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Kapella, an Aryan sage, denied the existence of a first cause, claiming that everything in nature found itself developed only in consequence of material fatal forces. The ancient Kabalists said: “A stone becomes a plant, a plant a beast, a beast a man, a man a spirit, and the spirit a god.”
CHAPTER XII.
Magic and Devil Worship
Elephas Levi claimed that the attraction and repulsion of the atoms is caused by the astral light. “There exists an agent which is material and spiritual, a universal plastic medium, a common receptacle of the vibrations of motions and the images of forms, a fluid and a force. By means of this force all nervous apparatuses secretly communicate with each other, thence come sympathy and antipathy, thence dreams and second sight. The existence and use of this force is the great secret of practical magic. The astral light attracts, repels, vivifies and destroys all things under the influence of powerful wills. It can be directed by the leaders of souls. By means of this agent we can correspond instantaneously from one end of the earth to the other, discern what is taking place at the antipodes, heal or hurt at a distance. The Gnostics called it the burning body of the Holy Ghost. Life is produced by the action of the astral light on the ether or matter. In man it forms the astral body, it is the first envelope of the soul, and it is by combining with the most subtil fluids that it forms this etherized body or phantom. The astral body is nourished by the astral light, as the physical body is nourished by the earth. The astral light is saturated with souls, which it releases in the incessant generation of existences, and whose imperfect wills can be dominated and employed by stronger ones. The elementary spirits are like children, they torment those who concern themselves about them. It is these that produce the raps on the walls and furniture.” – Mysteries of Magic, 65.
“An individual can leave the physical body and actually travel on either the material or astral plane in the astral body. Many persons are able to travel thus in their ordinary sleep.” – Astral World, 25.
All magic is religious, having been invented by the priests or Magi. It is said that the religious bodies copied their demonology from the Kabala of the Jews, and that the latter borrowed their system of theurgy and theology from the Egyptian and Babylonian priests. If any one outside of the religious bodies started any opposition devil-worship, they were promptly burnt. All the magic rituals are derived from the Key of King Solomon, claimed to have been found in his sepulchre at Jerusalem.
In the Magic Grimore, ascribed to Pope Honorius, he says: “We have seen with what power Jesus commanded demons, which power was transmitted to St. Peter, and, as the lawful successors of St. Peter, having the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and desiring to share the power of invoking and commanding spirits, which has been reserved unto us alone, with our brethren, we have included in this Bull the manner of their invocation. And because it is meet that the ministers of the altar should have authority over rebellious spirits, we hereby depute unto them all the powers which we possess in virtue of the Holy Apostolic Chair.” – Book of Black Magic, 100.
In invoking the Devil or other choice spirits, it is necessary to murder some being. If the conjurer cannot or dare not murder a human being, he takes an innocent virgin lamb and cuts its throat and tears off its skin to use for a magic apron or parchment. Instead of the skin of a lamb, the caul of a new-born child may be used. – Idem.
The sign manual of the demon Valefor, the patron of thieves, contains two Maltese crosses rampant and three links. As Solomon and his entourage worshipped the demon Astaroth, they probably stole from him the two pillars at the door of the Temple and the double triangle above them, for they appeared in the seal of that spirit. There are two or more crosses in each of the seals or signatures of Solomon’s seventy two black fiends. Their motto is, “In this sign we conquer.”
Solomon imprisoned the seventy two devils, with all their legions, in a brazen vessel and sank it in a deep lake in Babylon. The Babylonians, thinking that there must be a great treasure in the vessel, took it out of the lake and broke it open, when out flew the chief devils immediately, with all their legions following them. – See Waite’s Book of Black Magic.
We still worship pagan gods. The Hexagram, or double triangle of Solomon, is still used by different sects and societies. On it is the name of Agla, a pagan sun-god, and also the name of Tau, the Egyptian bull christ Taurus, with the pagan symbol, the Tau cross. The god A. and O., Alpha and Omega, with which the Hexagram is adorned, is a foul Babylonian idol, the same as IO. It has been represented that the Devil falls prostrate before the cross. But, to tell the truth, Lucifer uses the sign himself, also the double triangle and the single triangle in his signature. And Belial has four crosses by which he lies.
