Conditions After Death

Answer - 1. [ The questions for this and the other numbered answers which follow are not recorded in the MS.] Why should it be supposed that Devachan is a monotonous condition, only because some one moment of earthly sensation is indefinitely perpetuated - stretched, so to say, throughout aeons? It is not, it cannot be, so; this would be contrary to all analogies and antagonistic to the Law of Effects, under which results are proportionate to antecedent energies. To make it clear, you must keep in mind that there are two fields of causal manifestations, to wit, the objective and subjective. So the grosser energies, those which operate in the heavier and denser conditions of matter, manifest respectively in physical life, their outcome being the new personality of each birth included within the grand cycle of the evolving individuality.

The moral and spiritual activities find their sphere of effects in Devachan. For example, the vices, physical attractions, etc., of a philosopher, may result in the birth of a new philosopher, a king, a merchant, a rich Epicurean or any other personality, whose make-up was inevitable from the preponderating proclivities of the being in the next preceding birth. Bacon, for instance, whom a poet called “the greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind,” might reappear in his next incarnation as a greedy money-getter with extraordinary intellectual capacities. But the moral and spiritual qualities of the previous Bacon would also have to find a field in which their energies could expand themselves. Devachan is such a field, hence all the great plans of moral reform, of intellectual and spiritual research into abstract principles of nature, all the divine aspirations, would in Devachan come to fruition, and the abstract entity, previously known as the great Chancellor, would occupy itself in this inner world of its own preparation, living, if not quite what one would call a conscious existence, at least a dream of such realistic vividness that none of the life-realities could ever match it. And this dream lasts until Karma is satisfied in that direction, till the ripple of force reaches the edge of its cyclic basin, and the being moves into the next area of causes. This it may find in the same world as before, or another, according to his or her stage of progression through the necessary rings and Rounds of human development.

Then how can you think that but one moment of earthly sensation is selected for preparation? Very true, that moment lasts from first to last, but then it lasts but as the keynote of the whole harmony, a definite tone of appreciable pitch, around which cluster and develop in progressive variations of melody, and as endless variations on a theme, all the aspirations, desires, hopes, dreams, which in connection with that particular moment had ever crossed the dreamer’s brain during his life time, without having ever found their realisation on earth, and which he now finds fully realised in all their vividness in Devachan, without ever suspecting that all that blissful reality is but the progeny begotten by his own fancy, the effects of the mental causes produced by himself. That particular one moment which will be most intense and uppermost in the thoughts of his dying brain, at the time of dissolution will of course regulate all the other “moments,” still, the latter, minor and less vivid though they be, will be there also having their appointed place in this phantasmagoric marshalling of past dreams, and must give variety to the whole.

No man on earth but has some predilection, if not a domineering passion, no person however humble and poor, and often because all that, but indulges in dreams and desires, unsatisfied through though these be. Is this monotony? Would you call such variations ad infinitum on the one theme, and that theme modelling itself on, and taking colour and its definite shape from that group of desires which was the most intense during life, “a blank destitution of all knowledge in the devachanic mind,” seeming in a measure ignoble? Then verily you must have failed, as you say, to take in my meaning, or it is I who am to blame. I must have surely failed to convey the right meaning, and have to confess my inability to describe the indescribable. The latter is a difficult task, good friend, unless the intuitive perceptions of a trained Chela come to the rescue. No amount of description however graphic will help; indeed no words are adequate to express the difference between a state of mind on earth and one outside of its sphere of action; no English terms in existence equivalent to ours; nothing but unavoidable (due to early Western education) preconceptions:- hence lines of thought in a wrong direction in the learner’s mind - to help us in this inoculation of entirely new thoughts! You are right; not only “ordinary people” - your readers - but even idealists and highly intellectual minds will fail, I am afraid, to seize the true idea, will never fathom it to its very depths. Perhaps you may some day realise better than you do now one of the chief reasons for our unwillingness to impart our knowledge to European candidates.

A man in the way to learn something of the mysteries of nature “seems in a higher state of existence to begin with on earth than that which nature apparently provides for him as a reward for his best deeds”; perhaps “apparently,” not so in reality, when the modus operandi of nature is correctly understood. Then that other misconception - the more merit the longer period of Devachan. “But then in Devachan all sense of the lapse of time is lost: a minute is as a thousand years. A quoi bon then,” etc. . . .

This remark and such way of looking at things might as well apply to the whole Eternity, to Nirvana, Pralaya, and what not. Say at once that the whole system of being, of existence, separate and collective, of nature objective and subjective, are but idiotic aimless facts, a gigantic fraud of that nature which, meeting with but little sympathy with Western philosophy, has moreover the cruel disapprobation of its best representatives. A quoi bon in such a case this preaching of our doctrines, all this uphill work and swimming in adverso flumine? Why should the West be so anxious to learn anything from the East, since it is evidently unable to digest that which can never meet the requirements of the special tastes of its aesthetics? A sorry outlook for us, since even you fail to take in the whole magnitude of our philosophy, or to even embrace at one scope a small corner - the Devachan of those sublime horizons of “after life”. I do not want to discourage you, I would only draw your attention to the formidable difficulties encountered by us in every attempt we make to explain our metaphysics to Western minds even among the most intelligent. No, there are no clocks, not timepieces in Devachan, though the whole Cosmos is a gigantic chronometer in one sense. Nor do we mortals - ici bas même - take much, if any, cognisance of time during periods of happiness and bliss, and find them ever too short; a fact that does not in the least prevent us from enjoying that happiness all the same when it does come. Have you given a thought to this possibility, that perhaps it is because their cup of bliss is full to the brim that the “Devanchanee” loses all sense of the lapse of time, and that it is something that those who land in Avitchi do not, though, as much as the “Devachanee,” the “Avitchee” has no cognisance of time - i.e. of our earthly calculations of periods of time?

I may also remind you in this connection that time is something created by ourselves; that, while one short second of intense agony may appear, even on earth, as an Eternity to one man, to another more fortunate, hours, days and sometimes whole years may seem to flit like one short moment; and that finally, of all the sentient and conscious beings on earth, man is the only animal that takes any cognisance of time, although it makes him neither happier nor wiser. How then can I explain to you that which you cannot feel, since you seem unable to comprehend it? Finite similes are unfit to express the abstract and the infinite, nor can the objective ever mirror the subjective. To realise the bliss in Devachan or the woes in Avitchi, you have to assimilate them as we do. Western critical idealism has still to learn the difference which exists between the real being of supersensible objects and the shadowy subjectivity it has reduced them to. Time is not a predicate conception, and can therefore neither be proved nor analysed according to the methods of superficial philosophy; and unless we learn to counteract the negative results of that method of drawing our conclusions as agreeably to the so-called system of pure reason, and to distinguish between the matter and the form of our knowledge of sensible objects, we can never arrive at correct definite conclusions. The case in hand as defended by me against your (very natural) conception is a good proof of the shallowness and even fallacy of that system of pure (materialistic) reason. Space and Time may be, as Kant has it, not the product, but the regulators of the sensations, but only so far as our sensations on earth are concerned, not those in Devachan. There we do not find a priori ideas of Space and Time controlling the perceptions of the denizen of Devachan in respect to the objects of his sense, but on the contrary we discover that it is the Devachanee himself who absolutely creates both and annihilates them at the same time. Thus the “after states” so called can never be correctly judged by practical reason, since the latter can have active being only in the sphere of final causes or ends, and can hardly be regarded with Kant - with whom the term means on one page “reason,” and on the next “will” - as the highest spiritual power in man having for its sphere that Will.

The above is not dragged in, as you may think, for the sake of a (too far stretched perhaps) argument, but with an eye to a future discussion “at home,” as you express it, with students and admirers of Kant and Plato, that you will have to encounter. In plainer language, I will not tell you the following, and it will be no fault of mine if you still fail to comprehend its full meaning. As physical existence has its cumulative intensity from infancy to prime, and its diminishing energy henceforward to dotage and death, so the dream life of Devachan is lived correspondentially. Hence you are right in saying that the “soul” can never awake to its mistake and find itself “cheated by nature” - the more so since strictly speaking the whole of human life and its boasted realities are no better than such “cheating”. But you are wrong in pandering to the prejudices and preconceptions of Western readers. No Asiatic will ever agree with you upon this point. When you add that “there is a sense of unreality about the whole affair which is painful to the mind,” you are the first one to feel that; it is no doubt due much more to an imperfect grasp of the nature of existence in Devachan, than to any defect in our system. Hence my orders to a Chela to reproduce, in an appendix to your article, extracts from this letter, and explanations calculated to disabuse the reader, and to obliterate as far as possible the painful impression this statement of yours is sure to produce upon him.

Believe me, nature cheats no more the Devachanee than she does the living physical man. Nature provides for him far more real bliss and happiness there than she does here, where all the conditions of evil and chance are against him; and his inherent helplessness, that of a straw violently blown hither and thither by every remorseless wind, has made happiness on this earth an utter impossibility for the human being, whatever his chances and condition may be. Rather call this life an ugly horrid nightmare and you will be right. To call the Devachan existence “a dream,” in any other sense but that of a conventional term, well suited to your languages, all full of misnomers, is to renounce for ever the knowledge of the esoteric doctrine, the sole custodian of truth

Let me try once more to explain to you a few of the many states in Devachan and Avitchi. As in actual earth life, so there is for the ego in Devachan the first flutter of psychic life, the attainment of prime, the gradual exhaustion of force passing into semi-consciousness, gradual oblivion and lethargy and - not death - but birth, birth into another personality and the resumption of action, which daily begets new congeries of causes that must be worked out in another term of Devachan, and still another physical rebirth as a new personality. What the lives in Devachan and upon earth shall be respectively in each instance is determined by Karma, and this weary round of birth must be ever and ever run through, until the being reaches the end of the seventh Round, or attains in the interim the wisdom of an Arhat, then that of a Buddha, and thus gets relieved for a Round or two, having learned how to burst through the vicious circles, and to pass into Pari-Nirvana.

But suppose that it is not the case of a Bacon, Goethe, Shelley, or a Howard, but of some humdrum person, some colourless, flavourless personality who never impinged upon the world enough to make himself felt. What then? Simply that his Devachan state is as colourless and feeble as was his personality. How could it be otherwise, since cause and effect are equal? But suppose a cause of a monster of wickedness, sensuality, ambition, avarice, pride, deceit, etc., but who nevertheless has a germ or germs of something better, flashes of more divine nature - where is he to go to? The said spark smouldering under a heap of dirt will counteract nevertheless the attraction of the Eighth Sphere, whither fall but absolute nonentities, failures of nature, to be remodelled entirely, whose divine monad separated itself from the fifth principle during their lifetime (whether in the next preceding birth, since such cases are also on our records) and who have lived as soulless human beings. (See Isis, Vol. II, p.369, the word soul standing there for spiritual soul, of course, which, whenever it leaves a person soulless, becomes the cause of the fifth principle - animal soul - sliding down into the eighth sphere.) Of these persons whose sixth principle has left them, while the seventh, having lost its vehicle, can exist independently no longer, their fifth or animal soul of course goes down into the bottomless pit. This will perhaps make Eliphas Levi’s hints still more clear to you, if you read over what he says, and my remarks on the margin thereon (see Theosophist, October, 1881, “Death,”) and reflect upon the words used, “useless drones,” etc. [ See Appendix A.] Well, the first named entity then cannot with all its wickedness go to the Eighth Sphere, since his wickedness is of a too spiritual, refined nature. He is a monster, not a mere soulless brute. He will not be simply annihilated, but punished, for annihilation, i.e., total oblivion, and the fact of being snuffed out of conscious existence, constitutes, per se, no punishment, and as Voltaire expressed it “ le néant ne laisse pas d’avoir du bon”. Here is no taper glimmer to be puffed out by a zephyr, but a strong, positive, maleficent energy, fed and developed by circumstances, some of which may have actually been beyond his control. There must be for such a nature a state corresponding to Devachan, and this is found in Avitchi, the perfect antithesis of Devachan, vulgarised by the Western nations into Hell and Heaven, and which you have entirely lost sight of in your Fragments. [ See Appendix B.] Remember, to be immortal in good, one must identify oneself with good (or God); to be immortal in evil, with evil (or Satan). Misconceptions of such terms as “Spirit,” “Soul,” “Individuality,” “Personality” and (especially “Immortality” provoke wordy wars between a great number of idealistic debaters, and to complete your Fragment, I found it necessary to add Avitchi to Devachan as its complement, and apply to it the same laws as to the former. This is done with your permission in the appendix. [The “appendix” referred to appears on p. 137, Theosophist, March 1883. It will be found at the end of this work as Appendix B.]

Having explained the situation sufficiently, I may now answer your query No.1 directly. Yes, certainly, there is a change of occupation, a continual change in Devachan, just as much, and far more, as there is in the life of any man or woman who happens to follow, his or her whole life, one sole occupation whatever it may be - with this difference, that to the Devachanee this special occupation is always pleasant and fills his life with rapture. Change, then, there must be, for that dream life is but the fruition, the harvest time, of those psychic seed-germs dropped from the tree of physical existence in our moments of dreams, hopes and fancy, glimpses of bliss and happiness stifled in an ungrateful social soil, blooming in the rosy dawn of Devachan and ripening under its ever-fructifying sky. No failures there, no disappointments. If man had but one single moment of ideal happiness and experience during his life, as you think, even then, if Devachan exists, it could not be, as you erroneously suppose, the indefinite prolongation of that “single moment,” but the indefinite developments of the various incidents and events based upon, and outflowing from, that one single moment or moments, as the case may be - all, in short, that would suggest itself to the dreamer’s fancy. That one note, as I said, struck from the lyre of life, could form but the keynote of the being’s subjective state, and work out its numberless harmonic tones and semitones of psychic phantasmagoria.

There, all unrealised hopes, aspirations and dreams become fully realised, and the dreams of the objective become the realities of the subjective existence. And there, behind the curtain of Maya, its vaporous and deceptive appearances are perceived by the Adept who has learnt the great secret how to penetrate thus deeply into the Arcana of being. Doubtless my question, whether you had experienced monotony during what you consider the happiest moment of your life, has entirely misled you. This letter is thus the just penance for my laziness to amplify the explanation.

Answer - 2. What cycle is meant? The “minor cycle” meant is of course the completion of the seventh Round, as decided upon and explained. Besides that, at the end of each of the seven Rounds, comes a less full remembrance, only of the Devachanic experiences taking place between the numerous births at the end of each personal life. But the complete recollection of all the lives (earthly and Devachanic - omniscience, in short) comes but at the great end of the full seven Rounds (unless one had become in the interim a Bodhisattva, an Arhat), the threshold of Nirvana meaning an indefinite period. Naturally a man, a seventh Rounder (who completes his earthly migrations at the beginning of the last race and ring), will have to wait longer at that threshold, than one of the very last of those Rounds. That life of the Elect between the minor Pralaya and Nirvana - or rather before the Pralaya - is the great reward, the grandest in fact, since it makes of the ego (though he may never have been an Adept, but simply a virtuous worthy man in most of his existences) virtually a God, an omniscient conscious being, a candidate for eternities of aeons as a Dhyan Chohan. Enough, I am betraying the mysteries of Initiation.

But what has “Nirvana” to do with the recollections of objective existences? That is a state still higher, and in which all things objective are forgotten. It is a state of absolute rest and assimilation with Parabrahm, it is Parabrahm itself.

Oh for the sad ignorance of our philosophic truths in the West, and for the inability of your greatest intellects to seize the true spirit of those teachings! What shall we do, what can we do.?

Question- 3. [The answer to this is not in the MS.] You postulate an intercourse of entities in Devachan which applies only to the mutual relationship of physical existence. Two sympathetic souls will each work out its own Devachanic sensations making the other a sharer in its subjective bliss, but yet each is dissociated from the other as regards actual mutual intercourse. For what companionship could there be between two subjective entities which are not even as material as that ethereal body, the Mayavi-rupa?

Answer - 4 Devachan is a state, not a locality. Rupa Loka, Arupa Loka, and Kama Loka are three spheres of ascending spirituality, in which the several groups of subjective entities find their attractions. In the Kama Loka (semi-physical sphere, dwell the shells, the victims and suicides, and the sphere is divided into innumerable regions and sub-regions, corresponding to the mental states of the comers at their hour of death. This is the glorious Summerland of the Spiritualists, to whose horizons is limited the vision of their best seers - vision imperfect and defective because untrained and non-guided by Alaya (hidden knowledge). Who in the West knows anything of true Sahalokadhatu, the mysterious Chiliocosm, [ Mentioned in Beal’s Catena of Buddhism. pp. 101. 116.] out of the many regions of which but three can be given to the outside world, the Tribhuvana (three worlds), namely Kama, Rupa and Arupa Lokas? Yet see the sad mess produced in Western minds by the mention of even these three. From Kama Loka there is the great Chiliocosm. Once awakened from their post mortem torpor, the newly translated “souls” go ( all but the shells) according to their attractions either to Devachan or Avitchi. And these two states are again differentiated ad infinitum, their ascending degrees of spirituality drawing their names from the Lokas in which they are induced. For instance, the sensations, perceptions and ideation of a Devachanee in Rupa Loka will of course be of a less subjective character, than they would be in Arupa Loka, in both of which the Devachanic experiences will vary in their presentation to the subject entity, not only as regards form, colour and substance, but also in their formative potentialities. But not even the highest Devachanic state in Arupa Loka (the last of seven states) is comparable to that perfectly subjective condition of pure spirituality, from which the monad emerged to descend into matter, and to which at the completion of the grand cycle it must return, nor is Nirvana itself comparable to Pari-Nirvana.

Answer - 5. Reviving consciousness begins after the struggle in Kama Loka at the door of Devachan, and only after the “gestation period”. Please turn to my responses on the subject in your “Famous Contradictions”.

Answer - 6. Your deductions, as to the indefinite prolongation in Devachan of some one moment of earthly bliss, having been unwarranted, your question in the last paragraph of this need not be considered. The stay in Devachan is proportioned to the unfinished psychic impulses originating in earth-life. Those whose attractions were preponderatingly material will sooner be drawn back into rebirth by the force of Tanha. [ The “thirst” or craving for existence.] As one London opponent truly remarks, these subjects (metaphysical) are only partly for understanding. A higher faculty belonging to the higher life must see; and it is truly impossible to force it upon one’s understanding merely in words. One must see with his spiritual eye, hear with his Dharma-kayic ear, feel with the sensations of his Astitya Vijnana (spiritual “I”, before one can comprehend this doctrine fully, otherwise it may but increase one’s discomfort and add to his knowledge very little.

Races and Sub-Races

Question- There is a very interesting allusion in your last, when speaking of Hume you speak of certain characteristics he brought back with him from his last incarnation.

Answer - All of us, we bring some characteristics from our previous incarnations. It is unavoidable.

Question- Have you the power of looking back to the former lives of persons now living, and identifying them?

Answer - Unfortunately some of us have. I for one do not like to exercise it.

Question- In that case would it be improper, personal curiosity to ask for any particulars of my own?

Answer - The latter end of a very important cycle. Each Round, each ring, as every race, has its great and its smaller cycles on every planet that mankind passes through. Our Fourth Round humanity has its one great cycle and so have her races and sub-races. The “curious rush” is due to the double effect of the former - the beginning of its downward course - and of the latter (the small cycle of our sub-race) running on to its apex. Remember you belong to the Fifth Race. Yet you are but a Western sub-race. Notwithstanding your efforts, what you call civilisation is confined only to the latter and its offshoots in America. Radiating around, its deceptive light may seem to throw its rays on a greater distance than it does in reality. There is no “rush” in China, and of Japan you make but a caricature.

