony

Man's earliest religious history is also the history of Spiritism, or his communion with the realms of Spiritual existence.

To effect this communion, the human organism must be adapted to the perception of Spiritual entities, or else means must be found to promote this adaption.

We have mis-spent our time in sketching out the ancient forms of religious belief, if we have failed to show that men once communed with their Tutelary Gods and ministering spirits intuitively, inspirationally, and even directly, but that in process of time, either by reason of changes in man's receptivity, or from the altered conditions which civilization imposes, that communion became interrupted, then more and more difficult; in some periods it ceased altogether, and finally became limited to a few exceptionally endowed individuals, in which category (with occasional irruptions of a more diffusive character) it has continued down to the present day.

The spontaneous and natural communion with spiritual beings, whether it be exercised by communities or individuals, we may term Spiritism. The arts by which this communion is procured through prepared conditions, should with equal propriety be designated Magic, and whether these arts be practiced for good or evil purposes, their methods must involve a knowledge of the occult forces existing in nature, and the means of calling them forth and utilizing them. If the understanding and application of Nature's laws in any one department of being is a science, then must all knowledge and all arts, which are but the application of knowledge, be included in the term science, hence magic, however ominous its name may sound in superstitious ears, and however much it may have been perverted to purposes of evil, is still a branch of science, and as such, should be studied and legitimately used.

Magic may be termed the science of Spiritism, and whilst it would be as idle to tender it to the acceptance of those whose natural endowments supply them with the art it professes to teach, as to paint the cheek of the rose, or blanch the lily white, its careful study may furnish us with a clue to the better use and guidance of natural gifts, and where there are lacking, instruct us in the methods of supplying the deficiency. In order to point out the spheres of power in which magic operates, it is necessary to define the order of communion which nature permits, through the exceptional endowments of her highly gifted children, the world's Seers, Prophets, Sybils, and Mediums.

The first gift included in the discernment of Spiritual beings is that of vision, or the faculty of seeing Spirits, recognizing their signs in aerial pictures, their writings when inscribed in spiritual substances, also of perceiving the spirits of fellow-men, reading the thoughts and characteristics masked to the mortal eye, and taking cognizance generally of the spiritual part of things in the Universe.

The second gift of the prophetic order is, the faculty of hearing sounds, whether in the form of spirit voices, music, or other vibrations made on the ethereal medium in which spirits live, rather than on the atmosphere which mortals breathe and dwell in.

The power of seeing and hearing spirits, opens up two of the principal avenues of intelligence to our Souls, and in like manner, the spiritual senses of smell, taste, and touch can be operated upon.

Through one or other of these gates to the inner consciousness, all spiritualistic phenomena must act, but the phenomena themselves are very various.

Something the Soul of man itself, looks forth through its material encasements, acting from within, and sees, hears, tastes, smells, and touches spiritual entities.

Sometimes ministering spirits produce effects acting from without upon the inner senses of man. Both methods are common, both belong to the one gifted individual.

Sometimes the influx of spiritual ideas is so silent, natural, and unmarked by physical disturbances, that their subject knows not that an Angel speaks, or that the soul has transcended the laws of sensuous perception, and derived ideas unconsciously from its near proximity to the realms of spiritual entities.

To account for the operation of the powers describe above, it is necessary to revert to the last section of the First Part, and bear in mind, that the realms of spiritual being are very near, in fact, all around and about us; that, though spirits of every grade and class swarm through the universe, ranged in their different spheres and orders, yet that the "spirit world," or the spheres through which the souls of men are making pilgrimage upwards and onwards to heaven are approximate to this earth, even as the soul of man is related to his body; that these spheres interpenetrate every atom of matter on this globe with a spiritual element, and again, as the disembodied spirits of earth are in the most direct, natural, and harmonious proximity to their still embodied friends, it is to the spirit spheres of humanity, that the most ready access to the human soul is obtained, and through which the most constant influx into the natural world transpires. To expect that the realms of disembodied human spirits should be the nearest in atmospheric proximity to man, the most in accordance with his grade of intelligence, and the most prompt to serve, bless and instruct him by ties of love, kindness, and adaptation, is just as rational as to suppose that the human mother would be the first to render aid to her suffering child, or that the child would be more likely to appeal for that aid to a tender parent than to some unsympathizing stranger. This phase of intercourse between spirits and mortals, we distinguish as Mundane Spiritism, and this we claim to be the most natural, direct, and spontaneous product of that divine plan which connects all conditions of being, from the highest to the lowest, in one unbroken chain of love and harmony, the links of which are millions of spheres of super-mundane, and sub-mundane spiritual existences.

There are but few analogies discoverable on the surface of mundane life, between the laws which separately govern Spirit and matter, but the closer we pursue our researches, the more clearly we recognize correspondence, if not actual analogies, between those elements. Amongst these are the laws of physical and moral gravitation.

As the heaviest and grossest bodies sink to the centre, so the least intelligent and exalted conditions of spiritual being obey the same law, and hence, sub-mundane Spiritism consists in communion with these lower orders of being, who are in point of position in the Universe, no less than in moral and mental unfoldment, lower than man, and whom the philosophers and mystics of old have significantly denominated, "the Elementaries."

It would be impossible to do justice to the immense multitudes of those beings who crowd the elements, and exist in all grades of semi-spiritual, semi-material bodies, from such progressed, but still rudimental conditions, as almost impinge upon the perfection of manhood, down to the "Pigmies," who emerge from rude, almost inorganic life, evolved from minerals, plants, water, earth, atmosphere and fire.

There are luxuriant and enormous growths, gigantic forms, exceeding the proportions of humanity, who abound in forests, mountains, hills, and desert places; stunted, dwarfish beings who frequent mines, caverns, and the deep recesses of earth, corresponding to the undeveloped elements of inorganic nature.

Beautiful, though still embryonic existences there are, who belong to the finer spheres, corresponding to flowers and air. Fantastic and diffusive shapes of elementary life crowd the waters, and resplendent globular unparticled essences exist, and can be detected in the realms of light and heat represented by fire. All are included in the title of Elementaries. All possess different functions, exert power in the particular elements to which they belong, are neither good nor evil per se, but malignant or beneficent in part, to those whom they affect or dislike; they possess, in short, varied powers and characteristics; and communion with them may be classed in the category of Sub-mundane Spiritism.

Myriads upon myriads there are in whom special animal instincts prevail, giving to their embryonic forms a similarity to the creatures whose natures they correspond to. These elementary spirits are all ranged and classed in the divine order of creation, under the same law of adaption that is manifest in the plants, animals and other products of different countries and climes. Every creature is as much in its place, and an inhabitant of its appropriate sphere, as is the material particle to which it corresponds. Hanging on the same divine thread of beneficence which binds man to the heart of Deity, these Elementaries could no more be riven away from the interminable chain of being, than the Planetary order of the skies could afford to part with Mercury, the youngest child of the solar system, because it is not so perfectly developed as Mars, nor yet cast out of the shining, starry family that circles round the parent sun, the planet Earth, because it has not attained to the size, lustre and glory of Jupiter.

"I number up my Jewels!" says the God of the sparkling sky; and which of his blazing sons of light could he disperse with, without throwing the whole scheme of revolving worlds out of eternal harmony?

"I number up my Jewels!" cries the Tutelary Angel of Earth, in the tender and merciful tones of divine Fatherhood; and which of his immortal soul gems could he afford to annihilate as his vision ranges, and his justice prevails, from the monarch on his throne, to the dying wretch in the cell of earthly condemnation?

"I number up my Jewels!" cries the Archangel of the grand solar system, and which of his minutest sparks of spiritual fire could he afford to extinguish, whether it blazed in the soul of a Copernicus, or glimmered in the uncouth form of a pigmy Elementary, on the lowest round of the ladder of sub-mundane pilgrimage?

Oh proud, disdainful man! disdainful and proud only in your ignorance! Which of you can say from whence you came, or deny what you might have been, however you may rejoice in the heigh to which you have now attained; however you may rest in the assurance that there is no such thing as retrogression, and that you cannot sink lower than you will to fall? Which of you who so cheerfully accept the vague theory of inductive science, that teaches you to believe men were once apes, need shrink back with contempt from the idea that your spirits were as rudimental as your bodies? Which of you that so fiercely reject the Darwinian theory, yet offer no better hypothesis for human origin - who would rather fancy you were nothing, than anything lower than you arrogance deems worthy of you - which of you can believe that from nothing sprang something, or that you suddenly appeared on the theatre of existence, a full-fledged immortal Soul, with a hitherward, but no whence - a heavenly goal to attain to, but no beginning to spring from?

The world that sees its Julius Caesars and Napoleon Bonapartes commence life as helpless, wailing babes, and end it as Masters of Europe and Lords over millions of their fellow-creatures, still scoffs at the idea that the race of man ever had a similar infancy.

The full-grown man of the nineteenth century repels with indignation the idea that he could have ever been related to the world of elementary being, and can see no justice, divinity, beauty, or order in the scheme that sows a germ of spiritual life in the most rudimental of material forms, and then expands it through a natural series of births and deaths, until it becomes fitted to take its place as a purely perfected and self-conscious spirit entity, in those realms where it awaits, in common with myriads of other spirits, a mortal birth on this or some other earth in the Universe. Yet such is God's plan, at least such does it appear to the most patient of students; those who have toiled through the esoteric significations of human history, and learned their spiritualistic lessons from the very beings who are in the experience of the truth they reveal. Such is God's plan, unless the philosophic minds, who have gathered up the accumulated wisdom of past ages, and studied nature and the mysteries of spiritual existence in their profoundest depths, have learned less than modern theorists, who never study such subjects at all.

Either the wisdom and occult knowledge of cycles of ages is wroth less than the scornful denial of utterly uninformed skepticism, or our brief review of sub-mundane Spiritism is a correct one as far as it goes.

Reserving more particular descriptions of the elementaries for further sections, we now proceed to notice the realms of supermundane Spiritism.

Here, legions of Archangels and Angels throng the Universe, of whom the imagination may conceive, but to whose being and nature the power of language can do no justice.

In whatever realms of spiritual life the entranced soul of the ecstatic may wander, with whatever resplendent beings that would may be permitted to hold converse, the mind is always directed to higher states, and higher individualities still. Like the revelating Angel addressing the Apocalyptic writer John, every Spirit or Angel that has ever communed with man, ignores worship, and ascribes all power and all glory to something still beyond - to Deific existences, incomprehensible, but ever felt in the understanding, and ever holding that central point of all devotion and worship, which we vaguely call God. Bear this fact in mind, and we shall be held guiltless of presumption when we write of what the eyes of Seers have beheld, of spirits with whom our fathers, like John of old, have identified even the Lord of life and light, and striven to worship as God; of mighty Angels, who, like the spirit that spoke through the thunders of Sinai, or from the midst of the burning bush, seem to man the last apex of glory on which the finite mind rests its conceptions of God. Higher and still higher, ever stretching away where roads are made of star dust, and paths are strewn with glittering Suns; where time is no more, and space is lost in infinity; stretching away into hemispheres where new sideral heavens form the boundary walls and gateways to the new corridors of an Universe wherein, end there is none.

Loose the reins of the imagination, and let the fiery steeds of a new mental Phoebus seek to traverse these high-roads of infinity! People them all with Angels ascending and still ascending in the scale of grandeur, power and immensity, and then question of the highest still, and still the choiring worlds will answer, "Higher yet! higher yet! There still are realms of being higher yet!"

We veil our presumptuous eyes against these vain speculations, retreat to our spheres of littleness, content to find that Angels, Guardian spirits, and Spirit friends, surround us, minister to our earthly powers and functions only as our minds can grasp and comprehend them, and thus we may concentrate our wandering thoughts on the firm assurance that God is, though man may never know Him, and rest in the certainty that all we hope and strive for, will yet be ours, as the heirs of immortal progress.

Super-mundane Spiritism teaches of Tutelary Spirits or Gods, and Planetary Angels.

The Jehovah of the Jews affords a well marked definition of the ancient belief in Eloihim, or Tutelary Gods.

The revelating Angels so often described by the Hebrew Prophets, and He who was claimed by the authors of the Apocalypse to have mapped out the masonic order of creation in that gorgeous vision, said to have been shown in the Isle of Patmos, or the isolation of the entranced Soul, clearly illustrate the nature of these celestial visitants who in the Oriental dispensation, talked with men, face to face. In our degenerate and unspiritual age, we have little to illuminate our prosaic lives, save the revelations of our Fathers. From time to time, bright beings flash athwart our path, more glorious than the forms of men or spirits, and the assurance that the realms of space must be filled with the messengers of God, induces us to yield acceptance to the Cabbalistic division of the higher orders of Angels into "Thrones, Dominions, Powers; - Angels of the Planets, Tutelary Spirits, Guardians of Nations, Cities, Men, the Souls of Ancestors, and beloved Spirit friends." The reader will remember the description so often rendered by Swedenborg in his ecstatic wanderings through Celestial spheres, or his having seen God as a Spiritual Sun. The same statement is made by several of the best modern Brahmins who are Seers. It was re-affirmed by Cahagnet's Somnambules under the control of many spirits who professed to have beheld the glory of this Spiritual Sun, and it was stated in opposition to all the preconceived opinions of surrounding listeners, by the Spirits who spoke with human voices at Koon's Spirit room in the opening of the American Spiritual Dispensation.

It has frequently been stated to the author by teaching Spirits, that the Tutelary Angel of every planet appears only as a Spiritual Sun, himself deriving light, heat, force, and being, from the Central Sun of the Universe; that these stupendous and sublime centres, the Spiritual Suns of Earths, Planets, and Satellites, impart their life-giving light, radiance and gravitating forces to the Physical Suns of the systems to which they belong; - that these Physical Suns are the most progressed aggregations of world matter in the Universe, hence become centres and parents of revolving Satellites, who derive a certain measure of light and heat from the Sun of their system, but like that material body, they would fade, perish and dissolve into their original elements were they not vitalized by the Spiritual Sun, which is to that system, as the Soul to the human body.

To the true Hierophant who can connect ancient mysteries with personal spiritual endowments, those who wear the Prophet's mantle, yet analyze its fabric by the light of modern science, Tutelary Spirits and Planetary Angels reveal themselves as distinctly now, as when they spoke from between the Cherubim and Seraphim of the "Ark of the Covenant," or reflected their lustrous rays from mimic skies, outstretched above the Hierophants of ancient mysteries.

Planetary Spirits respond to invocations from the sincere Spiritualist, and often hold watch and ward over the favored ones of earth to whom, through prepared conditions, they communicate many of the great truths of the Universe unattainable to mortals without their aid. Few of them are inferior to the highest of human intelligences, save the Spirits of Mercury and Venus, who should seldom be invoked and encouraged to commune with Earth.

Generally speaking, the Planetary Spirits are not attracted to earth, except on special missions, or by evocations procured as above states, through prepared conditions, of which more hereafter.
Ranging under the category of Super-mundane Spiritism, we place the Souls of men who have attained to the highest conditions of Angelic exaltation, and who are attracted to Earth as messengers of beneficence, beauty, and goodness.

Souls of men that have enjoyed ages of progress, and attained to radiant conditions of celestial happiness, sometimes return to earth for material knowledge, to study lower conditions of being, and gather elements of use, imparting in return the noblest teachings, and very generally associating their mission with some master mind of earth, through whom they become, by inspiration and heavenly influence, the promoters of mighty reforms, great upheavals of human thought, culminating in social, political, or religious revolutions.

On every round of that visionary ladder, whose foot is on earth, whose apex in heaven - Angels who have once been men, Spirits who have lived and labored on earth and risen from the ashes of death, victor-browed, to a triumphant inheritance beyond; household "lares" - heart loves who have just left us, but still hover on the threshold they have crossed to smooth our rough and rugged path over the stones their torn feet have trod - all such ministers of live and blessing as these, ascend and descend on this mystic ladder, forming an interminable chain of love and harmony between the highest and the lowest, connecting each and all by the links of sympathy, bearing up the tired hands that are dropping life's burdens for very weariness - catching at the outstretched arms that are tossed abroad in the agony of frantic supplication to the God of many creeds and nations, tenderly wafting up to heaven the piteous prayers that long ago they lisped forth in accents as faltering as our own, and returning inspiration for aspiration, peace and blessing for the incoherent appeals of human ignorance and impotence.

These are the beings that fill up the sum of man's limited and finite span of knowledge, concerning Super-mundane Spiritism.

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Fragments From This Curious Compendium of Ideality and Truth - Quotations From Classical Authors

One of the most curious compendiums of ideality and truth, allegory and veiled mysticism extant, is to be found in the ancient Caballa of the Jews.

This celebrated work is a collection of writings and allusions to traditions of still more authority, supposed to have been communicated by God to Adam, by Adam to Seth, by Seth lost or parted with in some mysterious manner, but renewed again in oral teachings from the God of SInai to Moses, from him revealed to Joshua, thence given to the seventy Elders, and thus transmitted to divers of the learned Jews, who dissented from the more direct assertions of the Talmud. There is another collection of writings and traditions bearing the title of Cabbala, attributed to Oriental scholars, but as this remarkable work is of little or not value without a key which can only be furnished by certain Oriental fraternities, its transcript would be of no value to the general reader.

Passing over the sources from whence the Jews pretend to derive their Cabbala, it is well to notice one peculiarity in its mode of inscription which may serve to explain the many confused and contradictory statements to which it has given rise.

The writers of the Jewish Cabbala evidently labored, and with remarkable success, too, to conceal the true meaning of what they wrote.

Thus some letters are so shortened as to leave the word intact, but the meaning masked; others are lengthened, crooked, or interpolated with seemingly unmeaning points, all with the same design; for example, in the sentence, Abraham came to week for Sara, the letter Caph is smaller than the others, by which Cabbalistic readers understand that as Sara was old, her spouse only wept for her a little.

In a certain passage the syllables Isch, signifying a man, and Escha, a woman, will be found with a point against the word man, absent in writing the word woman; next there occurs a point in the word woman, lacking in writing the word man; when the two points are combined in the same sentence, they signify God; when one alone is there, the word fire is implied. Without the pointing the idea conveyed is, man and woman do agree well together. With the interception of the subtle points in the peculiar mode of Cabbalistic writings, the sentence would read, When man and woman agree together, God is with them; when they disagree, fire is between them.

