Eulis! the History of Love/Part 2: Immortalization
PART II.
IMMORTALIZATION.
"Philadelphia, Sept. 30, 1873.
"Dear Sir,—I am deeply interested. I have never read anything of your Publications except the New Mola.[1] On the 61st page of that work, under Sedition XIX, I find a single sentence in capitals: the same thought I have been inclined to believe for more than thirty years:—'All People Do Not Have Souls!' My dear sir, do you mean it? Have you said something more about this somewhere else in your publications? … Oh, do you guess how my soul hungers in viewing the table of contents of the extraordinary Works published by your House:—and you will guess I have a soul?
"Praying that your valuable life may be long preserved, and that you may continue to enlighten the millions as only you can,
"I am, your true friend,
E. B. MERRILL,
308 Walnut Street."
E. B. Merrill, Esq.—Sir: The following Paper, in substance, is the reply to the questions involved in the "Mola" and your letter. In response to your interrogatories, allow me to say that:—All things are generally reputed and believed to reproduce their kinds. That is regarded as a determinate rule, and strict, unswerving law of nature. But it is not wholly true, nor an unchangeable law, because there is a law of spontaneous generation both in the faunal and floral departments of nature,—both vegetable and animal life produced by other than seed germination, some of which have, and others have not, the power of reproducing their kind; instances of which arc altogether too numerous to need special mention—as, for instance, the various acarii, produced from powdered flint which had first been calcined to white heat; and the familiar phenomenon of lizardesque beings originating from salted cabbage in dark, moist cellars; and still further, the occasional production of the low-type baboon, by the arrestation of gestation in pregnant negresscs,—an instance of which occurred in Charleston, South Carolina, but a few years ago. So it is not always strictly, albeit generally true, that things reproduce their types and species.
In the case of man, his origin by the methods and processes "universally believed in a few years ago, is now almost as universally discredited, for the Science of To-day rejects all that cannot be demonstrated accordant with Law; and the human being is proved to have been a gradual, and by no means a sudden or miraculous creation. [See the Volume "Pre-Adamite MAN," Published by this House.]
It is difficult to determine the precise point at which the purely animal left off, and the purely human began. Every recession from the highly human type is an approach toward the Simian, or ape-type, and ape-like forms, shapes, hands, facial angles, faces, noses, mouths, and features meet us among all races, colors, and classes of mankind at every turn; while embryology clearly demonstrates that the human being in utero passes through every stage of the world's animal growth and products, from the jelly-point to tadpole, fish, monkey, up to man; and the farther each gestative stage is pushed, the more perfect the resultant child. The lower types and forms of the Simiana are not, cannot be, immortal, by reason of paucity of cerebrum, or fore, top, brain, and redundance of back, low, brain, or cerebellum.
If a man is, as science proves he is, a growth, then his immortality is a growth also, and not a miracle or gift, or the result of any sudden force applied either physically or metaphysically; and he must have ascended from a non-immortal ancestry. We need a new exegesis of early scripture, for in the light of the daily resurrections of the remains of dead nations and obsolete civilizations; of the constant exhumations of the remains of Prehistoric races, some of which, reckoning from geologic data, date back not less than from three-quarters of a million to two whole millions of years ago, it is impossible to accept the literal account as we find it. People used to hold and believe that all mankind were the progeny of an original pair of Protoplasts, the autochthones or primal couple—Adam (Kadmon) and the fair Eve, his rib-originated compagnon du vie, or wife. But that dogma is a dogma no longer. Black, brown, white, yellow races, are all as clear cut and distinct from each other as are grayhounds from poodle dogs, or bantam fowls from headstrong, long-spurred, do-or-die game; nor will one race, even by admixture, produce a perfect specimen of either of the others.
In these days science explodes the fables of antiquity, and has already gone far toward dispensing altogether with the Edenic couple,—insisting that Tartar, Caucasian, Indian, and the Nigritian race came from diverse centres and sources, and Darwinian theorists hold the reins and drive straight from Palace to cavern; from man in pride and pomp, to man the cousin of hairy chimpanzee and red-rear baboon; and she demonstrates him to be a natural outgrowth of nature; and that his ancestors were some sort of superior ape-monkey or baboon, gorilla, nschiego or chimpanzee; and that he is himself a grand improvement, by natural and sexual selection, upon his progenitors, who slowly advanced from monkey-hood to be cave-dwellers and weapon-users; who gradually learned the use of fire and fighting, monogamy and mating, hut-building and clothes-wearing, and who, developing still, finally, through the lapse of thousands of—centuries, grew to be what he is now—generally, half-civilized; for he yet hangs, beheads, cruelizes his kind, and at best delights in carnage, drums, war, glory, gibbets, jails, Alcohol, Tobacco, Robbery, and Force, meat food, and fiery drink, still laying claim to survive the ordeal of death, in an etherealized form, but with out knowing really how or why: Holding firmly to the belief that his life on earth is but the prelude to his music of perpetual being beyond the grave, while all nature chants the low, sad requiem of all other sentient forms, the totality of which topple over into their original dust, and arc no more as Individuals, but only survive in their respective species. This belief gladdens him, yet it is a sad thought—Nothing sentient beyond the grave but man alone;— while all other forms of life and beauty go out forever?
Doubtless this development theory—of Darwin and others, is mainly true—so far as it goes,—but it fails to go far enough. It is eminently unsatisfactory to every true thinker and hoper for life beyond death; and the same class of persons find it utterly impossible to predicate immortality upon the materials furnished for that purpose by those who are mainly interested in the firm establishment of the grand idea. They ask Why? but no logical reply is given. I shall present it here and now.
