Eulis! the History of Love/Part 1: Affectional Alchemy
AFFECTIONAL ALCHEMY.
PART I.
Reader, mine, I am about to treat herein the grandest subject that ever engaged or challenged human thought. In doing so it is likely that I may repeat some things elsewhere, by myself or others, said before; but even if so, I have struck upon many things now given to the race for the first time.
A vast amount of "physiological" chaff is current in the world, originating in the pulpy brains of certain people with "M.D" after their names; folks who eke out a good living by putting medicines, of which they know little, into bodies whereof they know less.
A still larger amount of "chaff" labelled "philosophy" is afloat, generated for the most part in the angular heads of people, whom a chronic prostatitis or ovarian fever has so deranged that they really imagine themselves philosophers,—being only shams,—who propose to revolutionize the world, especially the domain of Marriage-land, by inculcating pudacious sophistries, better calculated to kill than to cure the victims, on either side. One thing is certain: Light is needed; and this work (originally intended to be called by a different title, but which intent was abandoned, owing to the vastly larger scope of the completed and rewritten volume) is meant to afford exactly what is required; and
I. What a tremendous deal of suffering, horror, crime, wretchedness and despair there is in this beautiful, but badly misused world of ours!—most of which might be prevented in the first instance, or remedied in the second, were there less consummate and confounded ignorance afloat up and down the earth's strong tides of human life, with its strangely, wildly surging ebbs and flows, heats and snows, in reference to matters pertaining to, and concerning the, relations, wise and otherwise, subsisting between the separate genders of the human race; especially that portion of it located in the so-called "civilized" lands, and particularly in the cis-Atlantic portion of the Lord's exceedingly immoral vineyard.
Now, whoever supposes that the ignorance alluded to is confined solely to the masses,—sometimes spellable as "them asses," according to Carlyle,—or that the sum total of non-knowledge must be looked for among the unread, unlettered and unwashed crowds that throng the great highways of the world, and whose struggles for life, and clamors for bread, occupy most of their time and attention,—will find him or herself most wofully mistake; for a far less dense and conglobate ignorance upon matters of vital import to every human being exists among the people—the rude crowd who jostle each other everywhere, and which is the plastic material that the brainful few mould into voters, hero-worshippers, or send to fight their battles against each other, armed with ploughs or rifles, pitchforks or bayonets, cannons or spades—than is to be found in circles making very lofty pretensions, not only to knowledge, but to morality also, from its geologic base to its astronomic summit.
For gross and culpable non-knowledge, especially upon all the vital points that cluster round the one word "sex," you must look, not amidst the untaught hosts, the democratic underlayer of society, but right squarely among the so-called "learned," professional, much-boasted, highly-cultured upper-strata, especially in those centres of population whence newspapers by myriads are scattered broadcast over all the lands. Were not this a painful fact, such classes of "reformers" as now march over the world were an utter impossibility.
They are an unhealthy set, the fungi of a false civilization, regnant for a time, but certain to disappear with the advent of common sense among the people as a general thing.
Sex is a thing of soul; most people think it but a mere matter of earthly form and physical structure. True, there are some unsexed souls; some no sex at all, and others still claiming one gender, and manifesting its exact opposite. But its laws, offices, utilities, and its deeper and diviner meanings are sealed books to all but about two in a million; yet they ought to have the attentive study of every rational human being, every aspirant to immortality beyond the grave. In some sense this matter has been, and is, the subject of thought, but only in its outer phases, or its grosser aspects; seldom in its higher ones, and never, until now, in any of its loftier and mystical bearings. Books by ship-loads on one or two, and always either its physiological or sentimental sides of the subject, have been put forth by ambitious M.D's, or notoriety-seeking empirics; books which mainly satisfied a prurient taste or morbid curiosity, gave but little light, and generally left their readers practically as ignorant as before.
Other books, in other millions, vile, atrocious, cancerous, abounding with death in every line, fraught with ruin on every page, have been, still are being, scattered everywhere across the nations, till the flower of the world's youth has been blighted, and the morality of earth sapped dry. Oh, that literature, foul, disgusting beyond belief! terrible as the cobra's fang, keener than the dagger's edge, monstrous as a drunkard's dream, more devastating than the spotted plague! until between the two millstones—quackery, pseudo-professional literature on the one hand, and the execrable, libidinous abominations on the other—one-half of the manhood and womanhood of our nation has been ground into the very dust. No punishment can be too severe for the disseminators of the latter; no contempt too great for the authors of the former.
Not one of the very many respectable people, including fifty French, a score of English, about as many Americans, and a few German authors, who have stained reams of good white paper, and spilled gallons of ink in writing anent the sublime subject of sex, have taken the trouble to go one inch below the surface; but have been content to copy each other, and repeat the same old worn-out story,—else concealed a few good ideas in barrels of words. They have taken man and woman, shown us their anatomy; explained something of physical gender; said something about function and periods, and there left us, because they knew nothing further themselves.
For example, there are ten thousand treatises extant concerning what the doctors call the sin of one Onan, meaning, thereby, a certain nameless solitary vice. But the man alluded to in the Bible never was guilty of that sin at all. Albeit his crime was equally bad, equally disastrous and hateful. In these days it is politely called "conjugal fraud," and in plain terms consists of the nuptive union to the orgasmal climax, which was allowed to occur only in a manner never intended by the Infinite God. "He wasted his seed upon the ground, that he might not beget children to inherit his brother's name." (See Bible.) Millions do the accursed thing to-day that they may be childless, as indeed they deserve to be; for he who does that heinous wrong commits a quadruple crime, against his wife, himself, nature and God; to say nothing about the right of all souls to be incarnated by the act of man.
Now the doctors truly say that the sin solitary, and the fraud conjugal are both bad; but fail to give us even half the reasons why.
Here let me make a point for the doctors, and all others besides. In the normal, proper nuptive union, a term I invent expressive of the most sacred and intimate fact of marriage, there is a certain amount of the male vital life in fluid form (semen) voided; exactly the same by actual weight or volume may be wasted in a lascivious dream,—a spontaneous ejection of superfluous vital force in the same form; 3d, the same may be lost by the abominable conjugal fraud; or by the heinous sin against one's self—solitary vice. But note the tremendous difference in the results that follow in each of the four cases. 1st. In the reciprocal and normal one, only joy results, positive and pronounced; and never is followed by any particularly sombre feelings; happiness ensues, and the man's soul is at perfect peace with his physical form.
In the second case, resulting from spermatic plethora, a relief follows, but leaves a weakness after it, requiring phosphoric food to recuperate from. There's a little shame-facedness too, but not much. In the third case the whole being is shocked, and the man feels himself to be contemptible and mean; and so he is. In the fourth case, a bitter, poignant remorse haunts the self-sinner day and night, for sometimes weeks together; and the results of his dreadful sin stands by him like an accusing goblin from the deeps. Now why? Remember, we suppose, what is true, that weights and measures are the same in all four instances; that the exact amount of fluid life is lost: yet one launches its victim into steep-down gulfs of remorseful, mental torture, and the others do not. The physiologists have not answered that question. I will. In case first, the normal one, waste is occasioned by the magnetic action of the electric lymph, the absorption of which by the masculine compensates the vital loss on one side; and the absorption by the feminine parietes of the exudation from Cowper's gland compensates on the other side; and here I give the doctors a new discovery—to them, not me—which is, that just within the vulva are two little glands, called glands of Duvernay, from their French discoverer. That much the doctors were aware of. But they did not know that those glands are the seat of all vaginal and uterine life; nor that trouble seals them up; Love only keeps them open. When sealed there is no exudation of magnetic lymph, which must be present, else marital rites mean death to her sooner or later. That's what ails half the wives of Christendom. Now another new thing for the doctors. Just forward of the prostate gland is what is known as Cowper's gland; but they know not its use. I have just explained it. It is to collect, store up, and discharge the magnetic fluid of the body in liquid form. It precedes both the semen and prostatic lymph: and upon contact with the lochia—Duvernay—they fuse: the result of which is the fulfilment of God's purpose in bi-sexing man. I hope this thought will be carefully studied and understood. Now in the case of the solitaire there is but one force at work. The result is from imaginative and mechanical forces: not from electric, magnetic or spiritual ones; hence he draws upon his very soul itself; violates and disobeys the fundamental law of love, and that is why he pays the dreadful penalty. Love resides in the soul; the basic law of that soul he deliberately prostitutes, wherefore his soul, as well as his body, must and does suffer.
an episode—a singular experience.
II. One day as I went walking up and down the town in soliloquent mood, I met a man, whose woe-begone countenance betokened great griefs tugging at his heart-strings; and that soul-pangs were racking the very foundations of his being. I met the man. No, I did not say that—it was my alter ego encountering myself!—and I learned his sad story, pondering deeply upon which, I pursued my way to where sleep and I were wont to woo each other; and there, throwing myself upon a lounge, drank some fresh, sweet milk, brought me by a chunky little germanesque neighbor of mine, of say nine years, pretty, as all children are, and loquacious and talkative as all children should be.
As I lay there I thought of the man,—a lone, and lonely man; for she whom he loved and trusted, many years younger than himself, was afar off, among strange people, where amid the rounds of gayety, in fashion's tide, she had no time to think of him,—the delving toiler; and far too many follow the example of that thoughtless girl.
She was wondrously fair, and heedless as beautiful; with fashions to air and conquests to achieve; poor, sweet little lady! And as I pictured her beauty and bloom, I could but justify her vanity, and on that basis condone her apparent heartless coldness in never deigning to write to him, who was suffering daily deaths by reason of her cold silence—and—contempt.
And so I lay upon the lounge and quaffed the sweet, delicious milk, and I drought about the Woman and the Man; and, as I did so, I fell into a sort of magnetic trance and clairvoyance—a habit familiar, seeing that the power to do so was born with me; and by its means I have a thousand times been able to see afar off, and to glimpse things denied to mortal vision. On this occasion I fell into it from having incidentally cast my eyes upon a third class triune, or magic mirror, such as for years I have used expressly to induce the state of psycho-vision. It hung over the table against the wall, where I had placed it after polishing it, preparatory to sending it to a lady in Brooklyn, N. Y., to whom impecuniosity had compelled me to sell it.
It was a fine one, though not the best or most costly; yet was capable of mighty things when in the humor; for, be it known, they, like watches, razors, locomotives and women, are very set in their ways, and will not work unless well treated, and coaxed besides; then they operate well enough, as did the one alluded to. Its power ranged to the aerial spaces above, and to the vaulted deeps below; and on its surface the dead could, and often did, cast cognizable pictures of themselves and surroundings then and then again. On the morning alluded to, as I breathed upon it, a thick, heavy, black, portentous cloud obscured its face, followed by a silvery sheen, indicative of coming trouble, hatred, folly, error, succeeded by happiness and contentment; but I actually forgot all that, nor recalled it till after the approaching drama was ended,—a drama strange and weird, fraught with pain unutterable, inexpressible, almost unendurable; yet whose results or fruitage was as ripe pomegranates are to the thirsty pilgrims, or the cool, bubbling waters to the parched lips of the Arab on the burning sands of Sahara. Little did I dream that the strange experience was full of true light to others than myself; yet such it is, and was; and with grateful heart I thank the Most Compassionate God, the Ineffable Lord, that I was found worthy to become the vessel for the conveyance of so grand a lesson to my brethren of the wide and wasteful world.
In an instant, as my eyes fell on it—that wondrous glyphæ—the outer world sight receded, and the soul-sight came in play. Child, table, chairs, lounge—all were gone and unheeded, and on the face of that marvellous glass I beheld a scene which at the time, and for six weeks afterwards, I religiously believed was at that very instant being enacted far away, in, to the man in Toledo, dreadful reality. The sequel—far along in this book—will show whether it was the shadow of an enacted fact, or a figment of fancy woven of mist, and conjured up out of the cellars of suspicion. I loved the man, at all events; hence what I saw froze my blood with horror, and made my nerves fairly tingle with excitement and pain. I saw the lady, whom the man loved so well, and for whom he yearned, and mourned, and wept bitter tears, revealed before the eyes of my soul. She was just emerging from a dormitory, evidently, judging by appearances, both a dishonest and dishonored wife and woman. She was gaily chatting with her paramour, a gallant young fellow, who stood near her, and on whom she gazed with unutterable tenderness, volupty and love. I shuddered with mortal anguish; for I loved my friend, and that woman bore his name. Until that hour I and he had believed her to be pure as an angel from heaven; and now did I, through sympathy for him, suffer,—ay, the agonies of the nether hell. Presently you will see whether the vision was a lesson or a fact; and whether jealousy is, and is not, sometimes based on solid ground, sometimes empty air.
On the day I met the man; he had told me that she had asked him very singular questions: "Is it possible for a husband to discover if his wife goes astray during an absence, without the ordinary evidence that establishes such facts? Can he find it out without seeing or hearing of it?" I don't know what answer was given; but I do know that the words sunk deep, like hot iron, into his soul; and he pondered on them till he grew morbid, and every day, in his loneliness, he imagined all sorts of things, which now bodied themselves in palpable form before my soul's gaze.
Subsequently she had written to say that her yearnings were great, and she was dying from the mere fact of prolonged absence; yet within a week wrote that she was supremely happy, and longed for nothing. This was ground for suspecting her to be a truant wife, and my friend a deceived husband; and all the more in that she was thrown in contact with some very popular agitators of the marriage and fidelity questions,—on what I regarded as the wrong side.
As I gazed on the scene upon the mystic mirror's face, I saw the lady and her lover as before, and beheld his burning kisses fall thick and fast upon her rich, ripe, and alluring lips; saw her languish in voluptuous death in his strong arms, and watched her return his fiery salutation. I heard his love expressions, and her warm replies; but the most cruel thing of all was their combined laugh and "joke" they were playing on my friend, by making his slender purse bear the cost of their guiltful amours. He loved that woman as mothers love the babes God sends through wailing agony to their longing hearts.
I leaped from the couch; rushed to my friend's place; told him the tragic tale; fired his soul with vengeance dire; and, putting a loaded revolver in his pocket, bade him swiftly traverse the 1,100 miles intervening betwixt him and his deep revenge. This done, I went to a grocery hard by, to drink beer to drown out the agony felt for the man,—the detestation of the woman. "Man proposes," but God upsets his calculations; or Destiny does. So now, on my way to Grambrins Halle, I encountered my little friend, the German child, at play. She strangely interested me; and I left the Halle with but one glass, where I had intended to drink at least a dozen. The child saved me! Returning, I caught her up, seated her jauntily on my head, and marched back to the lonely house on the hill, where I threw myself on the lounge, kissed this little child goodby, and, as she ran off trippingly home, at her little brother's call, who was just then having dreadful trouble with his rabbits, I caught sight of a scintillant flash of white light issuant from her head, like the radiant gleam of a peerless diamond, when all the lamps are brightly burning; and a glowing, streaming iridescence flowed from her lips. I had drawn her to me, and pressed her rosy, childish face to mine, inhaling the balmy aroma of her pure, fresh, joyous soul; and a portion of the roseate fire of her sweet lips had clung to mine. I saw it, like a thin cloud of opalescence, waving gently to and fro, as I moved my head, or breathed. I began to study the meaning of a kiss.
There are but few among the many who know the meaning of a kiss:—or that the soul, from its seat in the brain, is in telegraphic unity with the lips.—affectional, friendly, filial, parental, general, in the upper one; sensuous, magnetic, passional, in the lower; nor that, when loving lips meet lips that love, there is a magnetic discharge of soul-flame, and each party gives and receives large measures of magnetic life and fluid love at the instant of impact or contact, which measures are greater or less according to the love-fulness or emptiness of each respectively. While pondering on this, and marvelling at the beautiful irradiation alluded to above, I chanced to recur in thought to the mirror scene, and to the woman and the man, the weirdly strange phantorama already described; again that strange numbness of the outer being came over me, and in another instant I lay there, rapt, entranced, transfigured, and for the time being was as are the newly dead. Clearly, distinctly, did my soul's vision penetrate the spaces and localize itself in that far-off room, where still stood the recalcitrant wife and her new-found lover, and the woman stood on this side, the man upon that, hands on shoulders, and mutual kisses, accompanied with glowing red passion-fires from lip to lip; and as I thought of my friend, her husband, I exclaimed, "Guilty! by the Lord of Hosts!" But as I said so and gazed, a great change came over my feelings and my soul. I put myself in my friend's, her husband's place, by means of the three principles, Posism, Volantia and Decretism, hereinafter alluded to, and then, far more clearly comprehending the situation, I would not, as before, have slain her, spattered his heart's blood upon the walls and floor, or have sent a leaden bullet crashing through his brains, for the whole world, or millions more just like it; for whereas before I had observed effects, I now beheld their producing, hidden causes. A great cloud rolled away from before my gaze into the vague, dim Æth, and my soul, representing my friend, the man said unto my soul, She did not love you; if she had, this scene could never have occurred. It is but one of millions, this very day, transpiring in thousands of places the wide world over, and is the legitimate result of the wrong relations subsisting between the mated, or rather, mismated marriagees of the earth! Love only can keep souls, and the bodies they wear, true and faithful! Where it does not mutually exist there can be, and is, no guaranty of fidelity. Wherefore, it is incumbent on you to face the facts; call to your aid the rare philosophy of common sense; struggle manfully against this dreadful, appalling, yet perfectly natural catastrophe; accept the situation; hush the throbbings of your tortured heart; ask God for strength to bear the heavy burden, and be wise.
Still representing my friend, my soul said on: Perchance what you see is, after all, but a fevered dream, begotten of your depressed nervous state, morbidity of fancy and loneliness, combined with the suspicions kindled by the strange questions asked upon the eve of her departure many days ago, and greatly strengthened by unwisely worded letters sent back by her; and made still stronger by her six weeks' utter silence—in itself good cause for suspicion, for every husband has a right to know his wife's whereabouts, her surroundings and the company she keep; and if she does not keep him thus informed, he has fair and just grounds to infer that her actions are such as ought to be hidden from his gaze, and also from that of humanity at large.
If innocent, she is still guilty of a great folly: while your trouble and pain may really have no more solid foundation than vague and empty air. Let justice rule on both sides; for she was unwise, while your illness tortures things out of shape, till mere phasmas assume forms as solid in appearance as the very truth itself; and it mav be that your anxiety and sympathy may have conjured up a lie; and this apparently recusant woman really be as unsoiled as the down upon the ring-dove's breast, or the spotless plume of an angel's wing! Oh, how my heart, for my friend, clung to that hope! My soul to my soul went on: They twain, the far-off couple, are young; are adapted to each other: you (my friend, of course) are too old for her. You had no right to subject her to the terrible temptation of being away from your side for months together, in the midst of gay people, where everything appealed to and impressed her young heart and fancy, and made a wider gulf between herself and you. I know your heart is bleeding, that hot tears are streaming down your face, that your poor soul is sweltering amidst the tortuous flames of the fiercest hell of jealousy; yet why? for one who loves you not!—who is heartless to you, heartful to her paramour! Be a man! and remember that she, too, has rights which you are bound to respect;—not the right to dishonor, but to be free from you by laws human and divine, and to make such choice and legal disposal of herself as her youth demands, and her will, soul, and conscience prompt.
If she has fallen, it is the fault of her husband, not altogether her own. She admires him, but probably loves this distant Adonis, and, tempted beyond her strength, she may have forgotten and neglected duty, at the urgence and call of love; the facts of which came rushing through the air to you and took form and shape through the vision of the seer.
Be magnanimous! and if ye twain part, as ye likely will, and forever, do not fail to recognize the end as the legitimate result of the stupid folly of allowing her to dwell so far away in the midst of tempting scenes and people. Guilty, or not guilty, forget and forgive. Voluntarily free this simpleton from the chafing thrall that binds her to one whose purse, not person, is all on earth she cares for. Let her go at the call of affection, and, forsaking you and duty, yield her to the better and nobler law of love. Free her, and they twain will likely wed. Hold her, and she is that nameless thing—a wedded harlot.
My soul had, still as my friend, not myself, gotten thus far in its just reasonings when methought I heard a sweet and silvery voice say, "Behold!" And as the delicious tones rung glorified changes through my spirit I felt that I had grown a century within an hour; and notwithstanding that I actually believed my friend's wife to be guilty, and might probably so believe until my dying day, yet I had charity for her, as well as sorrow and sympathy for him. I put myself in his place, and for the first time in my life not only realized the luxury of forgiveness, but felt capable of even dying a lingering death that the woman so loved might be happy with him she so loved; and greater affection than that can no man show, in that he would lay down his life for a friend. I talked with the husband; persuaded him to lay by the pistols and revenge. He did so, and ceased to be jealous from that hour, caring but little whether the vision was of actual fact or a delirious dream.
"Behold!" I looked, still with that ultra soul-sight which leaps all boundaries, cleaves all space, flashes over rivers, mountains, seas, penetrates all bodies, and brings us in actual contact with the whole domain of mystery; and again I saw the little German child, through the walls of both houses, as clearly as if they were of finest crystal or purest glass instead of boards and mortar. And I beheld an ineffably pure, pearly-hued effulgence playing about her little head, undulating in billowy movement all about her infantile shoulders, streaming from her hair, glowing round her waist, and in loving wavelets all around. I watched this with astonishment. It was but the prelude to the celestial cantata that followed. I saw her mother gently chide her, and soon she went to bed, and slept the sweet, delicious slumber of absolute innocence; and as she thus lay I saw the gossamic cloud of pearly aura expand till it filled the room, penetrated the ceiling, the roof, swelling and lengthening out clear into the starlight, and forming to a point shot out and afar off into the very depths of space till I could follow it no more. Then I turned me again to the sleeping child; and what was my astonishment at beholding literally hundreds of bright shining and divinely beautiful forms, as of young children and the virgin dead, come trooping down the lane of pearly light, and, entering the house, gather and dance and play at the bedside of the slumbering little one. Good is catching! That child had enabled me to stave off a fit of jealous rage in sympathy with my friend; and now I was, through her again, about to learn one of the most important lessons of my life. I had kissed that child, and had become suffused with a portion of her own sweet aromal aura or atmosphere, and was, therefore, en rapport with the same bright beings as she was herself, and was played upon by the same celestial, pure and divine influences, whereof Love was the dominant or major clement.
A portion of these purer, better, and hyperphysical auras displaced and occupied the room of the grosser aura, earth-born and turbid. I found myself cleaner, better, than before, and comprehended Christ's "Suffer little children to come unto me." Not until that holy hour of rapt contemplation had I realized the immense meaning of a single touch of loving lips; that if it be purely given and received, both participants are blessed, not only directly, but through oblique ways, a myriad fold.
Love in very deed lies at the foot of all, and its mystic and ideal meaning outweighs the material and popular ones by as many degrees as the pure soul of that baby-girl outweighs the corrupt body of the low-lived debauchee. We may be hugged, embraced, kissed into heavenly states, or into their exact opposites! Hence, aside from common relational lip-contacts, they are worse than unwise who touch lips unless love be the underlying prompter; for if the kissed or kisser be bad, just so much of that specific evil is sure to flow from the magnetic poles of either pair of lips to the soul of him or her upon whose mouth they arc laid. I have said the moist lips are batteries charged with our very inmost good or evil. It is utterly impossible for a negress having borne a child to a white father ever to give birth to one perfectly negro,—even though its father, like herself, has never a drop of other blood in him,—for the reason that the blood of the white man, through his child, has mingled in the mother's veins. More than that, her blood under the microscope will not show the same crystalline forms after the birth of the mixed child as it did before. Just so is it impossible for us not to be made better or worse by lip touching.
Harlots invariably descend unless snatched from ruin by a miracle. It is because of the many forms of hell struggling in their veins, combating in their nerves; and as heaven or its opposite attends the kiss so also is it with every other sort of human contact—even the ordinary shaking of the hands. Gloves, therefore, have new uses.
I awoke from my slumber a wiser, and, I trust, a better man. I went out and found my soul-harried and victimized friend. I reasoned with him just as I had with my own soul a while before. I told him it was clear as sunlight that the absent woman really cared not a straw for him, but only for what current funds she could extract from him; and that, although to lose her was a bitter draught of gall, yet he had better swallow it, for that he was only loving his own sphere wherewith he had embalmed her. I asked what right had he to hold a woman in duress convert or non-couvert, whose soul was not attached by love to his; whose compliance, duty only, not affectional. It was clear he ought to give her up at once even if the effort snapped his heart-strings, because the making of her child was a doubtful question. Why should he pursue a heartless phantom? They were disunited in soul. Behold the folly of continuance! Let her go!
III. As previously remarked herein, writers upon the general topics of love and its offices, uses, abuses, nature, moods, and modes, have, in the main, been content with the merely superficial or external view thereof, and have, as a general thing, utterly ignored most, if not all, of the other and deeper significances attached thereunto; and not one of them has even attempted to tell mankind any more of the principles underlying sex, Love, and their copula passion, or desire, than any one's personal experience suggests; but we have plenty of hard, dry, pseudo-scientific flummery, else a long row of medical platitudes wholly useless, because totally indigestible by the average intellectual stomach. Who of them all has given us the rationale of the orgasm—the why and wherefore, or the cause of its being a thing of apparently no moment whatever at certain times, and under circumstances: yet at another will almost shock the human soul out of its earthly tenement, the body—by its keen, incisive, cutting, awful intensity? Which of them all has explained what every one ought to, but does not know to be a fact, i. e., that, as explained in the "New Mola," and elsewhere in this book, human conjugation is or may be triple; that is, it may be of soul, spirit or body, alone or either, and the binary minglings of the three, in various degrees, even to an infinity; for instance, one part soul, ten spirit, five hundred of mere body, and so on; but never true or normal except in exact equations; even tens or hundreds, according as the participants are high or low. The philosophers never even guessed at this truth.
Who of them has told, or can tell, why the nuptium fairly laps the very soul itself, of each participant, too, in the tenderest, softest, truly human, because strictly human, joy at one time; yet at another gives naught but cruel pain; else is but a nervous spasm, unsatisfactory to one party, and injurious to both; and yet the same people in both instances?
Why is it, O learned anthropologists, that the generative rite will at one time wholly unman one, yet at another—same ones too—will fill him with the most exquisite, manly, gallant sensibility; inspire him with the most lofty virtue and high resolve; charge him to the lips with true and royal courage; yet at another time transmute him into an errant coward and miserable poltroon? And, mirabile dictu—same parties still,—bring pain, keen mental agony, shame-facedness, and suicidal thought; yet at another, result in pride, joy, gratefulness, generosity, and mental summer, with physical springtime? Why will this mysterious duty—for such it is in God's sight, who by its means peoples the worlds, and stocks the starry spaces—plunge us into the deepest "blues," and fang our souls with remorse cruel as the grave, relentless as the Hadean gulf of Milton, and the other poets; yet at another induce a state of feeling in soul and spirit quite approaching the supposed angelic; why? and a myriad gaping crowd of scalpel-drivers repeat the sound, and echo "Why?" The answers: their science don't know, therefore cannot answer; wherefore I must take up my pen to respond to it, for those who need the information it is my lot to impart.
Since Dr. Dixon, of "The Scalpel" printed his great and warning essay on "The organic Law" (of sex), and the anonymous author of "Satan in Society" faintly echoed those stirring notes, nothing has been given to the world on the mighty subject worthy of attention or record. Neither essay filled the required bill, and for that reason I print this series of salvatory counsels. I may, and probably shall, ere long, be numbered with the armies of the dead; and who then will give Randolph's thoughts to the world? I don't know, and therefore give at least a part of them before I leave for good and all; consequently, I shall now convey certain brief and concise forms of certain knowledges, which, if abided by, will prolong many a life, and add immeasurable happiness to mankind. I wish to be clearly understood, and yet not to offend the most delicate or fastidious; for God is my judge that my sole aim is to teach certain truths, whose mission is to stop the tide of crime, misery and wretchedness now devastating our land. I am forced to use similes, but trust to be fully and entirely understood.
IV. Now for the answer to the loud "Whys?" of section three. The states resulting happily from human fusion were because there really was a human fusion, and that's just it! In all the other cases there was either too much body, too much spirit, and too little or no soul at all. They were violations of the love-law, and the suffering was the penalty. It is a pity that ten thousand times the pain was not the direct result of every violation of the organic law; and if every proposed debauchee could or would but die in the attempt, the world would soon be a great deal better off.
Where love sits enshrined over the married man's chamber door, and reason guides his conduct towards his wife therein, peace will reign, and the sale of syphilitic remedials vastly decrease. No pangs follow the celebration of the rites of holy love, nor judicious use of the divine, but abused, faculties of our nature. Unless love equals passion, marriage rites are never right; that's all!
V. The grand mistake made by physiologists and other essayists, writing on the current topic, consists in their persistent overlooking of the fact that man and woman are not the same. The male is an incarnation, so to speak, of one side of Deity; one hemisphere of the Imperial Over Soul; one section of Nature, matter, the Superlative and Infinite Mind of Minds; while the human female represents and is an embodiment of the other; for there is a male and female side to all these, and the two genders correspond to, represent, affiliate with, derive their respective powers from, and are attracted to, those respective sides. Thus either, alone, is an Incompleteness; they belong to opposite sides of nature, and it requires a bridge to span the amazing gulf that rolls between them. The magnetic materials for said bridge exists in nearly all human beings. Its name is Love. Bridges are in great demand. There's room for more.
VI. No true man can help loving all true women; not in the grosser sense, but in the higher one of soul. Not such as lie a man out of his manhood, run him in debt, empty his purse, and rob him of his peace, until he actually jeopardizes his soul's salvation,—pretending to love him, but meaning not one word of it,—laughing at him in the sleeve, and triumphing in the knowledge of how smart she was, how great a fool was he. That's the sort of women who, from the year one, have driven hard bargains with the masculine portion of the race, and rushed many a good man down the hills of ruin and gloom, and horrid, blank despair. Nor are they all dead yet.
I have neither time, assistance, or inclination for moralizing: but little patience with "Scripture" quoters; none at all with the modern "reform" tribes of the land and age: besides which I cordially despise all women-haters on one side, and Wesnerites (man haters) on the other; and no words of mine can express my utter abhorrence of the things miscalled Men, who practically regard woman as if she were nothing but a pleasure-vehicle, to be kissed, petted, and ill-treated in alternate slices. But I feel quite as much indignant contempt for that large class of women who are ever ready to use their beauty as a trap to catch male gudgeons; who look on all men as fair game, to be lied to, and played on, generally to the tune of rustling silks, and crisp bank notes; and whose utter heartlessness belies the index of their sex. There's quite as many heartless shes as hes in the world; only that one soulless woman is a greater danger to the world than a dozen scoundrelly men; for her sex gives her points of advantage denied to all of the opposite gender. A good, true woman is a diamond; a bad and heartless one worse than Milton's Satan.
Sitting near me in the eating-house where I dined yesterday, were four grave men, deliberately traducing their mother's sex. They went into paroxysms of what they called "Fun" anent pregnancy, menstruation, and sexive matters generally. They, and millions like them everywhere, in every bar-room, hotel, stable, store, grocery, consider it "smart" and manly to, even before young boys, habitually blaspheme Deity and dishonor the mothers that bore them, by irreverent, flippant and obscene speech concerning the sex. Poor wretches who disgrace the forms they bear by speaking of woman as if she were nothing but a target for filthy tongues to hurl their venom at; or, at best, as destined victims to their own abominable lubricity; mere extinguishers of the bale-fires rioting in their own veins,—the venomous fever-passions of their own gross natures, and far more ignoble than those of the four-footed dogs that run our streets. It made me sick; it always did—to listen to the outrageous talk going on everywhere about women, whenever two or more human males of the "civilized" kind happen to get together for an hour. Even stately officials, fathers of families, do; and if not, at least often allow it in their presence, which is almost as bad. So almost universal is this foul talk, to be heard everywhere, at any time,—ribald, coarse, obscene, and altogether devilish,—that it is no wonder that the public mind is debauched and totally demoralized.
It is a curious fact that people will talk smut, laugh heartily at coarse jokes and improbable stories concerning the eternal God's method of peopling the worlds, and filling up the starry domes beyond the grave, when of all human deeds it is the most sacred, serious, and laughless. No human being laughs then; for the weight of worlds rests upon human shoulders.
It is a bad sign any man hangs out when he makes "fun" of what ought to challenge his holiest emotions and most profound respect. There was a young man of the fun-making genus,—a fellow whose nature was inflamed nearly a year before his birth, and who kept it up to boiling-point by food and drink, and the secret books he first read, and then so artfully concealed, that the servant-girls were sure to find them,—read, get detected,—of course, by the owner.—result, destruction to poor she,—brag by he, who of course was petted and made much of, while his victim's head, in time hung low, for a bleeding heart was breaking. Well, this Lothario's eyes used to fairly glisten when they rested upon any young female form, and the burden of his talk was the victories he had won over too confiding women. Brag.
It so happened that he was one of a jury of inquest over the dead body of poor Maria Lee, a child of sixteen summers, whom a rich merchant of Loudon had betrayed, and then procured a double murder at the hands of an abortionist. Poor child! she bled to death from a skewer of steel run clean through both the uterus and its contents. The rich merchant paid some money;—some more in charity:—by-and-by joined the church, and his sin was forgotten. The medical practitioner went to jail for six months; was pardoned out in five weeks; and the babe went back to heaven in the arms of its slaughtered mother.
But there she lay, poor child, upon the long work-table of good Simon Scott, the carpenter, all pale and delicate as finest Parian marble or wax-work, and beautiful! O God, how immortally beautiful!—just as Deity had fashioned her before the rich merchant of Loudon and his friends, the doctor and death, had finished the work so fairly begun—finished her for the grave and heaven; for if ever its golden portals swing wide to admit a shining soul, surely its hinges will revolve like lightning to let in a ruined woman. Well, the autopsy went on; the facts were disclosed: and while the surgeon plied his work, and a strong magnifying glass was handed round among the jurymen, none were so eager and earnest in scrutiny and question, as the fast young man,—the general lover alluded to. He carefully examined lungs, brain, stomach, breasts, heart, uterus—all; and as he laid down the glass he muttered—and I—with the womb in my hand, and the knife between my teeth echoed, from the floor of my soul, his words—"Murdered, by God! curse him,—them! and me, too, if ever I"—and there he stopped; but not till his oath was registered up there where vows are never broken, and nothing is forgotten. If I could, I certainly would have every male over fifteen witness just such a redemptive and impressive scene; and would take every boy through the wards of a hospital for syphilides. I would have every girl taught the long-forgotten truth that her soul is worth, at least, quite as much as her body; something they little dream of, so ardent is their worship at the shrine of Saint Frivole.
Had I been so instruded long years agone, I had escaped very many subsequent mistakes, and consequent misery; but I. like most others, was a long time in learning thoroughly the tremendous difference between the chaste desire of pure love, and the lurid fires of burning lust. I learned it at last; hence this, and my later books, which I trust will serve as beacons to warn mankind off sunken rocks and reefs long after these hands have returned to primal dust, and the soul that animates them is kneeling at the feet of the Redeeming God.
VII. From the earliest historical ages an unnatural custom has prevailed; and its results have been fearful,—sub rosa mainly, for the victims generally grieve, mourn, and die in silence. I refer to the abominable practice of old men marrying young girls. I know that the temptations,—youth and freshness on one side; influence, society, position, money, on the other,—are great indeed; but for all that, it is a something against which that same society ought to turn; and one that God Himself frowns down; for never a marriage among them all produced other fruits than discontent, jealousy, madness and despair.
Campbell, in that odd book "Hermippus, or the Sage's Triumph," lays it down that the old can regain many months or even years of life by consorting and cohabiting with the young. It is, and is not true. If it were possible for two people, one sixty, the other sixteen, to fully and mutually love each other, then the girl would help the man, and the man increase the girl's recuperative power. But, happily, girls of sixteen can't love sixty, nohow you can fix it. I knew a man in New York State, who literally drove his daughter, a thin, pale, waxen child of sixteen, into a hated marriage of sixty-five or thereabouts. Two years afterwards, a child was buried in the West, and four weeks afterwards the father bore his daughter's body to bury it and his happiness together in one grave on the hillside.
Were a man of that age to use means to thus get a daughter of mine, say twenty-live years ago, when I was young, I think there'd have been a third-class funeral in that town; for I regard it as a crime even worse than some sorts of murder; and here are my reasons why: It is safe to say, where occasionally the young girl marries an old man, and good results follow, that such cases are extraordinary, and altogether exceptional to an almost universal rule; because the old man's motive is to prolong his miserable existence at the expense of a fresh young life; and of course his "love!" is but a selfish, mean, self-preservative instinct; while the girl's love is one of advantage, either money-wise or from gratitude, and therefore not real love at all; because in the very nature of things she can but feel an utter disgust, an awful and appalling horror and loathing at the bare thought, much less the sickening ordeal of fact.
Happiness is out of the question, and the cases exceedingly rare where they produce anything but misery. Nearly every one will at once see many of the reasons why; but there are some others not quite so self-apparent, and here they are. In marriage and its offices there must be a reciprocal play of electric and magnetic forces; for unless mutual, there's disaster just ahead, and sunken rocks all around, upon which that ship of wedlock is sure, sooner or later, to run aground; and in the wreck that follows some one is sure to be lost—and that some one is a young wife, tired of an old, besotted, worn-out man!