When a sorcerer conjures up one of the seventy two demons, he must draw the double seal of Solomon (double triangle) and the Pentagram, (five-pointed star) on a parchment of calfskin. These must be worn on his white vestment, together with the seal of the spirit invoked. And the secret seal of Solomon (the pillar standing in a circle) must be drawn with the blood of a black, virgin cock on virgin parchment. This is part of the conjuration: “I invoke and conjure you, O Spirit, by God the Father, by God the son, by God the Holy Ghost, by the Most Glorious and Holy Mother of God, by her Sacred Heart, by her Blessed Milk, by the Power and Victory of Hell, by the Ministers of the Tartarean Seat. I exorcise thee in the names of El, Elohim, Zabaoth &c. do thou forthwith appear. I conjure thee by the Living and True God Heliorem (Helios, the sun god) and Tetragrammaton Jehovah (the God of four letters). Come! I Adonai Saday, King of Kings, commands thee.” See Lesser Key of King Solomon, 55.
There is no use in trying to invoke spirits or perform any tricks in black magic unless you have confessed and received the Holy Communion, and you must pray for assistance to the pagan gods Adonai, Eloim, Ariel, Yahveh and Gibor, and fast, and abstain from the society of females for nine days, and take a bath, and wear the garb of a priest or a Levite, and you must have the sacred Masons’ implements, the sword, the staff, the rod, the sickle and the poniard. See Waite’s Book of Black Magic.
That part of nature called the astral light or universal spirit was virtually the supreme god of all religions. It was the Heaven or Nirvana of the Buddhist, (where the soul is blown out like a lamp some believed.) When he attained to perfection and was reabsorbed in this godhead, he had stormed the heights of Heaven and attained eternal bliss. He considered that his spirit would no longer be subjected to endless incarnations in material forms. But there is no knowing when it would again by choice or compulsion enter the ether and form another atom and again commence the unavoidable cycle.
All the vile religions have scared the human race into ca’niption fits by their assertion that our souls will be lost unless we bow down to their priests and worship their idols. According to the original parent religion, the Hindu, if we obey the priests faithfully, we will go to Nirvana and become a creator or electron, or elementary spirit. And all the authorities, both pagan and Christian, agree that the elementary spirits are mischievous, wicked entities. It would be better to lose our souls, for in that case they are banished into the ether or chaos and become the nucleus of a material atom. If we go to Nirvana, we are one step farther removed from the ultimate goal of all the ambitions of all the heavenly electrons and material atoms, the supreme pinnacle of attainment, man’s high estate, which is greater than that of the gods.
The Theosophists revel in the mystic and occult. If they can construct a sentence that no one can understand, and that they do not know the meaning of themselves, they are in the seventh heaven of delight, their wisdom borders on the Divine. Stating their doctrine of transmigration in plain language: God sits at his desk in Heaven, with a great lot of pigeonholes before him, in each one of which is a soul in a state of coma. When he receives a wireless from the earth that Pat and Biddie McGee have formed in their marital relationship a psychic vortex, or soul vortex, he makes a grab at the pigeonholes and lights perhaps on the soul of Pythagoras and sticks it into the new-born embryo, which already has a soul, and there is no room for any other. See “Spermatozoa,” Stand. Dic., and note those very energetic individuals in a frantic race to enter the ovum and blossom out as human beings. You will then realize that the child already has a very lively soul, provided by nature, and there is no occasion for any doped soul, supplied by any idiotic human plan.
