The Secret Doctrine, Volume 1 quotes

nor was their policy dictated by selfishness, or any desire to monopolise the life-giving sacred lore. There were portions of the Secret Science that for incalculable ages had to remain concealed from the profane gaze.

But this was because the imparting to the unprepared multitude secrets of such tremendous importance was equivalent to giving a child a lighted candle in a powder magazine.

The answer to a question which has frequently arisen in the minds of students, when meeting with statements such as this, may well be outlined here.

However superhuman the efforts of the early Christian Fathers to obliterate the Secret Doctrine from the very memory of man, they all failed.

Truth can never be killed; hence the failure to sweep away entirely from the face of the earth every vestige of that ancient Wisdom, and to shackle and gag every witness who testified to it.

Let one only think of the thousands, perhaps millions, of MSS. burnt; of monuments, with their too indiscreet inscriptions and pictorial symbols, pulverized to dust;

… frequent references in this first volume to matters which, properly speaking, belong to a later part of the work, but which could not be passed by in silence, lest the reader should look upon it as a fairy tale indeed—a fiction of some modern brain.

Thus, the Past shall help to realize the Present, and the latter to better appreciate the Past.

The errors of the day must be explained and swept away, yet it is more than probable—nay in the present case it amounts to certitude—that once more the testimony of long ages and of history will fail to impress any but the very intuitional—which is …

An archaic Manuscript—a collection of palm leaves made impermeable to water, fire, and air, by some specific and unknown process—is before the writer's eye.

On the first page is an immaculate white disk within a dull black ground.

On the following page, the same disk, but with a central point. The first, the student knows, represents Kosmos in Eternity, before the reäwakening of still slumbering Energy, the Emanation of the World in later systems.

truly, “a Chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.” Its one absolute attribute, which is Itself, eternal, ceaseless Motion, is called in esoteric parlance the Great Breath,28 which is the perpetual motion of the Universe, in the sense of limitless, ever-present Space.

That which is motionless cannot be Divine.

But then there is nothing in fact and reality absolutely motionless within the Universal Soul.

By the third symbol—the circle divided in two by a horizontal diameter—was meant the first manifestation of creative Nature—still passive, because feminine.

The first shadowy perception of man connected with procreation is feminine, because man knows his mother more than his father.

Hence female deities were more sacred than male.

Locke's idea, that “pure space is capable of neither resistance nor motion,” is incorrect.

Space is neither a “limitless void,” nor a “conditioned fulness,” but both.

Being—on the plane of absolute abstraction—the ever-incognizable Deity, which is void only to finite minds,39 and on that of mâyâvic perception, the Plenum, the absolute Container of all that is, whether manifested or unmanifested, it is, therefore, that Absolute All.

periodically “the playground of numberless Universes incessantly manifesting and disappearing,” called the “Manifesting Stars,” and [pg 045] the “Sparks of Eternity.” “The Eternity of the Pilgrim51 is like a wink of the Eye of Self-Existence,” as the Book of Dyzan puts it. “

The appearance and disappearance of Worlds is like a regular tidal ebb of flux and reflux.

”

1.

The Eternal Parent, wrapped in her Ever-Invisible Robes, had slumbered once again for Seven Eternities.

2. Time was not, for it lay asleep in the Infinite Bosom of Duration.

2.

Time was not, for it lay asleep in the Infinite Bosom of Duration.

3. Universal Mind was not, for there were no Ah-hi to contain it.

5.

Darkness alone filled the Boundless All, for Father, Mother and Son were once more one, and the Son had not yet awakened for the new Wheel and his Pilgrimage thereon.

6. The Seven Sublime Lords and the Seven Truths had ceased to be, and the Universe, the Son of Necessity, was immersed in Paranishpanna, to be outbreathed by that which is, and yet is not. Naught was.

2. ...

Where was Silence? Where the ears to sense it?

No, there was neither Silence nor Sound; naught save Ceaseless Eternal Breath, which knows itself not.

2.

The Vibration sweeps along, touching with its swift Wing the whole Universe and the Germ that dwelleth in Darkness, the Darkness that breathes over the slumbering Waters of Life.

3. Darkness radiates Light, and Light drops one solitary Ray into the Waters, into the Mother-Deep. The Ray shoots [pg 058] through the Virgin Egg, the Ray causes the Eternal Egg to thrill, and drop the non-eternal Germ, which condenses into the World-Egg.

3.

Darkness radiates Light, and Light drops one solitary Ray into the Waters, into the Mother-Deep.

The Ray shoots [pg 058] through the Virgin Egg, the Ray causes the Eternal Egg to thrill, and drop the non-eternal Germ, which condenses into the World-Egg.

6. The Root of Life was in every Drop of the Ocean of Immortality, and the Ocean was Radiant Light, which was Fire, and Heat, and Motion.

Darkness vanished and was no more; it disappeared in its own Essence, the Body of Fire and Water, of Father and Mother.

7. Behold, O Lanoo, the Radiant Child of the Two, the unparalleled refulgent Glory—Bright Space, Son of Dark Space, who emerges from the Depths of the great Dark Waters. It is Oeaohoo, the Younger, the ——.

2. They make of him the Messenger of their Will. The Dzyu becomes Fohat: the swift Son of the Divine Sons, whose [pg 062] Sons are the Lipika, runs circular errands.

Fohat is the Steed, and the Thought is the Rider.

He passes like lightning through the fiery clouds; takes Three, and Five, and Seven Strides through the Seven Regions above, and the Seven below. He lifts his Voice, and calls the innumerable Sparks, and joins them together.

2. The One Ray multiplies the smaller Rays.

Life precedes Form, and Life survives the last atom.

Through the countless Rays the Life-Ray, the One, like a Thread through many Beads.

The “Parent,” Space, is the eternal, ever-present Cause of all—the incomprehensible Deity, whose “Invisible Robes” are the mystic Root of all Matter, and of the Universe.

Space is the one eternal thing that we can most easily imagine, immovable in its abstraction and uninfluenced by either the presence or absence in it of an objective Universe.

It is without dimension, in every sense, and self-existent. Spirit is the first differentiation from “That,” the Causeless Cause of both Spirit and Matter. As taught in the Esoteric Catechism, it is neither “limitless void,” nor “conditioned fulness,” but both.

“Time” is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through Eternal Duration, and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced, [pg 069] but “lies asleep.”

The Present is only a mathematical line which divides that part of Eternal Duration which we call the Future, from that part which we call the Past.

Nothing on earth has real duration, for nothing remains without change—or the same—for the billionth part of a second;

To the untrained eye of the savage, a painting is at first an unmeaning confusion of streaks and daubs of colour, while an educated eye sees instantly a face or a landscape.

Nothing is permanent except the one hidden absolute Existence which contains in itself the noumena of all realities.

The Existences belonging to every plane of being, up to the highest Dhyân Chohans, are, comparatively, like the shadows cast by a magic lantern on a colourless screen.

As to borrowed or secondary light, whatever its source, it can be only of a temporary mâyâvic character.

Darkness, then, is the Eternal Matrix in which the Sources of Light appear and disappear.

Nothing is added to darkness to make of it light, or to light to make it darkness, on this our plane. They are interchangeable; and, scientifically, light is but a mode of darkness and vice versâ.

Yet both are phenomena of the same noumenon—which is absolute darkness to the scientific mind, and but a gray twilight to the perception of the average Mystic, though to that of the spiritual eye of the Initiate it is absolute light.

How far we discern the light that shines in darkness depends upon our powers of vision.

What is light to us is darkness to certain insects, and the eye of the clairvoyant sees illumination where the normal eye perceives only blackness.