The great disparity of years, magnetism, vitality and life-force between such an ill-starred couple renders it utterly impossible for the young thing to have one single taste or desire in common with the old dotard she calls husband.
She cannot absorb, reciprocate or assimilate him, or aught pertaining to him, magnetically, or in any other way; and she even loathes the food he dotes on, and the liquids he consumes to keep his unnatural fever up.
The magnetic auras issuant from them are unlike, and to her repellant, after a time, if not at once. He consumes, absorbs, and assimilates the totality of her vital life, and at length she dies for sheer want of that whereof he robs her. But a still stronger protest is here: it is found in the well-known fact that the old and coarse magnetism of the man poisons both the body and soul of the young girl; seals up the fountains of her youth and responsive power; shuts the door of amative joy in her face; robs her of her rights as wife; suggests evil thoughts to her mind, and paves the way for her to yield heart and all else to whoever near her own age tries to win her, by giving her a kind of love she needs, and which is proper for one of her tender years.
Where the disparity is even twenty years it is infinitely far too great. Ten years' difference is a deal too much, and five the limit, save in the case of bloodless girls and very magnetic men; in which union the female thrives on the fresh vitality of the man. But, even in such cases, she must be blonde, and he the opposite—always; for if the reverse happens, she's a doomed woman, and he a physical imbecile, in five years' time at the utmost. In the case of ordinary December and May marriages he robs her of life; she gestates horror instead of affection; for in natural marriage souls blend and interfuse more or less perfectly after a time; and those who have lived unhappy lives often find out how well they loved at heart, after death comes tapping at the gate, if not before. Then it is: "Who'd have thought it?" but too late! Such antipodes cannot blend, because the girl is peach-downy, supple, gay, lithe and lightsome, but the man lithy, that is, limy, calcareous; and they cannot, will not mingle in any more intimate relations than that of father and daughter.
Some people have young souls in old bodies, in which case things are not so bad; but where such soul-youth does not exist, and the parties live in passable harmony, still there's great harm done,—in faic, constructive wificide, and this is the reason why,—a wife is apt to become a mother quicker by an old husband than a young one; because the old man's blood is cooler, his passion slower in culmination; and she is likely to conceive from sheer weariness, and physical and mental inability to guard herself; besides which, she never dreams of danger, or of the female finesses she would put in play against a younger husband.
If ever it is right to prevent conception, I believe it is in exceptional cases like this before us; for his old blood, through his child, courses through her young veins, making her old prematurely; loading her down with the accumulated mental, physical and moral, magnetic and other diseases of all his long run of years. Besides which, his child is born old;—never knows what babyhood is, or childhood means. It looks, feels, is an oddity; knows no infantile days or pleasures, and is thus, by its own father, robbed and cheated out of its best and most halcyon days. But that's not the worst of it yet; for the offspring of January is sure to be nearly as calcareous as its father. Its bones are harder, firmer, more solid than is right; its cranium is broader, flatter, thicker, and dense as those of a grown man; and if the young mother escapes forceps-delivery, or a still worse operation, she may consider herself a fortunate woman. May God pity all such, and alas! thousands of such there are.
How often we hear the expression, "She tapped the fountains of his love." Well, the thing is possible, yet is seldom realized, for that can only be done when both are maritally conjoined while influenced by a passion born of perfect, deep, soul-founded love; and then! ah, then! the cup of human bliss is indeed full. Why? Because a portion of each soul becomes incorporate in the other, and the mystical blending—"they twain shall be one"—is complete.
But souls can be tapped without reciprocity, for the young wife's soul is drained from her, either directly as a sponge, by her old husband, or indirectly through the uterine and vaginal diseases sure to be her lot sooner or later; for the fluids of the twain will not, cannot blend, except in so far forth as to innoculate the poor young thing with malignant poison, by which I do not here mean syphilis, but I do mean that worse poison resultant from chemical incompatibility, mental and affectional disgust and repulsion, which leave ulcers and corrosions in their train, with death in the foreground. Gentlemen M. D.'s, here's the origin of evil; for even if the husband is not old, but only a hellion to her, she's your patient straightway, and you have a fine chance for the sale of lotions, washes, pessaries, supporters, and all the other vast paraphernalia born of non-love, "in the auld house at hame."
Birth months. Children conceived in May, June, July, August and September, and who, therefore, are born in February, March, April, May, and June, are, unquestionably, better constituted and will live longer, have more character and power than when the double events occur in other months; because nature and weather are more propitious at the start. Conceptions occurring in the morning hours are a myriad degrees better than when that event occurs at other periods.
A person's shadow on the wall in a room, by lamp-light, will reveal more of that party's real character than all the phrenology extant, and in its minute phases, too; just as a peculiar smile, observation, movement, or tone of voice will sometimes tell in a second more of a person's real self, than an acquaintance of fifty intimate years would otherwise.
Gender in the human being is a very different thing from gender in the animate kingdoms below the grade of man. In the beasts it means propagation, mainly for food purposes; but in man it stands for, and implies, a great deal more, as will be seen hereinafter.
At this point I wish to pick a flaw or two in the reasonings of the popular physiologists and phrenologists of the day, every one of whom urge their moral pleas mainly upon the ground that the marital-functional nuptive rite of the human being is precisely on a par with the creative act of beasts; that is, that God intended it in man as in animals, to be solely and only a propagative function,—that, and nothing more. It is for generative ends only, and the nervous state precedent to, and succeeding it, is but the natural spur to the God-foreseen result; therefore, say they, the sacred nuptium is permissible only when both parents desire to add one more unit to the great world's population. Now these philosophers either are conscious hypocrites, teaching what they don't believe; else they think us fools, and we know they are.
I have seen a book, of nearly a thousand mortal pages, and that doctrine was the whole gist and burden of its labored and lame argument: lame, for its author shows in a hundred places that he don't believe his own logic; he continually confutes himself, and the completest refutation of the absurdity is to be found in the words: It is not true! Why? because man is not a beast, and is not governed by identical laws; but comes under, and is played upon, and moved by, higher ones altogether than such as rule in the kingdom of beasts, birds, reptiles, fish and insects.
In those realms, sex is an instinct, a periodical function and appetite. In man, it is a fact of soul; a principle, and a mystical and divine power, altogether superior to the passing furore of beasts that perish and arc known no more; and it means more in his case than it does in all other departments of the sentient world, singly or combined.
I here throw down the gauntlet, and state, boldly and squarely, right in the teeth of all the so-called scientists on earth or under heaven, that the sexive principle, habitude, and instinct in the human is not in very many respects identical with that of the non-human inhabitants of the globe we live on; on the contrary, in us it means, implies, and leads to immeasurably more and deeper things than the average thinker ever dreams of or imagines. In the organic kingdoms outside of the human, the instinct is blindly obeyed, and self-seeking there, as everywhere else, and not propagation at all, is the all-powerful impelling motive, if motive there be. Bears and horses, cats and fishes, dogs and flies, and every other living thing bearing gender, invariably trouble themselves not at all concerning increase of family, or prolongation of the species, until such increase appears; by which time Nature has brought a new instinct and passion into play. Parallels between man and beasts are not correct or just; for in beasts sexive and parental instincts are separate affairs,—in man they coexist. In beasts the offspring and parents become disunited at maturity; in the human, the practical relationship lasts not only to the gates of the grave, but leaps the barriers of death, and flourishes in the far-off heaven; and will till the universe grows old, and Time himself topples with hoary age.
We are gravely told that animals obey the impulse once a year, or season, as the case may be; that man ought to go and do likewise; but we won't; nor will these self-same philosophers,—I'm sure of that!—especially in their own especial and particular cases; because man is a myriad grades or degrees higher and finer in organization than the animals; and his nature calls for more than theirs possibly can, or does.
They obey the instinct; it is the spur to propagation; but the beast, just like man up to a given point, risks all for the spur, and cares nothing for subsequent consequences, but leaves them for nature to attend to; and she does it like the kind, dear old mother that she is! In the average human, the spur is all that's cared for at the time; albeit consequences are foreseen, and due provisions made; for we marry and mate,—beasts only mate, and marriage is unknown to them. Not one human couple in fifty millions propagate on purpose, for as a rule it is impossible; not so with beasts; for one hour seals the origin of the progenal result; and men mark the periods, and know to a day when to look for the new animal; but we can only guess the time when our eyes shall gladden at the sight of the new soul God sends to cheer and bless us.
We are all accidents!—and not a few of us unhappy ones,—I, for instance. To apply rules to man applicable to animals alone, is an insult to the human race. Stirpiculture, or the rearing of better children, will never succeed upon agricultural, stock-farm, or barnyard principles.
True, nature requires a rich soil to produce high grades of fruit, whether human or other sorts; but in the former she requires the richest of fertilizers, and its name is love. Give her that, and she'll make your eyes glisten at the beauty of the work she does; deprive her of it, and crab apples are the result; and a human crab is the gnarliest and most bitter fruit in all God's garden. In the lower kingdoms nature does her best to produce a superior grade of body. In the human world she works wholly to produce a loftier order of soul in its triplicate divisions,—intellect, imagination, emotion; and is never satisfied until success fairly crowns her efforts. A handsomer race, physically. I never saw than the modern Greek; nor such a perfect race of scamps; for your Romaic rascal can discount all others on the earth, if we except these of New York and Boston, who are lords paramount in all sorts of villany, from the picking of a pocket to stealing a railway.
"I guess I'll make an experiment—only just one," says many a man; and he makes it; the upshot being that from the instant he does so, home ceases to be such to him, and any woman's presence and activities is preferable to those of his wife. But why? Simply because his imagination has rendered the other woman's charms live thousand times more important than they actually are, and yet they are sufficient to enable him to draw disparaging estimates between solid wife and fleeting mistress. New fire, strange blood, has inspired him with fresh passion, and he don't care for the old wife, in presence of the new harlot; and so he abuses one, and lavishes all he has on the other. But you just wait a bit; we'll see how it works in the end,—and so will he; and happily, too, if it be not too late. Three weeks' experience with a mistress will cure almost any man of that sort of weakness, if he have not, by that time, buried his wife's love in a grave ten thousand resurrectionless fathoms deep! He did not know that the strange, new, exciting magnetism meant death to his home-love, desolation to his hearth-stone, isolation to his heart, and ruin to his happiness; yet it did and does, and eternally will, because it is scortatory, malign, fiery, and while it effectually displaces and kills home-love, it fails to satisfy; and its end is bitter ashes. In a weak moment, many a man, fired with sudden and electric fire, has fallen into passion's dreadful snare, and for a moment of delirious joy has bartered off a whole life of happiness; for when once one indulges in stolen fruit, which may be sweet, but is never so good as that which grows on one's own trees, the habit becomes fixed, and "just once" lands him—or her—neck-deep in perdition! His talk—or hers—ought to be not "Just once;" but, "It's all very fine, sir or madam—but it won't pay, and—I'll see you in—well, you can guess where—first." That's human talk!
IX. As already said herein, marriage—by which term hereinafter, whenever and wherever printed in italic letters, I mean the nuptive union of the sexes; and it is only really nuptive when love is the prompter; otherwise it is a desecration and worse than beastly profanation—is productive of an entire series of effects and results aside from the perpetuatory or propagative one wherein man and animals are alike, and therein only; for in them sex distinctions are, of course, merely bodily, while in the human it involves and embraces the entire vast domain of both body, soul, and the interwoven spirit. In the non-human races the marriage office ceases when the germ is lodged; but in the human being its offices only begin at that point; for its results continue, whether the rite be propagative or no, not only through an arc or chord of fleeting time; but they, the results, stretch away into and through the infinite and eternal spaces, and probably cease not, but endure forever and forever.
If there is one thing more certain, after death, than another, it is that every immortal man and woman of us is bound and doomed to have all love and lust escapades universally known. We are destined to meet all with whom we have been carnally intimate in any degree, from that of pure and gentle love, to the horror and violence of inhuman rape. Every carnal association affects us, leaves its mark on us and the other; and some there be who will be astonished that their whole career was turned on earth in consequence of such or such an act—fact; and that defeat followed them in after life by reason of the invisible presence of some wronged victims, married or not. Nor is this all, for every escapade mingles magnetisms more or less; and a man in New York in 1875 may feel the life going out of him day by day, himself not even suspecting that a dozen or more women in as many different parts of the earth, or even from the spaces, are at that instant thinking of him, yearning for him, voluntarily or not, and are drawing out his soul just as easily and surely as he drew their life through honeyed lips ten, twenty, or thirty years before; wherefore libertinism and cyprianism are attended with strange penalties.
In the truly human being—the non-savage and non-barbaric specimens of the races—marriage never degrades the parties either in their own or each other's eyes; but it purifies the heart and soul, uplifts them to the Father, is really Pulchritudinem Divitiis Conjunctam, as it ever should be, that is, Beauty and Divinity joined as one; it therefore becomes in this mystic light, instantly, the holiest and most effective of all possible prayers, hence the most potent and tremendous energy and agency in the entire material and hyperphysical universe.
Let me tell you, reader, how and why this is so. But before I do it, just look at Jugurtha, Attila, Nero and the Bonapartes, with scores of other scourges of God and the human world,—called into being in an instant of time to lash the earth to agony,—a prayer of evil-guild, silently, but effectively uttered at the instant of their descent into the matrices that thereafter gave them to the world. Is not this sufficient to prove the truth of what I call a most effective prayer? Turn the page and behold a Christ, St. John, Buddha, Confucius, and see the results of peaceful prayer uttered silently too, exactly as in the other case or cases. But there are other proofs:—
X. That the creative function is the highest force in us, as it is in and of the Deity, admits of no denial; for it ought to be, if it is not, a perfectly self-evident proposition, axiomatic in its nature, and therefore requiring no attempt toward its demonstration; for it is palpably clear that two principles are interwoven and reciprocally acting and reacting upon each other everywhere and in all things in the universe whereof we know. These principles are male and female, and both alike are manifestations or modes of the superlative and ineffable Master-Potency, Power, Energy, or over-lapping, subtending, underlying, crowning essence of the universal realm, call it by whatever name you will; and it, the bisexive energy, displayed all around, demonstrates itself to be the Imperial Force of all that is. To it all things are subsidiary. To it all things bow, bend, acknowledge the peremptory sway of, and without which the All that is would become a blank and starless void, as terrible as eternal Night itself: more cheerless than the grave; a radical nihility, so utterly benumbed and benumbing that destruction itself were tame in comparison.
God is supposed to be a dual being; so is man; but Deity is dual in a double sense; that is to say, God is positively male, and positively female; while also, as in man, all the masculine or electric attributes of God are pervaded by the magnetic feminine principle. We all know that the better side of man is the she or mother side; and that from it spring all the major elements of both his greatness and his goodness; and we admire an intellectual giant, while we adore a loving man; because from his love, not his intellect, arises all of goodness, inspiration, aspiration, generosity of soul which characterizes him. We are pleased with the Platos, but we worship the Christs. It is the softer side of soul that generates moral or any other real grandeur, and makes great deeds possible to man; for it is that alone which has power to transmute man the savage into man the incarnate demi-god.
All sentient and non-sentient being is more or less pervaded, according to capacity, with what I may call the male and female aura or effluence of the great Supreme, the unknown and unknowable Deity; and all these incarnations of the original Life, save only the human, are distinctively and radically either wholly male or female. True, there are among the lower types and forms of organic life, a few seeming exceptions, as the so-called hermaphrodites; but, in reality, such are apparent only; for examination in the light of modern science proves all such organisms to be a union of the two principles in a single body, and not a fusion, by any means; and that the male side fecundates the other. But a human, canine, equine, bovine, or any other bisexed being is an utterly impossible thing, all those affirming to the contrary notwithstanding. There are and have been malformations claimed to be proofs of dual gender, but they were really one or the other.
Below man, while the sexes are distinct, in him, as a principle, not a physical fact, they for the first time fuse and blend, at least on this, and probably upon every other soul-bearing world in the eternal vaults of space. It is this blending of sex in soul that makes us what we are; for were we not half mother, our father's influence upon us would drive the world to chaos in a year; and all that is really excellent in us is the capacity to love and grow; and nothing is capable of love but man.
There is a curious proof of the soundness of the foregoing statement, yet it seems to have escaped the notice of the scientist: I allude to the notorious fact that some womb-bearers, wives and mothers too, are females only physically; while spiritually, mentally, morally, psychically, and in every other way but one, they were and are wholly hard, cold, masculine beings, living contradictions of the statements their forms and functions declare to the world. On the other hand, many who wear the Phallic sign of gender are no more men in soul, than is the little romping lass of five brief summers a full-grown, full-blown woman.
Such people are human monstrosities, and were born wrong. If you ask me why and how, listen, and the story shall be fully, fairly, yet briefly told:—
XI. If a human monad, or "zoosperm," from the left side of the father, encounters a ripe ovum from the left side of the mother, that fact determines the gender. It will be male. [See a section on this very point in the sequel.] Reverse the case, and reverse results will follow, invariably,—though how to do it on purpose is a somewhat difficult problem to solve; yet it can be done, and is far more easily accomplished than at first sight may appear.
Now accidents and inversions, aversions and perversions, occur in all departments of nature, but none so glaring and positive as are encountered among human beings; and the missexing of them is one of the most common forms of malconstruction; for it frequently happens that a female zoosperm, which is the living monad, or soul-germ, supplied by the male parent, and clothed in flesh by the mother, is unable to reach a corresponding female ovum, and is compelled to be expurgated, or enter one from the wrong ovarium; in which case the body of the child will be of one gender, its soul and spirit of the opposite one. In a normally peopled world such monstrosities, which now abound all about us, could not possibly be coaxed, drawn or forced into existence as a human incarnation; and it is utterly impossible for such to appear at all upon the world's stage, if parents wholly, or even partially, love each other; and when such miscreations are seen, it is proof stronger than holy writ that love did not rule in the hour of their generation. Now I have affirmed as a truth that true human sex is primarily of soul, and secondarily of body; hence it follows that the post-mortem state of such mixed beings is not a permanent duration of their condition here; for gradually the true sex of the individual asserts its native force and power the physical, or rather hyper-physical being is gradually toned down or up to his or her true condition; the malformation begins to lessen by slow degrees, its signs to disappear, and then they assume either the perfected states of man, or that of woman; their angularities are worn away, and the beings who on earth belied the story of their true gender become as other normal beings are; the memory of what they once were fades away, and they take rank among the truly human.
XII. The philosophers of my day were generally blind to, or oblivious of, the fact that the greatest degree of human excellence in offspring can never be attained, even though the parents are physically perfect; but that a wife every way inferior except in love, loving and being loved, will give the world such children as will prove themselves, indeed, truly great, and grandly good. The strongest force, mental power, and creative energy in the domains of science, art, philosophy, and literature everywhere, is invariably manifested by those who have the most loved and loving mother in them—people whose feminine or magnetic side entirely balances, or slightly overweighs the electric or masculine moiety of their being. He is everywhere most welcomely greeted, caressed and influential, who is most magnetic, or female,—not in the effeminate sense, but in the glowing, radiant heartfulness of his nature,—is one who has not the most intellect, but most gentleness, love, affection, combined with it. Take the real or ideal Nazarene, per example, who perished for loving mankind in his 49th year [see Bunsen]; or, going back of his alleged times, leap the chasmal years to the Bo-Tree man, and scores of others equally good, if not so famous; and whenever you find a great soul in a male body, depend upon it he is more than half mother; for it is the woman side of such people that gives them power, genius, mental pith, and enables them to write their names in adamantine letters upon the grand facade of the universal human temple! It is equally true, that those are the most glorious and glorified of the other gender, who were, or are, not the most electric, masculine and intellectual, but the most tender, pure, loving and feminine in all respects.
XIII. But you say, "We women are not perfect yet. We want perfect offspring! Some of us have not just such husbands as we wish. We are too pure to sully our souls, no matter how great the temptation may be. We prefer to abide in marriage as we have found it. Some children, the results of such marriage, are not what we would have them; therefore, pray tell us how to improve upon them hereafter."
The answer is simple, the method easy. Never run the risk of conception, except you be mentally and physically prepared,—not for it—but to utterly banish everything but the pure desire of your soul to give him all the love then—at the marriage—that you can, and wish, will, pray, desire, decree, that the result, if such there be, may be modelled after your soul's loftiest ideal. Keep up this all the time of gestation if possible, and the operation of the law just revealed will convince you and the world that nothing equal to it ever fell from human lips or pen.[1]
Please recall the incident of myself and the little fairy. Well, that is worth worlds to you, for suppose that, instead of wishing, willing, desiring, decreeing perfect offspring, you exert it to redeem your husband, to kindle up his love for you, for home, for his own fire-side. But perhaps you care little or naught for all that; still you want health, beauty, strength and long life, all of which are achievable by the same magic means; else in such moments—during power absence—all these are lost, and another nail driven home into your coffin. Obey this grand law, follow out this splendid rule, and ere long you will find that your power will perceptibly augment, most assuredly be felt, and before you are well aware of it will work such a redemptive change as shall bathe your house in pearly glory. This principle will win him from all others, and kindle love where all was cheerless, wintry blasts before. I know it, have seen it tried, and am confident that she who persistently tries cannot by any possibility fail! Of course the same power can be used by husbands. It is simply substituting active soul-will, love, for indifference, passive body and sufferance; but, as sure as death, here is the starting point of a divine life!
XIV. But how about promiscuity or variety in the love relations of life?
Reply: There may be those who can find happiness therein. I never could, and do not want to make the experiment. My reasons will be seen further on in this work; but before we come to that, I wish at this point once for all to say that I believe in free speech, and wide-spread agitation of all questions, social and sexual included; but while I champion the right, I by no means espouse the cause of those champions, for I must abide by the laves of my own individuality, and it is my firm belief that love-variety in any shape is injurious to soul and body, and that the highest point of human power can only be reached by those who are amatively true to each other; for purity alone is the price of power, the secret of soul-might, and it is the coin accepted at God's exchange for such glories as he keeps especially for true and earnest souls. I write these lines here because at this moment a paper lies, in two senses, before me, which distinctly says that I am an advocate of certain opinions which my entire life has been spent in confuting—as witness every book I have ever written, every speech I have ever spoken. Having put this on record, I now drop all that matter,—both the falsehoods and the falsifiers, forever and forevermore, as being beneath either notice or contempt.
The demand for novelty, "variety," or change in love matters, is not a part of my being, and only foiled zealots—feminine—and worse things in male shape, ever started such malignant slanders against me,—human perverts of both genders, who, failing to induce me to pervert certain knowledge and powers to their base ends and systems, sought to injure me by the meanest and most contemptible of all possible scandal. But I laughed at the cyprians, and snapped my fingers at the rogues in grain. I am only capable of one love at one time, but that time to me fastens its further end to the eternities just ahead of us all. Temporary attractions departed with my dead years, thank Heaven, and their fruitage was ever bitter, bitter.
XV. So true is the statement concerning the vastly greater and superior relative value of the Feminine Principle, that even in the present lubricious age, when woman is almost everywhere wrongly rated, badly educated, and worse placed than she should be, there is still, deep down in the hearts of most, even the coarsest men, a measure of gallant respect, which occasionally gleams forth in noble deeds, and brave championage of the sex, in such guise as to give great hope for fuller and better things by and by.
The chivalry of all ages has not only proved feal to her and acknowledged its dependence upon her smile and frown, boldly fighting for her right or wrong, then, in the foretime, just as now; but has taken especial pains to celebrate individual women and the universal sex; and this worship of the second, if not the primal element of nature, has been carried further, and been more general, than the modern reader might imagine. For instance, who among those who peruse this essay would believe, save on most indubitable evidence, that the very flower of one, nay, two of the leading nations of the world this day do homage to the emblem of Womanhood? Yet, nevertheless, such is the fact; for the noblest regalia, the highest honor won and worn by Britain's proudest men, is to be acknowledged to be worthy of wearing the royal insignia of the Garter; while the Fleur-de-lis of France, meaning something precisely similar, has been the boast of her noblest for centuries.
Now what does that same Garter mean? Is there any one so uninformed as to imagine for a moment that it signifies the mere string worn about the leg to keep nice stockings from dragging about fair heels? If so, here let that absurd notion be rectified, for the emblem signifies no such puerile nonsense at all. The motto of the order, Princely and Imperial, is in these days written Honi soit qui mal y pense, translated to mean—to the uninitiated, outside world—"Evil to him who evil thinks," which, in a certain sense, is true and correct, for it does mean that, but not at all in the manner that people generally think it does. It has no reference to general evil whatever, but it expressly means evil of a certain and peculiar kind; for it so happens that the real first word is not Honi but Yoni, and that means nothing more nor less than the feminine organs of generation, coupled with their periodic functions.
Now, while in all ages of the world's known history, a grand majority of all mankind, including all modern Christians, worship brute force, and luxuriate in varied forms of Phallic or Priapic worship, and the Phallus is the male organ of generation and Priapus was its god; while they, I repeat, adored and adore creative energy as symbolized by the emblem alluded to, of which all steeples, towers, beacons, light-houses, monuments, cenotaphs, and May and liberty poles and flagstaffs, are but symbols; while that form of worship—of the male god—has been, and still is, almost universal, except in its coarser, grosser forms, in our days, there have not been wanting other human hosts who did, and still do, pay homage at the shrine of the Feminine Deity, whose symbol is the rose, discus, arch, oval, and dome; and in some barbaric lands the organ itself, openly, as in all lands sub rosa or secretly; but in civilized America in its most low and disgusting form, for thousands seem to adore no god but Lust, and practically worship at no other shrine. Witness the universal prevalence of concubinage and harlotry, gotten to be even a licensed thing, and everywhere a winked-at adjunct of civilization, to the debasement of man and blasphemy of God and Womanhood, as of yore in Greco-Roman days; but this time entailing dreadful penalties instead of rewards upon its multitudinous devotees; for not even the triplicate king evils, opium, alcohol, and tobacco, inflict such awful punishments upon their votaries as Cypriana, the salacious Diva of Harlotdom. To return to the point at issue: In some form or other, most of us worship the disc symbol; and four-fifths of the intelligent world is to-day agitated, not merely concerning the symbol and its nature, but about the tremendous mysteries it shadows, and the vast volume of meanings that underlie and are embosomed within it. I trust, before this task of mine is finished, to demonstrate it to be in very truth what it claims,—a new revelation of sex, and to make one successful effort to remove the subject far above the muck, slime and filth hitherto attendant upon it; for if there is a divine thing on earth, it ought to be Love—its laws, rules, phases and moods,—knowledge of which is a redeeming power.
I alluded to the universality of sex emblems, and will close this section by calling attention to our national banner; for the American flair floating from a staff is one of the finest illustrations of the double glory in the world; because the staff symbolizes the Phallus; its cord represents the chain of love binding the sexes together; the folds of bunting are emblems of woman's floating drapery; the blue means his, her, their mutual truth and fidelity; the white, her purity; the red symbolizes her periodicity and ability to defy death by repeopling the world. I shall allude to other colors in another section.
XVI. A true negro never reaches a stage of mental development enabling him to master metaphysics; nor at maturity does he ever surpass in capacity the adolescent average Anglo-Saxon; but in the power of maintaining love at high tide he can discount all the white races of the globe! I make this observation at this point for two reasons: first, to draw a parallel; second, to tell the reader that in my medical practice, in nervo-vital diseases, I often prescribe "Negro meetings, and fifty cents in the plate" for being thereby benefited. They did so, these pale, haggard wives and chlorotic girls, and sat there to hear the ardent worshippers preach, sing. pray, shout, get glorious, and fill the room with a rich and healthy magnetism, every inhalation of which, to the sick ones, is worth a month's life, and a ton of doctor's stuff thrown in. Now for the other point: No sooner does an American boy get on his first pair of pants than he has prurient notions right straight along, and takes good care to demonstrate them with chalk upon the walls and fences everywhere. Now this is not so dreadful after all,—for such antics characterize all young animals,—provided his elders would take him in hand and teach him the true meaning of the origin of the strange ideas which from morbid nature, inculcation, precept and example of his associates he has imbibed, but does not comprehend.
I have said that this nation was the most passional one on earth. But then you know that nations and individuals are exactly alike; moved by the same forces, governed by the same principles, prompted by the same motives; and remember too, that this nation is but a boy yet, not out of its teens; hence, its universal pudicity is not to be wondered at; nor that its principal, most sincere and best-paid-for worship is, and for some time to come yet will be, at the passional shrine, in or out of wedlock. The same thing prevails all over the globe, and likely for the same reason; i. e., because as yet it is but a baby-world! At all events its worship is of the character already set forth; and its best men have been the most earnest devotees; for somehow or other, there is not and never has been a really great man in it but who has been more or less chargeable with practices not accordant with the strictest rules of nun-ship or monk-hood—which is oftener—in results—monkey-hood instead.
XVII. Hargrave Jennings, of England, the eminent Rosicrucian, writing upon the subject of the Garter, and before quoting Ashmole in regard to the same matter, observes: "All the world knows the chivalric origin of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. It arose in a princely act, rightly considered princely, when the real, delicate, inexpressibly high-bred motive and its circumstances are understood, which motive is systematically and properly concealed. Our great King Edward III. picked from the floor, with the famous words of the motto of the Order of the Garter, the "garter," or, as we interpret it, by adding a new construction with hidden meanings, the "garder" [gaurder, P. B. R.], (or especial cestus, shall we call it?) of the beautiful and celebrated Countess of Salisbury, with whom, it is supposed King Edward was in love." In other words she dropped a cloth which men ought never to behold; and Edward acted the part of a true gentleman, in preserving her from ridicule and shame, by turning an accident fouls would giggle at, into one commanding profound reverence and chivalric respect from all who pride themselves on being men.
Old Elias Ashmole, the very highest British authority on the points here involved, writing about them, says: "The Order of the Garter, by its motto, seems to challenge inquiry, and defy reproach. Everybody must know the story that refers the origin of the name to a piece of gallantry; either the Queen or the Countess of Salisbury having been supposed to have dropped one of those very useful pieces of female attire at a dance. [Here follows some Latin, the gist of which I have already given in the conclusion of the last section. P. B. R.] The ensign of the order, in jewelry or enamel, was worn originally on the left arm. Being in the form of a bracelet to the arm, it might possibly divert the attention of the men from the reputed original; it might be dropped and resumed without confusion; and the only objection I can see to the use of such an ornament is the hazard of mistake from the double meaning of the term periscelis, which signifies not only a garter, but breeches, which our English ladies never wear."
That settles the point. The garter was a girder, which the lady dropped; and the true gentleman picked it up, pinned it to his breast, and challenged the world's respect for himself and woman forever and forevermore. Glorious Edward!
XVIII. Isn't it curious that the generality of even educated people fail to see that the idea of sex as a principle, and in all its implications, runs through everything, even language? In French there's no it, as with us, but everything is il or elle,—he or she. We all know that human speech is the result of the gradual development of the race through ages of time; its different forms being determined by the differences of latitude, soil, climate, physical and other concomitant surroundings. Letters are but external symbols of human thought; and in them all two basic ideas predominate—i.e., the male and female. The letter D and its equivalents, the Egyptian hieroglyph and hieratic figure, and the Phœnician one likewise, is but the feminine symbol, more or less perfectly drawn, according to the ability of the scribes or sculptors who made them. Thus also—and nearer nature—are their equivalents of the Roman R; while their N, L, and sh, are unquestionably suggested by the phallus, or lingam, the opposite idea. And so it is all through the entire list of alphabets, ancient and modern; some letters representing one emblem, others its opposite, and still others the union of the two. Instance the Archaic alphabet, Greek, Phœnician, Italic, as they existed from 1,000 to 600 years before Christ's date—for the Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Daleth, He, Var, Zyin, Cheth, Kaph, Teth, Lamed, Samekh, Ayin, and Tav, and their English, Phenician, Greek and Italic equivalents, as unmistakably emblematize the above three ideas, as that rain tells of growth in field, forest and fen! What is the soft, sweet, flowing circle or ring, but the symbol of Faith, Eternity, Eternal Love, Magnetism,—the yoni,—the female emblem—the letter O? What is the letter I or the figure 1, but the symbol of generative power,—the lingam, or male? Ay, all letters are but interchanges, interminglings of the two original forms—the I or male, and the O or female ideas.
For instance, B is two-thirds female, one-third male; C is mainly female; D is both sexes; Q suggests union; and in fact, all letters convey the same meaning in clear, or less clear form.
XIX. The Lingam, Linga or Lingum (male organ-worship), is but the reverse of the discal or oval worship. The dome everywhere is but the female idea; the minaret represents the male; and as said before, actually the colors of all our flags, red, white and blue, green and yellow, are representative of the same, or Garter Idea; the first two meaning the spiritual purity and sacrificial blood of woman; the blue already explained; the green representing the result of the union of male and female—production, fertility, growth; and the yellow typifying ripeness, or the first completion of the destiny ordained to both.
XX. Torches, flambeaux, and fireworks everywhere symbolize sexual, therefore creative passion (and what this last means will be seen hereinafter; for it is not limited to the generation of progeny). They typify vaguely to some, clearer to others, the strange, inner mystic fire which, unlike all other forms of Flame, has its origin in God, and its flow from within us, not from without; for passion rises in the mind when normal,—in the soul; not the body, save when our natures are inverted; and even then its fountain is in the unholy soul, before it leaps to the still more unholy body. Desire is always first metaphysical before it is material in human kind; but when the conscience and moral poles arc reversed, the spark that explodes the mental flame may be, and often is, sent from the body first to the soul. Thus certain foods or drinks generate an excess of caloric in the nervous ganglia of the reproductive system; a spark—spontaneous combustion—leaps thence to the brain, the soul catches fire, and hurls its masses of lurid flame through the cerebrum, cerebellum, spinal cord, ovaria, prostate gland, testes or vagina—and—draw the curtain o'er the dreadful scene!
XXI. Just as sex runs through all nature so does it obtain of nations, tribes, peoples and ages; some are entirely female or male in their genius, art, literature, and general specialties; and so plainly does this truth manifest itself that I do not care to occupy time in proving it. But this will I say: The most masculine nations tend greatest to feminine worship; and, per contra, the ideal of the feminine peoples is the masculine worship.
Finally, the most masculine man adores at the female shrine, and his god is far more she than he; while the most feminine woman worships the most masculine man. Thus here, there, and everywhere the two universal principles seek each other, blend, fuse, intermingle, and unwittingly obey the mighty dual law!
XXII. Love between human beings of opposite sexes is of two general kinds: 1st, that in which passion is not an integrant, such as the love between parent and child; that which is wholly amitive or purely friendly; that which is platonic or purely spiritual, ethereal, based upon affinities of taste, similitudes of soul; that which is founded upon gratitude; and, lastly, that which is wholly and absolutely mystical—the don't-know-why-but-it-is-so kind of feeling—and which, while it may be to a limited extent gratified on earth, yet its full fruition can only be achieved, felt and realized after both shall have become citizens of the country of disembodied souls. Now it often happens that people in whom this sort of love exists mistake its nature and significance; imagine that they were born for each other; and, so they are, but not for the life below. They marry, and, to their first surprise, and subsequent horror, discover that for all the purposes of matrimony one is oil, the other water, without a particle of mental lime to combine and fuse the two together, and thereby form a true kalsomate of soul.
"I think the pity of this earthly life
Is love. So sighs a singer of the day
Whose pensive strain my sympathetic lay
Sadly prolongs. Alas! the endless strife
Of Love's sweet law with cold Convention's rules;
The loving souls unloved; the perfect mate,
After long years of yearning, found—too late!
"The treason of false friends; the frown of fools;
The fear that baffles bliss in beauty's arms;
The weariness of absence; and the dread
Of lover, or of love, untimely dead,—
Musing on these, and all the direful harms
That hapless human hearts are doomed to prove,
I think the pity of this life is love!"
So do I. But even a greater pity exists where, fired by the most ardent hopes, one or both find out that not a real tie of soul binds the twain together. Then comes the unveiling; and, my God, what an awful, horrible spectre stands frowning where each expected to behold and hold—she an Adonis, he a perfect Hebe!
When the mistake is made such parties marvel and wonder how on earth it can be so; and why the actual marriage produces effects so utterly foreign to their expectations and hopes. In the union of two such there is a compatibility of spirits to a great extent, but none whatever on the amative plane,—the sex of form; for the actual fact of marriage produces utter dissatisfaction to him, horror, pain, mental anguish, disease and lingering death to her. This generates discord and despair, general unhappiness, and is almost sure to drive the man to the house of the strange Woman, and his wife either to insanity, the grave, or the arms of a lover who can affiliate with her to some extent, at least upon the external or mainly sensuous plane; and the upshot of the matter is divorce and two wretched lives. Now, in my travels up and down the lanes of Marriage-land, I have seen scores of just such cases; and there are other scores, ay, millions that I have not seen, and of whose terrible secret no one but themselves are aware; and sometimes they do not know what ails them, and attribute their distresses to a thousand causes, not one of which is the real and true one.