A student of Occultism ought not to speak of the “stagnant condition” of the Fourth Round people, since history knows next to nothing of that condition “up to the beginning of modern progress” of other nations but the Western. What do you know of America, for instance, before the invasion of that country by the Spaniards? Less than two centuries prior to the arrival of Cortez, there was as great a “rush” toward progress among the sub-races of Peru and Mexico as there is now in Europe and the U.S.A. Their sub-races ended in nearly total annihilation through causes generated by itself; so will yours at the end of its cycle. We may speak only of the stagnant conditions into which, following the law of development, growth, maturity and decline, every race and sub-race falls during its transition periods. It is the latter condition your Universal History is acquainted with, while it remains superbly ignorant of the condition even in India was in, some ten centuries back. Your sub-races are now running towards the apex of their respective cycles, and that history goes no further back than the periods of decline of a few other sub-races belonging most of them to the preceding Fourth Race. And what is the area and the period of time embraced by its universal eye? At the utmost stretch, a few miserable dozens of centuries - a mighty horizon indeed. Beyond all is darkness for it, nothing but hypothesis.

Answer - No doubt there was. Egyptian and Aryan records and especially our Zodiacal tables furnish us with every proof of it, besides our inner knowledge. Civilisation is an inheritance and patrimony that passes from race to race along the ascending and descending paths of cycles. During the minority of a sub-race, it is preserved for it by its predecessor which disappears, dies out gradually, when the former comes of age. At first most of them squander and mismanage their property, or leave it untouched in the ancestral coffers. They reject contemptuously the advice of their elders, and prefer, boy-like, playing in the streets to studying and making the most of the untouched wealth stored up for them in the records of the past. Thus during your transition-period - the Middle Ages - Europe rejected the testimony of antiquity, calling such sages as Herodotus and other learned Greeks “the father of lies,” until she knew better and changed the appellation into that of “father of history”. Instead of neglecting, you now accumulate and add to your wealth; as every other race, you had your ups and downs, your periods of honour and dishonour, your dark midnight, and you are now approaching your brilliant noon. The youngest of the Fifth Race family, you were for long ages the unloved and the uncared-for, the Cendrillon [ Cinderella.] in your home. And now when so many of your sisters have died, and others are still dying while a few of the old survivors, now in their second infancy, wait but their Messiah - the Sixth Race - to rise to a new life and start anew with the arriving stranger along the path of a new cycle, now that the Western Cendrillon has suddenly developed into a proud and wealthy Princess, the beauty we all see and admire, how does she act? Less kind-hearted than the Princess in the tale, instead of offering to her elder and less-favoured sister - the oldest now, in fact, since she is nearly a million years old, and the only one who has never treated her unkindly, though she may have ignored her - instead of offering her, I say, the kiss of peace she applies to her the lex talionis with a vengeance that does not enhance her natural beauty. This, my good friend and brother, is not far-stretched allegory, but history.

Question- Even the Fifth Race (our own) of the Fourth Round began in Asia a million years ago. What was it about for the 998.000 years preceding the last 2.000? During that period have greater civilisations than our own risen and decayed?

To return to your questions. Of course the Fourth Race had its period of the highest civilisation. Greek and Roman and even Egyptian civilisations are nothing compared to the civilisations that began with the Third Race. Those of the Second were not savages, but they could not be called civilised. And now reading once of my first letters on the races (a question first touched by M.) pray do not accuse either him or myself of some new contradiction. Read it over and see that it leaves out the question of civilisations altogether, and mentions but the degenerate remnants of the Fourth and Third Races, and gives you as a corroboration the latest conclusions of your own science. Do not regard an unavoidable incompleteness as inconsistency. You now ask me a direct question and I answer it. Greeks and Romans were small sub-races, and Egyptians part and parcel of our own “Caucasian” stock. Look at the latter and at India. Having reached the highest civilisation and, what is more, learning, both went down, Egypt as a distinct sub-race disappearing entirely (her Copts are a hybrid remnant), India as one of the first and most powerful offshoots of the Mother Race, and composed of a number of sub-races lasting to these times, and struggling to take once more her place in history some day. That history catches but a few stray, hazy glimpses of Egypt, some 12,000 years back; when having already reached the apex of its cycle thousands of years before, the latter had begun going down. What does or can it know of India 5,000 years ago, or of the Chaldees, whom it confounds most charmingly with the Assyrians, making of them one day “Akkadians,” at another Turanians and what not? We say then that your history is entirely at sea. We are refused by the Journal of Science any claim whatever for “higher knowledge”. Says the reviewer, “Suppose the Brothers were to say ‘Point your telescopes to such and such a spot in the heavens, and you will find a planet yet unknown to you, or dig into the earth . . . etc., and you will find a mineral,’ etc.” Very fine indeed, and suppose that was done, what would be the result? Why a charge of plagiarism, since every thing of that kind, every plant and mineral that exists in space or inside the earth, was known and recorded in our books thousands of years ago; more, many a true hypothesis was timidly brought forward by their own scientific men and as constantly rejected by the majority with whose preconceptions it interfered. Your intention is laudable, but nothing that I may give you in answer will ever be accepted from us. Whenever discovered that “it is verily so,” the discovery will be attributed to him who corroborated the evidence, as in the case of Copernicus and Galileo, the latter having availed himself but of the Pythagorean manuscripts.

But to return to civilisations. Do you know that the Chaldees were at the apex of their occult fame before what you term as the Bronze Age, that the “sons of Ad” or “ the children of the Fire Mist” preceded by hundreds of centuries the Age of Iron, which was an old age already when what you now call the Historical Period - probably because what is known of it is generally no history but fiction - had hardly begun?

But then what warrant can we give the world that we are right, that far “greater civilisations than our own have risen and been destroyed”? It is not enough to say, as some of your modern writers do, than an extinct civilisation existed before Roma and Athens was founded. We affirm that a series of civilisations existed before as well as after the Glacial Period, that they existed upon various points of the Globe, reached the apex of glory and - died. Every trace and memory of the Assyrian and Phoenician civilisations had been lost until discoveries began to be made a few years ago. And now they open a new, though not by far one of the earliest, page in the history of mankind. And yet how far back do those civilisations go in comparison with the oldest? And even them history is shy to accept.

Archaeology has sufficiently demonstrated that the memory of man runs vastly further back than history has been willing to accept, and the sacred records of once mighty nations preserved by their heirs are still more worthy of trust. We speak of civilisations of the ante-glacial period, and (not only in the minds of the vulgar and the profane, but even in the opinion of the highly learned geologist) the claim sounds preposterous. What could you say then to our affirmation that the Chinese - I now speak of the inland, the true Chinaman, not of the hybrid mixture between the Fourth and Fifth Races now occupying the throne - the aborigines who belong in their unalloyed nationality wholly to the highest and last branch of the Fourth Race, reached their highest civilisation when the Fifth had hardly appeared in Asia, and its first offshoot was yet a thing of the future? When was it? Calculate. You cannot think that we, who have a tremendous odds against the acceptance of our doctrine, would deliberately go on inventing races and sub-races (in the opinion of Mr. Hume) were they not a matter of undeniable fact. The group of islands off the Siberian coast discovered by the Nordenskiol of the “Vega” was found strewn with fossils of horses, sheep, oxen, etc., among gigantic bones of elephants, mammoths, rhinoceroses and other monsters belonging to periods when man - says your science - had not yet made his appearance on earth. How came horses and sheep to be found in company with the huge “antediluvians”? The horse, we are taught in schools, is quite a modern invention of nature and no man ever saw its pentadactyle ancestor. The group of Siberian islands may give the lie to the comfortable theory The region now locked in the fetters of eternal winter uninhabited by man - that most fragile of animals - will be very soon proved to have had not only a tropical climate - something your science knows, and does not dispute - but as having been likewise the seat of one of the most ancient civilisations of that Fourth Race, whose highest relics now we find in the degenerated Chinaman, and whose lowest are hopelessly (for the profane scientist) intermingled with the remnants of the Third.

I told you before now, that the highest people now on earth (spiritually) belong to the first sub-race of the Fifth Root race; and those are the Aryan Asiatics; the highest race (in physical intellectuality) is the last sub-race of the Fifth - yourselves, the white conquerors. The majority of mankind belongs to the seventh sub-race of the Fourth Root race - the above mentioned Chinamen and their offshoots and branchlets (Malayan, Mongolians, Tibetans, Javanese, etc., etc.), and to remnants of other sub-races of the Fourth and the seventh sub-race of the Third Race. All these fallen, degraded semblances of humanity are the direct lineal descendants of highly civilised nations, neither the name nor memory of which have survived except in such books as Populvuh and a few others unknown to science.

Question- To what epoch did the existence of the continent of Atlantis belong, and did cataclysmal change which produced its extinction come into any appointed place in the evolution of Round corresponding to the place occupied in the whole Manvantaric evolution by obscurations?

Answer - To the Miocene times. Everything comes in its appointed time and place in the evolution of Rounds; otherwise it would be impossible for the best seer to calculate the exact hour and year when such cataclysms great and small have to occur. All an Adept could do would be to predict an approximate time; whereas now, events that result in great geological changes may be predicted with as mathematical a certainty as eclipses and other revolutions in space. The sinking of Atlantis (the group of continents and isles) began during the Miocene period as certain of your continents are now observed to be gradually sinking; and it culminated first, in the final disappearance of the largest continent, an event coincident with the elevation of the Alps; and second, with that of the last of the fair islands mentioned by Plato. The Egyptian priest of Sais told his ancestor Solon that Atlantis (i.e., the only remaining large island) had perished 9,000 years before their time. This was not a fancy date, since they had for millenniums preserved most carefully their records. But then, as I say, they speak but of the “Poseidonis,” and would not reveal even to the great Greek legislator their secret chronology. As there are no geological reasons for doubting, but on the contrary a mass of evidence for accepting, the tradition, science has finally accepted the existence of the great continent and archipelago, and thus vindicates the truth of one more “fable”. It now teaches, as you know, that Atlantis or the remnants of it lingered down to post-tertiary times, its final submergence occurring within the Palaeozoic ages of American history! Well, truth and fact ought to feel thankful even for such small favours, in the previous absence of any for so many centuries. The deep sea explorations, especially those of the Challenger, have fully confirmed the reports of geology and palaeontology. The great event, the triumph of our “Sons of the Fire Mist,” the inhabitants of Shamballa when yet an island in the Central Asian Sea, over the selfish if not entirely wicked magians of Poseidonis occurred just 11.446 years ago. Read in this connection the incomplete and partially veiled tradition in Isis, Vol. 1, pp. 588 - 94, and something may become still plainer to you. The corroboration of tradition and history brought forward by Donnelly I find in the main correct, but you will find all this and much more in Isis.

Question- I find that the most common question asked about occult philosophy by fairly intelligent people who begin to enquire about it is, “Does it give any explanation of the origin of evil?” That is a point on which you have formally promised to touch and which it might be worth while to take up before long.

Answer - It certainly does, and I have “touched upon” the subject long ago. Strangely enough, I found a European author, the greatest materialist of his time, Baron d’ Holbach, whose views coincide entirely with the views of our philosophy. When reading his Essais sur la nature, I might have imagined I had our book of Kiu-ti before me. In the forthcoming Theosophist you will find a note or two appended to Hume’s translation of Eliphas Levi’s Preface[ Theosophist, November 1882. See Appendix D.] in connection with the lost continent. And now, since I am determined to make of the present answers a volume, bear your cross with Christian fortitude, and then, perhaps, after reading the whole, you will ask for no more for some time to come. But what can I add to that already told? I am unable to give you purely scientific information since we can never agree entirely with Western conclusions, and ours will be rejected as unscientific. Yet both geology and palaeontology bear witness to much we have to say. Of course your science is right in many of her generalities, but her premises are wrong or at any rate very faulty. For instance, she is right in saying that, while the new America was forming, the ancient Atlantis was sinking and gradually wasting away; but she is neither right in her given epochs nor in the calculations of the duration of that sinking. The latter is the future fate of your British Islands, the first on the list of victims that have to be destroyed by fire (submarine volcanoes) and water. France and other lands will follow suit. When they reappear again, the last seventh sub-race of the Sixth Root-race of present mankind will be flourishing on Lemuria and Atlantis, both of which will have reappeared also (their reappearance following immediately the disappearance of the present isles and continents), and very few seas and great waters will be found then on our globe, waters as well as land appearing and disappearing and shifting periodically and each in turn.

Trembling at the prospect of fresh charges of “contradictions” at some future incomplete statement, I rather explain what I mean by this. The approach of every new “obscuration” is always signalled by cataclysms of either fire or water. But apart from this, every “ring” or Root Race has to be cut in two, so to say, by either one or the other. Thus having reached the apex of its development and glory, the Fourth Race, the Atlantean, was destroyed by water; you find now but their degenerated fallen remnants, whose sub-races nevertheless - aye, each of them - had its palmy days of glory and relative greatness. What they are now, you will be some day, the law of cycles being one and immutable.

When your race, the Fifth, will have reached is zenith of physical intellectuality and developed the highest civilisation (remember the difference we make between material and spiritual civilisations), unable to go any higher in its own cycle, its progress towards absolute evil will be arrested (as its predecessors the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, the men of the Third and Fourth Races, were arrested in their progress towards the same) by one of such “cataclysmic changes,” its great civilisation destroyed, and all the sub-races of that race will be found going down their respective cycles after a short period of glory and learning. See the remnants of the Atlanteans, the old Greeks and Romans [The “autochthonous” Greeks and Etruscan Romans.] (the modern belong to all the Fifth Race). See how great and how short, how evanescent were their days of fame and glory! For, they were but sub-races of the seven offshoots of the Root race.

No Mother Race, any more than her sub-races and offshoots, is allowed by the one reigning Law to trespass upon the prerogatives of the Race or sub-race that will follow it; least of all to encroach upon the knowledge and powers for its successor.

SECTION IV

Cosmic Origins

On the Hypothetical Absolute and Infinite Final Cause

Note - The following notes down to the end of the page are much abbreviated. So far as the original essay or memorandum of Hume is concerned, M’s notes are just made intelligible by a few lines of the original essay. I am not now abbreviating anything, but am giving you all I thought it necessary to preserve at this time. [A.P.S.] [ I put in italics the parts from Mr. Hume’s essay.]

The Absolute and Infinite is composed of the conditioned and finite. Causes are conditioned in their modes of existence, as attributes and as individual aggregates - unconditioned and eternal in their sum, or as a collective aggregate.

If the Absolute is a blind law how can it give birth to intelligence?

But passive latent intelligence or that principle diffused throughout the universe, which in its pure immateriality is non-intelligence and non-consciousness, and which, as soon as it becomes imprisoned in matter is transformed into both, can . . .[ Sentence not finished in MS.] The Absolute, if intelligent, must be omnipotent, omniscient and all good.

Please give your reasons why.

In the last the Absolute, itself non-conscious, is linked to intelligence by emanations supposed to be conditioned. How far this satisfies the mind as to the possibility of intelligence evolving out of non-intelligence depends on the mind addressed.

What do you know of the gradual development of brain since the Silurian period?

It is useless . . . [Sentence not finished in MS.] Show me the philosopher, who would prove it useless . . . to say that evil is as necessary to make good apparent, as darkness to make light cognizable. To the unconditioned it may be, to the omnipotent nothing is necessary.

Prove him first.

But clearly a conditioned agency is not the final cause. Above it is the law or principle that conditions it.

How’s this? Where? Not unless you create something outside the Absolute and limitless.

Problems lying behind the veil that separates the non-manifested final cause from the manifested universe are beyond the grasp of minds conditioned in that universe.

Indeed they are not.

. . .the Absolute infinite is unthinkable and we can neither comprehend it nor justify its ways to man.

Then why lose time over it? Who commissioned you to do so?

Your all pervading supreme power exists but it is exactly matter, whose life is motion, will, and nerve power electricity. Purusha can think but through Prakriti.

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What you would say would be: “Whether this be so or not (as regards the hypothesis of an absolute beyond the conditioned) it is and must ever remain a pure hypothesis. The highest intelligences in the universe know nothing about it. So far as they can explore, the manifested universe is boundless and infinite. Our philosophy admits only of what is known and knowable. This is admittedly unknowable even to Planetaries, and it is ex hypothesi non-existent. Why then consider it?

“Even were this conception correct how does it concern us? For thousands of years the highest Planetaries have explored the universe; they have found no limits to it, nothing in it is guided or governed by any external impulse, everything on the contrary proceeding from internal impulses which they understand and which suffice to explain everything they have ever had cognizance of. A quoi bon then to introduce the unnecessary conception of a something (which as non-existent for us is a nothing) outside and beyond what for us is limitless and eternal, when whether it exists or not it plays no discoverable part in anything that concerns us?

“The fact is, your western philosophical conceptions are monarchical, ours democratic. You are only able to think of the Universe as governed by a King, while we know it to be a republic in which the aggregate, indwelling intelligence rules.”

We might say more: never better. That is just what we would say.

Who are the artificers of the world?

Dhyan Chohans, Planetaries.

Essay by Hume, with Notes as before from M.

The universe may primarily be conceived as space pervaded by an infinite and eternal and homogeneous congeries of molecules, in which motion, their latent unconscious life, is inherent. In this, its passive, unmanifested state, may it be regarded as chaos?

Yes, if only people were capable of conceiving what real chaos is, which they are not.

Though truly a unity, it may be conceived in its various aspects, as space in regard to its boundless extension, co-existing with eternity in regard to its endless duration, cosmic matter in regard to its molecules, and cosmic force in regard to its all pervading motion. But these four conceptions must be held to indicate not four elements composing a compound, but rather four properties or attributes of one single thing, just as on earth one thing may be hot, luminous, heavy and in motion. This universe, one and indivisible in its passive, unmanifested form, this chaos, is for us non-existent.

For you, but why speak for others?

But throughout it are scattered centers of activity or evolution, and wherever and whenever activity prevails, there portions of the whole differentiate, and where this occurs, homogeneity ceases. This differentiation is due (1) to the greater or less proximity of the molecules, (2) to their greater or less attenuation.

What does (2) mean? How can the primal molecules grow thinner or fatter - ex nihilo, etc.

I was not aware that atoms were considered by you as something nihil. Are not the molecules considered by science as compound atoms? Your science knows only of such compound molecules, and a primal atom is and will remain for ever as a hypothetical abstraction for it. Science can know nothing of the nature of atoms outside the region of effects on her globe, and even that atom she calls indivisible, which we do not, for we know of the existence and properties of the universal solvent, the essence of the Panchamahabhutam, the five elements. Even the existence of the atoms which compose the unseen medium, through which the power which magnetises instantly a short, iron rod placed across the centre of a hoop two yards in diameter, around which a wire thickly covered with India rubber is coiled, even the existence of such atoms, I say, remains an open question, and science remains puzzled and embarrassed to decide whether it is an action at a distance, without or with some mysterious medium, or what?

(3) To changes in their polarity. This differentiation in activity is manifestation, and every thing so differentiated comes into existence or becomes conceivable for us. Each centre of activity (and these centres are countless) marks a solar system, but these are still rari nantes in gurgite vasto, hanging in the all pervading ocean of the unmanifested universe, out of which new manifestations are perpetually evolving, and into the oblivion of which others whose cycle has been completed are ever returning.