No one, that I am aware of, contends that monkeys, either large or small, are capable of overriding the billows of Death, and swimming safely to the etheral shores beyond, (they probably deserve that power quite as much as some men do), yet man is, physically, but an improved ape, which fact has a singular proof in this: viz., the higher simia will, and do, inter-breed with the lower human. Proof—the tailed "Men" of Namaqua Land: the dwarf peoples of gorilla-land, and the offspring of Hottentot women captured and impregned by the giant apes of Nigritia. But it does not follow that the monstrous progeny thus generated are immortal, even if, as is doubtful—the humanesque parent may chance to be so; nor does it follow that all who are undoubtedly human, are also possessed of power to exist consciously subsequent to actual death; for unquestionably all are not thus endowed who possess the external and ordinary characteristics of humanity; and there are thousands who pass and repass us in the streets every day of our lives who are no more immortal than the fish they ate for dinner; for that power, fact, quality, call it what you will, is a development, an outgrowth, a result, the principia of which I herein purpose to briefly set forth and, so far as my limits permit, explain. And first let me define what the world and myself understand as the true definition of the term Immortality:—
The body is supposed to contain within itself an electrical form just like itself—head, eyes, brain, tongue, arms, legs, sex-organs; that at death this Æreal form escapes the body, and goes to spend its eternal years in heaven or in hell; that it can die no more, but lives, loves, suffers, thinks, enjoys, in that other life; and that it is in all respects a human being still. This brief definition is as good as one occupying a hundred pages.
Now if man is—and the affirmative proofs are strong—the descendant of any sort of ape, existent now or extinct for a hundred millenia; if he is immortal and the ape-parents not so, it is clear that those advanced specimens of the Simiadæ from whom sprung the first immortal human beings must have conferred on their offspring a power and quality themselves had not; so that at death the progenitors returned to dust, while the progeny exulted in perpetual life, and renewed existence; immigrated to other worlds in the Vault, immortalized beings, but with no parents to meet and greet them on the farther shore—the lands beyond the swelling flood, the kingdoms o'er the Sea!—and, undoubtedly, such was actually the case. Of course these first fruits were not of the high and fine grades subsequently developed on the earth by dint of time and better physical conditions. Logic is a good sieve, even if a grain or two of error does occasionally fall through the meshes among the finer truths. Now either the parent-apes were capable of conferring what they had not themselves—which is equivalent to extracting the greater from the less—an absurdity on its very face—or man is not immortal by right or dint or reason of birth, and must, therefore, reach that condition, or attain that quality in some other way, by some other method, through some other rule or Law; that is, children must have the quality conferred upon them at the very instant of generation; must acquire it during the gestative period; at some other point or moment of their career, or, finally, gain it in some mysterious or miraculous manner not generally known or fairly understood. But it is sheerly preposterous to believe, and impossible in every way, that an immortal thing could, or can, derive its death-defying nature from that which is itself death's common prey and victim. To take a gallon from a river is easy; but a river from a gallon is impossible, yet not more so than to predicate the immortality of the offspring of apes as a derivative quality. Yet I hold that a non-immortal human couple may generate immortal offspring: but then that comes of the magnetic unction and appulsion of the parents, who thereby impart the immortalizing bias, which bias or tendency the subjects may either increase or destroy, by methods hereinafter explained and set forth.
Now let it be distinctly understood that we of Eulis hold that the general purpose of the material universe, the end for which it exists, is the crystallization of mind,—the immortalization of Soul; but it does not follow that all human beings are death-proof, any more than that all the countless myriads of seeds produced every year in the floral departments of nature are endowed with reproductive vitality; for by far the greater number is wholly inert, while others possess but weakling life, and even if they do germinate soon perish and decay. Transfer the view to the animated world and it will be seen that the union of the genders fails of one of its purposes—reproduction five thousand times for every single success, taking the lower planes of life only; while in the case of man, the union, so far as offspring is concerned, fails nine hundred and ninety-nine times for every single successfully implanted germ.