The study of a lifetime would fail to master all the subtleties with which these writings abound, and the determination which the authors of the Jewish Cabbala manifest to veil the meaning of their sentences under the mask of cypher; and hence it is doubtful how much the popular translations of this celebrated collection can be relied on, especially when they are given to the world by Mystics, as much interested in reserving Cabbalistic ideas, as their original authors.

The Talmud very probably contains a fair digest of the Cabbala, although the latter is richer in occult lore. From a comparison of the two we may glean the following summary of ancient Jewish opinions, concerning the Divine order of cosmogony.

"God is a Trinity," to-wit; Light, Spirit and Life. His first emanations are also triune, namely: En Soph, the masculine of Infinity; Sophia, the feminine of Wisdom and the Word, the divine Activity proceeding from the union of the two. A third triad of principles is indicated, namely: Matter, the formative mould; Life, the active principle of formation; and Soul, the eternal and infinite form of Spirit. Much stress is laid on the ineffable mystery of Triune being - that is, "Three in one, and one in three;" also on the science of numerals, the exact principle of mathematics, and the immutable order by which creation is designed, on geometrical proportions. Mathematics and geometry are as inextricably interwoven with Cabbalistic ideas as Spirit and matter.

The first man - Adam Kadman - is mysteriously mixed up with the Jewish Christ - the Adam of the fall; King David, and the original "only begotten Son of God." It would take all the craft of the unscrupulous Eusebius to disentangle the exact relations of Adam Kadman with his subsequent appearances on earth, and all the faith of the most unquestioning of Christian believers to swallow the Cabbalistic methods of interpreting the scheme of unaccountable perdition, and unaccountable salvation for man. There is some probability that the wild and unsustained theories of modern reincarnationists borrow their fantasies from these Cabbalistic ramblings; still there is much of beauty, much, too, of scientific value, in the suggestions thrown out concerning the just proportions of the universe, and the profound mathematical bases on which the structure of creation rests. To a great extent the scheme of descending emanations in creations, and ascending spheres providing for the progress of fallen spirits and elementary existences, agrees with the views of other ancient Theologians, whose opinions we have cited. Cabbalistic writers are very diffuse in their descriptions of different orders of "Resplendent Angels," Tutelary Spirits, Guardian Angels of every grade and function, Souls of men, Spirits, and legions of Elementaries, filling all space, crowding all elements, and peopling the universe with realms of Spiritual existence corresponding to the Archetypes, Spiritual principles and ultimates of form.

We shall have occasion to draw from the Cabbala again in our sections on Magic; meantime we close this brief notice by affirming that the very best and most reliable digests of Cabbalistic wisdom are to be found in the songs of Orpheus, the philosophy of Plato, the doctrines of Pythagoras, Appolonius of Tyana, and the modern mystics, Van Helmont and Behmen. Many others have borrowed fragments from this collection of writings, and though we are unprepared to assert that the celebrated Greek sages named above derived their ideas from the Cabbala, we are satisfied that they all and each drew from the same source, and that the fountains of wisdom that supplied them, poured forth their treasures from the grand old ranges of the mighty Himalayas, and trembled in the dewy chalices of the white lotuses that fringed the shores of the sacred Nile.

The more we pursue the wisdom of the ancients, through all their ramifications of varied speech, allegorical forms, and the symbolic representation, the more surely we shall come to the conclusion that they are all tributary streams from one central source; that this source was the Book of Nature, written over with flowers and bloom on the fair green earth, with suns and stars in the spangled vault of Heaven - that the great Schoolmaster, who first instructed men and angels in the letters of this divine alphabet was God, the Father of Spirits; that the means of teaching were intuition, inspiration, and direct communion with Angels, the messengers of God; - magic, as the artificer of a new form of communion, when the child-like early man lost the power of intuition, and broke the links of direct communication, by the corruptions of a materialistic civilization, and all means combined, when the pure heart and the clear brain can elevate the soul to its native heavens, and learn to master the occult forces of nature by science. Perhaps we may never return to the simple and child-like attitude which the early men of the earth sustained towards their God.

They conversed with their tutelary spirits as a man speaks with his friend. They looked, and saw that God was. They listened and God's Angels spoke to them in voices as clear as the sighing of the breeze or the murmuring of the brook. They reflected and their past spiritual origin and present destiny cast their images on the mirror of their minds as truthfully as the limpid waters of the lake reflects the lustre of the stars.

Had you asked the intuitional man of old, how he knew these things, he would have gazed upon you with astonishment, and questioned back, "How is it possible that you should fail to know them?" Socrates said, "I respect my own soul, though I cannot see it."

The men of our purely materialistic and external age doubt the existence of their own souls because they cannot see them.

How, then, can they expect to see spirits, hear their voices, or apprehend the nature of that God "who is a Spirit?"

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Angels, Spirits, Tutelary Deities, Souls and Elementary Spirits - Opinions of the Ancients - The Jewish Cabbala - Classical Authorities

When the Spiritual in human history first dominated the mind, is as impossible to ascertain as who was the first man.

A celebrated materialistic writer of the eighteenth century says: "The idea of subordinate Gods becomes a necessary sequence to the acknowledgment of deific existence at all, and it would be as useless to search for the country or time when Gods, Spirits and Angels were first believed in, as to attempt ascertaining the locality and period where and when religious worship began." This is essentially true, though an adversary writes it.

The origin of man's belief in Deity must be supplemented by his acceptance of intermediate spiritual existences, for the Soul which is the witness of the one, proclaims the other, and the chief difference between the opinions on these points is, that whilst the deepest and most incommunicable emotions of the Soul rest on its Author and Finisher, Deity, the senses may bear witness to the presence and operation of subordinate Spiritual existences in the phenomena that attend their ministrations.

It is enough to affirm that the vestiges of humanity in every country and age, bear testimony to man's belief in the ministry and interposition in human affairs of orders or beings both superior and inferior to mortals, operating for good and evil, but always through methods beyond the power of mortal achievement, appealing to the senses through modes of action not possible to man without their aid, and after a fashion which proves them to be limited by none of the known laws of nature.

From the days when the most ancient Sanscrit writings laid down modes of invoking spirits, described their qualities and influences, and prescribed the conditions under which mortals should hold communion with them, up to the nineteenth century, when the "spiritualists who permeate every land of civilization, point their little tracts descriptive of the best means of forming 'circles' for the purpose of evoking spirit presence and communion, there never was an age or time when man in some form or other did not believe in Spiritual existences subordinate to the Deity; in the means of communing with them, and in their influence on human action for good or evil."

From the collected opinions of the Hindoos, Chaldeans, Persians, Jews, Hebrew and Oriental Cabbalists, Talmudists, Greeks and Romans, as well as from the author's own personal experience with spirits of different orders and grades, we present the following special summary of ideas concerning the various degrees of Spiritual existences in the Universe.

Whilst nearly every nation of antiquity deemed of God as the Demiurgus; neither male nor female, yet both; as of a Central Source of life, light, heat and creative energy, one alone, yet incomprehensible, uncreated and indestructible, all taught of subordinate procedures from Him. The first of these was a Divine Being corresponding to the Bramah of the Hindoo Trinity, the Osiris of Egypt, the Ormuzd of Persia, the Logos of Philo, the Adam Kadman of the Cabbalists.

The idea embodied in this Eheogony was that in the Deity resided the masculine principle of Power, and the feminine of Wisdom, called by the Cabbalists En Soph and Sophia. From the incomprehensible union of these two proceeded a third, the Logos, or Word, through which the will of God became manifest in expression -that is, in the evolution of forms - worlds, suns, systems, reproductive germs, and realms of progressive being. In this stupendous system, the superior emanations were Gods, directing the birth, formation and destinies of worlds; then came Archangels, charged with missions of Almighty power and wisdom. To them succeeded legions of Angels, some entrusted with the direction of Planets, Earths, Nations, Cities and Societies, hence called "Tutelary Angels," and worshiped as Gods. Others, exercising rule in specific groups, and classified by Hebrew Cabbalists as "Thrones, Dominions, Powers."

The division of Angels and Spirits into grand Hierarchies, Legions, and specific offices of divine ministration, would occupy a volume, and give a vast and exalted perception of the antique view of Spiritual existence. Descending from the grander scale of angelic ministration recited above, we notice that the Sages and Seers of antiquity identified certain spirits as the inspiring agencies of art, science, different branches of industry, and all the occupations of social, artistic, and even commercial life. The Hebrew Scriptures continually declare that God put it into the heart of such and such individuals to work in brass or wood, fine linen, or rich coloring. In the direct and intuitional communion with Spiritual existences enjoyed by the Hebrews, it was assumed that all good or exceptionally great powers resulted from inspiration, and, as explained in the New Testament, those were called Gods, to whom the word of God came; so when the terms God, or Lord, were made use of to signify the source of the idea, Spiritual influence was the kernel implied in the expression.

Below all the inspiring agencies for good were assumed to exist legions of evil spirits, almost as numerous, and scarcely less powerful to tempt and destroy, than good Angels were to bless.

Between these two realms of opposing powers were ranged human Souls, not only in their incarnate forms of mortal being, but also as disembodied spirits, vast realms of spiritual existence being assigned to them, interpenetrating and surrounding the earth, through which, in successive stages of growth and progress, the pilgrim Soul was permitted to win its way back to the celestial state from which it had fallen by mortal birth.

Every human Soul was supposed to attract to itself from the moment of birth two Spirits, the one powerful to influence for good, the other for evil. These Spirits were called by the ancients good and evil Genii; and the natural proclivities to vice or virtue in the individual to whom they ministered were supposed to be stimulated or exalted, according as the Soul gave head to the inspiration of the tempter, or the counsellor.

Besides the realms of being above enumerated, it was claimed that other orders existed, neither wholly good or purely evil; neither entirely spiritual, nor actually material in their natures; creatures of the elements, corresponding in their state, power and function, to the different elements in the universe, and filling up all the realms of space with uncounted legions of embryonic and rudimental forms.

These being were, by reason of their semi-spiritual nature, invisible to man, and, because of the gross tincture of matter in their composition, unable to discern any orders of being but themselves, except through rare and exceptional rifts in their atmospheric surroundings. They corresponded to the ether, air, atmosphere, water, earth, minerals, plants and different elements of which the earth and the universe generally is composed. Some of these beings were malicious and antagonistic to man, and others harmless and good. All exerted power, especially in the direction of the element to which they corresponded; they were said to be endowed with graduated degrees of intelligence, and to have bodies subject to the laws of birth, growth, change and death.

From being invisible to man, except through rare or prepared conditions, they were termed spirits; from being embryonic, rudimentary and attached only to certain fragments of the universe, they were termed Elementaries. Every plant and every world, every dew-drop and every sun, sustained swarms of this parasitical life, so that there was not an atom of matter but what was redolent of it. Had the ancients been acquainted with the powers of the microscope, they would doubtless have classed the infusoria and animalculae revealed by this wondrous instrument with the realms of elementary spirits. Be this as it may, it was assumed that, as their existence was only rudimentary, and the evidences of that divine trinity which in man constitutes an immortal being, namely, matter, force and spirit, was lacking, so they had no soul and were not immortal. It was also taught of the Elementaries, that though they propagated their species, were animated by will and some share of intelligence, lived their term of life, and died, still they possessed no concrete, self-conscious principle of being sufficiently developed to enable the spiritual essence that escaped at death to become individualized, and retain a recollection of its past, or a personal consciousness of its own identity. Thence it was taught that the spiritual essence of the disintegrated organism was gathered up in death and passed into some more advanced form of being; that each successive birth purified its nature and enlarged its capacity; in fact, that it was life, instinct, and matter, in progressive stages of existence, and that this progress continued until the most rudimental sparks of spiritual being expanded into fully developed spiritual blossoms, attained to the glory and dignity of self-conscious spiritual entities, gravitated to spiritual spheres, and from thence became attracted to earth, entered into the Soul principle of man, and thus united him in essence with all the lower forms of being, and themselves commenced a self-conscious and immortal stage of fresh ascending pilgrimages.

"The spheres of elementary existence," says a famous Oriental Cabbalist, "are as numerous and their orders as rife with variety and function as are the earth's planets, suns, systems, and realms of ether."

There cannot be a grain of matter but has its corresponding spiritual counterpart. Ranging from the infinitely large to the infinitely little, from a world to a monad, all things in the universe of matter are supplemented by an universe of spirit, and it is as unreasonable to suppose that mighty suns and resplendent planets should be destitute of Providential law, order, guidance and maintenance, through deific tutelary Angels, as that a sand-grain or a dew-drop should be left to the direction of its own unaided and non-intelligent movements. All, all, are but external expressions of the immortal soul, which in fragments and atoms suited to the thing it vitalizes, animates, permeates and sustains all being, even as the Soul of man vitalizes his material structure."

We have given this teaching as a compendium of antique and chiefly Oriental thought; but we now preface all farther attempts at elucidating the subject matter of this work, by claiming every iota of this philosophy to be the truth, as it appears to the mind of the author.

From long years of communion with spirits of every grade, high and low, perfected and rudimental; from the privilege of wandering in their spheres in the clairvoyant condition, from visits made spiritually to the realms of elementary being where the poor, imperfect dwellers beheld in the astral body of their visitant an imaginary God, from dreams, trances, visions, open and oral communication with angelic beings and ministering spirits, and author insists that the doctrines herein enunciated are transcripts of the order of the Universe, as clearly laid down as the half-prophetic, half-bedimmed vision of humanity can apprehend it, and that, whether accepted or rejected, it contains holy truths, which belong to the best interests of humanity to comprehend; revealments which our fathers understood, and we have lost sight of, from our undue devotion to material interests, and our blind fanaticism in ignoring all spiritual research save such as comes through an effete and materialistic ecclesiasticism.

We are quite aware that if this volume should fall into the hands of one-idead, self-styled scientists, the avowal of faith just recorded will amply justify such readers in committing the work to the flames as the ravings of a lunatic. Should it be read by any of those presumptuous and narrow-minded Spiritualists who assume that there is no other realm of spiritual being than that occupied by their own particular familiars, we anticipate the wail of denunciation they will raise, insisting that no theory can be true, or worth studying, that has not been spelled out by their rapping spirits, declared in doggrel rhymes through their semi-tranced media, or lisped out in comical broken English, by the spirits of "little Indian maids," or "big braves," once renowned for eloquence and wisdom, but transformed through mediumistic witchery, into imbeciles and buffoons. Should it be read by the too devoted followers of the soul-illuminated Seer of Sweden, who cannot admit of any truth which the mind of Swedenborg failed to grasp, they will say, these writings are dictated by lying spirits, and that, because he, the conservator and revelator of all truth to the minds of the bigoted, affirmed, that all angels, even the highest that moved around the throne of God, "had once been men."

Should these pages fall into the hands of the intelligent modern Spiritualist whose incessant watch-word is "light, more light!" his comment will be, "this may be true or false, but because I don't know it to-day, I will endeavor to prove it to-morrow, and accept or reject it, only as I can prove it."

Should the work fall into the hands of a learned "Pagan," well-read "Heathen," or instructed Orientalist, he will say, "Surely this writer has heard the voices of the Oracles; beheld the glories of the mysteries; and sat at the feet of the Sages, who quaffed from the eternal fountain of revelation!

"He is an initiate - a Hierophant - a Brother who speaks the word of truth known only to the few; the Master's Word is whispered in these pages, thrilling through the bones to the very marrow of humanity."

According to some, but not by any means the most intelligent or best educated of the American Spiritualists, there is no God at all, only a "principle," and nothing higher in the scale of being than the spirits of their deceased friends and kindred; but these materialistic philosophers form but a small part of that intelligent nation of thinkers, and their teachings have but little weight beyond a few score of poor people, who gather together, and in grandiloquent phraseology congratulate each other on being the great I Ams of the Universe.

The majority of persons convinced by wonderful signs and tokens in America, that the souls of men live and communicate to their friends on earth, have seemed to the author to be waiting for some philosophy or revelation that should carry them beyond this one isolated fact, and reduce spiritual existence and human life to correspondential and appreciable doctrines of science.

Would that these humble writings might aid to practicalize their noble aspirations!

The sacred books of Hermes, once supposed to have been the most ancient writings in the world, but now more generally deemed to have been copies of the Hindoo Vedas, transplanted from India into Egypt, give most elaborate accounts of the different orders of angelic beings in the Universe, and render descriptions of the spiritual counterparts of every plant, mineral, raindrop or speck of dust in the earth and its atmosphere.

Eusebius, the Christian Bishop of Caesarea, who wrote in the fourth century of the Christian era, claimed to have been familiar with these famous Hermetic writings. He says they often repeat the question: "Have you not been told that all spirits are sparks from the Divine Soul of the Universe; Gods, Demons, Souls, yet in their variousness all emanations from Him?"

Jamblichus, quoting from the same source, writes: "From this one came all Gods that be; all souls, all spirits, good and bad, and many that be neither very wicked nor yet good.

"There be many kinds of spiritual essences besides soul, as spirits of the earth, the sea, running waters, and even some that do inhabit the holes of reptiles that live on the banks of rivers, or the depth of mines......Their abiding places cannot so much as be named, without enumerating all the secret corners of the earth......That these spirits are often under the dominion of man, is as true as that they may be transformed by the arch enemy of mankind into instruments of ill, to work the deeds of darkness, in which he delights."

Lao-Kiun, a contemporary of the great Chinese Sage Confucius, founded a school, which, for the spirituality of its doctrines, far transcended the teachings of Confuscius. His text of religious faith was: "Tao (meaning God) produced one; one produced two, two produced three, and three produced all things."

During the lifetime of this philosopher, a book containing the names and offices of innumerable companies of spirits was found, as it was asserted, suspended on the royal gate of Pekin, placed there by no mortal hand and supposed to be full of direct revelations from heaven.

This miraculous volume is said to have contained magical formulae for the evocation and control of spirits; directions how to cast out devils and heal diseases; also the profoundest secrets of alchemy, namely the composition of the philosopher's stone and the elixir vitae.

