Neue Lotusblüten 4, no. 7-8 (July-August 1911), 193-223

 

[Die “Hölle.”]

Franz Hartmann, M.D.^[i]

Translation from the German by Robert Hütwohl

 

One and the same law rules in the spiritual as in the material. Every action is followed by a corresponding reaction. Just as a pendulum set in motion, when it has swung in one direction, swings in the opposite direction, so it is in the life of mankind. A period of superstition in the Middle Ages, in which the orthodox devil and witchcraft played a great part, was followed by a period of disbelief and materialism, and now it seems that we are approaching a period again in which a morbid psychism and black magic with their entourage of hysteria, insanity and crime generally prevail. Under these circumstances it will be useful to make a little survey to see if there is any truth in the medieval superstitions concerning hell and its occupants. We find the answer to this question in the writings of the sages of the East, in the teachings of occult philosophy and the so-called “occult science” as it relates to the soul of the world.

          Modern rationalism, which denies everything which cannot be seen with the physical eyes and grasp with the hands, may have done the world a service by denying belief in eternal^[i] hell in the orthodox sense, i.e., in a pit of hell with fiery flames and sulphurous steam, in which the souls of men are condemned to roast for all eternity. In doing so he abolished the fear of hell and thereby to a certain extent also hell itself; for, as every occultist knows, through the intense contemplation of an object, living thought-forms are formed, the nature of which corresponds to the object of contemplation, and these in turn attract corresponding forces. Whoever fills his brain with ideas of lust and cruelty populates his sphere of thought with corresponding ideas; he forms around himself a hell with all sorts of devils who attract corresponding influences from the astral plane, and the more he fears hell, the more he makes himself accessible to these influences. In the Bhagavad Gita it is said: “The doubter perishes.” Whoever loses faith and firm confidence in the power of the spirit of truth within him hands over the key of the fortress to the enemy. It is not improbable that the descriptions of Dante Alighieri’s “Hell” are partly to blame for the atrocities committed by the Inquisition, since this gave rise to corresponding horrid notions that called for external representation; for every idea born into existence is a spiritual force striving for external activity. Life in the material world is only the final expression of inner forces and mental images that long to be revealed on the outside.

          Incidentally, the descriptions Dante gives of hell and purgatory are not entirely new. Similar descriptions can be found in older writers.

          Plutarch tells of a man named Tespesio, who was a very intelligent man but also was unscrupulous and led a bad life. He fell on his head from a height and was presumed dead; but on the third day he awoke in the mortuary, and was henceforth a different man, and the opposite of what he had formerly been; for now he excelled in conscientiousness in business, honesty, and piety, and was universally admired for his virtues. No one could explain this incredible transformation; but he himself gave the explanation for it. He said that when his soul left the body, he found himself in another sphere, amidst the souls of the dead, among whom he met various of his deceased friends and relatives, and among others his father, who died because of one he had committed robbery-murder in hell. His body was covered with bruises and wounds, and he was in great torment. Plutarch’s description of hell agrees on the whole with Dante’s.

          Dante himself did not have the visions he described, but they were reported to him by a young monk who lay in an apparently dead state for nine days and then woke up again. The same later died as abbot of an Italian monastery.

          Anyone who studies the history of the Middle Ages with its witch trials and the Inquisition, without prejudice, will soon come to the conclusion that the then generally prevailing belief in devils and ghosts was not completely unfounded; but that there was probably during these dark times a closer connection of our visible world with the low and infernal regions of the astral plane; for the poor, oppressed, and miserable people, having appealed in vain to the God of the Church, finally called upon the spirit of evil for help, and thereby created thought-forms by which such influences could take shape and manifest themselves.

          Now, if it was a merit of rationalism to have got rid of apothecary goods like sulfur and pitch from hell, on the other hand it made the mistake of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, teaching that there does not exist neither hell nor devil nor any other criminal judgment in the “beyond,” and that with the bodily death of the human being it would also be the end of his soul.