“The astral light keeps an unmutilated record of all that was, that is, or ever will be. The minutest acts of our lives are imprinted on it, and even our thoughts rest photographed on its eternal tablets. It is the Book of Life, it is the memory of God. If the medium or subject’s sight is ably directed by the mesmerizer, magician or spirit, the light must yield up its most secret records to our scrutiny.” – Astral World. It is claimed that each person’s atmosphere in the astral light is peopled with the images of his or her immediate family, thus accounting for the assertions of the mediums that they see the spirits of our lost ones.
Swedenborgians claimed that the human body is sometimes abandoned by the soul in consequence of overpowering fright, grief, despair or sickness, and that we encounter every day such living corpses. Into these bodies may enter the soul of an adept sorcerer or some earth-bound, disembodied soul. In insanity the astral soul is partly paralyzed, bewildered, and subject to the influence of every passing spirit of any sort, or it has departed forever, and the body is taken possession of by some vampire or human soul near its own dissolution, and clinging desperately to earth, whose sensual pleasures it may enjoy for a brief season longer by this expedient.
The ancients claimed that the soul was located in the solar plexus, and it was asserted that they could read, hear, see and smell through the navel. In our vermiform stage of development before evolution had supplied us with heads, the soul was perhaps in the stomach, but it may have moved since. Plato says that the divine part of the soul is located in the head. Haeckel says that the human soul is a combination of the souls of all the cells of the body. It is impossible to destroy any simple substance, and if it affords you any comfort, you can assume that the soul or ego is an indestructible electron. The Stoics claimed that the soul is in the heart, and that although it outlives the body, it is yet perishable and can only endure at the longest till the termination of the world period, 4,320,000,000 years. Epicurus claimed that “nothing that exists will ever cease to exist. Atoms exist from all eternity, and worlds were formed by their vortical motion. The soul is material and composed of exceedingly fine atoms, and is dispersed through the whole body. The rational soul is in the breast.” Stephanus, of Alexandria, says that “copper is like a man, it has a soul and body.” Yoga Ramacharaka says that “iron is alive and may be killed by poison.”
“Transmigration of the soul takes place in all flesh, in beasts, reptiles and fowls. For one form of uncleanness the soul will pass into a Gentile, for another into a mule, for others into an ass, a woman, a bat, a she-mule or a camel.” – Kabala Nishmath Chaim, Ch. 13, No. 1. It sometimes happens that one sacrifices an animal with a human soul in it. Therefore the slaughtering knife must be without defect, and the slaughter must needs be delicately done to avoid cutting the gizzard out of the human soul. “The soul of a murderer is transmigrated into water. Let no man drink from a running stream, lest the soul of a wicked sinner pass into him.” – Kabala Emeh Hamelech, fol. 153, col. 1.
“By a combination of the letters of the ineffable name Rava once created a man and sent him to Rav. Zera. The man being unable to reply when spoken to, the Rabbi said to him: ‘Thou art a creation of the company (of necromancers) return to thy dust.’ By the same means a Rabbi created pumpkins, melons, deers and roes.” – Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrim, ch. 7.
The soul, called Psyche, when she is at home, lives in that part of the brain called the Medulla Oblongata, and the spirit, called Budhi, lives in the next house up the street, the Pineal Gland. When Budhi, or the Word, wins the affections of Psyche, and they are married, the Word saves the soul, and the man who harbors these entities is illuminated and becomes a master.
If you read Genesis in the original Hebrew, you will find that Al or El, the sun, not the Christian God, says: “To every beast of the earth I gave a living soul.” The souls of human beings are composed of material as refined and spiritual as that of the souls of cockroaches and bedbugs, and men, if they behave themselves, are equally as good as those animals and of just as much importance in the universe.
CHAPTER XIII.