Again: Every healthy man—of course excluding libertines, debauchees, habitual passional transgressors, and all injured persons—in fair spirits generates from one-quarter of an ounce to an ounce and a half daily of the three forms of fluid life—semen, prostatic lymph, and the exudation of Cowper's Gland; and every normal evacuation thereof will average half an ounce, containing, as I have repeatedly demonstrated under a powerful microscope (one magnifying 35,000 times) from nineteen, the lowest number, to seven hundred and eighty-three, zoospermes, every one of which was capable of being developed in utero to perfect human proportions. Take the first case, and it is clear that eighteen must fail if one succeeds; and seven hundred and eighty-two lose their chances if one is fortunate enough to reach the ovum, and become incarnate in the mother's bosom. But, the chances are billions to one against even one of them effecting a safe lodgement; and we conclude that for every successful human union there are not less than nineteen hundred and fifty-seven billions of human germs doomed to quiescence, if not to perpetual death, taking the adult population of the globe to be about thirteen hundred millions. Another thought right here: Nature selects the fittest to perpetuate species; and the strongest and most active zoospermes always override the weaker, and reach the ovum, dooming, thereby, all the rest; but it is clear that they too must perish if there be no ovum to invite them. Precious few ripe zoospermes reach the ripened ova, because deprived of the element time, essential to their perfection, the consequence of which is, that the great majority of people spring from unripe conditions, and remain unripe from the cradle to the grave. I will tell you a profound secret of generation, whereby the most magnificent results in that line are producible at will. It is this: [Here follow the glorious truths hinted at, but of such a holy, delicate, and private nature as to be only impartable by words or ink. The publisher hereof has no desire to exclusively retain it, and will, therefore, impart it to such noble souls as can appreciate it.[2]] These principles alone can redeem the world, and clinch the rivets of Immortality. Nature makes many attempts, but only few successes, and as it is with trees and grasses, shrubs and flowers, so also is it with mankind. She tries, and tries hard, to immortalize a species, but only succeeds in doing it for individuals; and it is as easy to pass along the streets and pick out those of Perduring souls from those whose future is nihility, as it is to select a negro, Indian, Hottentot, or John Chinaman from a crowd of Digger Indians. The truth is, that while man, generally, is immortal, he is not universally so. The development theory is good and true to a certain limit, but it at any stage or rate is wholly incompetent to the tremendous achievement of accounting for the existence of Soul. It needs improving; and it is astonishing that its chief priests have never even attempted to demonstrate man's immortality, but rather have studiously evaded contact with the troublesome question. Their theory fails them from the moment they reach the psychical and metaphysical phases of the grand subject. They take no cognizance of soul per se whatever, because fully aware that they cannot give a reason why Souls should be at all. The fact is, that immortalization could not, cannot, be at all on their hypotheses. It is not inherited (of necessity); it is not a gift, nor the result of fiat or miracle, but is a process, an evolution, the principia of which arc as clear and plain as one, two, three, or a, b, c.
Three brothers may live: one of them shall survive the process of Death; the second shall die forever, as that specific Person or Individuality; and the third one having once been possessed of the elements and conditions of immortality may lose them and go out like an extinguished taper or snuffed candle, by reason of his repeated violation of either one of the fundamental or organic laws of his nature; while a fourth brother may nearly lose the great boon,—if boon it be,—as some believe it, and millions of others do not; but this fourth brother, by prompt action, the instant abandonment of all his pernicious, soul-wasting, mind-dwarfing practices and habits; the total and persistent avoidance of all infractions of the fundamental love-laws of his being, and a steady, manly course and demeanor, may regain what he has so rashly jeopardized and imperilled.
Some human infants are born immortalized, death-proof, and indestructible from the moment they were conceived; while others require long years and terrible disciplines and experiences ere they reach the coveted goal. For thousands of years the followers of Gantama, the Budha, have considered what we call immortality as an unmitigated curse, and continued existence as the most terrible and tremendous evil that can possibly befall a human being. They regarded Narwana, or the final cessation of existence, as the grand desideratum,—the Ultima Thule of all possible human hope, aspiration, and endeavor.
Dissatisfied with life, its pains and penalties, there are millions of us who would gladly cease to be. [Time was when the penman of these lines, disgusted with the sham Philosophies and Philosophers of the age, actually tried to accept the doctrine of Budha; but, having reached the power—through the extraordinary means recounted in Part III.—of glimpsing the mystical states beyond, he changed his faith, and raised his hopes, and all the more so by reason of his discovery that Nihilism and immortality alike are reachable through the continued exercise of the human will.]
The discovery alluded to in the bracketed sentence is this: There are two kinds of immortality: 1st. A man may survive death, and escape the thrall of his physical form, and maintain his ethereal state for a while; yet if he shall not have received the proper and essential love-impulsion before birth, or else have subsequently developed love, he is as certainly doomed to go out, fade, dwindle, go back to the monadal state, as that gravitation is a law. He will be like the huge soap-bubble at the end of a pipe-bowl, which only requires to be let alone in order to grow smaller by degrees until it is again all within the rim of the bowl, and then bursts forever beyond the possibility of reparation.
Since the advent of the modern phase of Spiritualism, there have been thousands of people who have sought to commune with their deceased acquaintances, but wholly unavailingly. Why? Simply because their friends thus sought have ceased to exist. 2d. A man may have received the proper impulsion before birth, or have gained it afterwards, and he may enter the ethereal lands with, to use a common but very expressive phase—such a good send-off as to be able to continue on forever. The two kinds of immortality may be likened unto this: one is as a seed planted in good rich soil, but only an inch or two deep, with a hard pan of solid, arid rock beneath it, which defies the roots to spread; wherefore, that plant looks well and promises much for a while, but it soon withers and is seen no more forever. The other seed, planted in the same soil with plenty of water and root-room, grows gayly, waxes strong, spreads, blooms, flourishes, triumphs, and perpetuates itself; yet the seeds were alike, and so was the soil.
There are, also, two kinds of Nihilism: 1st. That of the brute and the brute homos, or brutal-man—both of whom are doomed to sudden and total extinction—a cessation of being as complete as that of exploded powder, or extinguished light, which, as powder or light, can exist no more forever; and, 2d. A truly human nihility, rest, divine Narwana,—a state infinitely harder to reach than any phase of active immortality, whether transient or permanent!—the man dies with a celestial strain or note of divinest harmony and seraphic melody ringing sweetest music through every avenue, vault, and chamber of his being. Now observe, and mark well this definition of Narwana; On earth the longest duration of any single musical note never exceeds a few moments; but this Note of which I speak, this Sunburst of celestial music, this instantaneous rapture lasts unchangingly Forever, and FOREVER! It is unaltered, the sound, the music, the man, eternally the same, without an interval to suggest even the idea of monotone! It is an infinite melody, struck on an Eternal harp, enduring forever and aye!
