Pan, the Good Shepherd, the son of Deus, with the horns and feet of a goat, is the same as the Devil or christ. At the Witches’ Sabbath in England, the women made manikins, or images of men, of clay or wax, and these they worshipped and played with. And when these images were properly magnetized, they could perform miracles therewith and summon up demons from the abyss. If they possessed sufficient will power and knew the occult and secret form of words to use, they could play that the manikin was an enemy, and then stick him through the heart with a needle, and the next morning the enemy would be dead. If their magical power was sufficiently potent, they could summon a satyr or subordinate goat god to take the place of the manikin and consummate the Sabbatical marriage ceremony. Their spells were said to be sufficiently powerful to reduce a human being to the primordial protoplasm, and then cause it to again pursue the path of evolution through the cell, the blastoderm, the devil-fish and all the other beasts constituting eternity’s great highway by which the soul walks down. This is similar to the unavoidable cycle, the circle of necessity, the inexorable doom of the sacred mysteries of the Serpents’ Catacombs of Egypt.
The countersign of the Witches’ Sabbath was the closed hand with the thumb between the first and second fingers pointing downward to the abyss. The meeting place was lighted only by the altar fire, where the human sacrifice sizzled to attract the phantoms and ghosts. And the devotees, singing mystic songs, danced hand in hand in a circle around the god Pan. They used the holy grail like the churches and mystic societies, and the drafts from this poisonous cup, the singing, the whirling dance and the incense from the altar brought on the oft-times fatal frenzies in which the victims fell shrieking to the ground, as they do among certain Christian sects. They were seized and possessed by foul fiends from the Pit, or elementary spirits, and sometimes by the spirits of serpents that materialized themselves in the writhing human victims and crawled out of the prostrate bodies in plain view of the audience. There in the blackest hour of the night the Vinum Sabbati was prepared, a few grains of white powder thrown into a glass of water. And each one that drank found himself attended by a companion, a shape of glamour and unearthly allurement beckoning him apart to share in joys more exquisite, more piercing than the thrill of any dream. – Machen’s House of Souls, 438.
Similar to these convulsionaries are the miserable creatures in Russia afflicted by strange disorders, which people attributed to possession by the Devil. They throng the entrance of cathedrals without daring to enter, lest their controlling demons cast them on the ground. At the Elevation of the Host, these half maniacs, half mediums begin crowing like cocks, barking, bellowing and braying, and finally fall down in fearful convulsions. They prophesy and see visions. Paracelsus, the magician, could cast the demons out of the persons so possessed by the power of a stronger demon which he carried around in his pocket. That reminds us of the Salem witch that fled from a mob of Christolators who were intent on burning her, but when they were about to seize her, she crawled into a bottle, and nobody ever saw her afterward.
In the Devil’s Mass of the Yezdis, or Devil worshippers and sorcerers of Mesopotamia, the Jakshas or aerial spirits carry their prayers to the Devil and the Afrites of the desert. In their prayer meeting they dance in a ring about their high priest and whirl and leap in the air and cut each other with daggers until they are soaked with blood for the purpose of attracting the ghosts. The mystic circle induces Satan to manifest himself in miracles. Enormous globes of fire appear and assume the shapes of monsters.
The Sabbath was the Sunday of the Hebrew Kabalists, the day of their religious assembly, or rather the night of their habitual meetings. This festival, surrounded by mysteries as it was, found its safeguard in the very fright of the vulgar and escaped persecution through the terror it occasioned. The early Christians celebrated the pagan Mysteries of Jesus and probably held a Witches’ Sabbath. – See Mystic Christianity, 212.
One should trim his finger nails on Friday, never on Thursday, otherwise the nails will commence growing on the Sabbath, and it is very wicked for the nails to grow on the Sabbath. – Kabala. The Israelite, after the endless Sabbath observances, should fold up his veil, but if he forgets to do so, he is to shake it thoroughly the next morning, so as to shake all the devils out of it. And the reason is known to the Lords of the Kabala. – Kabala Kitzur Sh’lh. It is a very pious act to say a prayer to the moon at the close of the Sabbath, for the moon is a symbol of Jacob, the lesser light, (who was a christ). The full moon, the Queen of Heaven is his mother, and the sun is his father. The new moon is Jacob or Christ. – Ibid, fol. 72, col. 2. You should learn these things together with all the other profound wisdom of the Talmud, for Rabbi Yochannan says that it is lawful to split open an unlearned man like a fish.
Constantine, the Roman Emperor and canonized saint, the superstition-besotted, the assassin, the fratricide, the parricide, the uxoricide, the filicide, the regicide, chosen from Heaven as the murderer-in-chief of the world, according to Eusebius, “held up by God to the human race as an exemplary pattern of godliness and destined to share the Empire of Heaven with Christ,” this was the bloated, red-faced profligate who established Sunday worship in 321 A. D. and compelled the Christians to worship the sun-god on Dies Solis, the Day of the Sun, because his own god was Apollo. – See First Council of Nice, 28. Constantine was the founder of Christianity, and, like father like son, it followed in his footsteps. He could not obtain absolution for his crimes from pagan priests, but Eusebius washed them whiter than snow. Some said that Constantine had to sacrifice an infant to obtain the blood for the absolution.
CHAPTER V.
The Great God Baal
The palm tree, the candle and the Asherim are symbols and images of Baal, and the two last are offered up as sacrifices, corresponding to the pillars and candles in the worship of Jehovah. Around the temple of Jehovah as well as the temple of Baal, in the Holy Land, were the ancient nunneries. The Kadishim or Holy Ladies lived in tents arranged in a circle about the temple, and on each side of each tent or Fornix stood a Knight of Kadish. The pious people who desired to worship god gave up to the guard a shekel (sixty cents) and entered into the tent of the Kadish, and the money so collected went to the service of god, which means the priestly white slavers and the Worshipful Knights of Kadish. The Kadishim were the same as the Deva Dasi, the concubines and dancing girls of the Hindu temples, the slaves of the gods. “There is reason to believe that the Israelites at an early date applied the name of Baal to Jehovah. Baal was represented on the high places by pillars,” as the strange god of John’s Revelation is pictured on his throne. – “Baal,” Ency. Brit. One hundred of the most beautiful and seductive daughters of the people, innocent girls of tender age, were torn from their homes by the ruthless priests to fill the holy places of god around each temple. The priests by constant iteration convinced the parents that it was a high honor to be permitted to devote their daughters to god, and that as a reward, in the great hereafter, they would sit beside the Great White Throne with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the other Jews, and all the hod-carriers, who, having washed their robes white in the blood of the Lamb, sit on their little golden thrones with their dudeens in their mouths and their hats gently tilted over one eye, while they decorate with tobacco juice the dazzling surface of the crystal sea.
At the great temple of Baal, they had a palm tree standing in the midst of the garden, and in the holy temple of Jehovah they had a stone pillar around which the Kadishim, at the vernal equinox, danced in the nude. This is the day dedicated to Astarte, or Ishtar or Easter. This occult ceremony is one of the most beautiful and entrancing in our refulgent and god-given religion. As the Tree of Life stands in the midst of the circle of females, so the rays from the sun penetrate the earth and annually renew its life. So the rays of the sun at high noon penetrated the ark, that old box in which the priests kept the male and female emblems, and before which King David for occult reasons danced in the altogether. The ark corresponds with the sacred Argha of the Hindus, an oblong vessel, a sacrificial chalice, used in the worship of Isis, Astarte and Venus. It is a most holy symbol, containing, in the play, the germs of all living things, and