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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

 

Franchezzo

There is a 'special place in hell,' as the phrase is used, for those, such as political or religious leaders, who used their power over people to deceive, enslave, and aggrandize themselves.

 

 

return to the main-page article on "Hell" 

 

 

 

Editor's prefatory comment:

pity the 'big sloppy grins'

We discover that those who wield Earthly authoritative power over people – essentially, all of the cult leaders, be they of the political, religious, academic, corporate, or materialistic science stripe – will find themselves in a particular misery in hell. This suggests to us that where there is opportunity to serve, there is also a requirement to do so, and moral culpability if disdained.

We see these “big sloppy grins” on television every day, posturing as benefactors, as they go about their totalitarian ways of robbing the people of personal liberties. Do not envy the power of these “big sloppy grins.” Their deceit will come at a very high price – hundreds or thousands of years in the rat-cellar slime pits.

more than drinking the koolaid

The long reach of cultism encompasses much more than crackpot churches. The root idea of cult offers the sense of "cut." This core concept of "cut" leads us to images of refinement and refashioning and, by extension, development, control, pattern, order, and system.

Cultism as systemization finds a ready home in religion and philosophy which seek to regulate and redistill the patterning and ordering of ideas. However, in a larger sense, the spirit of cultism extends to every facet of society. We find it scheming and sedulously at work in politics, academia, family, corporations, entertainment, science, artistry – anywhere power might be gained by capturing credulous and fear-based minds.

See the “cultism” page for a full discussion.

 

 

'a snowball's chance in hell'

I was next sent to visit what will indeed seem a strange country to exist in the spirit world. The Land of Ice and Snow—the Frozen Land—in which lived all those who had been cold and selfishly calculating in their earthly lives. Those who had crushed out and chilled and frozen from their own lives, and the lives of others, all those warm sweet impulses and affections which make the life of heart and soul.

Love had been so crushed and killed by them that its sun could not shine where they were, and only the frost of life remained. Great statesmen were amongst those whom I saw dwelling in this land, but they were those who had not loved their country nor sought its good. Only their own ambitions, their own aggrandisement had been their aim, and to me they now appeared to dwell in great palaces of ice and on the lofty frozen pinnacles of their own ambitions.

Others more humble and in different paths in life I saw, but all alike were chilled and frozen by the awful coldness and barrenness of a life from which all warmth, all passion, was shut out. I had learnt the evils of an excess of emotion and of passion, now I saw the evils of their entire absence. Thank God this Land had far fewer inhabitants than the other, for terrible as are the effects of misused love, they are not so hard to overcome as the absence of all the tender feelings of the human heart.

There were men here who had been prominent members of every religious faith and every nationality on your earth. Roman Catholic Cardinals and Priests of austere and pious but cold and selfish lives, Puritan Preachers, Methodist Ministers, Presbyterian Divines, Church of England Bishops and Clergymen, Missionaries, Brahmin Priests, Parsees, Egyptians, Mahomedans —in short all sorts and all nationalities were to be found in the Frozen Land, yet in scarcely one was there enough warmth of feeling to thaw the ice around themselves even in a small degree...

the leader of the RCC Inquisition, in a special cage

There was one man whom I saw who appeared to be enclosed in a cage of ice; —the bars were of ice, yet they were as bars of polished steel for strength. This man had been one of the Grand Inquisitors of the Inquisition in Venice, and had been one of those whose very names sent terror to the heart of any unfortunate who fell into their clutches. A most celebrated name in history, yet in all the records of his life and acts there was not one instance where one shade of pity for his victims had touched his heart and caused him to turn aside, even for one brief moment, from his awful determination in torturing and killing those whom the Inquisition got into its toils.

A man known for his own hard austere life, which had no more indulgence for himself than for others. Cold and pitiless, he knew not what it was to feel one answering throb awake in his heart for another's sufferings. His face was a type of cold unemotional cruelty: the long thin high nose, the pointed sharp chin, the high and rather wide cheek bones, the thin straight cruel lips like a thin line across the face, the head somewhat flat and wide over the ears, while the deep-set penetrating eyes glittered from their penthouse brows with the cold steely glitter of a wild beast's.

like Hannibal Lector, still dangerous behind bars

Like a procession of spectres I saw the wraiths of some of this man's many victims glide past him, maimed and crushed, torn and bleeding from their tortures, —pallid ghosts, wandering astral shades, from which the souls had departed forever, but which yet clung around this man, unable to decay into the elements whilst his magnetism attached them, like a chain, to him...