Such is the Narwana of the good! The other, the Nihility of the evil and imperfect. Thus death has three Gates: the Iron one opens on Night—total extinction; the Silver one, on Immortal fields; the golden one on—What Gods may well aspire to!—if we are to believe what lordly and loftiest Seership tells us—and I am one who thus believes.
I, within the year 1873, met people whom I knew were under the ban of the bad Nihility. Elsewhere, in the volume of which this is a chapter, an account is given of a hoary-headed "man," of nearly seventy years, who sought, and expected, to prolong his own miserable and wretched life by absorbing that of a third young girl,—one of sixteen years,—he having already performed the burial-service over two prior victims; that old man is doomed to absolute extinction, unless saved by repentance, physical regeneration, and the growth of affection within him. It was not passion or lust only that urged him to prolong his own existence at the cost of others; to stretch out his wasted years by the awful crime of drinking the young life, and wrecking a child of so few summers; but the conscious and unconscious want of love was what urged him on to the deadly, selfish deed; he felt the need of the great base upon which immortality must be builded, or not at all. Many such as he there are.
But it does not follow that the monadal point, spark, or germ, constituting, underlying, and animating the old lecher, and others of his ilk; the detestable crew in whom lust reigns supreme; the infamous "Hullites" of the year 1873; and the still more infamous followers of the example of the thrice-dyed scoundrels who ravished young children, and were burnt for it,—it does not follow, I repeat, that the germs, or monadal points, basing their existence, will, at their demise, cease to be forever; but they will only cease to be those particularly villainous and vicious personalities; while the germs basing their being may appear and reappear here again and again, clothing themselves with new elements, and, of course, for that reason, running new careers. No one can go to the heavens until he shall have gotten all of good the earth or earths can give him; and not till he has undergone the full ordeal and disciplines incident to material life can he reach that golden supra-immortality whereof modern thinkers, outside the pale of us few, have never even yet dreamed, imagined, or surmised.
Nothing organically imperfect can ever enter and remain in the superlative and ineffable land of pure Souls. The imperfect must go back to the domain of chemics and matter; nor can they, with hope, knock at the doors of the golden temples of Eternity, except they be full, fair, pure, free, and good, even though their discipline extends through a billion of ages; and the greater the gifts or talent, genius or innate power one has, the heavier shall be the price paid for all accorded unto him. It may be well and truly said that there can be no peace in high places,—for storms, hail, and tempests, hurricanes, fierce lightnings and crashing thunders play and break around the mountain's brow; and he who would win the game of triumphant immortality must do so by loving well and much. But to return to the subject: Darwin and his co-thinkers saw clearly that a different genesis of man than the usually assigned one was imperatively demanded in presence of the startling discoveries constantly being made, and they adopted the theory of selection, and, so far as externals went, were right; but instead of immortal souls, originating in, among, from, or by, the Simiadae, it was only the soul-case, the mere physical body, the outer form that was thus developed, thus grew up through the slowing ages, while the inside, the works of the grand watch, the imperial soul itself, originated otherwise and elsewhere. Now by soul is here meant the thinking, conscious, knowing, hating, loving, aspiring principle—that mysterious something about whose origin, nature, perdurability or co-perishability with the body, so much has been said, sung, and written, until philosophers generally have got by the ears, while waging the fiercest of all intellectual battles. I propose herein to settle the controversy, or at least to indicate the clear road to such settlement, being perfectly confident and conscious that herein will be found the only possible method and route to the final adjudication. It is hard for a true thinker to have much patience with those whose highest conception of Soul and Spirit is that of a rarefied gaseous ether evolved from gross substance as light and heat radiate from glowing coals of fire in a wintry grate; because such a conception is wholly untrue, seeing that no possible refinement of solid substance or matter can ever approach the state of even the magnetic Æth of Space, much less that, diviner thing of which we are treating. It is clear that matter does not think; Soul does, therefore Soul is one thing, matter quite another, requiring a bridge to span the gulf between them, and that bridge is some subtle form of magnetism; nor can Soul be evolved from it by any process of rarefaction or refinement; for Soul it was from all past Eternity; soul it is, and such it will remain to all possible eternities to come; while matter, either in its solidified or condensed, or in its far-particled or fluid states, will remain matter until all its life is exhausted, and Deity shall have become senile and decrepit from the weight of Time and lapse of hoary centuries!
We know, can know, but little concerning God, notwithstanding so many people claim to be quite intimate acquaintances, and on familiar terms with Him! yet we have every reason to believe the Ineffable One to be pure Soul; and I, the writer hereof, so believe; and furthermore, that he is as A Sun, emitting countless billions of beams and rays every instant—and that each contains myriads of scintillas, every one of which is an embryon, or soul-germ, capable of development into perfect man or womanhood!
While God is clear Soul, matter is pure body; one is a unit, unparticled itself, yet emitting and irradiating, besides the countless scintillant sparks or monads just alluded to—a glory-sphere, aroma, aura, a portion of his divine Life, which is the breath of life to all these monads, and all else that exists within the radius of the universe. Soul, like God, is homogeneous, unparticled, indivisible, necessarily death-proof, in itself considered, and we conclude therefore Eternal, albeit no one can tell what "eternal" means, for we cannot clearly grasp a thousand years, much less millions of—ages! Matter, on the contrary, is heterogeneous, divisible; its Spirit is change, and that is the quintessence of Death itself.