To satisfy the bigotry and superstitious fears of succeeding generations, this book, together with all other magical writings, was destroyed. Still, it was asserted that private copies had been made and circulated of its contents. From a curious and very ancient roll of MSS, in the royal library of Pekin, the author has had the privilege of copying a fine astrological chart, and a magical evocation of elementary spirits, assumed to have been first written in the aforesaid book.

In Chaldea, the only great nation of antiquity in which Phallic and Yonic emblems are not found, proving by the universal prevalence of pure astronomical symbols, the extreme antiquity of the worship there practiced, a belief in various ascending and descending grades of spirits and angels, everywhere speaks out from the mighty and stupendous ruins. The same belief, only on a much more elaborate scale, was cherished amongst the Medes and Persians, and taught in all its minutiae by Zoroaster.

The universal prevalence of image worship throughout the East is due to the idea that the spirits of Stars, Planets, Angels, Seraphs, Chrubs and Elementary Spirits could be attracted to their images, when consecrated under magical formulae, and not only fix the worshipers' minds upon the spirits represented in the images, but actually draw them into these material receptacles. The strange and grotesque forms of consecrated images may thus be accounted for.

The winged Bull of Nineveh was the personification of the Cherubim. The winged Serpent represented the Seraphim.

The immense number of insects, birds and animals esteemed as sacred, and rendered homage to in animal images, were all supposed to be attended by spiritual essences, whose power resided in the particular shape of the creatures venerated.

The Persian Theogony not only includes all the ideas we have dwelt upon in other systems, but is divided by Zoroaster into interminable chains of Spiritual existences, two of whom, one good and another evil, is assigned as an Attendant "Ferver," to every living creature. Besides these, are hosts of Elementary Spirits, assumed to exert a beneficent or malignant influence upon every particle of the vegetable and animal kingdoms. Zoroaster's system, like that of the ancient Hindoos and Egyptians, was full of high moral teachings, and, save for the cruelty and reckless waste of life manifested in its system of sacrificial rites, forms a code of ethics not inferior to the sweetness and beauty of the teachings ascribed to Jesus of Nazareth. here as in Cabalism, Spirit is assumed to be a primal essence, containing the archetypes of all ideas. God is the one central source of light. Ormuzd the first Divine emanation, the King of Light. Mithra and Arimanes, the next procedures, are representatives of the resplendent God of Light, heat and goodness, and the terrific prince of cold, darkness and evil. All created forms are patterned after the archetypal ideas existing in the Divine Mind, and endless chains of good and evil Spirits, Angels, Genii and Elementaries, fill up all spaces in the invisible realms in which matter floats.

As in Chaldea, the most renowned methods of interpreting the will of God were by soothsaying and divination, so in Persia the favorite resort was to Astrology. The Persians claimed that the Stars were divine Scriptures, in which the order of visible nature was plainly mapped out; that the numerous changes and configurations of the heavenly bodies produced relative changes in the simplicity of the scheme indicated on the path of the Zodiac. That each star had its special influence upon the plant or living creature which was born during its ascendency.

Minerals, earths, waters and places, were directly governed by planetary influence. The mind was governed by the phases of the moon. All colored objects or glittering stones by the sun or one of the six planets; in fact, the rise and fall of nations and the destinies of individuals were spelled out by Persian Astrologers on the starry heavens, and he would have been considered an ignoramus or audacious skeptic, worthy of death, who should presume to dispute the prophetic dictum of any well-versed Persian Astrologer.

The Priests of this nation were called Magi, and it seems probable that this term, signifying Wise men, was used for the first time in this connection. Besides the Art of Astrology and Soothsaying, in which the Persian Magi were instructed as part of their education, they practiced in later days enchantment and divination, and as these arts began to be used popularly in other nations, and were often combined with Sorcery, Necromancy and phases of Magic of the most questionable character, the term Magician was at length applied to those who abused the power of Magic, exercised it for unholy purposes, or by aid of evil spirits. It was in this sense that the writers of the Pentateuch designated those Priests of Egypt who contend with Moses. They called them Magicians, whilst Moses in their phraseology was the Servant of God. They (the Magicians) acted under the influence of "Demons," Moses under that of the Hebrews' Tutelary "Deity." It is thus that we learn how the title of Magician - originally synonymous with superior wisdom and divine knowledge - may be used as a term of reproach by rival practitioners.

To the egotistical translators of the Septuagint, the performances of Moses with frogs, serpents, lice and other abominations were the work of "God," acting through his chosen servant; that of the Egyptian Priests, "Magic," a word as abominable in Jewish lips as it was honorable amongst Egyptians or Persians.

There is a Sanscrit word signifying worship, which somewhat resembles Magus, or Enchanter, a term synonymous in Chaldaic, with the Persian Magian. The translators of the Septuagint allege that the Babylonian High Priest was called Rab Mog, or Mag; hence it seems that Magic, Magian, Magician, and all their derivatives were, in the first instance, significant of deep religious meaning; but subsequently become corrupted into base and injurious terms, by the misuse that was made of the power they referred to.

In a curious old treatise, by Godwyn, on the manners, times and theological worship of the ancient Romans, published in 1622, there are the following items of information concerning the subdivisions of their Gods and Spirits, etc.:

"Though Satan had much blinded the hearts of men in old times, yet was not the darkness so great, but that they did easily perceive that there was some governor, some first mover, as Aristotle saith; some first originall of all goodnesse, as Plato teacheth; so that if any made this question whether there was a God or no, they were urged to confess the truth that there was a God; yet were they very blind in discerning the true God, and hence hath been invented such a tedious catalogue of Gods, that, as Varro averreth, their number hath exceeded thirty thousand. ......The second kind of Gods were called Semides id est demi-Gods; also, Indigites id est Gods adopted or canonized, or, men deified. For, as the select Gods had possession of heaven by their own right, so these Gods canonized had it no other way than by right of donation, being, therefore, translated into heaven, because they lived as Gods upon earth." ......Then follows a description of the rights of canonization, unnecessary to quote. The author goes on to say: "But that we may understand what is meant by these Semones (Gods of the third order), we must remember that by them are signified - not the Gods that appertain to us - but the necessaries of man's life, as his victuals, clothing and the like - to the which well-being of man were Gods of good and evil fortune, inclining to give or withhold.

"We read, likewise, of divers names given to many Gods who did severally afford help unto many, so that they were called tutelares, such as had undertaken the protection of any City or Towne, and thence are named for the City or Towne, as St. George, of England; St. Denis, of France; St. Patrick, of Ireland, etc., and the Romans, being fully persuaded of this kind of guard, held by tutelares, when they went about to besiege a Towne by certain enchantments or spells, they would first call out the Tutelar God, because they deemed it impossible to captivate the City as long as these Gods were within, and least others might use the same means in besieging Rome, therefore, as divers authors have thought, the true name of the Roman City was never known, least thereby the name of their Tutelar God might be descryed......And as they supposed some Tutelar spirit to have the charge of whole countries, so did they believe that others had the charge of particular men, and that so soon as any man was born, two spirits did presently accompany him invisibly, the one termed the good Angell, or bonus Genius, persuading him to that which is goo; the other called the Malus Genius, or evil Angell, tempting to that which should be hurtful, insomuch that they thought all the actions of men were guided by these Genii, so that if any misfortune befell a man they would say, 'We have grieved our Genius,' or 'Our Genius being displeased with us, or opposed to us.'"......"These Genii were thought to be a middle essence between Gods and men."......"They appear in divers forms, but oftener as a fierce tragical man, as did the evil Genius who warned Brutus of his fate, or a decrepit old man, or a sad one, or in many such forms of anger or woe as mankind doth assume."

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The explorers of ancient India, Egypt, Greece and Rome have wisely distrusted the propriety of giving very graphic representations or close descriptions of their monumental remains.

Most of the popular writers on these lands have contented themselves with hinting that Phallic worship prevailed amongst the ancients, and that its emblems are abundantly interspersed with other records; but the truth is, that all the records are overlaid with emblems of Phallic worship, and that there is scarcely a monument or inscription of antiquity which does not, in some form or other, perpetuate the idea of Solar or Sex worship, or both.

Nearly all the Scriptural names have a direct bearing upon sexual ideas. Every title, including the syllables El, Om, On, Di and Mi, signify the same ideas. The titles ascribed to the Sun and the Generative Gods are mutually convertible, and both are continually bestowed upon the Gods of the ancients.

Adonis, Elijah, Elisha, El, Bael, Belus, Jehovah, Jah, Abraham, Samson, Jachin, Boaz, Adam, Eve, Mary, Esau, Edom, Zeus, Jupiter, Thor, Odin, Sol, Helios, Asher, Dyonisus, etc., etc., etc., are all names significant of sexual ideas.

Most of the names bestowed on Hindoo, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Hebrew Gods bear the same interpretation, or else are applicable, in a double sense, to Solar and Sex worship. The names of the twelve tribes of Israel have direct reference to the generative functions; and thus are Bible names and Bible terms put into the mouths of innocent, lisping children as "the word of God," a word which, if interpreted in all the fullness of its meaning, would crimson the cheek of every virtuous matron with shame.

Up to the days when European civilization prevailed, and the influence of a temperate, equatorial climate moderated the excessive energy of that emotional nature which man inherits from his association with matter, stimulated to immense activity in the fervid heat of tropical climes, his religious aspirations were all tinctured with the idiosyncrasies of his physical nature. He deemed of his God as of himself.

The sublime beauty of the spangled heavens, the obvious correspondence of heat, light and planetary influence with his material well-being, and the final mystery and power of the generative functions, were the most direct and natural appeals that he could find in the universe to his sense of reverence and his ideas of power. Is it any marvel that he worshiped the heavenly host and deemed the laws of generation the most direct representations of Deific action in creation?

The chief symbols of these interblended systems are found in the various forms of crosses extant; in the Phallus or Lingham, and the Yoni, the male and female emblems of generation; in the triangle or Tau, the origin of the cross, the Serpent who in so many ways was esteemed as a deific emblem, and every object, natural or artificial, which bore the least resemblance to the figures enumerated above.

As regards the cross, it has frequently been attempted to show that it owes its sacred character to the instrument of punishment upon which the Christian's God was supposed to have suffered death.

Ages before the Jews were known as a nation, the cross was regarded all through the East as a sacred symbol.

To remove the obscenity of the idea attached to its original meaning, from the image, which modern civilization so devoutly cherished, it has been urged that it was reverenced by the Egyptians, because it was used as a Nileometer or measure of the river Nile. Granting this, and admitting that the Nile was held sacred by the Egyptians as the source of plenty and irrigation, hence, that the Nileometer, with its upright post and cross-piece to mark the height to which the water attained, was also held sacred as an emblem of redemption from famine, or a sign of possible destruction, still this does not account for the prevalence of the cross nor the reverence attached to it in lands where no Nileometer was required, and in distant ages ere Nileometers were invented.

Sculptured over every temple of the East, the cross in many forms was used to signify the generative power.

It was originally designed to represent a Trinity, and thus gave rise to the sacredness attached to the number three, with all its multiples, and in all the varieties of form in which the cross is found from the plain letter T, the Tau of the Scandinavians, or the hammer of Thor, to the eight-sided cross of the Templars, and in all its variousness it signified and does signify, nothing more or less than the fertility, fecundity and creative structure of the masculine principle of generation. The fact that the sun's two chief incidents of Zodiacal travel were the crossings of the Ecliptic plane at Spring and Autumn, deepened the reverence which antique nations cherished for this all-prevailing symbol, but instead of removing it from the earth to the skies, it simply showed in this dual significance, the unity of design expressed throughout the cosmic motions or the universe.

The female emblem was signified by an unit, a circle, a boat shaped shell, a lozenge, or any object, animate or inanimate, that resembled these figured, or implied receptivity, fruitfulness or maternity. The union of the female unit with the male triad, was designed by the sacred and mystic number 4, or symbolized by a serpent with his tail in his mouth, two fishes bent to form a circle, the rite of circumcision, and many other symbolical rites and figures.

The origin of Serpent worship arose first from the universal prevalence of these creatures throughout the Orient; the extreme subtlety of their natures implying wisdom, the custom of casting their skins denoting renewed youth and immortality, their tremendous and deadly powers of destruction, analogous to the "wrath of God," their supposed healing virtue indicative of the life-giving power of the sun, the glory of their shining scales imitating light; but, above all, the Serpent was deified as the antagonistic power of the skies, defined in the great constellation of the Dragon, which did annual war with the heavenly legions of the sun.

Endless were the fables invented to typify the wisdom and life-giving properties of serpents; endless the myths in which they figured as the representatives of good and evil Genii.

Serpent worship is, in all probability, as old as Sex and Solar worship, and a thorough understanding of the three systems forms a clue to all the signs, symbols, allegories and mysteries of all the ancient faiths that prevailed before the Christian era.

The ideas indicated by these symbols, and the legends attached to them, underlie all those stupendous rites, solemn mysteries and gigantic monuments of art that have overlaid the once splendid Orient with ruins that will remain the mystery and admiration of the race till time shall be no more. The myths and symbols of these interblended systems prevailed indeed long after the Christian era, and were preserved by the Gnostics, Manicheans, Neo Platonists, and many of the early sects amongst Christians and Philosophic Greeks; they are preserved and prevail amongst the most civilized of sects to-day, but alas! without any real appreciation of the ideas that once vitalized the images.

Much of the mysticism of the "Divine Plato," and the numerical wisdom of Pythagoras, owed their identity to the esoteric meaning veiled in Oriental symbolism.

The famous mysteries of Eleusis, the Bacchic and Dyonisian rites, the feats in honor of Ceres, the orgies of Cybele, and other mythical personages of the Greek Pantheon; ancient masonry, both speculative and operative, and its degraded and imbecile descendant, modern masonry, founded their origin upon the basic principles of these ancient systems of worship, and the mass of legendary lore to which they gave rise.

Curious as would be the tracery of these primitive roots through all the tendrils, branches and reproductive germs that have overlaid the world with theological systems, the work must be reserved for another place and time, and this part of our subject must close with a few words in evidence of the lamentable tendency to degeneracy which all great ideas suffer when they outlive their day and usefulness; whilst the ark of the tabernacle survives through the sacred flame that of old dwelt between the Cherubim and Seraphim is quenched in eternal night.

Throughout the churches of Christendom, the name of the Most High God, the Alpha and Omega of Being, the Great Spirit who dwells alone and unknown in central orgs of primal light, is scarcely remembered, and ever subordinated to the worship of the Cross, with all its varieties of expression and form.

The myth of the Sun-God reappears in every phase of the Christian's creed.

The surplices, robes and fantastic adornments of high ecclesiasticism, are simply imitations of the women's garments which the priests of antiquity wore to indicate that God was both male and female.

The bells and holy candles, the Lambs, Bulls, Eagles, Men, Lions, and twelve apostolic personages, the Serpents, etc., etc., which cast their prismatic glory from costly painted windows on the chequered marbles of the floor beneath, are all but so many astronomical signs of antique fire worship, or emblems of sexual religion. The very shape of the steeples that crown the "houses of God" are mementos of the reverence accorded to the sacred flame, or veiled effigies of the "divine Lingham."

It would be equally painful and humiliating to analyze the mythical character of every sign and symbol of modern ecclesiasticism, were we not deeply, reverentially conscious that the spirit that no longer vivifies the dead husks of extinct faiths, still pervades the earth, still manifests its undying love for poor, idolatrous humanity, still illumines the heart, and sustains the drooping tendrils of that religion which erects its altar in the soul, and finds its most imperishable shrine in the depths of man's spiritual consciousness.

Witnesses, too - witnesses on the sensuous plane of life - are not wanting to the truth of this undying spiritual influx, permeating every age, and adapting its revelations to all forms of faith that recognize spiritual existence.

Like the waving lines of the shining Ecliptic, over bounding yet ever sustaining the sun-like progress of human destiny, comes down the ages the tracery of an all-pervading realm of spiritual existence, at once the cause and effect of earthly being.

Soul and spiritual essence is the God and the procedure, the Creator and the creature; all things else are phantasmagoric shapes, born of the hour, as formative moulds in which the soul essences grow, perishing with the hour when their office is ended.

Were it not for the assurance that there is a realm of spirit adequate to produce, sustain and guide the tangled woof of creation, the pictures we have drawn, however faithful to the exoteric history of the race, would be but a temporary assemblage of dust and ashes heaped together into grotesque and incomprehensible images. With this compass to steer our way through the restless billows of life's storm-tossed ocean, we may rise and sink, drift far and wide of our mark, stagnate for awhile on the sluggish sea of materialism, or seem to founder amidst the foam-crested upheavals of convulsed opinions, but we are in the hands of that Love that will never forsake us, that Wisdom that is all-sufficient to direct us, that Power that is almighty to save us.

"God lives and reigns!" said stout-hearted Martin Luther, when, standing alone, he bore testimony to his faith before princes, potentates and the opposing force of earth's assembled great ones.

His strength is ours, and in that strength we can afford to stand by and watch the wreck of empires and dynasties, ecclesiastical faiths and man-made dogmas.

We are immortal parts of the immortal Soul of the Universe, and we never can be lost, or perish out of his hand.

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The Connection of Sex, Solar and Serpent Worship - The Spiritual and Material Ideas of Antique Faiths Contrasted - The Degradation and Death of Materialistic Worship, and the Triumph of the Spiritual

Ever interpenetrating the signs and symbols of the astronomical religion, ranging beside its emblems, yet never entirely losing its own individuality, or merging its identity in that of its companion, appears a system of worship, looming up from the antique ages, whose origin and meaning has, until recently, been involved in mystery. The repulsive nature of the subject has, in all probability, caused even the philosophers who had mastered its meaning and understood its symbols, to shrink from exposing their knowledge to the vulgar mind. This will be better understood when we intimate that the esoteric system, to which we allude, is sex worship, or religious belief founded on the assumed sacredness of the order of generation.

Amongst the emblems most commonly seen in this connection are the Phallus or Lingham, the Triangle, all the different methods of exhibiting the Cross, the Serpent with his tail in his mouth, and a vast number of such geometrical signs as include the triangle, cross and circle. Many learned archaeologists are of opinion that sex worship, if it did not actually antedate, is still of as ancient an origin as that of the stars.