Alternations of activity and passivity constitute the cyclic law of the universe. As the microcosm, man, has his days and nights, his waking and his sleeping hours, so has the earth, which, a macrocosm to him, is a microcosm to the solar system, and so has this latter, which, a macrocosm to a single globe, is itself a microcosm to the universe.

That the universe itself must similarly have its days and nights of activity and passivity is probable by analogy, but if so, these cover periods unthinkable, and the fact remains unknowable by the highest intelligences conditioned in the universe.

The night of the solar system, the Pralaya of the Hindoos, the Maha-Bardo or great night of mind of the Tibetans, involves the disintegration of all form, and the return of that portion of the universe occupied by that system to its passive, unmanifested condition, space pervaded by atoms in motion. Everything else passes away for the time but matter, which these ultimate atoms represent (though at times objective, at times potential or subjective, now organised, now unorganised, is eternal and indestructible), and motion is the imperishable life (conscious or unconscious as the case may be) of matter. Even, therefore, during the night of mind, when all other forces are paralysed, when omniscience and ignorance both sleep, and everything else rests, this latent unconscious life unceasingly maintains the molecules in which it is inherent, in blind resultless and purposeless motion inter se.

Why should it be more purposeless and resultless than the unconscious blind motion of the atoms in any foetus preparing for rebirth?

The solar system has disappeared even to the highest intelligences in other solar systems. Is this correct? Can the Planetaries in any way cognize the passive, non-being portions of the universe?

They can.

Adepts can at will, I know, create forms out of cosmic matter, but probably this cosmic matter is many degrees from matter as it exists in the passive latent universe, which perhaps should rather be called potential than cosmic matter.

Potentiality is a possibility, not an actuality. Find a better word.

But nothing has been annihilated any more than anything has been ever created, only this recently active, organised, manifested and existing portion of the universe, losing all differentiation of its parts, has passed into its primordial, passive, homogeneous, unmanifested, and, quoad all intelligences, non-existent or unconceivable state. It has resettled into chaos. If it is asked, whence these alternations of activity and passivity, the reply is that they are the law inherent in the universe. (Here as a footnote would come the purport of the argument approved by you against the unnecessary creation of an intelligence outside the self-governed universe.)

If you can show me one being or object in the universe which does not originate and develop through and in accordance with blind law, then only will your argument hold good and footnote be necessary. The doctrine of evolution is an eternal protest. Evolution means unfolding of the evolute from the involute, a process of gradual growth. The only thing that could have possibly been spontaneously created is cosmic matter, and primordium with us means not only primogenitureship but eternalism, for matter is eternal and one of the Hlun dhub, not a Kyen, - a cause, itself the result of some primary cause. Were it so at the end of every Mahapralaya, when the whole cosmos moves into collective perfection, and every atom (that you call primordial, and we, eternal) emanates from itself a still finer atom - every individual atom containing in itself the actual potentiality of evolving milliards of worlds each more perfect and more ethereal - how is it that there is no sign of such an intelligence outside the self-governed universe? You take a last hypothesis - a portion of your God sits in every atom. He is divided ad infinitum, he remains concealed, in abscondito, and the logical conclusion we arrive at is that, as the infinite mind of the Dhyan Chohans knows, the newly emanated atoms are incapable of any conscious or unconscious action, unless they receive the intellectual impulses from them. Ergo, your God is no better than blind matter ever propelled by as blind eternal force, or law, which is that matter’s God, perchance. Well, well, we shall not lose time over such talk.

The period of passivity ends, the night of mind ceases, the solar system awakes and re-emerges into manifestation and existence, and everything throughout it is once more as it was when the night set in. Though a period inconceivable to human minds has passed, it has passed but as a sound and dreamless sleep. The law of activity comes again into operation, the centre of evolution resumes its work, the fount of being commences to flow again. I conclude this must be so, or otherwise the matter ejected from the vortex or central point, would find none in a differentiated state from which to acquire its own impulses of differentiation.

When the hour strikes, the cosmic atoms already in a differentiated state remain in statu quo, as well as globes and everything else in the process of formation. Therefore you have seized the idea. [ I interpolate a warning here that Hume and I got a good deal off the rails at this point. It was not till long afterwards that the impressions suggested by this note, erroneous themselves though the note was afterwards justified, were cleared up. A.P.S.] in the still passive portion of the universe, in which, and interpenetrated by which, hangs the re-manifested solar system in the non-being where subsists the eternal mechanical motion, its uncreated cause or vortex is formed, which in its ceaseless rotation perpetually ejects the polarised active manifested conscious universe, the unpolarised passive unmanifested and unconscious universal element.

Call it motion. cosmic matter, duration, or space, for it is all these and yet one, this is the universe manifested and unmanifested, and there is nothing else in the universe. But the moment it passes out of passivity or non-being into activity or being, it begins to change its state, and differentiate from contact with what had formerly changed; and so the eternal wheel rolls on, the effect of today becoming the cause of tomorrow for ever and ever. But it must ever be remembered that the non-being, the passive, is the eternal, the real; the being, the active, the transitory and the unreal. For longer or shorter as its career may be according to the impulses it receives, sooner or later the manifested disintegrates into the unmanifested, and being fades into non-being.

But how about the highest Planetaries? They surely do not return into non-being, but pass on to higher or at any rate different solar systems?

The highest state of Nirvana is the highest state of non-being. There comes a time when the whole infinitude sleeps or rests, when all is re-immersed in the one eternal and uncreated sum of all, the sum of the latent unconscious potentiality.

It has been stated that a differentiation of the primordial element is the basis of the manifested universe and we must now consider the seven different principles that constitute and govern that universe, or in other words the seven different states or conditions in which this element exists in it.

There is no finite or primordial design but in conjunction with organised matter. Design is Kyen, a cause arising from a primary one. The latent design exists from the eternity in the one unborn eternal atom, or the central point which is everywhere and nowhere, called - (our most secret incommunicable name given at Initiation to the highest Adepts.) So I can give you the six names of the principles of our solar system but have to withhold the rest, and even the name of the seventh. Call it the unknown and explain why. A dam ye (a Brahman) will not give you the name of even the crown of the Akasa, but will speak of the six primary forces in nature represented by the solar light.

I’ll give you the principles by and bye. Study this well first.

Answer - Correctly conceived, nothing in Nature springs into existence suddenly, all being subjected to the same laws of gradual evolution. Realise but once the process of the Maha-cycle of one sphere, and you have realised them all. One man is born like another man. One race evolves, develops and declines like another and all other races. Nature follows the same groove from the “creation” of a universe, down to that of a mosquito. In studying esoteric cosmogony, keep a spiritual eye upon the physiological process of human birth, proceed from cause to effect, establishing as you go along analogies between the birth of a man and that of a world. In our doctrine you will find necessary the synthetic method; you will have to embrace the whole, that is to say, to blend the macrocosm and microcosm together, before you are enabled to study the parts separately, or analyse them, with profit to your understanding. Cosmology is the physiology of the universe spiritualised, for there is but one law.

Question- Taking the middle of a period of activity between two Pralayas, i.e., of a Manvantara, what I understand to happen is this. Atoms are polarised in the . . . [ Question not continued in MS.]

Answer - Polarising themselves during the process of motion, and propelled by the irresistible force at work in cosmogony and the work of Nature, the positive and negative or the active and passive forces correspond to the male and female principles. Your spiritual efflux comes out from behind the veil, but is the male seed falling into the veil of cosmic matter. The active is attracted by the passive principle, and the great Nag, the serpent-emblem of eternity, attracts its tail to its mouth, forming thereby a circle (cycles of the eternity) in that incessant pursuit of the negative by the positive. Hence the emblem of the lingam, the phallus and the eteis. [ So in MS.] The one and chief attribute of the universal spiritual principle, the unconscious but ever active life-giver, is to expand and shed; that of the universal material principle, to gather in and fecundate. Unconscious and non-existing when separated, they become consciousness and life when brought together. Hence again Brahman from the root brih, the Sanskrit for “to expand, grow, or to fructify,” Brahman being but the vivifying expansive force of Nature in its eternal evolution . . . .highest [ First part of sentence omitted in MS.] region of spiritual efflux from behind the veil of primitive cosmic matter. The magnetic impulse which has accomplished this result flits from one universal form to another within the first sphere, till having run the round of existence in that kingdom of the first sphere, it succeeds in a current of attraction to the second sphere.

Question- Do worlds of effects intervene between the worlds of activity in the series of descent?

Answer - The worlds of effects are not Lokas or localities, they are the shadow of the world of causes - their souls - worlds having like men their seven principles which develop and grow simultaneously with the body. Thus the body of man is wedded to and remains for ever within the body of his planet. His individual Jivatma, life principle, returns after death to its source, so that his Linga Sharira will be drawn into Akasa; his Kama Rupa will recommingle with the universal Shakti, the will force or universal energy; his animal soul, borrowed from the breath of universal mind, will return to the Dhyan Chohans; his sixth principle, whether drawn into or ejected from the matrix of the great passive principle, must remain in its own sphere, either as part of the crude material, or as an individualised unity to be reborn in a higher world of causes. The seventh will carry it from the Devachan and follow the new ego to its place of rebirth.

Question- The magnetic impulse, which cannot yet be conceived of as an individuality, enters the second sphere in the same, the mineral kingdom, as that to which it belonged in the first sphere, and runs the round of mineral incarnations, there passing on to the third sphere. Our earth is still a sphere of necessity for it. Hence it passes into the upward series and from the highest of these passes into the vegetable kingdom of the first sphere. Without any new impulse of creative force from above, its career round the cycle of worlds as a universal principle has developed some new attractions or polarisations, which cause it to assume the lowest vegetable form. In vegetable forms, it passes successively through the cycle of worlds, the whole being still a circle of necessity (as no responsibility can yet have accrued to an unconscious individuality and therefore it cannot at any stage of its progress do anything to select one or other of divergent paths); or is there something in the life even of a vegetable which, though not responsibility, may lead it up, or down, at this critical stage of its progress? Having completed the whole cycle as a vegetable, the growing individuality expands on its next circuit into an animal form.

Answer - The evolution of the worlds cannot be considered apart from the evolution of everything created or having being on these worlds. Your accepted conceptions of cosmogony, whether from the theological or scientific standpoints, do not enable you to solve a single anthropological or even ethnical problem, and they stand in your way whenever you attempt to solve the problem of the races on this planet.

When a man begins to talk about creation and the origin of man, he is butting against the facts incessantly. Go on saying, “our planet and man were created,” and you will be fighting against hard facts, for ever analysing and losing time over trifling details, unable to ever grasp the whole. But once admit that our planet and ourselves are no more creations than the iceberg now before me (in our K.H.’s home) but that both planet and man are states for a given time; that their present appearance - geological and anthropological - is transitory, and but a condition concomitant of that state of evolution at which they have arrived in the descending cycle; and all will become plain. You will easily understand what is meant by the “one and only” element or principle in the universe and that androgynous - the seven headed serpent or Manda of Vishnu, the Nag around Buddha, the great dragon of eternity from the emanations of which spring worlds, beings and things; you will comprehend the reason why the first philosopher proclaimed all Maya, but that one principle which rests during the Mahapralayas or the nights of Brahma.

Now think the Nag awakes. He heaves a heavy breath, and the latter is sent like an electric shock all along the wire encircling space. Go to your piano and execute upon the lower register of keys the seven notes of the lower octave, up and down. Begin pianissimo, crescendo from the first key, and having struck fortissimo on the last note, go back diminuendo, getting out of your last note a hardly perceptible sound. The first and last notes will represent to you the first and last spheres in the cycle of evolution. The one you struck once is our planet. The seven vowels chanted by the Egyptian priests to the seven rays of the rising sun to which Memnon responded meant but that. The one life principle when in action runs in circuits, even as known in physical science. It runs the round in the human body where the head represents and is to the microcosmos, (the physical world of matter) what the summit of the cycle is to the macrocosmos (world of universal spiritual forces); so with the formation of worlds and the great descending and ascending circle of necessity. All is one law. Man has his seven principles, the germs of which he brings with him at his birth. So has a plant or a world. From first to last every sphere has its world of effects, the passing through which will afford a place of final rest to each of the human principles, the seventh principle excepted. The world A is born, and with it, clinging like barnacles to the bottom of a ship in motion, evolve from its first breath of life the living beings of its atmosphere, from the germs hitherto inert, now awakening to life with the first motion of the sphere. With sphere A begins the universal kingdom, and runs the round of universal evolution. By the time it is completed, sphere B comes into objectivity and draws to itself the life which has completed its round on sphere A, and has become a surplus (the fount of life being inexhaustible, for it is the true Archnea doomed to spin out its web eternally, save during the period of Pralaya). Then comes vegetable life on sphere A, and the same process takes place. On its downward course life becomes with every state coarser, more material; on its upward, more shadowy.

No; there is not, nor can there be, any responsibility until the time when matter and spirit are properly equilibrized. Up to man, life has no responsibility in whatever form, no more than has a foetus who in his mother’s womb passes through all the forms of life - a mineral, a vegetable, an animal - to become finally man.

Question- Where does it get the animal soul, its fifth principle from? Has the potentiality of this resided from the first in the original magnetic impulse which constituted the mineral, or at every transition from the last world on the ascending side to the first sphere, does it so to speak pass through and ocean of spirit and assimilate some new principle?

Answer - Thus you see his fifth principle is evolved from within himself, man having, as you will say, the “potentiality” of all the seven principles as a germ, from the very instant he appears on the first world of causes as a shadowy breath, which coagulates with, and is hardened together with, its parent sphere. Spirit as life is indivisible, and when we speak of the seventh principle, it is neither quality nor quantity nor yet form that are meant, but rather the space occupied in that ocean of spirit by the results of effects, beneficent as are all those of a co-worker with Nature impressed thereon.

Science

Question- Can you (i.e., is it permitted) ever answer any questions relating to matter of physical science? If so, here are some points that I should greatly like dealt with.

Answer - Most undoubtedly I am so permitted. But then comes the most important point, how far satisfactory will my answers appear even to you? That not every law brought to light is regarded as adding a link to the chain of human knowledge, is shown by the ill grace with which every fact unwelcome, for some reasons, to science is received by its professors. Nevertheless whenever I can answer you I will try to do so, only hoping that you will not send it as a contribution from my pen to the Journal of Science.

Question- Have magnetic conditions anything to do with the precipitation of rain, or is that due entirely to atmospheric currents at different temperatures encountering other currents of different humidities, the whole set of motions being established by pressures, expansions etc., due in the first instance to solar energy? If magnetic conditions are engaged, how do they operate and how could they be tested?

Answer - Most assuredly they have. Rain can be brought on in a small area of space, artificially and without any claim to miracle or superhuman powers, though its secret is no property of mine that I should divulge it. I am now trying to obtain permission to do so. We know of no phenomenon in nature entirely unconnected with either magnetism or electricity - since where there are motion, heat, friction, light, there magnetism and its alter ego (according to our humble opinion) electricity, will always appear either as cause or effect, or rather both, if we but fathom the manifestation to its origin. All the phenomena of earth-currents, terrestrial magnetism and atmospheric electricity are due to the face that the earth is an electrified conductor, whose potential is ever changing owing to its rotation and its annual orbital motion, the successive cooling and heating of the air, the formation of clouds and rainstorms and winds, etc. This you may perhaps find in some text book. But then science would be unwilling to admit that all those changes are due to akasic magnetism, incessantly generating electric currents which tend to restore the disturbed equilibrium. By directing the most powerful of electric batteries - the human frame electrified by a certain process - you can stop rain on some given point by making “a hole in the rain-clouds,” as the occultists term it. By using other strongly magnetic implements within, so to say, an insulated area, rain can be produced artificially. I regret my inability to explain to you the process more clearly. You know the effects produced by trees and plants on rainclouds, and how their strong magnetic nature attracts and even feeds those clouds over the tops of the trees. Science explains it otherwise, may be. Well, I cannot help it, for such is our knowledge and the fruits of millenniums of observation and experience.

Were the present to fall into the hands of Hume, he would be sure to remark that I am vindicating the charge publicly brought by him against us: “Whenever unable to answer your arguments (?) they (we) calmly reply that their (our) rules do not admit of this or that”. I am compelled to answer that, since the secret is not mine, I cannot make of it a marketable commodity. Let some physicist calculate the amount of heat required to vaporise a certain quantity of water; let them compute the quantity of rain needed to cover an area - say one square mile to a depth of one inch. For this amount of vaporisation they will require of course an amount of heat that would be equal to at least five million tons of coal. Now the amount of energy, of which this consumption of heat would be the equivalent, corresponds (as any mathematician could tell you) to that which would be required to raise a weight of upwards of ten million tons one mile high. How can one man generate such an amount of heat and energy? Preposterous, absurd! We are all lunatics and you who listen to us will be placed in the same category if you ever venture to repeat this proposition. Yet I say that one man alone can do it and very easily, if he is but acquainted with a certain “physico-spiritual” lever in himself, far more powerful than that of Archimedes. Even simple muscular contraction is always accompanied by electric and magnetic phenomena, and there is the strongest connection between the magnetism of the earth, the changes of weather, and man, who is the best barometer living, if he but know how to decipher it properly.

Again, the state of the sky can always be ascertained by the variations shewn by magnetic instruments. It is now several years since I had an opportunity of reading the deductions of science upon this subject; therefore, unless I go to the trouble of catching up what I may have remained ignorant of, I do not know the latest conclusions of science. But with us it is an established fact that it is the earth’s magnetism that produces wind, storm, and rain. What science seems to know of it is but secondary symptoms always induced by that magnetism, and she may very soon find out her present errors.

The earth’s magnetic attraction of meteoric dust and the direct influence of the latter upon the sudden changes of temperature, especially in the matter of heat and cold, are not settled questions to the present day. I believe Dr. Plimpson in 1867 and Cowper Ranyard in 1879 both urged the theory, but it was rejected. It was doubted whether the fact of our earth’s passing through a region of space, in which there are more or less of meteoric masses, has any bearing upon the height of our atmosphere’s being increased or decreased, or even upon the state of the weather. But we think we could easily prove it; and since they accept the fact that the relative proportion and distribution of land and water on our globe may be due to the great accumulation upon it of meteoric dust, (snow, especially in our northern regions, being full of meteoric iron and magnetic particles), and deposits of the latter being found even at the bottom of seas and oceans, I wonder how science has not hitherto understood that every atmospheric change and disturbance was due to the combined magnetism of the two great masses between which our atmosphere is compressed. I call this meteoric dust a “mass,” for it is really one. High above our earth’s surface the air is impregnated and space filled with magnetic-meteoric dust which does not even belong to our solar system. Science, having luckily discovered that as our earth with all the other planets is carried along through space, it receives a greater proportion of that dust matter on its northern than on its southern hemisphere, knows that to this are due the preponderating number of the continents in the former hemisphere and the greater abundance of snow and moisture. Millions of such meteors and even of the finest particles reach us every year and every day and all our temple knives are made of this “heavenly” iron, which reaches us without having undergone any change - the magnetism of the earth keeping them in cohesion. Gaseous matter is continually added to our atmosphere from the never ceasing fall of meteoric, strongly magnetic matter, and yet it seems with them still an open question whether the magnetic conditions have anything to do with the precipitation of rain or not. I do not know of any “set of motions established by pressure, expansion, etc., due in the first instance to solar energy”. Science makes too much and too little at the same time of “solar energy” and even of the sun itself; and the sun has nothing whatsoever to do with the rain and very little with heat. I was under the impression that science was aware that the glacial periods, as well as those periods when the temperature was “like that of the carboniferous age,” are due to the decrease and increase, or rather to the expansion, of our atmosphere, which expansion is itself due to the same meteoric presence. At any rate we all know that the heat that the earth receives by radiation from the sun is at the utmost one third, if not less, of the amount received by her directly from the meteors.