Erewhile I spoke of the menstruum wherein floated the rain of soul-germs, and I gave it a name. I now give it another, LOVE!—which is the life of All,—the celestial influence of the Eternal One. In beasts, apes, et cætera, this vivific force is diffused. In some human beings it is condensed and crystallized. In some it is not. The first is immortal. The latter not so. Beasts, apes, Low-grade people, have instincts, attachments, magnetic attractions, and affection:—Man,—true men—alone have love! Beasts die. Immortal man lives on; but if man be more beast than human he must share their fate and lot, and as that specific individual dies out, and the divine spark, losing its consciousness, escapes, and once more floats freely i' th' air, until God once more breathes into some man's nostrils, and it again becomes not a quiescent, but a living, active human soul! If he be more man than animal he may challenge Death, defy ruin, laugh at destruction, snap his fingers in the face of the grave, and ride triumphant and victorious o'er the mazy wreck of worlds and countless starry universes!
But, as I have already hinted, there is such a thing as being ultra-human, not only in the line of Narwana, but in quite another direction. If a man reaches that mystic plane, then he comes beneath the sway and rule of supra-human, and ultra Law, and attains a destiny better, greater, higher than is afforded by the ordinary immortality, which gives him so much care and trouble, and for which he so painfully yearns and sighs!
What the destiny, state, condition, better something is, I am not yet ready to inform the world—but may leave it for the Brotherhood of Eulis to impart.
There are limitless regions of unexplored thought toward which that fast-increasing multitude, who think as I do, push; nor do we, as do many of the supernalists,—though not all,—confine ourselves to the mere outside, i. e. soul-facts of the universe. We believe a few things as do they, but not all that they do, for which they rate us soundly. They rejoice in the physical demonstration of the reappearing dead, but are not quite sure always that the manifesting powers are really their departed ones, for they have not, as have we, the means of establishing identities through an unmistakable agency alluded to elsewhere. Vast numbers of, but not all, the Spiritualists concern themselves mainly about raps, tips, quarreling, scandal, mutual vituperation, backbiting, libel, misrepresentation, "Social Freedom"—things of earth; while we occupy ourselves in actual research and inquiry into what happens to man after his flight over the river of death to that mystic state alluded to; to Narwana and Nihility; or to the upper spaces of the blue Empyrean. At and across the borders of death-land, we strike hands with all the Spiritualists, and there part company with some of them, because we seek to know more; they are content to drink fourth-class mental vinegar, acrid as gall, flavored hell-aciduously, and call it wine; while we quaff the waters of life on the very brink of the mighty River.
Just so far do we go with the cold, hard, dry, materialistic, uncheering Darwinism—a system which lands us in the grave, there to stay until we turn to grass, trees, beans, pineapples, or bananas—according to the locality where death overtakes and trips us up; but at that point we separate from Darwin completely,—because the system ignores Soul altogether. We are not wholly content with the modern spiritual doctrines, seeing that they fail to fill the great bill—of human want; and because it is all head and no heart; has no warmth, fervor, ardor, religion, about it; not because it fails to make men better, but solely because it affirms and accepts the development theory as opposed to the genesic account of man's origin, yet fails to tell us how, when, where, or by what agencies immortality became a fixed fact. It accepts the dogma, but gives no valid or adequate reason why. It originates no thought, but boldly borrows and appropriates the mental stock of others. In all lands it depends upon, and bases its faith on media, whom it teaches man to accept as oracles, yet no two of whom tell the same story, or see facts alike. George, Peter, and Thomas, communicating through Medium A, in latititude 16, have no recollection of communicating yesterday with the same party through medium B, in latitude 17-30. We, in our investigations of the recondite, occult and mystical;—ay, even in matters of mere finance, such as specution, buying, selling, contracting, or even in purchasing tickets in a lottery, prefer the better agency of a surer power—because it never lies, falters, prevaricates, and it ever tells the same story of the same thing, to all alike, no matter what the latitude or longitude may be!
But stop we here? Oh, no! for by the same instrumentality we enter the Slumber of Sialam, and with keen glance and quickened consciousness, scan, and leisurely survey realties denied to "Media," and with sure and rapid gaze trace the awful and majestic rush of hurricanes of glowing galaxies,—the wintry storm of falling worlds!—lamps of God flickering in the Vault! starry eyes glimpsing down into the Deeps!—pregnant earths waiting patiently to be delivered of the Humanity gestating in their bosoms.
Seers, ancient, mediæval, and modern, alike, inform the world that the supernal country is peopled by all grades of persons from the low and brutal barbarian to the high and polished civilizee; which, if true, proves that intellectual power and capacity is not a passport thither, nor a perquisite of immortality; for there are myriads—not merely of people—but of armies of savage races, tribes, and nations dwelling in that starry land.
Moral goodness is not the touchstone or key either; for no amount of that alone will warrant success, or prove the "Open Sesame" to the farther gate of the grave, nor be potent enough to ensure a man's safe arrival at the golden portals of disbodied glory; for of all mendacious people; of all pullers of the longbow; all perfected liars—on the authority of those who claim to know about it—the disembodied ones are champions, able to give long odds, and then heavily discount all embodied falsifiers from Judas Iscariot, and Peter, who denied his Lord, down to the level of—who you like. It is not race, nation, or complexion, that determines a title to supra-mortal existence; for there are people of all kinds there, even "Niggers" and Sangs Melees,—lots of them too, vivat!—and the dark-hued Southern and Oriental races and peoples outnumber the Northern and fair ones in the ratio of about twelve thousand to one hundred; besides excelling them in the same degree in mind, love, knowledge, force of character, and power of soul. The white Yankees, as a general rule, occupy, according to one A. J. Davis, a large tract known as "Diakka-land;" while but few dark-hued beings can be found there, because they constitute the population of the heavens proper,—a long remove from the stormy realm and imperfect people alluded to and named above, albeit myriads of the Lighthued races help to people these choice abodes of spirit-land.
