from: Scenes From Beyond the Grave
published in 1865 by Marietta Davis.

“I was welcomed with gay and sportive sounds. The beings whom you behold in the distance rushed forward to embrace me. They shouted, ‘Welcome! Welcome!’
I was awed, bewildered, and yet mentally quickened and energized by the atmosphere of this abode. I found myself endued with the power of strange and restless motion. Every organ sent forth and every pore emitted a phosphorescent illumination, which condensed about the head and formed the appearance of a brilliant diadem and reflected on the countenance a wild, unearthly glow. The exhalation as it extended became a flaming robe, enveloping my form and causing it to conform in appearance to the invariable likeness of my spirit associates. I became conscious of a strange pervasion of the brain, and the cerebral organs became subject to a foreign power, which seemed to operate by an absolute possession.”

Hell’s Revelry Palls but Does Not Appease

“I abandoned myself to the attractive influences that were around me, and sought to satisfy my craving desires for pleasure. I reveled, I banqueted, I mingled in the wild and voluptuous dance, I plucked the shining fruit, I plunged in the ardent streams, I surfeited my nature with that which externally appeared delicious and inviting to the sight and to the sense. But when tasted, all was loathing and a source of increasing pain. And so unnatural are the desires perpetuated here that what I crave I loathe and that which delights tortures me. My tortures create within me a strange intoxication. My appetite is palled, and yet my hunger is unappeased and unappeasable. Every object which I perceive I crave, and I grasp it in the midst of disappointment and gather it with increased agony. With every new accession of experience I am immersed in some unknown fantasy, delirium and intoxication. New and strange phenomena are continually manifested and add delirium to delirium, and fear to fear. I seem to myself to become part of that which is about me. The voices which fall upon my ear, again burst from me in uncontrollable utterances. I laugh, philosophize, jeer, blaspheme and ridicule by turns, yet every epithet, however impure, sparkles with wit, glows with metaphor, and moves adorned with every rhetorical embellishment. The metallic ores, the waving trees, the shining fruit, the moving phantasms, the deluding waters, seem to form a dazzling and mocking spectacle, which is ever before my eyes, and every subject of reflection, as its fellow in my heart, from which, in its mocking scenery, it meets a response. I inwardly crave to satisfy my hunger and my thirst, and the desire appears to create without and around me a tantalizing illusion of cool waters I may never drink, and grateful fruits I may never taste, and refreshing airs I never feel, and peaceful slumbers I may never enjoy. I know that the forms around me are fantastic and delusive, yet every object appears to hold controlling power, and to domineer with cruel enchantment over my bewildered mind.”

The Law of Evil Attraction

“I experience the power of the law of evil attraction. I am the slave of discordant and deceptive elements and of their presiding vice. Every object by turns attracts me. The thought of mental freedom dies within the dying will, while the idea that I am a part and an element of the revolving fantasy takes possession of my spirit. This realm, curtained with a cloud of nether night, is one sea of perverted and diseased magnetic element. Here lust, pride, hate, avarice, love of self, ambition, contention, and blasphemies, reveling in madness, kindle into a burning flame. And that speciality of evil which does not belong to and unfold from one spirit, belongs to and unfolds from another; so that the combined strength of the aggregate of all, is the prevailing law. By this strength of evil I am bound, and in it I exist. Here are those who oppressed the poor; who robbed the hireling of his wages, and bound the weary down with heavy burdens; the false in religious faith; the hypocrite; the adulterer; the assassin; and the suicide, who, not satisfied with life in the external form, has hastened its close.”

[to be continued]