Question- Is the Sun's corona an atmosphere of any known gases? and why does it assume the rayed shape always observed in eclipses?

Answer - Call it a chromosphere or atmosphere? It can be called neither; for it is simply the magnetic and ever-present aura of the sun seen by astronomers for a few brief moments only during the eclipses, and by some of our Chelas whenever they like - of course while in a certain induced state. A counterpoint of what the astronomers call the red flames in the corona may be seen in Reichenbach’s crystals, or in any other strongly magnetic body. The head of a man in a strongly ecstatic condition, when all the electricity of his system is centred around the brain, will represent (especially in darkness) a perfect simile of the sun during such periods. The first artist who drew the aureole about the heads of his gods and saints was not inspired, but represented it on the authority of temple pictures and traditions of the sanctuary and the chambers of Initiation where such phenomena took place. The closer to the head or to the aura-emitting body, the stronger and the more effulgent the emanation (due to hydrogen, science tells us, in the case of the flames) hence the irregular red flames around the Sun or the “inner corona”. The fact that these are not always present in equal quantity shows only the constant fluctuation of the magnetic matter and its energy, upon which also depend the number and variety of the spots. During periods of magnetic inertia the spots disappear, or rather remain invisible. The farther the emanation shoots out, the more it loses in intensity, until, gradually subsiding, it fades out; hence the outer corona; its rayed shape being due entirely to the latter phenomenon, whose effulgence proceeds from the magnetic nature of the matter and the electric energy, and not at all from intensely hot particles, as asserted by some astronomers.

All this is terribly unscientific, nevertheless a fact, to which I may add another by reminding you that the Sun we see is not at all the central planet of our little universe, but only its veil or its reflection. Science has tremendous disadvantages against studying that planet, which luckily for us we have not, foremost of all being the constant tremors of our atmosphere, which prevent them from judging correctly the little they do see. This impediment was never in the way of the ancient Chaldee and Egyptian astronomers, nor is it an obstacle to us, for we have the means of arresting or counteracting such tremors, acquainted as we are with all the akasic conditions. No more than the rain secret would this secret, supposing we do divulge it, be of any practical use to your men of science unless they become occultists, and sacrifice long years to the acquirement of powers. Only, fancy a Huxley or a Tyndall studying Yog-Vidya! Hence the many mistakes into which they fall and the conflicting hypotheses of your best authorities. For instance, the Sun is full of iron vapours - a fact that was demonstrated by the spectroscope, showing that the light of the corona considered largely of a line in the green part of the spectrum, very nearly coinciding with an iron line. Yet Professors Young and Lockyer rejected that under the witty pretext, if I remember, that, if the corona were composed of minute particles like a dust cloud (and it is this that we call magnetic matter) these particles would (1) fall upon the Sun’s body; (2) comets were known to pass through this vapour without any visible effect on them; (3) Prof. Young’s spectroscope showed that the coronal line was not identical with the iron one, etc. Why they should call those objections scientific is more than we can tell.

Firstly, the reason why the particles - since they call them so - do not fall upon the Sun’s body is self-evident; there are forces co-existent with gravitation of which they know nothing - besides that other fact that there is no gravitation properly speaking only attraction and repulsion. Secondly, how could comets be affected by the said passage since their “passing through” is simply an optical illusion? They could not pass within the area of attraction without being immediately annihilated by that force of which no vril can give an adequate idea, since there can be nothing on earth that could be compared with it. Passing as the comets do through a “reflection,” no wonder that the said vapour has “no visible effect upon these light bodies”.

Thirdly, the coronal line may not seem identical through the best “grating spectroscopes”; nevertheless the corona contains iron as well as other vapours. To tell you of what it does consist is idle, since I am unable to translate the words we use for it, and that no such matter exists except in the Sun - not in our planetary system, at any rate. The fact is that what you call the Sun is simply the reflection of the huge “storehouse” of our system wherein all its forces are generated and preserved - the Sun being the heart and brain of our pigmy universe. We might compare its faculae - those millions of small intensely brilliant bodies of which the Sun’s surface away from the spots is made up - with the blood corpuscles of that luminary, though some of them, as correctly conjectured by science, are as large as Europe. Those blood corpuscles are the electric and magnetic matter in its sixth and seventh state. What are those long white filaments twisted like so many ropes of which the penumbra of the Sun is made up? What the central part that is seen like a huge flame ending in fiery (threads) spires, and the transparent clouds, or rather vapours formed of delicate threads of silvery light that hang over those flames? What but the magneto-electric aura - the phlogiston of the Sun? Science may go on speculating forever, yet so long as she does not renounce two or three of her cardinal errors she will find herself forever groping in the dark. Some of her greatest misconceptions are to be found in her limited notions of the law of gravitation - her denial that matter may be imponderable, her newly invented term “force,” and the absurd and tacitly accepted idea that force is capable of existing per se, or of acting (any more than life) outside, independent of, or in any way otherwise than through matter; in other words, that force is anything but matter in one of her highest states, the three last on the ascending scale being denied, only because science knows nothing of them - and in her utter ignorance of the universal Proteus, its functions and importance in the economy of nature - magnetism and electricity. Tell science that even in those days of the decline of the Roman Empire, when the tattooed Britisher used to offer to the Emperor Claudius his nazzur [Tributary offering.] of “electron” in the shape of a string of amber beads, that even then there were yet men remaining aloof from the universal masses, who knew more of electricity and magnetism than they, the men of science, do now, and science will laugh at you as bitterly as she now does over your kind dedication to me. [ Mr Sinnett dedicated his Occult World to the Master K.H.]

Verily, when your astronomers, speaking of Sun-matter, term those lights and flames “clouds of vapour” and “gases unknown to science,” chased by mighty whirl-winds and cyclones (whereas we know it to be simply magnetic matter in its usual state of activity), we feel inclined to smile at the expressions. Can one imagine the “Sun’s fires fed with purely mineral matter - with meteorites highly charged with hydrogen giving the Sun a far-reaching atmosphere of ignited gas’? We know that the invisible sun is composed of that which neither has name nor can be compared to anything known by your science on earth; and that its “reflection” contains still less of anything like “gases,” mineral matter, or fire, though even we, when treating of it in your civilized tongue, are compelled to use such expressions as “vapour” and “magnetic matter”. To close the subject, the coronal changes have no effect upon the earth’s climate though the spots have, and Prof. Lockyer is mostly wrong in his deductions. The sun is neither a solid, a liquid, nor yet a gaseous globe, but a gigantic ball of electro-magnetic forces - the storehouse of universal life and motion, from which the latter pulsate in all directions, feeding the smallest atom as the greatest genius with the same material unto the end of the Maha-yuga.

Question- Is the photometric value of light emitted by stars a safe guide to their distance, considered of course in connection with distance as guessed by parallax, and is it true, as astronomy assumes faute de mieux in the way of a theory, that per square mile the Sun’s surface emits as much light as can be emitted from any body?

Answer - I believe not. The stars are distant from us, at least 500,000 times as far as the Sun and some as many times more. The strong accumulation of the meteoric matter and the atmospheric tremors are always in the way. If your astronomers could climb on the height of that meteoric dust, with their telescopes and havannas, they might trust more than they can now in their photometers. How can they? Neither can the real degree of intensity of that light be known on earth. Hence no trustworthy basis for calculating magnitudes and distances can be had, nor have they hitherto made sure in a single instance, except in the matter of one star, which stars shine by reflected and which by their own light. The working of the best double star photometers is deceptive. Of this I have made sure, so far back as in the spring of 1878, while watching the observations made through a Pickering photometer. The discrepancy in the observations upon a star (near Gamma Ceti) amounted at times to half a magnitude. No planets but one have hitherto been discovered outside of the solar system, with all their photometers, while we know with the sole half of our spiritual naked eye a number of them, every completely matured Sun-star having, as in our own system, several companion planets in fact. The famous “polarisation of light” test is about as trustworthy as all others. Of course, the mere fact of their starting from a false premise cannot vitiate either their conclusions or astronomical prophesies, since both are mathematically correct in their mutual relations, and that it answers the given object. Neither the Chaldees nor yet our old Rishis had either your telescopes or photometers, and yet their astronomical productions were faultless - the mistakes, very slight ones in truth, fathered upon them by their modern rivals, proceeding from the mistakes of the latter.

You must not complain of my too long answers to your very short questions, since I answer you for your instruction as a student of occultism, my “Lay” Chela, [ Mr. Sinnett called himself a Lay Chela, as he felt he could not observe the strict disciplines of a true Chela.] and not at all with a view of answering the Journal of Science. I am no man of Science with regard to or in connection with modern learning. My knowledge of your Western sciences is very limited in fact; and you will please bear in mind that all my answers are based upon, and derived from, our Eastern Occult doctrines, regardless of their agreement or disagreement with those of exact science. Hence I say, “the sun’s surface emits per square mile, as much light (in proportion) as can be emitted from any body.” But what can you mean in this case by “light’? The latter is not an independent principle; and I rejoiced at the introduction, with a view to facilitate means of observation, of the “diffraction spectrum”; since by abolishing all these imaginary independent existences, such as heat, actinism, light, etc., it rendered to occult science the greatest service, by vindicating in the eyes of her modern sister our very ancient theory that every phenomenon, being but the effect of the diversified motion of what we call Akasa (not your ether), there was in fact but one element, the causative principle of all. But since your question is asked with a view to settling a disputed point in modern science, I will try to answer it in the clearest way I can. I say then no, and will give you my reasons why.

They cannot know it, for the simple reason that heretofore they have in reality found no sure means of measuring the velocity of light. The experiments made by Fizeau and Corum, known as the two best investigators of light in the world of science, notwithstanding the general satisfaction at the results obtained, are not trustworthy data, neither in respect to the velocity with which sunlight travels nor to its quantity. The methods adopted by both these Frenchmen are yielding correct results (at any rate approximately correct, since there is variation of 227 miles per second between the result of the observation of both experimenters albeit made with the same apparatus) only as regards the velocity of light between our earth and the upper regions of its atmosphere. Their toothed wheel, revolving at a known velocity, records, of course, the strong ray of light which passes through one of the niches of the wheel and then has its points of light observed whenever a tooth passes accurately enough. The instrument is very ingenious and can hardly fail to give splendid results on a journey of a few thousand meters there and back, there being between the Paris observatory and its fortifications no atmosphere, no meteoric masses to impede the ray’s progress, and that ray finding quite a different quality of a medium to travel upon the ether of space, the ether between the Sun and the meteoric continent above our heads, the velocity of light will of course show some 185,000 and odd miles per second, and your physicists shout “Eureka”, nor do any of the other devices contrived by science to measure that velocity since 1887 answer any better. All they can say is that their calculations are so far correct. Could they measure light above our atmosphere they would soon find they were wrong.

Question- Is Jupiter a hot and still partially luminous body, and to what cause, as solar energy has probably nothing to do with matter, are the violent disturbances of Jupiter’s atmosphere due?

Answer - It is, so far; but is fast changing. Your science has a theory, I believe, that if the earth were suddenly placed in extremely cold regions - for instance, were it to exchange places with Jupiter - all our seas and rivers would be suddenly transformed into solid mountains; the air (or rather a portion of the aeriform substances which compose it) would be metamorphosed from their state of invisible fluid, owing to the absence of heat, into liquids (which now exist on Jupiter, but of which men have no idea on earth). Realize or try to imagine the reverse condition and it will be that of Jupiter at the present moment. The whole of our system is imperceptibly shifting its position in space, the relative distance between the planets remaining ever the same, and being in no wise affected by the displacement of the whole system; and the distance between the latter and the stars and other suns being so incommensurable as to produce but little, if any, perceptible change for centuries and millennia to come, no astronomer will perceive it telescopically, until Jupiter and some other planets whose little luminous points hide now from sight millions upon millions of stars (all but some 5,000 or 6,000), will suddenly let us have a peep at a few of the Raja Suns they are now hiding. There is such a King Star right behind Jupiter that no mortal physical eye has every seen during this our Round. Could it be so perceived, it would appear, through the best telescope with a power of multiplying its diameter 10,000 times, still a small dimension less point thrown into the shadow by the brightness of any planet; nevertheless, this world is thousands of times larger than Jupiter. The violent disturbances of its atmosphere and even its red spot that so interest science lately are due (1) to that shifting, (2) to the influence of that Raja Star. In its present position in space, imperceptibly small though it be, the metallic substances of which it is mainly composed are expanding and gradually transforming themselves into aeriform fluids - the state of our own earth and its six sister globes before the first Round - and becoming part of its atmosphere. Draw our own inferences and deductions from this, my dear “Lay Chela,” but beware lest in doing so you sacrifice your humble instructor and the occult doctrine itself, on the alter of your wrathful goddess, modern Science.

Question- Is there any truth in the new Siemens’ theory of solar combination, i.e., that the Sun in its passage through space gathers in at its poles combustible gas (which is diffused through all space in a highly attenuated condition), and throws it off again at the equator, after the intense heat of that region has again dispersed the elements, which combustion temporarily united?

Answer - I am afraid not much, since our Sun is but a reflection. The only great truth uttered by Siemens is that interstellar space is filled with highly attenuated matter, such as may be put in air vacuum tubes, and which stretches from planet to planet and from star to star. But this truth has no bearing upon his main facts. The Sun gives all and takes back nothing from its system. The Sun gathers nothing “at the poles,” which are always free even from the famous “red flames” at all times - not only during eclipses. How is it that with their powerful telescopes they have failed to perceive any such “gathering,” since their glasses show them even “the superlatively fleecy clouds” on the photo-sphere? Nothing can reach the Sun from without the boundaries of its own system in the shape of such gross matter as attenuated gases. Every bit of matter in all its seven states is necessary to the vitality of the various and numberless systems - worlds in formation, suns awakening anew to life, etc, - and they have none to spare even for their best neighbours and next of kin. They are mothers, not step-mothers, and would not take away one crumb from the nutrition of their children. The latest theory of radiant energy which shows that there is no such thing is nature, properly speaking, as chemical, light or heat ray, is the only approximately correct one. For, indeed, there is but one thing - radiant energy which is inexhaustible, and knows neither increase nor decrease, and will go on with its self-generating work to the end of the Solar Manvantara. The absorption of the solar forces by the earth is tremendous, yet it is or may be demonstrated that the latter receives hardly 25 per cent of the chemical power of its rays, for these are despoiled of 75 per cent during their vertical passage through the atmosphere, at the moment they reach the outer boundary of the “aerial ocean,” and even these rays lose about 20 per cent in illuminating and caloric power, we are told. What with such a waste must then be the recuperative power of our Father-Mother Sun? Yes, call it radiant energy, if you will; we call it life, all-pervading omnipresent life, ever at work in its great laboratory - the Sun.

Question- Could any clue be given to the causes of magnetic variations - the daily changes at given places, and the apparently capricious curvature of the isogonic lines which show equal declination? For example, why is there a region in Eastern Asia where the needle shows no variation from the true north, though variations are recorded all round that space? Have your Lordships anything to do with this peculiar condition of things?

Answer - None can ever be given by your men of science, whose “bumptiousness” makes them declare that only to those for whom the word magnetism is a mysterious agent can the supposition that the Sun is a huge magnet account for the production by that body of light, heat and the causes of magnetic variations perceived on our earth. They are determined to ignore and thus reject the theory suggested to them by Jenkins of the R.A.S. of the existence of strong magnetic poles above the surface of the earth; but the theory is the correct one nevertheless, and one of these poles revolves round the North Pole is a periodical cycle of several hundred years. Halley and Handstein, besides Jenkins, were the only scientific men who ever suspected it. Your question is again answered by reminding you of another exploded suggestion. Jenkins did his best some three years ago to prove that it is the north end of the compass needle that is the true north pole and not the reverse, as the current scientific theory maintains. He was informed that the locality in Boothia, where Sir James Ross located the earth’s north magnetic pole, was purely imaginary; it is not there. If he (and we) are wrong, then the magnetic theory that like poles repel and unlike attract must also be declared a fallacy; since if the north end of a dipping needle is a south pole, then its pointing to the ground in Boothia, as you call it, must be due to attraction, and if there is anything there to attract it, why is it that the needle in London is attracted neither to the ground in Boothia nor to the earth’s centre? As very correctly argued, if the north pole of the needle pointed almost perpendicularly to the ground in Boothia, it is simply because repelled by the true north magnetic pole, when Sir James Ross was there about half a century ago.

No; our “Lordships” have nothing to do with the inertia of the needle. It is due to the presence of certain metals in fusion in that locality. Increase of temperature diminishes magnetic attraction, and a sufficiently high temperature destroys it altogether. The temperature I am speaking of is, in the present case, rather an aura, an emanation, than anything that science knows of. Of course this explanation will never hold water with the present knowledge of science. But we can wait and see. Study magnetism with the help of occult doctrines, and then that which now will appear incomprehensible, or absurd in the light of physical science will become all clear.

Question- Could any other planets besides those known to modern astronomy (I do not mean mere planetoids) be discovered by physical instruments if properly directed?

Answer - They must be. Not all of the intra-Mercurial planets, nor yet those in the orbit of Neptune are yet discovered, though they are strongly suspected. We know that such exist and where they exist, and that there are innumerable planets “burnt out,” they say - in obscuration, we say - planets in formation and not yet luminous, and so forth. But then the “we know” is of little use to science when the spiritualists will not admit our knowledge. Edison’s tasimeter, adjusted to its unmost degree of sensitiveness and attached to a large telescope, may be of great use when perfected. When so attached, the “tasimeter” will afford the possibility, not only to measure the heat of the remotest visible stars, but to detect by their invisible radiations stars that are unseen and otherwise undetectable, hence planets also. The discoverer [ Edison became an honorary member of the T.S., and a letter of his exists in the Adyar records acknowledging his diploma of membership, which he promised to put in his “honour box” where he kept his really valued diplomas.] (an F.T.S., a good deal protected by M.) thinks that if at any point in a blank space of heaven - a space that appears blank even through a telescope of the highest power - the tasimeter indicates an accession of temperature and does so invariably, this will be a regular proof that the instrument is in range with a stellar body, either non-luminous or so distant as to be beyond the range of telescopic vision. This tasimeter, he says, “is affected by a wider range of etheric undulations than the eye can take cognizance of”. Science will hear sounds from certain planets before she sees them. This is a prophecy. Unfortunately I am not a planet - not even a “Planetary,” otherwise I would advise you to get a tasimeter from him, and thus avoid me the trouble of writing to you. I would manage then to find myself “in range” with you.

Take the human mind in connection with the body; man has two distinct physical brains—the cerebrum with its two hemispheres at the frontal part of the head (the source of the voluntary nerves), and the cerebellum situated at the back part of the skull, the fountain of the involuntary nerves which are the agents for the unconscious or mechanical powers of the mind to act through. And, weak and uncertain as may be the control of man over his involuntary actions, such as the blood circulation, the throbbing of the heart and respiration, especially during sleep, yet how far more powerful, how much more potential, appears man as the master and ruler over the blind molecular motion, the laws which govern his body (proof of this being afforded in the phenomenal powers of the Adept and even of the common Yogi) than that which you call God shows over the immutable laws of nature. Contrary in that to the finite, the “Infinite Mind”—which we name so but for argument’s sake, for we call it the infinite force—exhibits but the functions of its cerebellum, the existence of the supposed cerebrum being admitted, as above stated, but on the inferential hypothesis deduced from the Kabalistic theory (correct in every other relation) of the Macrocosm being the prototype of the microcosm.