The Secret Doctrine teaches the progressive development of everything, worlds as well as atoms; and this stupendous development has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end.

Our “Universe” is only one of an infinite number of Universes, all of them “Sons of Necessity,” because links in the great cosmic chain of Universes, each one standing in the relation of an effect as regards its predecessor, and of a cause as regards its successor.

The appearance and disappearance of the Universe are pictured as an outbreathing and inbreathing of the “Great Breath,” which is eternal, and which, being Motion, is one of the three symbols of the Absolute—Abstract Space and Duration being the other two.

Inextricably bound up with the relativity of human knowledge, they nevertheless can have no existence except in the experience of the individual Ego, and perish when its evolutionary march dispels the Mâyâ of phenomenal existence.

What is time, for instance, but the panoramic succession of our states of consciousness?

In the words of a Master, “I feel irritated at having to use these three clumsy words—Past, Present, and Future—miserable concepts of the objective phases of the subjective whole, they are about as ill-adapted for the purpose as an axe for fine carving.”

To realize the meaning, however, the sphere must be thought of as seen from its centre.

The field of vision, or of thought, is like a sphere whose radii proceed from one's self in every direction, and extend out into space, opening up boundless vistas all around.

It is the symbolical circle of Pascal and the Kabalists, “whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere”—a conception which enters into the compound idea of this emblem.

and according to Robert Fludd, “Darkness adopted illumination in order to make itself visible.”106 According to the tenets of Eastern Occultism,

Darkness is the one true actuality, the basis and the root of Light, without which the latter could never manifest itself, nor even exist.

Light is Matter, and Darkness pure Spirit. Darkness, in its radical, metaphysical basis, is subjective and absolute Light;

… until it had incubated cosmic matter and made it assume the annular shape of a serpent with its tail in its mouth—which symbolizes not only eternity and infinitude, but also the globular shape of all the bodies formed within the Universe from that fiery mist.

The Universe, as also the Earth and Man, serpent-like, periodically cast off their old skins, to assume new ones after a time of rest.

The serpent is surely not a less graceful or a more unpoetical image than the caterpillar and chrysalis from which springs the butterfly, the Greek emblem of Psyche, the human soul!

Heraclitus of Ephesus maintained that the one principle that underlies all phenomena in Nature is fire.

The intelligence that moves the Universe is fire, and fire is intelligence.

And while Anaximenes said the same of air, and Thales of Miletus (600 years b.c.) of water, the Esoteric Doctrine [pg 106] reconciles all these philosophers, by showing that though each was right, the system of none was complete.

To utter a Name is not only to define a Being [an Entity], but to place it under, and condemn it through the emission of the Word [Verbum] to the influence of, one or more Occult potencies.

Things are, for every one of us, that which it [the Word] makes them while naming them.

The Word [Verbum] or the speech of every man is, quite unconsciously to himself, a blessing or a curse;

Says the ancient Commentary167 to Stanza IV:

The Mother is the fiery Fish of Life.

She scatters her Spawn and the Breath [Motion] heats and quickens it. The Grains [of Spawn] are soon attracted to each other and form the Curds in the Ocean [of Space].

This will be explained in its place. Let us see, now, what may be the meaning of this Occult Stanza.

The Doctrine teaches that, in order to become a divine, fully conscious God—aye, even the highest—the Spiritual Primeval Intelligences must pass through the human stage.

And when we say human, this does not apply merely to our terrestrial humanity, but to the mortals that inhabit any world, i.e., to those Intelligences that have reached the appropriate equilibrium between matter and spirit, as we have now, ever since the middle point …

… our terrestrial humanity, but to the mortals that inhabit any world, i.e., to those Intelligences that have reached the appropriate equilibrium between matter and spirit, as we have now, ever since the middle point of the Fourth Root Race of the Fourth Round was passed.

Each Entity must have won for itself the right of becoming divine, through self-experience.

Hegel, the great German thinker, must have known or sensed intuitionally this truth, when he said, that the Unconscious evolved the Universe only “in the hope of attaining clear self-consciousness,” in other words, of becoming Man;

Erebus and Nux are born out of Chaos, and, under the action of Eros, give birth in their turn to Æther and Hemera, the light of the superior and the light of the inferior, or terrestrial, regions.

Darkness generates light.

Compare in the Purânas Brahmâ's Will or “Desire” to create; and in the Phœnician cosmogony of Sanchuniathon the doctrine that Desire, πόθος, is the principle of creation.

“Thou sayest well. And now look around and into thyself.

That light which burns inside thee, dost thou feel it different in anywise from the light that shines in thy brother-men?

”

Among the Mystics and Kabalists, the Rosicrucians were those who defined Fire in the most correct way.

Procure a sixpenny lamp, keep it only supplied with oil, and you will be able to light at its flame the lamps, candles, and fires of the whole globe without diminishing that flame.

If the Deity, the radical One, is an eternal and infinite Substance never consumed (“the Lord thy God is a consuming fire”), [pg 147] then it does not seem reasonable that the Occult teaching should be held as unphilosophical when it says:

They are Entities of higher worlds in the Hierarchy of Being, so immeasurably high that, to us, they must appear as Gods, and collectively—God. But so must we, mortal men, appear to the ant, which reasons on the scale of its special capacities.

The ant may also, for all we know, see the avenging finger of a Personal God in the hand of the urchin who, under the impulse of mischief, destroys, in one moment, its ant-hill, the labour of many weeks—long years in the chronology of insects.

The ant, feeling it acutely, may also, like man, attribute the undeserved calamity to a combination of providence and sin, and see in it the result of the sin of its first parent. Who knows, and who can affirm or deny?

The Brâhmanical doctrine has no equivalents for these. Vâch seems, in many an aspect, to approach the Chinese Kwan-Yin, but there is no regular worship of Vâch under this name in India, as there is of Kwan-Yin in China.

No exoteric religious system has ever adopted a female Creator, and thus, from the first dawn of popular religions, woman has been regarded and treated as inferior to man.

It is only in China and Egypt that Kwan-Yin and Isis are placed on a par with the male gods. Esotericism ignores both sexes. Its highest Deity is as sexless as it is formless, neither Father nor Mother;

… her Seventh Round, her mother Moon will have dissolved into thin air, as the Moons of the other planets have, or have not, as the case may be, since there are planets which have several Moons—a mystery again which no Œdipus of Astronomy has solved.

The Moon is now the cold residual quantity, the shadow dragged after the new body, into which her living powers and principles are transfused.

She now is doomed for long ages to be ever pursuing the Earth, to be attracted by and to attract her progeny.

while at the same time it is the graveyard, or corpse-emanations, which kill.

And like all ghouls or vampires, the Moon is the friend of the sorcerers and the foe of the unwary.

From the archaic æons and the later times of the witches of Thessaly, down to some of the present Tântrikas of Bengal, her nature and properties have been known to every Occultist, but have remained a closed book for Physicists.

This will be explained in Volume II. During the three Rounds to come, Humanity, like the Globe on which it lives, will be ever tending to reässume its primeval form, that of a Dhyân Chohanic Host.

Man tends to become a God and then—God, like every other Atom in the Universe.

Beginning so early as with the Second Round, Evolution proceeds already on quite a different plan.

and though understood to say that mankind was yet in the Fourth Round, in another place he seemed to say that we were in the Fifth. To this an “apocalyptic answer” was returned by another Teacher: “

A few drops of rain do not make a monsoon, though they presage it.

”... “No, we are not in the Fifth Round, but Fifth Round men have been coming in for the last few thousand years.” This was worse than the riddle of the Sphinx! Students of Occultism subjected their brains to the wildest work of speculation.