It is not age or sex either; because, if reliance can be placed upon the statements of investigators—thousands of infants and people of both genders are continually demonstrating that they still live—and lie! Nor is it talent, genius, or social status. What, then, really constitutes the passport to the ethereal worlds beyond and above the earth we live on? Reply: All who return evince, express, and counsel love! and so confirm the faith of us, who hold that, and that alone, to be the great sine qua non, the grand desideratum, without which it were as impossible to survive death as it would be to shoot out the centre of Donati's comet with a pocket-pistol! This establishes one pregnant fact, viz., All who are deathless have love at the core! It, alone, is the life-boat in which man sails o'er sounding seas to triumphant existence beyond the grave! Whence it assuredly, ay! and remorselessly follows that the*y who waste love, waste soul [see further on], and will assuredly dwindle back to his or her pre-existent monad life or state, there and thus to abide the chances; patiently waiting for an opportunity to begin a better and a fairer race on earth toward the glittering, golden, sunny, shining shores beyond!
How large the number of those who have written and preached about the immortality of the Soul; and yet not one of the whole vast host, with a single exception, has ever attempted to give a scientific reason why man is endowed with the power of death-survival, for which reason I attack the problem here, and for the first time in the world's literary history give the reasons why, enlarging somewhat upon the theory advanced years since, from the same source, in the book now called "Soul: The Soul World, and Homes of the Departed," then known as "Dealings with the Dead;" and I now proceed to state the argument; and start with the propositions, that:—No Apes are Immortal: Man is an improved Ape; therefore man is not immortal—by reason of descent. But some men are immortal; they ascended from Ape-ancestors; therefore apes possessed the elements which, in man, conspired to produce immortality. No apes being immortal, or endowed with death-proofness, it follows that his Simian ancestry could not have endowed him with such qualities. Then where did he get them, or it? and How? If he obtained it subsequent to birth, may he not lose it? If his origin is purely mortal, whence his immortality? A stick must have two ends. If man begins as a soul, what hinders him from coming to a full stop; a final cessation; for commencement not only implies, but inexorably means, End also? If he is death-proof in part, or totally, what is the rule and law underlying the tremendous fact? Is it gainable? losable? If either, why?
Now all of these are fair questions, worthy of fair reply. In the first place, there are what, in one sense, I may call apparitional or phantom men; individuals who are only so in seeming; who have little mind, less "Soul," and none of the higher, nobler traits, which we associate with the terms Man and Manhood. Such may have been born so; or, as in civilized life, may have worn away the jewel, and deprived themselves of the very first essential to the attainment of supra-mundane existence; people who talk about, but will never even glimpse the "Summer Lands," or scent their blossoms afar off, because they have wasted their substance, and steadily declined from the first, exhausted soul, spirit, body, therefore Love, consequently are not true Men, but mere phantoms, who at best become but the sentient vehicles for the exploitations of disembodied wags.
Some, so far as immortality is concerned, die in bringing forth some work, or mechanism;—laboring without recuperation, until the ability to build up soul is forever and forever lost; they having injured the heart-valves, kidneys, supra-renal capsules, prostate gland, and seminal vessels, rendering it wholly impossible for them either to propagate their kind, equal their former mental efforts, or elaborate the electro-ethereal body without which immortality can not be. There are very many in our midst who never received the proper congenital impulsion; acquired it since birth; or who have lost or wasted the power by too faithful worship at the altars of Mammon, Venus, or Onan. But it is gratifying to know that such even may escape nihility, and gain enduring life beyond the grave; aye, and by stern resolve and persistent endeavor, aspire to the sublime destiny reserved for noble souls,—that magnificent future awaiting the choice spirits of mankind—the Peers, princes, and Powers of the starry skies!
Soul, per se, I hold to be Eviternal, Sempiternal, and Eternal, just as is that Supreme Deity whom we believe to be, not because His existence is demonstrable, but because we cannot help it, for God is Soul, so is man—existere ergo sum! I It has been from Now to all past Eternity; is, and probably will be, from Now to all Eternities to come, and its one orbit is the grand Eternal year. Of course there will come a moment in the far-off æons when matter will have yielded up all its electric, magnetic, and ethereal life and essences, which it will have contributed to form the electric bodies of the Imperial hosts of the dead; when the last monad will have been incarnated, and no more new souls will be launched into being, and the mighty armies will migrate into space; the refuse of Matter prepare to again renew its forms in loftier moulds; the second act of the transcendent drama be ended, the third begun, and the true and real purpose and meaning of the vast universe begin to be realized and understood—as not Now!
Soul is an Empire, or rather a Republic of States with a central, controlling, governing power. So is Deity—a sun radiant through all space, yet central at Home, just as man lives all over his body, but mostly in a tiny point at the centre of his brain. Deity is conscious at all points; but supremely and infinitely so at the centre of that vast Brain whereof stellar galaxies are but tiny convolutions. and astral nebulæ mere nervous fibrilia! Soul is a radiant, invisible, crystallized globe of white Fire and Light located topographically, so to speak, in the middle of the head; and metaphysically, at the centre both of the conscious being, and that other existence of which we see the effects, but are not, and never will be, conscious.