When, further on in this New Revelation, I shall analyze the matter, hundreds who read it will see the real point, and, probably, make no effort to better their sad condition. From such unions as these spring a class of children so utterly angular and deficient that the marvel is they ever find peace at all on earth, or enjoy a happy hour.
XXIII. The second general kind of love between the sexes may be numbered one and two. The first of which is the exact opposite, in nearly all respects, of that just described in Section 22d. It is just as earnest, honest, and deceptive, as the other, but is far more endurable, because there is a better cohesion between them than in the other case; their lives are evener, their marriage satisfactory; their offspring more adapted to life on earth, and in society; their own physical health and that of their children is better; and their union will last longer and produce generally better results, albeit said union is quite as far from being right and proper as anything can well be.
In the first case, to use a meaning metaphor, the first couple only met each other upstairs, in the garret; they only fused in the brain. They could not affiliate downstairs—in the passional moms of the house of marriage; although they were compelled to descend once in a while, it was something to be gotten over as quickly as possible, and to be only remembered with a shudder by her, a smothered malediction by him.
In the other case it was kitchen and cellar life all the time; a monotony endurable certainly, but very unsatisfactory for all that; for it so happens that although some of us overvalue body, its adjuncts, functions and offices, yet, being human, we require a little intellect, soul and emotion with our lives; cannot be contented with body only, and feel the need of a little sour leavening to season the dry bread of earthly being. Such couples grow tired of each other; of the monotony; and either party of such a firm will strangely take to other persons who manifest qualities and powers, which, from their own state of soul-starvation, they know how to appreciate! The origin of such marriages takes its rise in physics purely. He is stout, magnetic, robust, full of fire, and passional auras envelop him round about; and passion always exaggerates both the properties and qualities of the object upon whom its eyes are cast; mentally endows it with what it has not, and never will have; and at the same time revels in an insane dream of fancied joys, destined never to be realized, because his whole being is in such a red-hot fever, that, could he actualize his desire, death would stop him instantly, because nothing human could endure such a poignancy as he hopes to enjoy.
She is young, round-limbed, rosy-cheeked, spirited, vivacious, full of health,—and from what she has learned through other females—full of curiosity as to the facts of marriage. Well, she has passed the rubicon, and they twain lengthen out their honeymoon for about a year; at the end of which time it is an old and flavorless story, and discontent comes in, because each feels the need of a little change. The upshot of such a union is that neither of them see a genuinely happy hour, till that wherein each hopes to be free from the other, and try their chances elsewhere. So much for general division number one. The next division is that which is being, with its mysteries holy and unholy—that is in its normal development, and abnormal or unhealthful one—about to be treated in the pages that follow.
XXIV. Love being much more than a mere sentiment between the sexes, it is plain that neither its ground-work, nature, or cryptic meaning, has hitherto in any land been thoroughly understood. I have for long, weary years studied it in many countries of the globe. Here and there I got—not a new idea of it, but suggestions which led me to investigate and explore. And now, in this, probably the last book but one or two which I shall ever write, I desire, not to make a confession, for I am proud of the truths alone I delved for,and brought up from the zem—zem of mystery—but to make a statement and explanation. I had struggled so hard to get a fair hearing at the bar of the world, that many a time, in view of the cruel fact that I was met everywhere with suspicion, slander and malignant envy, I have bathed in the dark waters of depair; and but for, as I believe, the protecting care of the dead, whose loving hands either held me up in the bitter strife, or, failing to be able to do that, eased my falls—I should have rushed of my own art into the awful fields of eternity. Early in life I discovered that the fact of my ancestry on one side, being what they were, was an effectual estoppal on my preferment and advancement, usefulness and influence. I became famous, but never popular. I studied Rosicrucianism, found it suggestive, and loved its mysticisms. So I called myself The Rosicrucian, and gave my thought to the world as Rosician thought; and lo! the world greeted with loud applause what it supposed had its origin and birth elsewhere than in the soul of P. B. Randolph.
Very nearly all that I have given as Rosicrucianism originated in my soul; and scarce a single thought, only suggestions, have I borrowed from those who, in ages past, called themselves by that name—one which served me well as a vehicle wherein to take my mental treasures to a market, which gladly opened its doors to that name, but would, and did, slam to its portals in the face of the tawny student of Esoterics.
Precisely so was it with things purporting to be Ansairetic. I had merely read Lydde's book, and got hold of a new name; and again mankind hurrahed for the wonderful Ansaireh, but incontinently turned up its nose at the supposed copyist. In proof of the truth of these statements, and of how I had to struggle, the world is challenged to find a line of my thought in the whole 4,000 books on Rosicrucianism; among the brethren of that Fraternity—and I know many such in various lands, and was, till I resigned the office, Grand Master of the only Temple of the Order on the globe; or in the Ansairetic works, English, German, Syriac or Arabic. One night—it was in far-off Jerusalem or Bethlehem, I really forget which—I made love to, and was loved by, a dusky maiden of Arabic blood. I of her, and that experience, learned—not directly, but by suggestion—the fundamental principle of the White Magic of Love; subsequently I became affiliated with some dervishes and fakirs of whom, by suggestion still, I found the road to other knowledges; and of these devout practicers of a simple, but sublime and holy magic, I obtained additional clues—little threads of suggestion, which, being persistently followed, led my soul into labyrinths of knowledge themselves did not even suspect the existence of. I became practically, what I was naturally—a mystic, and in time chief of the lofty brethren; taking the clues left by the masters, and pursuing them farther than they had ever been before; actually discovering the elixir of life; the universal Solvent, or celestial Alkahest; the water of beauty and perpetual youth, and the philosopher's stone,—all of which this book contains; but only findable by him or her who searches well. The thoughts which I gave to the world, that world paid me for, as it always has paid for benefits. But what of that? Justice is sure to be done me by and by.
I am induced to say thus much in order to disabuse the public mind relative to Rosicrucianism, which is but one of our outer doors—and which was not originated by Christian Rosencrux; but merely revived, and replanted in Europe by him subsequent to his return from oriental lands, whither, like myself and hundreds of others, he went for initiation.
The Rosicrucian system is, and never was other else than a door to the ineffable Grand Temple of Eulis. It was the trial chamber wherein men were tested as to their fitness for loftier things. And even Eulis, itself, is a triplicate of body, spirit, soul. There are some in the outer, a few in the inner crypts.
These, the facts concerning Rosicrucia and myself, are out at last. Now let us go on with the book.
Enthusiasts are the ambassadors of God. It is through such only that great truths reach the world, and that world takes exquisite pleasure in crucifying all such; and yet they will arise, proclaim their mission, deliver their message, establish new truths, and then march straight to Calvary or Patmos! In all ages there have been men cut out after a different pattern from their contemporaries, and who, for that reason, had and have a different destiny to fulfil. "To he great, is to he misunderstood," ay, and crucified time and again. Among all who have ever lived, none have worked harder, or accomplished more good for mankind than that class of men known in all time as Mystics, foremost among whom was, and is, that branch of them known as Hermetists,—men of mark; Pythagorean, . Rosicrucians, and lastly, the Brotherhood of Eulis,—all of whom were, and are, students of the same school.
When David G. Brown, of the city of New York, more recently connected with Bennett's "Herald," was, in Montreal, I believe, asked concerning the origin of the Great Society, or rather Fraternity, (the Rosicrucian branch,—but differing essentially from the branch of that august brotherhood represented by adepts in Europe, Asia, and myself and confreres in this country,—yet identical in spirit, so far as the general welfare of universal man is concerned), he responded as follows, save that he disguised certain names, which disguises I now throw off!—As one standing upon the beach by the sea, and gazing far off over the turbulent waters, finds the horizon lowering in the distance, and shutting out the land unseen that lies beyond; so we, standing upon the sands of time, and looking back over the sea of our past history, find there is a boundary beyond which the vision cannot extend, a point where many have written, "No more beyond!"
And, as the ocean casts up from its unfathomable depths wrecks of vessels lost, which float upon its surface, and are lost upon our shores: so sometimes, from the immeasurable gulf that has buried in its depths the secret of our origin, a waif drifting on the bosom of time finds its way to the limits of the historical epoch, and reveals to us something of what was, and is lost. Then let us learn all that we may from these waifs. Let us wander upon these trackless shores of a silent sea, and bring from its drift-wood and wrecks all that maybe gathered. Let us add all that may be added of our childhood's glory to our manhood's suffering, and our coming triumph. We will be proud that we are disciples of Hermes Trismegistus, that thrice-sealed Lord of Mind,—the Mystical Mal-Kizadek [Melchizadek] of Bible repute; but let us not forget to be proud that we are disciples of the viewless God. . . . Twine the laurel wreath for the victor, but add the cypress for the victim. . . . Let us go, then, to the land of romance and of dream,—the land of the Holy Byblus, and the Sacred Ganges. Standing upon their shores, our minds will revert back in the dim ages, to the days of our childhood, and the birth of the mystical reign of Ahrimanes. We will behold in our mind's eye a succession of kingdoms, like the succession of seasons, a rise and fall of dynasties, like the sowing and reaping of grain. We will count the number of patricians who live in idleness and luxury, and shudder at the multitude of plebeians who die in agony and want. Behold those monsters of selfishness and cruelty, whose insatiable appetite of ambition and pride, wealth and power, could not appease, and for whose maw the quivering flesh and trickling blood of a people became food. Here and there, we will find men struggling against oppression as we have struggled; people teaching virtue and charity as we have taught,—reviled and scorned as we have been. We will discover that others have borne our burdens who had no hope of receiving our reward; that knowledge is universal, and has no royal road; and that they were as wise in the wisdom of their generation, as we are in ours.
And now tread softly. We are entering the dark realm of the slumbering ages. The dust of a million years has gathered here, and no voice has awakened its echoes since the days when the Indian Bacchus consorted with the daughters of men.
We have left the land of the probable, and are journeying in the regions of the possible. The footprints here and there are of mortals, but of those who have beheld the hidden mysteries of Eulis, who are familiars of the Cabbala, who have raised the veil of Isis, and revealed the Chrishna, the—yae or the a.a.
Behold in the distance, shining from the east as the sun from the sea, the unquenchable torch of her who is nameless; observe the stars that circle round her, as she kneels to write upon the sand. See the sheen of her golden hair, and the spotless white of her robes; catch the first strains of that wondrous philosophy, classic and pure, as they fall in wordless music from her lips; and remember how its infinite truth and marvellous beauty, have, in all the ages that are past, bound us together by an indissoluble bond of brotherhood, and leavened with our faith in the innate kindness of the human heart, taught us to sacrifice ourselves, that the peoples may advance.
They were fragments of this philosophy which we wore as a crown of glory on our natal morn, that were disseminated by our Master and his innumerable followers, and cast hither and thither upon the stream of time, were finally washed by successive waves of war and pilgrimage, to the shores of Egypt. It is of these the author of the "History of Civilization in England" speaks, as "forming one of the elements in the school of Alexandria, and whose subtle speculations, carried on in their own exquisite language, anticipated all the efforts of modern European metaphysics."
They were fragments of this philosophy which, perverted by the strong individualities of Plato, Aristotle and Pythagoras, became alike the systems of their schools, the Portico, the Grove, and the Garden.
Melchizadek, or Hermes, was our first great master; but like many masters before and since, he lived when the "times were out of joint," and the age was not attuned to symphonies of thought and feeling. He taught his rich philosophy to all, opened great hidden depths of thought to the public eye, explained the most subtle truths to barbarian ears, and—threw pearls to swine. And his success. He gathered round him his disciples, and looked beyond at their followers; they extended in every direction, as far as eye could reach, surging like the waves of the sea, when tossed by tempests,—and with all the deep undertones and mutterings of the ocean. Were all these his pupils? All these versed in the shoals and depths of reasoning? No. They were families, some member of whom believed an abstract philosophical truth, and all the rest believed the man.
They reduced the laws of nature to form a creed, and they made a golden calf of some special physical force, and fell down to worship it. They resolved, themselves, after their agitation, into their own natural element. That was all.
As a rustic, uninstructed in the principles, might with open-mouthed wonder watch the burning of coal, and endeavor to associate it with the inflation of a balloon, so Hermes, expecting only the preconceived consequences of his teaching, was awed by the immense bubble he had formed. As he comprehended the magnitude of his creation, and its now evident consequences, perhaps there arose in his mind that inevitable conclusion that from all his teachings and all his labor little would be accomplished. The great minds among his followers would be philosophers, but they would have been philosophers without him. The mass would be fanatics, as they had been fanatics before him. He had done only this—given a direction to their studies and speculations, given a name and method to their ignorance and madness. And all this scholasticism and philosophy, all this ignorance and madness, would be the new religion of India, would take the place forever of her first idolatry. Hold! It is not yet too late to retrieve, and by one of those rapid and eccentric movements in literature, which the great genius of Bonaparte was wont to receive in war, to change the whole features of the campaign. And I am so changing it!—I, the last Grand Master of the Order, prior to its final absorption into regnant, peerless Eulis!
So we received our heritage, and the soul of philosophy vanished from India and the world as a dream. The kernel was hidden, and the shell alone permitted to remain to excite the awe of past generations, and the wonder of ours. Ah! most noble Master, you have long since, like Her who came before you, passed forever among the shadows of the invisible, and the dark, but deathless realms, where our fathers have gone before us. But as the material form was indestructible, and lives forever in that land of blossom and of flowers, so that spiritual and ideal emanation shall, through all coming time, live in the minds of men, and never cease to be born anew, for Eulis' nature is infinite and eternal!
How safely our secrets have been guarded, let each answer according to the progress he has made in mastering them. How little was abstracted by the Essenes, Gnostics and Batiniyeh, you all know.
For ten thousand years after Hermes, we lost no more, in our contact with all the various peoples of the world, than the electric elements we threw off in grasping their hands!
Though few in numbers, we guarded the great trust committed to our care with a never-ceasing vigilance. Every member was aware of its importance to the human race. Every member realized that the flowers gathered from the graves of dead years must be preserved as a wreath to crown the age to come. Amid the swarm of sects and societies that sprang to life in the East, surrounded by all the schools that flourished in the Golden Age of Greece, that little band of souls preserved their purity.
Secretly and silently they moved over the sands of time to the coming of the Nazarene. … In the twilight that suceecds the crucifixion of Calvary we can see indistinctly the movements of individuals, and the banding of men. They seem to move with an uncertain purpose, and to have lost their old effectiveness. One, two, three, five hundred years roll by as one would count the hours to midnight. Then there is a bustle. Work is at hand. Into those dark ages that succeed, pass the mustering bands, and for a thousand years death at the stake, persecution and despair on the one hand, and the retribution of the Vehmgerichte and kindred associations, alone point out the position of the contestants, and the progress of the fight.
Then from his cradle in the Alps looms up Christian Rosencrux. Seizing all at a glance, the society is reorganized; no more to dream, but to work; no more to wait for the human race to accomplish its destiny, but to assist in its accomplishment; to offer her bosom to the unfortunate; to raise the fallen; to succor the oppressed; to interpose her form between the tyrant and the slave; to lead the van in the great fight. She has the gathered knowledge of her ages of student-life. She has the patience taught by centuries of adversity. She has the courage of the true and the beautiful; and, above all, she loves the peoples, and Paschal Beverly Randolph succeeded Rosencrux, as the legitimate Grand Master of Rosicrucia, and Hierarch of Eulis. And now I would say one word in regard to contemporary societies. Many of them were organized with meritorious objects in the days gone by, but the state of things that gave them being has long since passed away. They presented a sad spectacle of having outlived their usefulness, and drag out a fitful existence of senseless ceremonies and abstract forms, from which the soul has long departed. A few should receive the tribute of respect due to that which is venerable and good, and Freemasonry should ever be associated with the broad mantle of its charity.
In the superstructures which have been erected at different periods, upon these foundations, one will often observe a pillar, here or there, called the Rose Croix, or occasionally hear the mystic name Eulis, softly pronounced.
I was conversing with a gentleman whom I supposed to be a member of one of these "Chapters," and he said, "The Rosy Cross is dead. We have, it is true, galvanized its skeleton into a transitory life, but the Rosy Cross of history is dead." Dead! I cried. She lives!—lives with the rich blood of the South in her veins; with the vigor of the North in her constitution; with the clear brains of the temperate zone, the depth of thought of the Orient, the versatility of France, and earnestness of purpose, and boldness of resolution of the New World; lives these three hundred years that you think her dead, as she lived the countless centuries before you thought her born; and may she never cease to have a fitting casket for her jewels, and remain a reflex of the glorious truth and beauty of the superlative wisdom, power and goodness.
So far well; but at last the world wants to know more of that wonderful fraternity, which, nameless at times for long centuries, blossomed a few centuries ago as Rosicrucia, but now has leaped to the fore-front of all the real reform movements of this wonderful age, and lo! the banner of peerless Eulis floats proudly—rock-founded—on the breeze. We, the people of Eulis, be it known, are students of nature in her interior departments, and rejecting alike the coarse materialism of the ages, and the sham "philosophies" of the ages past and current, accept only that which forces conviction by its irresistible logic. Men who realize the existence of other worlds than this are not apt to give loose rein to passion; nor he content with fraud in any shape. We cannot take say-sos for facts, and therefore we reject much that appeals to others with the force of truth. We are ambitious to solve all possible mystery; we prefer one method to all other hyper-human agencies, knowing it to be infinitely preferable to all other modes of rapporting the occult and mysterious; and this book, and all others from the same pen, is but a very imperfect sketch or outline of the sublime philosophy of the Templars of Eulis. We know the enormous importance of the sexive principle; that a menstruating woman is an immense power if she but knew it! that a pregnant one holds the keys of eternal mystery in her hand, and that while thus she can make or mar any human fortune! We know the mystic act is one unhinging the gates alike of heaven and of hell; and we know two semi-brainless people may, by an application of esoteric principles, stock the world with mental giants. But where shall we find students? Are not all the people, nearly, the slaves of lust, place, gold? Well, we find one now and then; and we hail him or her as the Greeks hailed the sea—with excessive joy! Thalatta! Thalatta! They are not multitudinous now, but will be in the good time coming.
XXV. Unquestionably while we occupy flesh and blood bodies, and probably after we wear our electric or ethereal ones subsequent to death, Love, other than amicive and filial, will depend upon the magnetic congeniality existing between the two concerned; although even the most perfect state of magnetic fusion and reciprocation is liable to lie disturbed by any one of quite a numerous list of causes.
"We arc all of us, more or less, counterparts and embodiments of nature; and nature has her ups and downs, fogs and sleets, storms and heats, ice and fire, volcanoes and wintry blasts; and so do, so must we. just as long as the earth and nature are as at present; when they change, so will we, and very likely not much before. If between a couple there be a full and mutual play of magnetism, it neither draws from the other, except to replace with his or her own, there is a good chance of general harmony, joy and content tor them. If not, then not. If one party overflows with magnetism, and the other has but a scanty supply, strong love may exist between them, all other things being equal; and the weak one will depend almost for life itself upon the strong; and the strong be firmly drawn toward the weak. But there must be an assimilation between, and blending of, the two magnetisms, else they will assuredly antagonize and repel each other! One party may be very glowing and loving and magnetic, say, for instance, on plane A,—a solid, physical, muscular, heedless, jolly, devil-me-care-sort of individual—say a man; such an one could make a perfect heaven—on his plane—with a woman of the same grade; but how would it be were he conjoined with a joyous, rich-souled, healthy, magnificent, intellectual, refined, delicate and spiritual woman,—equally magnetic as himself, but the grade of whose magnetism was as satin compared to his own—tow-cloth? Now just such couples, or those as naturally and organically incompatible, somehow or other, manage to get together, and the consequence is a life removed from happiness by a great, yawning, impassable gulf, whose black and sullen waters cannot be bridged.
Some day, in the future, there will be honorable methods whereby the present general mixed-upness will be made straight, and people having unfortunately made the wrong choice, and gotten some one's else wife or husband, will be able to—yes—in some cases actually "swap." Why not, if themselves are rendered happier by it; society is satisfied, the prior families duly provided for, and no sin committed, no harm done?
Woman faces heaven when she gives herself to Love and man!—willingly or victimly. The rule is universal, the exceptions monstrous; for there are, there can be none save in three cases—utter human depravity; certain physical malformations; and third, in those mysterious forms of prayer in vogue before Nineveh the first was founded, and whose tremendous importance and vital sacredness compel me to allude to no further herein. The first fact above is not only her nature, but I hold is an especial sign of her celestial nature, and of heaven's mystical favor. She receives both the human and the divine in her demise of affection,—if even by force! But coarser man looks toward the world's face, for then he is almost entirely of the earth earthy. Woman never is; she may be indifferent;horrified—but still she looks toward the empyrean, and from it—however degraded—receives a measure of life divine; for low as she may be, but touch the right chord, and she can mother heroes, and give gladsome Marys to the world.
Now here comes in a mooted point: of one unfaithful wife, and one unfaithful husband, which commits the greater sin?—or is it an equal grade of offence before God? To this I reply: In the act, right or wrong, man gives of himself, whether good or evil; and woman receives. The malign influence is external with and to him; internal with and to her. It is easy for him to rid himself of the bad effects, compared with her ability to do the same; for the foreign influence imparted to,—remains with her, and becomes an integrant of her very being; and, as she naturally stands nearer heaven, the greater is her fall—far greater than his who is already a great deal too near the earth. Hence I hold her sin greatest, just as I would tell an angel who had sinned, "Be thy punishment severe," but would bid a half imbecile to "Clear out and not bother the court."
XXVI. But there is another thought arising right here: It sometimes, and in this age and country, very frequently, happens, that one or both the parties to a marital compact, from a variety of causes, some of which I will state, manage to lose this magnetic attraction toward the other party; and ten to one each will at once conclude that all love between them is wholly lost or dead, when the fact is that each has quite as much as ever, but the bridge is broken down—that mystic bridge, which, resting on the abutments of both souls, spans the gulf of eternity. But, although often broken, this bridge is seldom utterly destroyed. The statistics of divorce prove the position here affirmed; for a large percentage of divorced couples, after enjoying a brief period of "Freedom," begin to think about it; conclude they had not been wise enough, and were altogether too hasty; that, after all, there's no home like the old one; no love like the old love; and they marry each other over again, and, having cut their eve-teeth. steer clear of former faults, and lead happy lives thereafter.
Why? Because they have a little more care; a greater amount of give and take, without being mad about it, and make more strenuous endeavors to please each other—and that's just it! for as soon as people do that, they cease fretting, scolding, fuming, worrying, complaining and borrowing trouble; and therefore cease to waste their magnetisms, consequently the honey bubbles up again and life's vinegar leaks out! Now, owing to these causes, married people are not as they should be,—the happiest beings on earth; far from it; the youths and maidens discount them largely on the general average; and you can almost always tell a married pair wherever you clap eyes on them; for it's heads up! and a smirk or smile to every one else but each other. Not so with unwedded lovers. The former lean away from each other, and gaze askant; the latter lean to each other and drink in delicious draughts of ecstasy from each other's eyes. Now the man who accounts for this state of things on the hypothesis that the one is passion appeased, the other only anticipatory, is a fool, besides being a selfish knave. The true reading is: Magnetic exhaustion in one case—magnetic reciprocity in the other. What magnetism is I will tell you presently; suffice it at this stage to record its existence, and to note such facts as above adduced.
I have already, in a previous paragraph of this section, indicated, generally, by suggestion, the cure for this state of affairs. Briefly, they are to utterly put a stop to all sources of magnetic depletion. Keep cool everywhere, under all provocations and circumstances. Eat, drink, sleep well, and whatever you do, make a business of it. When you work, with hands or brain, do it with a will; but don't work all the time. When the day's labor is done, forget all about it, and devote at least two hours of the evening to social chat, talk, visiting, or receiving visitors; walk out; read, listen to music, and persistently have your two, or even one hour a day, free from sordid strife and worldly care. Hard to do it at first in these grab-all days, wherein, as the sailor said, "People eat hard, work hard, fare hard, sleep hard, have a hard time generally through this life, at length dying hard, and going to perdition at last," which the sceptical old salt said was "particularly derned hard!"
A pint of water contains latent force enough to blow a town to flinders; an equal amount of magnetism contains active force enough to incarnate a new being, and launch an immortal soul upon the limitless sea of eternity! and yet in five minutes of growling, stewing, fretting, anger, or in a wanton's or libertine's arms, thrice that amount of imperial life is lost—and it means, also, the shortening of at least ten good days on earth!
XXVII. Of course excessive venery is an effective nail in any one's coffin; and so is excessive child-bearing, seeing that both are broad rivers, discharging magnetism from the human body and soul. And this reminds me to say something in reference, not to the fetid and unclean subject of conception-preventives, for I hold nearly all of them as utter abominations; but on the culture of the will directly, and the use of that will, and it alone, in determining for and against excessive progeny; for a couple had better have three really fine children, than thirty half-formed and delicate ones.
Excessive connubial pleasures invariably produce dyspepsia, not only of the body, but of the mind, intellect and soul; and when offspring results from such conditions, what wonder that they are lacking in all the grand essentials of a genuine and perfect man and womanhood. Absolute and prolonged continence is but a less evil, though its penalty is inflicted upon the transgressor alone. The human will, next to love, is the most powerful attribute of immortal mankind. In most people it is splurgy, occasional, paroxysmal, and, as a steady power, practically of no account. I have told some persons to "will," and straightway they screwed up their faces, clenched their teeth, and looked most absurdly and amusingly awful—or ridiculous. They strained and fumed as if trying to lift a ton. Now will is no such thing, to be exerted in no such way. It is simply a quiet power, and requires no muscular or nervous, but simply a still, mental force, to urge it into play, when it is feeble, as in most it is; it should be cultivated by thinking determinedly, at intervals, of one thing only at a time, to the total exclusion of every thing, topic or subject besides. Thus one can will—after practice—tears to the eyes, blushes to the cheeks, pallor to the face, as thousands of ministers and other actors constantly do. We can will to close our hands or eyes; and just so we close or open the sphincter ani, or that of the bowels, bladder, lips, and close them at pleasure. The Oneida Perfectionists declare, and with undoubted truth, that any man can, at will, after a little practice, effectually control the ejective action of the seminal vessels; but he is an unwise and suicidal man who attempts a thing so unnatural and injurious.
But how is it with woman? Can she control corresponding uterine muscles? I answer, most assuredly. All mothers and obstetricians know the enormous expulsive power of the uterus; and that contractile and expansive power, like that of any other sphincter, is measurably under her will. When she sees fit to keep it closed, no other power but her own can defeat her purpose; and she ought to know when to exert that power; and there is no necessity to use it, save when she believes an ovum is then present, and undesirable maternity threatened. In the will she has the only natural agent and means, justified of nature and God, of controlling the number of her children; but she is only thus justified, when disease, excessive maternal weariness, a sickly, disordered, depraved or drunken husband, or one whom she hates, or is hated by, or insanity, gloom or malformation, tell her in thunder tones she ought not to give to the world what she cannot give well, and with safety to her own life. By simply willing, and without much strain, the os uteri will close, and remain thus for days together; hence all washes and preventives can be consigned forever to the bad limbo whence they originated.
But this is only one of the silent energies of the human will. It is said, and I believe, that whom a woman blesses or curses when her moon is on her, stays cursed or blessed till that same woman removes it; well, if she curses, she hurts herself, hence cannot afford to do it; but she can, and ought to bless, all the time. This willpower, once started, grows apace; and with it, you, O wife of the troubled heart! can powerfully, silently, resistlessly, use it to direct the mighty magnetic power of your own soul upon him you love, would retain and wear, and wean too, from bad habits, and the malign influence of those who, claiming to be his friends, are really your foes, and, by their bad power over him, are practically enemies to both.
Fail you cannot. Nothing good can ever fail! True it may, to quote Poe, be trodden down; 'but it will rise again to the life everlasting. But to its present application. In far-off Oriental lands I was the guest of some Arab brethren, of a certain mystic tie; and one day, in a boat, we sailed away from Boolak, the port of grand Cairo, up the stately and solemn Nile. How far we went, whither, or what for, matters not; but then and there I ascertained that the women of that brotherhood, and some others in that distant sunny land, knew some natural secrets, which their fairer sisters of the West are totally ignorant of. When one of those wives is perfectly assured that, by reason of illness, age or weakness, she cannot safely bear more children without hazarding both lives, she shrinks with unutterable horror from what our American women contemplate with a "pish." At the house of one Mrs. L—ds, in Boston, I once heard a "woman," then on the point of marriage, declare she never would bear a child; but would kill them just as if they were "so many puppy dogs!"—the worse than female demon! The Oriental wife, I repeat, shrinks with superlative loathing from the idea of murdering, or conniving at the murder of the fruit of her womb, as all true women do, and ever will, knowing she were a murderess if she did; and that she is just as certain to suffer for it subsequent to death, as that death itself is sure to come. She knows that the nature of the ties that bind her in marriage will, time and again, subject her to the chances of maternity. Refuse those risks she never dreams of doing, well knowing she would be either laughed at, abused or divorced, or even, if not, that such denials fail to generate quietude in the tent, or peace in the family. What then? Why, she either times her meeting with her husband, with reference to her periods, so as to avoid distasteful chances; or, if accident prevents that, she merely places the ball of her thumb in her mouth, breathes hard upon it, strains and "bears down," and is instantly out of danger, for both ovum and zoosperm are forthwith expelled by the forceful contractions of the uterine and abdominal muscles. In these respects the law of God rules in the Arab tent, instead of the abortional devils which haunt the boudoirs of civilized and Christian mankind.
It is indeed very seldom that an Eastern woman resorts to that sinless method, and then only when age, disease, or malformations render it imperative. On the contrary, offspring are rightly considered as special blessings from the Supreme God; hence, the first lesson a bride receives from her mother are those that favor such a result. She is told to wholly, fully, freely, prayerfully abandon her entire faculties and being to the one grand end of woman-life—the sacred mission of the wifely mother. Hence it happens that the Oriental wife is always pure; there are not a hundred adulteresses or child-killers in all Islam, with its 200,000,000 votaries! There is not as many of those fearful crimes committed among all the Moslems, in ten years, as disgrace Boston, New York, or Philadelphia every month we live. The Oriental wife, with all her glowing soul, wills—save in very rare instances—to be fruitful, as all women should; and becomes so. There are rare cases in which a wife cannot, without imperilling her life, undergo the ordeal of maternity, and then, and then only, the timely exercise of the will alone forestalls death, prevents crime, and obviates all suffering.
XXVIII. Love, I have stated, is magnetic, and subject to magnetic law. It is a force also, capable, as all know, of exerting very strange effects both upon human souls and bodies. But how? that's the question! Tell us that! I will, listen:—
Matter and mind, in some mysterious way, are not only both alike and unlike, and conjoin to form the thing called man, but they act together directly and indirectly, fully or partially, and yet are not of the same nature, albeit they act and react upon each other in myriad ways, a fact which every one's experience demonstrates beyond cavil. One thing is absolutely certain; that the mind resides in the brain; that in it inheres what constitutes us human; and that the conscious point resides in the centre of the encephalon, at that spot where all three brains meet, viz., cerebrum, cerebellum and medulla, or spinal marrow, which is an elongated brain, is a clear fact, the proof of which can be found by consulting any good anatomical and physiological atlas. In this central point, as through and around the corpus callosum, there is, in death, a nervous and spheral waste; in life a brilliant sun varying in size from that of a large pea to a perfectly gorgeous sun-shining diamond three inches in diameter.—A ball of dazzling white fire!—and this is the soul—the being par excellence, the tremendous human mystery. It has a double consciousness; one facing time and its accidents and incidents; the other gazing square and straight right into eternity. For its hither use it fashions material eyes; for its thither use every one of a myriad rays darting from it is an eye whose powers laugh Rosse's Telescope to scorn! But there arises a fog from the body which mainly so envelops this central point that the eyes are veiled; sometimes in magnetic or other sleep the clouds shift, and then one or more eyes glance over infinite fields, and momentarily glimpse the actualities of space, time, possibility and eternity. [Were I, at this point to reveal what I know of soul, its destiny, nature, and the realities of the ultimate spaces, this world would stand agape! but I resist the temptation, and go on with this book.]
This central ball draws its supplies from space, air, ether, and being mystic and divine, directly from the Lord of the universe,—the Imperial Mystery,—Infinite and Eternal God. [About which mystery the Savans are as greatly at fault as they are concerning the facts of growth.] It breathes; has its tides, its diastole, systole, flux and ebbs; and, being compelled to gaze on the outer world through opaque glasses, diseased bodies, it takes but distorted views of things, and scarce ever can rely upon the absolute truth of what the senses tell it; from which results mistakes, confusion, misapprehensions, crime, and whatever else of evil betides its fortunes here.
The breath of the body is atmospheric air, which air is more or less penetrated with the ether of space, the breath of God, and the magnetism of the heavens surrounding the entire material universe. On these it subsists; and when it means a thing it discharges a portion of its own sphere, its divine nerval life toward the object of its desire and attention; and the vehicle is magnetism, and magnetism is that specific vif or fluid life manufactured by the sexual apparatus of either gender, as said before. The thing conveyed by it is the purpose of a soul; the result, a certain yielding of any other force on earth—for nothing can withstand the absolute decree of the waked-up human soul. Illustration:
XXIX. The soul of a woman non couvert sends its fires all over her form, because she loves the man. The atmosphere surrounding her bulges at the equator of her body—the pelvic region—across the hips; and she draws all males to her then with a very powerful attraction.
But after couverture, and before impregnation, if she be disappointed in her dream of bliss she sends the same sphere out to any one else but him; and for all affectional purposes thereafter, so far as she is concerned, he might as well'be dead; for the sphere flattens up when he is near her, and although he may compel her obedience, he can never reach her soul. Then comes Hades; if not openly, then assuredly behind the scenes! For there's no more warmth, verve, élan, or passion in her for him, because he has lost the power to evoke them; and while he may, by right of human law, and her sufferance, possess her form, her soul in its secure citadel grimly laughs him to scorn, and despises him with perfect unction, because it knows that every time he profanes her he stabs himself to the heart; for he outrages her soul, and outrage invites, curses, and whomsoever on God's broad earth a Woman curses then and there stays accursed, and horror and defeat follows in his footsteps wherever he may be! What d'ye think of that, my lady? What d'ye think of that, my man?
But take a woman after couverture, to the point of pregnancy; no sooner is the monad, seed or germ lodged within the sacred and most transcendently holy and mystical chamber of the womb, and the filamental door has closed the aperture thereof, shutting out and in its treasure, and from all eyes concealing the divine workshop of the Eternal, than her soul withdraws its attentions from the womb direct and alone, and begins to concentrate it and its magnetism upon that womb's contents; and from that instant she begins to love the man no less, but the unborn baby more. Why? Because, up to that point, her soul depended on the man; but now a new soul depends almost wholly upon IT. She must search out all the best particles of her blood, brain, food, drink, air, light, nervaura, muscle, bone, lymph, cartilage, carbon, and a million chemicals wherewith to build up a new body, from original materials, wherein this new soul is to dwell for a time and times and half a time,—if the abortionists, quacks, and fashions don't kill it. The soul sends lime, iron, silver, gold, calcium, nearly all the earths and salts to make the body stout and strong. Then she stores up fire in the bodv,—phosphor,—manufactures canals, pumps, reservoirs, telescopes, drums, cylinders, flutes, columns, domes, cellars, chemical laboratories, and mechanical contrivances of the most marvellous kind. After which she goes aloft and brings down fire from heaven, metaphysical flame, and lodges angels all over the little mansion; music here, science there, mathematics and memory, ambition, hope, joy, sorrow, love and aspiration. After which she takes a lower flight, and calls up tempters from the deeps of being to offset the angels, among whom are avarice, anger, lying, robbery, lust, and a fearful host beside; well knowing that if her new charge reach heaven it must do so alone; must toil, and sweat, and tread upon and over red-hot sands; wade through a million hells on its own feet; fight its way with its own strong hand, alone; while God looks on and smiles, he knowing that the goal is sweet, though the road be bitter, and that victory may be won at last.
Now, what time has a woman got for the frivolities of love when she is doing so grand a work as that?
Well, is it any wonder her love changes from her uterus to her bosom? Not any; and yet there are fools called men who cannot, will not, see all this, but think and insist that she who was so then shall be so now, when in fact a whole universe rolls between the two states. She is queer, short, snappish, soft, cranky then, and no wonder, for she has an undoubted right to raise the very Satan then if she choose; and most of them do it. for the simple reason that they can't help it! Why? Reader, I have already told you that the human being is all nature incarnated. Nature is changeable in her moods, sunny, tempestuous, coarse, foul, mean, genial, calm, blusters; and all these things and states she is forced to incarnate in the soul, spirit, and body of the new pilgrim about starting on its way from the valley of earth to the eternal land of paradise, the splendid city of the Ineffable God.
