CHAPTER XIX. The companion who was assigned to me in this expedition was a spirit who had been in this sphere before, and who was, therefore, well fitted to act as my guide on entering this Land of Horrors. After a short time we were to separate, he told me, and each to follow his own path--but at any time either of us could, if needful, summon the other to his aid in case of extremity.
As we drew near the great bank of smoke and flame I remarked to my companion upon the strangely material appearance they presented. I was accustomed in the spirit world to the realism and solidity of all our surroundings which mortals are apt to imagine must be of some ethereal and intangible nature, since they are not visible to ordinary eyesight,--still these thick clouds of smoke, these leaping tongues of flame, were contrary to what I had pictured Hell as being like. I had seen dark and dreary countries and unhappy spirits in my wanderings, but I had seen no flames, no fire of any sort, and I had totally disbelieved in material flames in a palpable form, and had deemed the fires of Hell to be merely a figure of speech to express a mental state. Many have taught that it is so, and that the torments of Hell are mental and subjective, not objective at all. I said something of this to my companion, and he replied:
"Both ideas are in a sense right. These flames and this smoke are created by the spiritual emanations of the unhappy beings who dwell within that fiery wall, and material as they seem to your eyes, opened to the sight of spiritual things, they would be invisible to a mortal's sight, could one still in the body of flesh by any miracle visit this spot. They have, in fact, no earthly material in them, yet they are none the less material in the sense that all things earthly or spiritual are clothed in matter of some kind. The number and variety of degrees of solidity in matter are infinite, as without a certain covering of etherealized matter even spiritual buildings and spiritual bodies would be invisible to you, and these flames being the coarse emanations of these degraded spirits, possess for your eyes an appearance even more dense and solid than for the inhabitants themselves."
My companion's spirit name was "Faithful Friend," a name given him in memory of his devotion to a friend who abused his friendship and finally betrayed him, and whom he had even then forgiven and helped in the hour when shame and humiliation overtook the betrayer, and when reproach and contempt or even revenge might have seemed amply justifiable to many minds. This truly noble spirit had been a man of by no means perfectly noble character in his earthly life, and had therefore passed at death into the lower spheres near the earth plane, but he had risen rapidly, and at the time I met him he was one of the Brotherhood in the second sphere, to which I had so recently been admitted, and had been once before through the Kingdoms of Hell.
We now drew near what appeared like the crater of a vast volcano--ten thousand Vesuviuses in one! Above us the sky was black as night, and but for the lurid glare of the flames we should have been in total darkness. Now that we have reached the mass of fire I saw that it was like a fiery wall surrounding the country, through which all who sought to enter or leave it must pass.
"See now, Franchezzo," said Faithful Friend, "we are about to pass through this wall of fire, but do not let that alarm you, for so long as your courage and your will do not fail, and you exert all your will-power to repel these fiery particles, they cannot come in actual contact with your body. Like the waters of the Red Sea they will fall apart on either side and we shall pass through unscathed.
"Were any one of weak will and timid soul to attempt this they would fail, and be driven back by the force of these flames which are propelled outwards by a current of strong will-force set in motion by the fierce and powerful beings who reign here, and who thus, as they imagine, protect themselves from intrusions from the higher spheres. To us, however, with our more spiritualized bodies, these flames and the walls and rocks you will find in this land, are no more impenetrable than is the solid material of earthly doors and walls, and as we can pass at will through them, so can we pass through these, which are none the less sufficiently solid to imprison the spirits who dwell in this country. The more ethereal a spirit is the less can it be bound by matter, and at the same time the less direct power can it have in the moving of matter, without the aid of the physical material supplied by the aura of certain mediums. Here, as on earth, we would, in order to move material substances, require to use the aura of some of the mediumistic spirits of this sphere. At the same time we shall find that our higher spiritual powers have become muffled, so to say, because in order to enter this sphere and make ourselves visible to its inhabitants, we have had to clothe ourselves in its conditions, and thus we are more liable to be affected by its temptations. Our lower natures will be appealed to in every form, and we shall have to direct our efforts to prevent them from again dominating us.
My friend now took my hand firmly in his and we "willed" ourselves to pass through the wall of fire. I confess that a momentary sense of fear passed over me as we began to enter it, but I felt we were "in for it," so exerting all my powers and concentrating my thoughts I soon found that we were floating through--the flames forming a fiery arch below and above us through which as through a tunnel we passed. Thinking of it now I should say it must have been about a quarter to half a mile thick, judging as one would by earthly measurements, but at the time I did not take sufficient note to be very exact, all my energies being directed to the repelling of the fiery particles from myself.
As we emerged we found ourselves in a land of night. It might have seemed like the bottomless pit of desolation had we not stood upon solid enough ground, while above us was this canopy of black smoke. How far this country extended it was impossible to form any idea, since the heavy atmosphere like a black fog shut in our vision on every side. I was told that it extended through the whole of this vast and dreadful sphere. In some parts there were great tumbled jagged mountains of black rocks, in others long and dreary wastes of desert plains, while yet others were mighty swamps of black oozing mud, full of the most noisome crawling creatures, slimy monsters, and huge bats. Again there were dense black forests of gigantic, repulsive-looking trees, almost human in their power and tenacity, encircling and imprisoning those who ventured amongst them. Ere I left this awful land I had seen these and other dreadful regions, but truly neither I nor anyone else could ever really describe them in all their loathsomeness and foulness.
As we stood looking at this country my sight, gradually becoming used to the darkness, enabled me to perceive the surrounding objects dimly, and I saw that before us there was a highway marked by the passage of many spirit feet across the black plain on which we stood. A plain covered with dust and ashes, as though all the blighted hopes, the dead ashes of misused earthly lives had been scattered there.