3. The inner, now concealed, man, was then [in the beginnings] the external man. The progeny of the Dhyânis [Pitris], he was “the son like unto his father.”

Like the lotus, whose external shape assumes gradually the form of the model within itself, so did the form of man in the beginning evolve from within without.

After the cycle in which man began to procreate his species after the fashion of the present animal kingdom, it became the reverse.

… been said in the letters to warrant the assurance, that the Occult doctrine has ever taught, or any Adept believed in, unless metaphorically, the preposterous modern theory of the descent of man from a common ancestor with the ape—an anthropoid of the actual animal kind.

To this day the world is more full of ape-like men than the woods are of men-like apes.

The ape is sacred in India because its origin is well known to the Initiates, though concealed under a thick veil of allegory.

or, as they are called, the First, Second, and the Third Root-Races.

As the solid Earth began by being a ball of liquid fire, of fiery dust and its protoplasmic phantom, so did man.

(a) That which is meant by the qualification the “Fourth,” is explained as the Fourth Round, only on the authority of the Commentaries. It can equally mean Fourth Eternity as Fourth Round, or even our Fourth Globe.

In the “Beginning,” that which is called in mystic phraseology “Cosmic Desire” evolves into Absolute Light.

Now light without any shadow would be absolute light; in other words, absolute darkness, as Physical Science tries to prove.

This “shadow” appears under the form of primordial matter, allegorized—if you will—in the shape of the Spirit of Creative Fire or Heat. If, rejecting the poetical form and allegory, Science chooses to see in this the primordial “fire-mist,” it is welcome to do so.

It is only after losing its velocity, and hence its fiery tail, that the Fiery Dragon settles down into quiet and steady life, as a regular respectable citizen of the sidereal family. Therefore it is said:

Born in the unfathomable depths of Space, out of the homogeneous Element called the World-Soul, every nucleus of cosmic matter, suddenly launched into being, begins life under the most hostile circumstances.

Through a series of countless ages, it has to conquer for itself a place in the infinitudes.

But none of these has, like man, the consciousness of the nature of that “Highest Being,”335 as none has that divine harmony in its form, which man possesses. It is, as Novalis said, and no one since has said it better, as repeated by Carlyle:

There is but one temple in the Universe, and that is the Body of Man.

Nothing is holier than that high form.... We touch Heaven when we lay our hand on a human body! This sounds like a mere flourish of rhetoric; but it is not so. If well meditated, it will turn out to be a scientific fact;

There is but one temple in the Universe, and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is holier than that high form....

We touch Heaven when we lay our hand on a human body!

This sounds like a mere flourish of rhetoric; but it is not so. If well meditated, it will turn out to be a scientific fact; the expression ... of the actual truth of the thing. We are the miracle of miracles—the great inscrutable Mystery....336

The Celestial Hierarchy of the present Manvantara will find itself transferred, in the next Circle of Life, into higher superior Worlds, and will make room for a new Hierarchy, composed of the elect ones of our mankind.

Being is an endless cycle within the One Absolute Eternity, wherein move numberless inner cycles finite and conditioned.

Gods, created as such, would evince no personal merit in being Gods.

Being is an endless cycle within the One Absolute Eternity, wherein move numberless inner cycles finite and conditioned.

Gods, created as such, would evince no personal merit in being Gods.

Such a class of Beings—perfect only by virtue of the special immaculate nature inherent in them—in the face of suffering and struggling humanity, and even of the lower creation, would be the symbol of an eternal injustice quite Satanic in character, an ever present crime.

3.

The Angels aspire to become men; a Perfect Man, a Man-God, is above all the Angels.

4. Every 14,000 years the soul rejuvenates, and rests in the jubilean sleep of oblivion.

But no other Kabalist has ever had the talent of heaping up one contradiction on the other, of making one paradox chase another in the same sentence, and in such flowing language, as Éliphas Lévi.

He leads his reader through the most lovely valleys, to strand him after all on a desert and barren rock.

It is through and from the radiations of the seven Bodies of the seven Orders of Dhyânis, that the seven Discrete Quantities [Elements], whose Motion and harmonious Union produce the manifested Universe of Matter, are born.

The History of Creation and of this World, from its beginning up to the present time, is composed of seven chapters. The seventh chapter is not yet written.

The first of these “seven chapters” has been attempted and is now finished. However incomplete and feeble as an exposition, it is, at any rate, an approximation—using the word in a mathematical sense—to that which is the oldest basis for all subsequent cosmogonies.

We men must remember that, simply because we do not perceive any signs of consciousness which we can recognize, say, in stones, we have no right to say that no consciousness exists there.

There is no such thing as either “dead” or “blind” matter, as there is no “blind” or “unconscious” Law.

These find no place among the conceptions of Occult Philosophy. The latter never stops at surface appearances, and for it the noumenal Essences have more reality than their objective counterparts;

(6)

The Universe is worked and guided, from within outwards.

As above so it is below, as in heaven so on earth; and man, the microcosm and miniature copy of the macrocosm, is the living witness to this Universal Law, and to the mode of its action.

For Nature, taken in its abstract sense, cannot be “unconscious,” as it is the emanation from, and thus an aspect on the manifested plane of, the Absolute Consciousness.

Where is that daring man who would presume to deny to vegetation and even to minerals a consciousness of their own?

All he can say is, that this consciousness is beyond his comprehension.

the Pre-existing, evolved from the Ever-existing, and the Phenomenal—the world of illusion, the reflection, and shadow thereof. During the great mystery and drama of life, known as the Manvantara, real Kosmos is like the objects placed behind the white screen upon which shadows are thrown.

The actual figures and things remain invisible, while the wires of evolution are pulled by unseen hands.

Men and [pg 299] things are thus but the reflections, on the white field, of the realities behind the snares of Mahâmâyâ, or the Great Illusion.

In other words, that dual motion transfers Cosmos from the plane of the Eternal [pg 303] Ideal into that of finite manifestation, or from the noumenal to the phenomenal plane.

Everything that is, was, and will be, eternally IS, even the countless Forms, which are finite and perishable only in their objective, but not in their ideal form.

They existed as Ideas, in the Eternity, and, when they pass away, will exist as reflections. Occultism teaches that no form can be given to anything, either by Nature or by man, whose ideal type does not already exist on the subjective plane:

And again from another translation:

God is not a mind, but the cause that the Mind is; not a spirit, but the cause that the Spirit is; not light, but the cause that the Light is.

427

Trismegistus: Reality is not upon the earth, my son, and it cannot be thereon.... Nothing on earth is real, there are only appearances.... He [man] is not real, my son, as man. The real consists solely in itself and remains what it is....

Man is transient, therefore he is not real, he is but appearance, and appearance is the supreme illusion.

Tatios: Then the celestial bodies themselves are not real, my father, since they also vary?

those in Laya resting meanwhile in its bosom. As its substance is of a different kind from that known on Earth, the inhabitants of the latter, seeing through it, believe in their illusion and ignorance that it is empty space.

There is not one finger's breadth [angula] of void Space in the whole Boundless [Universe]....

xx. Matter or Substance is septenary within our World, as it is so beyond it. Moreover, each of its states or principles is graduated into seven degrees of density.

But, where is that madman for whom the hideous shadows in his deranged mind, his illusions, are not, for the time being, as actual and as real as the things which his physician or keeper may see? [pg 315]

Everything is relative in this Universe, everything is an Illusion.

But the experience of any plane is an actuality for the percipient being, whose consciousness is on that plane, though the said experience, regarded from the purely metaphysical standpoint, may be conceived to have no objective reality.

