King Solomon's Goat

One night while I lay sleeping, my astral body left the physical and sped through the air, as it had a very bad habit of doing, to Hapenny, the very last place on earth, the place manufactured by the Devil out of scraps and old junk, which he had left over after building Hell. But my perverted soul always insisted on going there whenever it succeeded in bursting through the carnal and beating down its being’s door.

The soul atom or Ego is said to be located in the Medulla Oblongata. If the soul is immortal, it is probably an electron. An atom is said to be composed of ions or electrons, and probably is subject to dissolution, and consequently not immortal. But as no one ever saw an atom or electron on account of their extreme minuteness, for the purpose of this veracious story, we will call the soul an atom and play it is eternal. An atom is a vortex ring of ether in a constant state of vibration, and assumed to resemble in form a ring of smoke. Some of the Hindus claim that a Purusha or soul from the countless spirit ions constituting the spirit principle of the universe, the akasa or astral light, becoming involved in the ether, originates the vortex movement by which the atom is produced. The ether is the ultimate refinement of matter, a body of extreme tenuity that pervades the whole universe and permeates all grosser bodies. By the waves of this ether all the vibrations of light, heat, sound, energy, electricity and life are transmitted.

The electron is an extremely minute corpuscle or particle endowed with life, mind and energy. A thousand electrons, more or less, revolve in the atom at a terrific rate around a central sun, thus resembling the solar system. This central sun is a male or positive electron, and all those revolving about it are females or negative electrons and constitute the harem of the central sun, thus establishing polygamy at the very basis of life. Our solar system is an atom in a great cosmic animal or god called Pan, the all-god.

In my nocturnal journeys, I thought I was clothed in the carnal body, but as I was transported through the air, I must necessarily conclude that I traveled in the astral body and on the astral plane, in which astral bodies move about and ghosts manifest, together with doubles, wraiths, hobgoblins and dopplegangers, to which latter class I belonged. The astral body, one of the bodies of the soul, is composed of fine, ethereal matter, and in form is a duplicate of the human body. It is claimed that this body persists for some time after death, but eventually disintegrates.

Many a night I have been there in Hapenny when the body lay many miles away. These were not ordinary dreams. I was actually there, that is, I being in the soul atom or astral body. One night I was conducted through a new manufactory there, which I had never seen with the mortal eyes and never knew existed. But the next time I went there in the body, I found the building just as I had seen it in the vision.

The favorite outing place of my doppleganger is the Devil’s Half Acre, or Murderer’s Paradise. It always flies to that obsessed and accursed spot hard by the gates of Tophet, close round the hinges of Hell. Traveling in the astral body, I can see both the quick and the dead, but as I am always out there at night, the live ones are asleep, and only the spooks are abroad, prowling hither and yon in the moon’s pale rays, visiting again, like myself, the scenes of former crimes. These are earth-bound spirits who, during life, lived out a low, degraded existence, and they are bound by their own desires and the vibration of their astral bodies to these astral slums. I stood out on the old road in front of the dilapidated shack formerly occupied by a gun-fighter, and watched the astral bodies as they glided to and fro in the air.

There was Mr. B. with a red gash from ear to ear and a crimson stream of blood running down over the white, astral, vapor-like body. Around the body was the aura, a cloudy vapor extending outward to a distance of two or three feet in the shape of an egg, an emanation of a dark and dismal color, corresponding to his dark and dismal career. It was in back of that very shack that he cut his throat and burst the door that bound him to the mortal clay, crying as he passed over that he was eternally lost and damned, as the church had hypnotized him into believing. But that Hell is immeasurably preferable to the Devil’s Half Acre, because the astral body is relieved of pain, hunger and thirst and the necessity of laboring for food and clothing. In fact, I believe that we are in Hell now, that this is the lowest plane of existence. In the Devil’s Half Acre the poor and wretched outcasts of the earth, embellished with dirt and clad in rotting rags, lived on three cents a day.