All things whatever emit a sphere, aura, air, aroma, or atmosphere peculiar to themselves. So does man; so does Deity, and, as said before, His nervous fluid, or sphere, is Love, which, like all other fluids, is governed by Wave-motion, not linear. Proof: We are suffused with love, not merely penetrated by it. When a love is sharp and cutting, beware of it, for it is electrical passion, not magnetic affection. Love is the effluence of God's body; upon it souls feed, for Love is their life, and they derive sustenance from it in two ways: First, from the Æth-Love pervading the Empyreal Vault; that universe-life which flows out from God. Second, upon that fabricated by, and supplied it through, the nervous and pelvic or genital apparatus of the human frame; for that entire organic system of each gender is but a mighty, powerful, intricate, yet wonderful chemical laboratory and electro-magnetic battery, whose function and office it is—giving us pleasure, comfort, peace, and joy, while performing the strangely esoteric task—to elaborate matter's highest, purest, subtlest essences from food and drink, and absorbed imponderables, and send it to the central brain,—Material whereof Soul fashions the deathless lining of the fleshly frame, the electric body within and beneath that of clay, and which it will wear in the spaces where gross substances are unknown. Now it is easy to see that this great end and aim of Nature may be, and is, defeated in a variety of ways, some of which I will point out, and thus this monograph may be the means of saving many a being from ruin, utter, total, eternal, and complete. And first: It is clear that all diseases, injuries, disorders, or misuse of the sexual apparatus have a direct injurious effect upon the soul, and may, and do, often bar it from building the silver-hued body intended for eternity, and may thus doom one to Nonenity—the equivalent of complete Annihilation! Why? Because no mechanic, not even Nature, can perform perfect work without good materials and tools; and if the Prostate and Cowper's glands; the uterus, ovaria, and supra-renal capsules; the testes and vaginal fibrilia—which are the implements with which the spirit-building is accomplished—are not sound, active, healthful, normal, non-inflamed, the soul can no more erect its desired electrical body than a good brick-house can be built without mortar; for such a house would tumble in the first gale, while the touch of death would crumble the half-formed spirit into atoms finer than sparks of Light! Thus it is literally true that every excess and debauch adds a nail to a man's coffin; but, alas! in more senses than one! It is from the source named, alone, that the soul obtains the materials and elements whereof to construct an ethereal body—from the finest essences of matter held in absolute coalescence by the highest law, and, therefore, proof against death, division, decay, or dissolution—within its fleshly one, by processes analagous to that of gestation—and completes it as the vehicle whose true use only begins subsequent to the fact of physical death! The problem is Solved!
In my day I have encountered thousands of Lust-fired, passion-driven human beings of both sexes who I am sure were quite as pitiable as blamable; and I made such cases an especial study for many long years, in very many lands, the result of which is that I know, with more than mathematical certainty, that it is utterly impossible that such beings, as those described a few lines above, or the old man whose criminal longing for the lives and vitality of young girls I have elsewhere alluded to, can by any possibility have been rightly formed en utero. There was something lacking: too much mortar; too few bricks; nor did they receive the proper immortalizing impulse before birth, or have acquired it since. Such beings are semi-conscious of their lack of elemental soul; that it was and is attainable; that Love was a grand Fact, but not theirs; that it alone could satisfy their longings, and confer the boon they craved; that young girls were generally over-full of soul, life, animation, vivacity, and were easily drainable; that magnetism is a soul-conveying vehicle or fluid; and they rushed headlong to the conclusion that possession of such would, in some mysterious way, cause the young life to pass to the old frame, renew it, and confer upon them what themselves had not—the power of death-survival. Such beings—for Men they are not—have a secret craving for, and sense of lacking of, the magnetic unction and inner power which alone is the assurance of ethereal life beyond the grave; and this half-conscious sense constitutes the impelling spur and motive to the unhallowed wish, and the diabolic and detestable crimes it leads to. Furthermore: My investigations with all the powers at my command, and facilities accordant, led me to the irresistible conclusion, and deeply solemn religious belief, nay, absolute knowledge, that no confirmed Onanist, or correspondent transgressor of the other gender, is immortal, for reasons set forth elsewhere herein, and which cannot be repeated in this chapter, except to observe that the mechanical, vegetable, tree-like life of the insane from that abominable and most accursed cause, absolutely demonstrates the lapse and loss of Soul itself, leaving nothing but a mere humanesque automaton behind to show the world what once was, but is no longer, an immortal human being! Familiarity with, and investigation of Spiritualism, proves beyond all cavil, that while thousands of all other sorts of debauchees claim to reappear and manifest, yet that not one single Onanist has ever been known to demonstrate. They are Dead!—just as all such transgressors must and will inevitably die—soul and body, unless they turn right about and begin the salvatory life as recommended in this and other works by the same author.
Attraction, gravitation, selection, are regnant and unbending laws alike of Soul, Spirit, Mind, and Matter. Oil and water wont mix, neither can the floating germs or monads be attracted to, or be inhaled by, any non-human being now, because that possibility exists no more. Apply the law just stated, and you will see the reason why; for they can only be breathed in by, and come to active, conscious life within, brains of the very highest bimana.
The Simian progenitors of man did not endow him with immortality; but, by natural, which is sexual, selection (of the finest and fairest by the strongest, bravest, and most intelligent), at length produced beings a great deal finer, superior, higher, better, than themselves. Their parental affection enabled gestation to advance a step toward perfectness, and the consequence was superior bodies, and affections, in their young. "Cowper's" and the prostate glands were developed, enlarged, perfected; as were the testes, ovaria, uterus, and nervous systems of the females; and. for the first time, an organization existed of such potent, magnetic, and chemical power, that these organs in the course of generations—still by selection—were enabled to evolve and elaborate that which coalesced with the animal life-principle, elevating that specimen of the prehuman, until it was enabled to inhale monads of the strictly human type. Thus it is true that God breathed into his—her, its, their, nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living, conscious soul, which, being competent to evolve the finer essences, at once immortalized the being!