We followed this highway, and in a short time arrived at a great archway of black stone hewn into large blocks and rudely piled one upon the other. An immense curtain of what I thought at first was black gauze hung before the gateway. On going nearer I saw to my horror that it was made from spirits' hair, with the eyes strung like beads upon it, and, most horrible of all, the eyes were alive and seemed to look at us imploringly and follow our every movement as though striving to read our intentions in coming here.
"Are these eyes endowed with life?" I asked.
"With soul life? no, but with the astral life, yes--and they will continue so to live while the souls to which they belonged continue in the spirit bodies or envelopes from which these eyes have been torn. This is one of the gates of Hell, and the custodian has a fancy to decorate it in this way with the eyes of his victims. In this place there are none who have not themselves been guilty during their earthly lives of the most awful cruelties, the most absolute defiance of the laws of mercy and justice. In coming here they are only intent upon finding fresh means to gratify their lust for cruelty, and thus they expose themselves to becoming in their turn the victims of beings no more ferocious than themselves, but stronger in will-power and cleverer in intellect. This is the City of Cruelty, and those who reign here do so by virtue of their very excess of that vice. The wretched spirits to whom these eyes belong, with their degraded, stunted soul germs still imprisoned in their mutilated bodies, are at this moment wandering through the desolation of this land, or laboring as helpless slaves for their spirit tyrants, deprived even of the limited power of sight possessed by others in this dreary land; while between the eyes and their owners there yet exists a connecting link of magnetism which will keep them living and animated by a reflected life till the soul germ shall cast off its present envelope and rise to a higher state of life."
While we were studying this horrible gateway the curtain of living eyes was drawn aside, and two strange dark beings, half human and half animal, came out, and we took the chance to pass in unnoticed by the guardian of the gate, a gigantic and horrible creature, misshapen and distorted in every limb so that the worst ogre of fable could scarcely convey to mortal mind a picture of him. He sprang out with a frightful laugh and horrible language upon the two poor trembling spirits who fled from him in most abject terror, but neither he nor they seemed able to perceive us.
"Are these beings soulless?" I asked, pointing to the poor frightened spirits. "Were they ever on earth?"
"Yes, most certainly, but of a very low type of savages, scarcely above the wild beasts, and quite as cruel, hence the reason they are here. In all probability their means of progression will come from being reincarnated in a slightly higher form of earth life, and their experience here, which will be short, will give them the sense that there is retributive justice somewhere, although they will be apt to form their ideas of a God from their dim recollections of the powerful beings who reign in this place."
"Do you, then, hold the doctrine of reincarnation?"
"Not as an absolute law under which all spirits must pass, but I do believe that in the experiences of many spirits reincarnation is a law of their progression. Each spirit or soul born into planetary life has spiritual guardians who from the celestial spheres superintend its welfare and educate the soul by which means as seem best to them in their wisdom. These spiritual guardians, or, as some term them, angels, differ in their methods and their schools of thought, for there is no sameness anywhere, I am taught, and no absolute path upon which all must walk alike. Each school of thought which has its counterpart, its dim imperfect reflection on earth, has the perfected system of the school and its highest teachers in the celestial spheres, and from these higher spheres their doctrines are handed down to earth through spirits in the intermediate spheres. The end all have in view is the same, but each maps out a different path by which the pilgrim souls shall reach it. The guardian angels watch over the soul germ during all of what may be termed its childhood and youth, which lasts from the moment it first sees the light of individual consciousness till through repeated experiences and developments it attains to such a degree of intellectual and moral consciousness that it stands upon the same level as its spiritual guardians, and then it in turn becomes the spiritual guardian of some new-born soul. I have also been taught that the soul germ in its first stage is only like a seed, like, in fact, any other seed in the minuteness of its size and powers. It is, in fact, a spark of the Divine Essence containing in itself all that will constitute the perfected human soul. Of its very essence it is immortal and indestructible, because it is seed from that which is Immortal and Indestructible. But as a seed has to be sown into the darkness and degradation of the material earth in order that it may germinate, so has the soul seed to be sown into the corruptions of matter, first in its lower and then in its higher forms. Each animal is in itself the type of a soul-seed, the human type being the highest of all, and each seed will in turn develop to the highest degree possible for it through successive spheres and experiences. Some schools of thought hold that the soul will progress more rapidly if it is again and again returned to material life to be born anew, in a fresh form each time, and to live over again the experiences it has missed, or to expiate in the mortal form the wrongs done in a former incarnation. The spiritual children of this school of thought will indeed be thus returned to earth again, and for them each new lesson will have to be worked out in an earthly life.
"But it does not follow that this experience will be the lot of all spirits. There are other schools who maintain that the spirit spheres contain means for the education of the soul quite as useful and expeditious; and with the spiritual children committed to their charge the totally different course of sending them to gather experience in the lower spheres rather than to earth, will be pursued. They will be made to live over in memory their past earth life and to expiate in the spirit the wrongs done in their earthly existences. As each soul differs in its character or individuality, so each must be trained by a different method, else would all resemble each other so exactly that a monotonous sameness would result and there would be none of that variety and contrast which give a charm to earthly life, and I believe will still continue to do so in the celestial spheres.
"I have ever been taught, therefore, to avoid trying to found a general rule applicable to all spirits upon the experiences of any one community of spirits with which I may come in contact. Even in the visit we shall pay to this sphere we shall only be able to see a part, a fractional part, of this immense sphere of evil spirits, yet we shall traverse an extent of space far greater than if you had traveled over the whole of the little planet Earth from which we both have come. In the spirit world like draws to like by a universal law, and those of entirely opposite natures repel each other so entirely that they can never mingle or even touch the circle in which each dwells. Thus in our wanderings we shall only visit those with whom either from nationality or temperament we have some germ of feeling, however slight, in common."