… of the brain, and everything else in Nature into a mode of motion, we protest against the doctrine as being unphilosophical, self-contradictory, and simply absurd, from a scientific point of view, as much and even more than from the Occult aspect of the Esoteric Knowledge.

For truly the Astral Light of the derided Kabalists has strange and weird secrets for him who can see in it; and the mysteries concealed within its incessantly disturbed waves are there, the whole body of Materialists and scoffers notwithstanding.

The Astral Light of the Kabalists is by some very incorrectly translated “Ether,” the latter is confused with the hypothetical Ether of Science, and both are referred to by some Theosophists as synonymous with Âkâsha. This is a great mistake.

Some fifteen years ago, the writer was the first to repeat, after the Kabalists, the wise Commandments in the Esoteric Catechism.

Close thy mouth, lest thou shouldst speak of this [the mystery], and thy heart, lest thou shouldst think aloud; and if thy heart has escaped thee, bring it back to its place, for such is the object of our alliance.452

And again, from the Rules of Initiation.

And again, from the Rules of Initiation.

This is a secret which gives death: close thy mouth lest thou shouldst reveal it to the vulgar; compress thy brain lest something should escape from it and fall outside.

A few years later, a corner of the Veil of Isis had to be lifted; and now another and a larger rent is made.

This is a secret which gives death: close thy mouth lest thou shouldst reveal it to the vulgar; compress thy brain lest something should escape from it and fall outside.

A few years later, a corner of the Veil of Isis had to be lifted; and now another and a larger rent is made.

But old and time-honoured errors—such as become with every day more glaring and self-evident—stand arrayed in battle-order now, as they did then.

and that the best scholars, the most acute minds, among our Âryanists and Egyptologists, have been too often darkened by one or another preconception, and still oftener, by one-sided views of the secret meaning.

Yet even a parable is a spoken symbol: a fiction or a fable, as some think; an allegorical representation, we say, of life-realities, events, and facts.

And just as a moral was ever drawn from a parable, such moral being an actual truth and fact in human life, so a historical, real event was deduced, by those versed in the hieratic sciences, from emblems and symbols recorded in the ancient archives …

They do not understand it even now. The evolution of the God-idea proceeds apace with man's own intellectual evolution.

So true is it that the noblest ideal to which the religious spirit of one age can soar, will appear but a gross caricature to the philosophic mind in a succeeding epoch!

The philosophers themselves had to be initiated into perceptive mysteries, before they could grasp the correct idea of the Ancients in relation to this most metaphysical subject.

They do not understand it even now.

The evolution of the God-idea proceeds apace with man's own intellectual evolution.

So true is it that the noblest ideal to which the religious spirit of one age can soar, will appear but a gross caricature to the philosophic mind in a succeeding epoch!

Therefore, such being the case, all those who have sought to give a name to the Incognizable Principle have simply degraded it.

Even to speak of Cosmic Ideation—save in its phenomenal aspect—is like trying to bottle up primordial Chaos, or to put a printed label on Eternity.

What, then, is the “Primordial Substance,” that mysterious object of which Alchemy was ever talking, and which was the subject of philosophical speculation in every age? What can it be finally, even in its phenomenal pre-differentiation?

Æther is the Aditi of the Hindûs, and it is Âkâsha. Electricity, magnetism, heat, light, and chemical action are so little understood even now, that fresh facts are constantly widening the range of our knowledge.

Who knows where ends the power of this protean giant—Æther; or whence its mysterious origin?

Who, we mean, that denies the Spirit that works in it, and evolves out of it all visible forms?

Indeed, there are few myths in any religious system worthy of the name, but have a historical as well as a scientific foundation.

“Myths,” justly observes Pococke, “are now proved to be fables, just in proportion as we misunderstand them; truths, in proportion as they were once understood.”

The most distinct and the one prevailing idea, found in all ancient teaching, with reference to Cosmic Evolution and the first “creation” [pg 363] of our Globe with all its products, organic and inorganic—strange word for an Occultist to use!—is that the whole Kosmos has …

Seb, the Egyptian God of Time, carries a goose on his head; Jupiter assumes the form of a swan, and so also does Brahmâ; and the root of all this is that mystery of mysteries—the Mundane Egg.

One should learn the reason of a symbol before depreciating it.

The dual element of Air and Water is that of the ibis, swan, goose and pelican, of crocodiles and frogs, lotus flowers and water lilies, etc.;

The Secret Teaching explains the reason for this reverence by the symbolism of the prehistoric races.

In the beginnings, the “First Cause” had no name. Later it was pictured in the fancy of the thinkers as an ever invisible, mysterious Bird that dropped an Egg into Chaos, which Egg became the Universe.

Hence Brahmâ was called Kâlahansa, the “Swan in [Space and] Time.” Becoming the Swan of Eternity, Brahmâ, at the beginning of each Mahâmanvantara, lays a Golden Egg, which typifies the great Circle, or [circle] itself a symbol for the Universe and its spherical bodies.

This is the Dissolution [(?) Pratisanchara] termed Incidental because Hari is its Incidental [Ideal] Cause.593

When the Universal Spirit wakes, the World revives; when he closes his eyes, all things fall upon the bed of mystic slumber.

In like manner, as a thousand Great Ages constitute a Day of Brahmâ [in the original it is Padmayoni, the same as Abjayoni, “Lotus-born,” not Brahmâ], so his Night consists of the same period.... Awaking at the end of his Night, the Unborn ...

“Lord, where art thou ... sleepest thou, O Lord? ...”And the Spirit answered him; “

I never sleep: were I to fall asleep for a moment before my time, all the creation would crumble into dissolution in one instant.

”

the springs of waters dry up, the great rivers see their waves exhausted, the ocean shows its sandy bottom and plants die. Men and animals decrease in size daily.

Life and motion lose their force, planets can hardly gravitate in space; they are extinguished one by one, like a lamp which the hand of the Chokra [servant] neglects to replenish.

Sûrya [the Sun] flickers and goes out, matter falls into Dissolution [Pralaya], and Brahmâ merges back into [pg 404]Dyaus, the Unrevealed God, and, his task being accomplished, he falls asleep. Another Day is passed, Night sets in, and continues until the future Dawn.

Sûrya [the Sun] flickers and goes out, matter falls into Dissolution [Pralaya], and Brahmâ merges back into [pg 404]Dyaus, the Unrevealed God, and, his task being accomplished, he falls asleep.

Another Day is passed, Night sets in, and continues until the future Dawn.

And now again reënter into the Golden Egg of his Thought the germs of all that exist, as the divine Manu tells us. During His peaceful rest, the animated beings, endowed with the principles of action, cease their functions, and all feeling [Manas] becomes dormant.

With the Hindûs, the Spirit of Fire or Heat—which stirs up, fructifies, and develops into concrete form, from its ideal prototype, everything which is born of Water, or Primordial Earth—evolved Brahmâ.

The Lotus-flower, represented as growing out of Vishnu's navel, the God who rests in the Waters of Space on the Serpent of Infinity, is the most graphic symbol ever yet made.

It is the Universe evolving from the Central Sun, the Point, the ever-concealed Germ.

In its workings Nature is observed to have fashioned a wonderful piece of living mechanism, governed by an added living soul; the life development and history of which soul, as to its whence, its present, and its whither, surpass all efforts of the human intellect.616

The new-born is an ever-recurring miracle, an evidence that within the workshop of the womb an intelligent creative power has intervened to fasten a living soul to a physical machine.

The amazing wonderfulness of the fact attaches a holy sacredness to all connected with the organs of reproduction, as the dwelling and place of evident constructive intervention of deity.

This Yah-hovah then, or Jehovah, is identical with our Chaos—Father, Mother, Son—on the material plane, and in the purely physical World; Deus and Demon, at one and the same time; the Sun and Moon, Good and Evil, God and Demon.