          Henceforth, for this class of believing non-thinkers, there was no other devil to fear than the public prosecutor and the police, and no other hell to fear than prison. Now everyone could do what they wanted; for why should a man not seek to satisfy all his appetites while he is alive, when there is no other existence for him after the death of the body, and this his present life is his all?

          Spiritism and psychic research have put an end to this superstition of the “enlightened” and relegated nihilism to the junk room of dismissed theories, where it is only used to feed the rats bred by Haeckel and others. Nowadays the scientific proof — not of the immortality of the personality of man — but of its persistence after the death of the material body is irrefutable, and it is raised beyond all doubt by innumerable exactly scientific investigations into hypnotism, somnambulism, etc., that man, when he has left his physical body, lives on in a finer, invisible, but nonetheless material, ethereal or “astral” body and is still the same, endowed with life, consciousness and sentience, capable of thinking; and since even during his earthly existence his longings and passions had their origin within him, and the external body was only the instrument for their operation, so even after leaving the physical body this inner man is still afflicted with the same lusts, desires and passions, which perhaps have an even stronger effect on him because they lack the means to satisfy them, because the physical body with its organs is missing. Both heaven and hell are already within us, as anyone can see by introspection. We create them ourselves through ourselves and through the cooperation of others, and since they are within ourselves, everyone brings his heaven, hell, or purgatory wherever he turns, be it in the “here” or in the “hereafter” with himself. In anyone who has not killed the “worm” of his passion during his life on earth, that worm lives on even after the soul has left the body (Mark IX, 44). This is poor consolation for those who love their passions and will not let go of their “worms,” yet hoping for heavenly delights in the “hereafter,” and therefore many seek refuge in the haven of ignorance; like an ostrich, they bury their heads in the sand so as not to see the danger which threatens them and try to persuade themselves that their actions will have no consequences for them, while others, trusting in the heresies of a fictitious theology, try to persuade themselves imagine that the self-made and feared idol, who they believe rules the world, can be persuaded to release them from the punishment which they deserve.

          Heaven and hell are within us, we create them within ourselves, but they are also outside of us; for just as every human being populates the aura surrounding him with the products of his feelings, will and thinking, so too does all human beings fill the aura of the globe, the astral world and the world of thoughts with the products of their psychic and intellectual activity. Then everything shows itself in its true form; i.e., each takes the form which suits its character; its qualities are determined by the nature of its essence; the beautiful appears in beautiful forms and the ugly in ugly forms. Then like associates with like, and whoever brings his devil with him will not want for a company of devils.^[ii]

          According to the more recent Theosophical teachings, Hell is the lowest region of the astral plane of our world, corresponding to the lowest and densest region of man’s astral body, a state of darkness and heaviness such as a man may experience immersed in the “mire of vice.” It is indeed like a swamp; for it is said to be like a thick, sticky slime, and its inhabitants are monstrosities and ugly thought-forms of various kinds.

          “Hell” is therefore that region in the astral body^[iii] of our earth, both inside and outside the globe, which is the dwelling place of demons and a certain kind of deceased human beings. These are the forms of desire (Kāma-rūpas) of godless but not therefore spiritless people, i.e., they may be intellectual, but the sense of morality has died in them. They are unscrupulous and incapable of improvement. They are, as it were, phantasms, monstrosities of various sorts, whose form and environment correspond to their character; but they are nonetheless not empty dream images, but living creatures, albeit “mentally” (or more correctly, “spiritually”) dead.

          No man goes to hell unless he deserves hell. Everyone is judging himself. The penalty for sin is the consequences which sin entails. This is a general law of nature and there are no exceptions to it; everyone eventually finds himself in that state in which he completely surrenders. In the Bhagavad Gita it is said that after leaving one’s body, one enters into that being of which one is thinking when one departs, i.e., with which his soul is filled:

Then when the soul leaves this world,

When sattva reigns in it, it perishes

To the world of the gods of light, where those dwell

Who looked for the good and found it.

But if the body dies, as long as rajas

In him has dominion, so leads the way

Into the realm of fire, there, where the place

For earthbound beings is located.