Ghosts and Hobgoblins
The Hindus of the Malibar coast said they had ghosts, but they knew them to be bad spirits, for good ones can hardly ever appear at all. Apuleius says the human soul is a demon or genius, an immortal god. According to Philo Judaeus, the air is filled with an invisible host of spirits, the bad ones are mortal, and the good ones are immortal. The soul, upon the death of the body, transforms into a lemure (phantom). If it is wicked, it is called a larvae. The ghosts who, through vice, fearful crimes and animal passions, are confined to the eighth sphere immediately surrounding the earth, are the magnetic vampires and demons so well known to mediaeval ecstatics, nuns, monks and witches, the blood demons of Porphery. They may be cast out by powerful magicians, but if a sorcerer is not available, you can take a saucer containing two ounces of nitre and pour over it one ounce of vitrol and place it under the bed of the obsessed, and the devil will take to his heels.
Paracelsus says: “It is possible that my spirit, without the aid of the body and through a fiery will alone, and without a sword, can stab and wound others. I can also bring the spirit of my adversary into an image, and then double him up and lame him.” According to Cotton Mather some young girls had become mediums by sitting with a West Indian negro woman. They declared that the spectres of various witches appeared to them and bit and pinched and stuck pins into them. Some of the witches confessed that they did afflict these girls by sticking pins into manikins made of wax or rags, and by clutching and pinching their hands together and wishing in what part and after what manner they would have the girls afflicted, and it was done.
If you are haunted by an objectionable ghost, provide yourself with a sword or a dagger and stab him when he makes his appearance. They are awfully afraid of swords, although if you cut one in two, he will join together again, or if you cut his head off or leg off, he will put the member right on again. But he does not like it, and will thereafter leave you severely alone. Bodin says that in 1557 an elementary, thundering demon fell down with the lightning into the house of one Poudot and kept throwing stones all about the room for several days. The magistrate came to investigate, and the spirit knocked his hat off and drove him out of the house. At last Poudot got a sword and slashed all around the room, whereupon the spirit disappeared.
Where the ghosts are real troublesome, you can drive them away by distributing holy medallions around the house where the ghosts can see them. As the medallions have been blessed or magnetized, God has been injected into them, and they consequently are gods, and mischievous spirits who cut up capers around the house are afraid of these deities. I have a blessed idol of Buddha on my desk to keep the ghosts out of the office and prevent them from interfering with the composition of this pious work.
Modern spirits are often lying spirits. They are ever on hand to humor the respective hobbies of the persons who communicate with them at circles, and deceive them. When Luther, the sorcerer, evoked the demon, he was told that he should not worship the Virgin. But when St. Dominic called upon the devils, they told him that nobody was damned that persevered in her holy worship. The golden legend of James de Viragine shows that the Virgin gave to St. Dominic a miraculous rosary, by which he could perform greater miracles than Christ. But a certain abandoned sinner was bold enough to doubt the virtues of the rosary, and immediately fifteen thousand devils took possession of him, and being questioned by St. Dominic, they emitted flames from the nostrils, eyes and ears of the demoniac and certified to the virtues of the rosary. Over a hundred angels appeared in golden armor, together with the blessed Virgin herself bearing a golden rod, with which she administered a sound thrashing to the demoniac. The numerous theological truths uttered by St. Dominic’s devils were embodied in so many articles of faith, according to Isis Unveiled, 2-76.
One who is unprotected, the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with the semblance of voices. In all the Mysteries, strong drink or anaesthetics were administered to the initiates to sunder the soul from the body and produce visions. The Sankhya system teaches that the ghost, or astral body, can shrink to such a minute space that it can penetrate anything, or enlarge to a gigantic body, or float through space, or standing on the earth can reach the moon, that its will is irresistible, having dominion over all things and the ability to attain every desire.
It is claimed that phantom hands have appeared at seances under test conditions and written messages on a table in broad daylight, when the medium was six or eight feet away, but the theory is that the materialized hand is an emanation from the medium, the astral hand of the medium. Madam Blavatsky says that “this is the spiritual or astral body that is raised in incorruption. It is useless to argue that these are spirit hands. To make hands or faces objective, they are compelled to use either the astral limb of the medium, or material furnished by the elementals, or the aural emanation of all persons present. Pure spirits will not and cannot show themselves objectively. Those that do are elementary spirits.”