XXX. I have said that,—pregnant states aside, and even to a great degree then, for the mother is aided in all her mystic work by the husband and father if he be a man, and loving, gentle, kind and forbearing as he should be, and not fly at her in fury and anger, because she fails in some essential things,—the ethereal, magnetic vehicle, with its load of soul-born love, can be by the persistent will projected upon, and made to effectively operate on, almost any though not every human being. There are those that a given person's magnetic effluence will no more touch than water will a duck's back; it rolls off, and never contacts at all. In such hard cases the attempt had better be abandoned, for two reasons: first, it cannot succeed, owing to organic differences of constitution; and second, if it could it would be effort thrown away. But the same power and force can be directed upon ourselves by ourselves, either upon an afflicted member of the body,—from brain to heel,—or upon the internal viscera, as in cases of dyspepsia, liver trouble, kidney difficulty, heart disease, cancer of stomach; above all, the pelvic viscera of either gender when disordered, as most are; gravid uterus, ulcerated, originating frequently in lacerated, vagina; ovarian disease, vulvular congestions; inflamed prostate, or febrile testes and vaginitis,—all these are reachable by the force named, exerted in the manner specified in a preceding section, but which are worth repetition. Direct the attention toward the cause of anxiety,—a person, sick or well, generally, or to a specific point of body, mind, morals,—and strongly, yet calmly, desire, wish, will, the love-cure to be effective; but a few trials will be needed to ensure absolute, if qualified, success; an assuagement will assuredly follow, nor is the genuine cure far off. It is a scientific application of the mother's power over her babe, exerted on a wider scale.
XXXI. But what's the use of anything unless used and enjoyed? There are thousands of married couples living in a very bad and unhappy state, simply because they won't fairly try for any other; and so magnetic will-force is of no account, whatever, as a force per se. It must be exerted to be available. Then, and not till then, it, and the love borne on it, is one of the most powerful instrumentalities on earth. Witness the many undoubted cures of disease effected by those who go about laying on of hands; for although some of them are charlatans, yet others are not, in proof of which behold the results following their practice. But wives and husbands neglect this matter, and suffer in consequence. People find one another growing cool—from causes already set forth herein,—and instead of checking that coolness, by trying to, they fly off at a tangent, set up a domestic growlery, create innumerable excuses for a fuss; grow sullen, morose; and contrive, by every earthly means, to render matters ten times worse than ever; when a timely and persistent resort to the aid of the great magnetic law would speedily correct all the trouble, which, in married life, nine times in ten, originates either in outside or inside magnetic exhaustion; or in domestic passional satiety, and excessive nervous waste, which creates disgust on one side, antipathy on the other, with a grilling fire of discontent beween the two. Now this, to some, may be an unpalatable truth, yet true nevertheless. And here, as well as anywhere else, let me say further, that a fair share of obedience to the supreme law of cleanliness, sunshine and ventilation, will go a great way toward preventing magnetic exhaustion, and put a stop to that same satiety and disgust, with all their attendant and overcrowning horripilances. Some people bathe too often, and I have seen those whom I did not believe had bathed five times in sixty years.
If a wife finds her husband growing cool, let her attend to her dress, manner; smiles instead of frowns; sugar, not salt; honey, not vinegar; and place her will steadily, strongly, persistently, upon him, at the same time sending forth her woman's love, sympathy, and magnetic force of magnetic love. The man don't live who can resist it! His love will revive just as surely as that heaven exists. But she cannot work this magic charm in anger, jealousy or indifference. Let her remember this, for it is the grand true secret of fascination—was learned from the birds, and has worked miracles in human life. The same principle obtains among unwedded lovers!
When wives dress up and put their best foot forward to please their own households, as they do for outsiders; when the husband dons his best coat and pantaloons, boots and hat, cane and gloves as often and readily, to walk out with his own wife, as—when away—he does to do the same for somebody else's, the world will be a good deal better off than it is to-day.
Men's lives will be happy and pleasant when they learn: 1st. That a woman is a woman—not a softer sort of man. 2d. That wives appreciate forbearance. 3d. That occasionally a woman's organization becomes so deranged that she needs sympathy, love, tenderness and great patience on his part, for she cannot help her vagaries. Bread thus thrown upon the waters will return a harvest of love ere many days. 4th. A wife is a truer friend, even if homely, than the most beautiful outsider that ever lived. 5th. Take your wife into your counsels; the place of amusement; walk, talk, and be pleasant with her. Attentions pay large interest. 6th. Never bring all your troubles home to saddle them on her; and 7th, and last, Study your wife, and adapt yourself to her; let her really be your other half; for lo! ye twain are one flesh. No matter what mothers-in-law, or any relation, may say or do. Remember that ye are one, and "For this cause shall a man leave father and mother and cleave (only) to his wife," if she really be such in soul and spirit, as well as in law, gospel, and appearances.
Any mother, can, if she will, produce offspring that shall be superior to either parent, by avoiding all disagreeables of whatever kind or nature. By believing she shall and will produce a superior specimen of the race, and by firmly resisting discontent, anger, jealousy, hatred, and all evil—dwelling only on that which is true, beautiful and good.
Women suffering from affectional perversions, resulting in the trains of evils known as "female complaints," have a positive means of rejuvenation in the will, in the cultivation of the purer attributes of their nature observance of the law of soap and water, and a firm determination to be no longer slaves to drugs, anger, selfishness, the doctors, envy, or anything else calculated to unbalance them. Thus mentally they can heal themselves, become healthy, and gain the new life, energy, and power.
We now pass to the consideration of one of ihc most strange and aberant phases of love—if love he not a misnomer as applied to it—with which the mind has to grapple during its search into the mazy labyrinths concealed beneath the human form.
XXXII. If it was possible for me to look upon this broad world and broader universe with the jaundiced eyes of some zealot, full of bile, gloom, bitterness and bigotry; if I were capable of believing that God is not all good; if I could imagine a yawning gulf, and it peopled with tortured souls, whose agonizing shrieks for sudden death were answered back by the exultant shouts of jubilant fiends, with a King Devil at their head,—which I can't—but if I could, then would I believe that from that pit, clean back of the shadow of God, came trooping forth a score of superlatively horrible gorgons, destined by the mandate of the chief fiend to desolate the earth, and torment mankind, among which, one, always clad in rays of light, yet sweltering with venom at its heart, stands among the foremost. I mean that awful thing for which in English there is no name, but which ever and always assumes the garb and mien and office of the bright, heaven-born angel, LOVE. In other of my books I have named this pestilent thing Vampiyrism.
Now the name is familiar to everybody, because, in the first place it pertains to a monstrous leech which inhabits tropical waters; fastens on to whatever has sentient life, and never lets go until the last drop of blood is sucked out, and the victim topples into the arms of death. Secondly, the same name is applied to a huge bat inhabiting dark caverns in Oriental and other lands, darkness and gloom being its natural habitat; and when man or beasts travelling along that way chance to fall asleep, this bat of Hades stealthily approaches, and gently, soothingly, flaps its huge wings, croning and droning its wierd sing-song the while; thus fanning its victims, until a deep, comatic sleep falls upon them, so hard and strong, that not a stir is made while the bat opens a vein, and drinks its fill of living gore!
When the awaking crimes, the eves open in another world than this, tor mankind, never at all for beasts. The name in the third use is attached to certain peculiar, fantastic beings,—half human, half demon, of Oriental and German story. These beings emerge from deep darkness in the middle of the night; open new-made graves, take out the bodies therein, eat the flesh, and then, the horrid banquet over, stealthily return whence they came, surfeited to plethora with the dreadful repast. But it sometimes happens—so goes the legend—that no new-made graves offer their temptations, and still the ghouls must live; wherefore they gain access to houses and drain the veins of whomsoever they possibly can. These harpies are, however, vulnerable to shot and death; but if you kill one, be sure to bury him five feet or a fathom, beneath the solid earth; and be sure you run a stake through his breast, with a cross on top; and if possible, at a cross-roads; for if you neglect to do this, and the vampyre's body remains above ground, just as soon, and as surely as the moon's beams shine upon it, just so surely will its life return and it go scot free to continue its ravages through successive lives and deaths. All these horrid things, whether creative of nature in some of her dark moods, or whether some of them are the offspring of perverted imagination, the reality, if of life or of legend, alike are all bad enough, and we turn from the bare contemplation of each with a shudder, begotten of horror on the body of disgust; and yet, fearful as they are, not one of them, or all combined, can equal the horrible reality—the absolutely unmistakable genuine, living human ghouls, right in our very midst; devouring gorgons, who are everywhere about us; who go up and down our streets, and in and out before us, clad in fine raiment; faces decked with smiles; and who only enter our houses, and partake of our hospitality, to betray our trust, and fatten on the lives of us and ours—for where of the male gender their sole aim is to gratify their own infernal morbidity of passion at anybody's expense whatever; and the wives and daughters of our friends become the prey of wretches, for whom no punishment is too severe;—doubly-dyed vampires, from whom conscience has forever taken its flight, and to whom gratitude is unknown. The ghoul originates in such marriages as have no love to cement the union. The father is a coarse, selfish, material surface man, without tenderness, affection,—anything wholly human; and his wife, if not as cold as himself, is probably just the opposite, and from the altar to the grave never realizes the least love:—nothing but selfish passion,—is a woman who yearns, and vainly, for what she cannot get,—true love; and the consequence is that her child comes to earth with yearnings never to he gratified: love-hungry from eternity to time, and through time all the way back to eternity again! Now, when he or she thus born, encounters those of opposite gender, who are full of love, they cling to such with the tenacity of death itself, until they sap out the full soul, and fill their empty ones. What care they even though desolation, despair and death follow in their footsteps, and all their tracks are blood spots from hearts that they have broken? For so long as these leeches get their fill, no matter what evil betides those upon whom they feed,—and whom they ruin. These ghouls have no principle, declare love with like fervor to every one they meet; and having ruined them, blasted their happiness, destroyed their peace of mind, shipwrecked families, violated daughters, debauched honest men's wives, they brag of it, and send fiery clouds of remorse and shame, to crown the victims of their rapacity, and coarsely brutal lust. Their crime is fiendish. I conclude this section by briefly recapitulating the res gestæ of it, which may be thus summarized:—
Many people of both sexes often experience a terrible attraction toward another, that resembles, but is not, love. On the contrary, it is a fearful, monstrous passion, and they almost vainly struggle to escape it. Such persons are vampyrized; and a vampyre is a person born love-hungry, who have none themselves, who are empty of it, but who fascinate and literally suck others dry who do have love in their natures. Detect it thus: the vampyre is selfish, is never content but in handling, fondling its object, which process leaves the victim utterly exhausted, and they don't know why. Break off at once. Baffle it by steady refusal; allow not even hands to touch, and remember that the vampyre seeks to prolong his or her own existence, life and pleasure, at the expense of your own. Women when thus assailed should treat the assailant with perfect coldness and horror. Thus they can baffle this pestiferous thing—which is more common than people even suspect; in fact, an everyday affair. Many a man and wife have parted, many still live unhappily together, some aware, but many unconscious, that the prime cause of all their bickerings and discontent is vampyrism on the part of one or the other. It causes fretfulness, moodiness, irritability; a feeling of repugnance arises toward the one who should be most dear; and eventually positive dislike takes the place of that tender affection which should ever grow more and more endearing between those who have given themselves to each other. This dislike becomes in many cases so strong that the parties cannot endure each other's presence; and separation becomes inevitable, neither, perhaps, conscious of the true cause. This is sometimes owing to an inferior development of amativeness, sometimes to debility, lack of vitality, the consequence of a feeble or shattered nervous system; and in either case the cure is to be found in less frequent contact, separate rooms, health, and mutual endeavor to correct the fault.
XXXIII. What vast hosts, what tremendous throngs of what are called husbands, and notoriously what almost infinite numbers of married women find home a real hell on a small scale instead, and all for want of mutuality, domesticity, sympathy, and, above all, reciprocity, that is the impartation and reception each by, to, and from the other, of the mysterious thing known as magnetism! And many such there be, who, realizing nothing but the worst kind of blanks in their lottery of life, actually long for death, or anything else, to mitigate or change the current horror of their lives. People, too, make great mistakes about this self-same mystic magnetism. They imagine it to be either all physical, or all mental, when, in fact, it is both; and this subtle fluid, or emanation, is the absolute connecting link between soul and body, matter and mind, and, ultimately, between man and the Deity. Thus in a few lines is solved a mystery which has puzzled the world for centuries,—that of the subtle something which was, and is, the connecting link between the two. There is a magnetism or effluence of soul, arising in, and flowing forth from, the persons of either sex, who are, by nature, endowed with large, open, free, sensitive, generous souls; and this sphere is deeply charged with mind, love, and all else that distinguishes noble from ignoble souls. Nor does this magnetism depend at all upon size of brain, or mere physique; for it abounds as much among the small people, intuitive and physically weak, as it does among those who are materially opposite in construction. Hence a man or woman of this sort, if the partner be loved, will be able to parent offspring every way perfect, and, physically speaking, better than themselves. There is but little danger of such persons going to the bad, because all their natural tendencies are upward and advancive, not retrogressive, barbaric, or descensive; for their soul-magnetism charges their physical, and it is full of life, energy, emotion and goodness; hence, whoever comes within the area of its action is benefited, not injured; and this is an imperative, universal rule.
XXXIV. But there is another, and to some extent, more powerful magnetism than this. And I may here remark that it is a generally conceded fact that illegitimate children are nearly always smartest, as compared with the fruits of honest marriage; but are they the best? Doubted, as a general thing. They are smarter, fuller of nerve, dash, élan, because struck into being at passion's highest tide; but their moral natures and principles are almost universally, wofully deficient; and of all the famous bastards of history not one was ever noted for goodness! True, they all have a very large measure of personal magnetism, and mental force; but let it never be forgotten that goodness alone is absolute power, and, therefore, the best is always greatest, even though the good man make less show than the more volatile and estimably gifted son of earth; wherefore, he who would beget the noblest sons and daughters must do so under the dominance of a calm and steady love, within the pales of those barriers which society has erected to protect itself from barbaric savage principles and peoples, individual as well as aggregative.
XXXV. There is another sort of magnetism, rich, full, voluptuous, Websterian, which originates in body, not in soul; and it flows in copious streams from the persons of such as have it, suffusing everything and everybody with its warm and vivifying power. It is charged with passion, enthusiasm, volcanic fire; and while it warms others is very apt to burn. It comes of full veins, large lungs, livers, good digestion, steady nerves, fulness of habit, appetite and spirit, and always more or less wins influence and marked distinction for its possessor. Aaron Burr was a good example of its nature, character, and power. Now mark this: The ghoul wins and ruins, because affectionally and in love he is a perfect vacuum; and silly, female butterfly women rush to him, and get their wings scorched like any miller at a candle, because the empty gorgon draws upon their fulness. They think to find reciprocation, but attain utter exhaustion and ruin instead. On the other hand, the physically magnetic man suffuses the bodies and souls of his victims with his own magnetic fulness; the woman, or man, as the case may be, is drawn to him or her, and while he or she is there to keep up the incessant play of aromal forces, both are happy; but when the parting time comes, and the lesser person no longer has the full one to draw, drain, or feed upon magnetically, then heart-aches and excruciating pangs follow upon one side, and, generally, a magnificent indifference and don't-care-much-about-it-ness on the other.
People with debts of gratitude to pay name towns, counties, lakes, rivers, ships, inns, horses, and boats after their benefactors and friends. I never exactly follow precedents, yet have a little bill to pay, and do it by christening a hitherto nameless crime. I allude to the horrible one committed by a species of human ghoul differing from either of the others just described. The Dentonite,—for such is the name I give the awful sin—is soulless, and altogether void of human feeling; I mean he is not immortal any more than a mongrel cur-dog is, and his lack of soul impels him to seek to supply the dreadful want from young girls, whom he will remorsely violate and ruin, even if cool deliberate knife-butchery aids him in his fiendish crime—as is often the case; and terrible, awful, outright murder ends the dreadful tragedy. I can conceive no worse horror than that, nor give it a more befitting name.
XXXVI. My investigations into the mysteries, philosophy, and rationale of the human being, and its loves and passions, has led me to the inevitable and irresistible conclusion that Force is of body, nerves, and muscular organization mainly; and that real Power lies in the soul alone. Now, by the term power I do not mean, as some have misunderstood me in the past to mean, the mere genital powers common alike to man and brutes; but I do mean that irresistible energy latent in all souls, and developed but in an exceedingly limited few. I hold that no power, such as is here intended to he understood, ever comes to man through the intellect. I affirm that the Baconian adage, "Knowledge is power," is not wholly, but only partially true; for I here repeat, Goodness alone is power, and goodness inheres not in brain, but in heart, metaphysically speaking, or on the emotional side or department of man's intricate and involute nature; wherefore, I lay it down as an axiom, that power can only come to, and be developed in, the soul through Love; not passion or lust, look you, but Love; the underlying, primal fire-life of the immaterial soul; the invisible being that constitutes us man or woman; the fire-energy subtending the very basis of our being and, indeed, of all else that exists outside the Eternal Flame itself, the unimaginable Lord God of the Infinite Universe, that most mystical Heat which fuses all things, subtends all existence, and which is the formative floor of the worlds now rolling in silent majesty through space, cushioned upon the Æther, the very breasts of the mother side of God! Now, the true sensing of that higher, deeper, inner love is the beginning of the road which leads the soul into, and invests it with, real power in the loftier degrees; for Love, I maintain, lieth at the foundation. And it is the very synonym of life and strength, and lordly will, and clingingness, and truth, and real development; wherefore, I lay it down as another immutable truth that the true-love conjugation of man and wife is the loftiest and most sacred prayer to, and imitation of, God, possible to any creature in the whole vast realm of matter and mind, spirit and thought. Thus, in proof: how often it happens that a loving couple continually grow more youthful in soul, fruitful in happiness, and joyous in habitude, instead of servile, decrepit, warped and prematurely wrinkled, as in the cases of those to whom the wondrous realities of love are as thrice-sealed books! Why? Because they who thus truly love, in their sacred, spiritual passion, strike out this divine spark; partake of that celestial fire; replenish themselves with the quintessence of life itself; grow better, and spiritually stronger, and more beautiful, ripe, morally wealthy, calm, hopeful, attuned to this upper music; pass the brutal lands untouched; walk unharmed amidst moral malarias, and draw down to their souls, as copper-rods the lightning, the divine fervor and fire of the aerial spaces, the far-off heavens, and become baptized of the Holy Spirit, and earthly protegés of the supreme Lord of Glory,—our God.
Now once in a while couples do love each other, and from the product of such unions, what few civilized people there are take their rise and departure; and thus the world is saved by God's fiat, just as one honest man, and good, was declared sufficient to prevent the overthrow of Sodom.
The world owes its salvation to the accidents of Love; but by and by, what are now exceptional cases will become the universal rule, and then farewell human Boyhood, and welcome glorious Manhood.
Couples not loving each other are mutually exhaustive, and, as a consequence, fret and fume, worry the life out of one another, and wear their very souls threadbare and to shreds, so that here on earth they amount to but little, and after death enter the ethereal realms in a state of immortal leanness, wizzenness, scranniness, requiring, perhaps, ages of time, or, at least, a long lapse of years, before they can ever reach a condition of soul-fatness, or celestial plumptitude. We can gain much by truly loving!
XXXVII. Light is the shadow of God! Deity is never to be seen, for He ever recedes from telescopic or visual scrutiny. But He is always to be felt; and whosoever feels for God is sure to touch and find him! for when we feel for him, he invariably comes forth and whispers to the soul: Here am I! But the inscrutable Being dwells within the Everlasting Shadow,—behind the Everlasting Flame; for He is the Eternal Fire! and the quintessence of All Heat; not the heat of combustion, but its opposites, like unto that which is evolved from within our souls when we truly Love. Men gazing upon solar light have been struck dumb with the tremendous conception that God was concentrated Light, and that to find him they must rush into the intolerable effulgence, the awful brilliance of all the focal spaces! But they erred. The amazing glories they beheld and conceived, and which they confounded with, or to he the very God, was but the dark shadow shielding him from view in the penetralia of mystery! Man, not God, is concentrated, focalized fire,—a condensation and crystallization of God's Nervous Fluid; and even thing, especially the human soul, is a form of that fire. But man, as we know him here, is not the only self-consciousness in being; nor is this the best or worst of worlds. There are, and the Ærial spaces abound with, multiform intelligences, having their conscious origin in Æthereal realms, as we have ours in matter. But as the divine Fire is the base of all alike; and as love and inter-fusion is the destiny of all, it follows that there is one common point where the sub-human, human, and ultra-human can contact each other and meet; and this point is that of interblending, for that one point everywhere, and in all things, is the only one thing common to all which exist as living entities anywhere.
It follows again that the higher the motives urging us when that universal duty is accomplished, the more powerful is the prayer it really is; the higher it reaches; the more it brings us en rapport with the blessed ones of the purer Æth, and the greater rain of goodness, power, health, life, mystic enjoyment, and all possible good it calls down upon our heads to saturate our souls. But there are grades of these ultra-human orders, towering away from our place and position in the eternal scale, in series vast, inconceivable, of Orders, Societies, Grades, Hierarchies, to an unimaginable Eterne: and other series descending to an equally unimaginable deep of the opposites of what we call goodness; and these, too, meet us on one common ground as the others; and can and do, when we give lust the rein, instead of love, ascend from the depths to us. and infuse us with strange ills and evils. The White Magic, which I here reveal, teaches how to rapport the good. The Black Magic of Africa and America (Voudooism) rapports us with the denizens of hell; and crime and wretchedness as surely flow out from the one affiliation, as the good flows forth from the other. I have made this revelation here, because it will do good, and afford a new held for the explorations of such as are interested in solving the tremendous problem of evil, its nature and origin.
XXXVIII. I have already told the world herein and elsewhere—[in "Soul, the Soul-world, and Homes of the Dead;" a reprint and enlargement of the original volume "Dealings with the Dead"]—that the seat of human consciousness is in the brain,—that it is a polar world or globe of white diamondesque fire in the human head. It is subject to two states, a positive and negative, masculine or electric; and a feminine, magnetic, or womanesque state. In its intellectual or male mood, it thunders forth its edicts from its throne in the brain, the central point of the head. But in its most awe-inspiring, creative and mystic moods, its fiats are given forth from another seat within the body. The brain is its throne of Force; the pelvis its seat of power! In sleep, especially that which is healthful, therefore dreamless, the soul sends a fibril of fire—an incandescent railway, from the corpus calossum to the medulla oblongata, down the spinal marrow to right back of the stomach; to the solar plexus,—the great storehouse where the servants of the body bring all the treasures they have gathered during the wakeful day, from the various laboratories,—stomach, intestines, ovaria, nerve-ganglia, lungs, liver, testes, arteries; and there the soul charges the fine aroma with its own life, and sends them back to become parts and portions of the living being; it imparts life-fire to every section of the human frame. After this the soul sometimes sends a filamental cord out into the air, above the earth, and on that ladder of light mounts the azure, and scans and contemplates distant scenes, and occasionally unfathomable mystery itself! Hence all dreams, could we translate them, have a fixed and determinate meaning.
But there is a farther revelation to be made right here. If human interblending occurs white weary, half asleep, vexed, anxious, distrustful, suspicious, thinking of money, or in an excited, passionate or mental state, two things are likely to occur, i.e., pregnancy,—in which case the child is sure to come here and stay here, die here, and go to the other world, and remain there, for centuries perhaps—half asleep, vexed, anxious, distrustful, suspicious, and mentally or otherwise excited all the livelong years; for although the woman builds up the child, the father invariably imparts the bias, because:—
XXXIX. In the beginning of the marriage every fibre of his body sends a spiritual—material portion of itself to the left half of the prostate gland, and his spiritual, emotional, soul and mind send corresponding portions of themselves to the right half of the prostate, and at the exact instant that these all meet at that point, the nervo-vital muscles spasmodically contract, and the procreative fluid passing through, takes with it the prostatic exudations, and the immortal being is thus charged with a joyous load of heaven, or a grievous burden of intolerable horrors. But impregnation may not occur; yet the fluids thus charged, and discharged, arc absorbed in great measure by the innumerable mouths and duels of the vaginal parietes, and she absorbs his physical, mental and moral poisons as surely as if the husband was freighted down with syphilitic virus;—only that the one eats away and cankers her flesh; while the other corrodes her soul!
Men are proverbially, in these matters, careless of possible consequences, and this is a source of terrible dread to their wives; to such a degree, that fear paralyzes their passional nature; and on their side there is, and can be, no response; finding which to be the case, the average husband grows crisp and cranky, offish, petulant, downright angry; all of which she feels, and discord and misery reign beneath that roof.
Well? Reply: By an effort of the will the male can prevent the prostatic flow; and, secondly, the wife by becoming mentally positive at the crisis, and willing that she ought not, must not, will not conceive, cannot; or that she will not absorb that which will impair her mental or physical health—cannot so absorb it. Hence she is safe, whenever she wills to be!
XL. Power, true power, can only descend from heaven to true loving souls, because power is feminine, and woman represents it, albeit she is practically ignorant of the fact; and a man has yet to learn that the seeds of power descend either through the feminine channels of his soul, or to him through woman. All great men have been made so through women, either by their mothers, or by some woman whose love made her will and wish him to be good, great and happy, during the sacred prayer of holy, loving wifehood. I have already alluded to the ability of a woman to utterly ruin any man her soul loathes and hates, under precisely the same circumstances; for it lies within her power to make or mar the best man living. I have seen it tried, in both the make and the mar, and with results magnificent in the one case, and insufferably poignant in the other. Thus man, by love all the time, but especially then, can wholly modify woman's character, and kindle her ice to a gentle, constant and invigorant flame. But carelessness and ignorance on the part of many millions of wives, in some sense, make them responsible for their own miseries; for they all have the ability to resist the depleting effects of pestilent vampyrism, and avoid all the diseases, disasters and ailments, mental, moral, physical and emotional, thus engendered; and also to wholly transform the nature and character of almost any man, no matter how coarse, inconsiderate, careless, indifferent or mean.
In declaring these new and weighty truths I victoriously plant the white banner over the frowning ramparts of the social world. Why? How? Attend:—
XLI. Because almost everywhere in this broad land marriage practically exists as a repressive system; it is all head, and the man is that head, while the wife is but an appendage, and by no means either partner or equal; and, so long as such is the case, things will not grow better, because happiness is what every one seeks for, and if not found at the fireside at home will be searched for elsewhere. Now I want to stop all that by showing the law underlying human weal as it has never been shown before on earth. The system of marriage should be one of absolute equality and partnership between couples. I want to help along that system; for the one now in vogue practically drives enormous hosts of people to heaven across lots, over steep-down gulfs of social and domestic horror. I am teaching all to avoid such. On the marriage question, as mainly discussed at present, there is too much everlasting gabble on the horrors of deformity in all parts of the social machine; but I seek to make people purer, nobler, truer, and draw, not drive, them heavenward by appeals to the good, the true, and the beautiful latent within them, and which, when active, brings bliss to every beating heart.
XLII. Too many marriagees concern themselves about mourning; I wish them to be deeply, continually interested about joy. They think mainly concerning how to make the best of a bad bargain; bearing life's crosses; abiding with befitting patience to the end, and all that; while I am teaching them how to make a bad bargain an exceedingly good one; how to neutralize the social poisons by wholesale—and the worst of them are generated at home; and all through the triple white magic of Love, will, and persistent trying; that is, to cure their ills by the constant exercise of common sense, which, it seems, after all, is a very uncommon thing, judging by the stupid way in which nine married couples out of every ten totally ignore its clear and plain behests; for common sense is the genius of the average mind, and is an excellent guide to go by.
XLIII. I have said, and it is true, that the other, the feminine, magnetic, and, therefore, superior pole, or polar dwelling, of the viewless soul of human kind, is in the genital system of each sex respectively; whence it follows that in all nuptial unions, where true love reigns and rules, governs and controls, the entire beings of each party, the entire soul of each officiates at the banquet, and the celebration; wherefore, both the positive and negative powers and forces of each party assist at the—in the—incarnation of the new soul, if a new soul is then and there called into outer being, to run the gauntlet of time in its race to the fields of eternity; and all such generation is holy; and, it being a genuine marriage, none but truly human children are called into the world.
But where no love inspires the parents, only one of the two grand forces of their souls officiate either in, or at, the generation of their mutual offspring; and such children are death-sure to be deficient in some quality, and to pay through lives more or less angular, limited, and bitter, for the sins of their parents, and their profanation of the holiest of all human sanctities, and violation of the grandest and deepest law of the human world—that of Love; from such conditions it happens that the lands are teeming with half-men, half-women, and abound in human weaklings. "Illegitimates" are exceptional in brilliance, because at least some tolerable measure of Love, and a great deal of Passion, obtained when they were called into earthly existence.
Apply the principle herein laid down, and it is not hard to see the reason why inferior-brained, but strongly loving and loved women, become mothers of mental-moral millionaires, while brainy mothers give us children born to intellectual penury. Men with comparatively small cerebral capital and calibre, but whose love-nature is large, full, open, generous, almost invariably become fathers to their mental superiors; while per contra we all know that great talent, and actual genius seldom produces anything higher than a very low grade of mediocrity. Their children are notoriously below par—and PA also. These truths may be new and novel, as are many of those to follow herein, but they are assuredly destined and commissioned to revolutionize the world of thought on these subjects, nevertheless and nothwithstanding.
XLIV. The negative or brain pole of the soul, so to speak, is Thoughtful. Its mission is to scan, search, explore, investigate, reason, understand, know. It is en rapport more or less perfectly, with the intellectual and knowing universe; that is to say, it is masculine and electric. Now an electric man "progresses," stores up, advances toward, and captures knowledge, facts, things, ideas and principles; and only give him time, and he will become an encyclopædia on legs, for all that's knowable he feels bound to find out. But the positive pole or sphere of the soul being feminine or magnetic, is in direct contact or rapport with the very soul of being itself;—the foundation fires of the universe—with all that vast domain underlying increase, growth, generation, evolution, emotion, heat, expansion, energy, power—the sole and base of being, the arterial blood of God Himself—measureless Love—the primal fire-flow of the whole vast realm of universal existence, whence the female is nearer God than the male, and God is far more female than its opposite; for it is in him, as in the human, a far less labor to create than it is to gestate and bring forth. God struck the universe into being by a single fiat of his Imperial Will; but it took even him billions of centuries to gestate and bring forth man; just as a man occupies one second of time only, to plant a monad in the uterine soil, but it takes woman forty odd weeks to prepare it for its uses on the earth; or it takes man one second to begin a work, which occupies all the energies of woman's soul and body about twenty-six million seconds to complete what he began! Hence one good mother is worth at least fifty millions of male drones, without love to guide them heavenwards; and her influence for good in the universe, bears the same ratio to his worthlessness, as a general rule; and right here I desire to impress upon my readers, not only the tremendous value and importance of any human soul, and the awful consequences of destroying human life at any stage; but to enforce upon them the absolute necessity of marriage and parentage,—for every child, no matter how imperfect, is eventually a positive gain to the universe; and every female who goes to the grave childless; every man who fails in his duty to himself, God and nature, and dies without prolonging his human line, commits a grave offence,—so grave as not to be easily forgiven.
Thus it is readily seen that through Love man seizes directly on all that is, and is in actual contact and rapport with all and singular every being that feels and Loves within the confines of the habitable universe. But an}-amount of brain or learning he may have affiliates him to a very few at most, because all sentient creatures love and feel, while comparatively few can think and know. Love forever against the world! The positive throne or seat of the soul, in the male, is in, near, and about, the prostatic gland, with three radii extending to the connected viscera, whence it happens that emasculation injures the very soul itself.
In the female, the major force of the soul resides in the uterus, with three radii extending to the right and left ovaria and the connected viscera, whence it happens that illness or injuries there have the most baleful, injurious and debilitating effect upon every portion and department of her being and nature. We often hear the phrase "A fine specimen of a woman!" "A magnificent woman!" but such terms are never applied to any mere bundle of brains, but always of those of fine physical presence, geniality of demeanor, and magnetic fulness, indicating Love within the soul, whether it be well and highly cultured or not. Now it is possible for a man to grow fat who is lean, or lean who is fat, by pursuing steadily Bantingism—I believe they call it—or its opposite, as the case may demand; and I know that a lean soul can also grow fat, and non-magnetic people reverse their states. The mode I have already herein pointed out, hence need not again recur to.
XLV. Do not forget that herein and elsewhere I have declared the great truth that true manhood and womanhood are more or less en rapport with one or more of the upper hierarchies of Intelligent Potentialities, earth-born and not earth-born. I believe there are means whereby a person may become associated with, and receive instruction from, them. More than that, I believe in what I may call will-magnets, or talismans; that it is possible to construct and wear them, and that they emit a peculiar light, discernible across the gulfs of space by those intelligent powers, just as we discern a diamond across a play-house; that such are signals to the beholders; and that they will, and do, cross the chasmal steeps to save, succor, and assist the wearers, just as a good brother here flies to the relief of him who shall give the grand hailing-signs of distress. This is provable.
This grand mystery of the will, properly cultured, is the highest aid to man, for it is a divine Energos, white, pure magic, the miracle-working potentiality which cometh only to the free and wholly unshackled human soul; while to woman it is the only salvation from marital vampyrism, the shield and buckler of her power, and the groundwork upon which must be builded the real rule of her influence in the world and at home. The reasons why will be readily seen by recurring to the basic propositions of the divine science, which declares that God, the soul of the universe, is positive heat, celestial fire; that the aura of Deity (God-od) is love, the prime element of all power, the external fire-sphere, the informing and formative pulse of matter. The deduction is crystalline; for it follows that whoso hath most love—whether its expression be coarse or fine, cultured or rude—hath, therefore, most of God in him or her; the element of time being competent to the perfecting of all refining influences, over the ocean of Death, if not upon the hither side. Conversely put, the statement stands thus: whoso most resembleth God, therefore, hath most of love, goodness, and the elements of power. God is not a libertine! Now these latent energies I claim to here give the true knowledge of, that all may understand the laws of love, will, and ethereal force, and the principles and modes of their evolution, and crystallization in the homos; the result aimed at being the elimination of the gross, and their orderly consolidation into personal power. I hold that Love is, ever was, and eternally will be, absolutely pure. Paste is not diamond, though they resemble somewhat, nor is Love ever anything but its own transcendant self; yet normal passion is divine, because through it alone God gives true men to the great man-wanting world. There can be no such thing as unholy Love; nor good badness, nor bad goodness.
XLVI. Silence is strength, and the silent lip and steady head alone are worthy. I do not believe in the, to me, absurd dogma of human equality; it is the demonstrable negation of all human reason and experience; is a hypocritical, cruel, and delusive falsehood; puts people out of their element, and into wrong positions; it never was, will, nor can be, true; for "aristocracy" of some kind always rules, is always a unit in interests, while "democracy" is always ruled, and is eternally at war with itself, and clashing about its own interests, which interests it perpetually injures and destroys. But it is true that some souls are nobler, better, higher, finer, richer, riper, rounder,—these seven,—than some other souls, and are worth immeasurably more, whether weighed or plumbed in God's scales or man's. For some souls are young, green, acid, acrid, bitter, imperfect, and non-poised,—these seven,—and such stand for æons of ages gaping, on the highways, at regal souls rushing across the deeps toward Achievement; here, there, now, then, up the streets of the worlds, and down the corridors of heaven. Splendid, "aristocratic" souls, who will circumnavigate eternity while the others are wondering, "What next?" and, "Did you ever!"—new souls, just created, requiring a thousand or two of ages to get their eternal sea-legs on, before being able to steadily walk the decks of the eviternal ship of centuries and power, or compete with those who, living now, yet have passed their ordeals long before this civilization had taken root in the mouldy soil of scores that had preceded it.—Men who make and govern circumstances instead of allowing circumstances to govern them.
XLVII. True Passion is but one, and a minor mode, of Love's expression; its offices are triplicate; and when people understand that one grand secret, farewell to social, domestic, and all other ills; and it is this grand secret I have, for long years, been teaching, somewhat, not fully, in all my books, on both shores of the oceans that girdle the world. I know that brains and intellects differ, but hearts and affection are ever the same; that through these last man can attain unto Godness, and woman reign queen and equal, where she now serves as drudge, toy, and legal and illegal—something worse; that woman, as such, has most of love crystallized within her, and for that reason is entitled to stand the peer of the best man breathing God's free air; not by reason of her beauty, accomplishments, wealth, or any other accident, but because she hath the womb,—the perfected laboratory wherein she fashioneth, and alone completes, what it took God, Nature, and Man, singly and combined, to only begin; and that, too, so badly, that the wonder is, that swarming hordes of murderers do not throng the world's highways where civilized man now walks. But so infinitely great an artiste is she, that from the worst of seed she has raised many a splendid human tree; redeemed the race from savagery; fostered and cultured art, science, religion, and all that renders earth habitable, and that, too, under all sorts of repressions and bad conditions; assuredly entitling her now to a chance of trying what she can do, under favorable circumstances, who did so well under the bad; and I hold this to be the strongest argument for woman ever made since the world began; and I advance it only as one of the external reasons I entertain, holding in reserve others as much stronger and more cogent than these, as a chain-cable is superior to a child's slender whip-cord.
