Porphyry, whose works—to borrow the expression of an irritated

phenomenalist—“are mouldering like every other antiquated trash in the

closets of oblivion,” speaks thus of these Diakka—if such be their

name—rediscovered in the nineteenth century: “It is with the direct

help of these bad demons, that every kind of sorcery is accomplished

... it is the result of their operations, and men who injure their

fellow-creatures by enchantments, usually pay great honors to these bad

demons, and especially to their chief. These spirits pass their time in

deceiving us, with a great display of cheap prodigies and _illusions_;

their ambition is to be taken for gods, and their leader demands to be

recognized as the supreme god.”[367]

The spirit signing himself Swedenborg—just quoted from Davis’s

_Diakka_, and hinting that he is the I AM, singularly resembles this

chief leader of Porphyry’s bad demons.

What more natural than this vilification of the ancient and experienced

theurgists by certain mediums, when we find Iamblichus, the expositor

of spiritualistic theurgy, strictly forbidding all endeavors to procure

such phenomenal manifestations; unless, after a long preparation of

moral and physical purification, and under the guidance of experienced

theurgists. When, furthermore, he declares that, with very few

exceptions, for _a person_ “_to appear elongated or thicker, or

be borne aloft in the air_,” is a sure mark of obsession by _bad_

demons.[368]

Everything in this world has its time, and truth, however based upon

unimpeachable evidence, will not root or grow, unless, like a plant, it

is thrown into soil in its proper season. “The age must be prepared,” {220}

says Professor Cooke; and some thirty years ago this humble work would

have been doomed to self-destruction by its own contents. But the

modern phenomenon, notwithstanding the daily _exposés_, the ridicule

with which it is crowned at the hand of every materialist, and its own

numerous errors, grows and waxes strong in facts, if not in wisdom and

spirit. What would have appeared twenty years ago simply preposterous,

may well be listened to now that the phenomena are endorsed by great

scientists. Unfortunately, if the manifestations increase in power

daily, there is no corresponding improvement in philosophy. The

discernment of spirits is still as wanting as ever.

Perhaps, among the whole body of spiritualist writers of our day, not

one is held in higher esteem for character, education, sincerity, and

ability, than Epes Sargent, of Boston, Massachusetts. His monograph

entitled _The Proof Palpable of Immortality_, deservedly occupies a

high rank among works upon the subject. With every disposition to be

charitable and apologetic for mediums and their phenomena, Mr. Sargent

is still compelled to use the following language: “The power of spirits

to reproduce simulacra of persons who have passed from the earth-life,

suggests the question—How far can we be assured of the identity

of _any_ spirit, let the tests be what they may? We have not yet

arrived at that stage of enlightenment that would enable us to reply

confidently to this inquiry.... There is much that is yet a puzzle in

the language and action of this class of materialized spirits.” As

to the intellectual calibre of most of the spirits which lurk behind

the physical phenomena, Mr. Sargent will unquestionably be accepted

as a most competent judge, and he says, “the great majority, as in

this world, are of the unintellectual sort.” If it is a fair question,

we would like to ask why they should be so lacking in intelligence,

if they are human spirits? Either intelligent human spirits _cannot_

materialize, or, the spirits that do materialize have not human

intelligence, and, therefore, by Mr. Sargent’s own showing, they may

just as well be “elementary” spirits, who have ceased to be human

altogether, or those demons, which, according to the Persian Magi and

Plato, hold a middle rank between gods and disembodied men.

There is good evidence, that of Mr. Crookes for one, to show that many

“materialized” spirits talk in an audible voice. Now, we have shown,

on the testimony of ancients, that the voice of human spirits is not

and _cannot_ be articulated; being, as Emanuel Swedenborg declares, “a

deep suspiration.” Who of the two classes of witnesses may be trusted

more safely? Is it the ancients who had the experience of so many ages

in theurgical practices, or modern spiritualists, who have had none

at all, and who have no facts upon which to base an opinion, except

such as have been communicated by “spirits,” whose identity they have {221}

no means of proving? There are mediums whose organisms have called

out sometimes hundreds of these would-be “human” forms. And yet we

do not recollect to have seen or heard of one expressing anything

but the most commonplace ideas. This fact ought surely to arrest the

attention of even the most uncritical spiritualist. If a spirit can

speak at all, and if the way is opened to intelligent as well as to

unintellectual beings, why should they not sometimes give us addresses

in some remote degree approximating in quality to the communications

we receive through the “direct writing?” Mr. Sargent puts forward a

very suggestive and important idea in this sentence. “How far they

are limited in their mental operations and in their recollections by

the act of materialization, or how far by the intellectual horizon of

the medium is still a question.”[369] If the same kind of “spirits”

