King Solomon's Goat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XIX.

The Bible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XX.

Heaven

The Lord doeth all things well.
He consigns the Jews to Heaven,
And all the rest to Hell.

There are forty nine heavens to which we ordinary mortals may attain, so you needn’t worry. Besides, there are certain aristocratic heavens reserved for the great and good men of high spirituality, such as Moses, the fakir, thief and murderer, and David, the bandit, outlaw and assassin, and Solomon, the fratricide, Mormon and pillar of Ashtoreth, and all the popes, bishops, priests and ministers. We will each go to that place we like the best, and to which we are fitted by our vibration. Some of us, like certain ministers, will go to that heaven where the beautiful fairies are. The ancient Jews will have a little heaven of their own, where they can worship the three balls and the ass-headed god and the god with whiskers on, and where they will have a chance to cop the golden paving stones, and sell corner lots, and insure their palace not made with hands eternal in the heavens.

And the ancient Scotch Presbyterian will walk the golden streets with his savage, gore-imbued devil-god, in his paradise overlooking the abyss of Hell, where he can gloat over the souls in torment, as they rise up out of the Bottomless Pit every thousand years, each one fastened by his tongue to a hook on an endless chain, which rises from such a fathomless depth of hellfire that it takes the victim a thousand years to make the circuit. It is claimed that these heavens and hells are built up from the astral substance by the imaginative power of the minds of the different religious sects.

This region contains all the heavens that have ever been dreamed of in theology, each filled with the devotees of the various creeds. Each of the great religions has its own particular region in which its disciples gather, worship and rejoice. In each region the religious soul finds just what he had expected and hoped to find on the other shore. You may even see the golden crowns, harps and stiff halos in some cases and hear the eternal chant of praise. These heavens are not eternal. Everything on the astral plane is subject to change like all other matter. Even the religious progress and change their opinions. – Astral World, 70.

The occultists do not, as a rule, disclose the process by which you may see the astral visions and pass out of the physical and journey in the astral body. But this is one way to see the pictures in the astral light: Between sleeping and waking, in the neutral state of Jagrata, when the eyes are closed and a numbness falls upon the body, and you experience a floating sensation, take note of the visions that appear to you, if any, and then by your will power impress them upon physical brain, so that you may remember them. These visions may be pictures on the astral light or scenes on the astral plane, but whatever they are, some of them prove to be true prophetic visions.

One occult teacher advised those who wished to induce trance to go into the silence, that is, to go into a room by yourself, where you will not be disturbed, and lie down and completely relax the muscles and think of nothing at all. The Hindus say fix your mind on your navel, but some fix their gaze on a crystal. You will see the visions when you doze off, if you can get them at all.

When you are in the astral body it is possible to remember the experiences of your previous lives, that is, the lives of your ancestors. In the physical body heredity and memory are stored in the cromatin or brain matter of all the millions of cells of the body. The human astral body is made up of the astral bodies of all the cells. It is possible that memory is inherent in the astral matter of all the cells, and that in the astral we are more in rapport with the cells than in the physical.

In the lowest astral plane next to the earth, it is said, is the region where the astral shells or corpses disintegrate, an arm sloughing off here, a leg there, and a head elsewhere. It is claimed that the spirits have deserted these shells. If you should happen to meet one of these ghosts walking in a graveyard without any legs or without any head, it may scare you into a fit, but it will not do you any harm, for it is dead. Then there are certain spectres or phantoms whose company is very undesirable when you take a lonely walk in the ghoul-haunted woodlands. These elemental spirits like to play practical jokes and have a little fun with you, but they will not do you any harm, unless you are sufficiently weak to allow them to obsess you. Cast out fear, cultivate a strong will, and be, like Solomon, the master of demons and men.

“There are certain entities or beings in the astral world which never were human and never will be, for they belong to an entirely different order of nature. They are fairies, satyrs, imps and goblins. At spiritual seances they sometimes play elfish pranks. They seem to be particularly apt to play tricks on neophytes in psychic research who seek to penetrate the astral without proper instruction. To such a one they appear as hideous forms, monsters &c.” – Astral World, 92.

Some of the elementals are electric spirits and confer upon the medium the power of magnetic healing. The medium, upon the approach of the spirit, is charged with electricity. The spirit may appear as a bird with a human face and a parrot’s bill and sharp, black eyes and body covered with hair, and deliver messages which can be heard clairaudiently by the medium. That reminds us of the claim of Mahomet that a little bird stood on his shoulder and whispered the laws of the Koran in his ear. They are certainly the Devil’s own laws.