Lunar magnetism generates life, preserves and destroys it, psychically as well as physically.

And if, astronomically, the Moon is one of the seven planets of the Ancient World, in Theogony she is one of the Regents thereof—with Christians now as much as with Pagans, the [pg 424] former referring to her under the name of one of their …

Object of horror or of adoration, men have for the serpent an implacable hatred, or prostrate themselves before its genius.

Lie calls it, Prudence claims it, Envy carries it in its heart, and Eloquence on its caduceus. In Hell it arms the whip of the Furies; in Heaven Eternity makes of it its symbol.

Thus, in the beginning of their joint existence as a glyph of Immortal Being, the Tree and Serpent were divine imagery, truly.

The Tree was reversed, and its roots were generated in Heaven and grew out of the Rootless Root of All-Being.

Its trunk grew and developed; crossing the planes of the Plerôma, it shot out crossways its luxuriant branches, first on the plane of hardly differentiated matter, and then downward till they touched the terrestrial plane.

The Assyrians have not only preserved the records of seven and twenty myriads of years, as Hipparchus says they have, but likewise of the whole apocatastases and periods of the Seven Rulers of the World.662

The legends of every nation and tribe, whether civilized or savage, point to the once universal belief in the great wisdom and cunning of the Serpents.

They are “charmers.” They hypnotize the bird with their eye, and man himself very often does not overcome their fascinating influence; therefore the symbol is a most fitting one.

But if the homogeneous One and Absolute is no mere figure of speech, and if Heterogeneity, in its dualistic aspect, is its offspring, its bifurcous shadow or reflection, then even that divine Homogeneity must contain in itself the essence of both good and evil.

If “God” is Absolute, Infinite, and the Universal Root of all and everything in Nature and its Universe, whence comes Evil or D'Evil if not from the same Golden Womb of the Absolute?

Thus we are forced either to accept the emanation of good and evil, of Agathodæmon and Kakodæmon, as offshoots from the same trunk of the Tree of Being, or to resign ourselves to the absurdity of believing in two eternal Absolutes!

Having to trace the origin of the idea to the very beginnings of the human mind, it is but just, meanwhile, to give his due even to the proverbial Devil. Antiquity knew of no isolated, thoroughly and absolutely bad “God of evil.”

Pagan thought represented good and evil as twin brothers, born from the same mother—Nature; so soon as that thought ceased to be archaic, Wisdom passed into Philosophy.

In the beginning the symbols of good and evil were mere abstractions, Light and Darkness; later their types were chosen among the most natural and ever-recurrent periodical cosmic phenomena—the Day and [pg 444] Night, or the Sun and Moon.

Having commenced by being synonymous with Nature, “God,” the Creator, ended by being made its author. Pascal settles the difficulty very cunningly by saying:

Nature has perfections, in order to show that she is the image of God; and defects, in order to show that she is only his image.

The further back one recedes into the darkness of the prehistoric ages, the more philosophical does the prototypic figure of the later Satan appear.

Demon est Deus inversus, being a very old adage. Indeed, Evil is but an antagonizing blind force in Nature; it is reäction, opposition, and contrast—evil for some, good for others.

There is no malum in se; only the Shadow of Light, without which Light could have no existence, even in our perceptions.

If Evil disappeared, Good would disappear along with it from Earth. The “Old Dragon” was pure Spirit before he became Matter, passive before he became active.

Indeed, Evil is but an antagonizing blind force in Nature; it is reäction, opposition, and contrast—evil for some, good for others. There is no malum in se; only the Shadow of Light, without which Light could have no existence, even in our perceptions.

If Evil disappeared, Good would disappear along with it from Earth.

The “Old Dragon” was pure Spirit before he became Matter, passive before he became active. In the Syro-Chaldean Magic both Ophis and Ophiomorphos are joined in the Zodiac in the sign of the Androgyne Virgo-Scorpio.

There would be no Life possible (in the mâyâvic sense) without Death; no regeneration and reconstruction without destruction.

Plants would perish in eternal sunlight, and so would man, who would become an automaton without the exercise of his free will, and his aspiring towards that sunlight, which would lose its being and value for him had he nothing but light.

Good is infinite and eternal only in the eternally concealed from us, and this is why we imagine it eternal. On the manifested planes, one equilibrates the other.

Let thy wrath be appeased: the Râkshasas are not culpable; thy father's death [pg 448] was the work of Destiny [Karma].

Anger is the passion of fools; it becometh not a wise man.

By whom, it may be asked, is any one killed? Every man reaps the consequences of his own acts. Anger, my son, is the destruction of all that man obtains ... and prevents the attainment ... of emancipation. The ... sages shun wrath:

Let thy wrath be appeased: the Râkshasas are not culpable; thy father's death [pg 448] was the work of Destiny [Karma]. Anger is the passion of fools; it becometh not a wise man. By whom, it may be asked, is any one killed?

Every man reaps the consequences of his own acts.

Anger, my son, is the destruction of all that man obtains ... and prevents the attainment ... of emancipation. The ... sages shun wrath: be not thou, my child, subject to its influence. Let no more of those unoffending spirits of darkness be consumed;

and prevents the attainment ... of emancipation. The ... sages shun wrath: be not thou, my child, subject to its influence. Let no more of those unoffending spirits of darkness be consumed; let this thy sacrifice cease.

Mercy is the might of the righteous.

670

Cronus with his scythe cuts down even the longest and, to us, seemingly endless cycles, which, for all that, are limited in Eternity, and with the same scythe destroys the mightiest rebels. Aye, not one will escape the scythe of Time!

Praise the God or Gods, or flout one or both, that scythe will not tremble one millionth of a second in its ascending or descending course.

The Titans of Hesiod's Theogony were copied in Greece from the Suras and Asuras of India.

Cronus with his scythe cuts down even the longest and, to us, seemingly endless cycles, which, for all that, are limited in Eternity, and with the same scythe destroys the mightiest rebels.

Aye, not one will escape the scythe of Time!

Praise the God or Gods, or flout one or both, that scythe will not tremble one millionth of a second in its ascending or descending course.

In the Norse Cosmogony it is again the same.

In the beginning was a great Abyss (Chaos), neither Day nor Night existed; the Abyss was Ginnungagap, the yawning gulf, without beginning, without end.

All-Father, the Uncreated, the Unseen, dwelt in the Depth of the Abyss (Space) and willed, and what was willed came into being.692

At any rate, she is the “Mother of the Gods,” and it is from Brahmâ, Îshvara or the Logos, and Vâch, as from Adam Kadmon and Sephira, that the real manifested Theogony has to start.

Beyond, all is Darkness and abstract speculation.

With the Dhyân Chohans or the Gods, the Seers, the Prophets and the Adepts in general are on firm ground.

The eight symbols determine good and ill fortune, and these lead to great deeds. There are no imitable images greater than heaven and earth. There are no changes greater than the four seasons [meaning North, South, East and West, etc.].

There are no suspended images brighter than the sun and moon.

In preparing things for use, there is none greater than the sage. In determining good and ill-luck there is nothing greater than the divining straws and the tortoise.718

Noah sends out a “black” raven after the Deluge, which [pg 478] is a symbol for the Cosmic Pralaya, after which began the real creation or evolution of our Earth and Humanity.

Odin's “black” ravens fluttered round the Goddess Saga and “whispered to her of the past and of the future.”

Now what is the inner meaning of all those black birds? It is that they are all connected with the primeval Wisdom, which flows out of the pre-cosmic Source of All, symbolized by the Head, the Circle or the Egg;

as well on the side of the Father as on the side of the Mother. And this is the sense of the words: And Elohim spake: “Let there be Light and it was Light!” ... And this is the “two-fold Man”!