XLVIII. I further hold that there are Æthereal (spacial) centres of Love, Power, Force, Energy, Goodness, and for, and of, every kind, grade, species, and order of knowledge known to man, and whereof he knows not anything; and that it is not only possible to reach those centers, and obtain those knowledges, but that it is achievable by a vast number, who now drone and doze away life, die half ripe, and wake up, when too late, to find out what fouls they have been, necessitating what it is not the present purpose to reveal. In the present instance it only remains for the purposes of this Declaration of Principles, to draw a brief comparison between my system and the very best that can possibly, truthfully be said of any single one of all the others now extant anywhere. They are divided into two parts, one of which proceeds to totally ignore the body, mortifies the flesh, and renders life truly a semi-graveyard operation from birth to baptism, from that to death. The other allows the utmost limit to lust and license to the elect, and roundly berates all others outside. Vide Mormonism, Perfectionism, and Islamism, and contrast them with their opposites in belief, as the Shakers. But current systems, as a general thing, bend all their energies toward the salvation of men's souls, and, in spending time in trying to get souls into heaven, lose sight of the bodies, which, practically, may go to the other place, of so little account are they. They believe in crucifying the flesh altogether, and generally effect that very thing for the soul. They wholly lose sight of a fundamental principle of human nature, which is to take delight in doing the very thing it is sternly forbidden to.
The people of a town might not, if let alone, leave its boundaries once in ten years; but you just make a law that they shall not leave it, and that town will be empty in less than a single day. Again: Said landlord Boniface, "Traveller, you must go further to pass the night, for my house is full, and I have no place to put you." Says weary traveller, "Don't say so; don't say no; poor me! How can you serve me so? I'm so fagged out I can't walk another step. I'll put up with anything rather than go on." Says Boniface, "Poor, weary man, I pity you, and on one condition you can stay; there is one room with two beds. The one nearest the door you can sleep in; the other—at the far corner—is occupied by a lady, who must not be disturbed in any way. You must enter it on tiptoe, without a light, go quietly to bed, and at daybreak quit it in the same manner. Do you agree to these conditions?"—"I do;" and he was shown the door, and again strictly cautioned. But, by and by, there was a sound of devilry by night, and that weary, wayworn traveller lifted up his voice and yelled aloud; and his voice went flying the descending stairs, and his body, with protruding eyes, and hair erect, came speedily following down, down, reaching the lower floor just one second after his voice. "O Lord!" said the traveller. "What's the matter?" asked Boniface. "Why, that woman's dead!"—"I knew that before," said landlord; "but how did you find it out?" Just so. Human nature is strongly perverse, and this incident suggests the query that were social life and marriage based upon consent and attraction instead of what they are based on, there wouldn't be a hell on earth or anywhere else, in less than one hundred brief years—brief to God, and to immortal man.
Finally, to conclude this section, I admit, and triumphantly, too, that in the cultured, or magic, because magnetic, will, I find a remedy for very many of the ills besetting us on the earth, especially in our marriage matters in the false society of to-day; and furthermore, that by obedience to law, herein set forth, the elixir of life may be found, and the human stay on earth be prolonged a great deal beyond the storied threescore years and ten.
Let us now proceed to the consideration of a phase of the matter in hand, never before fairly treated upon, or even touched by those who assumed to discuss it, by reason of its recondite nature. It being my highest ambition to do good while the frame lasts, I possibly may achieve it better in essaying the unravelling of the knot alluded to, than in any other way.
Men are often seen whose actione currente is wholly feminine; but a far greater number of females are found who have ail the yearnings proper only to the opposite gender. Understand me. It is the proper function of man to impart, to give, to enforce, to generate, to beget his kind; and of course the impelling sensations are peculiar. It is the proper function of woman to reverse all this—to receive, respond, provoke passion, accept, exude, gestate, and to have all the sensations proper thereto. But thousands have the characteristics of their proper sex, physiologically, with their normal sensations, impellant or nervo-vital action, and instead have all the latter characteristics of the reverse gender. This abnormal state, so very common, results from their mothers wishing and hoping that the unborn may be of one sex, while nature determines to, and does produce its opposite; wherefore such girls will love like a man; such boys love like a woman, and of course can never be satisfied in this life on that very account. The upshot of it all is, that urged on by an irresistible impulse, such persons resort to unnatural methods to appease the quenchless thirst; assuage the yearning appetite,—hence we have onanists, masturbationists, pederasts; those who associate with four-footed beasts, and in other respects sink to very infamous levels—even to those horrible ones, to name which I fairly shudder, and therefore will not.
When a woman is pregnant, her whole desire should be that of giving to the world a perfect specimen of her maternal work, allowing nature to determine the sex; and then we shall behold no more such improperly constructed human beings on this fair earth of ours; wherefore we shall be rid of agitators of the "Sexual Question."
XLIX. In announcing the law and fact that the subtle element called magnetism is the connecting link between mind and body, the flesh, sinew, bone and muscle, and the incorporeal viewless soul of man, I declared a new truth, or rather one newly discovered. True, it has been suspected that electricity, in some of its subtler forms, was that link, but I am not aware that the subtler element, magnetism, was ever even suspected to be such link. Body is the seat of the senses; soul is the seat of the deeper faculties; for Emotion, Love, Sympathy, Memory, Fancy, Judgment, and a hundred other human attributes belong to the region and domain of soul, spirit, mind,—the invisible man within,—and the vehicle of their display and action upon, and in the outer world, is magnetism. Proof: When we are in perfect magnetic rapport with an individual, that person can be made to imitate our action, think our thoughts, do as we do, and be for the time our exact counterparts; but we may be in absolute electric contact, and not one of these strange results will follow. Observe these facts: cohabitation, love not being the spur, is a magnetic halfness; with love, it is a magnetic circulation, that is to say, pleasure results from a nervous current rushing along the nerves of each, and mingling in chemico-magnetic union in and at the termination of the nervous filaments radiating from every portion of the two beings, and converging to a point at the respective vital centres of each.
There can be no mutual joy unless such nervous currents do flash along the nervo-telegraphic system; nor can we experience any pleasure, whatever, either nerval, gustatory, or in any other manner, unless such currents do thus pass; and, moreover, every true, or even false human joy, must first be in the soul, before the body can participate. We cannot lift a board till we bend to it, and brace the muscles to the task. This is the principle of Posism: i. e., placing ourselves to do the work, receive a blow, shock or impression. We hate, and all our external features array themselves—involuntarily—ever to materially express the metaphysical emotion. Now for the application of this principle to the subject under consideration.
L. It would look foolish for one to verbally protest burning love, while the face betokened its deadly opposite, or actual, stupid indifference! If the heart means love, and the lips assert it, the voice, manner, eyes, and genial glow, must express it also, if one expects to be believed. Yet in spite of the notoriously plain truth, there are thousands who talk love, while face, feature, voice and conduct give the lie direct to all the lips have spoken; and yet the speakers marvel because their story is not credited. Such persons, too, may honestly mean just what and all they say, yet, failing to pose themselves to the requirements of the case, fail also both in winning credence, and retaining what of love they have already won. Counsel: If your lips speak love, always pose your features to the natural language of the passion or sentiment. For the expression of feature, the soft and flowing modulations of tone, the mellow cadence and inflection of the voice, tells the immortal story of the heart quite as plainly, and far more eloquently, than can possibly any collocation of mere words, which any one can marshal to his or her aid; and soft and gentle tones will do more for errant, faulty husbands and wives than all the protestations or verbal storms that one could utter in a century!
We have societies for the protection of beasts; and need a larger one for the protection of human beings in certain vital respects. It ought to be just ground for instant divorce wherever and whenever a human male forces unwelcome embraces upon any female, whatever. The beasts of the field don't do so. Why should men? More than that; it ought to be a criminal offence in the eye of the law; and as such, punishable, for any human male, under any cirumstances, whatever, to force the inclinations of any woman, whatever, or to exact or seek wifely offices or concessions, except when she wills and ordains that such may be. Make this a law, and we shall have less work for sextons in digging graves for "Mrs. so and so," at any age between sixteen and thirty-five. The common sense of mankind knows full well that he is no man, but only a satyr, who demands what cannot be granted, save with a shudder of unutterable horror and disgust; pangs past endurance, or at the risk of health and life.
The action of the muscles is as clear an expression of a passion, and the mental states behind it, as are the tones which utter it; for "Actions speak louder than words" is not only a truism, but an absolute and unqualified truth itself. Wherefore if you mean love, look love from top to toe, and all over!
LI. You never saw a sick man, really, desperately sick, whoever denied the existence of a God. It requires a fine stomach, keen appetite, and excellent digestion to make a first-class sceptic. Why? Because conditions of body effect changes in the soul's feelings; and the play between the outer and the inner being is mutual, for the soul affects the body for good or ill quite as much as the body affects the invisible soul. Married people arc either not aware of this double-acting law of the homos, or else wilfully ignore its heavy meanings. They live a cat-and-dog life, because neither reasons that some physical disturbance unhinges the soul, or that some metaphvsical derangement unfits the body to express what the soul itself may be completely full of. Thus, a woman suffering catamenial pains, or some other ill, is apt to be rather Novemberish externally, even while July really reigns deep down in her sweet, but ruffled, soul; and a man, worried to death with worldly cares, is not always either in mood or condition to lavish tenderness even upon the children of his loins, or the wife of his bosom, all of whom he loves beyond his then-capacity of expression. A person in certain physical states is insane for the time being; is fully willing to curse God, and die; yet a dose of opening medicine would unbar the gates of his soul, and within two hours that self-same man would bless God, and live.
And a wife in certain magnetic and mental states, the result of physiological causes, would fly at a man and scratch his eyes out, when, next day, after a good dose of senna, she would love and caress him half to death.
At this writing I am suffering from partial paralysis, partly the result of a severe fall,—a mere matter of twenty-five feet through the trestle-work of a bridge, upon a not very soft pile of rocks at the bottom, sent down there by the savage threats of two converging locomotives, one behind and one before. But that injury I could have recovered from, by reason of the strong resilient energies of my constitution, had it not happened that for months before, then, and months afterward, I was continually laboring with brain, hands, and pen,—bad enough,—but was also subjected daily to violent and continued affectional and mental emotion; cause: "A woman at the bottom of it;" and that sort of excitement is quite sufficient to bring on paralysis, without the help of any locomotive that ever screeched over the "Middle Ground,"—a place in Toledo, where more ghosts of mangled dead walk than upon any surface of equal area in the entire universe.
As physician, I have treated many cases of disease which the patients attributed to scores of causes other than the right one,—affectional trouble. Merchants, bankers, men of large business, are almost invariably, and inevitably, stricken down in the midst of life and hope, by apoplexy, paralysis, chronic dyspepsia, stone, gravel, or embolism; not alone by reason of their business activity, or even nervous exhaustion, but because they do no not loosen up, change their modes of motion, and devote more time to the homeside, social life, and "fun." Business, the infernal demon-god, is all in all; passion but a spasm; love, a myth, an unrealized dream, its joys still more unreal, vague, phantomesque, until at length nature wears out, God insulted, and he sends the Angel of Midnight to drop the curtain, and change the scene.
Aphrodisiacs are certain preparations—most of them outright infernal—which excite the amorous or passional appetites of the human being. There are long lists of them; and many years before this book was written, its author discovered the best six tonics the world had ever seen, or has yet. I refer to the Protozonic Remedials. And I have known hundreds upon hundreds of people, who lived so close to the dollar-counter, that nature withdrew her smiles from them, and impotence, dead, sterile, horrible, became their lot, and for years they had never known love in its physical aspects unless under the forcing power of some disastrous stimulant. To these the protozones were blessings, indeed, and once more the mad-house and apoplexy were left behind,—not because they were remedials, but civilizers; humanizers, fitting the wasted nerve, balancing the tottering brain, restoring the primal conditions upon which human happiness in the social arc depends, not being mere chemicals, but alchymics or conveyers of spirit: soul. But what a state of things is that wherein men, otherwise sensible, so far forget their duties to self, home, wife, socicty. and God, as, in the mad chase for wealth, to sacrifice Manhood, Love and Paternity. Paternity! just think of it! what a glory, and what a joy, compared to which all the wealth and honor earth can give were but hollow shams and empty mockery! while Parentage, Fatherhood,—above all Imperial Motherhood, is a diadem which even gods might well aspire to. I have seen women pass along the streets who gave token of their coming pain and glory; and I have seen things shaped like unto men laugh and giggle as they passed along; the doers of God's finest and greatest work; the incarnators of regal soul; these unappreciated martyrs of love, and victims of man too often beside.—and I have felt like rushing upon, and tearing the heartless scoundrels to pieces; for if there be a transcendantly glorious thing on earth it is a mother. And I, Paschal, the writer, here say that I took off my hat, and did homage to even pregnant woman I ever saw; and I would do it, were that woman no higher than a common troll, so highly and devoutly did I, do I, adore and worship Motherhood. There, that's my soul!
But if these laughers, these careless husbands, knew the truth I now reveal in the next few lines, they too, like myself, would laugh, but with royal joy, instead of coarse derision. It is this: 1st, most seekers after domestic bliss, like him who builds from the roof groundward, begin at the wrong end. It is to be found in soul, not sense; spirit, not form; heart, not dress; and love, not passion. 2d. A pregnant woman, judiciously loved and treated,—not spoiled and pampered, or kept at a dead level of life, love, temper, feeling, passion, ardor, fervor, labor, rest, but made to develop her womanhood,—will, in every ten days, add more soul, strength, fervor, beauty, compactness, energy, power, and force of character and genius to her baby than she could in all the forty weeks of gestation if neglected in the above respects; for she will knit more greatness in it every hour she lives; and each step or stage of gestation will be carried one or more degrees toward perfection. The only difference between a genius and a human ninny is, that one is finished up as the work goes on. He is well kneaded, and needed, too; well risen; well baked, and, therefore, is well flavored; well done; will keep well; give excellent satisfaction all around, and will be longed for, and wept over when gone, just as children mourn the good things that have passed away forever.
LII. Paralysis, caused other than by physical injury, is the result of over-emotion; too acrid states of the blood and fluids—(often removable by continued catharsis) and by nerve-embolism, as well as that of the blood-vessels, consequently the system is not supplied with a proper amount of vitalized pabulum. Paralysis more often results from affectional troubles than anything else, and the only cure is their re-arrangement, accompanied with phosphorized cordials, and phosphoric food, to which may be added the daily pouring over the head and backbone of at least two pailfuls of hot water, as hot as can be borne, alternating with ice-rubbing of the spine, or rhigolene-spray baths; this will cure it nine times in ten, when mentally caused; and would have saved Napoleon III., and perhaps a disastrous war, had his physicians been wise; but they were not, and suffered him to eat, drink, smoke, and libertinize to excess, until at last his constitution, enfeebled by amatory outrage in his early life, refused to respond to desire; his embolism increased; fistula attacked the perinæum, involving the entire pelvic system, necessitating castration at the knife of the surgeon, and ending at Chiselhurst, in fever and death, but a few months after,—and the crisis hastened swiftly by the keen anguish resulting from the consciousness that he, the great emperor, was no longer a man, but only a eunuch or human stag. This fact of his loss occasioned the "Decheance" act of the French Senate;—for they would not be ruled by either a woman—or a castrato.
Barrenness of woman results from similar causes; and so also does the four kinds of male impotence, now abounding even-where to a frightful extent. These are, 1st. Lack of muscular force; 2d. Inability to elaborate the vital fluid; 3d. Inability to retain it at all; or to retain it if, and when, elaborated; 4th. Inability to vitalize it by reason of trouble in the prostate gland. Hitherto the medical people have recognized but one form of impotence, whereas there are no less than four, each, of course, requiring quite dissimilar methods of curative treatment.
LIII. Nothing goes on either in soul or body without some sort of expenditure. We have a mental, moral, and affectional digestion as well as a physical one; and we all know that unless we excrete the superfluous matter of the food and drinks we take, dyspepsia comes in, and finally we grow dull, sleepy, and stupid from the accumulated phosphates, acid or alkaline, lime, carbon, etc., urea, uric acid, etc., and death soon comes tapping at the door; but who ever suspected that it is just as necessary to void mental, moral, and affectional wastes, and thus prevent soul-dyspepsia, or cure it if established? Yet such is the case. The mind that would be healthy must cast out of it all it cannot appropriate, assimilate, and transmute, else mental, moral, and affectional diseases set in, and psychal debility is the result, terminating in a complete deadening of all these higher qualities which par excellence make us truly human.
LIV. Now he or she who dwells mainly in the brain is subject to enormous nervous waste: and the blood, charged with refuse brain and nerve-rust, rushes to the kidneys, and there unloads its bad freight; but all servants get tired, and so do the organs named; so that after a while they cease to drain and sift so perfectly as of yore; consequently the alkaline phosphates and urea are not all discharged, but a portion is poured back into the circulation, until finally every inch of the physical body is poisoned; and a healthy soul cannot healthfully act through poisoned nerves and tainted fluids. The kidneys begin to suffer and give out; the supra-renal capsules change their fibre, and no longer act as storehouses for the kidney-life placed there daily by the watchful soul. The bladder goes next, then the testes, prostate, ovaries, or uterus follow; and before you know it, the man or woman is a splendid wreck. Wherefore follow Solomon's advice, and remember two things: 1st, that there's a time for work and rest and sleep, and amusements and converse and amorous diversion; next, that all work, and no play, makes Jack a dull boy; meals, sleep, love-seasons, all should be as nearly as possible orbital or periodic in their motions, just as the day, night, winter, spring, and autumn in the world without. In a little while nature, will assist, and each season will come in full force at its proper time, just as eclipses occur, and green fields smile again.
Surely married people will understand this delicate, but very important suggestion. Hundreds of people, consulting me as physician, have benefited by that advice, and by resolutely sleeping apart, as a custom, have begun to realize a domestic felicity they never before imagined to be possible. Nay, it is absolutely necessary in all cases where perfect restoration does not follow every night's slumber.
Reader, you have one hundred and sixty bones, and five hundred muscles; your blood weighs twenty-five pounds; your heart is five inches in length and three inches in diameter; it beats seventy times a minute, four thousand two hundred times per hour, one hundred thousand eight hundred times per day, and twenty-six millions seven hundred and twenty-five thousand two hundred times per year. At each beat a little over two ounces of blood is thrown out of it; and each day it receives and discharges seven tons of that wonderful fluid. Your lungs will contain a gallon of air, and you inhale twenty-three thousand gallons a day. The average surface of the air-cells of your lungs supposing them to he spread out. exceeds twenty thousand square inches. The weight of your brain is three pounds. In the average American man it will weigh about eight ounces more. Your nerves exceed ten millions in number. Your skin is composed of three layers, and varied from one-fourth to one-eighth of an inch in thickness. The area of your skin is about one thousand seven hundred square inches, and you arc subjected to an atmospheric pressure of fifteen pounds to the square inch. Each square inch of your skin contains three thousand sweating tubes, or respiratory pores, each of which may be likened to a little drain-tile one-fourth of an inch long, making the aggregate length of the entire surface of your body of two hundred and one thousand three hundred and sixty-five feet, or a tile-ditch for draining the body almost forty miles long.
Now in any act which requires more than a normal drain, every atom of this magnificent machine is injured, and its life jeoparded. But in sexism, true and normal, and false and perverted ones also, yield up a portion of the life of every particle of the being; also when we sleep with nervous or organic incompatibles. In righteous conjugation what one gives out is instantly replaced by the other, and perfect rest and equilibrium follow the natural shock. But in the false rites, what of life goes out, stays out. There is no return in kind; no change given for the golden coin of life recklessly thrown on the counters of lust!
LV. The bitterest matrimonial discontents arise from the half-unconscious misconception that happiness, not growth, is the end of marriage, and the forgetfulness that human nature is universal. It is impossible for two people thoroughly to know each other until they have been tested by the exigencies of a united life. If then a radical antagonism of temperament is developed, which makes the union oppressive, why should the discordant souls be kept together? What is to be gained by holding them in the bonds of hatred? The remedy cannot be found in the abolition of the civil contract of marriage, leaving them bee to repeat again and again the disastrous experiment, because that has been tried and failed. Now it seems to me that there should be schools of marriage; that is, institutions with professorships, expressly to teach the laws which alike, everywhere, underlie human happiness. As it is to-day, pretty faces win male stupidity, and disaster invariably follows. Above all, our system of nervous life, the good food poorly cooked, the way we eat, drink, sleep,—all are axes laid at the roots of the tree of domestic life!
There's not one sound man in five hundred; nor a woman in a thousand, who does not have the doctor's care for ills resulting from this false life. The food we eat, and what we drink, a£t upon our souls, our emotions, and our loves, quite as much as upon our mere bodies; and I had rather have one meal cooked by a good, loving old mother, than all the hotels of earth, with golden plate, could furnish; because such food is seasoned with goodness.
LVI. I am satisfied that sleeping together, and too frequent yielding to the impulses incident to the chemically fevered state we are in, produces a peculiar nervous exhaustion which, if long continued, always results in a chronic morbidity closely verging upon actual insanity,—indeed, in most cases, upon some points, it is insanity itself; for what else can that state be called which sees nothing at all but ill, dark-omened shadows continually floating over the sky of life; and which beholds, in the wife or husband, nothing but demons or gorgons; chatters about him, or her; exposes faults, magnifies mole-hills into rocky mountains; and only breathes venom, spite, and malignant hate, upon one sworn at the altar to be loved and cherished till death 'did them part. This is sheer madness; down-right insanity; and in that mood what worlds of wrong are daily done, and that, too, by people in whose hearts angels slumber, and long to be awakened, that their wings might fan the fevered brow, and lull the weary souls to rest. This insanity has its rise in satiety, and non-reciprocity in the more intimate relations of husband and wife; and is akin to that which falls like a leaden pall sooner or later upon the onanist and debauchee.
Owing to the imperfect marriages of to-day, and the few past decades, millions of half-children, or unsound ones, have been born: crooked, angular, violent, unreliable, impulsive, vagarious, and constitutionally morbid, with a powerful bias toward unquestionable insanity. Passing along the streets it is easy to pick out people thus born: their faces and heads betray the unmistakable brand of incipient lunacy; and it requires but little provocation to fan the latent embers into a glowing and terrible flame. The average insane head is smaller in all its dimensions than the sane. The latter shows, also, less irregularity of outline. The left anterior quarter of the sane head is usually larger than the right, while the right anterior quarter of the insane head is almost always larger than the left. Many insane people show a decided projection in the right frontal region. Now mark the conduct of our friends thus organized.
LVIII. But why are they insane? What's the actual—not theoretic—but purely scientific facts of such cases? Reply: Magnetic and amative depletion act upon some people precisely as starvation acts upon everybody. When the stomach can no longer get food, the body begins to consume and feed upon itself; first it absorbs the fat, and we grow lean; then it attacks the muscles, and we become skeletons; next the liver goes, and we become cadaverous: their the mucous surfaces are called upon; and at last the serous plates are attacked, and the grave closes over a bunch of bones only. In the case of the sexual pederastic, Dentonian debauchee, when his lust alone drives him to either excess or sexive horrors, there is no return, and his passion consumes his body. First, the nerves become strained and tensioned beyond endurance, and one after another gives way; then the muscular cords are slackened: then the testicular glands decrease: then the prostate: then the marrow of the hack-bone softens and yields its fat to feed the fearful fire, creeping up till it reaches the brain; then the substance of the brain goes down to death's hot furnace; the soul shuts itself up, moodily waiting its time of flight, and when it acts at all is compelled to do so through diseased organs and perverted channels; hence, all it does is distorted, outre, queer, abnormal. The man is mad—and—let the curtain fall; the tragedy is ended.
LVIII. When teaching those who were desirous of mastering the principles pervading the books, and constituting the soul of the system evoked and elaborated by him whose pen scores these lines, it was the custom for him to address them in these following words, or their equivalents: First, the mystery of Life, and Power, Seership,—in its loftier, not merely its lesser meanings,—forecast, endurance, insight, far-sight, longevity, silent energy, mental force, magnetic presence, and impressive capacity, lie in, flow out of, pertain to, and accord with, the she or mother-side of Deity, the love-principle of human-kind, and the sexive natures of the complicate homos. Outside of its sphere of operations all is cold and deathful; within its mystic and magic circle dwells all there is of fire, latent and active, actual and metaphysical; all there is of energy, procreant power, physical, mental, spiritual, and all other; and it—Love—is the master-key unlocking every barred door in the realms that are. Remember, O Neophyte (and reader of this book), that I am not dealing in mere philosophical formulæ, "recipes," or trashy "directions," but in, and with fundamental principles, underlying all being. Fix this first principle firmly in your memory, and roll it under the tongue of your clearest understanding; take it in the stomach of your spirit; digest it well, and assimilate its quintessence to, and with, your own soul. That principle is formulated thus: Love Lieth at the Foundation (of all that is); and Love is convertibly passion; enthusiasm; affection; heat; fire; soul; God. Master that. Second, the nuptive moment, the instant wherein the germs of a possible new being are lodged, or a portion of man's essential self is planted within the matrix, is the most solemn, serious, powerful, and energetic moment he can ever know on earth; and only to be excelled by correspondent instants after he shall have ascended to realms beyond the starry spaces.
LIX. If a man actualizes that moment while under the dominion of animal instinct, or human lust alone, then the effect is losing, unmanning, degrading, to both himself and her; murderous toward the recipient, and suicidal to himself. It means hatred, disease, and magnetic ruin to both; its influence for evil spreads over a wide area on earth; feeds and sustains barbarism; nourishes the monstrous Larvæ of the middle kingdoms of the æred habitats of disembodied beings, even when no progeny results. But if there shall, then he and she generate misery, crime, and possible murder as the heritage of that child. If, on the other hand, low be the prompting angel at the hearth-nuptial, then strength, goodness, truth, harmony and sweet melodies of life ensue to the twain, and are insured to the offspring God shall give them. Third, at the very instant his seminal glands contract to expel their treasures, at such instant his interior nostrils open, and minute ducts, which are sealed at all other times, then expand, and as the lightning from his soul darts from the brain, rushes down the spinal-cord, leaps the solar plexus, plunges along the nerval filaments to the prostate gland to immortalize the germal human being; and while the vivific pulse is leaping to the dark chamber wherein soul is clothed in flesh and blood, at that instant he breathes in through the inner nostrils one of two atmospheres underlying, inter-penetrating—as the spirit does the body—the outer air which sentient thingsinhale. One of these auras is deeply charged with, because it is the effluvium of, the unpleasant sphere of the border spaces, where is congregated the quintessence of evil from every inhabited human world in the entire congeries of soul-bearing galaxies of the broad universe; else he draws in the pellucid aroma of divinity from the far-off multiple heavens. It follows that as are the people at that moment so will be that which enters into them from the regions above, beneath, and roundabout; wherefore, whatsoever male or female shall truly will for, hopefully pray for, and earnestly yearn for, when love, pure and holy, is in the nuptive ascendant, in form, passional, affectional, divine and volitional, that prayer will he granted, and the boon be given. But the prayer must precede.
Discoid reigns in marriage-land to-day, and one principal cause is, that while the magnetic tide is at its height, and before the soul withdraws its power from the pelvis back to the brain-seat, they part company, and the spiritual auras and vital air escapes into the external world, instead of being stored up and absorbed by the woman's spirit and soul.
XL. The consequence is that the evil forces take hold, with deadly grip, upon the very roots of their triplicate being, because in acting as they do, they defy, annul, prostitute, violate, and disobey, the very primary law of human existence, and voluntarily seek to defeat God Almighty's great purpose, underlying their creation.
LXI. Balzac says:" He who begins with his wife by a rape is a lost man!" I say, it is next to impossible that she ever can love him after, as before! and I say this after a large medical practice of not less than thirty years. But most "Men" (?) not only begin thus, but keep it up—the fools!—and their name is legion!—till hatred, horror and disgust either kills her outright, or suggests an evil from which every true human shrinks.
LXII. Abortion at any stage from conception to birth is—Murder in the first degree. It effectually kills the child, demoralizes the mother, destroys her moral and physical health, while living, and after death dooms, irrevocably dooms, her and her assistants to the perpetual society of murderers beyond the grave, from which doom there is no appeal. So beware of the crime.
LXIII. Circumstances may demand non-increase of family; therefore, avoid all risk forty-eight hours before, and one hundred after the Catamenial period. Avoid all risk after a return from a journey or temporary absence; and
LXIV. After the make up following an unpleasantness, tiff, spat or downright family quarrel, because the reaction creates not only increased affectional and procreative energy, but also a peculiar liability to the risk of unwished-for parentage, then especially.
LXV. Mental, moral, physical and domestic trouble, mutual magneto-vital exhaustion are easily preventable between couples if they will but sleep apart, have hard beds, good ventilation, never sleeping in day-worn under-clothes, and each magnetizing the other at the seven magnetic points of the human frame—sides, spine, throat, head, breast, and over the stomach.
LXVI. Superior men, whatever their rank or calling, are very attractive to women, as a general thing; therefore such men—as they are almost always very licentious—have great need of watchfulness and prayer; considerable prayer—but more watch!
LXVII. The true nature of any wife is quickly changed for the worse by the pigness and private brutalisms of their husbands; and "can't a man do as he likes with his own?" requires a universal No, even if ownership of the wife is conceded, which it isn't.
LXVIII. When a husband's private conduct, unreasonable demands, etc., has estranged the dear love, so precious to every genuine man, there is but one way to change it back, and that is forebearance, self-restraint, care, gentleness, reciprocity, Love. It is best to eat only when one is hungry. But why force an unwelcome feast to you, horror to her, except she be ahungered as well? If she be not in sympathy with her husband in all respects, it means death to her affection for him, in time, if not at once; and he is a poor bird who foolishly ruins his own nest, and how many human birds do it!
We are triplicate beings—soul, spirit, body. Our loves and passions may be of either one, two or all three of these. If our love be only of soul it is too fine and ethereal for this lower world, and for all practical purposes is useless. If it be of spirit only, it is too vague, unsubstantial, unthoughtful, and physically unsatisfactory. If it be of body only, then lust is regnant, with hell all around, and crime swelters in the air. If our loves be of soul and spirit only, then we are bereft of the power to become Energies in the world, because we lack the material force to either make our mark on each other, the world, or to give good physico-vital constitutions to our offspring. If our loves be of soul and body, we are isolated from the rest of mankind, and are lone pilgrims all the way along. If they be spirit and body only, we are extreme—either all transcendental affection, or downright animal passionists. It is only when our loves are triplicate that we fulfil our true mission, and realize the supreme joys of existence.
The marital office and function is therefore material, spiritual and mystic. The Christian world knows much about the two first, but nothing whatever of the last. This book of my doctrine only contains it, for it alone declares and establishes the fact that the marital function is unquestionably the highest, holiest, most important, and most wretchedly abused of all that pertains to the human being. Its offices are so vital that I hold as cardinal, indisputable axioms, that
LXIX. He who is diseased or unsound, pelvically, is not a true man while thus; that his soul is barred out from the heavens whither all souls repair during sound sleep, and that his immortality is not certain till he does become sound. Woman everywhere is subject to the same law and penalty.
LXX. We hold that any over-passional, inconsiderate male human is no man, and that such a husband must necessarily destroy the best wife ever given by God to the son of man; and
LXXI. An over-passional woman can easily destroy and rain any husband on the earth, and totally unfit him for combat with the world.
LXXII. Children are the gifts of God. They will not come unless the message is sent for them during the wife's lunar season; hence any artifice to prevent conception, save such as are based upon time, will, and her moon's changes, are diabolic, inhuman and dangerous to both the man and the woman, souls as well as bodies.
LXXIII. Giours and fools think to avoid all disaster through the murderous habit of incompletion of the conjugal rite. But they are mistaken, both the wife and husband, for such folly begets hatred, disease of bladder and brain, nerves and soul in him, and a correponding host of evils in the wife. Why?
LXXIV. Because it is not merely suicidal and unnatural, but is also a conjugal fraud, among whose results may be reckoned dyspepsia, insanity, paralysis, and impotence on his side, and uterine, vaginal, and ovarian inflammations, ulcers, leucorrhas, and prolapsus on her side, physically, and hatred, disgust and ruin on both sides.
LXXV. Too few husbands respect the modesty of their wives; forget that drapery, perfumes, beautiful trifles, are powerful adjuncts; do not know that it is impossible for a wife to love him unless she is won, not forced, to compliance; that he can never hold her soul, and she be made to realize the natural God-intended joy of conjugal association, except by those affectional and magnetical caresses and endearments which to the wise husband suggest themselves. Above all let none be careless of modesty; for whoever cannot blush is lost!
LXXVI. Too frequent exercise of any power, quality, or faculty is ruinous. This is especially true of marriage matters, which are only productive of two results—hell or heaven. For the true and holy rite is ascensive, and leads to health, happiness, delight, longevity, gracious, celestial and glorious joy; or descensive, leading to the lowest depths of social, moral and domestic horror, on which sad rocks too many souls are wrecked.
LXXYII. Love between husband and wife should last to the brink of the grave; but it don't. With careful obedience to these rules, and judicious food, drink, and occasional baths, it will. Doctors, clergymen, merchants, lawyers, people of letters, all whose minds are constantly on the stretch; also, women of like mental culture, are all more or less deficient in vital energy, and all will speedily reach primitive vigor, endurance, and elasticity of spirit and body, only through the natural methods herein set forth.
LXXVIII. Conjugal love never stands still. It either increases or diminishes, and husbands and wives both injure and mar it by heedlessness.
LXXIX. She who yields to a libertine is sure to be despised by him. lie who patronizes a harlot is worse than a beast, and either are unworthy of the forms they bear, for no beast sins against beast-morals, as humans do against theirs. . . . Whoever yields to passion not love-founded is not only a fool but a suicide; for love-passion builds up the human soul, but mere lust absolutely wastes soul, and every one guilty of the folly knows this from experience, for a debauch lessens the entire volume of power. Whoever is false to a true wife or husband contracts the malaria of the Shades, and is sure to bring home the subtle poison, and lay the broad foundation of domestic Ruin. Sexual faith and purity is the price of power; just as Love is the sole base of immortality. All people no do have souls.
LXXX. Both husbands and wives will grant as a boon, when either would refuse to accord a rite claimed as a right. Nothing is lost, but everything is gained by the persuasive mood. He comes too near who comes to be denied. Insistance is brutalism. Ask in love—be sure to show it; if you're true, she's sure to know it. Slow paces last the longer. Unless there's mutuality, a little, but growing pandemonium is kindled.
LXXXI. Govern yourself, then you may rule a kingdom, and then your mate.
LXXXII. Nothing but love can keep a man faithful, and not that always, unless he finds greater solace at home than abroad; and that's just it. They too often do, and that's her fault; for unless he does she's never sure of him.
LXXXIII. A woman must have love—must love and be loved—in all its true meanings; ought, of course, to have and exercise it at home, but if she don't have it there she will elsewhere; and he who imagines he can keep her true, in heart, at least, without loving her right along, and right straight from his to her soul, is an egotist, a fool, and dolt! Lost love seldom returns. It can only be won by truth, assiduity, and genuine manhood.
LXXXIV. An idle wife may be successfully tempted; so may a dressy one, or one subject to flattery. For such to be tempted is to fall. She will forget everything but a slight to her love—not passion; but a man will forget a slight to his love, but never forgive a sin against his conjugal rights. Ought he?
LXXXV. No power can tempt a woman against the man she loves, and whom she knows loves her in return.
LXXXVI. No rite of marriage gives ownership, but equality. Proprietorship means despair to her, dishonor to him.
LXXXVII. A woman in love can be wholly trusted, but not so with a man.
LXXXVIII. One sheep-killing dog will ruin all the other dogs he comes across, if you grant him time; and one loose woman will corrupt five hundred innocent girls or wives in six months if you but give her the chance to do so. It is their chief delight.
Finally I commend these twenty-eight points to the study of mankind, as also that portion of knowledge which is yet to be taught you here[in]after.
LXXXIX. The entire social, conjugal and domestic worlds to-day, are in an uproar, chaos and revolution.
It is deplorable that so much ill-will, sickness, discontent, hatred, sadness, insanity and wretchedness exists among the married of to-day. But it is true, and domestic happiness is the exception to an almost universal rule, at least among the people of every sort and section of this nation, and scarcely anywhere else, in such frightful forms upon the globe. Husbands neglect their wives and practically hate them; wives the same, and universal domestic chaos reigns supreme. The worst of the matter is, that both wives, husbands, and society at large attribute the bad state of things to wrong causes, for the fact is, that the real one lays right before their very eyes, yet they will not see. Such a state of things cannot exist among Oriental nations, or the dark-skinned people of the world. Were it not so serious a matter, one would laugh at the absurd and puerile folly that permits the reign of such social non-concord for a single day, when its causes are so palpable, and its cure so easy. As things exist, wives are defrauded, husbands do not love them, and wives fail to hold their lords in affectional duress. How few, indeed, know how, or even care to accomplish health and happiness at home; and yet, it is in every man's power to make his wife love him, and in every wife's to make her husband worship God through her. On my soul, I truly believe, that if my rules were followed, the social millennium would be close at hand. No strictly good human power can dwell in, or be developed by any man who is sexually unsound, imbecile, puerile, weak or impotent; nor in any woman with fallen womb, leucorrhea, ulcerated vagina or passional frigidity. How, let me ask, in God's Holy Name, can you expect home, happiness or heaven in a family where the wife never, from the altar, where she swore her life away, to the grave that closes over her fretted corpse, never realizes the slightest marriage joy, or anything else than utter and profound disgust? How can a man be constant, faithful, good or great, who is in a sense, compelled to run after harlots because his wife is concentrated ice? You can't expect perfection from conditions themselves imperfect! But there is a clear passage and open water out of this Polar sea of marriage land.