The author of this work deems that the primal faith of humanity was unmixed solar and astral worship, but the authoritative reasons for this belief are of little consequence to the general reader. It is enough to say that the emblems of solar and sex worship are so constantly combined in the same monumental remains, that we must infer both were understood, and in a measure reduced to systematic expression, at this earliest period where man began to leave records of his thoughts.

There are no shadows without a substance, no fables without a genuine idea to allegorize upon.

The fable of the Garden of Eden, the temptation and fall of man, is very generally assumed by materialistic writers to have a purely astronomical origin, and to have been founded on the following astral order. The August constellation of the Virgin, represents a woman holding a flower, sprig or fruit in her hand, beckoning to Botes or Joseph, the constellation a little to the north of the Virgin, but in close proximity to her. This configuration of the heavenly signs, it is alleged, may be as often interpreted into the fabled relations of Adam and Eve as the Virgin Mary and Joseph. The radiance, bloom and beauty of the season in which these constellations appear, signifies the earthly Eden. The astral woman tempts the astral man, she herself is tempted by the Serpent, who presently appears in the skies as the Great Dragon. The woman gives of the fruit she holds to man, he eats and falls. The Cherubim and Seraphim of the skies (the typical signs of constellated stars), drive them forth from the Eden of Summer into the gloom and famine of Winter. To restore the fallen man to a future paradise, a Savior must be found, and this is effected in the birth of the Sun-God, at midwinter, and his renovating influence during the succeeding Spring and Summer.

To accept of this fable without allowing for a spiritual significance concealed beneath it, is equivalent to the assumption that the ancients actually worshiped the sun, moon and stars as personal Gods; but the ancients never enunciated sacred ideas except in allegorical forms of speech, and never mapped out the scheme of an allegory without a profoundly spiritual meaning veiled by it.

"As it is above, so it is below," "On the earth as in the skies," were the sentences by which the mystics of old were accustomed to affirm the universal correspondence between the harmonies of the natural and spiritual in every department of being.

To understand how the ancients interpreted these astral hieroglyphics into such a system as would explain the fall of man, and yet preserve the correspondence between his estate on earth and the movement of the heavenly bodies, it is necessary to revert to the theory enunciated in Section I, where it was shown that the Soul originally dwelt in a purely spiritual state of existence; but being tempted by the craving desire for earthly knowledge, it became attracted to this planet - incarnated in the form of man - and hence " the fall" of spirit into matter. With all that reverence which finite being must feel when it presumes to speculate on infinity, we may imagine that the form of the highest spiritual existences may admit of no parts or angles, but may be, indeed, like the perfection of the spiritual Sun, a globe; but all organic forms are sections of the perfect sphere, and man is obviously a complex assemblage of lines and circles, united in himself all the details of mathematical proportion, subordinate to the perfection of figure assumed to exist in the Spiritual Sun.

In taking on a material existence, therefore, and changing from a purely spiritual entity to become an organized material being, the first principle of earthly life to be evolved must needs be the means to produce and reproduce it.

This, in an earthly state of being, is just as sacred and paramount a theme as the formation of worlds, and the birth of suns and systems in the aggregate of the Universe.

As the function of creation is the highest and most wonderful with which the mind can invest Deity, so the imitative law must become the noblest and most sacred function of God's creatures. In the beginning of earthly existence, we believe it was thus esteemed, and in those remote ages when sex worship was incorporated into a religious system, the highest and noblest elements of human thought clustered around the subject of generation, elevating it to the topmost pinnacle of human worship.

As the clear intuitions of the early man carried him back to his state of primeval, spiritual innocence, and recognized in his birth into matter a descent in the scale of being synonymous with the idea of a fall, so he imagined he perceived the order of this scheme mapped out in the constellated Zodiac of the skies. As he recognized the generative functions to be the immediate means of the Soul's birth into matter, so he elevated them into divine significance and set up the emblems as fit subjects for religious reverence. In process of time the instinctive appetites of man's sensual nature stimulated sex worship into excess, and degraded a holy idea into gross licentiousness. But this was the abuse, not the true origin of sex worship. Physical generation was once esteemed as the gate by which the Soul entered upon the stupendous pathway of progress, and became fitted for its angelic destiny in the celestial heavens; but, like all sacred ideas when translated into matter, the law of physical generation came to be regarded as mere physical enjoyment; it sank into sensuality, and hence the necessity which the wise and philosophic priesthood of old perceived, of veiling all teachings on this subject in mysteries, and expressing all ideas in its connection in obscure symbolism.

There are marked evidences in the vestiges of antiquity as to how the sexual idea encroached upon the forms of Solar worship.

The primitive conceptions of creation were exalted, sublime; but when the idea of sex worship became universal, even the Astral religion became imbued with its materialistic influence. The impersonations of the stars and the powers of nature were divided into male and female.

The story of creation was woven into romantic legends of amorous Gods and Goddesses; the emblems of generation were profusely interspersed with astronomical signs and any description of animal, however loathsome, as long as it was remarkable for procreative power, became deified as a type of the creative energy.

To those who esteem the spiritual idea as antagonistic to the material, and believe with the most exalted of the Essences, that in heaven, angelic essences are pure and free from all the impulses and attributes of matter, it must indeed have seemed a fall for the Soul to descend to earth and become incarnate only through the process of physical generation. And yet such is obviously the law of physical being. In the order of the Universe, spirit is the primal essence in which there is neither sex, age, sin, nor capacity for pain.

With the descent of Soul into physical life, man becomes dual, male and female, with sex as the dividing line between them. Then, too, ensues that mysterious transformation of the soul's faculties which converts spiritual love into material passion, institutional knowledge into human reason, boundless perception into dim memory and vague prescience, eternal things into temporal, and a creature without parts or passions, into one all organs, and swayed by every emotion that ranges from the depths of vice to the heights of virtue.

The brief race on earth run, spiritual spheres of progress opening up fresh avenues of purification to the pilgrim Soul, still preserving all the faculties acquired by its birth and association with matter, the celestial Angel stands related to the germ spirit, as the fully unfolded blossom to the embryonic seed. In this order of progress it is clearly shown that the means whereby the spirit-dweller of the original Eden becomes the perfected Angel of a celestial heaven, are: mortal birth, a pilgrimage through spheres of trial, discipline and purification, and an organism made up of separate parts with appropriate functions, the due and legitimate exercise of which constitute the methods of progress. In such a scheme, every trial and suffering has its meaning, and every passion (even the tendencies to vice and crime), their use in shaping the rudimental Angel, through remorse and penalty, into ultimate strength and divine proportion.

A familiar but apposite illustration of the relative difference between the germ spirit that descends from realms of primeval innocence to be born into matter, and that same spirit unfolded through spheres of discipline into the perfected Angel, is found, if we liken the two states to those of the acorn and the full-grown oak.

The one is still the oak in germ, but the noble proportions of the tree, its overshadowing branches, the vast girth of its mighty trunk, the splendor of its Briareus arms wide-stretched to the winds, with its ten thousand leafy hands tossed abroad on the ambient air; its rich harvest of countless germs, and the unborn forests that are to be furnished from their reproductive powers, all grow out of the association of the primal acorn with the formative matrix of earth.

Even so it is with the Soul. To become an Angel it must first be a Man, then a Spirit, struggling on through spheres of graduated unfoldment, and when all is done, the Soul originally expelled from its Eden of innocence and ignorance will regain it with the strength, wisdom and love with alone can constitute it an Angel of God.

It was with this perception of the Soul's destiny that the ancients esteemed the generative functions as divine, and the deification of their emblems as an act of religious duty. Whilst we believe this view of the origin of sex worship the true one, those who regard it simply from the standpoint of results, and contemplate the abominations practiced in its celebration, might well believe it to be the offspring of man's merely animal and instinctive nature; such it undoubtedly became when it sank into that corruption and abuse which too often attends the decadence of ideas, however exalted in their source. There was much, too, in the Jewish Theogony to favor the tendency to excess in sex worship.

Throughout the writings of the Pentateuch the utmost importance is attached to the production of offspring. Every means was adopted by the priestly law-givers to promote the propagation of the species.

Childless women were branded with the bitterest reproach. Dunuchs or persons afflicted with personal blemishes were forbidden to hold sacred offices. Every inducement which a stringent law could hold out to compel the people to "multiply and replenish the earth" was an essential of the Jewish religion. On the other hand, the prophetic writings of the Jews abound with fulminations of the Divine wrath against those who carried their ideas of sex worship to excess and sensualism. The unsparing denunciations of the Hebrew prophets against the practice of sacrificing to "strange Gods," are accompanied by the plainest descriptions of what those sacrificial rites were, and give color to the belief that the religious veneration which had once sanctified the idea of the generative functions as a divine mystery, had sunk into an all-pervading and soul-corrupting sensualism.

In comparison with Egypt, Chaldea, Assyria and Hindo-stan, Judea was but a modern nation.

The nomadic tribes of the Jews had made no mark on the world's history when Egypt was hoary with age, and India had recorded cycles of time, lost in the night of antiquity. The exoteric remains of solar and sex worship, together with all their signs and symbols, presented to the Jews only a dying vestige of faiths of whose resplendent maturity no historic epoch, however remote, can show an authentic record.

We only know it must have been so. Maps of the heavens, and perfected charts of astral motions, involving intricate calculations, which must have required thousands of years to arrive at, were all handed down from pre-historic to the commencement of historic times, and that with a completeness which fully sustains the enormous claims of the Hindoos for the existence of their dynasty during cycles of time which baffle the human mind to conceive of.

How many times have the silent but most eloquent catacombs of the old earth, in the form of upturned plains, the beds of rivers, the depths of artesian wells, and the recesses of newly discovered caverns, brought to light conclusive testimony that man lived, labored, wrought in clay, stone, pottery and metals, tens of thousands of years ago, on the face of the earth!

The author has himself spent years in India studying out that wonderful system of numerals which point to the antiquity of man, and the fact that he commenced astronomical calculations more than twenty thousand years ago. Some of these silent voices indicate axial changes in this planet which could not have transpired in less than a hundred thousand years. Others prove that the Hindoos clearly understood the precession of the equinoxes ages before the Christian era.

About the commencement of that period the colossal forms of the mystic Sphinx might have been found in long and majestic rows in the various temples of old India, and yet the mystery of the Sphinx could only have been solved by a people who had correctly understood the precession of the equinoxes. To effect a change in the position of the sun in the Zodiacal path from one sign to another must occupy at least 2140 years; and yet such changes had occurred, been fully calculated and recorded in the astronomical riddle of the Sphinx, a composite figure, designed to celebrate the sun's passage from the sign of the Virgin to that of the Lion, when the Jews were unknown as a people.

What amount of intellectual power had the mind of man arrived at ere these records of astronomical lore, mechanical skill and artistic power were achieved?

The remains of tropical plants now found amidst the awful desolation of the Arctic and Antarctic regions - the constant stream of revelation silently but surely upheaving its mystic writings from the superincumbent debris under which the earth of a million years ago lies buried - the stony voices that thunder through the colossal remains of ruined cities, and the swift but immutable footprints of the fiery squadrons whose march through the skies, the mind of man has followed up through ages of unrecorded time, all proclaim that the movements of the Universe transpire in spiral and ever-revolving cycles.

Like the path of the sun on the Ecliptic, now ascending on the royal arch of the northern hemisphere, now descending into the southern bow, but ever moving in gyrating circles upward, typifying the march of planets, nations, ages of time and human souls, so that those who study the part may comprehend the whole, all these stupendous witnesses figure out the laws by which cycles of civilization are born, grow, ascend to their culminating point of splendor, then turn the hill of time, descend lower and lower into engulfing depths, lower and lower into corruption, degradation, death! And yet they rise again, and, Phoenix-like, spring from the funeral ashes of their pyre to be reborn in nobler, higher forms of younger civilizations.

So has it been with man and his religious beliefs. Solar and sex worship, born of man's highest conceptions of the Divine plan, rose into an almost perfect science, the science by which the antique man perceived the correspondence between the earth and the heavens, the Creator and his creatures. This famous era of ancient civilization culminated, crossed the equinox of prophetic death, descended into the night of corruption and sensualism, and perished with the closing up of Oriental dynasties.

The real spiritual truths of antiquity have never died; but yet their exhibition has only at times illuminated the ages with coruscation of light, so little understood that their holy radiance has been mistaken for the baleful glare of "Supernaturalism." They have never died; but, as yet, they only give promise, not a full assurance, of the resurrection that is at hand.

Mankind, absorbed in its devotion to the pursuits of material science, has ignored its spiritual interests, or carelessly committed them to the charge of an ignorant and selfish Priesthood; but when the day of true spiritual awakening comes, then the Soul of the Universe shall be known and felt in the Souls of His Creatures, the light of this spiritual revelation will shine upon husks and figments of the dead past, of which reason, no less than intuition will be ashamed. It will show the lifeless bodies of ancient faiths, from which the soul has long fled, leaving nothing but dust and ashes, forms and ceremonies, surplices and shaven crowns behind.

It will show the painted Clown and many colored Harlequins of an ecclesiastical circus still performing their dreary tricks in an amphitheatre from which the stately personages of the grand Drama have vanished, where the curtain has fallen, the lights are quenched, on which the eternal midnight of a dead age has set in, with nothing to relieve the silence but the fluttering wings of the spectral ideas which already begin to flit forth into the morning of a new day, seeking the resurrecting life and light of a new Spiritual religion.

Posted by mikki at 05:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Showing the Nations of Antiquity That Have Worshipped the Sun-God as an Impersonation, and Accepted His History as Displayed in the Astronomical Order of the Starry Heavens.

The Hindoos - the oldest nation that possesses scriptural as well as monumental records, dating back to the highest antiquity, even to pre-historic ages - believed in one Supreme Omnific Central Source of Being, and from Him descending emanations corresponding in many respects to the mythical personages of the astronomical religion.

The biographies of two of their principal Avatars or incarnated God-men, Chrishna and Buddha Sakia, are closely accordant with the history of the Sun-God. The births of these Avatars through the motherhood of a pure Virgin, their lives in infancy threatened by a vengeful king, their flight and concealment in Egypt, their return to work miracles, save, heal and redeem the world, suffer persecution, a violent death, a descent into hell, and a reappearance as a new-born Savior, are all items of the Sun-God's history, which have already been recited, and maintain in every detail the correspondence between the Hindoo faith and the Sabean system. The feasts, fasts, seasons of lamentation and rejoicing, the reverence paid to fire, flame, heat, light, and even the minutest details of ceremonial rites practiced in the most ancient astronomical worship, are scattered through the varying forms of Hindoo theology, until the parity of the two systems cannot be questioned. An equally faithful adherence to the Sabean legend is to be found in the story of the Indian Dyonisius, subsequently repeated in Egypt, and forming the basis of the Osiric legend.

Egypt taught the Sun-God's history, and that in a series of myths and mysteries still more elaborate than those of India.

The stories of Osiris, Isis, Horus and Typhon, are direct transcripts of the astronomical scheme. The myths of the Gods Zulis and Memnon, the worship of Heliopolis, the gorgeous order of the famous mysteries, and the mythical personages scattered throughout the wonderful woof of Egyptian Theogony, are but elaborations of the Zodiacal table, and the worship of the powers of nature.

The Chaldeans, Ethiopians, Phoenicians and the most settled of the Arabian tribes, taught the same basic idea in their varied systems of worship.

The disinterred ruins of the once mighty city of Nineveh, is one complete inscription of the Sun-God's history and worship.

The most ingenious and varied symbolisms of Astral and Solar worship, speak in unmistakable tones of evidence from the magnificent remains of Babylon, from the ruins of Tadmor in the Desert, and in innumerable groups of once famous, though now unknown vestiges of human habitation, scattered throughout Central Asia. Even the Troglodyte remains bear witness to the prevalence of Solar worship, in rude carvings and grotesque imitations of the heavenly bodies.

From the ruins profusely scattered throughout Asia Minor, from the land of the Phascanna, Iberians, Albanians, Phrygians and Ionians, the author of this work has collected an immense number of photographic representations of planetary and Solar worship.

The Scythian nations generally worship fire, and preserve traditions of a crucified Sun-God. They celebrate the Sun's birthday on a 25th of December, and amongst some tribes of the Tartars the author has attended all the festal ceremonies described as appertaining to the astronomical religion.

The religions of China and Japan were originally founded on the mythical history of the Sun-God. Many additions and interpolations upon the basic legend have obtained in Chinese and Japanese worship, but the foundation is unique, and the feasts, ceremonial rites and seasons of observance, all prove the parity of worship amongst these people, with the Sabean system.

In the Islands of Ceylon, Java, the Phillipine and Moluccas, various forms of Solar and Astral worship have existed for ages.

The Druidical system of worship, though largely interspersed with other ideas, to be hereafter described, was firmly planted on the Sabean system, and recognized a Sun-God Mediator with a complete Zodiacal history in the incarnated deity they called Hesus.

The entire of the splendid imagery of Grecian and Roman mythology was but a paraphrase of Egyptian Solar worship, enlarged, embellished and beautified by the poetic mentality of Greece and Rome.

The idea of the Great Spiritual Sun of the ancients, the unknown and unknowable, finds its perfect correspondence in the Greek Zeus - the God who dwells alone, and from whom proceed, as subordinate emanations, all the impersonated powers of nature, planetary and astral spirits, who figure in the famous Pantheon. Apollo, Mercury, or Hermes, Bacchus, Prometheus and Esculapius were Sun-Gods, Mediators, Saviors; Ceres, Proserpina and Pluto played their special parts in the Astral Drama, but all derive their names and histories from the same source. Hindoos, Egyptians, Arabians, Parsees, Greeks and Romans, all drank at the same celestial fountain, and only varied their rites, ceremonials, names and figures to suit the ideality of the land whose age or climactic influence determined their intelligence.

The Jews, whose records of war, bloodshed, violence, laws, customs, dresses, upholstery and cuisine, the Christians hold sacred as the inspired word of God, worshiped a Deity who was only one of the Eloihim or astral tutelary spirits of the Egyptians. Bel, Belus, Baal, Baalpeor, Moloch, Dragon, Jehovah, Jah, I am, etc., etc., etc., these, and the names of the various other Gods, or tutelary Deities worshiped by the various nations of Arabia and Asia Minor, including the Jews, are only so many synonyms of the one Mediatorial Sun-God, who, under every conceivable variety of form and title, reappears in the stupendous system of Astral and Solar worship, itself an external expression of the sublime and harmonious order of the universe.