Light, however, on our plane, is Darkness in the higher spheres.

“Man and woman ... on the side of the Father” (Spirit) refers to Primary Creation; and on the side of the Mother (Matter), to the Secondary. The two-fold Man is Adam Kadmon, the male and female abstract prototype and the differentiated Elohim.

Shiva-Rudra is the Destroyer, as Vishnu is the Preserver; and both are the Regenerators of spiritual as well as of physical Nature.

To live as a plant, the seed must die.

To live as a conscious entity in the Eternity, the passions and senses of man must die before his body does. “That to live is to die and to die is to live,” has been too little understood in the West.

Although deputing power over the fire to Hephæstus-Vulcan, over the sea to Poseidon-Neptune, and over the Earth to Pluto-Aïdoneus, the Aërial Jove was still all these; for Æther, from the first, had preëminence over, and was the synthesis of, all the Elements.

Tradition tells of a grotto, a vast cave in the deserts of Central Asia, whereinto light pours, through four seemingly natural apertures, or clefts placed crossways at the four cardinal points.

From noon till an hour before sunset the light streams in, of four different colours, as averred, red, blue, orange-gold, and white, owing to some either natural or artificially prepared conditions of vegetation and soil.

The Magic of the ancient priests consisted, in those days, in addressing their Gods in their own language.

The speech of the men of the Earth cannot reach the Lords. Each must be addressed in the language of his respective Element.

So says The Book of Rules, in a sentence which will be shown pregnant with meaning, adding as an explanation of the nature of that element-language:

No more than this: The crime of one's own next-of-kin, say of one's father, is always excused and often exalted, whereas the crime of our neighbour's parent is ever gladly punished by hanging.

Yet the crime is the same.

So far the “blessings of Christianity” do not seem to have made any appreciable advance on the morals of the converted Pagans.

But this is from no fault of theirs, for each prays as ardently to Jehovah for the destruction of the other, as the Athenians prayed to Boreas.

Both resorted to a neat little piece of black magic con amore.

Such abstinence from divine interference being hardly due to lack of prayers, sent to a common Almighty God for mutual destruction, where, then, shall we draw the line between Pagan and Christian?

To the impartial, however, the Madonnas in crinolines and the Christs in white kid gloves must appear far more absurd than the Kwan-Shi-Yin and Kwan-Yin in their dragon-garb.

The subjective can hardly be expressed by the objective.

Therefore, since the symbolic formula attempts to characterize that which is above scientific reasoning, and is as often far beyond our intellects, it must needs go beyond that intellect in some shape or other, or else it will fade out from human remembrance.

Submitting beforehand to every criticism in order to go on with their task, they only claim the privilege of showing that the Physicists are as much at loggerheads among themselves in their speculations, as these speculations are with the teachings of Occultism.

The Sun is Matter, and the Sun is Spirit.

Our ancestors, the “Heathen,” like their modern successors, the Parsîs, were, and are, wise enough in their generation to see in it the symbol of Divinity, and at the same time to sense within, concealed by the physical symbol, the bright God of Spiritual and …

Such belief can be regarded as a superstition only by rank Materialism, which denies Deity, Spirit, Soul, and admits no intelligence outside the mind of man.

But if too much wrong superstition bred by “Churchianity,” as Laurence Oliphant calls it, “renders a man a fool,” too much scepticism makes him mad.

We prefer the charge of folly in believing too much, to that of a madness which denies everything, as do Materialism and Hylo-Idealism.

But this opposition can, at most, be only temporary.

People have laughed at everything unusual, and have scouted every unpopular idea at first, and have then ended by accepting it.

Materialism and Scepticism are evils that must remain in the world so long as man has not quitted his present gross form to don the one he had during the First and Second Races of this Round.

When Sir Isaac, in 1687 ... showed mass and atom acted upon ... by innate activity ... he effectually disposed of Spirit, Anima, or Divinity, as supererogatory.

Had poor Sir Isaac foreseen to what use his successors and followers would apply his “gravity,” that pious and religious man would surely have quietly eaten his apple, and never have breathed a word about any mechanical ideas connected with its fall.

Great contempt is shown by Scientists for Metaphysics generally and for Ontological Metaphysics especially.

Better late than never!

And now Father Æther is re-welcomed with open arms and wedded to gravitation, linked to it for weal or woe, until the day when it, or both, shall be replaced by something else.

Three hundred years ago it was plenum everywhere, then it became one dismal vacuity; later still the sidereal ocean-beds, dried up by Science, rolled onward once more their ethereal waves.

Till that day there is nothing to be done. For if gravitation were dethroned to-morrow, the Scientists would discover some other new mode of mechanical motion the day after.822

Rough and up-hill is the path of true Science, and its days are full of vexation of spirit.

But in the face of its “thousand” contradictory hypotheses offered as explanations of physical phenomena, there has been no better hypothesis than “motion”—however paradoxically interpreted by Materialism.

… of the planets, nor Le Couturier's electricity, nor Foucault's heat,846 nor this, nor the other, can ever help any of the numerous hypotheses about the origin and permanency of rotation to escape from this squirrel's wheel, any more than can the theory of gravity itself.

This mystery is the Procrustean bed of Physical Science.

If Matter is passive, as we are now taught, the simplest movement cannot be said to be an essential property of Matter—the latter being considered simply as an inert mass.

The law of gravity, however, seems to be becoming an obsolete law in starry heaven.

At any rate those long-haired sidereal Radicals, called comets, appear to be very poor respecters of the majesty of that law, and to beard it quite impudently.

Nevertheless, and though presenting in nearly every respect “phenomena not yet fully understood,” comets and meteors are credited by the believers in Modern Science with obeying the same laws and consisting of the same Matter, “as the suns, stars and nebulæ,” and even “the earth …

Science is like Cæsar's wife, and must not be suspected—this is evident.

But it can be respectfully criticized, nevertheless, and at all events, it may be reminded that the “apple” is a dangerous fruit.

For the second time in the history of mankind, it may become the cause of the Fall—this time, of “exact” Science. A comet whose tail defies the law of gravity right in the Sun's face can hardly be credited with obeying that law.

The chief and most fatal mistake and fallacy made by Science, in the view of the Occultists, lies in the idea of the possibility of such a thing existing in Nature as inorganic, or dead Matter.

Is anything dead or inorganic which is capable of transformation or change?—Occultism asks.

And is there anything under the sun which remains immutable or changeless?

He made one still more suggestive remark which ought to have become the motto of Science, but has not. Sir William Grove said that: “

Science should have neither desires nor prejudices. Truth should be her sole aim.

”

This was during the supreme and autocratic reign of Matter. When Matter was dethroned, and Motion was proclaimed the sole sovereign ruler of the Universe, heat became a “mode of motion.” We need not despair; it may become something else to-morrow.

Like the Universe itself, Science is ever becoming, and can never say, “I am that I am.”

On the other hand, Occult Science has its changeless traditions from prehistoric times. It may err in particulars;

But this hypothesis, popular as it is, is not one that ought to be accepted to the exclusion of the simpler views of the material nature of sun-force, and of its influence in modifying the conditions of matter.

We do not yet know sufficient to be dogmatic.

897

We fail to see this, and we know it is not so. Pantheism may be “physically rediscovered.” It was known, seen, and felt by the whole of antiquity.

Pantheism manifests itself in the vast expanse of the starry heavens, in the breathing of the seas and oceans, and in the quiver of life of the smallest blade of grass.