XC. There cannot be a doubt but that the "Philosopher's Stone" of ancient and mediæval lore, and the "Elixir Vitæ" Water of Life and Perpetual Youth, so vaguely hinted at by old writers, and which constitutes the burden of the celebrated book "Hermipus Redivivus" or the Sage's Triumph over decrepitude and death, means this identical triple mystery, which scarce any one practically knows, but which all should learn, and which every physician and divine in the land ought to be compelled to teach their subjects under heavy penalties of neglect, because it is the secret of sustained youth, grace and beauty; it is the gate of power, and the crown and signet of ineffable human glory; it unveils the throne of Will, and taps the fountains of excessive joy; it is the Jemschidgenie of Persian story; and he or she who knows, appreciates diviner and celestial bearings of life and its meanings, becoming indeed a child of the Infinite, and no longer a stranger to the Father's face; and they alone who have it, are able to reach that magnificent sweep of clairvoyant vision, which, leaping from earth at a bound, scans the unutterable glories of space, and beholds the rain of starry systems as we view a gentle summer shower.
XCI. The great source of crime, illness, wretchedness, and suffering has been traced to its one single source, and that is, the abuse, improper use, and mismatching of people in their loves, conjugal relations, and sexual incompatibilities.
It is proven that these bad conditions are frequently the result of organization, and sometimes spring from incompatible, electric, magnetic and chemical relations between couples. That absolute separation is the only cure for some who are wretched in their married state, or inter-relationship; while attention to health, and a fair amount of try is a certain cure for other cases.
XCII. The body of man is a mere conglomerate of earths and metals, gases and fluids wholly material, but penetrated and permeated in every atom by imponderable elements essentially electric in their nature. Thus beneath, and lining our eyes are ethereal organs corresponding thereto; beneath our limbs, heart, lungs, brain, in short, all our parts are corresponding electric organs, and the totality of these constitutes the ethereal, spiritual, death-proof man or woman, and when dissolution occurs this inner man or woman oozes out of the material structure, becomes self-conscious again, and takes its place anions; the countless armies of the departed, hut neither lost or dead; and this internal, ethereal man, woman or child, can he contacted by us in the flesh, by conforming to the laws governing such contact, and the observance of a few simple rules.
XCIII. A passionless man or woman is a human nonentity. It is only when we are wholly man or woman in the higher, holier, and also physical sense, that we can reach the loftier and more significant heights of any sort of power whatever; therefore, those who would cultivate those loftier instincts, and gain mental wings wherewith to scale the heavens, should at once attend to the business of regaining perfect health, mental, physical, emotional and passional. Presently great-hearted love and blessed compassion will nestle in all our hearts, and in this glad, prophetic hope we may all be happy yet. We are none of us ever wise except when merciful. Let us all be so, for only then can we be perfectly human—only then become vessels for the influence and effect of God-ness. Never yet did man come to the absolute conviction of Soul and Immortality, but he also came to that of God and Prayer; for, say what you will, both are and ever will be positive realities in the universe.
In Love alone lies the boon of IMMORTALITY! INJUSTICE reigns to-day.
Sad are the times when wedded wives decay,
And brothels flourish, and Cyprians bear the sway;
These are the times! their scarlet banner waves,
And honest wives, neglected, fill up a million graves!
"When woman's eye grows dull,
And her check paleth,
When fades the beautiful,
Then man's love faileth;
He sits not beside her chair,
Clasps not her fingers,
Twines not the damp hair
That o'er her brow lingers.
"He comes but a moment in,
Though her eye lightens,
Though her cheek, pale and thin,
Feverishly brightens.
He stays but a moment near,
When that flush fadeth,
Though true affection's tear
Her soft eyelid shadeth.
"He goes from her chamber straight
Into life's jostle;
He meets at the very gate
Business and bustle;
He thinks not of her within,
Silently sighing;
He forgets, in that noisy din,
That she is dying.
"And when her heart is still,
What though he mourneth,
Soon from his sorrow chill
Wearied he turneth.
Soon o'er her buried head
Memory's lights setteth,
And the true-hearted dead
Thus man forgetteth."
But it won't be so when both sides have found out, as a rule and law, that no happiness is direct, although joy may be—but always reflected; in other words, that to be happy, and loved, we must first love and render happy some other soul. This is the eternal law of Love's equation, and is as absolute, rigid, and unalterable, as are the laws of number, reflection and gravitation.
We all need, at times, a little, and occasionally a good deal of, coaxing. We are a perverse set, and oftentimes refuse to do the very identical thing others want, and we ourselves are aching, dying, to do, simply because some witling has not sense enough to coax us; and many a good man, and better woman, has been suffered to gallop straight into the jaws of death, right into the mouth of hell, for want of a little, gentle persuasion, even of the blarney sort; especially is this true of men, even quite as much as of the other sections of the human being.
I believe the only physician who has been known to condemn exercise was Cardenus, a physician of Milan. He exclaims against using any exercise that can fatigue a man in the smallest derive, or throw him into a sweat, or accelerate his respiration. He gravly observes that trees live longer than animals, because they do not stir from their places. About the same time Asgill, a French writer, undertook to prove that man is literally immortal, or rather that any given living man might probably never die, if he used sufficient prudence, and a forcible exercise of the will. He complains of the cowardly practice of dying, considering it a mere trick, or unnecessary habit.
XCV. I copy from my manuscript of the Ansairetic Mvsterv, a medico-religio, and mystic composition of mine upon the same general subject as this book, but which, as it expounds certain very delicate facts and principles, adapted only to the mature, and therefore for private study—the following paragraph—stating, before I do so, that while alive and able, such of my patrons and patients as need that now widely famous letter, can write for it; but in no case will it be sent save under seal, as a private message from physician and teacher to patient and pupil; and genuine candidates for full, true, noble Man and Womanhood:—
"Wherever you see a rich, jouissant, beauty, spirit or power in a boy or girl; wherever you behold force of genius, you may rest assured that the conception of which they are the result, occurred when their parents both loved and were impassioned. Au contrarie:—whenever you come across genuine meanness, lean, weazelish, deceitful, slanderous, lying, scrawny, white-livered people, grab-allish. selfish, and accursed, generally, you may safely wager your very life that such beings were begotten of force, and were mothered by passionless, sickly, used-up wives, without the slightest danger of perilling your stake!"
XCVI. The best people on earth see the most trouble: while the heartless, dry and mean go on to success swimmingly, and never feel a soul-pang from the cradle to the grave; yet. nevertheless, true men and women arc never failures! Sham ones always are! because the good influence survives, the bad dies out. The good, when they enjoy, do so intensely; but the bad, coarse being's life, in all its phases must be on a par with—him or herself: and there's as much difference between the joys of such as betwixt the Dundreary skip of a fop and fool, a ninny, or idiot, and the joyous romp of a gushing-hearted, brainful girl.
It has been my lot to encounter a great deal more of human pinch-beck than the solid soul-ful gold; not that I have not known some noble and glorious people among the radical classes, I for years associated with; yet, as a general rule, I found it unsafe to trust to the honor of those who were extreme in the business of world-bettering; they are a bad breed; and Diogenes' lantern is still needed by whomsoever travels among them.
A happy man never writes a book! This is my twentieth! But I might have been happy had I kept away from the world-saving "Philosophers." Here and there I have met a real lady or gentleman, such as that king of nature's nobleman, Jesse B. Furguson, of Tennessee—God bless his green and pleasant memory!—and latterly a few others of the same State; but among professional reformers—and I speak only of such as I personally know, I found a few golden ingots, and a plentiful surplusage of brass ones—born malcontents who take to world-saving, themselves needing it most by far. Such people as preach divine charity and all that, yet constantly yelp and howl down to the bitter depths of death, slander or disgrace, any and every human being whom they cannot use at will, or who disagrees with them. They are magnificent demonstrations of the sublime truth of the philosophy I teach, viz., that as was a person's anti-natal circumstances, so will his or her subsequent life be. If begotten in lust, alone, then that will be their bias from the breast to the grave; if of "authority" backed by brute force, on the body of half-dead compliance, then such will go through life, biting, barking, snarling, growling, making all sorts of trouble; incapable either of generosity or appreciation, and scattering discord wherever their scandal-scattering footsteps fall;—generally, long, lean, lank, slab-sided human halfness, one or more of whom infests nearly every neighborhood. Thus in close juxtaposition with nature's noblemen, I have never failed to meet men of souls so contemptibly small as to make one ashamed of the form one wore. Who would naturally have dreamed, surmised, or indeed have ever suspected there was the slightest connection between Love and Slander? yet there is. Read this scrap, which I cut from a paper many years ago, and then to the proof:—
"The slanderer is a pest; an incubus to society, that should be subjected to a slow cauterization, and then be lopped off like a disagreeable excrescence. Like the viper, he leaves a shining trail in his wake. Like a tarantula, he weaves a thread of candor with a web of wiles, or, with all the mendicity of hints, whispers forth his tale, that, like the fabling Nile, no fountain knows. The dead—ay, even the dead—over whose pale, sheeted corpse sleeps the dark sleep no venomed tongue can wake, and whose pale lips have then no voice to plead, are subjected to the scandalous attacks of the slanderer—
"'Who wears a mask the Gorgon would disown,
A cheek of parchment, and an eye of stone!'
"I think it is Pollock who says the slanderer is the foulest whelp of sin, whose tongue was set on fire in hell, and whose legs were faint with haste to circulate the lie his soul had framed.
"'He has a lip of lies, a face formed to conceal,
That, without feeling, mocks at those who feel.'
"There is no animal I despise more than these moths and scaraps of society, the malicious censurers—
"'These ravenous fishes who follow only in the wake
Of great ships, because perchance they're great.'
"Oh, who would disarrange all society with their false lapwing cries! The slanderer makes few direct charges and assertions. His long, envious finger points to no certain locality. He has an inimitable shrug of the shoulders, can give peculiar glances—
"'Or convey a libel to a frown,
Or wink a reputation down!'
"He seems to glory in the misery he entails. The innocent wear the foulest impress of his smutty palm, and a soul pure as 'arctic snow twice bolted by the northern blast,' through his warped and discolored glasses, wear a mottled hue.
"'A whisper broke the air—
A soft, light tone, and low,
Yet barbed with shame and woe!
Nor might it only perish there,
No farther go!
"'Ah, me! a quick and eager ear
Caught up the little meaning sound;
Another voice then wreathed it clear,
And so it wandered round,
From ear to lip, from lip to ear,
Until it reached a gentle heart,
And that—it broke!'"
Now observe that it is inflexibly true that every slanderer, of whatever gender, is nearly always a long, lank, little, lilly-livered, tucked-up, wizenish being, without any plumpness, either of body, spirit or manner; they are invariably disappointed, unloving, three-cornered folks, without the slightest love save that of self; and when modern spiritualism came along thousands of such rushed into its ranks, disgraced the cause and themselves, and foisted their miserable twaddle upon the world as true supernalism, when, in fact, spiritualism really had nothing to do with it whatever. As at present constituted that ism contains, within its ranks, three, nay, four, sorts of people, ist. Those who hail it as the demonstration of human continuance beyond the grave, and the celestial harbinger of the good time coming. These people are true supernalists; and among them have I ever found sympathizers, and people fit for the heaven they seek. 2d. A large class of social revolutionists under various leaderships, who, accepting the facts, are eager to push on toward the realization of the promised good time. These two comprise the army whose iconoclastic blows right and left are demolishing some of the idols of the Past; but they are builders yet, and it remains to be seen what sort of edifice they will give us in lieu of those now crumbling before their fierce artillery. 3d. A smaller class who cling to old traditions; insist upon tying this century to the old dead ones, and fastening their faith about equally on the Bible and the manifestations. The fourth class is made up of malcontents; always making trouble, never satisfied; having, here and there, an able leader who has his hands full all the time. The rank and file of this trouble-making army wouldn't pass muster at the gates of heaven; for a more ungenerous, malignant, back-biting set was never developed by any civilization earth ever saw. Born of loveless parents, they rush through life striking alike, hap-hazard, at friend or foe; discontented from the nipple to eternity; full of malice; steeped to the lips with cruel, cool, cobra-like venom, they are never happy save when slandering their betters, picking flaws in others' characters, and in stabbing in the back those whom they dare not face. Beware of such! They abound, and like some snakes, not on legs, arc dangerous. I have already described them physically, so that they will be known when met. I owed this duty to mankind; and I now proceed to pay my little Bill.
XCVII. Reduced from competence to nothing, by the terrible Boston fire of Nov., 1872, I went to Ohio from necessity, and finding materials at hand, in great abundance, made it my especial business to study the workings of the organic law of sex, as displayed in the product of marriages, accomplished at periods varying from fifteen to sixty-five years anterior to 1873. One remarkable case was that of a man in Ohio, a long, lank abortion, whose nature constantly impelled him to find fault with everything and everybody—even himself, or rather Itself; nor was it ever happy, except when going up and down retailing slanderous tales and scandal concerning whoever failed to suit it, come or go at its beck and call, and do humble homage at its feet. Now the fault is not altogether theirs,—these unhappy ones,—for they had no hand in their own make-up (save in that they usually make no effort to correct their shortcomings), but is that of their progenitors. We have no right to run the risk,—of being guilty of the insensate folly of parenting such monstrosities,—for such they are, and moral abortions beside; nor to parentage at all unless mutual love, esteem and respect be the prompting spur.
People of that grade are usually one-sided, angular, not to be depended on, and generally passion-driven; or rather you may set it down as incontrovertibly true, that wherever you find one of the class alluded to, there also will you find a devout disciple of Onan. I once lost the "friendship" of a male human being of a slightly different type from the above, yet still a monstrosity. He had fed me for months in exchange for information marketable at far higher prices than he paid—still I was grateful; and one day he proposed that I should aid him in a cruel scheme; but I preferred to go hungry, ay, starve outright, rather than comply with his demands; because I well knew that to do so would be conniving at an outrage against an innocent child, in the first place, and at his own destruction and probable death, in the second; hence my pity for her made me foil him; and my friendship for him caused me to defeat his well-cherished plans. I knew I should transform him, and his household, too, into bitter enemies of mine; yet still I determined to do right, no matter at what sacrifice or pain to me; and at once decided to protect a young thing, and save him from himself, by in no manner lending either knowledge, power or influence, to do an evil deed. Magic powers, too, he wanted,—he, an old man, of eight and sixty!—to enable him to compass the ruin, or "marry"—just think of it!—a mere child, of but a few months over fifteen summers,—fair to look on; a hundred weight of beauty and glee; simple, heedless, joyous as a morning bird, carolling its sun-greeting roundelay; and he coarse as rag-carpet; brutal as a Kaffir on the war-path; lecherous as a satyr; one-third human, two-thirds goat; nearly two hundred pounds of rough, uncouth, unwashed feculence, whose presence anywhere was a sign hung out, warning passers-by to "keep to the windward." And yet this man had a great, rich jewel of goodness, away down in the inner deeps, and that it was which, as will be hereinafter seen, urged him to sacrifice all things in the vague hope of achieving one certain, but tremendous guerdon,—the salvation of his own soul; yet he knew not what he was striving after. I did; and so instead of helping him wed her, I cautioned the child against it, because I knew such a step meant inevitable death to her within a few brief, lust-harried, agonizing months; for the gentle Adonis had confidentially boasted to me of his intentions, yhet he said that, passionally a moderate man was he, and that, save under extraordinary circumstances, he would be content with—what may God protect even a woman of the wilderness from! Finding some Power working against him—for I had taken a woman and a man into my confidence, to enable me to save the girl from the horrible fate threatened her, the old "man" desired me to use certain magic spells, common among the people down South, and other lands I wot of, to enable him to gain control of her, to be used for awhile, as only a human beast can use God's image in female form—and then, utterly ruined, to be cast aside as a loathed and loathsome thing forever, with a bagnio close by, and a darkly rolling, sullen river, in the near distance! For the life of me I was so stone blind as to be wholly unable to view the matter as he did, and so—well, he lost the game; for a young man honorably wooed and won her.
XCVIII. I missed many a good meal by doing as I did. but I kept my manhood unsullied, by defeating a wrong. To this day I hold his own written letter requesting me to disgrace myself, and tarnish my soul, by an infamous deed in furtherance of his abominable and abnormal passion, said letter being written that I might clearly and distinctly comprehend his meaning. That man thereafter hated me with fifty thousand horse-power, in which he was natural, because all animals are rendered furious if their lusts are defeated.
Not only do individuals in their conduct proclaim the cat-and-dog lives led by their immediate progenitors, but it often happens that whole classes in a community do the very same thing; for instance: Once I went to a "Religious Picnic," of the "Reformers," and while taking a drink behind a tree.—it was whiskey, too, a beverage plentifully provided and dispensed by the saints, most all of whom Were excellent judges of the article,—and at the earnest solicitation of a particularly reverend brother, I tried it on; and as it passed along the tube leading to my stomach I experienced a sensation, only comparable to a desperate encounter between two infuriate ironclads, going on simultaneously with an electrical storm, a couple of Vesuvian volcanic eruptions, and four typhoons, all going on in my internal man, until I gasped for breath, and mine eves resembled a pair of exceedingly large peeled onions, or two burnt holes in a blanket: which experience satisfied me once for all, and led me to wonder if that was the best brand of Reformer's whiskey, what could be the quality of the article served out down below. I failed to see wherein whiskey was a high moral motor.
While trying to catch my breath, I overheard one saint counsel another to get me to orate, and both spoke of me in such opprobrious terms as would have fired me with indignant anger without the additional damnable stimulus of the rankly poison draught. Ten minutes afterward, against my will, I took the stand «and spoke my piece, just as we Randolphs are accustomed to, and dealt out justice to my traducers; for doing which, and differing from them about what constitutes manhood, the leading saints proposed to silence me, demonstrate their sainthood, and end the dispute by cool, calm, deliberate, premeditated Murder, by drowning me in the river hard by. They did not attempt it, because when they proposed it my hand slid round to my hip-pocket, and cowards seldom attack a well-armed man. This experience satisfied me that, until people are really spiritual, it is best to be always prepared with carnal logic to withstand their material arguments. I have alluded to these things to make a point in my book, and not because the savages who proposed to murder me are worth the slightest notice, but solely, only and for the express purpose of making two remarks; the first is this: that the world needs something better than it has now before Reform will be a thing of heart and conduct, instead of empty words as at present; and second, to point out the characteristics of certain salacious and other self-assumed "Reformers." Of course, your pseudo-philosopher is never a full, round, genial, or generous man; but will invariably be found, on close examination, to partake largely of the hang-dog, sneak-thief, and lecherous look. They are generally moderately tall, thin, spare males, who, as a rule, have larger, but more ill-shaped and angular, heads, than either large, fat, or little-bodied men. The same holds true of females—such as delight in breaking up families, creating scandal, and ruining other people by slanderous tongues or innuendo. Husbands, wives, be very chary of entertaining guests of either sex thus made up; else you may expect moral poison and ruin to remain after themselves have departed. Theirs is the vampire build, and that sort of influence is theirs, seven times in every eight, where they have taken to the business of world-saving. In thirty years I have conversed with scores of such and found, exceptionless, that their ideal of love was that which better men stigmatize as unhallowed lust and fiery passion, unredeemed by the faintest spark of manhood, womanhood, or genuine goodness. They all declare for a "central, solar, or pivotal love, with planetary loves revolving round it;" that is to say, a main one with "outside" indulgences to keep the cosmos in order; which means, in plain Saxon, that man is but a featherless rooster, entitled to one queen-hen with a flock of lesser chic-a-biddies to relieve her during incubation. I should not like to lionize, but would assuredly glory in canonizing that species of foul fowl; such people can see no higher use for certain organic functions than to fill their own places after death, or to gratify their morbid natures.
They cannot imagine anything else, nor even dream that through the offices of monogamal, conjugal life, the soul itself may be enormously intensified and expanded, and the evolution of mighty thought itself go on at a more rapid rate, taking higher flights, skimming deeper oceans, and, consequently, the mental, psychal, emotional, and creative powers of the human spirit be enhanced a million fold. This is all Greek to these harpers on a single string, and that a base one. Some of these people call themselves physicians, and pass their time in inventing "preventives," embracing "shields," "pellets," "plugs," excoriating and tanning "washes," and a hundred other infamous abominations to entrap the suffering, and enrich themselves. Let all henceforth know, not only what is set forth on this point elsewhere herein, but that the man who wishes to spare the partner of his joys, who, poor soul, always runs the risk of death every time she yields, not to please herself, but to bless the man she has called husband, can, by will, restraint, and firmly holding his breath, when so disposed, prevent the inhalation of the monad or germ, and its descent to the prostate, and, also, by will, the flash of fire from his central soul, which alone, and only, can render fruitfulness possible. They never dreamed of that, yet it is as certainly true as truth itself! They cannot see these splendid things, because their visual range is groundy, while these lofty truths are at their base anchored in the substance of the human soul, and held there by a cable, Love, whose other end girdles the Infinite God!
Man deals with masses; woman with individuals; and the Great One deals with, protects, comforts, solaces, and, through pure love alone, redeems both. Would that these revealments might reach every human heart, even though mine own is aching and breaking the while.
XCIX. Said Lewis Kirk, "An ounce of heaven, a pound of hell, makes life. Not many ever experience mental pain—mind-suffering—in its keenest sense. Financial trouble!—Pshaw!—is nothing!" and as times go, the first statement is correct; for none but those who are conscious of soul, can experience soul-pangs;—and it is these who turn in any direction for relief, and fall victims to the abominable quackery of the would-be world-reformers,—a class which sprung into notice with Fourier and Graham, and which, since the advent of Spiritualism, has increased to an alarming extent all over this land. Their hobby is "Sexism,"—a thing of whose basic principles they are as ignorant as they are of who built Baalbec. These tramps scour the country, victimize honest men's wives and daughters; and even have the effrontery to enforce their odious embraces upon decent women, on the infamous and filtiry plea that they, the lady-victims, require a change of magnetism—forsooth!—which change themselves are the very ones to triumphantly effect. Hoodwinked by psychologic power, deluded by specious sophistry, anxious for relief, ready to make any sacrifice to obtain it, women, by hundreds, fall into the accursed net, and are ruined; for no matter how secret the deed may be, her soul knows the fact, feels the weight, and suffers untold agony in consequence, and all because of salacious wretches who ought to swing by their heels, if not by their necks, at the nearest tree. I can have some pity for those who fall for lack of strength to resist temptation; but none for those who ruin by a "medical theory!" These people find a woman ill with gravid uterus, leucorrhœa, or ulcerated vagina or womb, whereupon they proceed to the most infernal exposures, inspections, and tactual manipulations, conceivable, and utterly horrent to any sensitive and delicate woman; the upshot of which is she takes his stuff, and grows ten times worse than ever, because wholly bent on svmptomology, they are ignorant that all these troubles are physical expressions of internal, mental, emotional, affectional or spiritual states half the time; and that ulcerations proceed from lacerations,—or brutalisms on the part of the he head of the house. They do not realize that disturbances, originating in spiritual commotions, can only be cured by administering spiritual remedies,—that is to say, operating upon the soul as well as upon its physical garment—flesh, blood, bone and nerves. How this is accomplished, has already been set forth herein.
C. It is my intention, if I live, during the years I spend on earth, to devote my time to teaching such as desire more light on the matters which have been the sole study of my life. Ostracized by those for, and with whom I had labored since 1848; met with ingratitude at every step, I gladly accept the ostracism of the many for the good companionship of the few; yet not so few after all, for day by day the ranks of the discontented army, who have been content to follow where impulse led, has grown thinner, and our Brotherhood of Thinkers has increased correspondingly, until at last we, of Eulis, know we have but to let the world know that our doors and hearts are open, to welcome acolytes by thousands. Neglect, slander, vile prejudices, contumely—all have—in this trial of six and twenty years—though ranking millions armed with staves, crying, "Crucify him! crucify him!"—proved signally unequal to the task of defeating a single solitary man, and that man the penman of this book,—Paschal Beverly Randolph!—the sang mélee!—Proud of his descent from the kings and queens, not of Nigritia, but of Madagascar, to say nothing,—to say nothing of the Randolphs, nor their rise from Warwick, the king-maker! Listen to one of our wild melodies, and then say if such blood should bow and bend before the ignoble crowd whose only patent is that they boast the lineage of the seashore sorcerers:—
MADAGASCAR SONG.
[Translated by Sir John Bowring.]
Trust not—trust not to the seashore sorcerers!
In the times of old the sorcerers came
To our island and were thus accosted:
"Land is here, so tarry with your women;
Be ye good and just, and be our brothers!"
Thus the sorcerers promised—we believed them.
Soon they overturned our walls—erected
Threatening fortresses, which poured forth thunder
In their fury; and their priests would give us
Other unknown gods than ours to worship;
And they spoke of services and obedience.
Better die! The fight was long and bloody.
They were masters of the murderous lightnings,
And our multitudinous hosts they scattered ;
All were scattered—all—our people perished.
Trust not—trust not to the seashore sorcerers!
More invaders came, yet bolder—stronger.
On the seashore they their banners planted;
But Heaven fought with us, and they were conquered!
Heavy torrents fell; and mighty tempests,
Storms and poisonous winds o'erwhelmed the stranger.
They are gone—are dead; and we, the living,
Live to know that we are free and happy.
Trust not—trust not to the seashore sorcerers!
I did not follow the counsel thus given; and lo, the terrible penalty I paid. My crime was rete mucosmal, and for that scarce a lecturer or paper devoted to "Reform" but had its fling at me, even to the extent of abusing my dead mother, who went to heaven nearly fifty years ago. But I bided my time! Veni! Vidi! Vici! Hundreds of "Lecturers" and thousands of "The faithful and unco-Godly," most of whom I never saw, considered their labor incomplete, and their speech imperfect, unless they could soundly abuse my mother's only son. But what did it avail—in the end? They were compelled to borrow, or rather steal, my thought, and pass it off as their own; and I have cut out of their articles and speeches thousands of lines, and hundreds of thoughts, which I had first given to the world! It is a terrible crime to be by God constituted differently from those who see light in the same thought you do, yet feel the pulses of manhood throbbing in your veins;—and sure to be hated on that account. I am a Sang Mélee; and not less than twelve strains of blood rush through my veins, yet have I ever met insult all the way along of life, because I dared to be myself! But triumphantly have I done that same thing, "and all despite my good Lords Cardinal," from the early days till now,—Selah! For the fault of the Infinite, if fault it was, to make me of an unfashionable cast, have I been almost crucified, and have suffered, as it were, a thousand deaths. For the Madagascan tinge on my cheek, not its volcanic fires in my soul—Fires which held the cowards at bay for five and thirty years—have I been doubly wronged, by these and them and those, who, when help was needed, gladly availed them of my brain and speech and pen, to devoutly damn me when the fights were won! Driven by the flaming sword of mean prejudice from all noble occupation and employment, by those whose pallor, alone, not Soul, or Honor or Manhood, or nobility of character, made them strong, and gave them warrant to invade my rights, and darkly slander me,—and invariably behind my back! lacking manly courage to do it to my face,—cowards, all, whom I felt and feel were, and are, as far beneath me as the floor of space is below the loftiest Turret of the Immeasurable Temple wherein God resides! Attacked with bitter and envious malignity, ever without the chance of reply,—by tongue and pen,—still I survived; and—despite them all. Treated more like a beast of the jungle than a human being; they exhausted all logic trying to prove me a nobody,—themselves the only real thinkers; and in seeking to justify their own outrage, really vindicated me! They thought it better to denounce and slay me, than to afford me a fair, free field to contest in the matter of Mind!—heaping abuse and contumely on me all the while, yet what availed it all? I became a Power in the world! What are they? I took to Mirrorology, and they did not like it, because it enabled me to laugh their isms and practice to utter scorn!—just where and as, I hold them to and in this hour! But their hostilities—in all these years—drove me back upon God and my own soul; and I prefer being called all the names the discontented could or can apply, to being counted among their malign confraternity, because my Philosophy taught me to forbear retaliation, seeing they could not help doing as they did, being aborts, badly begotten and worse brought forth— constitutionally mean,—physico-worshipping fathers, half-murdered victims for mothers. My science told me just what to expect of them; while my vision disclosed images of pool-haunting newts, when seeking for figures to represent their souls; and, en passant, it was partly because I advocated Oriental Magic, in preference to their mesmeric and similar revelative methods, that I was hated. I could not help it, for I believe in God, and even so do I believe and know that those dark ovoids, in proper hands, are capable of enabling a true soul to scan more mysteries in a week than they can in a lifetime, with all their fantastic methods combined—Mysteries forever and ever beyond their reach; for we know where we go after death; they but guess at it.
Oh, how I have yearned for everlasting death, in view of the pitiless, remorseless persecutions, insults, wrongs, heaped on my head by thousands whom I never either harmed or even met—envious, jealous, sordid! I pitied them, and longed for lasting rest. It is not so now, for the victory is mine, and I pity and forgive them all,—in the same spirit in which an elephant pities and forgives—a bed-bug!—for I regard all slanderers as most people do that delicate and deliciously odoriferous insect. During the year 1874 I propose to give the world a test of the powers of Vision of the soul when under the sleep of Sialam,—that upper clairvoyance which comes never by mesmeric roads, nor drugs, fumes, ethers or spiritual circles, but ever by the three principles, through the aid of the Vast Ovoid elsewhere treated of herein. [If I die there is another—a selected chief of Eulis—who, in time, will finish what I leave undone—at least, such is my hope.] Because I know well that weak and impatient ones or mere wonder-seekers, fail with them, as would an Ashantee with a transit instrument; but others, a goodly band of royal seers! succeed, and are able to accomplish loftiest things of seership, not alone by visions in the oval, but from the point d'appui of mental crystallic, ascensive, penetrative, and comprehensive grasp, reached by steadily gazing on their dark and glorious faces. It is only unripe ones who fail; malignant quacks and folly-driven fanatics who, too low in the sensual scale, too gross in mental and physical tastes and habitudes to appreciate aught of pure spirit, unsullied thought, and the vision that flights immensity, and laughs at towering mountains, and roaring, intervening oceans, of either water or space, denounce through malignant envy and the spiteful jealousy of the Naga, what is forever beyond and above them. These are beneath notice, and their spite and hatred, as their regard and praise, are of equal weight and value,—less than that of the shadow of an atom!
Mesmerism and other methods of reaching psycho vision were but the guide-boards pointing to this, the surer, purer, better, than all others on the globe beside. Many a man has become a libertine, and many a woman fallen low, low, low, from the temptations and facilities afforded by animal magnetism; but in all the broad world no soul has been degraded, but all uplifted, through this Old-new, New-old Sight of the Soul. I expect to produce the Sequel to "After Death," and "Dealings with the Dead," in a volume concerning "BEYOND THE SPACES." Through the Sialam Slumber have I been educated; and I honor and pænize the glorious bridge that enabled me to keep the human bloodhounds at bay, and to span the unfathomable ocean of Eternity!
CI. The saving, that to the pure all things are pure, is not true, for filth is filth to everybody, and you can't dress it up, or sugar it to the acceptance of any but a born idiot or fool; nor can an unholy deed, suggestion, or thought, be right, no matter what subterfuges of sophistry or false logic are brought to bear to prove it so; wherefore, the slang of these pseudo reformers, stripped of its glitter, is insufferably offensive to any health-loving soul in all the lands. It can never be right to defile the bed of a husband or wife, even though their lives be cat-and-doggish; nor can it ever be right for any one to love one and hold another in unloving, legal duress. Let them fairly, squarely, part company before either hangs out the Sign, To Let. Be off with the old in honest style before going on with the new!
We people of the world are born to trade in equivalents. If we give love we want it in return. If we labor for and protect even where there's no love whatever in the case, yet still we have the right of being respected, and you shall not live on my earnings yet respect me not, and have dalliance elsewhere. For if you yield to another, you and that other must abide the consequences. That other must care for, feed, clothe, labor for, and protect you; for I am not bound by any law, human or divine, to keep a corner in that I work for, for others' uses!—and, by Heaven, I won't do it! If you do the bad thing then let's part, for you no longer command my respect, nor are entitled to the results of my labor, or deserving of my homage or esteem in any degree whatever. Equivalents is the Eternal law! Remember and abide by it!
Now here is another new revelation: Pleasure, like light, has two modes and motions; 1st, wave; 2d, linear; one in rays, the other in billowy undulations; one like beams from a candle or star; the other like the swelling of the ocean waters. The pleasures of Lust or passion alone, as in unloving union, or the sin of the Onanite, is always Electric, non-responsive-aloneness, non-mutual; therefore, like lightning, destructive. It is keen, sharp, cutting, incisive, and shocks the body and soul to the verge of death. It is wholly selfish, and results from the rush and escape of just so much nervo-vital life, wherefore, of course, is self-murderous, because the electric loss is not compensated by a magnetic inflow from a loving opposite. It is linear. But when pleasure results from a meeting of the electric currents of the male with the magnetic flow of the female, in the nerves of each, as in the touch of loving lips, the two currents spread out into waves, which flow all over the vast nervous network of both, until they die out as they roll upon the foot of the throne whereon each soul sits in voluptuous expectancy. In the one case all joy is local; in the other, it is diffused over both beings, and each is bathed in the celestial and divine aura—the breath of God, suffusing both bodies, refreshing both souls! But this holy experience cannot be had where habit has blunted the nerves of each; excess has destroyed impressibility. Rest, Repose, Slumber and Activity, Wakefulness, imprcssionablcncss, are the equations of the eternal sexive law,—and all others as well.
Let me restate the law in clearer terms: 1st. The joys of Love are consequent upon the rush of nervous fluid along the nerval fibrils, filamental cords, or wires of the system, centring in the vital ganglia of either sex. When it flows alone it is electric. When it contacts on both sides it is magnetic. 2d. The fulness of Love-joy depends upon the plethora of vital life and nerve-aura stored up in the ganglia of the system, but especially upon the greater or less stock magazined within the mystic cripts appointed of Nature for that purpose. 3d. The conditions essential to the maintenance of any special power of either soul or body, especially of Love and its offices, which involves both, are: Regular remission, voluntary cessation of its activities for a period more or less protracted, and whose term depends upon, 1st, the amount of force expended in other directions; and, 2d, upon the recuperative energies of the individual. 4th. In order to reach the highest possible affectional life, there must be lengthened terms of inaction, during which period the forces accumulate; the nervous magazines expand; the filaments grow stronger, more conductive, and sensitive at the same time; while morbid inflammations cease and normal appetite succeeds to insane physico-passional burnings,—which latter are unnatural, while the former is healthful. 5th. The intimate relations between soul and body render each at times the tormented victim of, and martyr to, the other; hence Love-offices are never in order save when each mind and each body agrees with the other, and the four combine and unite to one common purpose. Otherwise disastrous results inevitably follow; for loveless union is like a money-lender,—it serves you in the present tense, lends you in the conditional mood; keeps you in the subjective; rules you in the future, and puts a period to you in the end; whereas Loving union wafts you up to Godness; ripens you; increases the bulk of soul and adds immeasurable joys to the sum total of life. Therefore take care your love don't perish in the using of it! 6th. Remember that the human soul is a musical instrument played on by the fingers and the breath of God, wherefore see to it that it be kept in tune so that none but finest symphonies are evoked; for it is only then that you can realize either the true stress or strain of being. Forget not that the soul is a Republic; that each organ and faculty is one of the States; and that to insure the common weal each should conspire to one common purpose—the happiness of all.
7th. Life without love is perpetual death! To be truly human and purely good, we must love. To be strong, something must lean upon us; and they who live apart, isolated lives, are dwelling in the midst of viewless horrors, ready at any moment to take form and lash their souls to frenzy. We were born to love; to beget our kind; to bear children to the world and God; and failing therein, we defeat the very purposes for which Deity launched us into being.
CII. Ever since I began to write on this prolific and most vital theme, I have persistently, constantly endeavored to prove that the overstocked condition of the female labor market, and the preponderance of the female over the male element in society were fruitful causes that led to the increase of the Social Evil; and I now write to show that there are operating, right here in our very midst, the most wicked practices, tending not only to an increase of this evil, but sapping the very foundations of the morals of society.
It is a startling fact that the number of marriages is diminishing; the number of divorce cases increasing, there being forty-four on the docket of the Supreme Court for one term in a single county in Connecticut, the State of "blue laws" and "steady habits." Another startling fact is, that among the native element of society the number of births is less than the number of deaths in many sections of all the States.