Posted by mikki at 05:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Most Ancient Form of Worship - The Astronomical Religion, Or the Sunbeam System - Solar and Astral Gods

The shelves of any ordinary sized library could be entirely filled with fragments of literature concerning the worship of the ancients, and the peculiar character of those myths which have been preserved from the remotest days of antiquity, and now underlie all the present systems of theological belief. It is a remarkable fact that, notwithstanding the vast collection of writings extant on this subject, there is no one compendious and accessible text-book from which the masses generally could derive reliable information and assimilate the knowledge thus widely diffused; and it is no less worthy of observation that, whilst the mythical character of early worship is stamped with unmistakable fidelity upon every form of modern theology, this damaging fact seems to make no difference in the idolatrous veneration with which the modern worshiper clings to the items of his faith; on the contrary, whilst the evidence accumulates around him, that the ideas to which he renders divine homage are paraphrases of ancient fictions, he all the more sturdily battles for his idol, and denounces every attempt to shake the authenticity of legends which he translates into divine revelations.

Perhaps it is for want of an authentic text-book; perhaps because the literature of the subject is too widely diffused and broken up into too many scattered fragments, that this apathy of idolatry prevails so universally, and that the common sense and intelligence of the nineteenth century is contented to bow down with purse and person before lifeless husks from which the spirit has departed; the husks which at best only contained in their original form the spirit of an impersonated myth.

It is not for the sake of converting one single idolator of the nineteenth century that we now write. It is not with the desire of proving to any sincere worshiper of the name of Christ that he is adoring the Sun-God of the ancients, that we now collect the torn fragments of the great Osiric body, and present a concrete, though necessarily microscopic view of the original structure. When the idolatries of fire-worship have done their work, their perversions will die the natural death which the divine order of the universe demands; until that time arrives we write for the truth's sake alone; let who will accept or reject us. Truth is "the Master's Word," which unlocks all mysteries, furnishes the clue to all religious beliefs, underlies the magical history of the race, and therefore its free enunciation is demanded in this work.

At what period the early man first commenced to worship the starry host of heaven, or in what nation the germ was first planted of that stupendous system which overlaid the earth with temples and survived all the wrecks of chance, change and time, none can say. We find the manifestations of its completeness only when humanity had acquired the art of recording its opinions in picture-writing, symbolical engravings, hieroglyphical and alphabetical Scriptures.

Traditions come wafted down the ages on the tongues of men with an impress as authoritative as graven Scriptures; for, ere men had learned to record their thoughts, they depended on memory for their preservation; hence they cultivated and strengthened this faculty, held its integrity sacred, and hence the perpetuity and universality of oral traditions.

Tradition affirms that when the mind of man rose out of the lethargy of savagism to the dawn of reason, and became fired with all those anxious inquisitions into the nature of cause and effect which reason prompts, he began to perceive that all the grand machinery of nature was coincident with the apparition and disappearance of the resplendent lights which spangled the canopy of the over-arching heavens. The God whom his earliest perceptions recognized in the majestic Sun, was unquestionably the source of those climactic changes which formed the principal theme of his primal studies.

To cultivate the ground, feed and protect his flocks, and determine the best times to perform the simple duties of agriculturist and herdsman, it became necessary to study the succession of the seasons, and consider not only the familiar alternations of night and day, but the equally important order which marked the changes in tides and times, together with all the variations of climate, and their effects in heat and cold.

None could fail to observe that every change on the face of nature kept step with the succession of certain solar and astral phenomena

From the early dawn of these perceptions, up to the maturity of the stupendous astronomical religion, man learned to read the fiery Scriptures of the skies, and the ever mobile face of nature, with a profound depth of understanding.

How many ages it required to outwork a complete theology from the book of nature and the starry heavens, man may never determine.

Thought grows fast or slowly according to the amount of momentum that is imparted to it. The world is very old in relation to that succession of changes we call time.

Millions of years have been consumed in laying down the rocky walls that extend from the circumference to the interior of the earth's crust. It occupied the world builders untold ages to develop a spear of moss or a tuft of lichen, from a mass of primary granite. Time is nothing in the issues of divine purposes; a second or a billion of years are but indices on the dial plates which mark the rounds of eternal progress, and since the first human worshipper veiled his adoring eyes in the passion of his soul's communion with the Spirit who dwells in the orbs of primal light, up to the age when reverend scholarly men were set apart by the busy multitude to watch the order of marching worlds from the high towers of the early "episcopacy," many successions of times, seasons, generations and ages had come and gone. The constellated heavens had been studied out; charts had been drawn; numerical Bibles written. The starry legions had been divided into geometrical proportions, and their motions calculated with mathematical precision. Even the forward movement of the entire solar system around what science now asserts to be an undiscovered but inevitable centre, had been perceived and the precession of the equinoxes was understood. The whole grand scheme, involving the awful majesty of the Sun-God, the mild radiance of the moon, the glory of the fixed stars, the erratic motions of the wandering planets, the terrific apparition of fiery comets, flashing meteors, and the deep and unfathomable mystery of floating nebulae - all these, no less than their influence upon the fair, green earth, with its lofty mountains and shoreless seas, its sombre forests and quiet vales, its half-savage, half-divine inhabitants - all this realm of power and mystery, sublimity and littleness, solemn silence and restless eloquence, the ancient mind discovered, by thousands of years of patient and untiring study, to be all in motion - motion of one continuous and correspondential order - motion which swept "the heavens, and the earth, and all that in them is," through regions of space, unknown and unknowable, but still defined to the piercing intelligence of the astronomical priesthood as one grand and interblended universe of Love, Wisdom, and Power.

From the results of our forefathers' sublime discoveries, from the mass of varied records they have left, an the fragmentary collections that we have gathered up of their wisdom, we give in the following pages a brief and most imperfect compendium of their religious belief. It is only necessary to consult the diagram of the heavens, as mapped out on any common almanac, school atlas or celestial globe, to perceive that the apparent path of the sun is laid down in an imaginary waving track called the Ecliptic. This path (assuming as did the ancients, that the sun moves around the earth), crosses the equator or fanciful belt encircling the earth at two periods of time, which by the relative positions of the sun towards the earth, divide up the solar year into winter and summer, and place the sun in the aspect of south and north towards the earth.

The path of the Sun on the Ecliptic was defined by ancient astronomers between two lines, parallel to each other, sixteen degrees apart, the sun's march being between them.

This space was, and still is, called the Zodiac. The Zodiacal circle was divided into three hundred and sixty degrees, these again into four right angles of ninety degrees each, and the whole into twelve signs, consisting each of thirty degrees.

These signs were, with the ancients, arbitrary divisions of certain groups of stars called constellations. They were named chiefly in accordance with the climactic changes transpiring on the earth at the period when the sun was passing through them.

In January, now called the first month of the year, the sun passed through the constellation or group of stars called, from the season of storms and heavy rains that then prevail, Aquarius, the washer, or the Greek Baptizo. In February he enters the sign of Pisces, or the Fishes, a time of famine, dearth, and distress, when the fruits and roots are consumed, and little is left to the primitive man but the spoil of the accumulating waters.

In March the sun enters Aries the Lamb, significant of the young and tender products of the approaching Spring. In April, when the energy of the agricultural season is to be typified, the constellated group through which the sun passes is called the Bull. In May, when Summer and Winter are reconciled, and the sweet genial period of flowers and bloom seems to knit up the opposing seasons in fraternal harmony, the constellation then prevailing is called Gemini, or the Twins. In June, when the sun appears to undergo a retrograde motion significantly explained in astronomy, the sign in the ascendant is termed Cancer or the Crab. In July, the raging heat of the burning Summer suggests for the ascendant sign that significant title of the Lion, whilst the Virgin of August, the Scales of September, the Scorpion or Great Dragon of October, the Archer of November, and the Goat of December, are supposed to have somewhat more direct reference to fancied resemblances in the shapes of the constellations, than for the physical correspondence between their names and the climacteric conditions of the earth. Besides these subdivisions of the Zodiacal path, there were two other methods of marking the astronomical year. The first was the division of the whole twelve months into four seasons, each of which contained ninety degrees, and were symbolized by a special emblem, as - an Ox, a Lion, an Eagle, and a Man. The Ox denoted the agricultural pursuits of the Spring, the Lion the fierce head of the Summer, the Eagle was adopted for certain symbolical reasons as a substitute for the Scorpion of Autumn, and the Man was still retained as the Winter emblem of Aquarius, or the water-bearer. Added to this quarternial division of the year, were the two primal and opposing conditions of Summer and Winter, always held significant by the ancients of good and evil principles.

The most solemn and important periods of the astronomical year were when the Sun descended from the North at the close of Summer to cross the plane of the autumnal equinox, and that when he ascended from the South in the Spring to cross the vernal equinox. The first motion heralded death of the great light-bringer, famine and desolation to the earth; the second inaugurated the rejuvenating power of his triumph and glory in the promise of Spring, and the fulfillment of Summer.

Slight as seems this foundation for a theology, it is on this only, that the superstructure of every theological system of the earth has been upreared.

Besides the general titles assigned to the twelve Zodiacal constellations, each separate star visible in the heavens, had its name, and was supposed to exert an influence peculiar to itself for good or evil upon mankind. Thus all the stars through the plane of, or near which the sun passed in Summer were deemed to be beneficent and in harmony with the celestial traveller of the skies, favorable also to the inhabitants of earth to whom they aided in dispensing seed-time and harvest, fruits, flowers, and all manner of blessings. On the other hand, the stars of Winter were assumed to exert a malignant influence not only on the mighty Sun-God, whom they opposed, but also upon man and his planet, causing storms, tempests, pestilence, and famine. By these malignant astral influences the gracious Sun was shorn of his heat-dispensing powers, and the hours of his illumination upon earth were shortened. The majesty of Day was so obscured by the hosts of malignant Spirits, supposed to inhabit the wintry stars, that he vainly strove to contend against them. On the opposing spiritual forces inhabiting the Summer and Winter constellations, was founded the apocalyptic legend of "the war in heaven," and endless flights of visionary astronomical myths.

In this celestial scheme every star became a symbol of some good or evil genius; every constellation was a realm, peopled by innumerable legions of beneficent or malignant angels, and the entire field of the sidereal heavens was made the battle-ground of infinite squadrons of opposing angelic influences.

On the earth the solar year was mapped out into grand subdivisions of time, in which the impersonated stars and their rival influences enacted a mighty drama with the Sun-God for its hero, the inhabitants of earth for an adoring audience, and a royal astronomical priesthood for its historians.

These ancient priests, called from their custom of studying the face of the heavens from high watch-towers, Episcopacy, became in ages of practice familiar with every phase of the sublime epic they wrote. They occupied centuries in correcting their calendars and amending their Zodiacal charts. They invented thousands and tens of thousands of allegorical fables descriptive of the scenes, incidents and angelic personages of the celestial drama. They varied names, images and symbols to suit the progress of ideas in revolving ages, and invested their astral Gods with all the attributes which fervent Oriental fancy could suggest.

As an example of the leading ideas which prevailed throughout this stupendous system, it is proper to recite some of the main features which clustered around the supposititious history of the magnificent Sun-God. When this light-bringing luminary entered the sign of Aries, or the Lamb, in March, he was assumed to have crossed the vernal equinox and become the Redeemer of the world from the sufferings and privations of Winter. Then the earth and its inhabitants rejoiced greatly. The young Savior had entered upon his divine mission, bringing the earth out of darkness into light; miraculously healing the sick; feeding starving multitudes, and filling the world with blessing.

This triumphant career culminated to its fullest glory between the months of July and August, which, in the figurative language of the astronomical religion, was sometimes called the betrothal of the Virgin, sometimes the marriage feast of the Lion, of July, and the Virgin, of August. This was the season of the grape harvest, the time when the Sun converted, by his radiant heat, the waters which had desolated the earth in Winter into the luscious wine of the vintage. Then it was, as the ancient astronomers proclaimed, that the great miracle of the solar year was performed, the Sun manifested forth his most triumphant glory.

From thence the constellation of the Scales, or the Balances, seemed for a time to maintain the celestial hero in a just and even path; his miraculous power and life-giving presence was hailed with feasts and rejoicings, which lasted until the fatal period when the Great Dragon of the Skies, the mighty Scorpio of October, appears in the ascendant. Then sorrow and lamentation possessed the earth. The Savior of men must cross the autumnal equinox and from thence descend into the South - the Hades, Acheron, Sheol, Hell, Pit, of many ancient nations.

To announce the dire calamity at hand, the Dragon, of October, is preceded by a bright and glorious star called in the Spring Vesper, or the evening star; in autumn, Lucifer, or "the Son of the morning." In the sweet vernal season this splendid luminary is the herald of Summer, the brightest and most beautiful of all the heavenly host. Then it appears high in the heavens, and occupies what is significantly called the seat of pride. Appearing in the boding season of Autumn, low on the edge of the horizon, and shining only in the early dawn, its name is changed with its station - it is now the fallen Angel; the mighty rebel, who seduced by pride and vaulting ambition, has been dethroned and cast down to the ominous depths of the lowest hell. Transformed into Lucifer, "Son of the Morning," this star becomes the herald of the darkest ill that can beset the path of the celestial Savior. As it appears in advance of the great constellation of the Dragon, it is assumed to be the rebel Angel that incited "a third of the host of heaven to disobedience;" hence it is often confounded with the Dragon, of which, however, it is only the prototype.

The constellation of the great Dragon is the most powerful of the entire Zodiac. From its peculiar form, and the immense group of shining stars that extend in the convolutions of its resplendent train, it has been called the Starry Serpent of the Skies. Its attendant luminaries are assumed to be third of the host of heaven seduced by the rebel Angel from their allegiance, and its position as the inaugural constellation of the much-dreaded wintry season impresses upon it the ominous name of Satan, or the adversary. And thus, from the position of a group of stars, and their apparition in the season deemed fatal to the prosperity of earth and its inhabitants, has arisen that stupendous myth, that legend of world-wide fear, the supposititious existence of an incarnate spirit of evil, the Satan of the Persians, the Typhon of Egypt, the Pluto of the Greeks, the old Serpent of the Jews, and the most popular of all objects of alternate fear and worship, the Devil of the enlightened Christians.

Following up the astronomical legend, we find the great Dragon of October waging its annual war against the Sun-God. By the influence of its leader, Lucifer, the celestial Sun-God has already been put to death in his crossifiction of the autumnal equinox; from thence he is cast down into the power of the two evil months - November and December - who are crucified with him on the autumnal equinox.

It is just at midwinter when Capricorn, the Goat - signifying in ancient mythical language the renewer of life - is in the ascendant, that the Sun-God reappears as a new-born babe.

In the fanciful imaginings of the astronomical historians, the cluster of stars which appear in the midwinter sky bear a resemblance to a manager or stable, whilst the fertile minds of the "episcopacy" discover the reappearance of the Virgin of Summer with her companion, Bootes, or the constellation called Joseppe, or Joseph. For three days at midwinter the feeble radiance of the Sun appears to remain stationary, yet so greatly obscured, that the legend declares he descends to the nethermost parts of the universe and is lost to sight.

In the Greek theology this three days of solar obscuration is accounted for by the descent of Orpheus into the realms of Pluto, where, by the magic of his sweet music, he is supposed to rescue lost souls from the very jaws of Hades. In the astronomical legend the vanished God is represented as going on a mission of mercy, to illuminate with his radiance the darkened souls who have been held captive in the realms of perdition. At length, on the 25th day of December, he reappears, and amidst the figurative paraphernalia of constellated stars then in the ascendant, he is declared to have been born in a manger through the maternity of the Zodiacal Virgin.

The women who have wept for Tammuz, the Syrian Sun-God, the mourners who have lamented with Isis for the Egyptian Osiris, the Greeks who have wandered with Ceres in search of the lost Proserpina, the devotees who have wailed for the slain Chrishna, one of the Sun-Gods of the Hindoos, and the Marys who weep at the sepulcher for the Christ of the Jews, all the nations of antiquity throughout the Orient - each of whom, under many names and in many forms, have adored the Sun-God, and believed in his annual birth, life, miracles, death and resurrection - all have united to celebrate the new birth of their idol on the 25th of December, the period at which the solar orb actually passes through the constellation of the Zodiacal sign Capricorn, or the "renewer of life." After the 25th of December, the legend again loses sight of its new-born Savior.

In all Eastern theogonies Egypt is represented as the land of darkness and the symbol of obscurity. During the prevalence of the two constellations of January and February, it is supposed that antagonistic influences threaten the young child's life. The royal power of Winter, with its storms and tempests, is in the ascendant, hence the world's Redeemer is in danger from a mighty King. To avert the evil, the young child is carried by stealth to the land of Egypt; there in concealment he remains until the season of danger is passed, when he recrosses the equator at the vernal equinox, ascending from the southern depth of Egypt into the light and glory of an acknowledged worker of miracles. Again the earth rejoices in the presence of the young Lamb of Spring, who "taketh away the sins of the world," and redeems it from the famine, desolation and evils or the past Winter. From this time forth the Sun-God proclaims "peace on earth, and good will to men," and fulfills his promise in miracles of healing, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and bringing life and plenty to all.

On taking a retrospective glance at this famous myth, it will be seen that the Sun-God is its central figure, and his passage through the constellated stars of the Zodiac, together with the peculiar changes of atmosphere, climate, and natural productions effected on earth by solar and astral configurations, form the connected woof of the celestial drama.

Next in importance in the mythical history is the impersonation of the Virgin Mother of the Sun-God. This constellated figure is assumed to hold in her hand a sprig, flower, or fruit which she extends in the attitude of invitation to a minor constellation, named Bootes, Jo-seppe, or Joseph, who from its proximity to the Virgin of Summer, is sometimes impersonated as her betrothed, sometimes as the Father of men, Adam, yielding to the seductions of Eve, tempting him by the extended fruit she holds in her hand. The next, and not least important figure in the legend is the impersonation of the evening star of Spring, transformed from an angel of light into Lucifer, the leader of the rebel hosts and the morning star of Autumn.