Philosophy rejects one finite and imperfect God in the universe, the anthropomorphic deity of the Monotheist as represented by his followers.

In his reply to Dr. Gull's attack on the theory of Vitality, which is inseparably connected with the Elements of the Ancients in the Occult Philosophy, Professor Beale, the great Physiologist, has a few words as suggestive as they are beautiful:

There is a mystery in life—a mystery which has never been fathomed, and which appears greater, the more deeply the phenomena of life are studied and contemplated.

In living centres—far more central than the centres seen by the highest magnifying powers, in centres of living matter, where the eye cannot penetrate, but towards which the understanding may tend—proceed changes of the nature of which the most advanced physicists and chemists fail to …

This “mystery,” or the origin of the Life Essence, Occultism locates in the same Centre as the nucleus of prima materia of our Solar System, for they are one.

The Sun is the heart of the Solar World [System] and its brain is hidden behind the [visible] Sun.

Thence, sensation is radiated into every nerve-centre of the great body, and the waves of the life-essence flow into each artery and vein.... The planets are its limbs and pulses.

We say and maintain that Sound, for one thing, is a tremendous Occult power; that it is a stupendous force, of which the electricity generated by a million of Niagaras could never counteract the smallest potentiality when directed with Occult Knowledge.

Sound may be produced of such a nature that the pyramid of Cheops would be raised in the air, or that a dying man, nay, one at his last breath, would be revived and filled with new energy and vigour.

For Sound generates, or rather attracts together, the elements that produce an ozone the fabrication of which is beyond Chemistry, but is within the limits of Alchemy.

It may even resurrect a man or an animal whose astral “vital body” has not been irreparably separated from the physical body by the severance of the magnetic or odic chord.

As one saved thrice from death by that power, the writer ought to be credited with personally knowing something about it.

And if all this appears too unscientific to be even noticed, let Science explain to what mechanical and physical laws, known to it, are due the recently produced phenomena of the so-called Keely motor.

… his explanations, being quite orthodox from the Spiritual and the Occult standpoints, if not from that of materialistic speculative Science, called exact, are therefore ours in this particular—what can Science answer to facts already seen, which it is no longer possible for anyone to deny?

Occult Philosophy divulges few of its most important vital mysteries.

It drops them like precious pearls, one by one, far and wide apart, and even this only when forced to do so by the evolutionary tidal wave that carries on Humanity slowly, silently, but steadily, toward the dawn of the Sixth Race mankind.

Occult Philosophy divulges few of its most important vital mysteries.

It drops them like precious pearls, one by one, far and wide apart, and even this only when forced to do so by the evolutionary tidal wave that carries on Humanity slowly, silently, but steadily, toward the dawn of the Sixth Race mankind.

For once out of the safe custody of their legitimate heirs and keepers, those mysteries cease to be Occult:

and secondly, because it was beyond his power to pass to others that which was a capacity inherent in his own special nature. Hence, the whole secret could not be made over permanently to anyone, for practical purposes or use.955

Individuals born with such a capacity are not very rare.

That they are not heard of more frequently is due to the fact that they live and die, in almost every case, in utter ignorance that they are possessed of abnormal powers. Mr.

but never has the world's index finger so pointed to an hour when all is making ready for the advent of the new form of force that mankind is waiting for.

Nature, always reluctant to yield her secrets, is listening to the demands made upon her by her master, necessity.

The coal mines of the world cannot long afford the increasing drain made upon them. Steam has reached its utmost limits of power, and does not fulfil the requirements of the age. It knows that its days are numbered.

The coal mines of the world cannot long afford the increasing drain made upon them. Steam has reached its utmost limits of power, and does not fulfil the requirements of the age. It knows that its days are numbered.

Electricity holds back, with bated breath, dependent upon the approach of her sister colleague.

Air ships are riding at anchor, as it were, waiting for the force which is to make aërial navigation something more than a dream.

Everything originated in the One, and, proceeding from the One, must finally return to the One.

Light becomes heat, and consolidates into fiery particles; which, from being ignited, become cold, hard particles, round and smooth.

And this is called Soul, imprisoned in its robe of matter.963

While the Christian is taught that the human Soul is a breath of God, being created by him for sempiternal existence, having a beginning, but no end—and therefore never to be called eternal—the Occult Teaching says:

Nothing is created, it is only transformed.

Nothing can manifest itself in this Universe—from a globe down to a vague, rapid thought—that was not in the Universe already; everything on the subjective plane is an eternal is; as everything on the objective plane is an ever-becoming—because all is transitory.

… planets are not merely spheres, twinkling in Space, and made to shine for no purpose, but they are the domains of various Beings with whom the uninitiated are so far unacquainted, but who have, nevertheless, a mysterious, unbroken, and powerful connection with men and globes.

Every heavenly body is the temple of a God, and these Gods themselves are the temples of God, the Unknown “Not Spirit.”

There is nothing profane in the Universe. All Nature is a consecrated place, as Young says:

Every heavenly body is the temple of a God, and these Gods themselves are the temples of God, the Unknown “Not Spirit.”

There is nothing profane in the Universe.

All Nature is a consecrated place, as Young says:

Modern Science is Ancient Thought distorted, and no more.

We have seen, however, what intuitional Scientists think, and are busy about; and now the reader shall be given a few more proofs of the fact that more than one F.R.S. is unconsciously approaching the derided Secret Sciences.

... Let us now turn to the upper portion of the scheme. With hydrogen of atomic weight = 1, there is little room for other elements, save, perhaps, for hypothetical Helium.

But what if we get “through the looking-glass,” and cross the zero line in search of new principles—what shall we find on the other side of zero?

Dr. Carnelly asks for an element of negative atomic weight; here is ample room and verge enough for a shadow series of such unsubstantialities. Helmholtz says that electricity is probably as atomic as matter;

Even Plato, the greatest Philosopher of his country, was guilty, before his Initiation, of such statements as that liquids pass into the stomach through the lungs.

Without metaphysics, as Mr. H. J. Slack says, real Science is inadmissible.

The nebulæ exist; yet the Nebular Theory is wrong. A nebula exists in a state of entire elemental dissociation. It is gaseous and—something else besides, which can hardly be connected with gases as these are known to Physical Science; and it is self-luminous.

And if it is objected that the Count was an ardent Roman Catholic, then we may cite Le Couturier, as ardent a Materialist, who said the same thing, as did also Herschell and many others.1041

From Gods to men, from Worlds to atoms, from a Star to a rush-light, from the Sun to the vital heat of the meanest organic being—the world of Form and Existence is an immense chain, the links of which are all connected.

The Law of Analogy is the first key to the world-problem, and these links have to be studied coördinately in their Occult relations to each other.

Conversely, as to the effects of cometary matter, have we not another example of a half visible form of Life and Matter?

The ray of sunlight entering our apartment reveals in its passage myriads of tiny beings living their little life and ceasing to be, independent and heedless of whether they are or are not perceived by our grosser materiality.

And so again, of the microbes and bacteria and such-like unseen beings in other elements.

Such is, nevertheless, the Kabalistic teaching, and it is that of Archaic Philosophy.

Space is the real World, while our world is an artificial one.

It is the One Unity throughout its infinitude: in its bottomless depths as on its illusive surface; a surface studded with countless phenomenal Universes, Systems and mirage-like Worlds.

Crookes bravely and fearlessly reduced it to its simple constituents, [pg 683] and thus publicly forced it on scientific notice. Says Plutarch:

An idea is a Being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of the manifestation.1074

The revolution produced in old Chemistry by Avogadro was the first page in the volume of “New Chemistry.” Mr. Crookes has now turned the second page, and is boldly pointing to what may be the last.