And dies the man covered by tamas night,

Stubbornly shutting off the light of faith,

So he gives up his human rights

And goes inverted to lower beings.”^[iv]

          Such teachings are contained in all religious systems throughout the world. Men imbued with heavenly love and divine thoughts are children of heaven; People filled with devilish desires and evil thoughts are children of hell, but people who only live in the sensual and for whom a spiritual life without the body is unthinkable are the “lukewarm” and “will be spat out.” (Revelation III:16); for they have neither a heavenly nor a diabolical life in them.

          What are the devils of hell? — A master gives the following answer: “When after man’s death the immortal part of his soul enters the region of the spirit, all his lower elements remain in the world of phantasms as “doubles”, shadows or ghosts of the deceased person as a sum of evil forces and impure elements in the form of a wicked demon in which there is no other animating principle than hate and lust, and which will eventually dissolve into the cosmic elements.” Gautama Buddha teaches: “Five tracks are there , Sariputto: the wrong way, the animal womb, the realm of ghosts, mankind and the world of the gods. I know the ascent and the downward path by cultivating it, in the dissolution of the body after death, to ruin and calamity. And I see through and recognize the heart and soul of a person, Sariputto: This is how this person acts, he works towards it, he has taken such a path that when the body dissolves, after death, he falls on the wrong track, in ruin and calamity is advised; and then later I see him with the heavenly eye, the clarified, unearthly one, filled only with painful, stinging, burning feelings. Just as, Sariputto, if there were a coal pit, deeper than a man’s height, full of glowing coals, without flames, without smoke: and one came, sunburned, exhausted, trembling, thirsty, and walked straight towards this pit, and then later I see him inside in the coal mine, filled only with painful, stabbing, burning feelings.^[v]

          Let’s take a look at what the great mystic Jakob Böhme says in his mystical, but difficult to understand language, in relation to the inhabitants of hell:

     “There is no help; her torment only increases; the more they mourn, the more infernal fierceness kindles. They must not lift up their eyes to shame; because they see nothing in their surroundings but only a strict judge (the bad conscience). . . There is ah! and woe and no salvation. Hardness (hard-heartedness) gives birth to (a) hard, rough, cold and astringent quality, sweetness (bliss) has dwindled, like a glowing charcoal, since there is no longer any sap in the wood. She thirsts and there is no refreshment. The bitterness (bitterness) is like a heated pestilence, and bitter like bile. The fire (passion) burns like a fierce brimstone. Love has become enmity (hate). The sound is nothing but a hard pounding like thunder. The corpus (the body) is a house of mourning.”^[vi]

          This is the description of the condition in which a remorseful man finds himself partway through his temporal life, but which will naturally be all the more pronounced when he has discarded his physical body and the sensual world with its attractions has disappeared from him.

          “Oh, the beauty and lust of this world! O riches and proud splendour! O might and power! Your unjust judgment and great splendor with all your lust is all in one heap and has become hellish fire.”^[vii]

          “All sorts of infernal fruit and education (thought forms) will now arise in this gorge; all of infernal quality and manner; just as in heaven celestial formations arise after celestial quality and kind.”^[viii]

          It is clear that there is no redemption for evil, only annihilation. Evil cannot redeem itself, nor be redeemed by another. An egoist cannot get rid of his egoism as long as he remains an egoist stuck in his egoism. The dark cannot turn into light, but when the light comes, the dark disappears. A man completely permeated and absorbed in and filled with the spirit of evil is a devil, hell is his own being, from which he cannot come out, nor be prayed out of by others; but as long as there is still something good in a person, it can unfold, gain power over evil and free itself from evil. Since there are relatively few perfect devils (black magicians) among people today, there is also something good in most of them, and salvation naturally takes place before or after death, sooner or later, through what is more divine in man or heavenly in nature, is freed from what is earthly or sinful in it. In other words, it is not the sinful man who is set free after death, but the God-man, who is associated with the sinful man during mortality, is set free from him.