This evil star is followed by another important actor in the Astral Drama, namely, the Great Dragon, the antagonistic power of all systems, by whom the beneficent Sun-God is put to death on the cross of the autumnal equinox; crucified between the two evil wintry constellations prevailing in November and December. According to an ancient Sabean tradition, one of these evil angels, symbolized by the Goat of December, repented him of the wrong done to the sinless God who was crucified with him, hence he becomes at first the hoary sign of Winter, the Goat, who participates in the death of the beloved Sun, and then the friend of the dying God, sheltering him in his manger, and protecting the fruitful Virgin in her hour of parturition. This phase of the legend, like thousands of others, is doubtless an attempt to reconcile the antagonistic characteristics of the wintry sign, during which the Sun is lost, with the favorable aspect of the same constellation in the last part of his month of power, when he is represented as ushering the new-born God into being, under the title of the renewer of life.

Endless are the fantasies of this kind interwoven with the Zodiacal legend. The discoveries of each succeeding age afforded to the astronomical priesthood a boundless field for the exercise of their favorite method of symbolical expression, thus, whilst we always find the main ideas of the scheme preserved intact, the divergent branches of ideality which spring forth from the parent root are in truth a realization of the parable of the mustard seed of the Jewish Scriptures. In the paraphrase of the Christian history of the Sun-God, the writers represent one of the thieves crucified with the Savior of mankind as becoming penitent at the last dread hour of death - Jesus, in allusion to his approaching new birth, answers him, "to-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." This is a highly ingenious and creditable mode of disposing of the difficulty which ancient astronomers experienced in representing the constellation of December at once antagonistic and favorable to the dying God. The Capricorn of Winter shares the Sun-God's evil fate, but becomes favorable to him in the hour of his new birth in "Paradise." We have now brought the legend up to that point when it is to recommence with the renewal of Zodiacal history.

The Sun of righteousness is now to be re-born in the stable of the Goat, through the maternity of the immaculate Virgin, and thus the light of the world, the Lamb of Spring, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the good master of the twelve Zodiacal Apostles, is ever sacrificed, that he may take away the sins of the world, and ever restored to life, that all may have hope of immortality in his resurrection, etc., etc., etc.

It would indeed be "vanity and vexation of spirit" to attempt to discover the exact order in which the antique mind first clothed the starry heavens with these fantastic symbolisms, and yet we must not suppose that the exoteric meaning of which we have given a brief sketch, is the all of this ancient and most wonderful faith. Later on in this volume we shall see that every symbol has a correspondential spiritual meaning, and that the esoteric philosophy veiled under this mass of symbolism is the real heart of its religious significance. These explanations, however, we must reserve for the present. How the ancients ultimately evolved an exoteric scheme from the external face of nature and its correspondential relations to the spangled heavens, can be no marvel to those who will consider their wisest and best minds as devoted, during the course of thousands of years, to this one grand field of observation. The origin, growth and perfection of such a system is far less problematical than is the conduct of modern theologians in reference to it. So long as the famous astronomical religion was practiced and taught amongst these nations whom Christians contemptuously denominate "the heathen," it was denounced by them as the vilest of idolatries, but at the point where they attempt to build up a theology of their own, they first begin by stealing the astronomical myth, then transpose its origin to a far later date, rechristen its personages, locate them in fresh birth-places, declare them to be genuine personalities, invest them with the most sacred names and attributes, fall down and worship them, and then call upon the name of the Most High God as a witness to the credibility of their audacious fictions.

In consideration of the vast and cumulative mass of testimony which the discoveries of archaeology and philology supply us with, concerning the foundation of all theological systems, the idolatry of the nineteenth century puts to shame the devotion of humanity's infancy to myth and mysticism.

The antique man would blush for the mendacity of the modern Priesthood, who not only steal the images of their forefathers' creation, but, reclothing them with the tinsel and varnish of ecclesiastical trumpery, set them up in shrines to worship as the legitimate offspring of divine inspiration.

With those who have dared to dispute the authenticity of these monstrous fabrications, the Christian world has offered no other arguments than fire an sword, torture and denunciation; and as the culminating point of the monstrous wrong which modern Priestcraft has perpetrated on the people, by foisting on them the myths of antiquity as genuine subjects for worship, it hesitates not to affix the awful name of that God, who is a spirit, not only, as above stated, in witness of their blasphemous plagiarisms, but as an actual participator in a Drama, which, if removed from the realm of myth to actuality, would subvert every law of reason, decency, justice, or morality, that has ever been promulgated since time began.

We commenced this section by affirming that if all the fragments that have been written on the history of the Sun-God an the order of the astronomical religion were gathered together, they would fill a library.

Our only regret is, that the present hour does not furnish us with the opportunity to give to the world a thorough but compendious aggregation of these severed fragments in one concrete body of testimony. We can only glance at them now; but we may not altogether omit to notice them, for, ere we can describe the origin, progress and development of the spiritual idea of which Art Magic is, in part, the external form, we must give the outlines of that religious system in which the human spirit took shape, as in a matrix; in which its conceptions were first unfolded, and from which its aspirations radiated forth in the insatiate demand for spiritual bread. At this present writing, we only feel justified in raising the veil sufficiently to show the first point of contact between God and Man, the Creator and the Creature, Religion the Body and Spiritualism the Soul of the Universe' but we reserve to ourselves the duty (God inspiring and mortal span of life permitting) of inscribing a volume in the future, wherein shall be shown, in its completeness, how the Teraphim of the ancients were fashioned, and how the moderns have stolen and worshipped them; when, and in what mode, ideas descended to man in the past from the starry heavens, and in what absurd perversions the Priesthood of the present endeavor to plant those ideas in divine soil, until the abomination of desolation sits in the holy places of human thought, and scientific, reasoning men, and pious, pure-minded women, worship a God whose example, if imitated, would fill the earth with monsters of injustice, impurity and wickedness.

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Early Conceptions of the Hindoos

Opinions of Ancient and Modern Philosophers and Spiritists Concerning the Nature and Individuality of One Supreme Being.

The best of Philologists agree in attributing to the nations or peoples called Aryan, or Indo-European, the first linguistic records we possess:

"Men do not invent names for things of which they have no idea."

"The Word has always been recognized as the fittest Symbol of Truth, and the purest manifestation of Deity." The Aryan name for God was Div, which signifies "The clear light of day;" and this word has become the root-word of all worship for untold ages until we arrive at its modern appellative, Deity.

In fragmentary accounts given of the most early historic people, classified as Aryan, it is asserted that they kept fires constantly burning as their chief element in religious worhip. Fustel de Coulanges in his fine epic (for such it is), entitled "La Cite Antique," published in Paris, in 1870, clearly proves that the Aryan's religious belief, recognized in fire the symbol of God - in light his wisdom - in material forms an expression of his potential word - and in Guardian Spirits his Ministering Angels or tutelary deities.

When we trace the early conceptions of the Hindoos - that most ancient of contemplative men, those children of the Spirit, who communed with Nature's God through the profoundest study of Nature herself - we find they cherished ideas so exalted of the First Great Cause, that they ventured not to embody their thought of Him in any form, symbol, or even to assign Him a name.

The Supreme Being was with them, the Unknowable, and only became typified as Brahm, which, interpreted, signifies The Void, The Silent Region which cannot be pierced - the unfathomable which cannot be gauged or understood. That the human mind might rest on a Providential scheme, the Sages of India taught that there were three Subordinate emanations from the First Great Cause, who embodied the Grand Trinity of his Deific attributes. This primordial Trinity consisted of Brahma, the Creator; Vishnu, the Preserver; and Siva, the Destroyer and Reproducer.

Each of these Deific emanations were so intimately connected in the Hindoo mind with the attributes of heat and light, that the earliest Hindostanee worship may with truth, be assumed to have laid the foundation of that stupendous systems known, in later ages, as the astronomical religion. A large proportion of the Vedas - the oldest of the Hindoo Scriptures - consist of epics in praise of Light; accounts of the miracles outwrought by the mighty Sun-God; invocations to the spirits of the air, moon, stars, and sacred fire, and different elements. Many are the prayers addressed to Indra, the starry-robed Ruler of the constellated heavens, as well as to the spirits of different departments of the Universe. Fire was held sacred in every household, and employed in all sacerdotal rites. The very shape of the pyramidal Temples, or the blunted pylons, signified the all-pervading reverence of the Hindoo mind for the symbol of the tapering flame

In one of the most ancient of the Vedic hymns, addressed to the Heranyagarbha, occurs the following passage:

"In the beginning there arose the Source of golden light, He was the only born Lord of all that is. He established the earth and the sky. To what other God shall we offer sacrifice? He through whom the sky is bright, and the earth is firm; who measured out the light in the air. To what other God, etc., etc.

"Wherever the mighty water clouds went; where they placed the seed and lit the fire; thence arose He who is the only life of the bright Gods. To what other God, etc., etc.

There was neither entity, nor non-entity then - neither atmosphere nor sky beyond. Death was not, nor therefore immortality; nor day nor night. That One breathed breathless by itself. There was nothing different from it, nor beyond it. The covered germ burst forth by mental heat; then first came Love upon it, the Spring of mind. The rays shot across, and there were mighty powers producing all things. Nature beneath, and Energy above.

The Vedic hymns are nearly all invocations to the Solar and Astral sources of light and heat; the Vedic philosophy, speculations on the origins of Being, ever re-affirming the influence of Solar and Astral agency in Creation.

The following passage, descriptive of the Hindoo's God, will convey an idea of his sublime conceptions of Deity:

"Heaven is his head; the sun and moon are his eyes; the earth his feet; space his ears; air his breath. He is the Soul of the Universe. The Sun of all luminaries. All Creation derives light from him alone. The wise call him the Supreme Light-giving Spirit."

In the Egyptian and Persian Theogony, the direct acknowledgment of one Supreme Being corresponding to the Sun and its attributes, is as marked as in the Aryan and Indian records. The elaborate woof of Grecian and Roman Mythology partake of the same golden threads of belief, and whilst ramifying into a complete system of Polytheism, still refer back to the Indian and Egyptian idea of Creation springing from one Supreme Source, and this a spiritual centre of heat or creative energy, and light or creative wisdom.

In the Orphic Songs, the one first Great Cause celebrated as Zeus is more completely associated with the Egyptian idea of a Sun-God, a spirit "without parts of passion, sex or nature," than in the theories of later philosophers. Orpheus, the Sage, to whom the introduction of Egyptian Theogony into Greece is mainly due, chants thus of the Supreme Being:

"Zeus is male, Zeus is female. Zeus is the spirit of all things. Zeus is the rushing of uncreated fire. Zeus is the king; he is the sun and moon. Zeus is the mighty power, the demon, the one mighty frame in which this universe revolves. He is fire and water, earth and ether, day and night. All things unite in the body of Zeus"

Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and other of the most distinguished Grecian sages, taught more directly of God as a Spirit, and as the source from which all subordinate gods proceeded.

Passing on to the mediaeval, and still later ages, we find the most illuminated of the Mystics either reaffirming the ancient beliefs of India and Egypt in the Great Central Sun, or claiming to receive confirmation of this truth from spiritual inspiration, direct revelations, or intercourse with superior orders of being.

Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelus, Jacob Behmen, and Swedenborg, taught this idea of Deity with more of less distinctness. Swedenborg, in particular, who elevates his conception of Jesus Christ into the Lord, from whom, and to whom, all the activities of the Created Universe proceed and return - clearly teaches that "The Lord" is only seen as a Sun. In his essay on "Creation by Two Suns," he affirms that, "The Sun of Heaven is the Lord, the light there is Divine truth, and the heat there is Divine good, which proceed from the Lord as a Sun. From that origin are all things which exist and appear in the heavens." Again he says: That the Lord actually appears in heaven as a Sun, has not only been told me by the angels, but has also been given me to see several times, wherefore what I have seen and heard concerning the Lord as a Sun, I would here describe, etc., etc.

Of still more recent date are the teachings of certain spirits claiming to have had a mortal existence, many thousands of years ago, but who found themselves impelled to return to earth during the great spiritual outpouring of the last quarter of a century, in the United States of America. We shall quote from those who manifested their presence at the spirit house of Jonathan Koons, a farmer residing in the remotest wilds of Athens County, Ohio, and who gave their testimony, speaking through trumpets, with an audible voice, under circumstances which defied the probability of collusion or imposture, and with a power and spirituality of tone and presence acknowledged by all who heard them to have been truly sublime and authoritative.

The communications given by these spirits orally were transcribed by those present, and subsequently corrected by themselves - others were written by spirit hands in the presence of many witnesses, or found in locked drawers. From the MSS. preserved of these wonderful writings, the history of the Athens County manifestations are elaborately described in "Hardinge's Twenty Years' History of Modern American Spiritualism," and it is from the pages of this highly authentic work that we submit the following excerpt.

The author says:

"These spirits declare that 'there is an electric element, divided through space by another element, which bears no affinity to it; that spirits, at least such as communicate with earth, cannot themselves penetrate this interior element; in fact, to their apprehension, no one in the universe can do so, save only God; and this mysterious innermost, with all its hidden and impenetrable glories, is called by the spirits the 'subter fluid.' They declare that the electric element forms the various paths in which planets and all other known bodies in space travel and move in their respective orbits, but that nothing visible to spirits, or comprehensible to them as of an organic nature, can penetrate the realms of the 'subter fluid,' yet it divides and permeates all space, and seems to hold in control the infinite realms of the electric element. 'Rays of light,' however, they say, 'can and do penetrate the 'subter fluid,' as they appear to issue from and return to it incessantly.' Also, 'There is a grand central territory in the universe, known to exist by all spirits, and in all worlds. It embraces illimitable though unknown realms; yet its position as a vast central point is defined, from the fact that from thence, and to thence, seem to strand all the illimitable lines of attraction, gravitation, and force, which connect terrestrial bodies, and link together firmaments teeming with lives and systems. All the innumerable firmaments, spangled with an infinitude of solar and astral systems, seem to revolve around, and derive attractive and living forces from this unknown centre. Sometimes it is called 'the Celestial Realm.' Again 'The Central Sun,' 'Heaven,' 'God,' 'The Infinite Realm,' 'The Eternal Life!' While firmaments thickly sown with suns and revolving satellites, appear but as specks of light in comparison with the inconceivable vastness of this celestial laboratory, invisible and boundless as it is, from which flows out, through all universes, the centrifugal and centripetal forces of being."

In Cahagnet's "Celestial Telegraph," several spirits, communicating through celebrated Somnambules, startled their hearers' preconceived opinions on the subject of Deity by affirming positively that he was seen and known by highly exalted angels as a Grand Central Spiritual Sun.

Through the ecstatic Bruno it was asked; "Do angels, such as you describe your Guardian Gabriel to be, see God?" A. "Yes." Q. "In what form?" A. "In that of the Sun." Q. "Is it our terrestrial Sun?" A. "No; there is in the heaven of heavens but one Sun, which is the Spiritual Sun, the form in which God appears. Our terrestrial sun is but the reflection of the rays dispensed from the Great Central Spiritual Sun, which is God."

The Hindoo child seeress Sanoma, heretofore referred to also affirmed, when in ecstatico, at the tender age of five years, when her infant mind had never been impressed with one single idea of theology, that the God of the universe was a Spiritual Sun, whilst all the suns and stars, visible or invisible to the naked eye, derived their light and heat only from Him. When questioned by Sir James Mackintosh, the eminent astronomer, whether the sun of our solar system was not an incandescent body, and the originator of all light and heat received by his satellites, she emphatically denied that it was so, and exposed, with wonderful acumen, in her lisping, child-like tone, but with penetrating scientific arguments, the fallacies of those astronomers who endeavor to defend the incandescent theory of the sun's body.

This youthful ecstatic affirmed that all the light and heat in the universe proceeded from the great Central Spiritual Sun, and was reflected from thence to every body in space, according to its size, situation, and the energy of the centrifugal and centripetal forces operating between suns, satellites, and systems.

During an unbroken system of communication, extending over a period of nearly half a century, between the author of these pages and spirits of various degrees - during perceptions of angelic spheres observed by his liberated spirit amongst the realms of the wise and blest, similar testimony to the existence of a Deity who is no mystery to His creatures, has been rendered.

It seems strange, and not in the order of the Providential scheme, that the one sole mystery of the universe would be the Being most capable of originating revelation, namely a First Great Cause. But has this Supreme One been a mystery from the beginning? or would He have continued so, if man, in his egotism and pride, had not flattered himself with the assumption that subordinate beings, tutelary spirits, and even specially inspired men, were the real Gods of the Universe, condescending to come and minister in person to humanity? Did not the first men of the earth, fresh in their primitive inspiration from Deity, rightly apprehend Him in the beginning? Have not the Prophets, Seers, Magians, Mystics, and modern Ecstatics, ever perceived and known God in gleams of the original brightness, dimmed by ages of materialism, and perverted by gloomy, earth-made theologies? Wherever the voices of the angels find reverberating echoes in human inspiration, there this Great Mystery of God is solved in the revealment of the uncreated, self-existent, infinite, and eternal Spiritual Sun, from which emanate, and to which return, all rays of light, light, heat, germinative, creative, and sustaining power.

Wherever we see the people of earth straying away in search of human idols, striving to discover in their God man-made, man-shaped, and man-like personalities; wherever we see an interested ignorant and selfish priesthood, enslaved by their own passions and prejudices, aiming to keep the people enslaved to their opinions - there look to find the face of the Infinite veiled in mystery; the truths of Godhead, natural science and spiritual inspiration crowded back into the realms of mystery; and mystery, the mother of all abominations, setting up idols for human worship, which change with the customs of the age, and the fashion of the hour. To drown the voice of Spiritual science, and that reason which insists that the most obvious existence in Creation must be Creation's Author, the epithets of "Pagan, Heathen, Infidel, Heretic, Fire Worshiper and Blasphemer" have been shouted through the highways of life's common places, and still echo in our ears even in this analytical nineteenth century' for the rule of Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth, is not yet broken, and until it is, her votaries will fight for her and perish soul and body for her, and all the while the light will be "shining in the darkness, though the darkness comprehendeth it not."