“Many of the angels on the astral and the ghosts that haunt houses are thought forms created by the people who imagine them, and obtain all their apparent mind from the action of the thought force of their creators. Repeated thought and repeated belief will serve to keep alive and strengthen these entities, otherwise they will disappear in time. Many supernatural visitors, saints and semi-divine beings of all religions have been formed in this way. The power of the devils arise in the same way.” – Idem.

According to the Theosophists man has two souls, the animal and the spiritual, and at death the animal soul or spook, together with the spiritual soul, passes to that part of the astral called Kamaloka, or place of spooks, the lowest plane. But the spirit soon deserts the spook and leaves it to meet its just reward in the second death, because on earth it desired too much of carnal pleasures. The spooks retain all the impressions accumulated in the earth life and can communicate with mortals through mediums. Among these are the demons that obsess human beings. The spiritual soul passes on to Devachan, or the house of gods, which evidently includes those astral planes where the religious grovel before their various imaginary idols. See “What is Theosophy,” 46. This alleged spiritual soul, that deserts its brother soul in the depths of Hell, receives its due reward, for in the sub-heaven to which it goes, it has no memory of the earth life, consequently it is not immortal, and it is in jail and cannot get out. It would be better to stay in Hell with the spook, for it could have more fun haunting houses than worshipping imaginary gods with a lot of stiff-necked orthodox hypocrites.

In Ceylon they have twenty six heavens, and at the end of the world period they kill off all the spirits in all these heavens except those in the five upper spheres, the four highest of which are Nirvana.

You need not think that because you go across that you will have surcease from sorrow. It is only in the highest heavens that they have no sorrow, and that is because they don’t know anything. You cannot obtain happiness here or hereafter by purchasing absolution from any fakir, but only by doing to others as you would be done by. The astral planes of the Spiritualists in which the soul may advance, improve and ultimately attain to the highest heaven, corresponds with Purgatory, that superlative graft of religion. You can be prayed out of this limbo, if your relatives are willing to put up the stuff, otherwise you will be shoveled down into Hell. But a cheaper way is to have a Hindu prayer wheel. I am going to devote the immense revenues which I shall receive from this pious work to the construction of prayer wheels, which will be placed at street corners on all the highways and byways, so that even he who runs can turn the wheel and bring around to the open slot, so that God can see it, one of the many prayers printed on the wheel, for instance: “O, God, save my mother-in-law from Hell.”

In the coma, between sleeping and waking, the gates of the astral world are sometimes opened, and you can see the ghosts on the astral plane, great throngs of spirits, having no indication of piety, all busily engaged in their favorite occupations or sports. If in this state of Jagrata you happen to float into a graveyard, you will see the ghosts lying or sitting on their graves or pacing up and down beside them with bowed heads and in deep thought, trying to figure out how they got there and where they are going. See Seership, 179.

It is said that two persons can exchange bodies if they wish. Or if someone else has a better body than you have, and you wish to steal it, invite him to take a trip with you in his astral body on the astral plane. All the time keep commanding your astral body, sotto voce, to enter into his body, and when his astral body has emerged, prepared to take a trip with you in spook-land, that is the instant for your astral body to take possession of his physical body and leave his astral body out in the cold. But be careful to back into his body, for if your astral body enters his physical body face to face, you will be in wrong end to and will be crazy as a loon. Now there is no place for the other astral body to go except into your abandoned physical body, and as you are a wicked robber who just stole a house, he will probably hesitate about entering the body of such a person, and if he delays too long, he will be a lost spook, condemned to wander forever in the land of shades.

Do not allow them to palm off any gods upon you. Do not allow anyone to assume authority over you. I charge you to teach your descendants these things from father to son, down through the clanging corridors of time, down through the endless vista of eternity. There is nothing but matter in the universe, and all matter is equal. This being so, all forms produced therefrom, whether visible or invisible, must be equal, and one form has no right to assume authority over another. All beings are composed of matter, be they gods or be they worms, and no one mass of matter is superior to another or worthy of worship. The worm that crawls the earth is the equal of the king that sits upon a throne. Never bow the knee to anything that walks or swims or flies, that lives in the flesh or that exists only in the diseased imagination of depraved religious fanatics. Remember this: There is none greater than you in Heaven or Earth or Hell.

THE DEVIL’S HALF ACRE.

By Willard Bartlett.

From the Beacon

In rummaging through the attic of an old wraith-haunted, country house, I discovered a course of lessons in Yogi Philosophy. These lessons I devoured with avidity, and practiced with assiduity the occult rites, until I could readily pass into the silence and project my astral body or ghost to any desired place. In fact the unruly ghost would sometimes quit the body without my consent and leave me stranded high and dry without any soul.