          Now since a man, if he has not already become a perfect saint or adept all his life, does not at once shed all other lower elements and principles of which his nature is composed when leaving his physical body, but more or less time is necessary, until these deeper vibrations come to rest, his soul does not go straight into “heaven” or a higher consciousness, but requires a shorter or longer intermediate state for its liberation. This intermediate state, which is spoken of in all religious systems, is called the “world of desires” (Kāma loka) and by the Catholics “purgatory,” because in this state the soul is still caught in the fire of its passions and in its purification from them. Also, this “purgatory” is not a state which only begins after death; anyone who is burdened with their passions and would like to get rid of them is already in it, and the existence of this “purgatory” needs no further proof for them. But one must not think of an orthodox, external fire, but rather of a decomposition of useless parts of the soul body. Theophrastus Paracelsus teaches: “All good belongs to God, all evil to the devil.” The shell must rot so that the core can thrive. Jakob Böhme says: “The putrefaction (decomposition) is his (man’s) purgatory in his sins and not someone else’s.^[ix] “Then it (the soul) is not in hell, nor in heaven, but in the gate in the midst of the torment (movement) of the principle, since fire (desire) and light (knowledge) separate.”^[x]

          It is needless to enumerate all the names of the great world sages, prophets and saints, seers, occultists and mystics who have written consistent accounts of the afterlife and have realized spiritual things through their own spiritual vision and inward enlightenment. Let’s choose e.g., the writings of the English mystic Dr. [John] Pordage, where we find in it a detailed description of the qualities of the inhabitants of the dark world as well as of the world of light, and not only did this celebrated physician, theologian, and philosopher know these things by spiritual intuition, but he himself, along with many others, had to suffer externally from an encroachment of this invisible world into visible existence.^[xi]

          He tells how he was placed in the dark principle in 1653 and “circulated” through it for five years before being redeemed. Also that he would not have written about these deep mysteries of the darkness of hell if he had not believed that this knowledge was bestowed on him so that it might be made known. During this time, Pordage not only had heavenly and hellish visions, but both he and his householders and neighbors were plagued a great deal with external “spirit manifestations,” some of which are known to spiritualists. These consisted not only in apparitions of giants, dragons, etc., but in the spreading of a pestilential stench, intolerable noises, offensive taste sensations, tormenting feelings of fear and states “which cannot be expressed in words.” Images and figures also appeared on window panes, on roof tiles and stones, such as would have delighted the heart of a modern spiritist, but were regarded by the witnesses of the time as the work of the devil and were hewn out and destroyed with hammer and chisel.

          Hell or “the dark world” is described by Pordage as a thick gross darkness that can be touched and felt.

     “It is also a stinking, abominable, and poisonous principle, and reveals itself also to the mind and soul of devils as a loathsome, stinking place, filled with all sorts of crawling and swarming vermin. But one must not think that there are real bodily toads and snakes and vipers in it, like those who crawl around on this earth in the visible world, but there are innumerable poisonous essences in there, disgusting, biting, tormenting essences, of which this principle as of swarming with a multitude of locusts, which do not but swarm around the devils and damned ghosts like stinging bees or wasps, and crawl on and over them like worms, which they cannot shake off. The woe and the abomination cannot be expressed in words, and no pen can describe it. The essential qualities which emanate from the nature of this spirit are pride, envy, cruelty, avarice, self-will, as a consuming, devouring quality.”^[xii]

          Among the denizens of hell, one distinguishes invisible formless spirits (spiritual forces) and their personifications as formed, visible beings, or “damned spirits, who through their unbelief (and ill will) have made themselves thorns and thistles,” and to to these also belong the human inhabitants of this world who have given themselves over to evil (black magic), and since they have turned away from the divine completely and have been completely filled and permeated by the spirit of evil, they are in fact not human but inveterate devils who inhabit the earth in human form.

          Among the first, the formless, are:

     “The spirit of pride, anger, jealousy, envy, enmity, malice, murder, lying, stealing, fornication, adultery, and uncleanness, idolatry, disbelief, hypocrisy, deception, sorcery, black arts, etc. They are all devils, i.e., not persons, but dark forces centered or abiding in the fallen angels and damned spirits (souls).”