Madam Blavatsky tells of the following wonderful manifestations that occurred in Thibet. A body of traveling Bikshus, or monks, claimed the power to reincarnate the Buddha in any infant. A child four months old was brought to their cave and set down in the middle of the room, while the monks sat in a circle around it at some distance. A skeptic minister sat close to the child to expose the trickery. The chief Pase Budha went into a trance, and his astral and spiritual body took possession of the child and made it walk and talk, saying “I am Buddha, I am the old Lama, I am his spirit in a new body.” The minister said: “The baby looked at me with an expression of intelligence that was simply awful. It sent a chill through me, I felt a real terror, my hair rose upon my head, and my blood ran cold. The eyes seemed to search my very soul with an expression that made me think that it was the face of the Superior himself, his eyes, his very look that was gazing upon me.”
If you wish to conjure up or materialize a spirit, purchase from the Yogis some ancient blood of a black cat, which comes in powdered form. This, together with a sparrow’s brain, burnt upon the altar will produce a smoke or vapor of peculiar odor and a color unknown and unnamed by human beings, being a combination of many colors. From the smoke of this magic altar it is possible for spirits to materialize, so that even persons without the astral vision can see them.
Sometimes a band of occultists will meet around their altar fire, which is kindled between the horns of the goat and fed with the ancient blood of a black cat and other material from which ghosts can materialize. The occultists stand in a row hand in hand, the Grand Master at the head by the altar, and all strongly command that a spirit shall manifest. As the command passes from one brother to another it gains force, and the power of the will is enormously augmented, and after a time there issues from the floor a thread of astral matter, which ascends perpendicularly and widens out as it ascends, assuming a human form, but weak, wavering and limp, bending this way and that on every breath of air. But after the circle has pumped the power into him for a while, he becomes sufficiently strong to walk or glide about and take a seat in the circle and talk to the members. The materialized body is soft and moist and cold as a corpse. When they wish him to disappear they stand again hand in hand, the Grand Master next to the spirit, and send the command from one to the other ordering the ghost to depart, and he will again become weak and wabbly and sink down to the floor and disappear through the same nail hole from which he emerged.
If the company wishes to engage in a dangerous experiment, one half of them will occupy one side of the hall and the other half the other side. They must first erect between them a circle of sheet lead, over which the devil cannot jump to attack any of the members. Then each bunch will think evil vindictive and murderous thoughts of the other bunch, and conjure up dire monsters to attack them, and soon a horrible, gigantic and vicious thought-monster, part beast, part devil and part human, will materialize and rush at the members and endeavor to attack them, but fortunately for them, he cannot pass the leaden circle, for if he could reach those that made him, he would strike them dead with a charge of electricity through the heart. In order to lay this devil they have conjured up, they have to clothe themselves entirely in silver-colored garments. They then enter the circle from both sides and close in on the monster. These silver-colored beings scare the devil to death, and he crawls back in his hole.
A man, named B, built a house with second-hand lumber from an old building that had been torn down. The old building was reputed to be haunted by the former owner, who was murdered there. The ghost was very mad because B took his lumber, and, in order to be revenged, he went with the lumber to the new house and haunted that. B says that the ghost would appear to him when he was going to sleep and jab him in the eye with his finger and seize his arm and hurl it against the wall. When B was half asleep one night, the ghost appeared with a pail of water and threw it all over him. The dog could see the ghost even when B could not, and would bark and show his teeth and propose to fight the phantom. B sold the house to some colored folks. They were scared white by the skilligin, gave up the property and demanded their money back, because the ghost was an incumbrance on the estate and a legal defect in title, he being in possession, claiming ownership.
St. Clemens Romanus says that Simon Magus (Paul), of the New Testament, could make himself invisible when and to whom he pleased. He created a man out of air, who passed through the rocks and mountains and flew along through the air. He threw himself from precipices without being injured and flung himself into the fire without being burned, he animated statues, he walked through the streets attended by strange figures, which he said were the souls of people departed.