There was something in the atmosphere of the neighborhood that urged all the inhabitants on to crime. The family life was a hell on earth. The place was obsessed by the Devil and accursed of God. A village will acquire a character of its own. It is claimed that all the evil thoughts of all the vicious inhabitants of a vile place will linger in the surrounding atmosphere for years and exercise a baneful influence on all who dwell there. In the Devil’s Half Acre you could not take a step without treading on the crimson stain of a reeking crime. The spooks were and are now as thick as Tophet there; the place is haunted by ghosts and fiends unholy in Death and Hell bedight. It was the obsession of the place by the powers of evil that attracted to it all the notorious criminals.

The next spook to pollute the atmosphere was that of Mr. D. who, when on earth, was engaged in the banking business. In his left hand he carried a jimmy and in his right a gun, and he was peering here and there looking for a safe to crack or a cashier to shoot up. He was floating through the air at a height of about ten feet, and on his forehead blazed the blood-red mark of Cain, and his black aura was lighted by the fires of Tophet. When in life he lived in the house across the road. From this house also emerged a ghost with a halter around its neck. It was there with the halter he had swung himself over the battlements of time and dropped into eternity. The vicious influence of this house was irresistible. It is well to know this law of thought obsession and avoid these accursed places.

The next spirit to make its appearance was my old friend Mr. E. who came from walking up and down in the earth trying to sell the girl he led by the hand. He was still on his uppers as usual, as I could see by the ragged condition of his astral body. The accompanying aura of a slate-green hue, embellished with dull-red flames, indicated a low, deceitful and sensual character. He stopped and, looking me over, said: “I remember you. Don’t you want to buy my wife here again? She is in good condition now. I admit that I cheated you forty years ago when I sold her to you for fifty cents, but now in the astral world she is a vision of youth and beauty.”

Then came the ghost of Mr. F., a Sunday School teacher, who operated on a class of young ladies in the vestry of the church, that time-worn vestry, that well-beloved vestry, where the foundations of their philosophy were laid. A very genial, loving gentleman he was too, but his scholars being exceedingly frivolous, he found it necessary, in order to impress upon them the Divine truths, to pat them on the knees and sort of instil religion into them by the massage process. He has found his heaven. He appeared on the astral, surrounded, embraced and beloved by that same dazzling galaxy of beauties, now a star-crowned angel band.

It is claimed that they have schools over there, in which those who so desire may be instructed in virtue and wisdom and assisted to advance. When at last they learn the great secret and discover the key that unlocks the horns of the bull, they pass through the low and narrow portal between the horns of Taurus, squeeze through the needle’s eye, and enter the higher heaven.

Then I saw a lot of ghosts and fragments of ghosts sometimes without any heads, and sometimes lacking limbs, floating about aimlessly without any rudders, for they were dead, and their spirits had fled, leaving in the Devil’s Half Acre their astral shells. That is what they are called when their spirits have departed in the spiritual body and left the astral body to return to the elements like the carnal body.

A human being in a normal condition is unable to see an astral body, or ghost, because the vibrations on the astral plane are too rapid for the human eye to see. The vibrations of the ultra-violet or X rays, at one end of the spectrum are too rapid, and the infra-red rays, at the other end of the spectrum, are too slow for the human eye to see. But we have astral senses, appurtenant to the astral body, duplicates of the physical senses, and persons in a trance and sometimes people asleep are able to use these astral senses and see and communicate with the denizens of the astral world.

THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE SOUL ATOM.

By Willard Bartlett.

From The Nautilus

I will preface my story with the simple statement that I am now 500,000,000 years old, more or less, that the atom in which my soul is located, or which constitutes my soul, first found a home in what is called a living being, a cytod or cell, in the primordial or earliest epoch of earth’s history. A cell is a minute mass of living protoplasm, or jelly-like substance, not as large as the head of a pin, a combination of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, ammonia, sulphur, etc. While it is true that I existed before that, and, in fact, from all eternity, I previously resided in what is called inanimate matter, in the igneous rocks. But we will say that I was born when my soul atom became involved in the said protoplasm of one of the earliest plant cells.

All matter is endowed with mind, and a soul exists in every atom. It is impossible to produce new life, as it is said scientists have done, and impossible to create life, as God is claimed to have done, for life always existed in every atom. It is by certain combinations of matter that life becomes manifest in motion.