A wicked and fearful extravagance in the mode of living, rendering marriage and housekeeping so difficult, is one cause of the decline of marriages. The poorer class must ape the style of the rich, and they make a great display when they marry. Being unable to come up to the standard, they remain single, and plunge into sensuality and vice. It is estimated that in New York City, and the surrounding suburbs, there are more than two hundred thousand females, and quite as many men, living, openly or in private, lives of shame and sensuality. The same causes are operating in New York to-day that led the citizens of San Francisco, years ago, to form vigilance committees, and for the same purpose, viz. to correct intolerable evils, and to purify the political and social atmosphere. Marriage and employment would have a tendency to check this fearfully growing evil. The better portion of society must look to it, or this element in their midst will rush by a pathway of ruin to restore the equilibrium, for they cannot wholly escape the dread influences and effects.
There is the revolting sin of fœticide, or infanticide, the tendency of which is to ruin both soul and body, sunder, the bonds of pure love between the sexes, and send our most promising young women and wives into premature graves, spreading a gloom dark as night over hearts and homes that should be bright with health, joy and happiness. It is trying to checkmate the Infinite God.
There is a plan whereby much of this evil may be obviated. I am aware that it has been tried, but never in right-down earnest in these States; or under municipal surveillance. I refer to the establishment of Matrimonial Bureaus, under sworn commissioners, and direct care of Public authorities. So far all such affairs have been in the interests of money-seeking panders and procuresses, and to afford better facilities for supplying men with victims and mistresses, and bagnio-keepers with ruined girls. There are scores of thousands of both sexes without any chance of finding mates, and they are rushed to ruin through "Personals" and blind advertisements; and in trying to sail toward honorable marriage, run straight upon the reefs* of social vice, and are forever lost. No one wants to lie bad; no one sighs for harlotry or libertinism; and no one prefers a life of shame to one of honor and respect; hence it is the duty of the State to take measures to prevent all such false steps, and establish bureaus wherein women, and men, too. may find suitable mates, and establish decent, comfortable homes, instead of filling bagnios, gaming-hells, jails, prisons, syphilitic hospitals, and premature graves. All of us have human hearts and human feelings, and we were created duo-sexed expressly that we might commingle our natures. The soul needs love just as much as the body requires food. Love-starvation the nostalgia, or homesickness of the soul—is the most terrible evil that can oppress the human spirit. Reader, think how dreadful must have been the suffering that inspired these lines—the requiem of a breaking heart:—
"Out from his palace home
He came to my cottage door;
Few were his looks and words,
But they linger for evermore.
The smile of his sad, blue eyes
Was tender as smile could be;
Yet I was nothing to him,
Though he was the world to me!
"Fair was the bride he won,
Yet her heart was never his own;
Her beauty he had and held,
But his spirit was ever alone.
I would have been his slave,
With a kiss for my life-long fee;
But I was nothing to him,
While he was the world to me!
"To-day, in his stately home,
On a flower-strewn bier he lies,
With the drooping lids fast closed
O'er the beautiful, sad blue eyes.
And among the mourners who mourn
I may not a mourner be;
For I was nothing to him,
Though he was the world to me!
"How will it be with our souls
When they meet in the better land?
What the mortal could never know,
Will the spirit yet understand?
Or, in some celestial form,
Must the sorrow repeated be,
And I be nothing to him,
While he dims heaven for me?"
And yet just such wails arise heavenward every day in the year from literally thousands of bleeding spirits.
CIII. I do not envy the feelings of those guilty of breaking up love-matches, or tyrannically ordering what shall or shall not he. If there is a hell, hereafter, it seems to me that all such ought to go there, at least tor a summering, if no longer; yet there are those who ruthlessly destroy others' happiness, because they have the power.
"My wife was not my wife, but always her mother's daughter!" has been the story ever since mothers-in-law came in fashion; and it is my opinion that more families have been "smashed into smithereens," to emote a Hibernicism, by that awful power, than perhaps any other single cause in the list, yet they think they do no harm; forcibly reminding one of the "Moral man" of the Russian poet, NEKRASOF:—
"A strictly moral man have I been ever,
And never injured anybody—never.
"I lent my friend a sum of money he could not pay,
I jogged his memory in a friendly way,—
Then took the law of him the affair to end;
The law to prison sent my worthy friend.
He died there—not a farthing for poor me!
I am not angry, though I've cause to be.
His debt that very moment I forgave,
And shed sad tears of sorrow o'er his grave.
A strictly moral man have I been ever,
And never injured anybody—never.
"I sent my slave to learn the art of dressing
Meat—he succeeded—a good cook's a blessing;
But he, too, oft would leave his occupation,
And gained a taste not suited to his station.
He liked to read, to reason, and discuss;
I, tired of scolding, without further fuss,
Had the rogue Hogged—all for the love of him;
He went and drowned himself—'twas a strange whim.
A strictly moral man have I been ever,
And never injured anybody—never.
"My silly daughter fell in love one day,
And with her tutor wished to run away;
I threatened curses, and pronounced my ban;
She yielded, and espoused a rich, old man.
Their house was splendid, brimming o'er with wealth;
But suddenly poor Mary lost her health,
And in a year consumption wrought her doom;
She left us mourning o'er her early tomb.
A strictly moral man have I been ever,
And never injured anybody—never."
CIV. Probably when animal loves die out, and spiritual Loves succeed them, as a general rule, the true civilization we hope for will come along. Society must outgrow the possibilities of evil, and change its impudicities; its scabrous practices; its practical polygamy and polyandry; its infernal saturnalias of Lust, for their exact opposites, and then, but not till then, will all the sexive horrors take their departure from the world. We, who ourselves, Men of Eulis, beholding the curses and contrasts of the present civilization—this thing that shines so bright, yet nurses Murder at its breasts,—this thing that glitters with the Beauté du Diable,—strive by lifting the veil to show the concealed horror; and to warn mankind against it. We believe not in any form of concubinage or libertinism, but we do not use the same weapons against them that others are accustomed to. We propose to make every man and woman master and mistress of themselves, and enable them to detect the paste from the diamond!
CV. Of late years there has run a chain of peculiar crime the whole length and breath of the United States, from Maine to Texas, Boston to San Francisco. It appears as if the arch-fiend of Lust, himself, had invented this new enormity. I allude to the systematic rapes, by terrible violence, or by drugging, of young children,—girls of from five to fifteen years of age, and generally by hoary-headed, scoundrel lechers, rheumy-eyed, filthy, wholly disgusting in every conceivable sense. Many of these awful crimes are the work of demonized men, acting from sudden impulse upon their own responsibility; but there is every reason to believe that an atrocious gang, with its head-quarters in New York City, and having its laws, rules, countersigns, and pass-words, with branches here and there all over the vast country, and members in nearly every considerable city, town, and village in the land. There are papers which advertise their regular meetings; albeit in a blind way, so that none but the initiate can understand. The principal idea that forms the soul of this infamous band is this: Young girls are by them supposed. while pure, and preceding, and just subsequent to puberty, or their natural advance into womanhood, to be endowed with the power of prolonging the life of him who shall first, by means foul or fair,—if it be possible that such an horror could—which it cannot, never can be, fair,—succeed in debauching her. It is supposed that two-fifths of her allotted term of life will, by the deed, be transferred from her to him; and that the life-stock thus obtained, can be, and is, shared by all others of the band, on the principle of magneto-vital transfusion, not of blood, but of Nerve-aura. Thus a band of forty would gain an average of one month's continued life beyond the allotted term of each, as the result of one outrage—but which they term by a gentler name. It is to this band that is to be attributed eight tenths of the child-rapes, which, by their ultra horror, so frequently shock the nerves of the people of the world. They are all sworn to secrecy, and the traitor is liable to sudden death by murder, the pistol, knife, or poison, at any moment. Perhaps their secret had never leaked out but for the confession beneath the rope, and in view of the fire that awaited him, of the wretch, whose summary, and I almost said—Righteous,—taking-off a few years ago, by an infuriated mob in the "West, is still fresh in the public mind. The crime, like that of Onan and the Pederasts, I regard as worse than murder, because it has none of the terrible motives for, or provocatives of those awful deeds, or ordinary rape: for this latter is seldom aided by the cruel knife, nor the dreadful climax crowned with inhuman butchery, as the latter nearly always has been.
Lust seems to be having a Saturnalia in these days; and in 1873 of the Christianic Era, a male human, through the Public Press, boasted that he went about the country seducing men's wives on "Principle"!! declaring he did no wrong! Onanism is mainly a physical disease; but the other crimes, including the boasting libertine's,—meaning, one Moses Hull, the author of a shocking "Personal Experience,"—are the deliberate actions of lost and conscienceless human souls! in other words, of human brutes, not yet immortalized.
CVI. In September, 1873, I attended a convention of ultra Radicals in Chicago, led by a noted agitatress, with whose courage and persistence in advocating her views I was particularly pleased, and took my stand on her side, because of her sex, and a persecuted member of it besides; and not because it was, is, or ever could be, possible for me to view the social question from either her standpoint or that of her confreres; I do not, cannot, never did, believe in Promiscuity, as some claimed that woman did, but which I heard her emphatically deny,—a little while before either that convention closed, or some peoples' eyes were opened—as mine certainly were, through an incident that occurred in the hall. However, on the ground of her gender, her championship of Fair play for woman; her splendid attack upon the unjust and unequal Taxation laws, and because of her right to a fair and candid hearing, I maintained in Chicago, as in Boston the year previous, when the same woman was up for office—stout battle in behalf, not of her peculiar doctrines, but of human responsibility, individualism, and the sacred right of Free discussion; and I would have stood by the side of any other human being under similar circumstances, even though, as in this case, nearly every one of her points of doctrine were and are quite dissimilar and antipodal to those I hold upon the same questions. I defended her right to a fair hearing in her bold, iconoclastic attack upon the wrongs of woman, and the injurious marriage system of to-day. I by no means could see it right for one man or woman to share the favors of another's wife or husband,—for I was barbarian enough then to have Sickleized him who should victimize a loved and loving wife of mine; and I would have justified any other man or woman in the same procedure then; I justify them just the same to-day; and hope to till I pass away,—provided always that she was not to blame,—assisted not at her own disgrace.
At that convention I uttered no word either for or against "Social Freedom;" confining my speeches to the three points above named; but I hailed that woman and every one else's declaration of belief and confidence in sanctified monogamic marriage; and their denunciation of unbridled license. A few days before I went to that convention I had heard of, and read, the unqualifiedly infamous and infernal recital of "A Personal Experience;" and I went there expressly to measure swords with the thing in human shape who published it; but the coward and braggart dared not show his polluted front; for Mr. Moses Hull was not there to defend his peculiar views and practice.
My command of language is limited; nor could I find words bitter enough to express my opinion of him, who gloried in profaning the very holiest shrine at which Manhood worships and renders grateful homage—that of the family; and I then, and now, would justify the wronged husband who should kill him. My intentions became known by the injudicious gabble of a confidant; and others came and persuaded me to bottle my lightning against him for the time being, lest it kindle a fire not easily extinguished.
On the same day I learned that the foes of Free discussion were preparing a coup against the female leader. She was a woman; I a man; the duty was plain: I would have a hand in the battle, and stand up for fair play until there was good skating upon ice five feet thick on the lurid lakes of Gehenna! I took my stand, and committing the author of "A Personal Experience" to the care of God and his own conscience, fairly and deftly threw that bone of contention entirely outside of the rather warm arena; but in doing so purposely allowed myself to be misunderstood by many people in the conclave, and throughout the nation. I sought in my speeches to make two points only; they were these: 1st, the individual nature of the human soul; its actual life, its personal responsibility and destiny; and, 2d, I declared my belief, and here repeat it,—that a female adulteress or harlot is no worse than a male libertine or voluptuary; that neither is beyond the range of pardon; and that I could, and do, alike pity her who "falls" from force of circumstances, poverty, presents, opportunity, importunity, and organization; and him who, distracted and rendered passion-mad by a billowy expanse of beautiful, snowy, palpitating bosom, loses his seven senses and follows straight in old Adam's wake.
In the Chicago conclave, as in all my works, I pleaded for the female outcast, and held that she who through misfortune stepped aside and became a mother ere a bride, should not be held in less esteem than him who brought the trouble to her door. That it is but fair to remember our own weakness, and give the helping heart and hand. I think so still; and it was in allusion to what the leading woman of the convention said on that very point that I uttered the memorable sentence: "I will stand by this woman (naming her) in the utterance of such views until there's good skating on ice five feet thick upon the Lakes of Tophet!" and so I would, and whereever or whenever a wrong is to be righted and human justice dealt out as God's eternal is.
CVII. It is impossible for me to denounce as an unmitigated scoundrel and villain, any human being whose misconceptions of Manhood and human duty and obligation lead him to trample upon what most of us regard as holy; for we may not know the hidden causes underlying his actions. He is certainly a strange man who can justify his own or another's proceedings when lust is alone the prompter,—to first seduce every woman, married or single, that he can, and then publicly boast of it! Impregnating other men's wives; compelling men and women too to remain in ignorance as to the paternity of a given child, if such should be the issue of the "Passional attraction;" forcing an honest, hard-working man to support his harlotized wife, and the wandering "Lover's" bastards, and he, the "Wanderer," laughing at the man he has dishonored, and the wife he has degraded!—forgetting the last victims while in search of new ones; repeating the ghastly crime everywhere; encouraging his own wife to play the role of common cyprian; and scattering possible discord and desolation wherever his salacious footsteps fall! Supposing such a being to be sane, then such a thing in human shape, who would deliberately win the favors of any woman, save a very common courtesan, and then brag of it, to her shame and his own dishonor, is too small a specimen of the genus homo to be tolerated in society calling itself civilized. Savagery is his status, and to it should he be relegated. But a civilized man of such views and practice is not sane; for he gives incontestable proof of being the victim of chronic prostatic inflammation, undoubtedly of Onanistic, but more likely of Pederastic origin; and thus being sexually mad, is a semi-responsible cerebro-prostatic maniac, to whom the universe appears as one grand discus or yoni and himself the aspiring priapic-phallic godling!
But there! I have done with him; this thing named Moses Hull, having thus handed him and his ilk down the ages, and that's enough! That crime, and the other, child-rape—which latter I call Dentonism—after the most wretched and contemptible thing that ever wore the semblance of a man,—Hull excepted,—I regard as the worst that ever existed within the confines of civilization, and in calling the attention of the public, but especially legislators, thereto, I amply redeem my promise, and have fully paid my little Bill!
I never did, by speech or pen, advocate any of the peculiar social theories broached and ventilated in that, or any similar conclave—for reasons already herein and elsewhere set forth in my various writings: and yet, because I held my peace upon the main questions at issue, and in spite of the fact, I was held to have sanctioned and fully endorsed all the radical utterances there made; to have upheld what I have fought all my life long,—the total abrogation of all marriage; and to have espoused the doctrine of connubial hand-fastening, or temporary marriages, and I know not what else of absurdity the foes of Fair play and Free discussion chose to invent and fashion in fantastic garb out of whole cloth to suit their own peculiar fancies. As I suffered by distortion, so did others, and yet the sun actually rose next day!
Love's Alchemy—The Marrow; Res gestæ; Summing up.
CVIII. Human marriage, being triplicate,—material, mental, emotional,—has three offices, clear and distinct. 1st. Its functions are humanizing and perpetuating; 2d. They are refining, elevating, a means of soul-growth; and, 3d. The purpose it serves is a mystic one, for beyond all doubt the ultimate of the human is deific—a fusion mingling, interblending—at-one-ment with the Omnipotent God; what came from, must return to, the centre; and he who would be nearer God is he who loves the purest.
CIX. The test of all Love is its self-sacrificing unselfishness; and all amative love is false, unclean, abnormal, unless it be based upon the non-physical; it must be builded of respect, affection, that which is mental and spiritual; else it lasts not.
CX. Woman loves easier than man, and it is easier broken, unless its roots are grounded in her very soul; then it is next to death to give it up. When a man loves in right down earnest, and from the feminine side of his soul, it, all other things being equal, ever-masses, overweighs, any love modern women—Society people, I mean are capable of. But take the two and probably the loves will balance each other, with this eternal fact in woman's favor; she is self-sacrificing, and her love, when it is love, is untainted with earth; is never external, never merely sensual.
CXI. Woman can conceal, dissemble, pretend love,—not a spark of which she really feels,—to perfection; and hoodwink any man she chooses to play upon; but a woman with her eyes open cannot be served the same way by a man; for love, if it be real, tells its own story. More men love their wives than wives their husbands! He cannot make believe half as well as she; for the lady can coolly kiss a man with the intent of playing upon him at the very first chance; embrace him, with a load of deceit in her heart. But when a man loves he loves all over. Blast it, and you destroy him. But in these days love as true and solid as that is exceedingly rare indeed!
The undetected and unconvicted adulterers exceed the uncaught ones five hundred to one. This result from the non-understanding of the real and radical differences existing between true soul-love and its mere passional and magnetic counterfeits—which are fifty times more abundant than the other.
CXII. No wicked person can truly love and remain wicked. That is the redemptive, salvatory and alchemical power of the divine principle! True-heartedness is the corrective agency of the great human world and human soul. Without it we are ships on the stormy deep, with a wild rush of angry waters threatening to submerge us at any instant! With it, we are life-boated into fair havens and secure anchorage! With it, we arise into bliss and blessedness; without it, misery is our lot; for it is the telegraphic System wherewith God engirdles the worlds! From Him it goes; to Him it returns, bringing up from the deeps the poor forlorn ones it finds there, and stringing them like beads to hang round the neck of the ineffable and viewless Lord of infinite and superlative glory!
CXIII. At first Love springs up and surges in our souls, a new-born and strange power, which rules us with a rod of iron. At the start it is vague, general, diffusive; and we are glad without knowing the reasons why, like unto the babe quickened en utero; and we are irresistibly urged to centre it on some one, some reciprocating soul; and unless we do, wretched are we! If we fail so to do, but expend its forces here, there, everywhere, anywhere, we speedily cease to be truly human; but sink till we are the bond slaves of pernicious, debasing, demoralizing habit, from which there may be deliverance, but a very troublous one. We must love one; for unless we do the measure of our life on earth is unfilled.
CXIV. The new soul descends to man; by him is bequeathed and entrusted to the dear mother's care, during those mysterious forty weeks. By her it is robed in flesh and blood, and during the wonderful and thrice holy process she needs all the vital life that he can spare; and it is his bounden duty to impart it in every possible form, from the gentle caress to the kind word and act of tender gallantry. She knows when she requires magnetism, and she is to be sole and supreme judge of when, and where and how that vital power shall be imparted! Do not forget this.
An hour's rest on his loving shoulder at the eventide, just as they sit by the open casement, is sometimes of more value to an unwell woman, than untold gold and diamonds would be at another time, and under different conditions.
Moreover. I have no patience with the puerile jargon of the "Physiologists." to the end that the great climax of connubiality ought always to cease from the conceptive moment till after lactation;—that non-intercourse should he the rule, and rigidly enforced, all of which I regard as stupid nonsense—prefixed with a dash and two d's,—because we are human beings, not mere animals; and both the mother and babe require that magnetic life and vif which only the father and husband can supply.
There is a very curious thing right here: Instances are numerous of a wife descending, subsequent to conception, to other than the father of her child. In such case, the second man determines the shape, quality and calibre of the unborn infant's soul! The woman has no right to wrong any man in that style; for she ranks but as a cyprian, and the child is essentially an illegitimate; because, whereas, the husband has given body to his offspring, the other supplies it with the elements of spirit, and the babe will be more like him than its own father! because spiritual laws are of stronger force than physical! Don't forget this!
But the husband has no more rights in this respect than his wife; because wherever he goes he is sure to bring back a non-assimilable, foreign, magneto-vital influence, which neither his wife nor child can appropriate and absorb; and thus he warps the babe's soul, if not its body, and infuses an aura into the very marrow of the being of both his dependents, which is injurious to all, and may crop out in physical disease or mental ailment, in after years, by the hair-graying conduct of his angular child!
When babes and children have trouble, they cry themselves to sleep; when men and women have trouble, slumber flies their weary eyes. Now when men are careless concerning the substance of this paragraph, they indicate a bad state of puerility; for of all human duties, the grandest is that of fathering those who shall be superior to ourselves. "But how? Suppose an inferior woman to be already pregnant, how shall I, her husband, correct the faults of haste, imperfect organization,—in a word, suppose the child to be has been launched into existence under very unfavorable conditions; how shall I correct the bad bias; and what shall I do that it may come to the world a far better and nobler being than if things ended just as they began? Tell me this, O man of Eulis, and I—I will thank you on bended knee!"
Well put, my questioner. Now heed thou well the reply thereto: —1st. Remember that in her condition your marital offices are never in order save when she determines they shall, aught to, or may be. 2d. That if offered and accepted at any oilier time, a direct injury results to the mother and her unborn child. 3d. Wherefore Infrequency is the true policy to be pursued, if you hope for good results. 4th. Remember that consummation is threefold:—of body, spirit, soul. That then the greatest streams of magnetism flow from husband to wife, and wife to husband. That said Magnetism is a vehicle conveying the states of the soul, body and spirit; and through it, then both the mother and the child may be blessed or cursed; poisoned or purified; filled with divine life, or charged with the quintessence of horror and hell!
Well, do you see the point? do you understand your duty? and do you perceive that, if by restraint you add vigor to your entire being; and when she invites you to share it with her, you do so, wishing, willing, praying that untold good, unnumbered blessings may follow, and result therefrom,—that they will come, just as sure as God reigns? If you do not so perceive it, it is high time you did. Were you an initiate of Eulis, you would find out more on this wonderful point; but as it is, take what I herein give you, and God grant you may profit by it.
CXV. Love, and love only, can secure the devotion and heart-fidelity of a woman, and any other sort is not worth having. When a woman loves, even if unreturned, she is a heroine: but if returned, she is happy, which is a great deal better than heroism!
CXVI. Married people ruin their homes, even though loving ones, by unwise and untimely association. It should never be a matter of course, but ever and always a dual inspiration; otherwise it is detective.
CXVII. Woman and man are not equals. They are diverse compatibles; each contrasts and opposites the other,—offsetting in all ways. The two, together, constitute the being called man. Either alone is but an incompleteness,—a halfness. Neither owns the other, but are joint interestants in the social compact. The idea of ownership is what has made marriage as it is to-day,—a jangle, wrangle, tangle,—anything, everything, but what it should be. It were well if we would each of us constantly bear in mind that we conquer oftenest when we stoop to do so; and that more is to be gained by graceful sacrifice than stubborn reliance upon reserved rights.
CXVIII. The second purpose of marriage is the peopling of the Spaces; its essence is spiritual. In true marriage there is a mutual infiltration of soul, whence it happens that nature, in slowly moulding each to resemble the other, proclaims that marriage real and true; but not all the ceremonies on earth could fuse a couple of natural antagonists. If these likenesses are not observed, it is a pretty sure sign that there is but little love coursing round that homeside, and still less flowing through the channel of their lives.
We do not want to find ourselves growing away from each other; but in fusing natures and blending spirits, to coalesce with our opposites, effecting a chemical union, admitting no separation, and the only solvent of which is the grand Alcahest—Death:—And if the marriage be perfect, even death is unable to change it.
Reader: don't be a fool! don't lavish your love on one who talks, but never acts it. I, the author of this book, tell you that if your heart is overflowing with affection, you are in all the greater danger of first filling some empty, bladder-like being, with your own soul's sphere, then falling desperately in love with it, only to waken from the dreadful sleep to find him or her a diabolic sham, and yourself wrecked, ruined, prostrate, helpless, broken-hearted, deserted, and wretched beyond description. Prove all things, especially proffered Love, and when you find it real, give rein to your soul:—But not till then!!
CXIX. When a couple are alike, equally choleric, mental, physical, frigid or the reverse; passive, positive, magnetic, electric, tall, slender, fat, active, indolent; then such are constitutionally, temperamentally, and in most other respects, non-adapted to each other; and if they are not careful, there will be more down than up, discord than its opposite, in that family. But, where such persons have already cast the die of what passes current in these days as marriage, there's wisdom in seeking to create or build up an artificial harmony, which care and time will render habitual, natural and permanent; because Habit becomes even stronger tnan nature, as witness the use of narcotics, which all arc disgusted with at first. If people will but attempt in thus making a second nature, the barrenness, usual in such cases, will be obviated, as well as the premature senility and impotence resultant; for that both these effects are often owing to such causes is as clearly established as any other medical fact, albeit the sufferers are not always aware of the reason.
CXX. In all males of the human species the personal, physical charms of woman, based upon desire, is the central attractive point, round which all desires cluster. His better, nobler, higher love comes afterward. Reverse the case for woman. Her love never has that rise. She takes to the better side first—his social, mental, moral, spiritual manhood; and only after the lapse of time, frequently a whole year, does she awaken to the realization of the purely sensuous or passional; and uncounted thousands there are who never awaken thereto at all from the altar to the grave. If all such cases he is an unwise man who does not by careful and assiduous attention, by every delicate and tender means, seek to establish the natural equilibrium; by all true human methods arouse the dormant power in the breast of her who shares his lot and life.
CXXI. Prior to the actual marriage the husband loves deepest, most intensely and devotedly. But after that, his ardor cools, and a revulsion of feeling, amounting to dislike, is almost sure to follow; in which he is the exact opposite of woman; for it is then only that she begins to cling to him with a depth and fervor surprising to him, astonishing to herself. Wise is he who then gives her reason to make that love permanent, solid, lasting, even to the brink of the grave.
Men, all males in fact, love fiercest before marriage; all females, subsequent thereto. It is the Law. But a man must so comport himself at these primal interviews as not to wound her sensitive spirit, or cloud her life with gloom, dread, fear, suspicion. First impressions last the longest!
CXXII. Man's Love is never a steady stream, or constant force. He, so to speak, packs it away in the presence of other "Business," and gives it an airing now and again; but woman reverses all that, and loves right straight along from the start, every day and all the time, provided she loves at all. Whatever she may be about, no matter what, her love is the sole theme of her life, the only occupation of her mind; and she takes good care to give it air every hour of the day; and a fair return, in kind, amply repays her for many an hour of mortal anguish. If she fails to get it, God help her! for her life is but a lingering, painful, torturous death. It is even so with man. If he loves,—as I have loved, My God!—and after long months of toil awakens to find his idol but a phantom; that he has been embalming a doll in his own heart and loving it, but getting no return, what wonder that madness comes, and the wild beating of his heart and throbbing of his temples drive him to the brink of ruin, until he stands toppling on the cliffs of suicide, doubtful whether to leap or not; and only saved by the Omnipotent hand of the interfering God!
CXXIII. Lust ties man to the outer walls of human life, and keeps him there a prisoner feeding upon the poorest of husks. But Love frees him from many a gyve and thrall; gives him the freedom of God's gardens of joy; feeds him with the bread of life; opens the gates of heaven; and admits him to the companionship of celestial Verities and divinest life and truth. Without love we are, indeed, poor hermits in the world!
CXXIV. People plunge headlong into perdition and social gehenna by rushing into each other's arms too often! Passional excess generates disease; Love cures them; and all the kidney difficulties and nervous disorders extant are but the physical expression of the morbid and unhealthy states of the love-natures of their respective victims.
Those who love can never prostitute themselves or each other, in any way.
It is just as impossible to kindle fire with ice as to long deceive a soul that loves. But, ah, God, how terrible is the awakening to the fact that all this time you have been lavishing your heart's best treasures on a dead stock! Then—in her case, comes leucorrhœa or gravid uterus,—not physical ailments, but the outward sign that there's love trouble in the soul, and love the only remedy. In his case insanity more or less pronounced, and enduring.
CXXV. There are periods when love insists upon passional moods. It is its natural appeasement. If not yielded to, a frightful train of ills are sure to follow, and madness may end the cruel scene.
CXXVI. Jealousy quite as often springs from magnetic incompatibility and impotence as from love-estrayal; and it brings on heart-pain, dyspepsia, liver and Bright's disease, prostatic, urethral, vaginal, ovarian, and other fatal troubles, long before the allotted span of years run out.
CXXVII. Doctors tell us that actual marriage will cure some diseases of woman. But a diseased woman is not fit for it; and actual marriage in diseased states of either party is—monstrous! The doctrine is nonsense, pure and simple. Magnetism may do. marriage no! But facts are facts, and the thing occurs. If love underlie it, well and good; if not, then not. It is disastrous. But if good results follow, it is Affection that works the miracle, nothing coarser! And more wives are injured in that manner than sextons can find spades to dig graves for!
That is a very poor sort of love which always exacts but never gives! "She prated of Love all day long, and neglected by one single act to prove her truth," is the story of many a man's life. "He says he loves me—but just look at me; does love waste one as I am wasted? My God! Let this bitter cup pass from me!" is the daily cry of millions of "Married" women!
I'm tired and sick of dead babies! They ought to fill out the term of threescore years and ten; but they don't; and those who escape the sewers, sinks, drains, and being carried out with the tides, or being snugly put away in a cigar-box and stuck in a hole in the garden, are mighty uncertain of a safe deliverance from measles, scarlatina, croup, paregoric, or Mrs. Winslow's soothing syrup! Ah, but isn't it a soother?—soothing mam a one to a sleep that knows no waking! But these dead ones are not all the oil-spring of the riff-raff, or haul-handed servitors at labor's shrine; but many a hundred of them might lay claim to aristocratic lineage; and I have quite enough experience to satisfy me that those who do, or who wink at, such deeds, are, many of them church-goers, full of deadly piety, who, behind the scenes, revel in debaucheries dreadful enough to shame a Satyr. Not a few of them are "Reformers," in public preaching perfect purity, but in private practising promiscuity, and the very ones—if male—with whom no decent, respectable woman could be alone with ten minutes, save at the absolute certainty of being insulted by the most villainous proposals.
In my Medical practice, and that of Teacher, three classes of persons mainly sought relief or counsel: 1st. Wives whose daily life was a living death; whose "homes" were tophets in petto; and whose "Husbands"—sic?—in one respect treated them worse than they did the dumb brutes in barn or stable—poor, waxen-faced martyrs, worse than sacrificed and slaughtered on the altars of a legalized sensualism, so low and mean, selfish, exacting, as to even shame the beasts of the field; and these wives human! 2d. Men and women whose hearts and souls yearned for affection which they found not; and which they were denied by those from whom they had the right to expect it!—people who were either fretting to death under the awfully galling yoke of a bad marriage; or who wanted advice to guide them to the desired haven—and heaven, of Marriage, as God intended it should be. 3d. But by far the largest class of callers and correspondents must be reckoned that vast mass of people whose entire gender-nature had been broken up, or down, and demoralized until they had become mere phantom men and women, incapable of realizing the sublime meaning of the words Sex and Marriage; and so disordered and diseased that Hope itself, with folded wing and fouled anchor, perched upon a bleak cliff on some island far away. O my God! what utter horror and blank despair have I seen gleam from the eyes of thousands!—victims all,—to vampiral depletion; nervous and vital exhaustion; impotentia, barrenness; diseases of uterus, vulva, ovaries, kidneys, prostate, heart, lungs, brain—the terrible personal hades outgrown from society, society, society, with its falses and shams; its money-marriages; its deceit and hypocrisy, denouncing the Wrong with the breath, but with act encouraging concubinage, cyprianism, libertinage: and by its repressions, fashion, style, display and airiness discouraging marriage, and fostering thereby the solitary vice now desolating millions, and decimating all the fair lands I make the solemn statement and declaration that a cry fair percentage of that third class were from the dignified, wealthy, respectable, Christian, aristocratic, and even reverend stratas of society, not of this country alone, but of all civilived lands, including Cuba, Chili, Brazil, France, Spain, China. Australia, Japan and England. In fact, the demand for sex tonics and invigorants is not only simply enormous but almost universal, and all springing from violation of the Love-laws of our common human nature. Of course, such a demand for such medicines speaks in thunder tones against the causes producing it, and equally loud against the private habits of us of the world. But the facts exist; and even the dreadful syphilis in modified form rages in the blood and bones of unnumbered thou sands—not only of guilty debauchees,—who are scarce to be pitied!—but, alas, in those of innocent wives and prattling infants! What are these half murdered ones—of both the latter classes—to do? suffer and die like leprous dogs? or are they to reach forth and make desperate efforts for physical salvation? If the latter, then all legislators should at once look to the enactment of laws suppressing quackery; making syphilis a criminal offence; hanging abortionists; squelching "flash" papers, and legalizing all unions based on blind trust on one side and villainous libertinage on the other; and punishing re-unions elsewhere as it now punishes polygamy outside the favored Mormon and Perfectionist churches, institutions or bagnios, "Religious" and "Theological." Shame on the Press—the First Estate of modern nations, that it hesitates to launch its thunders at the class of wrongs just cited, and hurl them forever into hades!
"Firm in the right! the Public Press should be,
The tyrant's foe, the champion of the free!
Faithful amd constant to its sacred trust,—
Calm in its utterance, in its judgment just,
Wise in its teaching; uncorrupt and strong,
To spread the right and to denounce the wrong!
Long may it lie ere candor must confess
On Freedom's hordes, a weak and venal Press!"
It is generally admitted that there's something wrong in society, but what the cure is or shall be is not so apparent. One class of people advocate "Social Freedom" as the panacea, whatever that may mean. Before I went to, at, and until the last day of, the Chicago Convention, elsewhere alluded to, I thought I knew the correct meaning of the terms. I find I did not; and therefore look in other directions for the social cure. Spoiled cheese, and cheese spoiled, are the same to me; nor for my life can I now see the difference in the moral grade and status of a cyprian or libertine on the pay-rolls, and the same, impulse and passion being the spur and motive. The cheese smells equally bad in both cases!
It wouldn't be a bad thing to make it a punishable offence for any M.D. to call syphilis by the nicer name of scrofula, thus fooling honest wives, and screening recreant husbands—even if they are well paid for their white lies! For in these days that scourge burns the bodies of unspotted virgins, in the shape of furor albus, womb complaint, etc., inherited from infected mothers. The evil is bad enough if it stopped right there, but it don't; because, in the first place, it brings on pruritis,—vaginal itching; creates morbid desire, and subjects girls as pure as snow to the almost dead certainty of falling victims to the first graceful, smart, and salacious scoundrel that comes along,—a scoundrel and victim too, it may be of the same inherited-fluid ruin coursing like streams of fire through his swollen veins! In the second place, these girls are to become wives and mothers; these boys husbands and fathers; thus the curse is injected into the veins of myriads of the yet unborn—children doomed before birth to endure a life of perpetual ill-health and morbid unrest; to know nothing of real happiness from the breast to the tomb—to which latter they are likely to be rushed prematurely by suicide, resultant from insanity begotten by the beings who parented them. Again I repeat Syphilis is a crime, and should be held as such.
CXXVIII. Love is multiple in form and mode. Sometimes it will endure and suffer long. At others it will die as if lightning-struck; but the "dying" sort of affection is not worth tying to! Never!
Irish Love is gallant, but non-lasting, and is more affectional or amicive than ardent and amative. Negro Love is diffusive, hilarious, sensual. Oriental Love is sad-eyed, dreamy, vague, skyey, poetic, rapt, heavenly, divine, but not keen, or passional. Spanish Love is fiery, ardent, impetuous, terrible, scorching, consuming; tender, but not enduring. German Love is parental, maternal, filial, domestic, dead-level, and mainly physical. It has no Italian heights; no sunbursts; no mountains or valleys; no anguish; no great joys; no hill-tops crowned with glittering sheen. French Love is superficial, lascivious, and, when youth is gone, a thing of memory, not of fact. English Love, like its food and architecture, is solid, lasting, nourishing, life-prolonging, good to have, but has no extremes. Scotch Love is domestic, but mealy. Northern Love is like that of the felidæ—catty, scratchy, periodic, poisonish, often downright brutal, and never tender, delicate, or refined. Yankee Love is fitful, uncertain, changeful, passional, moody, seldom more than superficial, because the Yankee faculties are all engrossed in the one grand object of American life—dollars and dimes, dash and display. Western Love I know but little about, and, judging from what I saw in Ohio, is so-so-ish, not deep; cool, calculating, and seldom drives its victims to suicide, because only the heartful sink to despair!
Lastly. Southern Love is volcanic, chivalrous, gallant, true, tender, jealous, safe when earnest, devotional and devoted, genuine and manly. The well-bred Southerners are the true ladies and gentlemen of America! I never met but one mean man among them in all my life (and he was descended from a French family, born in Limerick, or the Cove of Cork). They have less sharp intellect, perhaps, than the northern people, but more Soul; hence, while subject to fevers, amative weakness they are free from!