So far as we know, the corroboration of it by modern Science receiving but little consideration—so far as the highest Planetary Spirits have ascertained, who, remember, have the same relations with the trans-cosmical world, penetrating behind the veil of cosmic matter, as we have behind the veil of this our gross physical world—the Infinite Mind displays to them, as to us, no more than the regular unconscious throbbings of the eternal and universal pulse of nature throughout the myriads of worlds, within as without the primitive veil of our Solar System. So far as we know within and to the utmost limit, to the very edge of the cosmic veil, we know the fact to be correct owing to personal experience; for the information gathered as to what takes place beyond we are indebted to the Planetary Spirits, and to our blessed Lord Buddha.

This of course may be regarded as second-hand information. There are those who, rather than yield to the evidence of facts, will prefer regarding even the Planetary Spirits as “erring,” disembodied philosophers, if not actually liars. Be it so. “Every one is master of his own wisdom,” says a Tibetan proverb, and he is at liberty either to honour or degrade his slave. However, I will go on for the benefit of those who may yet seize my explanation of the problem and understand the value of the solution.

It is the peculiar faculty of the involuntary power of the Infinite Mind (whom no one would ever think of calling God) to be eternally evolving subjective matter into objective atoms (you will please remember the two adjectives are used but in a relative sense) or cosmic matter, to be later on developed into form, and it is likewise that same involuntary mechanical power that we see so intensely active in all the fixed laws of nature, which governs and controls what is called the universe or the cosmos. There are some modern philosophers who will prove the existence of a Creator from motion; we say and affirm that that motion—the universal perpetual motion which never ceases, never slackens nor increases its speed, not even during the interludes between the Pralayas or nights of Brahm, but goes on like a mill in motion whether it has anything to grind or not (for the Pralaya means the temporary loss of every form, but by no means the destruction of cosmic matter, which is eternal)—we say then this perpetual motion is the only eternal uncreated deity that we are able to recognise. To regard God as an intelligent spirit, and accept at the same time this absolute un-materiality, is to conceive of a non-entity, of a blank void; to regard God as a Being, an Ego, and to place this intelligence under a bushel for some mysterious reasons, is most consummate nonsense; to endow him with intelligence in the face of blind brutal evil, is to make of him a fiend, a most rascally God. A being, however gigantic, occupying space and having length, breadth and thickness, is most certainly the Mosaic Deity. No-being and a mere principle lands you directly in the Buddhistic Atheism or the Vedantic primitive Acosmism.

What lies beyond and outside the worlds of form and being, in worlds and spheres in their most spiritualised state (and you will perhaps oblige us by telling us where that “beyond” can be, since the universe is limitless and infinite) is useless for anyone to search after, since even Planetary Spirits have no knowledge or perception of it. If our greatest Adepts and Bodhisattvas have never themselves penetrated beyond our Solar System—and the idea seems to suit your preconceived theistic theory wonderfully, my respected brother, they still know of the existence of other such solar systems with as mathematical a certainty as any western astronomer knows of the existence of invisible stars which he can never approach or explore. But of that which lies within the worlds of systems, not in the “trans-infinitude,” (a queer expression to use), but in the cis-infinitude, rather, in the state of the purest and most inconceivable immateriality, no one ever knew or ever will know all; hence it is something non-existent for the universe.

You are at liberty to place in this eternal vacuum the intellectual or voluntary powers of your Deity, if you can conceive of such a thing. Meanwhile we say that it is motion which governs the laws of nature, and that it governs them as the mechanical impulse given to running water, which will profit them either in a direct line or along hundreds of side furrows they may happen to meet on their way, whether those furrows are natural grooves or channels prepared artificially by the hand of man; and we maintain that wherever there is life and being however much spiritualised a form, there is no room for moral government, much less for a moral governor, a Being who at the same time has no form nor occupies space! If verily the light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehends it not, it is because such is the natural law; but how much more suggestive and pregnant with meaning for one who knows to say that light can still less comprehend darkness or ever know it, since it kills it wherever it penetrates, and annihilates it instantly. A pure, yet volitional, spirit is an absurdity for volitional mind. The result of organism cannot exist independent of an organized brain, and an organized brain made out of mind is a still greater fallacy. If you ask me, whence then the immutable laws since laws cannot make themselves, then in my turn I will ask: and whence their supposed Creator? A creator cannot create or make himself if the brain did not make itself; for this would be affirming that brain acted before it existed; how could intelligence—the result of an organized brain—act before its Creator was made?

All this reminds me of wrangling for seniorship. [ This refers to the “Senior Wrangler,” the first on the list in the mathematical examination of Cambridge University. In the old days, each scholar proceeding to a degree was a “wrangler,” that is, one ready to defend his thesis by disputation against all comers.] If our doctrines clash too much with your theories, then we can easily give up the subject and talk of something else.

Study the laws and doctrines of the Nepaulese Svabhavikas, the principal Buddhist philosophical school in India, and you will find them the most learned, as the most scientifically logical, wranglers in the world. Their plastic, invisible, eternal, omnipresent and unconscious Svabhavat is force or motion ever generating electricity, which is life. Yes, there is a force as limitless as thought, as potent, as boundless as will, as subtle as the essence of life, so inconceivably awful in its rending force as to convulse the universe to its centre could it but be used as a lever; but this force is not God, since there are men who have learned the secret of subjecting it to their will when necessary. Look around you and see the myriad manifestations of life, so infinitely multiform, of life, of motion, of change. What caused them? From what inexhaustible source come they, by what agency out of the invisible and subjective have they entered our little area of the visible and objective? Children of Akasa, concrete evolution from the ether, it was force which brought them into perceptibility, and force will in time remove them from the sight of man. Why should this plant in your garden, to the right, have been produced with such a shape, and that other one to the left, with one totally dissimilar? Are these not the result of varying action of force—unlike correlations? Given a perfect monotony of activities throughout the world, we should have a complete identity of forms, colours, shapes and properties throughout all the kingdoms of nature.

It is motion with its resulting conflict, neutralization, equilibration, correlation, to which is due the infinite variety which prevails. You speak of an intelligent and good—the attribute is rather unfortunately chosen—Father, a mortal guide and governor of the universe and man . A certain condition of things around us we call normal; under this nothing can occur which transcends our every day experience (“God’s immutable laws”). But suppose we change this condition and have the best of him, without whom even a hair of your head will not fall, as they tell you in the West. A current of air brings cold to me from the lake, near which with my fingers half frozen I now write to you this letter. I change, by a certain combination of electrical magnetic, odyllic or other influences, the current of air which benumbs my fingers into a warm breeze, I have thwarted the intention of the Almighty and dethroned him at my will. I can do that or, when I do not want nature to produce strange and too visible phenomena, I force my nature (seeing nature influencing Self within me) to suddenly awake to new perceptions and feelings, and thus am my own creator and ruler.

But do you think you are right when saying “the laws arise”? Immutable laws cannot arise since they are eternal and uncreated, propelled in the eternity, and God himself, if such a thing existed, could never have the power of stopping them. And when did I say that these laws were fortuitous per se? I meant their blind correlations, never the laws or rather the law, since we recognize but one law in the universe, the law of harmony, of perfect equilibrium.

Then for a man endowed with so subtle a logic, and such a fine comprehension of the value of ideas in general and that of words especially, for a man so accurate as you generally are to make tirades upon an “all-wise, powerful and loveful God” seems to me, to say the least, strange. I do not, protest at all, as you seem to think, against your theism or a belief in an abstract idea of some kind; but I cannot help asking you, “How do you or how can you know that your God is all-wise, omnipotent and loveful, when everything in nature, physical and moral, proves such a being, if he does exist, to be quite the reverse of all you say of him? Strange delusion, and one which seems to overpower your very intellect.

The difficulty of explaining the fact that unintelligent forces can give rise to highly intelligent beings like ourselves is covered by the eternal progression of cycles and the process of evolution ever perfecting the world as it goes on. Not believing in cycles, it is unnecessary for you to learn that which will create but a few pretext for you, my dear brother, to combat the theory and argue upon it ad infinitum. Nor did I ever become guilty of heresy I am accused of in reference to spirit and matter. The conception of spirit and matter as entirely distinct and both eternal could certainly never have entered my head, however little I may know of them. For it is one of the elementary and fundamental doctrines of Occultism that matter and spirit are one, and are distinct but in their respective manifestations and only in the limited perception of the world of our senses. Far from lacking philosophical breadth then, our doctrines show but one principle in nature, spirit-matter or matter-spirit, the third, the ultimate absolute, and quintessence of the two, if I may be allowed to use an erroneous term in the present application, losing itself beyond the view and spiritual perceptions of even the Gods or Planetary Spirits. The third principle, say the Vedantic philosophers, is the only reality, everything else being Maya, as none of the Protean manifestations of spirit-matter, or Purusha and Prakriti, have ever been regarded in any other light than that of temporary delusions of the senses. Even in the hardly outlined philosophy of Isis, this idea is clearly carried out. In the book of Kiu-te spirit is called the ultimate sublimation of matter and matter the crystallization of spirit; and no better illustration could be afforded than the very simple phenomenon of ice-water-vapour, and the final dispersion of the latter, the phenomenon being reversed in its consecutive manifestations, and called the spirit falling into generation or matter, this trinity resolving itself into unity. A doctrine as old as the world of thought was seized upon by some early Christians, who had it in the schools of Alexandria and made it up into the Father or generative Spirit, the Son, or matter-man, and the Holy Ghost, the immaterial essence or the apex of the equilateral Δan idea found to this day in the pyramids of Egypt.

Thus once more it is proved that you misunderstand my meaning entirely whenever, for the sake of brevity, I use a phraseology habitual with western people. But in my turn I have to remark that your idea that matter is but the temporary allotropic form of spirit, differing from it as charcoal does from diamond, is as unphilosophical as it is unscientific from both the eastern and western point of view; charcoal being but a form of residue of matter, while matter per se is indestructible and, as I maintain, can conceive of. Bereaved of Prakriti, Purusha (spirit) is unable to manifest itself, hence ceases to exist, becomes nihil, without spirit or force; even that which science styles as not living matter, the so-called mineral ingredients which feed plants, could never have been called into form.

There is a moment in the existence of every atom and molecule of matter when, for one cause or another, the last spark of spirit or motion or life, call it by whatever name you please, is withdrawn; and in the same instant, with a swiftness that surpasses that of the lightning glance of thought, the atom or molecule or the aggregation of molecules is annihilated to return to its pristine purity of intra-cosmic matter; it is drawn to the mother fount with the velocity of a globule of quicksilver to the central mass. Matter, force and motion are the trinity of physical objective nature, as the trinitarian unity of spirit and matter is that of spiritual subjective nature; motion is eternal because spirit is eternal, but no modes of motion can ever be conceived unless they be in connection with matter.

And now to your extraordinary hypothesis that evil, with its attendant train of sin and suffering is not the result of matter, but may be perchance the wise scheme of the moral Governor of the Universe. Conceivable as the idea may seem to you, trained in the pernicious fallacy of the Christian, that the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, it is utterly inconceivable for me; must I repeat again that the best Adepts have searched the universe during millenniums and found nowhere the slightest trace of such a Machiavellian schemer, but throughout the same immutable inexorable law. You must excuse me therefore if I positively decline to lose my time over such childish speculations. It is not the ways of the Lord but rather those of some extremely intelligent men, in everything but some particular hobby, that are to me incomprehensible.

As you say, this need make no difference between us personally; but it does make a world of difference if you propose to learn and offer me to teach; for the life of me I cannot make out how I could ever impart to you that which I know, since the very A.B.C of what I know to be the rock upon which the secrets of the occult universe, whether upon this or that side of the veil, are encrusted, is contradicted by you invariably and a priori. My dear Brother, either we know something or we do not know anything. In the first case, what is the use of your learning since you think you know better; in the second case, why should you lose your time? You say it matters nothing whether these laws are the expression of the will of an intelligent conscious God, as you think, or constitute the inevitable attributes of an unintelligent unconscious God, as I hold. I say it matters everything, since you earnestly believe that these fundamental questions of spirit and matter, of God and no God, are admittedly beyond both of us, in other words that neither I nor yet our greatest Adepts can know any more than you do.

Then what is there on earth that I could teach you? You know that, in order to enable you to read, you must learn your letters; yet you want to know the course of events before and after the Pralayas, of every event here on this globe on the opening of a new cycle, namely, a mystery imparted at one of the last Initiations, as Mr. Sinnett was told; for my letter to him upon the Planetary Spirits was simply accidental, brought out by a question of his. And now you would say I am evading the direct issue, that I have discoursed upon collateral points but have not explained to you all you want to know, and that you ask me to tell you. You say, “I dodge as I always do”. Pardon me for contradicting you, but it is nothing of the kind; there are a thousand questions I shall never be permitted to answer, and it would be dodging were I to answer to you other than I do. I tell you plainly you are unfit to learn, for your mind is too full, and there is not a corner vacant from whence a previous occupant would not arise to struggle with and drive away a new comer. Therefore I do not evade. I only give you time to reflect and deduce, and first learn well what was already given you, before you seize on something else. The world of force is the world of occultism and the only one whither the highest Initiate goes to probe the secret of being; hence no one but such an Initiate can know anything of these secrets. Guided by his Guru, the Chela first discovers this world and its laws, then their centrifugal evolutions into the world of matter. To become a perfect Adept takes him long years but at last he becomes a Master; the hidden things have become patent and mystery and miracle have fled from his sight for ever; he sees how to guide force in this direction or that, to produce desirable effects; the secret chemical, electric or odic properties of plants, herbs, roots, minerals, and animal tissue are as familiar as the feathers of your birds are to you. [ Mr. Hume was an ornithologist and had a valuable collection of stuffed birds.] No change in the etheric vibrations can escape him; he applies his knowledge, and behold a miracle! and he who started with the repudiation of the very idea that miracle is possible is straightway classed as a miracle worker and either worshipped by the fools as a demi-god or repudiated by still greater fools as a charlatan.

And, to show you how exact a science is Occultism, let me tell you that the means we avail ourselves of are all laid down for us in a code as old as humanity to the minutest details, but every one of us has to begin from the beginning, not from the end. Our laws are as immutable as those of nature, and were known to man an eternity before this strutting gamecock, modern science, was hatched. If I have not given you the modus operandi or begun at the wrong end, I have at least shown you that we build our philosophy upon experiment and deduction, unless you choose to question and dispute this fact equally with all others. Learn first our laws and educate your perceptions, dear brother; control your involuntary powers and develop in the right direction your will, and you will become a teacher instead of a learner. I would not refuse what I have a right to teach, only I had to study for fifteen years before I came to the doctrine of cycles and had to learn simpler things at first. But, do what we may and whatever happens, I trust we shall have no more arguing, which is as profitless as it is painful.

Neither our philosophy nor ourselves believe in a God, least of all in one whose pronoun necessitates a capital H. Our philosophy falls under the definition of Hobbes; it is pre-eminently the science of effects by their causes, and of causes by their effects. And since it is also the science of things deduced from first principles, as Bacon defines it, before we admit any new principle, we must know it, and have no right to admit even its probability. Your whole explanation is based upon one solitary admission, made simply for argument’s sake in October last. You were told that our knowledge was limited to this our Solar System: ergo, as philosophers who desired to remain worthy of the name, we could not either deny or affirm the existence of what you termed a supreme omnipotent intelligent being of some sort beyond the limits of that Solar System. But if such an existence is not absolutely impossible, yet, unless the uniformity of Nature’s laws breaks at those limits, we maintain that it is highly improbable. Nevertheless we deny most emphatically the position of Agnosticism in this direction, and as regards the Solar System our doctrine knows no compromise. It either affirms or denies, for it never teaches but that which it knows to be the truth. Therefore we deny God, both as philosophers and Buddhists. We know that there are Planetary and other spiritual lives, and we know that there is in our system no such thing as God, either personal or impersonal. Parabrahm is not a God, but absolute immutable law, and Isvara is the effect of Avidya and Maya, a ignorance based upon the great delusion.

The word “God” was invented to designate the unknown cause of those effects which man has either admired or dreaded without understanding them, and since we claim and are able to prove what we claim, i.e., the knowledge of that cause or those causes, we are in a position to maintain that there is no God or gods behind them. The idea of God is not an innate but an acquired notion, and we have but one thing in common with theologists—we reveal the infinite. But while we assign to all the phenomena that proceed from the infinite and boundless space, duration and motion, material, natural, sensible and known (to us at least) causes; the theists assign them spiritual, supernatural, unintelligible and unknown causes. The God of the theologians is simply an imaginary power, “un loup-garou” as Dolback expresses it, a power which has never yet manifested itself. Our chief aim is to deliver humanity from this nightmare, and to teach man virtue for its own sake, and to walk in life relying on himself instead of leaning on a theological crutch that for countless ages was the direct cause of nearly all human misery. Pantheistic we may be called, agnostic never.

If people are willing to accept and regard as God our “One Life,” immutable and unconscious in its eternity, they may do so, and thus keep to one more gigantic misnomer; but then they will have to say with Spinoza, that there is not, and that we cannot conceive, any other substance than God, or as that famous and unfortunate philosopher says in his fourteenth proposition—Praeter Deum neque dari, neque concipi potest substantia—and thus become Pantheists. Who but a theologian nursed on the most absurd supernaturalism can imagine self-existent being, of necessity infinite and omnipresent, outside the manifested, boundless universe? The word infinite is but a negation with excludes the idea of bounds. It is evident that a being independent and omnipresent cannot be limited by any thing which is outside of himself, that there can be nothing exterior to himself—not even vacuum; then where is there room for matter? for that manifested even though the later limited.[So in MS.] If we ask the theists, “Is your God vacuum space or matter?” they will reply, ‘no.” And yet they hold that their God penetrates matter though he is not himself matter.

When we speak of our “One Life,” we also say that it penetrates, nay, is the essence of every atom of matter, and that therefore it not only has correspondence with matter, but has all its properties likewise, etc., hence is material, is matter itself. “How can intelligence proceed or emanate from non-intelligence? you kept asking last year. “How could a highly intelligent humanity, man the crown of reason, be evolved out of blind unintelligent law or force?” But once we reason on that line I may ask in my turn: “How could congenital idiots, non-reasoning animals, and the rest of the creation have been created by, or evolved from, absolute wisdom, if the latter is a thinking intelligent being, the author and ruler of the universe?” How says Dr. Clarke in his examination of the proof of the existence of the Divinity: “God Who hath made the eye shall He not see, God Who hath made the ear shall He not hear?” But according to this mode of reasoning, they would have to admit that in creating an idiot, God is an idiot, that he who made so many irrational beings, so many physical and moral monsters, must be an irrational being. We are not Adwaitis, but our teaching respecting the One Life is identical with that of the Adwaitis with regard to Parabrahm, and identical in every respect with the universal life and soul, the macrocosm with the microcosm, and he knows that there is no God apart from himself, no Creator as no being. Having found Gnosis we cannot turn our backs on it and become agnostic. Were we to admit that even the highest Dhyan Chohans are liable to err under a delusion, there would be no reality for us indeed, and the occult science would be as great a chimera as that God. If there is an absurdity in denying that which we do not know, it is still more extravagant to assign to it unknown laws. According to logic, nothing is that of which everything can truly be denied, and nothing can be truly affirmed. The idea, therefore, either of a finite or infinite nothing is a contradiction in terms. And yet according to theologians, “God the self-existent Being, is a most simple, unchangeable, incorruptible being, without parts, figure, motion, divisibility or any other such properties as we find in matter; for all such things do plainly and necessarily imply finiteness in their very notion, and are utterly inconsistent with complete infinity.” Therefore the God here offered to the adoration of the nineteenth century lacks every quality upon which man’s mind is capable of fixing any judgement. What is this in fact but a being of whom they can affirm nothing that is not instantly contradicted? Their own Bible, their revelation destroys all the moral perceptions they heap upon him, unless indeed they call those qualities perfections, that every other man’s reason and common sense call imperfections, odious vices and brutal wickedness.