     “These spirits” are not mere qualities, but forces which produce corresponding qualities in the beings they affect. So, for instance, the spirit of anger gives birth to the evil quality of anger in a man who becomes possessed by it; the spirit of vanity makes people vain, etc. They have no form or figure; but the apostate angels (black magicians) may appear in horrible and horrid forms which, by God’s permission, a man might want to lose his senses.”

     “The fallen angels feel nothing but fear and torment in their eternal nature, and cannot feel anything else, they feel it in their own inward qualities. They are in a perpetual war and strife against themselves, so that inwardly, in their own soul essences, they can find no peace, unity and harmony at all, but pure discord, hostility and adversity, with one quality hating the other. This is the hellish torment they feel within themselves and cannot shake off (because their nature is made up of these qualities). They can have no remorse, nor give glory to Gods’ justice, for they are now caught in the angry, cursing, and blasphemous nature of the great dragon and subjected to the spirit of the wrath-fire.”

          Hell is not tied to any particular place, but, like Heaven, is everywhere; it is a state of consciousness; everyone brings their hell with them. “Its height is much greater than the principle of this visible world; its limits reach into the realm of divine justice, and whoever wishes to measure its depth must look down with his mind deeper than the earth and deeper than the sea of this visible world. It is not included in any part of this world, but permeates and comprehends it entirely. Its principle can be likened to heaven, like the coarser air in which we humans live, and without which we cannot live; with the pure ether extending throughout the atmosphere. It is a tormenting, stinking, loathsome, abominable, and poisonous principle, and so reveals itself to the mind and soul of devils and the damned denizens themselves.^[xiii]

          Life in hell is a welling-up source, a fountain which can never be exhausted, from which constantly wells up a painful hunger that can never be satisfied, a burning thirst that can never be quenched, and produces steady motion without rest; it is a suffocating darkness so abominable that it cannot be expressed in words, nor compared to anything in visible creation.

          In this principle, there are many types of apartments, such as the region of the curse, the dwelling place of eternal death, despair and unbelief, also the inhabitants of this infernal principle are free to take up residence in this or that infernal region at will.^[xiv]

     “The separation of the four first forms of nature from the rest, or the shared birth of the dark wrath-fire essence into a principle of its own, is the true reason for all evil, insofar as it has separated from the forms of gentle light. This is the ‘tree of the knowledge of evil’ within us, which, like the ‘tree of the knowledge of good,’ bears its special fruits. From the dark mind come all images and conceptions of lust, revenge, cruelty, etc. They are not empty imaginations or chimeras, but real and essential representations, magically formed.”

          Since the bodies of the inhabitants of hell are not made of coarse matter but of plastic (astral) matter, their appearance also corresponds to their character and they can transform themselves into other forms through their imagination and willpower.

     “The devils in this dark world can transform their human forms into all sorts of other forms through their dark magical arts, such as e.g., in the likeness of serpents and poisonous worms and other horrid beasts, dragons, bears, tigers, dogs, wolves, etc., but they cannot appear in a brilliant form formed from the first principle of heavenly light. They cannot transform themselves into angels of light, but still, by means of assumed images and ideas, they can change into the form of certain persons, living or dead, with such equality in appearance that no mortal eye can distinguish these images from the shape they want to imagine; both in regard to the equality of the body, its shape and figure and the clothes.”^[xv]

          As there are various forces in external nature, such as heat, light, electricity, magnetism, sound, with each having its peculiar properties, yet all emanating from one source, being all vibrations of the ether, and one being transformable into the other, so it is with the spiritual powers, both infernal and heavenly; they are all certain forms of will or “essence of life” in nature and related to one another. As heat can produce light, so hate produces jealousy, jealousy, anger, love, gentleness, patience, etc., and just as a piece of iron does not glow of itself, but can be made glowing by being penetrated by heat, so it is with the virtues and vices of men. Man becomes wise by his understanding being enlightened by the light of truth; he loves when his soul is permeated by the spirit of love; he hates when the infernal “tincture” of hatred fills him and awakens in him, etc. The “devils,” as well as the “angels,” are personifications of such spiritual powers, and just as a heated object radiates warmth again, so does every angel or devil out again part of that power which has become evident in him. Pordage says:

     “Every devil (or devilish man) is the agent, the working being, the giver and emitter of his own tincture; he radiates it, and it enters the hearts and minds of men to tempt and seduce them. This infernal tincture is not outside the devils and out of their nature, but in the very essence of their infernal hearts or souls, and from their soul essence it goes up and tinges their own minds.” It is similar with the sunlight itself itself is colorless and odorless but produced in different plants different flowers with different colors and odors according to the properties of the plants.

          And as it is with hell and its hellish emanations, so it is with heaven and the influences which come from the heavenly world. Man is a world in miniature; he creates his own heaven and hell by means of influences that penetrate him from outside and which he absorbs and shapes within himself. In himself is the formative power of thought and the life-giving will. From every good thought an angel can be born, from every bad one a devil. Human nature is composed, as it were, of various personalities or “illusory egos” produced by man’s thought and will; every passion developed in him through his thinking and feeling and enlivened through his will represents such a personality, an “elemental” or perhaps a devil, who can take possession of the whole nature of man, and since there are probably only a few completely passionless people there, then most are surrounded by such false “egos,” as in general the spiritual sphere or “aura” of each of the products of his ideas and “imaginations,” i.e, things he has formed within himself, and each of these thought-forms represents, as it were, a separate, individual, living being theological notions, superstition, error, and wickedness dwell, a hell peopled by demons and monsters living and suffering and fighting one another; but the God-man (Jesus) in man, born again in the Spirit of God, destroys these creations of the imagination. In the light of true self-knowledge, all these bodily shadows are destroyed.^[xvi]

          If man allows a devilish power to grow within him, if he surrenders to it and sacrifices himself to it, he identifies himself with the devil he, himself, has created, feeds him with his spiritual life, gives him his consciousness, enters into him and becomes that devil itself; but man is originally of a divine nature, and when he comes to the consciousness of his true nature and unites himself with this God of his, he is exalted above heaven and hell with all their devils. Redemption and the power to rise out of the kingdom of darkness and passion into the kingdom of light and freedom is in man himself. Through the power of the heavenly self within him, he can send the devils, who have nested in him, into the abyss of annihilation, i.e., conquer his passions.

          After leaving the body, the soul suffers from the conditions that man has created for himself during life; but as far as suffering from without is concerned, there is no greater hell than our world, in which selfishness is the ruler and one abuses and torments one another. All our sufferings spring from ignorance of our higher nature and the imaginary delusion of ownness which has taken its place. Angelus Silesius says that if the devil could step out of his own being, he would immediately be on the throne of God.

          What must I do to be saved? Śaṅkarāchārya says: “The human being at his core is “existence-knowledge-bliss” (Sat-chit-ānandam). When the knowledge of our blissful existence is revealed in us, then we are free from all illusion and have eternal bliss. The key to the gate of this eternal bliss is immortal, selfless, divine love. Anyone who sacrifices himself to her enters her and she is absorbed in him.

          This love is immortal and a divine force because it is unselfish and impersonal; it desires nothing for itself, but sacrifices itself for the good of the whole, and because God is love and the world of appearances proceeded from himself, it is said that God created the world out of love and the eternal word through the Incarnation sacrificed itself; for the eternal Word is the expression of a divine thought, and as a man’s evil thought proceeds from the human being and is a part of it, so the divine thought which God expresses in him is a part of himself.

          But as there is an impersonal eternal divine love, so there is its opposite, an impersonal spiritual hatred which, being impersonal, is also immortal and a magical power of the will. From this the state called hell emerges. He who is filled with the power of this evil will acts according to the nature of this will; he practices evil not for personal gain, but out of a tendency toward evil. Such creatures are the disciples of black magic and are rightly called “devils” as representatives of malice. This is the rationale on which rests the belief in an “eternal” hell that will disappear only at the end of all creation, and of which it is written in the “Revelation of John” Ch. XX, 10: “They will be tormented day and Night”; i.e. both during their incarnations on earth, where they have created bad karma through their evil deeds, and in the nights which follow the days of their earthly existence. This cosmic process becomes “from eternity to eternity”, i.e. going on from one manvantara to another, until after untold ages the good spiritual powers return to God and evil sinks into the “bottomless abyss” of the unmanifest.