Other spirits I saw haunting this man, and taunting him with his own helplessness and their past sufferings, but these were very different looking, they were more solid in appearance and possessed a power and strength and intelligence wanting in those other misty looking shades. These were spirits whose astral forms still held the immortal souls imprisoned in them, though they had been so crushed and tortured that only the fierce desire of revenge remained.

These spirits were incessant in their endeavour to get at their former oppressor and tear him in pieces, and the icy cage seemed to be regarded by him as being as much a protection from them as a prison for himself.

One more clever than the rest [of his tormentors] had constructed a long, sharp-pointed pole which he thrust through the bars to prod at the man within, and wonderful was the activity he displayed in trying to avoid its sharp point. Others had sharp short javelins which they hurled through the bars at him. Others again squirted foul, slimy water, and at times the whole crowd would combine in trying to hurl themselves en masse upon the sheltering bars to break through, but in vain.

The wretched man within, whom long experience had taught the impregnability of his cage, would taunt them in return with a cold crafty enjoyment of their fruitless efforts. To my mental query as to whether this man was ever released, an answer was given to me by that majestic spirit whose voice I had heard at rare times speaking to me, from the time when I heard it first at my own grave.

On various occasions, when I had asked for help or knowledge, this spirit had spoken to me, as now, from a distance, his voice sounding to me as the voice spoken of by the prophets of old when they thought the Lord spoke to them in the thunder. This voice rang in my ears with its full deep tones, yet neither the imprisoned spirit nor those haunting him heard it; their ears were deaf so that they could not hear, and their eyes blind so that they could not see.

if he were released, he would do it all over again, and worse

And to me the voice said, "Son, behold the thoughts of this man for one brief moment—see how he would use liberty were it his." And I saw, as one sees images reflected in a mirror, the mind of this man. First the thought that he could get free, then that once free he could force himself back to earth and the earth plane, and once there he could find some still in the flesh whose aspirations and ambitions were like his own, and through their help he would forge a still stronger yoke as of iron to rivet upon men's necks, and found a still crueller tyranny—a still more pitiless Inquisition, if that were possible, which should crush out the last remnant of liberty left to its oppressed victims.

He knew he would sway a power far greater than his earthly power, since he would work with hands and brain freed from all earthly fetters, and would be able to call up around him kindred spirits, fellow workers with souls as cruel and cold as his own. He seemed to revel in the thought of the fresh oppressions he could plan, and took pride to himself in the recollection that he had ever listened unmoved to the shrieks and groans and prayers of the victims he had tortured to death.

he wanted his famous religious order to rule over the earth

From the love of oppression and for his own relentless ambition had he worked, making the aggrandisement of his order but the pretext for his actions, and in no single atom of his hard soul was there awakened one spark of pity or remorse. Such a man set free to return to earth would be a source of danger far more deadly than the most fierce wild beast, since his powers would be far less limited.

he thought the Inquisition was still raging in its glory

He did not know that his vaunted Inquisition, which he still sought to strengthen in all its deadly powers, had become a thing of the past, swept away from the face of God's earth by a power far mightier than any he could wield. And that, like the dark and terrible age in which it had sprung up like a noisome growth, it had gone never more to return—thank God! —never again to disgrace humanity by the crimes committed in the name of Him who came only to preach peace and love on earth.

Editor’s note: Franchezzo believes that the Inquisition, along with the great Dark Ages which offered support, cannot return to the Earth. Possibly, but the spirits do not know the future, and so we take his comment here as mere hopeful dicta.

Gone, with its traces and its scars left yet upon the human mind in its shaken and broken trust in a God and an Immortality. The recoil of that movement which at last swept away the Inquisition is yet felt on earth, and long years must pass before all which was good and pure and true and had survived throughout even those dark ages shall reassert its power and lead men back to their faith in a God of Love, not a God of Horrors, as those oppressors painted Him.

From this frozen land I turned away, chilled and saddened. I did not care to linger there or explore its secrets, though it may be that again at some future time I may visit it. I felt that there was nothing I could do in that land, none I could understand, and they but froze and revolted me without my doing them any good.

 

 

Editor's last word:

We are reminded of Jesus’ statement in the New Testament, how he could do no good work in certain towns, as the hardness of hearts of the populace precluded any outreach intervention. The free choice of all, for good or ill, is ever honored at every level of the astral realms.