Nay more, those who read our Buddhist scriptures, written for the superstitious masses, will fail to find in them a demon so vindictive, unjust, so cruel and so stupid, as the celestial tyrant upon whom the Christians prodigally lavish their servile worship, and upon whom their theologians heap those perfections that are contradicted on every page of their Bible. Truly and veritably, your theology has created her God but to destroy him piecemeal; your church is a fabulous Saturn who begets children but to destroy them.

A few reflections and arguments ought to support every new idea. For instance, we are sure to be taken to task for the following apparent contradiction. We deny the existence of a thinking conscious God, on the ground that such a God must either be conditioned, limited and subject to change, therefore not infinite, or, if he be represented to us as an eternal, unchangeable and independent being, with not a particle of matter in him; then we answer that it is no-being, but an immutable blind principle, a law. And yet, they will say, we believe in Dhyans or Planetaries (Spirits also) and endow them with a universal mind—and this must be explained. Our reasons must be briefly summed up thus:—

(1) We deny the absurd proposition that there can be, even in a boundless and eternal universe, two infinite, eternal, and omnipresent existences; (2) matter we know to be eternal, i.e., having had no beginning; (a) because matter is nature herself; (b) because that which cannot annihilate itself and is indestructible exists necessarily, and therefore it cannot begin to be, nor cannot it cease to be; (c) because the accumulated experiences of countless ages and that of exact science show to us matter (or nature) acting by her own peculiar energy, of which not one atom is ever in a state of absolute rest, and therefore it must have always existed, i.e., its materials ever changing form, combinations and properties, but its principles or elements being absolutely indestructible; (3) as to God, since no one has ever or at any time seen Him or It, unless He or It is the very essence and nature of this boundless, eternal matter, its energy and motion, we cannot regard him as either eternal or infinite or yet self-existing.

We refuse to admit a being or an existence of which we know absolutely nothing because (a) there is no room for him in the presence of that matter whose undeniable properties and qualities we know thoroughly well (b) because if he or it is but a part of that matter, it is ridiculous to maintain that he is the mover of that of which he is but a dependent part, and (c) because if they tell us that God is a self-existent, pure spirit, independent of matter, an extra cosmic Deity, we answer that, admitting even the possibility of such an impossibility, i.e., his existence, we yet hold that a purely immaterial spirit cannot be an intelligent, conscious ruler, nor can he have any of the attributes bestowed upon him by theology, and thus such a God becomes again but a blind force. Intelligence as found in our Dhyan Chohans is a faculty that can appertain but to organised or animated beings, however imponderable, or rather invisible, the material of their organisations.

Intelligence requires the necessity of thinking; to think one must have ideas; ideas suppose senses, which are physical and material; and how can anything material belong to pure spirit? If it be objected that thought cannot be a property of matter, we will ask, “Why not”? We must have an unanswerable proof of this assumption before we can accept it. Of the theologian we would enquire what was there to prevent his God, since he is the alleged Creator of all, from endowing matter with the faculty of thought, and when answered that evidently it has not pleased him to do so, that it is a mystery as well as an impossibility, we would insist upon being told why is it more improbable that matter should produce spirit and thought, than that the spirit or the thought of God should produce or create matter.

We do not bow our heads in the dust before the mystery of the mind, for we have solved it ages ago. Rejecting with contempt the theistic theory, we reject as much the automaton theory, teaching that states of consciousness are produced by the marshalling of the molecules of the brain; and we feel as little respect for that other hypothesis—the production of molecular motion by consciousness. Then in what do we believe? Well, we believe in the much laughed-at phlogiston (see article “What is Force and What is Matter?” “Theosophist”, September) and in what some natural philosophers would call nisus—the incessant though perfectly imperceptible (to the ordinary senses) motions or efforts one body is making on another—the pulsations of inert matter—its life.

The bodies of the Planetary Spirits are formed of that which Priestly and others called phlogiston, and for which we have another name—this essence in its highest (seventh) state forming that matter of which the organisms of the highest and purest Dhyans are composed, and in its lowest or densest form (so impalpable yet that science calls it energy and force) serving as a cover to the Planetaries of the first or lowest degree.

In other words, we believe in matter alone, in matter as visible nature and matter in its invisibility as the invisible, omnipresent, omnipotent Proteus with its unceasing motion which is its life, and which nature draws from herself, since she is the great whole, outside of which nothing can exist. For as Belfinger asserts: “Motion is a manner of existence that flows necessarily out of the essence of matter, that matter moves by its own peculiar energies, that its motion is due to the force which is inherent in itself, that the variety of motion and the phenomena that result proceed from the diversity of the properties, of the qualities and of the combinations which are originally found in the primitive matter, of which nature is the assemblage”; and of which your science knows less than one of our Tibetan Yak-drivers of Kant’s metaphysics. The existence of matter, then, is a fact; the existence of motion is another fact; then self-existence and eternity or indestructibility is a third fact; and the idea of pure spirit as a Being or an existence—give it whatever name you will—is a chimera, a gigantic absurdity.

Now that you are at the centre of modern Buddhistic exegesis, in personal relations with some of the clever commentators (from whom the holy Devas deliver us), I shall draw your attention to a few things which are really as discreditable to the perceptions of even non-initiates as they are misleading to the general public. The more one reads such speculations as those of Rhys-Davids and Lillie, the less can one bring oneself to believe that the unregenerate western mind can ever get at the core of our abstruse doctrines. Yet hopeless as their cases may be, it would appear well worth the trouble to test the intuition of some of your members by half expounding one or two mysteries, and leaving them to complete the chain themselves. Shall we take Mr. Rhys-Davids as our first subject, and show that, indirectly as he has done it, yet it is himself who strengthened the absurd ideas of Mr. Lillie, who fancies he has proved belief in a personal God in ancient Buddhism. Rhys-Davids’ “Buddhism” is full of the sparkle of our most important esotericism, but always, as it would seem, beyond not only his reach but apparently even his powers of intellectual perception. To avoid “absurd metaphysics” and its “inventions,” he creates unnecessary difficulties and falls headlong into inextricable confusion. He is like the Cape settlers, who lived over diamond fields without suspecting it.

I shall only instance the definition of Avalokitesvara on pp.202-3. There we find the author saying what to any Occultist seems a palpable absurdity: “The name Avalokitesvara, which means ‘ The Lord who looks down from on high,’ is a purely metaphysical invention. The curious use of the past participle avalokita in an active sense is clearly evident from the translation into Tibetan and Chinese.” Now saying that it means “the Lord who looks down from on high,” or as he kindly explains further, “the spirit of the Buddhas present in the Church,” is a complete reversal of the sense. In short, Avalokitesvara literally interpreted means “the Lord that is seen,” “Isvara” implying moreover rather the adjective than the noun,—lordly, self-existent, lordliness—not Lord. It is, when correctly interpreted, in one sense “the divine self perceived or seen by self,” the Atman or seventh principle ridded of its Mayavic distinction from its universal source, which becomes the object of perception, for and by the individuality centred in Buddhi, the sixth principle, something that happens only in the highest state of Samadhi. This is applying it to the microcosm. In the other sense, Avalokitesvara implies the seventh universal principle as the object perceived by the universal Buddhi or “Mind” or Intelligence, which is the synthetic aggregation of all the Dhyan Chohans, as of all other intelligencies, whether great or small, that ever were, are or will be. Nor is it the “spirit of the Buddhas present in the Church,” but the omnipresent universal spirit in the temple of nature in one case, and the seventh principle, the Atman, in the temple of man in the other. Mr. Rhys-Davids might at least have remembered the (to him) familiar simile made by the Christian adept, the Kabalistic Paul: “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God and that the spirit of God dwelleth in you?” and thus avoided making a mess of the name. Though as a grammarian he detected the use of the “past participle passive,” yet he shows himself far from an inspired Paul in overlooking the true cause, and saving his grammar by raising the hue and cry against metaphysics. And yet he quotes Beale’s Catena as his authority for the invention, when in truth this work is perhaps the only one in English that gives an approximately correct explanation of the word, at any rate, on page 374.

“Self-Manifested”—how? It is asked. “Speech or Vach was regarded as the Son of Manifestation of the Eternal Self, and was adored under the name of Avalokitesvara, the manifested God.” This shows as clearly as can be that Avalokitesvara is both the manifested Father and the manifested Son, the latter proceeded from and identified with the other; namely the Parabrahm and Jivatma, the universal and the individualised seventh principle, the Passive and the Active, the latter the Word, Logos, the “Verb,” call it by whatever name you will; only let these unfortunate deluded Christians know that the real Christ of every Christian is the Vach, the “mystical voice,” while the man Jeshu was but a mortal like any of us, an Adept more by his inherent purity and ignorance of real evil, than by what he had learned from his initiated Rabbis and the already (at that period) fast degenerating Egyptian hierophants and priests. A great mistake is also made by Beal, who says: “This name (Avalokitesvara) in Chinese took the form of Kwan-shai-yin, and the divinity worshipped under that name (was) generally regarded as a female.” Kwan-shai-yin, or the universally manifested voice, is active male, and must not be confounded with Kwan-yin, or Buddhi, the spiritual Soul (the sixth principle) and the vehicle of its “Lord”. It is Kwan-yin that is the female principle or the manifested passive, manifesting itself “to every creature in the universe, in order to deliver all men from the consequences of sin”—as rendered by Beal, this once, quite correctly (p.383)—while Kwan-shai-yin, the Son identical with his Father, is the absolute activity, hence having no direct relation to objects of sense as Passivity.

What a common ruse it is of your Aristotelians! With sleuth-hound persistence they track an idea to the very verge of the impassable chasm; and then, brought to bay, leave the metaphysicians to take up the trail if they can, or let it be lost. It is but natural that a Christian theologian, a missionary, should act upon this line, since, as easily perceived even in the little I gave out just now, a too correct rendering of our Avalokitesvara and Kwan-shai-yin might have very disastrous effects. It would simply amount to showing Christendom the true and undeniable origin of the “awful and incomprehensible mysteries” of its Trinity, Trans-substantiation, Immaculate Conception, as also whence their ideas of the Father, Son, Spiritus—and mother. It is less easy to shuffle at pleasure the cards of Buddhistic chronology than those of Krishna and Christ. They cannot place—however much they would—the birth of our Lord Sangyas Buddha A.D., as they have contrived to place that of Krishna. But why an atheist and a materialist like Mr. Rhys-Davids should so avoid the correct rendering of our dogmas even when he happens to understand them—which does not happen every day—is something surpassingly curious. In this instance the blind and guilty Rhys-Davids leads the blind and innocent Mr. Lillie into the ditch, when the latter catching at the proffered straw rejoices in the idea that Buddhism teaches in reality a personal God.

Does your B. T. S. [ British Theosophical Society] know the meaning of the white and black interlaced triangles of the Parent Society’s seal that it has also adopted? Shall I explain? The double triangle, viewed by the Jewish Kabalists as Solomon’s seal, is, as many of you doubtless know, the Sri-an-tara of the archaic Aryan Temple, the “mystery of mysteries,” a geometrical synthesis of the whole occult doctrine. The two interlaced triangles are the Buddhanymus of creation. They contain the “squaring of the circle,” the “philosopher’s stone,” the great problems of Life and Death—and the mystery of Evil. The Chela who can explain this from every one of its aspects is virtually an Adept. How is it then that the only one among you who has come so near to unravelling the mystery is also the only one who got none of her ideas from books? Unconsciously she gives out to him who has the key, the first syllable of the Ineffable Name! Of course you know that the double triangle, the Salkir Chakram of Vishnu, or the six-pointed

star, is the perfect seven. In all the old Sanskrit works, Vedic and Tantric, you find the number six mentioned more often than seven, this last figure, the central point, being implied, for it is the germ of the six and their matrix. It is then thus: the central point standing for seventh and the circle, the Maha-akasha, endless space for the seventh universal principle. In one sense both are viewed as Avalokitesvara, for they are triangles; the upward pointing one is wisdom concealed, and the downward pointing one wisdom revealed (in the phenomenal world). The circle indicates the bounding, circumscribing quality of the All, the universal Principle, which from any given point expands so as to embrace all things, while embodying the potentiality of every action in the cosmos. At the point there is the centre round which the circle is traced, they are identical and one, though from the standpoint of Maya and Avidya (illusion and ignorance) one is separated from the other by the manifested triangle, the three sides of which represent the three gunas, finite attributes. In symbology the central point is Jivatma, (the seventh principle) whence Avalokitesvara, the Kwan-Shai-yin, the manifested “voice” (or Logos), the germ point of manifested activity; hence, in the phraseology of the Christian Kabalists, “the son of the Father and mother,” and agreeably to ours, “the self manifested in self”, Jih-Sui, the “one form of existence,” the child of Dharmakaya (the universally diffused essence), both male and female, Parabrahm or “Adi Buddha” while acting through that germ point outwardly as an active force, reacts from the circumference inwardly as the supreme but latent Potency. The double triangles symbolize the Great Passive and the Great Active, the male and female, Purusha and Prakriti. Each triangle is a trinity because presenting a triple aspect. The white represents in its straight lines: Jnanam (knowledge), Jnata (the knower), Jneyam (that which is known). The black: form, colour and substance; also creative, preservative and destructive forces, and are mutually correlating, etc.

Well may you admire and more should you wonder at the marvellous lucidity of that remarkable seeress, who, ignorant of Sanskrit or Pali and thus shut out from their metaphysical treasures, has yet seen a great light shining from behind the dark hills of exoteric religions. How, think you, did the writers of “The Perfect Way” come to know that Adonai was the Son and not the Father, or that the third person of the Christian Trinity is female? Verily they lay in that work several times their hands upon the keystone of Occultism. Only does the lady who persists in using without an explanation the misleading term “God” in her writings know how nearly she comes up to our doctrine when saying: “Having for Father, Spirit which is Life (the endless circle or Parabrahm) and for mother, the Great Deep, which is substance, (Prakriti in its indifferentiated condition) Adonai possesses the potency of both and wields the dual powers of all things.” We would say triple, but in the sense as given this will do. Pythagoras had a reason for never using the finite useless figure 2, and for altogether discarding it. The one can when manifesting become only three. The unmanifested when a simple duality remains passive and concealed. The dual monad (the seventh and sixth principles) has, in order to manifest itself as a Logos, the Kwan-shai-yin, first to become a triad (seventh, sixth and one-half of fifth); then, on the bosom of the “Great Deep,” attracting within itself the one circle, form out of it the perfect square, thus “squaring the circle”—the greatest of all the mysteries, friend—and inscribing within the latter the word (the Ineffable Name)—otherwise the duality could never tarry as such, and would have to be reabsorbed into the one. The “Deep” is space, both male and female, “Purusha (as Brahma) breathes in the eternity; when “He” inbreathes, Prakriti (as manifested substance) disappears in his bosom; when “He” outbreathes she reappears as Maya,” says the sloka. The one reality is Mulaprakriti (indifferentiated substance), the “rootless root,” the . . . But we have to stop lest there should remain but little to tell for your own intuitions.

Well may the geometer of the R. S. [ Royal Society.] not know that the apparent absurdity of attempting to square the circle covers a mystery ineffable. It would hardly be found among the foundation stones of Mr. Roden Noel’s speculations upon the Pneumatical Body . . . of our Lord,” nor among the debris of Mr. Farmer’s “A New Basis of Belief in Immortality,” and to many such metaphysical minds it would be more than useless to divulge the fact, that the unmanifested circle, the Father or Absolute Life, is non-existent outside the Triangle and Perfect Square, and is only manifested in the Son, and that it is when reversing the action and returning to its absolute state of unity and the square expands once more into the circle, that the “Son returns to the bosom of the Father”. There it remains till called back by his mother, “the Great Deep,” to remanifest as a triad, the Son partaking at once of the essence of the Father and that of the mother, the active Substance, Prakriti in its differentiated condition. “My mother (Sophia, the manifested wisdom) took me,” says Jesus in a gnostic treatise, and he asks his disciple to tarry till he comes. . . . The true word may only be found by tracing the mystery of the passage inward and outward, of the Eternal Life through the states typified in these three geometric figures.

The criticism of “A Student of Occultism” (whose wits are sharpened by the mountain air of his home) and the answers by S.T. K. Chany (June Theosophist) upon a part of your annular and circular expositions need not annoy or disturb in any way your philosophic calm. As our Pondicherry Chela significantly says, neither you nor any other man across the threshold has had, or ever will have, the “complete theory” of evolution taught him or get it unless he guesses it for himself. If anyone can unravel it from such tangled threads as are given him, very well, and a fine proof it would indeed be of his or her spiritual insight. Some have come very near it. But yet there is always with the best of them just enough error, colouring and misconception—the shadow of manas projecting across the field of Buddhi—to prove the eternal law that only the unshackled spirit shall see the things of the spirit without a veil. No untaught amateur could ever rival the proficient in this branch of research; yet the world’s real Revelators have been few, and its pseudo-Saviours legion; and fortunate it is if their half glimpses of the light are not like Islam enforced at the sword’s point, or like Christian theology amid blazing fagots and in torture chambers. Your Fragments contain some—still very few—errors, due solely to your two preceptors of Adyar, one of whom would not, and the other could not tell you at all. The rest could not be called mistakes—rather, incomplete explanations. Those are due, partly to your own imperfect education in your last theme—I mean the ever threatening obscurations—partly to the poor vehicles of language at our disposal, and in part again to the reserve imposed upon us by rule. Yet, all things considered, they are few, and trivial, while as to those noticed by “A Student,” etc. (the Marcus Aurelius of Simla) in your No.VII, it will be pleasant for you to know that every one of them, however now seeming to you contradictory, can (and if it should seem necessary shall) be easily reconciled with facts.

The trouble is that (a) you cannot be given the real figures and different age in the Rounds, and (b) that you do not open doors enough for explorers. The bright luminary of the B.T.S [ British Theosophical Society.] and the intelligences that surround her (embodied, I mean) may help you to see the plans; at all events, try. “Nothing was ever lost by trying.” You share with all beginners the tendency to draw too absolutely strong inferences from partly caught hints and to dogmatize thereupon as though the last word had been spoken. You will correct this in good time. You may misunderstand us, are more than likely to do so, for our language must always be more or less that of parable and suggestion, when treading upon forbidden ground; we have our own peculiar modes of expression and what lies behind the fence of words is even more important than what you read, but still, Try! Perhaps if Mr. S. Moses [ W. Stainton Moses, the spiritualist, who wrote under the pseudonym “M. A. (Oxon)” could know just what was meant by what was said to him and about his Intelligences, he would find all strictly true. As he is a man of interior growth, his day may come and his reconciliation with “the occultists” be complete. Who knows?