Now take notice. Magnetism is the power of man. It is of two kinds, physical and mental, or of the body and the soul. One may abound in the first, and have nothing whatever of the other, else would we expect to see men of strong build, firm health, any amount of physical, magnetic plethora, capable of being fathers to the very finest specimens of the human race; but such is notoriously not the fact, but quite contrary; for they only who abound in mental, emotional, soul-magnetism, are capable of generating a superior breed of human beings. Again, Magnetic strength is one thing, magnetic unction quite another. The first is material; the second psychal; the results of one are superior physical specimens of the species: those of the second, mental and moral giants; and in the scale of soul-weight puny people, with large spiritual souls and magnetic unction, will produce children a myriad times superior to the other. Bear this in mind, for on it hangs the solution of the problem before me; for if the breather have not love-unction sufficient to plant the germ of immortality, bv bequeathing strong love-power to his offspring, how can that child have a starting-point wherefrom to go toward the land of spirits? or force to elaborate the electrical body essential thereto? And if he does not then endow his babe, at death its soul will dwindle back to the monadal state; its present identity and individuality be lost, and the monad will escape into the spacial Æth, to be again breathed in under more favorable auspices, until at last success crowns its efforts in the process of immortalization. This often, very often, occurs; and these reincarnate souls frequently partially awaken to a vague, dim sense of their then pre-existent states; and this explains in a few lines what has been an insoluble problem all along the ages, from Budha to our own day; and it is the only satisfactory solution ever given to the world.
Were Darwinism all true, and man merely a developed Simian, there could be no such thing as destiny or Fate. But there is, and men are cast to a certain lot and career as positively as that they are born, and are compelled by a resistless power to move in given lines and grooves, hopelessly, and are as certainly and solidly bound to the wheel of a peculiar fortune, for good or ill, as was the fabled Ixion. Some are doomed to perpetual strife, struggle, poverty, hopeless effort, from the nipple to the grave; they fail in all things, and disappointment, disaster, ruin, and defeat stalk by their sides, turn whithersoever they will or may. Love, wealth, fame, comfort, rest, joy, happiness, success, all elude them, and if apparent triumphs come, defeat invariably ends the game. Other people do or say with impunity things that are sure to bring down storms of obloquy and pain upon their devoted heads, and sorrow and agony is their lot forever on the earth. On the other hand there are those exactly opposite; whose every step is a triumph, and whose touch transforms everything to gold, money, fame; success flows in upon them like a rolling tide, and they revel in delight without a shadow, till life on earth closes on them in a blaze of wealth and glory; yet these people are not half as able, good, noble, true, as the other class. Now all the Darwinism on earth cannot account for this, yet the solution is easy. The successful class are those who are embodied for the first time, and all their ranks can not furnish a first-class man. The others, the failers, have undergone prior existences on earth, and are either paying penalties for former transgressions, or are undergoing ripening disciplines preparatory to special sunbursts of usefulness, joy, and glory on the further shores of time. Weigh a soul of each class in the scale of actual worth, and the Failers touch ground while the victors on earth kick the beam; and one of the former is of more real value to earth, life, God, and the universe, than scores of the others. It is as the Atlantic to a brooklet.
Children begotten without love are not necessarily immortal; but a proper culture of their better parts may easily make them so. They who do generate offspring by loveless marriage commit a crime against nature and the Deity; for all human beings have a right to receive the immortalizing impulse at the moment of their generation; and also to that culture and training thereafter which alone can make assurance doubly sure in respect to this, the most important of all human matters.
They who become parents under Love's sweet influence at once give the required impulsion to the new being; enable it to survive death's ordeal, and help God Himself to empeople the starry homes of the dead!
It follows that the low, harsh, crash, selfish, hard, crusty, dry, ungenerous people are not entitled to, nor without Very strenuous effort at self-redemption from the lot of beasts, can attain, immortality, much less the other and vaster glory reserved for greater souls, mainly those who, themselves abounding in love, yet languish unto death without return.
Of course a child receiving Love's impulsion will ride triumphant over death's dark tides, even though its bodily eyes never open upon or glimpse this world of ours!
Many and many a full-grown man or woman, stepping into the grave at ripeness of years, only step out of it again as dwindled monads; and when reborn they too have vague, shadowy reminiscences of the, to them, foretime. They who are loveless are no more immortal than the ox which falls beneath the butcher's axe; while, per contra, myriads of savages, Indians, blacks, and the uncouth of all races, ages, and climes, attain to immortality, because of the love and love-generating power within them; for that alone lies at the foundation, and is the sole process of its attainment or Immortalization.
In conclusion: Let all who wish for immortality learn to Love,
and cherish the better feelings of the human heart; take good care
to preserve, regain, and cultivate affectional, amative, and psychical Health! Where the nature is injured take immediate means to
restore it; thus the point will be gained, and goodness reign. Let
no one despair; for while there's life there's hope! and, however
dark the outlook, don't for a moment forget that God still lives!
that the darkest hour is just before day; that the densest clouds have
silvery linings, and that, though love-lorn and wretched, friendless,
isolate, and alone, still
We may be happy yet!