Man, in his primitive appearance on earth, came only as a poor, untutored savage, the mere form of the being he was to become - only a prophecy of the Lord of Creation he should be. As he emerged from savagism to the dawn of an intellectual morning, the perception of his descent from an antecedent sphere of spiritual existence possessed his memory, and a perception of his return to that blest state of purity and happiness inspired his power of prevision.

His gradually awakening intellect taught him to analyze and understand himself. Casting about for the causes of existence, that supports on which it rested and the aims for which he lived, man dedicated all his earliest powers of mind to religion. Even his earliest triumphs in the arts of civilization were but used as means to the one end. His superb temples of worship, his solemn preparations for another life, and his colossal monumental records of his religious beliefs, remain almost imperishable evidences of his deep and undivided interest in the problems of religion; whilst of his social and commercial pursuits, only the most fragmentary and unimportant vestiges can be found. India, Egypt, Arabia, the recesses of the mighty Himalayas and the giant Koh Kas, the lovely vales and smiling plains of Asia - vales blooming like glimpses of the fabled Eden, and savage wilds, deserted now, desolate and ruined - all bear witness to the unquenchable devotion of the early man to his religious belief; all are thickly strewn over with colossal remains of that stupendous system in which that belief found expression. The burning lands of the Orient are one vast bible overwritten with distinct asseverations that to the early man God was not the Unknowable, and religious faith was no mystery. Whence came this faith if not from man's intuitive knowledge and the obvious facts of creation? Sun, moon, stars, the constellated glories of the heavens, their eternal order and their majestic march through infinity - these were scriptures in which the natural instincts of an unspoiled nature recognized God's own writing, and interpreted it without failure or effort.

The ancient man did not vainly exhaust his intellect to discover God. Untrammeled by creeds, unfettered by priestcraft and unbiased by inherited prejudices, he did not seek God, he simply found Him - knew Him in the love which engenders life; the wisdom that sustains it; the power that upholds it - knew Him in the sacred flame, which is heat; the splendor of light, which is revelation. He discovered the reflection of his dwelling-place in the majesty of the blazing sun, and perceived his own destiny - God's Providence and Nature's profoundest harmonies - in the constellated paths of the starry heavens and the movements of the fiery legions of space.

Priestcraft, Kingcraft, Artificial Civilization, with their long train of crime and disease, want and woe - an over-strained devotion to the idols of ecclesiasticism and physical science, have alienated the soul of man from pure, natural, spiritual religion, interrupted the precious communication which pure, spiritual natures alone can enjoy with angelic spheres of existence, and driven the soul off into the baneful mysticisms of idolatrous faiths or blank materialism.

It is a hopeful and significant sign to behold the spiritual standards once more set up on earth. It is a hopeful and significant fact to note how the best of the modern Seers tend towards ancient faith in the Divine Spiritual Law as the Author and Centre of being, and the prophecy of a better, more truthful, just and reasonable theology is continually renewing itself in the air, as the lips of the most inspired teachers of the time re-affirm the sublime utterances of old: "God is a Spirit, and they who worship Him, must worship Him in spirit and in truth."

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Deity - The Supreme Being of Beings

Is There One or Many Gods - Who Can Know the Unknowable - May not the Known Lead up to What Has Been Deemed the Unknowable?

It is easier for the imagination to rest upon the idea of one God than many, and still more natural for the soul of man to accept of Polytheism than Atheism.

The utter insufficiency of any argument which attempts to shut out an idea because its magnitude baffles the finite mind, has never been more completely demonstrated than when man, the puny, shadowy phantom who flits through a few sand grains of time, and then disappears for an eternity, attempts to argue against the existence of any higher being than himself, simply because he, by his sensuous perception, cannot apprehend it.

No man can, by sensuous perception, apprehend the existence of his own soul. Socrates well understood this truth when he said, "I respect my soul though I cannot see it," and the Apostle Paul equally well appreciated its force when he declared that the spiritual man alone could judge of the things of the spirit.

From the revelations of spirits who are in the experience of spiritual entities, and the sublime imaginings of those who in the childlike faiths of antiquity were nearer to God than are the mammon-worshippers of today, we will erect our scheme of the Divine Godhead, surrounding the noble temple with such a scaffolding of testimony as will enable every reader to climb to the highest pinnacle of a thought which the finite mind can reach.

That "God is a Spirit," and the eternal, uncreated, self-existent, and infinite realm of Spirit is God, none can deny who profoundly analyze the depths of being pointed to in our first two Sections; but as to the mode in which God can be apprehended, or whether there be one or many Gods, remain questions open to much broader fields of speculation.

Were it not more in the order of these writings to present the results of vast mental struggles, and the conclusions drawn from researches which have only permitted the panting Soul to pause for breath at the gates which lead from one stage of infinity to another, we should precede our own definitions of Godhead, by the opinions of the authorities we propose to cite; but the responsibility of affirmation is ours, and surrounded as we are "by a cloud of witnesses," who wave the lustrous banners of spiritual truths above our page, how can we hesitate, or, in the cold world's materialistic phrase, why fear to commit ourselves to opinions we know in our Soul to be Divine truth?

The Solar System of which our earth is a part, moves around the physical sun as a centre of light, heat, and attraction.

By well defined astronomical laws we know that this Solar System forms only a part of a larger and far grander aggregation of starry worlds, called the Astral System.

The exact centre of this system is not arrived at, yet all the observations of astronomy point to such a pivotal centre, and the known laws of Science determine that in the visible universe, all motions proceed in and are sustained by the dual modes of centrifugal and centripetal force. That the stars discovered by astronomical Science are only a part of an array of systems which occupy the spaces of infinity, is an axiom universally acknowledged; hence, indeed, the terms "infinity" and "boundless," as applied to the sidereal heavens; but in the midst of that unknowable which stretches away into vistas where the glass of the astronomer cannot penetrate, and the mind of the most aspirational becomes palsied, even there, the steadfast helm of physical science guides the ship and prophesies of an inevitable port of knowledge yet to be reached.

"The law which rounds a dew-drop shapes a world," and the principles which inhere in one System prevail throughout space. We cannot find a telescope that will pierce into the Astral Centre nor resolve all the floating masses of nebulae that crowd the galaxy into blazing Suns; but we know by analogy that that Centre and those Suns exist, and that the only horizon that shuts them out from human discovery, is human ignorance and incapacity.

In the midst of all our baffled wisdom and enlightened ignorance, physical Science and spiritual revelation supplementing each other, assure us there is one grand central Sun of being.

Physical Science tells us it must be so. Spiritual revelation affirms it is so. That central Sun is God. This perfection of being exists in the form of a globe, the only point of union between mathematics and geometry, and occupies the centre, the only position whereby revolving universes can live, move, and have their being and life, be born, sustained and renewed.

God is the dispenser of heat and light, the two elements in being which account for generation and revelation, love and wisdom, life and sense. This Spiritual Sun throws off from the centre the elements of new-created worlds by centrifugal force, and draws them back and keeps them in determinate orbits by centripetal force. Its nature is Spirit; its attribute, Will; its manifestations, Love, Wisdom, Power. This is God.

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Hindoo Vedas - The Oldest Written Scriptrues

Arguments Derived Chiefly From Ancient History in Support of the Philosophy Affirmed in the Preceding Pages, With Extracts From the Vedas.

The oldest written Scriptures in existence are supposed to be the Hindoo Vedas.

They repeatedly affirm the original and independent existence of spirit as the sole creative cause of Being, and claims that man was an emanation from this divine element, that he was originally pure and good, and that his existence on earth and his successive transmigrations through various animals forms are simply designed as purifications through which his soul may regain that alliance with Brahm, the Supreme Being, which he has lost by a descent from a spiritual to a material existence.

Extracts From The Vedas

"That spirit who is not matter is one; He is the incomprehensible Being from whom all proceed, to whom all must return. He is Brahm - The Spirit."

"As ten thousand beams emanate from one central fire, thus do ten thousand souls emanate from Him, the one Eternal soul, and return to Him."

"May this soul of mine, which is a ray of perfect wisdom, pure intellect, and eternal essence, which is quenchless light and eternal heat, fixed within a changeful, created body, be re-united by devout meditation and divine science, with the Spirit, supremely blest and infinitely wise."

In all clear and thorough analyses of the Egyptian mysteries, the corner-stone of belief rests on the assumption that the First Great Cause is a Spirit. That the first and only element of Being was Soul - that it existed eternally, and filled infinity. By its power of will it separated itself into emanations and elements, And by its own inherent capacity for creation, the unresting element of force was evolved; then came matter, and by the action of force on matter, the unspeakable wisdom of the uncreated soul, moving on the ocean of clues, created Form and evolved order. The fiery particles of matter ascended to form luminous bodies, the heavier descended and aggregated into earth, seas, plants, animals, and the bodies of men.

From the eternal soul proceeded successive emanations of spiritual beings, more or less elevated according to their status of ascent or descent in the grand scale of the Spiritual Kingdom.

Herodotus affirms that the Egyptians were the first people who distinctly taught the immortality of the human Soul, but the same doctrine, and in all probability, the original of all religious systems, was enunciated in India, when the Egyptian Dynasty was yet in its infancy. More of the specialty of belief in both these monumental nations will hereafter be given when treating of their magical ceremonies; but it is in order to observe here, that the foundation of their famous mysteries was laid in the belief that the soul had fallen from an original state of purity and innocence, had gravitated from a spiritual essence to a material body, and that the chief end, aim, and scope of earthly being, was to conduct the soul through successive stages of purification, back into original alliance with Deity.

This is the central doctrine of Plato, Pythagoras, Jamblichus, Plutarch, and, indeed, of all the most renowned sages, philosophers, and historians who flourished from the beginning of historic times, to those of the early Christian fathers. The Cabalists, Gnostics, Essenes, Therapeuts, the Mystics of the mediaeval ages, and some of the seers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cherished similar opinions concerning the origin of soul, and its probationary experiences.

In this category of testimony we cannot exclude the witness of those, who, as spirits themselves, freed from the materialistic shadows which obscure our vision and darken our intuitions, must be more qualified than we are to disclose the realities of past and future states of spiritual being.

Amongst all the latter-day revelations claiming to originate with the enfranchised souls of those who had once lived on earth, none come to mortals with more untrammelled freedom from human intervention, than the revelations of Kerner's Seeress, Madame Hauffe, commonly called "The Seeress of Prevorst," and the Somnambules of Alphonse Cahagnet, a working man of Paris, once a materialist; a mere curious experimenter in the outset, with the modern marvel of animal magnetism, but one who, as an impartial and intelligent interpreter of unlooked for revelations received through the magnetic sleep, constitutes one of the best and least questionable of the witnesses for spiritual truth and revelation in the nineteenth century.

About the year 1846 or '7, Mons. Cahagnet, having become very familiar with somnambulistic revelations from the world of spirits, and enjoying the privilege of this communion through several of the most remarkable and lucid subjects that the age afforded, received a number of communications affirming the fact of the soul's existence anterior to its appearance upon earth. Whilst denying emphatically any belief in the doctrines of the Re-incarnationists, and declaring against it in the most positive terms, the communicating spirits uniformly alleged that, when freed from the trammels of matter, they all remembered having lived in an anterior state of purity and innocence as spirits; that they perceived how truly and wisely their earthly lives were designed for probationary purposes, and meant to impart vigor and knowledge to the soul; but that once undergone, it was never again repeated, and the return of the soul to its former spiritual state was never interrupted by re-incarnations on earth. These spirits, too, alleged that the sphere of eternity afforded the souls of evil or unprogressed men all the opportunities necessary to purify them from sin and its effects, through innumerable stages of progress.

A witness so unexpected as these spirits afford, and revelations so full of evidence of their genuine character, cannot be dismissed without a few examples of their style of teaching.

A spirit communicating with the ecstatic Bruno, says: "We are born and die but once; when we are in heaven, it is for eternity."

Q. "Do we recollect our earthly existence?" A. "Yes, and our anterior one also." Q. "What anterior existence?" A. "Before appearing on earth, man lived in a spiritual world similar to the one in which he lives on quitting earth. Each awaits his turn in this world to appear on earth, an appearance necessary, a life of trials none can escape."

Through the best of all, Mons. Cahagnet's Lucides, Adele, in an interview with the spirit of the illustrious Swedenborg, these words were given: "The life anterior which we have all passed through, was, so to speak, a life of nothingness, of childbirth, of happiness like that which we enjoy on our exit from the earth; but this happiness cannot be comprehended, because it is not accompanied with sensations to prove its sweet reality, therefore God has deemed fit that we should pass through these successive lives, the first, on the globe of which I speak to you - a life unknown, of beatitude, devoid of sensation - the second, the one you enjoy, a life of action, sensation - a painful life placed between the two, to demonstrate through its contrast the sweetness of the third - the life of good and evil, without which we should not be able to appreciate the happy state reserved for us." ... Many more spirits communicating through different media confirmed these opinions and elaborated upon their truth and reasonableness, but the limitation of our space forbids further extracts.

In one of the principal cites of Hindostan, there resides, in the very focus of religious and political conservatism, a noble Hindoo, whose official rank and standing is by no means commensurate with his extreme poverty. Bound by the latter restriction and a careful observance of the forms and ceremonials which belong to his nation, he is compelled to hide in the depths of his highly spiritualized and intellectual nature the extraordinary revelations that have been made to him from invisible authors through the mediumship of his little niece, a child of some twelve years old. In the presence of this little one, whose quires of blank paper are rapidly filled up by no visible hands and without even the ordinary appliances of pens, pencils or ink.

It is enough to lay the blank sheets on a tripod, carefully screened from the direct rays of light, but still dimly visible to the eyes of attentive observers. The child sits on the ground and lays her head on the tripod, embracing its supports with her little arms. In this attitude she most commonly sleeps for an hour, during which time the sheets lying on the tripod are filled up with exquisitely formed characters in the ancient Sanscrit. Over four volumes of these writings have been thus produced and that in something less than a period of three years.

Questions are often laid in simple Hindostanee on the tripod, when information is sought by the family of the Hindoo, and the responses are always found embodied in some portions of the next writings received.

In answer to several questions concerning the origin of Soul and the doctrine of its transmigration through the forms of animals, one of the Sanscrit writings contained the following sentences:

"That the Soul is an emanation from Deity, and in its original essence is all purity, truth, and wisdom, is an axiom which the disembodied learn, when the powers of memory are sufficiently awakened to perceive the states of existence anterior to mortal birth. In the Paradises of purity and love, souls spring up like blossoms, in the all Father's garden of immortal beauty. It is the tendency of that Divine nature, whose chief attributes are Love and Wisdom, Heat and Light, to repeat itself eternally, and mirror forth its own perfections in scintillations 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 life also illuminates into light, hence the soul emanations from the Divine are all love and heat, whilst the illumination of light, which streams ever from the great central Sun of being, irradiates all souls with corresponding beams of light. Born of love, which corresponds to Divine heat and warmth, and irradiated with Light, which is Divine wisdom and truth, the first and most powerful soul emanations repeated the action of their Supreme Originator, gave off emanations from their own being, some higher, some lower, the highest tending upward into spiritual essences, the lowest forming particled matter. These denser emanations, following out the creative law, aggregated into suns, satellites, worlds, and each repeating the story of creation, suns gave birth to systems, and every member of a system became a theatre of subordinate states of spiritual or material existence.

"Thus do ideas descend into forms, and forms ascend into ideas. Thus is the growth, development, and progress of creation endless, and thus must spirit originate and ever create worlds of matter, for the purposes of its own progressive unfoldment.

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

"'Forever!' shout the blazing suns, leaping on in the fiery orbits of their shining life, and trailing in their glittering pathway ten thousand satellites and meteoric sparks, whirling, 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. From whence? As the earths groan for the lordship 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 intellect, which appealing to the blest souls in their distant paradises, fill them with indescribable longings for change, for broader vistas of knowledge, 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 earth, and only to regain its paradise again by the fulfillment of that pilgrimage.

"When spirits lived as such, in paradise, emanations 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 earths 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 the other living creatures, must reproduce his kind. All things in matter are male and female; minerals, plants, animals, and men. Spirit, the creative energy, is the masculine principle that creates; nature the passive recipient, is that which germinates; hence creation. Men 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 pilgrimages ere he reaches the large and shining planet named the 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 fleeting, spiritual existence, as rudimental as the material shape from whence it emerged; a butterfly springing up from the chrysolitic shell, but ever as it onward rushes, in new births, new deaths, new incarnations, anon to die and live again, but still stretch upward, still strive onward, still rush on the giddy, dreadful, toilsome, rugged path, until it awakens once more - once more to live and be a material 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 being that antedate its appearance on this earth as a man, that the belief in the doctrine of the metempsychosis (transmigration of souls through the animal kingdom) 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 existence 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 acquires 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 farther purifications of the soul commence anew; commence with that sublime attribute 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 conquest over sin, and prophetic sight stimulates him to aspire until he shall attain, by well-directed effort, the sublime heights of purity and goodness from which he fell, to become a mortal pilgrim."

The triumphant souls who enter Heaven by effort are God's ministering angels. Angels of power, wisdom, strength and beauty. The dwellers in the 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 nevermore 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 myriad 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 spiritual existence an Elementary Spirit."

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Speculation Regarding the Origin of Man

The Scheme of the Solar Universe - The Fall of Man But The Shadow - The Fall of Spirit - Man the Microcosm of Being - His Pre-Existence.

All human beliefs that are derived from oral, traditional, monumental, or sacerdotal sources, incline to ascribe the origin of man to a purer and more spiritualized cause than that of human generation.

The favorite and widely diffused idea of the ancients, that man incurred the penalty of mortal birth and the discipline of a mortal existence by disobedience, pervades so universally the foundations of all religious system, that it demands from philosophy some more rational explanation than the contemptuous stigma of "myth." Whence comes myth, and can it any more explain the origin of ideas than a shadow can account for form without a substance? We can accept nothing, learn nothing, hope for nothing, from modern theology; for it teaches no philosophy, owns allegiance to no science, and is amenable to no requirements of reason or justice. And yet even she cherishes, in her usual materialistic way, the dogmas of original sin and the fall of many from a state of primeval innocence.