Our Ideas on Evil

(Copied out at Simla, September 28^th, 1882)

Evil has no existence per se, and is but the absence of good and exists but for him who is made its victim; it proceeds from two causes, and no more than good is it an independent cause in nature. Nature is destitute of goodness or malice; she follows only immutable laws when she either gives life and joy, or sends suffering and death, and destroys what she has created. Nature has an antidote for every poison, and her laws have a reward for every suffering. The butterfly devoured by a bird becomes that bird, and the little bird devoured by an animal goes into a higher form. It is the blind law of necessity and the eternal fitness of things, and hence cannot be called evil in nature. The real evil proceeds from human intelligence, and its origin rests entirely with reasoning man, who dissociates himself from Nature.

Humanity alone, then, is the true source of evil. Evil is the exaggeration of good, the progeny of human selfishness and greediness. Think profoundly and you will find that, save death (which is no evil, but a necessary law) and accidents, which will always find their reward in a future life, the origin of every evil, whether small or great, is in human action—in man, whose intelligence makes him the one free agent in nature.

It is not nature that creates diseases, but man. The latter’s mission and destiny in the economy of nature is to die his natural death brought by age. Save by accident, neither a savage nor a wild (free) animal dies of disease. Food, drink, sexual relations, all are necessities of life, yet excess in them brings on disease, misery, suffering, mental and physical, and the latter are transmitted as the greatest evils to future generations, the progeny of the culprits. Ambition, the desire of securing happiness and comfort for those we love by obtaining honour and riches, are praiseworthy natural feelings; but when they transform man into an ambitious, cruel tyrant, a miser or a selfish egoist, they bring untold misery on those around him—on nations as well as on individuals. All this, then, (food, wealth, ambition and the thousand other things we have to leave unmentioned) becomes the source and cause of evil, whether in its abundance or through its absence. Become a glutton, a debauchee, a tyrant, and you become the originator of diseases, of human suffering and misery. Lack all this and you starve, you are despised as a nobody, and the majority of the herd of your fellow-men make you a sufferer for your whole life. Therefore it is neither nature nor an imaginary deity that has to be blamed, but human nature made vile by selfishness. Think well over these few words; work out every cause of evil you can think of and trace it to its origin, and you will have solved one-third of the problems of evil.

And now, after making due allowances for evils that are natural and cannot be avoided—and so few are they that I challenge the whole host of Western metaphysicians to call them evils or trace them to an independent cause—I will point out the greatest, the chief cause of nearly two-thirds of the evils that pursue humanity ever since that cause became a power. It is religion, under whatever form or in whatever nation; it is the sacerdotal caste, the priesthood and the churches. It is in those illusions that man looks upon as sacred, that he has to search out the source of that multitude of evils which is the great curse of humanity and that almost overwhelms mankind; ignorance created gods, and cunning took advantage of the opportunity. Look at India, look at Christendom and Islam, at Judaism and Fetichism. It is priestly imposture that rendered these gods so terrible to man; it is religion that makes of him the selfish bigot, the fanatic, that hates all mankind out of his own sect, without rendering him any better or more moral for it. It is belief in God or gods that makes of two-thirds of humanity the slaves of those who deceive them under the false pretence of saving them. Is not man ever ready to commit any kind of evil, if told that his God or gods demand the crime? Voluntary victim of an illusory god, the abject slave of his crafty ministers, the Irish, Italian or Sclavonian peasant will starve himself, and see his family starving and naked, to feed and clothe his padre or pope.

For 2.000 years India groaned under the weight of caste, Brahmins alone feeding on the fat of the land, and today the followers of Christ and Mahomet are cutting each other’s throats in the name for the greater glory of their respective myths. Remember, the sum of human misery will never be diminished until that day when the better portion of humanity destroy, in the name of truth, morality and universal charity, the alters of their false gods.

If it is objected that we too have temples, we too have priests, and that our Lamas also live on charity, let them know that the objects above named have in communion with their Western equivalents but the name. Thus in our temples there is neither a god nor gods worshipped, only the three sacred memories of the greatest as the holiest man that ever lived. If our Lamas, to honour that fraternity of the Bhikkus established by our Blessed Master himself, go out to be fed by the laity, the latter, often to the number of 5 to 25,000 is fed and taken care of by the Sangha (the fraternity of Lamaic monks) the Lamasery providing for the wants of the poor, the sick and the afflicted. Our Lamas accept food, never money, and it is in these temples that the origin of evil is preached and impressed upon the people. There they are taught the Four Noble Truths (Arya sachchani), and the chain of causation (the twelve Nidanas) gives them a solution of the problem of the origin and destruction of suffering.

Read the Maha-vagga: (Vin. Pit.I.i.1), and try to understand, not with the prejudiced western mind but with the spirit of intuition and truth, what the fully Enlightened One says in the 1^st Khandhaka. Allow me to translate it for you. “At the time when the blessed Buddha was at Uruvela on the shores of the river Neranjara, as he rested under the Bodhi-tree of wisdom after he had become Sambuddha; at the end of the seventh day, having his mind fixed on the chain of causation, he spake thus: ‘From ignorance spring the Sankharas of three-fold nature—productions of body, of speech, of thought; from Sankharas spring consciousness; from consciousness springs name and form; and from these spring the six natures (of the six senses, the seventh being the property of but the enlightened); from these spring contact; from this sensation; from this thirst (or desire Kama-tanha); from thirst—attachment, existence, birth, old age and death, grief, lamentation, suffering, dejection and despair. Again by the destruction of ignorance, the Sankharas are destroyed, and their consciousness, name and form, the six regions, contact, sensation, thirst, attachment (selfishness), existence, birth, old age, death, grief, lamentation, suffering, dejection and despair are destroyed. Such is the cessation of the whole mass of human suffering.’ Knowing this the Blessed One uttered this solemn utterance. When the real nature of things becomes clear to the meditating Bhikkhu, then all his doubts fade away since he has learned what is that nature and what its cause; from ignorance spring all the evils, from knowledge comes the cessation of this mass of misery; then the meditating Brahmin stands dispelling the hosts of Maya like the sun when it illumines the sky.” Meditation here means the superhuman, not supernatural, qualities of Arhatship in its highest or spiritual power.

Alone the Adepts, i.e., the embodied spirits, are forbidden by our wise and intransgressible laws to completely subject to themselves another and a weaker will, that of free-born man. The latter mode of proceeding is the favourite one resorted to by the Brothers of the Shadow, the Sorcerers, the Elementary Spooks and, as an isolated exception, the highest Planetary Spirits, those who can no longer err. But these appear on earth but at the origin of every new human kind at the junction or close of the two ends of the great cycle; and they remain with man no longer than the time required for the eternal truths they teach to impress themselves so forcibly upon the plastic minds of the new races as to warrant them from being entirely lost or forgotten in ages hereafter by the forth-coming generations.

The mission of the Planetary Spirit is but to strike the Key-note of Truth. Once he has directed the vibration of the latter to run its course uninterruptedly along the catenation of the race, and the end of the cycle, the denizen of the highest inhabited sphere disappears from the surface of our planet until the following resurrection of flesh. The vibrations of the primitive truth are what your philosophers term innate ideas. To your question: “May a Planetary spirit have been humanely incarnated?” I will first say that . . . there can be no Planetary Spirit that was not once material, or what you call human. When our great Buddha, the patron of all the Adepts, the reformer and codifier of the Occult System, reached first Nirvana on earth, he became a Planetary Spirit, i.e., his soul could at one and the same time rove the interstellar spaces in full consciousness and continue at will on earth in his original and individual body. For the divine self had so completely enfranchised itself from matter that it could create at will an inner substitute for itself, and leaving it in the human form for days and weeks, sometimes years, affect in no wise by the change either the vital principle or the physical mind of its body. By the way, that is the highest form of Adeptship man can hope for on our planet; but it is as rare as the Buddhas themselves, the last Hobelgan who reached it being Tsong-ka-pa of Rokowr (XIVth century), the reformer of esoteric as well as vulgar Lamaism.

Many are those who break through the egg-shell, few who once out are able to exercise their nirupa namaphen [ So in MS., but evidently wrongly transcribed.] fully, when completely out of the body. Conscious life in spirit is as difficult for some natures as swimming is for some bodies. Though the human frame is lighter in its bulk than water, and though every person is born with the faculty, so few develop in themselves the art of treading water that death by drowning is the most frequent of accidents. The Planetary Spirit of that kind, the Buddha-like, can pass at will into other bodies, of more or less materialized matter, inhabiting other regions of the universe. There are many other grades and orders, but there is no separate and eternally constituted order of Planetary Spirits. I may answer with what I said to G.H. Fechner one day when he wanted to know the Hindu view on what he had written: “You are right; every diamond, every planet and star has its own individual soul besides man and animal . . . and there is a hierarchy of souls from the lowest forms of matter up to the world-soul; but you are mistaken when adding to that the assurance that the spirits of the departed hold sweet communion with souls that are still connected with a human body, for they do not.” The relative position of the inhabited worlds in our solar system would alone preclude such a possibility; for I trust you have given up the queer idea (a natural result of early Christian training) that there can possibly be human intelligences inhabiting purely spiritual regions. You will then as readily understand the fallacy of Christians who would burn immaterial souls in a material physical hell, as the mistake of the more educated spiritualists who lull themselves with the thought that any other than the denizens of the two worlds immediately interlinked with our own can possibly communicate with them. However ethereal and purified of gross matter they may be, the pure spirits are still subject to the physical and universal laws of nature. They cannot, even if they would, span the abyss that separates their world from ours. They can be visited in spirit; their spirit cannot descend and reach us. The attract, they cannot be attracted—their spiritual polarity being an insuperable difficulty in the way.

Once fairly started upon that subject I will endeavour to explain to you still more clearly where lies the impossibility. You will thus be answered in regard to Planetary Spirits and seance room spirits.

The cycle of intelligent existences commences at the highest worlds or planets, the term “highest” meaning here the most spiritually perfect. Evolving from Kosmic matter, which is Akasa, the primeval, not secondary, plastic medium or ether of science, instinctively suspected, improves with the rest. Man first evolves from this matter in its most sublimated state, appearing at the threshold of Eternity, as a perfectly ethereal, not spiritual, entity, says a Planetary Spirit. He is but one removed from the universal and spiritual world-essence—the “Anima Mundi” of the Greeks or that which humanity in its spiritual decadence has degraded into a mythical personal God. Hence at that state the spirit-man is at best an active power—an immutable, therefore, an unthinking principle (the term immutable being again used here but to denote that state for the time being), the immutability applying here but to the inner principle which will vanish and disappear as soon as the spark of the material in him will start on its cyclic work of evolution and transformation. In his subsequent descent, and in proportion to the increase of matter, he will assert more and more his activity.

Now the congeries of the star-worlds (including our own planet) inhabited by intelligent beings may be likened to an orb, or rather an epicycloid, formed of rings like a chain, worlds interlinked together—the totality representing an imaginary endless ring or circle. The progress of man throughout the whole, from its starting to its closing points, meeting on the highest point of the circumference, is what we call Maha-Yuga, or great cycle—the Kyklos whose head is lost in a crown of spirit and its lowest circumference in absolute matter, viz., the point of cessation of action of the active principle. If, using a more familiar term, we call the great cycle the macrocosm and its compound parts or interlinked star-worlds the microcosm, the occultist’s meaning in representing each of the latter as perfect copies of the former will become evident. The great is the prototype of the smaller cycles; and as such, each star-world has in its turn its own cycle of evolution, which starts with a purer and ends with a grosser or more material nature. As they descend, each world presents itself naturally more and more shadowy, becoming at the antipodes absolute matter. Propelled by the irresistible cyclic impulse, the Planetary Spirit has to descend before he can reascend. On his way he has to pass through the whole ladder of evolution, missing no rung, to halt at every star-world as he would at a station, and, besides the unavoidable cycle of that particular and every respective star-world, to perform in it his own life-cycle, viz., returning and reincarnating as many times as he fails to complete his round of life in it, as he dies on it before reaching the age of reason, as correctly stated in Isis.

That is what happens. After circling, so to say, along the arc of the cycle, circling along and within it (the daily and yearly rotation of the Earth is as good an illustration as any) when the spirit-man reaches our own planet, which is one of the lowest, having lost at every station some of the ethereal, and acquired an increase of material nature, both spirit and matter have become pretty much equilibrated in him. But then he has the earth’s cycle to perform, and, as in the process of involution and evolution downwards, matter is ever trying to stifle spirit, when, arrived at the lowest point of his pilgrimage, the once pure Planetary Spirit will be found dwindled to what science agrees to call a primitive or primordial man amidst a nature as primordial, speaking geologically; for physical nature keeps pace with the physiological as well as the spiritual man in her cyclic career. At that point the great law begins its work of selection. Matter found entirely divorced from spirit is thrown over into the still lower worlds, into the sixth “gati” or “way of rebirth” of the vegetable and mineral worlds, and of primitive animal forms. From thence, matter, ground over in the workshop of nature, proceeds soul-less back to its Mother-Fount, while the egos purified of their dross are enabled to resume their progress once more onward.

It is here that the laggard egos perish by the millions. It is the solemn moment of the survival of the fittest—the annihilation of those unfit. It is but matter (or material man) which is compelled by its own weight to descend to the very bottom of the “circle of necessity” to then assume an animal form; as to the winner of that race throughout the worlds, the spiritual ego, he will ascend from star to star, from one world to another, circling onward to re-become the once pure Planetary Spirit, then higher still, to finally reach its first starting point, and from thence to merge into Mystery. No Adept has ever penetrated beyond the veil of primitive cosmic matter. The highest, the most perfect vision, is limited to the Universe of Form and Matter.

But my explanation does not end here. You want to know why it is deemed supremely difficult if not utterly impossible for pure disembodied spirits to communicate with men through mediums of Phantomosophy. I say because (1) on account of the antagonistic atmospheres respectively surrounding these worlds; (2) of the entire dissimilarity of the physiological and spiritual conditions; and (3) because that chain of worlds I have just been telling you about is not only an epicycloid but an elliptical orbit of existences, having, as every eclipse, not one but two points—two foci which can never approach each other, man being at one focus of it and pure spirit at the other. To this you might object. I can neither help it nor change the fact. But there is still another and far mightier impediment. Like a rosary composed of white and black beads alternating with each other, so that concatenation of worlds is made up of worlds of causes and worlds of effects—the latter the direct result produced by the former. Thus it becomes evident that every sphere of causes (and our Earth is one) is not only interlinked with, and surrounded by, but actually separated from, its nearest neighbour, the higher sphere of causality, by an impenetrable atmosphere (in its spiritual sense) of effects, bordering on and even interlinking , never mixing with the next sphere; for one is active, the other passive—the world of causes positive, that of effects negative. This passive resistance can be overcome, but under conditions of which you most learned spiritualists have not the faintest idea.

All movement is, so to say, polar. It is very difficult to convey my meaning to you at this point, but I will go on to the end. I am aware of my failure to bring before you these, to us, axiomatical truths, in any other form but that of a simple logical postulate, if so much, they being capable of absolute and unequivocal demonstration but to the highest Seers. But I will give you food for thought if nothing else. The intermediary spheres, being but the projected shadows of the world of causes, are regulated by the last. They are the great halting-places, the stations in which the new self-conscious egos, to be the self-begotten progeny of the old and disembodied egos of our planet, are gestated. Before the new Phoenix, reborn of the ashes of its parent, can soar higher to a better, more spiritually perfect world—still a world of matter—it has to pass through the process of a new birth, so to say, and as on our Earth where two-thirds of infants are either still-born or die in infancy, so in our “world of effects”. On Earth it is the physiological and mental defects, the sins of the progenitors, that are visited upon the issue; in that land of shadows, the new and yet unconscious ego-foetus becomes the just victim of the transgressions of its old self, whose Karma, merit and demerit, will alone weave out its future destiny. In that world we find but unconscious, self-acting, ex-human machines, souls in their transition state, whose dormant faculties and individuality lie as a butterfly in its chrysalis; and spiritualists would yet have them talk sense! Caught at times into the vortex of the abnormal mediumistic current, they become the unconscious echoes of thoughts and ideas crystallized around those present. Every positive, well-directed mind is capable of neutralising such secondary effects in a seance room.

The world below ours is worse yet. The former is harmless at least; it is more sinned against by being disturbed, than sinning; the latter, allowing the retention of full consciousness (as being a hundredfold more material) is positively dangerous. The notions of hell and purgatory, of paradise and resurrection are all caricatured, distorted echoes of the primeval one truth taught humanity in the infancy of its races by every first Messenger—the Planetary Spirit whose remembrance lingered in the memory of man as Elu of the Chaldees, Osiris of the Egyptian, Vishnu, the first Bhuddhas, and so on. The lower world of effects is the sphere of such distorted thoughts, of the most sensual conceptions and pictures, of anthropomorphic deities, the out-creations of their creators, the sensual human minds of people who have never grown out of their brute-hood on Earth. Remembering that thoughts are things—have tenacity, coherence, and life, that they are real entities—the rest will become plain. Disembodied, the creator is attracted naturally to its creation, and creatures sucked in by the maelstrom dug out by their own hands. But I must pause, for volumes would hardly suffice to explain all that is said by me in this letter.

One [ In the MS of C.W.L., these two paragraphs exist in a condensed form. In the MS of F.A. they do not appear at all. The paragraphs as I print them are from a copy of a letter of the Master K.H. which I obtained in Paris in 1916. In this copy the Greek words are wrongly copied. I have tentatively restored autokrates, apeiron, noumena and oiakonomos on the recommendation of a Greek scholar.] of your letters with a quotation from one of my own: “Remember that there is within man no abiding principle”—which sentence I find followed by a remark of yours, “How about the sixth and seventh principles?” To this I answer: Neither Atma nor Buddhi were ever within man— a little metaphysical axiom that you can study with advantage in Plutarch and Anaxagoras; the latter made his nous autokrates—the spirit of self-potent—the apeiron that alone recognized noumena, while the former taught on the authority of Plato and Pythagoras that the Oiakonomos or the nous always remained without the body, that is, floated and overshadowed, so to say, the extreme part of the man’s head. It is only the vulgar who think it is within them, says Buddha; you have to get rid entirely of all the subjects of impermanence composing the body, that your body will become permanent.

The permanent never merges within the impermanent, although the two are one. But it is only when all outward appearances are gone that there is left that one principle of life which exists independently of all external phenomena. It is the fire that burns in the eternal light, when the fuel is expended and the flame extinguished, for that fire is neither in the flame nor in the fuel, nor yet inside either of the two, but above, beneath, and everywhere.

Death

By the late Eliphas Levi

(Theosophist, October 1881)

DEATH is the necessary dissolution of imperfect combinations. It is the reabsorption of the rough outline of individual life into the great work of universal life; only the perfect is immortal.

It is a bath of oblivion. It is the fountain of youth where on one side plunges old age, and whence on the other issues infancy.[ Rebirth of the Ego after death. The Eastern and especially Buddhistic doctrine of the evolution of the new, out of the old Ego.]

Death is the transfiguration of the living; corpses are but the dead leaves of the Tree of Life which will still have all its leaves in the spring. The resurrection of men resembles eternally these leaves.

Perishable forms are conditioned by immortal types.

All who have lived upon earth live there still in new exemplars of their types, but the souls which have surpassed their type receive elsewhere a new form based upon a more perfect type, as they mount ever on the ladder of worlds; [ From one loka to the other; from a positive world of causes and activity, to a negative world of effects and passivity.] the bad exemplars are broken and their matter returned into the general mass.[ Into Cosmic matter, when they necessarily lose their self-consciousness or individuality, or are annihilated, as the Eastern Kabalists say.]