          In the end, everyone enters what corresponds to their innermost being. The divine returns to God, the material to earth.

 

Notes

^[i] The word “eternal” does not mean a never-ending period of time, but “eternity” is that from which ”time” springs; in the eternal, past, future and present are one. “I myself am eternity when I leave time, and summarize eternity in God and God in me.” Angelus Silesius.)

^[ii] Every experienced occultist or clairvoyant is familiar with the hideous forms of demons, vampires, and the like, which gather in places where blood is spilled, at executions, in slaughterhouses, and the like, and at the sight of which even the animals are terrified.

^[iii] {R.H.—Here, the astral body is not the etheric double or liṅga-śarīra (as with earliest theosophical teachings) but the kāma-rūpa.}

^[iv] F. Hartmann. The Bhagavad Gita. XIV. 14-15. — “Sattwa,” knowledge. — “Rajas,” passion. — “Tamas,” stupidity.

^[v] Karl Eugene Neumann. “The speeches of Gotamo Buddhos. Vol. I, p. 117. {Die Reden Gotamo Buddhos; aus der mittleren Sammlung Majjhimanikayo des Pali-Kanons zum ersten Mal übers. von Karl Eugene Neumann. München, R. Piper, 1922}

^[vi] Aurora Ch. X. 65.

^[vii] See number [verse] 66.

^[viii] Aurora Ch. XIX. 120.

^[ix] “Of the Three Principles.” XX. 85.

^[x] “Forty Questions.” XXIV. 6.

^[xi] J. Pordage “Divine and true metaphysics, or science of things invisible and eternal obtained by wonderful personal experience.” Frankfurt and Leipzig 1715. {J. Pordage. Göttliche und wahre Metaphysica, oder wunderbahre, durch eigene Erfahrung erlangte Wissenschaft der unsichtbaren und ewigen Dinge. 3 Teile. Frankfurt und Leipzig 1715 [J. Pordage. “Divine and true metaphysics, or science of things invisible and eternal obtained by wonderful personal experience.” Frankfurt and Leipzig 1715.]}

^[xii] It is a well-known fact that there are certain haunted or ghostly apparitions which emanate a loathsome, pestilential stench. Also, at some spiritistic séances, materialized, visible, and tangible monstrosities with half-human, half-animal forms, e.g., giant scorpions with human arms. They are the products of animal passions that have become a person’s alter ego.

^[xiii] Just as the astral body of man or animal is not only within the physical body, but extends its sphere to some distance outside it, so the astral body of our planet is not only within the visible earth, but extends to it, where it touches the astral sphere of the moon. Jakob Böhme says: “The dwelling place of devils is from the moon to and into the earth, in deep dives and caves; especially where deserts and wild wastes are, and where the earth is very stony and bitter. The whole body of nature is like a human body. The seven spirits of nature rule in it and the heart of nature stands in the middle of it. (Aurora XXV. 20.)

^[xiv] Feelings of malice, revenge, jealousy, hatred, anger, etc., can be indulged and dwelled upon at will.

^[xv] This may also be the reason for the apparent proof of identity of the deceased at spiritistic sessions more often than one is inclined to believe; since these “elementals” can not only assume the form of the deceased, but also imitate his mannerisms according to the model they find in the subconscious of those present.

^[xvi] See illustration [Beginning of this article.]. Archangel Michael’s fight with the demons, or the victory of the higher self over the self-created semblance of self.

^[i] Hell [Die „Hölle.” Franz Hartmann, M.D. Neue Lotusblüten 4, no. 7-8 (July-August 1911), 193-223] {This article was reformatted from the original, but with the content unchanged other than fixing minor typos. Translation from the German by Robert Hütwohl, ©2025}