Each of the thousands of atoms, of which said primitive life cell was composed, had a soul destined to take its place in some descendant, if it had an opportunity. And the souls are waiting in the atoms to be born, and not in Heaven as asserted by the Yogi philosophers. The Yogis claim that the souls are waiting in some department of the Buddhist heaven crying to be born. Bosh! They are waiting in the spermatozoa, those little monsters, those little devils that drive their great human masters to crime and murder, to the gallows and the stake; there they are howling to be born. In their frantic race to enter the ovum, as shown under “Spermatozoa,” Stand. Dic., no wonder they are excited. They have been waiting 500,000,000 years for the opportunity to become human beings.

Cells propagate by division; that is my original ancestor, a little, round mass of protoplasm, divided itself into two cells to produce offspring, and all of my ancestors have done the same through all these millions of years, consequently I have in my body, in all of the cells, some of the original matter of which my original cell ancestor was composed. That is eternity’s great highway by which the soul walked down.

The human germ cell divides in the same manner into two individuals and we propagate, as our earliest ancestors did, by casting off a cell, which, being joined by a cell of the opposite sex, becomes fertilized. The human embryo develops by repeated subdivisions of this twin cell, and each one of the myriads of cells so produced is a living, thinking being.

The question has arisen why the cells in an embryo arrange themselves in the form of the parent, and it has been asserted that they are so distributed by God in pursuance of a Divine plan. But it is actually done by the volition of the cells themselves. Each cell takes its proper position in compliance with the instruction of its parent cell, and if removed by force to some other part of the embryo, will return to its original place, thus evincing the most surprising intelligence. It must be remembered that a molecule is as large as a universe, that there is no such thing as size, that as much ability may be stored up in the nerve centre of a cell as in all the debris of a human brain.

We are immortal, but with no memory of past lives. If we do not propagate, this life will be the end of our line that has continued unbroken for millions of years, and we will have to go back into the abysmal void, into the womb of chaos and commence all over again. That will be our fate in any case. Only that cell of our bodies which may be incorporated in our progeny will continue in human form. That cell is a remote relative of ours, having descended from the ancestral germ cell from which our embryo was developed.

Of the earliest plant cells, developed by spontaneous generation in the primordial epoch, some developed tails, or projected filaments of protoplasm from their jelly-like bodies. With these tails they propelled themselves through the primeval seas, and thus separated themselves from the plants and became animals. In this earliest epoch of life’s history all beings lived in the water. These primitive plants possessed as much soul and mind as the animals that thus branched off from them, and all plants still possess soul and mind.

But I am sorry to say that my ancestor, who thus projected a tail and became an animal, was a degenerate, a lazy loafer, a robber, a murderer and a cannibal. We all have to live on protoplasm. The plants made their own living plasm, manufacturing it from inorganic matter, but the animals were too indolent to do such laborious work, when they could just as well kill and eat the plant cells and subsist on them. In this way they lost the recipe for making plasm, and we descendants are consequently born cannibals, condemned to rob, murder, despoil and eat our fellow beings, or starve.

My next beautiful ancestor, to whom I will introduce you, was an animal consisting of numerous cells arranged in the form of a sack or stomach, called a blastoderm or gastraea. There was no central brain at this time, each cell having a brain of its own.

Yesterday, while patrolling my beat down in the mine, in a drift in the limestone, the earliest sedimentary deposit laid down on the bed of the primeval ocean, I found the house of my archaic ancestor, willed to me by him millions of years ago, and delivered by him to me yesterday. It is a minute shell, with which he protected his precious stomach. This stomach took its flight to Heaven in the earliest dawn of time, but the house, one of the many mansions of the soul, preserved intact came down to me through unnumbered ages, while myriad races came into being and faded into eternity, and religions sprang up and flourished and waned, and empires rose and rotted and fell.

In the next stage, the stomach has become elongated, and the nerve centre or spinal cord makes its appearance along the whole length of the body. At this period my beloved grandfather was a very aristocratic and exclusive worm, belonging to one of the first families, and, like them, had as much brains in his tail as in his head, for no cranial brain had yet developed.

The remaining steps of the evolution, through which my ancestors have passed, are depicted in the development of the human embryo, and I will ask you to read up on the subject of embryology, which I have found quite as interesting as dime novels.

notes

1

Where in this book the words God, Lord, Christ, Messiah and Lamb are capitalized they refer to Christian deities, otherwise to pagan gods.