Who can render account of these opinions? And since time cannot quench them, nor the devotees of classical lore and antique philosophy blot them out from the "wisdom of the ages," why not seek to harmonize them with those glimpses of an inner and higher life with which all human records are so mysteriously illuminated?

The Fall of Man is but the shadow of a still diviner truth, the substance of which is - The Fall of Spirit. All existence originates in Spirit. As the curious mechanism of the clock, the ship, the steam-engine, are all creations first of the mechanical mind, in which their several parts are contained ere they can become reduced to a material expression, so the clockwork of the sideral heavens, the worlds which sail through the oceans of space, and the mechanism of every organized form, from the rounding of a dewdrop to the complicated structure of a man, must have had their origin in mind. Since mind is but an attribute of Will, and Will is Spirit, we cannot escape from the conclusion that the creation of the physical universe is but the expression of a spiritual idea. The creation of a physical man is no more, no less. The human race is the external expression of a spiritual idea, because ideas must originate with spirit ere they can be expressed in matter. The watch, the ship, the steam-engine are as much genuine creations of the soul before as after they are modeled out in matter. Should they never be thus incarnated, they have been, and are, and ever will remain, in the imperishable realm of spiritual entities.

Matter creates nothing. It is only the mold which Spirit uses to externalize its ideas for the sake of external uses.

The things which will appear as new inventions, the methods of science which will take their places as new discoveries on earth in ages yet unborn, are all in imperishable existence now and ever have been in the eternal realms of spirit. Can man be exempt from this universal law of procedure?

Man, who is the microcosm of being, the conservator of all forms of force, all varieties of matter - can he be the sole exception to the all-embracing order of Divine procedure? Only in the superstitious and unscientific belief of the bigot, or the scarcely less unreasonable blindness of materialism. Man was a spirit ere he was born into matter.

In the primordial conditions of planetary life, creatures so finely organized as man could not be sustained, hence long ages of preparatory growth were essential to fit this or any earth for his reception.

When matter had been sufficiently laborated by the successive births and destructions of millions of generations of organized beings in the vegetable and animal kingdom, the earth awaited the advent of a still higher and nobler creature than any that had yet appeared; one who should in its perfection and microcosmic powers finish the work of creation, cap the climax of animated being, and close up the succession of mortal forms by the introduction of an immortal being. The earth called for a man, and he came. He was already an immortal existence, a spirit; not a perfected, self-conscious, individualized entity, but a bright, luminous emanation of the Divine mind. He was the Divine idea in the shape of the man that should be. Angelic in essence, spiritual in substance, he lived in a paradise appropriate to him, pure and innocent, but still wholly lacking in those elements of love, wisdom, and power which can be perfected alone through incarnation in a material body, and progress through probationary states.

That man existed as a pure spiritual being, a sinless paradisaical unit, previous to his incarnation in a material body, is not only the opinion of those sages of antiquity who studied from the original books of life, rather than from records made and altered to suit the purposes of successive generations of interested priests, but it is the witness of the human spirit itself ere it became bent and perverted by theological myths, or its memories were dimmed by time and the more vivid impressions of mortal experiences. In every primordial condition of the human family the belief in a fall or descent of the spirit from heaven to earth from purity to transgression, is an unquenchable element in man's nature. Belief it can scarcely be called; it is a memory, growing fainter and fainter as it receeds from its source, but still an indestructible link of connection in that chain of destiny which has finally incarnated the soul in a mortal body.

We shall close this section by citations from some few out of the countless host of authoritative minds who have favored the opinions herein announced as the rationale of the first act in the Divine drama of human existence.

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Spirit. The First Great Cause. The Corner Stone.

The Constitution of the Solar Universe - Matter- Extension - Divisibility - Impenetrability - Ether - Force - Attraction and Repulsion - Spirit Primordial - Will

The Solar Universe, of which the earth is a part, consists of Matter, Force and Spirit.

Matter is an aggregation of minute, indestructible atoms, existing in the four states known as solid, fluid, gaseious and ethereal. The general attributes which distinguish matter in the three first conditions, are indestructibility, extension, divisibility, impenetrability, and inertia.

By indestructibility is meant that property which is the antithesis of annihilation, and utterly prevents the assumption that a single atom of matter, however minute, whether in the finest condition of air or the hardest of crystal, can ever be wholly put out of existence.

Extension is the property by which an atom of matter can be changed so as to occupy more or less space.

Divisibility is the property by which an atom can be divided or reduced to the smallest known particles, and yet each particle preserve some capacity for farther subdivision.

Impenetrability implies the impossibility of one atom occupying the space of another; an inertia is the tendency of matter to continue either in that condition of rest or motion in which it has once been set by the application of force, until another force changes the former direction. There are many other definitions applicable to matter; such as crystalline, porous, dense, elastic, etc.; but the five general properties enumerated above, will sufficiently explain its nature for our present purpose.

Ether is matter in so rare and sublimated a condition, that its divisibility into particles is no longer possible to man in his present stage of scientific attainment. It far transcends the rarefaction of the finest of gases, hydrogen, and filling up every space of the solar universe explored by man, not occupied by particles matter, may with propriety be called unparticled matter.

Force is the life principle of being. It is the second of the grand Trinity of elements which constitute existence, and ranks, therefore, next to matter, which it permeates, vitalizes, and moves. It is motion per se, and though matter is never exhibited without it. Force, as we shall hereafter prove, can exist without a material body for its exhibition.

Its attributes are dual, and should be named Attraction and Repulsion.

The vast and extended orbits of planetary bodies are marked out and regulated by Force, with its dual attributes, now attracting the revolving satellite to the centre, now forcing it off into a relative point of distance, but always maintaining it in a given path or orbit between the oscillations of its contending motions.

Force is the unresting life which charges every atom of matter, and fits inorganic masses to become organic. It is Electricity in the air; Magnetism in the earth; Galvanism between different metallic particles - cohesion, disintegration, gravitation, centripetal and centrifugal forms of motion; Life in plants, animals, and men, the aural, astral, or magnetic body of spirits.

Spirit is the one primordial, uncreated, eternal, infinite Alpha and Omega of Being. It may have subsisted independent of Force and Matter, evolving both from its own incomprehensible but illimitable perfection; but Force and Matter could never have originated Spirit, as its one sole attribute comprehends and embraces all others, must antedate, govern, and surpass all others, and is itself the cause of all effects. That attribute is Will.

As there are but two attributes of Force, namely, attraction and repulsion, yet many varieties of modes in which attraction and repulsion are perceived, so, whilst there is but one attribute of Spirit, namely, Will, there are many subordinate principles emanating from Will, such are Love, Wisdom, Use, Beauty, Intelligence, Skill, etc. The most marked and distinctive procedures are, however, nine; namely, Love, Wisdom, and Power; Creation, Preservation, and Progress; Live, Death, and Regeneration.

In Matter, Force, and Spirit, then, is the grand Trinity of Being, which constitutes the solar universe and its inhabitants.

Reasoning from analogy, and still more, founding upon the assertions of wise teaching angels and the vague shadows of antique beliefs, founded in a spiritual enlightenment far in advance of the present, we have authority for supposing that the astral, and all other universes included in the illimitable fields of being, may have proceeded from and include the same primordial Trinity of elements, and that Spirit, Force, and Matter form that stupendous Ego, the totality of which, to finite beings, is vaguely called God, the separated units of which include Astral and Solar Systems, Suns, Satellites, Worlds, Spirits, Men, Animate and Inanimate Things, and Atoms.

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Part I.

Introductory

Standing as we do upon the sublime heights to which the progress of ages has elevated us, we are enabled to look aback upon the footprints left by the ascending feet of those who have preceded us, and take account of every obstacle they have surmounted, every impulse that has swayed them to the right or the left, and almost hear the pulse-beats of the pilgrim hearts that have throbbed in response to the eternal cry of Life's Marshals, "Onward and Upward!" The piercing and analytical eye of science can investigate these footprints, and determine almost with mathematical precision the physical characteristics of the beings who have made them. The species or class to which the toiler belonged, becomes a letter in that alphabet, whereby science as clearly unravels the unwritten past, as the scale of a fish, or the fossiliferous imprint of a vanished organism can interpret the species and class to which the relic belonged; but the far more penetrating gaze of the soul looking into the metaphysical causes which underlie all physical effects, beholds an outstretched panorama of being, which transcends those spheres of knowledge bounded by physical horizons; hence it can pierce not only the causes, but master also the ultimates and controlling forces of mortal existence.

To arrive at a complete apprehension of truth, or that which is, we must call up the witness of that which was, that which shall be, and that which moves, as well as that which is moved upon. The anatomist who numbers up the bones, recites the names and describes the forms and functions of the tissues, organs and apparatuses which constitute the physical structure, explains nothing of the true man except the house he lives in.

The physiologist who explains the motions which proceed throughout the wonderful housekeeping processes of human life, supplements in one degree the science of anatomy, but does no more than his contemporary by way of unveiling the mystery of that being which inhabits the many-sided structure. Oh, how long! how wistfully, and yet in what agonizing yearning for light - light upon the mystery of self-knowledge, light upon the problems of who am I? what am I, whose am I? whence do I come? and whither am I bound? - has the I am of moral existence waited! Can the answer ever be rendered? If so, it must come from the realm of true knowledge, the esoteric innermost, from whence and to which the exoteric is but a temporary pilgrim! Those who have stood face to face with this esoteric sunbeam, who have beheld it vanishing behind the clouds of matter for the span of a mortal term of existence, but emerging again into the clear noonday radiance of a day which knows no night, a firmament whose unbounded vistas enshroud no mysteries, a realm of being limited only by the capacity of finite perception - such an one surely has the right to say, I know, and such an one writes and alleges he will reveal the order of Divine wisdom as manifest in human existance, and declared by the souls who have lived and struggled behind the veil, broken their way by the sword of death through its misty envelopment, and finally attained to that breadth of vision where cause and effect cohere like pearls on the unbroken thread of destiny, where past and future lie outstretched in the boundless panoramas of a never beginning, never ending present.

Any attempt to elucidate the problems of being, conducted in one direction, and by one method alone, must fail.

Those philosophers who reason from induction alone, only arrive at a mayhap perception of truth, nor do they fare any better who conduct their arguments through the half-declared processes of deduction. Both methods are essential to master the entire situation.

Theory must prompt the possibility of new discoveries, and facts must goad us on to the evolvement of new theories - even phenomena are needed to startle our self-conceit from the arrogant assumptions of half-enlightened, half-blind belief, and failures must follow on the heels of successes ere we can presume to erect a milestone on the path of destiny for the guidance of others. When every method has been exhausted, and all avenues to the way of light have been carefully traversed, then, and not till then, can the soul of man venture to affirm, I know; then, and not til then, are we in a position to challenge the bigoted adherents of a single school or a solitary method, and say, "I have entered upon a grander vista of truth than you - follow me!" Emerging from the many branching avenues of knowledge which the study of spirit and matter, fact and theory, intuition and phenomena afford, let us lay out our scheme of the Universe, and then proceed from its underlying principles to such results as their action have given shape and organic life to.

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In presenting the following pages in an English dress, I feel it necessary, in my capacity as editor, to excuse the many shortcomings to be found in its context, on the following grounds:

The author of this work, although a perfect master of the English language in conversation, fails to render his glowing thoughts in writing with equal perspicuity.

In preparing these writings for the press, I found many Latin quotations and numerous foot-notes encumbering the text, and to render the first into English, by the aid of a better scholar than myself, and embody the second into the sense of the page, obliged me in many instances to sacrifice the construction of the sentences I interpolated. In much of the idiomatic phraseology which appears in this work also, I could have wished to effect changes, but the pressure on my own professional duties leaving me but little time for literary occupation, and the haste enjoined upon me by the author, who desired to complete the work with as little delay as possible, induced me to trust that the sublimity of the sentiments, the grandeur of intention, and the high-toned philosophy which pervades this noble work, will make ample amends for errors in orthography, or foreign modes of expression.

Trusting also, that the warmly cherished friends who have so generously and confidingly stood by me during the preparation of this work will derive as much pleasure from its perusal as the self-appointed critics, who have never read it, seem to have derived from attacking its unknown contents and well-known editor, I chose by commending it heartily to that brave five hundred who dare advance without fear or favor to the investigation of Art Magic.

New York. EMMA HARDINGE BRITTEN.

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The following pages were written at the solicitation of highly esteemed European friends, who deemed that the author's long years of experience as a student and adept in the Spiritism of many lands might furnish to the world some valuable information concerning the mysteries of that spiritual communion now so prevalent throughout the civilized world.

In order to gratify these too partial advisers, the author at first collated his personal experiences into a series of autobiographical sketches, the first few chapters of which were published under the title of "Ghost Land; or Researches into the Realm of Spiritual Existence," in Emma Harding Britten's high toned American Magazine, the "Western Star." As the calamitous fires which devestated the city of Boston some five or six years ago caused the suspension of Mrs. Britten's excellent periodical, the author determined to lay his papers aside, for any use posterity might derive from them, but the same friendly spirit of appreciation which had dictated the transcription of the autobiography subsequently pleaded for its continuance, or the preparation of a still more occult work, in which the much needed desideratum of a comprehensive philosophy, covering the principles which underlie spiritual existence should be given to the world, as a basis on which to found the superstructure of spiritual science.

This suggestion was too much in accordance with the author's habits of thought to be lightly rejected. A hasty and fragmentary sketch of the work was drawn up, but when compared with the vast fields of untrodden revelation that yet remained to be gleaned, the author would fain have committed his abortive attempt to the flames, and trusted to time to unfold that mighty realm of magical philosophy which can never be disclosed in a single life-time much less condensed into one volume. But the all-too-appreciative friends to whom the author's despair of purpose was revealed thought otherwise.

They deemed the broken gleams of light submitted to them were all-sufficient for the age in which they were to be given, and urged that the suggestions rendered, belonged to humanity, and could not fail to throw light upon many of the mysteries of spiritual manifestations.

Whilst wandering incognito through the cities of the United States, still seeking to add fresh records of Spiritualistic interest to an already full treasury of facts, the author had the pleasure of meeting with his highly esteemed English friend, Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten. In addition to urgent appeals from this authoritative source to publish his book of magic, the author was farther tempted by the generous promise that he would be relieved of all the vexations and technical details of this publication.

Shrinking with unconquerable repugnance from any encounter with those butchers of human character, self styled "critics," whose chief delight is to exercise their carving-knives upon the bodies of slain reputations, without regard to qualification for the act of dissection, and equally averse to entrusting the dangerous and difficult processes of magical art to an age wherein even the most sacred elements of religion and Spiritualism are so often prostituted to the arts of imposture, or mean traffic, the author's reluctance to the proposed publication, even with all the advantages of his English friend's invaluable cooperation, would hardly have been conquered, had not loved and trusted spirit friends taken the helm of the storm-tossed mind, and advising the excision of such passages as would be dangerous to the half-informed spirituality of the present age, those well-trained counselors themselves suggested the conditions of publication which they deemed most in harmony with the author's wishes and position, conditions subsequently embodied in the circular which announced the publication of this volume.

The reception which that circular met with, the unworthy jibes, sneers, and cruel insults which have been leveled against the excellent lady who volunteered to stand between the author and his shrinking spirit, have caused him the deepest remorse for having placed her in such a position, and induced a frequent solicitation on his part that the publication of the book should be abandoned. In confiding the management of this work to his friends, the author had entire confidence that the invaluable services rendered by the noble editress to the Spiritualists of America, which would have been sufficiently appreciated to protect her against misrepresentation and unjust attack.

That these expectations have been so rudely disappointed, only proves how much better the spiritual intelligences who dictated the conditions of publication understood the elements to be dealt with than the trusting mortals they counseled.

That Emma Hardinge Britten has found five hundred friends in America, who put faith alike in her judgment and honesty, is deemed by her as a sufficient trimph for one lifetime. Should the author of "Art Magic" find five hundred readers who can appreciate its occult pages, that shall be esteemed as an equal meed of recompense for his share of the work.

Having already made confession of inefficiency to cope with so vast a subject in so small a space, acknowledging that a mere sketch is here presented instead of the full length portrait of Art Magic the author's mind had conceived, and given to all whom it may concern, the rationale of how this publication came to be launched upon the world, we shall conclude in the quaint words of Robert Turner, the translator of Cornelius Agrippa's fourth book of "Occult Philosophy" into English, who in presenting his introductory words to the public, says:

"There be four sorts of readers -- sponges, which extract all, without distinguishing; hour-glasses, which receive and pour out as fast; bags, which retain only the dregs of spices, and let the wine escape; and sieves, which retain the best only. Some there are of the last sort, and to them I present this Occult Philosophy, knowing that they shall reap good thereby." A conclusion in which Dr. Robert Turner is cordially joined by

THE AUTHOR

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In sending out Art Magic to the readers of The Progressive Thinker, we do so with the firm conviction that we are presenting them with a most remarkable book, one that will not only prove very interesting, but highly instructive. While many will not endorse by any means all that it contains, yet they will find therein a vast fund of historical, spiritual, philosophical and occult information, which will prove of priceless value.

Readers of Art Magic will find in its pages much "quaint, queer and curious" lore relating to occult subjects and occult formulas and practices during all past history and among the various esoteric cults that have flourished in the ages gone. Some of these cults are being revived, in some degree, at the present day.

The student who wishes to delve into the ancient mysteries, as traced in occult lore, will find this volume invaluable: for here is condensed a vast fund of information that could not otherwise be obtained, without many years of patient research, and with access to rare and scarce sources of knowledge.

There has been for several years a great demand for this work by thinking minds, as high as $25.00 being paid for a single copy, and even at that price the supply fell far short of the demand. The copyright having nearly expired, Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten gave us the privilege to republish the work, thus giving to the many what was only possessed by a select few. We are profoundly thankful to this estimable lady for the privilege; the great good that will be accomplished thereby will redound to her credit. Just think of it, about 12,000 Ghost Lands distributed in one year, and even more than that number of Art Magic will be sent forth as gifts to the subscribers of The Progressive Thinker on conditions set forth in that paper.

J. R. FRANCIS, Publisher.

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