The priest-hierophant of the Egyptian temples wore a breast-plate of precious stones, in every way similar to that of the high priest of the Israelites. The tabernacle was simply the archaic telephone of those days of Magic, when Occult powers were acquired by Initiation, just as they are now. Ancient divination was always accomplished with the help of the spirits of the elements. But there are good as well as bad spirits, beneficent and malevolent “gods” in all ages. Alas, Christians are still worshipping the Jewish Jehovah, the “spirit” who spoke through his teraphim.

Wm. Oxley is an ardent Spiritualist equipped with a wily tongue, and habitually swayed by deceitful visions in his boots. A.D. Bathell is another calumniator and manqué philosopher, yet a useful purgative of the Theosophical Society. Wm. Oxley attributes the authorship of the Mahabharata to a “Spirit” named Busiris. By adjusting the force of its two-faced blowing Wm. Oxley manages to keep himself from falling off the fence. The initiated Brahmans do not know when the Vedas, the Mahabharata, and especially the Bhagavad-Gita, were written, and by whom. But Wm. Oxley who is not a philosopher, still less a sage, does know. Harken! Whomsoever Wm. Oxley claims that he had seen and conversed with, was not with Master Koot-Hoomi as he alleges.

Works of fiction are no fiction, but presentiments of what lies in the bosom of the future. Many will be the unconscious crimes committed, and many will be the victims who will innocently suffer death at the hands of the righteous judges and the too innocent jurymen, both alike ignorant of the fiendish power of suggestion. The body may be slain but not the soul. The consequences of the death penalty for judge and jury, the community at large. and not the least for the criminal, are too grim and too harsh to contemplate. Capital punishment is futile, unnecessary, and fraught with potentially dire societal harms. While the seed of a tree may be destroyed, the spiritual “seed” which produces the soul of a man cannot be destroyed by capital punishment, but will eventually produce such a man again as sure as the seed of a thistle will produce nothing else but a thistle. One’s criminal powers and proclivities cannot be eliminated by killing his body. Having been deprived of one instrument for their manifestation, such powers will manifest themselves in other, still less convenient, and more dangerous ways. Moreover, by deferring the manifestation of an evil cause we pass on to a future generation an evil inheritance, with which we ourselves ought to have contended, and which we ought to have sought to ameliorate. Mortal man is an instrument of immortal spirit. A ray of divine mind dwells in the heart of every man. But the divine mind is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophises. The physical man is the musical instrument; the divine the performing artist. The physical body is a transient mask of the spiritual man within, and instrument of action on the objective plane. By the power of an inequitable law the slayer’s knife did stab himself, thus the unjust judge has lost his own defender. Letter to “Lucifer” from a puzzled student. Like an eye-for-an-eye, capital punishment is nothing but a relic of Jewish barbarity. As the juryman, in deciding for a verdict of guilty, becomes an accessory in a fresh murder, so an increasing number of people refuse to repay evil for evil.

Such illusive shadows, belonging to neither Earth nor Heaven, are used by sorcerers and other adepts of the Black Art to help them in persecutions of victims; to hallucinate the minds of very honest and well-meaning persons occasionally, who fall victims to the mental epidemics aroused by them for a purpose; and to oppose in every way the beneficent work of the guardians of mankind, whether divine or human.