Our souls are as it were a music, of which our bodies are the instruments. The music exists without the instruments, but it cannot make itself heard without a material intermediary; the immaterial can neither be conceived nor grasped.

Man in his present existence only retains certain predispositions from his past existences.

Evocations of the dead are but condensations of memory, the imaginary coloration of the shades. To evoke those who are no longer there, is but to cause their types to reissue from the imagination of nature. [To ardently desire to see a dead person is to evoke the image of that person, to call it forth from the astral light or ether wherein rest photographed the images of the Past. That is what is being partially done in the seance rooms. The spiritualists are unconscious Necromancers.]

To be in direct communication with the imagination of nature, one must be either asleep intoxicated, in an ecstasy, cataleptic, or mad.

The eternal memory preserves only the imperishable; all that passes in Time belongs of right to oblivion.

The preservation of corpses is a violation of the laws of nature; it is an outrage on the modesty of death, which hides the works of destruction, as we should hide those of reproduction. Preserving corpses is to create phantoms in the imagination of the earth [To intensify these images in the astral or sidereal light.] the spectres of the nightmare, of hallucination, and fear, are but the wandering photographs of preserved corpses. It is these preserved or imperfectly destroyed corpses, which spread, amid the living, plague, cholera, contagious diseases, sadness, scepticism and disgust of life. [ People being intuitionally to realize the great truth, and societies for burning bodies and crematories are now started in many places in Europe.] Death is exhaled by death. The cemeteries poison the atmosphere of towns, and the miasma of corpses blight the children even in the bosoms of their mothers.

Near Jerusalem in the Valley of Gehenna a perpetual fire was maintained for the combustion of filth and the carcasses of animals, and it is to this eternal fire that Jesus alluded when he says that the wicked shall be cast into Gehenna; signifying that dead souls will be treated as corpses. The Talmud says that the souls of those who have not believed in immortality will not become immortal. It is faith only which gives personal immortality; [ Faith and will-power. Immortality is conditional, as we have ever stated. It is the reward of the pure and good. The wicked man, the material sensualist only survives. He who appreciates but physical pleasures will not and cannot live in the hereafter as a self-conscious Entity.] science and reason can only affirm the general immortality.

The mortal sin is the suicide of the soul. This suicide would occur if the man devoted himself to evil with the full strength of his mind, with a perfect knowledge of good and evil, and an entire liberty of action which seems impossible in practice, but which is possible in theory, because the essence of an independent personality is an unconditioned liberty. The divinity imposes nothing upon man, not even existence. Man has a right to withdraw himself even from the divine goodness, and the dogma of eternal hell is only the assertion of eternal free-will.

God precipitates no one into hell. It is men who can go there freely, definitely and by their own choice.

Those who are in hell, that is to say, amid the gloom of evil [ That is to say, they are reborn in a “lower world” which is neither “Hell” nor any theological purgatory, but a world of nearly absolute matter and one preceding the last one in the “circle of necessity” from which “there is no redemption, for there reigns absolute spiritual darkness”. (Book of Kiu-te).] and the sufferings of the necessary punishment, without having absolutely so willed it, are called to emerge from it. This hell is for them only a purgatory. The dammed completely, absolutely and without respite, is Satan who is not a rational existence, but a necessary hypothesis.

Satan is the last word of creation. He is the end infinitely emancipated. He willed to be like God of which he is the opposite. God is the hypothesis necessary to reason, Satan the hypothesis necessary to unreason asserting itself as free-will.

To be immortal in good, one must identify oneself with God; to be immortal in evil, with Satan. These are two poles of the world of souls; between these two poles vegetate and die without remembrance the useless portion of mankind.

Editor’s Note: This may seem incomprehensible to the average reader, for it is one of the most abstruse of the tenets of Occult doctrine. Nature is dual: there is a physical and material side, as there is a spiritual and moral side to it; and, there is both good and evil in it, the latter the necessary shadow to its light. To force oneself upon the current of immortality, or rather to secure for oneself an endless series of rebirths as conscious individualities—says the Book of Kiu-te, Vol. XXXI—one must become a co-worker with nature, either for good or bad, in her work of creation and reproduction, or in that of destruction. It is but the useless drones, which she gets rid of, violently ejecting and making them perish by the millions as self-conscious entities. Thus, while the good and pure strive to reach Nipang (nirvana or the state of absolute existence and absolute consciousness—which, in the world of finite perceptions, is non-existence and non-consciousness)—the wicked will seek, on the contrary, a series of lives as conscious, definite existences or beings, preferring to be ever suffering under the law of retributive justice rather than give up their lives as portions of the integral, universal whole. Being well aware that they can never hope to reach the final rest in pure spirit, or nirvana, they cling to life in any form, rather than give up that “desire for life” or Tanha which causes a new aggregation of Skandhas or the individuality to be reborn. Nature is as good a mother to the cruel bird of prey as she is to the harmless dove. Mother nature will punish her child, but since he has become her co-worker for destruction she cannot eject him. There are thoroughly wicked and depraved men, yet as highly intellectual acutely spiritual for evil, as those who are spiritual for good. The Egos of these may escape the law of final destruction or annihilation for ages to come. That is what Eliphas Levi means by becoming “immortal in evil,” through identification with Satan. “I would thou wert cold or hot,” says the vision of the Revelation to St. John (III, 15-16). “So then because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. The Revelation is an absolutely Kabalistic book. Heat and cold are the two “poles,” i.e., good and evil, spirit and matter. Nature spues the “luke-warm” or “the useless portion of mankind” out of her mouth, i.e., annihilates them. This conception, that a considerable portion of mankind may after all not have immortal souls, will not be new even to European readers. Coleridge himself likened the case to that of an oak tree bearing, indeed, millions of acorns, but acorns of which under nominal conditions not one in a thousand ever developed into a tree, and suggested that, as the majority of acorns failed to develop into a new living tree, so possibly the majority of men fail to develop into a new living entity after this earthly death.

(Theosophist, March 1883)

“DEVACHAN” is of course a state not a locality, as much as “Avitchi”—its antithesis (which please not to confound with Hell). Esoteric Buddhist philosophy has three principal lokas so-called namely (1) Kama Loka, (2) Rupa-loka; and (3) Arupa-loka; or in their literal translation and meaning—(1) world of desires or passions, of unsatisfied earthly cravings—the abode of “Shells” and Victims, of Elementaries and suicides; (2) the world of Forms, i.e., of shadows more spiritual, having form and objectivity but no substance; and (3) the formless world, or rather the world of no-Form, the incorporeal, since its denizens can have neither body, shape, nor colour for us mortals, and in the sense that we give to these terms. These are the three spheres of ascending spirituality in which the several groups of subjective semi-subjective entities find their attractions. The time having not yet come to speak of the latter two, we will merely notice the first, namely the Kama-loka. Thence it is, that all but the remaining shells, the suicides and the victims of premature violent deaths, go according to their attractions and powers either into the Devachanic or Avitchi state, which two states form the numberless sub-divisions of “Rupa” and “Arupa” lokas; that is to say, that such states not only vary in degree, or in their presentation to the subject entity as regards form, colour, etc.,—but that there is an infinite scale of such states, in their progressive spirituality and intensity of feeling; from the lowest in the Rupa, up to the highest and the most exalted in the Arupa-loka. The student must bear in mind that personality is the synonym for limitation; and that the more selfish, the more contracted the person’s ideas, the closer will he cling to the lower spheres of being, the longer loiter on the plane of selfish social intercourse.

II

To use an antiphrasis, “Avitchi” is a state of the most ideal spiritual wickedness, something akin to the state of Lucifer, so superbly described by Milton. Not many, though are there who can reach it, as the thoughtful reader will perceive. And if it is urged that, since there is Devachan for nearly all, for the good, and the bad, and the indifferent, the ends of harmony and equilibrium are frustrated, and the law of Retribution and of impartial, implacable Justice hardly met and satisfied by such a comparative scarcity if not absence of its antithesis, then the answer will show that it is not so. “Evil is the dark son of Earth (matter) and Good the fair daughter of Heaven” (or spirit) says the Chinese philosopher; hence the place of punishment for most of our sins is the Earth—its birth place and playground. There is more apparent and relative than actual evil even on earth, and it is not given to the hoi polloi to reach the fatal grandeur and eminence of a “Satan” every day. See foot-notes in art. “Death” by Eliphas Levi (October Theosophist, Vol. III), the editorial answer to the art: “Death and Immortality” (November Theosophist, p.28); and the words used by the author, when speaking of those who are immortal in good by identification with God (or good), and immortal in evil by identification with Satan (Evil). Although the general rule applies but to “Sorcerers,” i.e., adepts in black Magic, real Initiates and sons of Evil, generally known as “the Brothers of the Shadow,” yet there are exceptions to that rule as to every other. Occasionally men reaching the apex of evil become “unconscious” sorcerers; they identify themselves with “Satan,” and then Avitchi becomes their Fate. Happy they are when thereby they avoid a worse punishment—a loka from which indeed, no traveller—either returns or, once within its dark precincts—pursues his journey!

The Harmonics of Smell

(Theosophist, August 1882)

The old proverb, that “Truth is stranger than fiction,” is again exemplified. An English scientist—Professor William Ramsay, of University College, Bristol—has just communicated to Nature (see number of June 22), a theory to account for the sense of smell which is likely to attract much attention. As the result of observation and experiment he propounds the idea that smell is due to vibrations similar to, but of a lower period than those which give rise to the sense of light and heat. The sensation of smell, he explains, is provoked by the contact of substances with the terminal organs of the olfactory nerves, which are spread as a network over a mucous membrane lining the upper part of the nasal cavity. The proximate cause of smell is the minute hairlets of the nasal membrane which connect with the nerves through spindle-shaped cells. The sensation is not excited by contact with a liquid or a solid, but always with a gas. Even in the case of smelling metals, such as brass, copper, tin, etc., there is a subtle gas or pungent vapour given off by them at ordinary atmospheric temperatures. The varying intensities of smells depend upon their relative molecular weight. As the smell growing stronger as the gases rises in molecular weight, to the quality of smell; that he thinks may depend upon the harmonics of the vibration. “Thus, the quality of tone in a violin differs from that of a flute by the different harmonics or overtones, peculiar to each instrument. I would ascribe to harmonies the quantity of smell possessed by different substances. . . . Smell, then, may resemble sound in having its quality influenced by harmonics. And just as a piccolo has the same quality as a flute, although some of its harmonics are so high as to be beyond the range of the ear, so smells owe their quality to harmonics, which, if occurring alone, would be beyond sense.” Two sounds heard simultaneously, he remarks, give a discord or a concord, yet the ear may distinguish them separately. Two colours, on the other hand, produce a single impression on the eye, and it is doubtful whether we can analyse them. “But smell resembles sound and not light in this particular. For in a mixture of smells, it is possible, by practice, to distinguish each ingredient,” and—in a laboratory experiment—to match the sensation by a mixture of different ingredients. Apparently astonished at his own audacity, he brings forward “the theory adduced with great diffidence.” Poor discoverer, the elephantine foot of the Royal Society may crush his toes! The problem, he says, is to be solved “by a careful measurement of the ‘lines’ in the spectrum of heat rays, and the calculation of the fundamentals, which this theory supposes to be the cause of smell.

It may be a comfort for Professor Ramsay to know that he is not the first to travel the path he suddenly has found winding from his laboratory-door up the hill of fame. Twenty or more years ago, a novel, entitled Kaloolah, was published in America by one Dr. Mayo, a well-known writer. It pretended, among other things, to describe a strange city, situated in the heart of Africa, where, in many respects, the people were more civilized and perfected than contemporary Europeans. As regards smell, for instance, the prince of that country, for the entertainment of his visitors—the hero of the story and his party—seats himself at a large instrument like an organ, with tubes, stops, pedals and keys, and plays an intricate composition, of which the harmonics are in odours, instead of in sounds as with a musical instrument. And he explains that his people have brought their olfactory sense, by practice, to such an exquisite point of sensitiveness as to afford them, by combinations and contrasts of smells, as high enjoyment as the European derives from a “concourse of sweet sounds.” It is but too plain, therefore, that Mr. Mayo had, if not a scientific, yet at least an intuitive cognition of this vibratory theory of odours, and that his smell harmonicum was not so much the baseless image of a romancer’s fancy as the novel-readers took it for when they laughed so heartily at the conceit. The fact is—as has been so often observed—the dream of one generation becomes the experience of the next. If our poor voice might without profanation invade so sacred a place as the laboratory of University College, Bristol, we would ask Mr. Ramsay to take a glance—just one furtive peep, with closed doors, and when he finds himself alone—at (it requires courage to say the word!) at..at..at Occult Science. (We scarcely dared speak the dreadful word, but it is out at last, and the Professor must hear it.) He will then find his vibratory theory is older than even Dr. Mayo, since it was known to the Aryans and is included in their philosophy of the harmonics of nature. They taught that there is a perfect correspondence, or mutual compensation between all the vibrations of Nature, and a most intimate relation between the set of vibrations which give us the impression of sound, and that other set of vibrations which give us the impression of colour. This subject is treated at some length in Isis Unveiled. The Oriental adept applies this very knowledge practically when he transforms any disagreeable odour into any delicious perfume he may think of. And thus modern science, after so long enjoying its joke over the puerile credulity of the Asiatics in believing such fairy stories about the powers of their Sadhoos, is now ending by being forced to demonstrate the scientific possibility of those very powers by actual laboratory experimentation. “He laughs best who laughs last”—an adage that the graduates of India would do well to remember.

(Notes to Theosophist, Vol. 4, p.37)

A. See Plato’s History of Atlantis, as given by the priests of Sais to his great ancestor Solon, the Athenian law-giver.

Atlantis, the submerged continent and the land of the “Knowledge of Good and Evil” (especially the latter) par excellence, was inhabited by the fourth race of men (we are the fifth), who are credited in the Popol-Vuh (the book of the Guatemalans) with sight unlimited, and “who knew all things at once.” Eliphas Levi refers to the secret tradition, among occultists, about the great struggle that took place in those far-away prehistoric days of Atlantis, between the “sons of God,” the initiated Adepts of Sham-bha-la (once as fair a land, an oasis surrounded by barren deserts and salt lakes)—and the Atlanteans, the wicked magicians of Thevetat, (see Isis, Vol. I, pp. 589-94).

It is a well-established belief among the Eastern and especially the Mongolian and Tibetan occultists, that, towards the end of every race, when mankind reaches its apex of knowledge in that cycle, dividing into two distinct classes, it branches off, one as the “Sons of Light” and the other as “the Sons of Darkness,” or initiated Adepts and natural-born magicians or—mediums. Towards the very close of the race, as their mixed progeny furnishes the first pioneers of a new and higher race, there comes the last and supreme struggle, during which the “Sons of Darkness” are usually exterminated by some great cataclysm of nature, either by fire or by water. Atlantis was submerged: hence the inference that that portion of the mankind of the fifth race which will be composed of “natural-born magicians” will be exterminated in the future great cataclysm—by fire.

B. (37). What was in reality that much maligned and still more dreaded goat, that Baphomet, regarded even now by the Roman Catholics as Satan, the Grand Master of the “Witches Sabbath,” the central figure of their nocturnal orgies? Why, simply Pan or Nature.

C. By “the dogma of elementary forces” Eliphas Levi means “spirit” and “matter,” allegorised by Zoroaster for the common herd into Ormazd and Ahriman, the prototype of the Christian “God” and “Devil”: and epitomised and summed up by the philosophy of Occult Science in the “Human Triad” (body, soul, spirit—the two poles and the “middle nature” of man), the perfect microcosm of the One Universal Macrocosm or Universe. In the Khodah-Avesta the Zoroastrian dualism is contradicted: “Who art thou, O fair being?” inquiries the disembodied soul of one who stands at the gates of its Paradise. “I am, O soul, thy good and pure actions . . . thy law, thy angel, and thy God.”

D. P.38. The seventh state of matter-life. The Fire and Light of the “Astral Virgin” may be studied by the Hindus in the Fire and Light of Akasha.

E. . . .” to avoid seeing what God is,” i.e., seeing that God is but man and vice versa, when he is not the lining of God, the Devil. We know of many who prefer voluntary life-long blindness to plain, sober truth and fact.

F. (38), Cupid, the God, is the seventh principle of the Brahm of the Vedantin and Psyche is its vehicle, the sixth or spiritual soul. As soon as she feels herself distinct from her “consort,” and sees him, she loses him. Study the “Heresy of Individuality” and you will understand.

G. In the Christian legend the Redeemer is the Initiator, who offers his life in sacrifice for the privilege of teaching his disciples some great truths. He who unriddles the Christian Sphinx “becomes the Master of the Absolute,” for the simple reason that the greatest mystery of all the ancient initiations, past, present, and future, is made plain and divulged to him. Those who accept the allegory literally, will remain blind all their life, and those who divulge it to the ignorant masses deserve punishment for their want of discretion in seeking to “feed pigs with pearls.”

The Theosophist, read by the intelligent, who, when they understand it, prove that they deserve as much of the secret knowledge as can be given them, is permitted to throw out a hint. Let him who would fathom the mystery of the allegory of both Sphinx and Cross, study the modes of initiation of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, ancient Jews, Hindus, etc. And then he will find what the word “Atonement,” far older than Christianity, meant as also “the Baptism of Blood.” At the last moment of the supreme initiation, when the Initiator had divulged the last mysterious word, either the hierophant or the “newly-born,” the worthier of the two, had to die, since two Adepts of equal power must not live, and “he who is perfect” has no room on earth. Eliphas Levi hints at the mystery in his volumes without explaining it. Yet he speaks of Moses who dies, mysteriously disappears from the top of Mount Pisgah, after he had laid hands on the initiated Aaron: of Jesus, who dies for the disciple “whom he loved,” John, the author of the Apocalypse: and of John the Baptist, the last of the real Nazars of the Old Testament (see Isis, Vol. II, p.132), who, in the incomplete, contradictory and tortured Gospel accounts, is made to die later through Herodias’ whim, and, in the secret Kabalistic documents of the Nabatheans, to offer himself as an expiatory victim after baptizing (i.e., initiating) his chosen successor in the mystic Jordan.

In these documents, after the initiation, Aba, the Father, becomes the Son, and the Son succeeds the Father and becomes Father and Son at the same time, inspired by Sophia Achamoth (secret wisdom), transformed later on into the Holy Ghost. But this successor of John the Baptist was not Jesus, the Nazarenes say. But of this anon. To this day, the initiation beyond the Himalayas is followed by temporary death (from three to six months) of the disciple, often of the initiator: but the Buddhists do not spill blood, for they have a horror of it, knowing that blood attracts evil powers. At the initiation of the Chinnamasta Tantrikas (chinna, severed, masta, head) the goddess being represented by a decapitated head, the Tantrik Shastras say that, as soon as the Adept has reached the highest degree of perfection, he has to initiate his successor and—die, offering his blood for the sins of his brothers. He must “cut off his own head with the right hand, holding it on the left.” Three streams of blood gush out from the headless trunk. One of these is directed into the mouth of the decapitated head (. . .”my blood is drink indeed”. . . the injunction in John that so shocked his disciples). The other is directed towards the earth as an offering of pure, sinless blood to mother Earth: and the third gushes towards heaven as a witness for the sacrifice of “self-immolation.” Now, this has a profound occult significance which is known only to the initiated: nothing like truth is explained by the Christian dogma: and, imperfectly as they have defined the quasi inspired authors of “The Perfect Way” reveal the truth far nearer than any of the Christian commentators.