CXXIX. An old man should be very careful of the intimacies of wedded life; he should change his amative for amicive ardor; because all old people arc more or less troubled with Embolism,—a clogging of the veins, nerves, arteries, muscles—all the viscera, with the limy, chalky, carbonaceous, calcareous refuse of the body—such as the organs cannot get rid of; and the accumulation means a cessation of physical joys and vigor, and ultimate death. When Embolism prevails to a considerable extent, the orgasm is a dangerous thing for that man, and death stands close by whenever he forgets that he is no longer a youth. But if such will insist on being foolish, they should first get rid of the Embolism, and cleanse the body of all superfluities in the shape of phosphates, alkaline or acid; dissolve the clayey refuse, and evacuate it at once, else some time he may, in repeating youth-like follies, so shock and shatter his nervous system as to rob him of what few years remain to him on earth. This cleansing process is quite easy of accomplishment, as I have elsewhere stated, and while alive, am ready to instruct about. And this point suggests another closely connected with it:—
CXXX. Self-venery is more often a disease than it is a vice or crime. In either case the fault or habit is easily corrected, cured, and broken. All that is necessary is to exhibit medicines that will repress the amative appetite, and for awhile seal up the ducts. The waste being stopped, of course strength accumulates, for the rich, vital life is retained, assimilated, and the diseases of nerves, brain, and pelvic viscera disappear before the returning march of vigorous and triumphant health.
CXXXI. I cannot resist the desire to repeat my warning against the ruinous and suicidal policy of "conjugal frauds," that is, carrying the marriage to a point short of completion; but I have additional reasons. They are these: The shock to the nervous system is at least ten times greater in such cases than in the normal rite, or even its dreadful counterfeit; and I never saw a case where it had been a habit, that the man was not terribly injured, cerebrally as well as nervously. In all such cases Sanity was a diminishing ratio; and the brain injured almost beyond the power of reparation. The natural office must be naturally fulfilled, else the strain on the blood-vessels of the pelvis is so great, that premature impotence is sure; while that upon the cerebral arteries means insanity, paralysis, brain-softening, spinal disease, apoplexy, and death! Unless both realize what God intended, ruin, sooner or later, is the inevitable result. In cases where the sensuous equations are not alike, the more rapid nervous action can be retarded by an effort of the will, and God's design be accomplished, not frustrated. One-half the sudden deaths of middle-aged men result from this cause!
CXXXII. Many husbands, by various means, have so impaired their personal vigor, as to be semi, if not wholly, impotent; but instead of imputing it to the right cause, they attribute it to some fault on the other side of the house, and poor she leads an unhappy life in consequence. Now this is all wrong; but the cure quite easy: 1st. He should occupy his own chamber solus. 2d. Breathe deeply. 3d. Be much in the sunshine. 4th. Drink no liquors. 5th. Bathe often. 6th. Eat solid beef, and unsifted flour—no potatoes at all; and in four weeks he will recuperate all his lost energies, and be a man again; for while he remains a weakling and a passional imbecile, he could not be happy with the best and fairest wife that ever was fashioned by the master hand of Omnipotence!
CXXXIII. It often happens that from some occult reason there is a great deficiency, even to the extent of horror and disgust on the part of some ladies; whose lords not realizing the enormity of such conduct, lead lives of insistance, and reap crops of passive, yet enforced compliance on the part of their—victims, shall I say? Such men should realize that it is in their own power, by delicacy and kindness, to change the morbid to a natural state; so that what was shrunk from with loathing, will, in six months, be accepted as natural and right, and be fully reciprocated—with a little noble and forbearing trial, and some patience; yet the reward is ample; and oh, how delightful! to feel that she regards you as a saviour from yourself! instead of as before,—a little domestic tyrant, bent on mischief, careless who suffers so long as you—do not!
CXXXIV. True Manhood, and all that it implies, proclaims itself in nothing so well and fairly as in the tones of our voices. When we arc right in that respect, the sounds are clear, deep, round, full, sonorous, melodious, with an underlayer of music ringing out bell-like from our very souls. It then shows that we are right both at the emotive and brain centres of our duplicate being; but when they are cracked, shrill, sharp, acute, squeaky, false, coppery, gongy, it indicates little power and less Soul; for it is morbid, and its possessor is better fit for almost anything else than holy, honorable, God-sanctioned marriage!
CXXXV. Soul-vigor, and what it implies, depends to a great extent on Lung capacity, and that generally indicates good digestion.
No great act or mighty thought can originate in, or be accomplished by, one who is deficient in the foundational quality of absolute manhood. Just so long as we are morbid in that department, that long we are demoralized all over, inside, outside, head to heel, and soul and body.
Sexive health and purity is the price of power. We cannot have it on any other terms whatever; wherefore Truth to one love builds up the entire being; while any departure therefrom, any degree of promiscuity, beats the soul's wings to the ground, cripples its energies, lays it low, just as summer torrents lay low the ripening grain. As a thinker, I regard that as one of the most important of all truths. In nothing is this rule more imperative than in the cases of such persons as desire to cultivate the inner powers of the being; for any passional excess or "Variety" as certainly disarms the soul, seals up the spiritual eyes, blunts the inner power of perception, and ruins the capacity for psycho-vision, as that water and fire are antagonistic. It is said that one cannot serve God and Mammon at the same time; and it is equally certain that we cannot cultivate the better and loftier powers resident within us, and at the same time give a loose rein to the carnal passions of our nature.
CXXXVI. The force of Genius is the force of Gender, and both are the force of Destiny! No man or woman can be truly great unless their amatory natures are well developed!
In my medical practice I first cured people of innumerable diseases myself, and then taught my pupils how to do likewise, by, firstly, secondly, and lastly, getting them right sexively; after which dear old Nature carried them straight up the hills of health! When a man is full of vigor he scorns to do a mean thing, because he feels himself so much a MAN. You pick out all the scoundrels and drivers of hard bargains, and that portion of their nature will be found missing; no color in their faces, no manhood in their being; too mean to live; too miserable to die!
On the other hand, when a lady's periods are sweet, pure, regular, she's mighty apt to be very pleasant company to whoever chances to pass by that way; and her very smile is a ray of sunlight straight out from heaven! But just as soon as the fleurs blanches appear, she begins to sour right away; and a woman in either state should forever he held apart and sacred, for she is no more capable of wifeliness at such times than is the weanling crawling on the floor. Why, every one can see at a glance.
CXXXVII. Death is but the beginning of some people's real trouble; and marriage is generally the commencement of everybody else's; for there's so much morbidity afloat that people are perverted before marriage, and remain so afterward. Such can never avoid slander, scandal, backbiting; but take thereto as ducks to water, because the foundations of nobility are sealed up; and neither man or woman thus characterized can live at peace with any other of God's creatures on the footstool. Such wives either fool their lords, or make home too hot to hold them. Such men neglect their wives, and general chaos reigns supreme. Now if such would but take pains to revive and cultivate the true instinct, the road to happiness would open straight before them.
CXXXVIII. When the skin of the face, hands, arms, is loose and flabby, it is a sure sign of three things: kidney, bladder, vaginal, urethral, brain, or uterine trouble; originating in affectional disturbances; of chronic discontent; and of the need of cure by affection. Let this be done, and they who would love and be loved breathe deeply, and the physical ailments will disappear. Promiscuity can never do it. I have heard doctors recommend it; but I have no patience with them or with that other ilk who contend for "Variety in Love." To me they are but human toads bent on besliming the morals of mankind. I defy any sane man to love the wife whom he knows shares with another favors to which he alone by their mutual troth is entitled! Public opinion sets in strong tides against such doctrine; and although it is sometimes pig-headed and wrong, yet in this it is unquestionably right: because no true, genuine man or woman is willing to. or capable of, sharing the love which ought to lie exclusively their own. Lecherous human halflings advocate the doctrine; but it is always on their side of the house, at the expense of some one else's wife or daughter! It is simply monstrous and impossible for healthy people to be happy in "Variety."
CXXXIX. People who have no charity toward those who, by pressure of circumstances, place, opportunity, or magnetism, step aside and commit a social fault, will upon analysis be found not overly sound at heart, secretly unprincipled, and wofully lacking in the basic elements of genuine man or womanhood.
Prudes are not perfectly clean in all corners of their souls.
Those who demolish bagnios are usually bagnio-patrons! Rakes and libertines have less mercy than their opposites; while those who say a good word for the fallen are the ones who know how it is themselves to be spat upon, maligned, lashed, scorned, neglected; and that too by those unworthy to latch their shoestrings! while they who hate the opposite sex give proof positive of foul personal habits within the secrecy of their own rooms!
CXL. Men often like their wives, as household conveniences, yet never really husband them; and that's exactly what every woman wants but don't get—as a general rule! Now if there is one fool greater than another, it is either the wife who submits to such treatment, when she has her remedy in the exercise of the three principles named elsewhere in this book; or the husband who expects that a neglected wife can really love him, and honestly be sorry when he dies!
CXLI. Virtue, not its opposite, is the normal state of man ' Affection, not passion, is what we crave and yearn for; and finding are blest. When we go astray it is more from the pressure of circumstances than the natural inclination of our souls. Most of us were born wrong, and inherit tendencies not good for us; still in the cultured will we have a never-failing remedy.
The heart's allegiance must first be turned aside before the body yields to passional breezes blowing from off the home-shore; wherefore I hold it better to not try to break the bad connection by force, but by the applied will rewin the straying one to love's arms again.
CXLII. The essence of Marriage is consent. Ceremonials merely publish the fact; wherefore it should be the law of every land that he who finds a woman worth seducing, and does it, should, by that act alone, he compelled to maintain and acknowledge her as a lawful wife, unless she sees fit to waive her undoubted right to claim and hold him as a husband. The fad that a man has done such an act should in law bar him from marriage with any other woman. Such is the way in which I look at it; and if society would but adopt the idea there would be fewer libertines, and some millions less of ruined girls and forlorn prostitutes.
She who robs a woman of her husband; or he who ruins a confiding girl merits a season in Tophet, and if I were Brahm would get it—sure!
CXLIII. The more familiarities a single woman permits a man to take, the more he is sure to undervalue her, and the less she respects and honors him. It is natural for him to despise one who allows too great freedoms. So also within the sacred pale of wedlock: the very first immodesty on either side blunts the edge, takes the bloom from the peach, lessens them in their own and each other's eyes, and is the beginning of folly which often ends in the divorce courts, the brothel, bagnio, or the grave! Modesty and circumspection build up tottering loves. Their opposites bring disrespect and finally dissolution. I say these things here, because I have long known them to be true.
What a pleasant thing it must be to a sensible and sensitive woman to have, whenever her heart prompts her to express affection—her better half meet her with a storm of coarse and disgusting passion,—the base idea of which must be perfectly withering to her soul. Poor She!—one of thousands!—how ardently must she long for death, and dread even heaven itself, if there is marrying and giving in marriage away over in the upper Land! Amd how such a woman must try to be a Budhist and long for nihility rather than continued life. But then such states are begotten of her—their, deep unrest, causing them to long—as have I ere now—for whole eternities of sweet and restful sleep. But then women capable of such yearnings are immortal; will survive death, and, let us believe—their longings will be appeased, their pangs assuaged over there where it is certain they, like myself, will at last be understood; for such seldom are on this earth, and at thirty odd, it is too late to hope to be while in the flesh.
Helen, a loose one, caused the wars of Troy, and from her down the lane of ages, men, and women too, have practically adored body, and worshipped Lust and Fashion, openly or sub-rosa; and until some decimating scourge, originating in Lust, shall sweep the earth—as it will within a century!—of six-tenths of its human denizens, the same wild worship will continue as before.
CXLIV. How very seldom married people praise each other! yet nothing on earth goes so far toward rejuvenating a waning regard, as the expression of gladness at each other's points, acts, trials, victories, industry, perseverance; yet all this power for good is practically ignored; and while others are praised and cheered to the echo, we never get the slightest token of appreciation, even though we toil like abject slaves to deserve it. If love exists between couples, it ought to show itself in something better than mere empty words. If it does not, whole troops of discontentments come crowding at our fireside; for neglected duties, broken promises, lip affection, magnetic, or passional attraction, will not fill the bill of an anxious heart! They paralyze us, render us cross, selfish, non-ambitious, careless, hopeless, solitary, and despondent. That affection which words itself by daylight, and snores when Night veils the world, is not worth an hour's purchase. Palsied affection seldom gets entirely well again! and non-reciprocal marriage infuriates all males; and too many wives make not the slightest effort toward mutuality; and by so neglecting one of the first of wifely duties, clap the lid on the coffin of their happiness, and hurry their joys to an untimely grave; and after thus committing marital suicide, they weep and wonder that their lords do not fall down at their feet to worship and idolize them as of yore, in the halycon days of courtship and the honeymonth; not realizing that he, poor fellow, has found the lace all paper, the diamonds all paste;—and no man likes either of these! She is not wise, who expects to hold a man securely unless one of her strongest cords is reciprocation, which every husband has a right to expect and realize; and every wife, by her vow, is bound to culture and accord. Otherwise their union is but a mockery and a sham.
She who habitually fails in that wifely duty helps to support the females who occupy the palaces of sin—and gin, to whose society her husband is, as "they say." driven by her coldness. The strange woman at least simulates accord; while the honorable wife expresses frigidity, horror, indifference, or disgust: neither of which arc well calculated to keep a man in good training for his constant combat with the world!
I hold him not a good man who ever seeks what can never be sanctioned except by mutual love; for it is a profanation of the divinest sanctities of the human soul; and he is a poor specimen of a man who can seek solace in a cyprian's arms, or revel in passional debauch bought with current coin either in or out of wedlock; for nothing but Love can ever justify an act which may launch an immortal soul into being. Under these holy conditions marriage generates glorious thoughts, noble resolve, courage to endure; gives a better zest of, and hold on, life, fortune, goodness, God!
Under the false condition every participant rests on the edge of Hades, ready to roll off into it at any moment; and if there is an especial curse, they deserve it who, with their eves open, as mine now are, and for some time have been,—violate that sacred law. That and "Variety" are death to true affection, and also destructive of the power and ability to experience any but coarse and gross emotion; besides brutalizing human nature, destroying nobleness of character, they totally unfit us to become parents of pure children and good ones; but only of such as. born of passion, shall rush on passion-tides adown the stream of life, cursing their progenitors at every inch of the dreadful way! But true love, thank Heaven! antagonizes, and finally destroys, lurid, baneful lust. The twain are incompatible; but the angel slays the fiend whenever they meet in combat on anything like even terms. Thank God for that again! So be it forever!
CXLV. There are too many million outrages inside, as well as without, the pale of matrimony; but these wont be. when both sides understand and obey the law which underlies human nature where. Men are chronically inflamed by reason of wrong life; are too excitable, hence unreasonable; and are apt to obtrude offensively, and far too frequently, for the best interests of all concerned. Wives yield when it is clear that from ill-health they ought not, and cannot without injury. No human season occurs oftener than thrice a month at most;—before, after, and midway, of her lunar period. The first two being ovarian seasons, maternity may result. The latter is her periodic soul-season, when motherhood is impossible, but soul-blending the divine resultant. Here is another new revelation of Sex, and the statement of a law discovered by carefully noting hundreds of cases in a medical practice of nearly thirty years; and it is one that ought to be conformed to, because it will yet prevent innumerable child-murders that else would result from ignorance of it. In announcing this law I do mankind a service, and save many a woman from risks they may not wish to encounter.
It is held by some modern physiologists to be a law, that if the wife reaches the natural demise of marriage before the husband, and conception occurs, the resultant will be a boy, whose nature will resemble her own far more than it will her husband's; but if the father anticipates, the product will be feminine; but she will be more like him than its mother. Thus the gender of an inchoate human being can be predetermined by the Omnipotence of Will; all that is essential is the agreement as to what it shall be.
Before ending this section, I desire to re-impress the great truth and vital law. It is this: Where husband or wife is ill, mentally, morally, emotionally, or in any other way, that illness can be assuredly remedied by them, if when lying by each other they will but place their hands on each other's breasts, and will an interchange of vital life. It will instantly pass and repass, affording an exhibition of soul-power that shall astonish most people; and this mutual impartation becomes not merely a physical-nervous joy, but a most powerful magneto-vital, health-engendering force; an invigorant of the most wondrous potency; a direct and holy prayer, certain to be honored and answered by the everlasting and very loving God! CXLVI. Couples fail in being happy or rendering each other so, from muscular flabbiness, and consequent pulpiness of brain. Now if they will but lift all they can, gradually increasing the weight of the bags of sand, or whatever else it may be, five minutes before retiring, and two on arising, while in night-dress, ovarian, uterine, vaginal, kidney, bladder, testicular, and prostatic weaknesses will vanish like mists before the morning sun; and with the increase of muscular strength will come an accrement of Love and its cognates, thus dispensing with the aphrodisiacs now so largely used. In three months this course will revolutionize a household. Because it will give the soul a better vehicle to operate through; clear the channels of the body; remedy constitutional weakness; prevent and cure Embolism—the great impotence-creator, and will give a prolonged lease of life and all its nobler pleasures.
CXLVII. Love-starvation is a terrible thing to endure, but one which is not at all necessary; for by posing the soul for a mate or a love;—by willing and decreeing it as a system, the love-power will go out from you and centre on your adaptation, just as surely as that you make and persevere in the effort. The same principle applied to amative disorders will repair the impairment.
CXLVIII. Accursed forever must he, she. or they be, who counsel either conjugal frauds, condanuism, or any other destructive social abomination. They are seldom anything else than murderous. They lead to abortion, that is murder; and its perpetrators, nonprofessional, should be paraded through the streets on a mule's back, placarded "Abortionists!" while the professional baby-killers should swing by the neck to the nearest tree or lamp-post!
Another class of wretches need legal attending to. I refer to the makers and advertisers of peculiar stimulants, because they are compounded of villainous drugs, which agitate for a while, but are dead-sure to land the takers upon the bleak shores of sterility and hopeless impotence. There are cases wherein sex-tonics, invigorants, and direct aphrodisiac agents are absolutely essential to the restoration of amative and general health, but such are incapable of harming even a child, because their action is tonic and constitutional, and not sudden, fiery, lust-begetting, and destructive.
There are plants, essences, tinctures, and extracts, which, in the hands of good physicians, are effective for the purposes sought, while utterly non-dangerous, and free from harm. Let such be used, or none at all.
Elsewhere, herein, I have alluded to a paper upon the esoteric part of the grand topic of this volume—called the Ansairetic Mystery, in which form I have opened up certain knowledges which I deem quite essential to the complete education of every true adult person. Concerning it, while I live, letters can be addressed to me; when dead, to my heirs, and those who will then become sole publishers of all my works.
The End of the Vision.—I promised to give the sequel to the curious Vision, related in the forepart of this book, concerning The Woman and the Man.
1st. It will be remembered that I sincerely loved and sympathized with my friend, to such an amazing magnetic extent that at times I was in absolute rapport with his entire soul; and at one time, believing the vision to have been true, I pitied him, and the millions who have sailed in the same boat, and been wrecked upon the rocks of treachery, adultery, and deceit. But in this case the vision was not true, for the lady was then, and ever after, as pure as snow-flakes winging their way from space to earth, while still floating in mid-air. But she had, prior to leaving, associated a day or two with a woman of the world, who had suggested the strange question upon which the man had long pondered and morbidly brooded; and his loneliness, and her long silence, had strengthened his evil suspicions, which suspicions he had imparted to me, and I had entered into full sympathy with him, believing just as he did.
2d. My friend was an artist of wide celebrity; very magnetic, and ties of that character were easily formed by him; and to sever them was often as fraught with agony as would be pulling teeth from a sensitive soul, were that possible; hence he was quite easily vampirized by unprincipled women, just as I have been a score of times, in as many lands, in my own strange life, by female leeches, who, attracted by the magnetic fulness of the nature inherited from the dear mother who bore me, came to feed upon it, and deplete my very soul; this, be it known, being possible without the slightest guilt of a sensual character, for such is not always essential to the attraction of the vital life of a full soul by an empty cormorantic one. It was from the abundance of these she-fiends who clustered round me, that for a time a semi-libertinish odor attached itself to my name; because, being foiled in their desperate game and diabolic intent, they generally went off and took sweet revenge, à la Mrs. Potiphar, and scandalized me far and near, right and left; cyprians, vampires, ghouls, all!—without a single exception!—penniless adventuresses, who came to learn of me how to victimize mankind, because I knew all the higher, white, as well as the lower, and black, magic, and they panted like the hart after the brooklets for the information they knew I alone, if I chose, which I did not, impart, but dismissed them empty as they came. It is a curious circumstance of my life that the worst foes I ever made were, 1st. The people to whom I lent money; and, 2d. Those whom I refused to initiate into the mystical secrets adverted to above; for the fellow who invited me to Massillon, after the Boston fire, finding I would not instruct him how to be a greater scoundrel than Nature made him, or God intended, perjured what soul he had, and thereby extorted nearly all I had saved from the fiery wreck two months before. The old "Man" of the Letter and young girl notoriety, also turned upon me for identical reasons. The Ranks of "Reformers" are thickly strewn with unprincipled males, and females, too, and I have been "done" to the tune of thousands by adventuresses of that peculiar ilk, as in the La Hue case detailed in the book called "My Curious Life;" and in the case of "La Blondette," of the "Woman's Book."
So much for victimization through magnetisme mauvais, to say nothing of another instance where, through a cleverly morphined pint of ale—"Bitter beer" it proved—my mother's only son was relieved of some hundreds of dollars; compelled to execute a will, and acknowledge a fact which never existed, by the persuasive eloquence of a six-barrelled revolver in the hands of a male, and a four-barrelled one in the pocket of a thieving she-zingara. I therefore could pity the Man. 3d. If you turn to the section of the Mirror Vision, you will see that it had prophesied coming trouble, to be followed by a calm; and also that I had utterly forgotten the fact for the time. About the same period in which my friend was in the trouble about the woman, that trouble was enhanced and exacerbated by the arrival of a female from California, who had crossed the continent expressly to lay seize to his heart and—passions. She was strongly sensuous; of fine presence; voluptuous, sharp, keen, practical, and totally devoid of honor and principle; yet fearfully, desperately in love with him; so that, between all the powers bearing on him, the man was entirely distraught; and that, too, at a time when from other causes he was ill, morbid, downcast, and very negative; he, therefore, had brooded on his wretched fancies till himself was half daft, and I, his friend, through sympathy, was in full rapport with him. 4th. He had entrusted the absent one with certain very important financial business, which she, in thoughtless mood, had utterly ignored and totally neglected; consequently he was angry. 5th. He wearied me with the constant recital of his troubles, while I myself was ill, tired, worn out with excessive loneliness, mental toil, and financial embarrassments, all of which combined, threw me into a very morbid physical state; and his injuries and my absurd fancies took the dreadful form they did, which state of soul was taken advantage of by the teaching dead!—the viewless powers of the empyrean, to inculcate the most solemn, if most painful lesson he or I had ever learned; for there was not, and never had been, the slightest ground for either jealousy or suspicion; for their object was as pure as the sweetest angel who flits in glory about God's eternal throne!
The lesson cured two of us of jealousy in the first place. 2d. Rid him then, and me, shortly afterward, of all vampiral influences, whether from California or elsewhere. 3d. It brought us both nearer to those to whom our hearts went out in craving, longing, yearning, for the bread of life—Womanly affection. 4th. It led us to bend our stubborn souls at the shrine of the forgiving God! 5th. It taught us the mighty lesson of God-reliance and self-control. 6th. Taught us the folly of indulging even in occasional bibulant habits. 7th. It opened the road-way to a higher possible life, though the lesson was a terrible one; taught us the folly of unjust suspicion, and to ask pardon, while extending charity—of all. to all, and to ask it, too, of that good and compassionate Lord whose chastening hand had brought us face to face with truth and human duty, until at last the glorified beings flitting by that way peered into our humble rooms, beheld us there on bended knee,—contrite souls pleading for full redemption, and, turning their holy gaze heaven-ward again, they sent a message home to God:—"Behold! They Reason justly!" Reader, go thou and do likewise!
Moral!—1st. Never let your love be drawn out till you are sure it is right that it should be. 2d. If you are magnetic, take care to restrain its flow, and do not allow yourself to permit it to saturate a vampire, and then fall in "Love" with your own spheral emanation. 3d. Pray for deliverance all the time, else embodied and viewless leeches will sap your body and soul to the very lees, and then laugh at you when the certain Horror comes! 4th. Trust no one who seeks to separate you from your mate. 5th. Bear and forbear, give and forgive, and trust ye each other. 6th. Never be jealous, no matter what the proofs be, so long as your two bodily eyes do not saction it. Remember my Lesson! 7th. Fulfil the part of husband and wife as if both stood on the verge of death; so shall ye be holy, pure, and fully, truly Human!
Upon good physical conditions, soundness, health, normal play of electric, nervous, magnetic, and passional forces, depends, unquestionably, much of the weal or woe. happiness or misery, sanity or insanity, attendant upon us in our journey through life. An experience of many years, in many lands, has familiarized me with all methods extant for creating the best conditions of vital health; combating obscure diseases of the nervo-vital organization, and for overcoming the effects of both excess and violated natural law. That experience, travel, experiment, and observation enabled me to not only found, but firmly establish a New System of Medicine, embracing all that is good of Homœopathy, Water Cure, Magnetics, and a dozen other methods. I am nearly at the end of my career as a practical Physician, but desire that my methods and systems may survive to bless and relieve mankind, when my body shall rest beneath the hillside, and my weary soul shall sweetly sleep near the Throne of my Redeeming God,—the Ineffable One, whose hand has brought me out of the deeps, and given me a crown of victory at this end of my half-century of life; wherefore I propose to teach others a part, or the whole, of the magnificent System evolved during all these years of toil and struggle; and these are my reasons for desiring to do so:—
Very many of the large-brained, active-minded People of this Country, as is the case with the same class in Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna, Constantinople, and other large centres of population, labor under some form of Nervous disease, caused mainly by cerebral exhaustion from mental overwork. Another large class, including both sexes, suffer the same troubles, but from different causes,—the distressing symptoms being difficult to alleviate, much less to cure, with the means at hand, for the reason that until my discoveries and improvements there was no absolute medical agent, or Pharmaceutical preparation in existence, capable of meeting such cases successfully; and since my preparations—during 25 years of trial—have proved their unexampled power over all diseases involving nerves, brain, lungs, kidneys, and sexual organization, their popularity, without the adventitious aid of advertising, paid-for certificates, and other modes of puffery, demonstrating this fact,—I am proud to say, the field of their usefulness is wholly unchallenged by the products of the Pharmacopoeia of the civilized world.
In the experience of every Physician worthy the name, numerous cases present themselves, which may be generally defined as loss of magnetism, depletion of magnetic force; in other words, Vital Exhaustion; to cure which, thousands have resorted to the various hypophosphites, preparations of Lyttae, Valerian, etc.; some of which undoubtedly afforded temporary relief; but all of which are impermanent, and, as Dynamic remedies, and no other, are adapted to that class of troubles, wholly and utterly unreliable. Patients who need and resort to such remedies—and in vain, for reasons self-apparent—may be classified as, First, those who, forgetful that Vigor is the gift of God, have exhausted the brain and nervous system by indoor life, too constant mental application,—of course involving loss of lung-power,—and hence, like plants in a cellar, are bleached out. The Second class have lived too fast; and late hours, wine, and personal excess have stranded them midway of life's sea; the Nerve fountains are run dry; vital energy is sapped and gone; and existence is dull, feverish, wholly spiceless, and insipid. A Third class have led such fretful, vexed, and troubled lives that, without intentional error, they have nearly extinguished the fire of life. A Fourth class, embracing both sexes and all ages, from ten years to threescore, consists of those unfortunates who, by neglect or other causes, have become inverted, and by solitary habits (not to be mentioned, but whose terrific consequences must be met and conquered), have sapped and drained their vitality, till their flesh is waxy, nerves unstrung, brain softened: they have become unreliable, changeful, angular, crooked, wild, shiftless, aimless, suspicious, lonely, nervous; easily affected by the weather, bad news; are gloomy, morose, scary, discontented, dreamy, fidgety, suicidal, secretive; now tender, then coarse and callous; now gentle, then the opposite; vapory, fretful, easily worried; wholly unfitted for life's most solemn duties; disquieted themselves, and estranging their best friends; they have become worn out, exhausted, and, in the case of females, loaded down with troubles that would kill half the men living; often, in their cases, resulting in morbid state of mind and body; and in men resulting in Impotence, and worse trouble. There is a Fifth class, whom Disease has wasted and reduced so that there is scarcely life enough to make it at all desirable; and a morbid melancholy, almost utter despair, follows. They have frighful dreams, flashes, headaches, palpitations, anger fits, hysteria, and angularities without number. A Sixth class have gone to waste, impotence, and senility, at 30, 35, and 40 years of age, who with a little care could retain full vigor till threescore years and ten!
The above list embraces, 1st. All that vast mass of people who are exhausted by mental labor and sedentary occupations; who from various causes arc angular, excitable, nervous, and, at times. unaccountably morbid; 2d. All who are passionless, cold, non-attractive, non-attracted, or, if attracted, hopelessly so, from lack of responsive ability; who are unsettled, uneasy, subject to mental, temperamental, gloomy, lonely, and passional storms; 3d. All who have half-ruined their minds and bodies, sapped their health and vigor, and are now crooked and fretful, despondent by passional excess, normal or otherwise, or from any cause whatever.
Who can doubt that, in reference to very many of these troubles, perverted, excessive, or abused Physical Love lieth at the foundation? No woman is ill whose Nervous apparatus is sound; no man is so whose natural appetites and brain are strong and vigorous. Life and power, strength and force, beauty and love, talent, genius, endurance and longevity, all depend upon the normal health of the vital-nervous organs, for when these are disordered the whole being must and does suffer, and nine-tenths of all the diseases of "Civilization" originate in the disturbances of that portion of the human economy.
The remedials I propose to teach how to manufacture, will revive energy lost from whatever cause, for they are nervous force and vital power in tangible form, and act, not by stimulation, but by invigoration, restoring magnetic and dynamic power, when nothing else on earth can do it.
Physicians and others are hereby given to clearly and distinctly understand, that in no sense whatever are either of these preparations empirical productions, or "Patent Medicines." Their discovery opens a new era in the curative art. They are not Medicines, but dynamic agents; have been thoroughly tested in France, England, and 35 States of this Union; and, where properly administered or taken, it is doubtful if a case exists of Incipient Consumption, Wasting, Nervousness, Hypochondria, Hysteria, Nervous or Vital Prostration, Leucorrhcea, Sterility, Brain Softening, Dyspepsia, Mental Wandering, General Debility, Whole or Partial Weakness from Nerval Exhaustion, that they will not speedily and radically cure, because of their extraordinary dynamic power.
In the Medical Profession, the great want has long been that of a powerful, positive, certain, yet harmless Nervine-Invigorant, capable of direct action upon the brain, nervous centres, and pelvic apparatus; an agent that will allay morbid inflammation, yet stimulate, exhilarate, tone up, and permanently strengthen; that will supply nervous energy, correct all morbid action, and furnish the material lost or wasted by excessive mental toil, venery, masturba-tion, onanism, and other forms of vital prostation. Every Physician of any reasonable amount of practice frequently has cases of weakness, mental and physical, demanding the exhibition of peculiar tonic stimulants and aphrodisiacs, that shall be certain in effect, yet non-irritant or reactionary. This want is generally met in my remedials, beyond all question the most perfect vitalizing agents known, and hence peculiarly adapted to all cases of Female disease, Marasmus, or Wasting, all anæmic cases, and those morbid states resulting in Hysteria, Despondency, Melancholia, Insanity, and Suicidal Depression, all of which result from Uterine, Ovarian, Cerebral, Nervous, Prostatic and Seminal Exhaustion in either sex respectively. To meet and conquer, especially, severe and stubborn cases of all such, I propose to instruct suitable persons how to prepare and use the following list of remedial agents, hitherto prepared by no one but myself; viz., 14 Formulas, embracing 1 Barosmyn, 1 Lucina Cordial, 1 Protogene, 3 for Eye diseases, with instruments, 2 for "accidental" complaints, but whose effects are supremely terrible—(these formulas are the only perfect cure on earth,—Hope for Poisoned wives). In short, I purpose to teach the best of my discoveries, and to give Parchment certificates to Prove the purchaser has actually been instructed in my system and my formulas.
Through these remedials many have regained health; old men and barren women have become happy parents, and patients standing on the verge of death have been rendered strong and vigorous,—of course not alone by medicines, but by the course laid down for their guidance, especially those set forth in my Pamphlet on the Prolongation of Human Life and Power, called "The Golden Secret."
Where Parties expressly desire it, the above system will be supplemented by a Series of Esoteric instructions, involved mainly in the Ansairetic Mystery.
Those who have read my Works, need not now, at the end of 30 years, be told that, as an expert, in diseases of the nervous and genital systems, my fame is too well established to be successfully contested by any man, men, or party, nor that the ablest Physicians in the land are glad to accept my teachings and improvements upon original discoveries. During the past year I have by a new discovery revolutionized the entire treatment of such diseases. By it the physician and patient need no longer "guess," but go at once to the cure of the case. The discovery is entirely original, and will be imparted to practitioners,—those who wish to make a specialty of treating that class of human ailments. Terms by mail. The cardinal principle of both the treatment and remedials, is that, contrary to all the "schools," I hold that Life itself is a principle; that we are not born with a given amount of it, which, when exhausted, gives us up to death; but that we can not only accrete and gather in new life, and thus add long years to the sum total of its duration, but also that we can intensify, deepen, broaden, and expand it in every direction, thus preserving our fire, beauty, vigor, energy, magnetic and personal force, to an unlimited degree. And not only that, but—and here is indeed a mighty discovery—that the very source of exhaustion, is, properly understood, the actual fountain of perpetuity, endurance, long life, and power, mental, physical, moral, emotional, and magnetic. In a word, I hold it possible to almost wholly rejuvenate ourselves and become young again in spirits, vigor, mental power, and endurance,—that loss of love is loss of life, and that both can be restored. These things I teach, and among others give much practical knowledge of inestimable value, on the observance of which depends the happiness of all wedded couples, and ignorance of which fills the land with vice, murder, suicide, divorce, and wretchedness incalculable. [This knowledge is broadly laid down in the large work, "The Master Passion," and the greater one "Good News," Tables of Contents of which will be sent to any address on receipt of postage thereon.]
My instructions will prove of inestimable value and importance not only to Physicians, but to other men, and especially to women, for a great many reasons which I do not choose to set forth herein.
Lastly: this book will inevitably call attention to the B. O. E. (Brotherhood of Eulis), the Hope of the world and Sheet anchor of Mankind. All such are informed that a handbook of the Order will be issued from this Grand Lodge; to the officers of which application for information should be made; and to no other authority, save myself, until death.[2]
My address at present is Toledo, Ohio; when it is changed, due notice will be given.See second note below.[3]
- ↑ Complaints on both sides—deep, if not loud—are made about want of passional fervor, and affectional ardor; and unjustly often in both cases, for each takes especial pains and particular care not to strive in any way to bring about a different nerval condition. I once asked an Arab physician in Egypt, if such things existed among the dark races, in the harems, or amidst the nomads. Yes, he said; but seldom. And when it does, the entire character of the food is changed; abstinence l'amour, is persisted in; and when both these fail, the weak one is by the other mesmerized with a long-fringed feather, tenderly, lightly, slowly drawn down the spine, breasts, and across all parts of the well-washed cuticle, so lightly as scarce to touch! There is a peculiar and powerful conducting property in such a feather, and never yet in 2,000 years has it been known to fail. In your cold land (America) the aphrodisiacal treatment should be accompanied with the internal cordials I told you of; and Allah, precious Allah! will speedily bless the unfruitful pair; for a soul begotten without fervor had better never come to earth, for it will be wretched and a curse to itself until its flight toward the Ghillem. There is more on these points, but they cannot be given herein.
- ↑ There are quite a number of exceedingly important and inexpressibly holy and delicate questions connected with the subject-matter of this work, which, although alluded to, have not been openly and freely discussed herein, for self-apparent reasons. These things relate to the inner mysteries of the human being and of Eulis, (or the Philosophy of Love, Agape, not stogu,) and are only to be given under the sacred conditions of Patient and Physician or Teacher and Pupil. How long I may remain to teach of course I do not know,—only this I do know—that I have suffered much and am weary; but while able I shall take great delight in clearing up the doubts and mysteries besetting those about me; and all who need such counsel as I am capacitated to impart, are hereby freely warranted in asking or writing for it,—assured that I will do my best toward alleviating the distresses of body and heart, Soul and Spirit; and although I cannot bear the burdens of all, still I have done somewhat of good in that line, and am ready to continue so doing while life lasts.
- ↑ In March, 1874, I organized a society, provisionally, down in Tennessee—"The B. O. E." to which it was my intention to teach all the occult branches of esoteric knowledge, constitute it my literary heir, and through it spring many lofty truths upon the world; but
"The best laid plans of mice or men
Aft gang aglee!"And so did mine with reference to that society; for owing to irreconcilable misunderstandings it became absolutely necessary to dissolve the provisional society as the B. O. E., and to utterly decline to permanently organize it, owing to the presence in it of a person with whom it became impossible for me to break bread and taste salt—things which no man of Eulis or Rosicrucia will ever do under unpleasant conditions. Consequently, hereafter as heretofore, I shall do what good I can, single-handed and alone—yet not alone, for God and I are a clear majority. I'll help myself and others, and He will help me.
June 30, 1874.