And who shall venture to gainsay that each of these constituents, if attacked in some different manner, and if the result were submitted to a test more delicate and searching than the radiant-matter test, might not be still further divisible?

Where, then, is the actual ultimate element? As we advance it recedes like the tantalizing mirage lakes and groves seen by the tired and thirsty traveller in the desert.

Are we in our quest for truth to be thus deluded and baulked? The very idea of an element, as something absolutely primary and ultimate, seems to be growing less and less distinct.1078

in mirroring the world, the monads are not mere passive reflective agents, but spontaneously self active; they produce the images spontaneously, as the soul does a dream. In every monad, therefore, the adept may read everything, even the future.

Every monad—or Elemental—is a looking-glass that can speak.

It is at this point that Leibnitz's philosophy breaks down. There is no provision made, nor any distinction established, between the “Elemental” Monad and that of a high Planetary Spirit, or even the Human Monad or Soul.

He draws a distinction between Monads and Atoms,1091 because, as he repeatedly states:

Bodies with all their qualities are only phenomenal, like the rainbow.

Corpora omnia cum omnibus qualitatibus suis non sunt aliud quam phenomena bene fundata, ut Iris.1092

A Materialist, treating of the periodical creations of our globe, has expressed it in a single sentence:

The whole past of the earth is nothing but an unfolded present.

The writer was Büchner, who little suspected that he was repeating an axiom of the Occultists. It is quite true also, as Burmeister remarks, that:

Otherwise Christians would have better realized the profound truth that Nemesis is without attributes; that while the dreaded Goddess is absolute and immutable as a Principle, it is we ourselves—nations and individuals—who propel it to action and give the impulse to its direction.

Karma-Nemesis is the creator of nations and mortals, but once created, it is they who make of her either a Fury or a rewarding Angel.

Yea—

We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal high road of respectability and duty, and then we complain because these windings are so intricate and so dark.

We stand bewildered before the mystery of our own making, and the riddles of life that we will not solve, and then accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us.

But verily there is not an accident in our lives, not a misshapen day, or a misfortune, that could not be traced back to our own doings in this or in another life.

Until then the only palliatives for the evils of life are union and harmony—a Brotherhood in actu, and Altruism not simply in name.

The suppression of one single bad cause will suppress not one, but many bad effects.

And if a Brotherhood, or even a number of Brotherhoods, may not be able to prevent nations from occasionally cutting each other's throats, still unity in thought and action, and philosophical research into the mysteries of being, will always prevent some persons, who are trying …

Several valuable quotations are made in Natural Genesis with the view of supporting the author's theories, but they justify the teaching of the Secret Doctrine far more. For instance, Plutarch is quoted from his Life of Sulla, saying:

One day when the sky was serene and clear, there was heard in it the sound of a trumpet, so loud, shrill, and mournful, that it affrighted and astonished the world.

The Tuscan sages said that it portended a new race of men, and a renovation of the world; for they affirmed that there were eight several kinds of men, all being different in life and manners;

Most certainly chance is “impossible.” There is no “chance” in Nature, wherein everything is mathematically coördinate, and inter-related in its units. Says Coleridge:

Chance is but the pseudonym of God [or Nature], for those particular cases which He does not choose to subscribe openly with His sign manual.

Replace the word “God” by Karma, and it will become an Eastern axiom.

She cannot escape it.

Mystery is the fatality of Science.

The language of the French preacher is ours, and we quote it in Isis Unveiled. Who—he asks—who of you, men of Science:

Has been able to penetrate the secret of the formation of a body, the generation of a single atom? What is there, I will not say at the centre of a sun, but at the centre of an atom?

Who has sounded to the bottom the abyss in a grain of sand?

The grain of sand, gentlemen, has been studied four thousand years by science; she has turned and returned it; she divides it and subdivides it; she torments it with her experiments;

Through pure excess of complexity, and long before observation can have any voice in the matter, the most highly trained intellect, the most refined and disciplined imagination, retires in bewilderment from the contemplation of the problem.

We are struck dumb by an astonishment which no microscope can relieve, doubting not only the [pg 734]power of our instrument, but even whether we ourselves possess the intellectual elements which will ever enable us to grapple with the ultimate structural energies of nature.

How little is known of the material Universe, indeed, has now been suspected for years, on the very admissions of these men of Science themselves.

But all is doubt, negation, iconoclasm and brutal indifference, in our [pg 739] age of a hundred “isms” and no religion.

Every idol is broken save the Golden Calf.

Unfortunately, no nation or nations can escape their Karmic fate, any more than can units and individuals. History itself is dealt with by the so-called historians as unscrupulously as legendary lore.

and he finally admitted that in legend alone rests real history; for he adds:

Legend is living tradition, and three times out of four it is truer than what we call History.

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Very soon, indeed, under their combined efforts, it will share the fate of those ruined cities in both Americas, which lie deeply buried under impassable virgin forests.

Historical facts will remain concealed from view by the inextricable jungles of modern hypotheses, denials and scepticism.

But very happily actual History repeats herself, for she proceeds, like everything else, in cycles; and dead facts, and events deliberately drowned in the sea of modern scepticism, will ascend once more and reappear on the surface.

Whenever a Theosophist is taxed with insanity, he ought to reply by quoting from Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes:

By opening so freely their lunatic asylums to their supposed madmen, men only seek to assure each other that they are not themselves mad.

This is again similar to the doctrine of Fichte and German Pantheists. The former reveres Jesus as the great teacher who inculcated the unity of the spirit of man with the God-Spirit or Universal Principle (the Advaita doctrine).

It is difficult to find a single speculation in Western metaphysics which has not been anticipated by archaic Eastern philosophy.

From Kant to Herbert Spencer, it is all a more or less distorted echo of the Dvaita, Advaita, and Vedântic doctrines generally.

Kenealy, Book of God, p. 118.

That which was natural in the sight of primitive man, has only now become miracle to us; and that which was to him a miracle, could never be expressed in our language.

There is no nation in the world in which the feeling of devotion, or of religious mysticism, is more developed and prominent than in the Hindû people. See what Max Müller says of this idiosyncrasy and national feature in his works.

… is the Esoteric Teachings, and the Initiates of the Future, whose mission it is, and will be, to redeem and ennoble once more the primitive conception, so sadly profaned by its crude and gross application to exoteric dogmas and personations, by theological and ecclesiastical religionists.

The silent worship of abstract or noumenal Nature, the only divine manifestation, is the one ennobling religion of Humanity.

Surely the words of the old Initiate into the primitive Mysteries of Christianity, “Know ye not ye are the Temple of God” (1 Corinth, iii. 16), could not be applied in this sense to men;

Thou art Existent, before all time and without place. Thou art Existent, and thy existence is so profound and secret that none can penetrate and discover thy secrecy. Thou art living, but within no time that can be fixed or known;

Thou art living, but not by a spirit or a soul, for Thou art Thyself, the Soul of all Souls.

” There is a distance between this Kabalistical Deity and the Biblical Jehovah, the spiteful and revengeful God of Abram, Isaac, and Jacob, who tempted the first and wrestled with the last. No Vedântin but would repudiate such a Parabrahman!

From the superb religious poem by the Kabalist Rabbi Solomon ben Yehudah Ibn Gabirol, the “Kether Malchuth,” we select a few definitions given in the prayers of Kippûr: “Thou art One, the beginning of all numbers, and the foundation of all edifices;

Thou art One, and in the secret of Thy unity the wisest of men are lost, because they know it not.

Thou art One, and Thy Unity is never diminished, never extended, and cannot be changed. Thou art One, but not as an element of numeration; for Thy Unity admits not of multiplication, change or form. Thou art Existent;