materialize that produce the direct writing, and both manifest through

mediums, and the one talk nonsense, while the other often give us

sublime philosophical teachings, why should their mental operations be

limited “by the intellectual horizon of the medium” in the one instance

more than in the other? The materializing mediums—at least so far as

our observation extends—are no more uneducated than many peasants and

mechanics who at different times have, under supernal influences, given

profound and sublime ideas to the world. The history of psychology

teems with examples in illustration of this point, among which that of

Boehmè, the inspired but ignorant shoemaker, and our own Davis, are

conspicuous. As to the matter of unintellectuality we presume that no

more striking cases need be sought than those of the child-prophets

of Cevennes, poets and seers, such as have been mentioned in previous

chapters. When spirits have once furnished themselves with vocal organs

to speak at all, it surely ought to be no more difficult for them to

talk as persons of their assumed respective education, intelligence,

and social rank would in life, instead of falling invariably into one

monotonous tone of commonplace and, but too often, platitude. As to Mr.

Sargent’s hopeful remark, that “the science of Spiritualism being still

in its infancy, we may hope for more light on this question,” we fear

we must reply, that _it is not through “dark cabinets” that this light

will ever break_.[370]

It is simply ridiculous and absurd to require from every investigator

who comes forward as a witness to the marvels of the day and

psychological phenomena the diploma of a master of arts and sciences.

The experience of the past forty years is an evidence that it is not

always the minds which are the most “scientifically trained” that are

the best in matters of simple common sense and honest truth. Nothing {222}

blinds like fanaticism, or a one sided view of a question. We may

take as an illustration Oriental magic or ancient spiritualism, as

well as the modern phenomena. Hundreds, nay thousands of perfectly

trustworthy witnesses, returning from residence and travels in the

East, have testified to the fact that uneducated fakirs, sheiks,

dervishes, and lamas have, in their presence, without confederates

or mechanical appliances, produced wonders. They have affirmed that

the phenomena exhibited by them were in contravention of all the

_known_ laws of science, and thus tended to prove the existence of

many yet unknown occult potencies in nature, seemingly directed by

preterhuman intelligences. What has been the attitude assumed by our

scientists toward this subject? How far did the testimony of the

most “scientifically” trained minds make impression on their own?

Did the investigations of Professors Hare and de Morgan, of Crookes

and Wallace, de Gasparin and Thury, Wagner and Butlerof, etc., shake

for one moment their skepticism? How were the personal experiences

of Jacolliot with the fakirs of India received, or the psychological

elucidations of Professor Perty, of Geneva, viewed? How far does the

loud cry of mankind, craving for palpable and demonstrated signs of

a God, an individual soul, and of eternity, affect them; and what is

their response? They pull down and destroy every vestige of spiritual

things, but they erect nothing. “We cannot get such signs with either

retorts or crucibles,” they say; “hence, it’s all but a delusion!” In

this age of cold reason and prejudice, even the Church has to look to

science for help. Creeds built on sand, and high-towering but rootless

dogmas, crumble down under the cold breath of research, and pull down

_true_ religion in their fall. But the longing for some outward sign of

a God and a life hereafter, remains as tenaciously as ever in the human

heart. In vain is all sophistry of science; it can never stifle the

voice of nature. Only her representatives have poisoned the pure waters

of simple faith, and now humanity mirrors itself in waters made turbid

with all the mud stirred up from the bottom of the once pure spring.

The anthropomorphic God of our fathers is replaced by anthropomorphic

monsters; and what is still worse, by the reflection of humanity itself

in these waters, whose ripples send it back the distorted images of

truth and facts as evoked by its misguided imagination. “It is not a

miracle that we want,” writes the Reverend Brooke Herford, “but to find

palpable evidence of the spiritual and the divine. It is not to the

prophets that men cry for such a “sign,” but rather to the scientists.

Men feel as if all that groping about in the foremost verge or

innermost recesses of creation should bring the investigator at length

close to the deep, underlying facts of all things, to some unmistakable

signs of God.” The signs are there, and the scientists too; what can {223}

we expect more of them, now that they have done so well their duty?

Have they not, these Titans of thought, dragged down God from His

hiding-place, and given us instead a _protoplasm_?

At the Edinburgh meeting of the British Association, in 1871, Sir

William Thomson said: “Science is bound by the everlasting law of

honor to face fearlessly every problem which can fairly be presented

to it.” In his turn, Professor Huxley remarks: “With regard to the

miracle-question, I can only say that the word ‘impossible’ is not,

to my mind, applicable to matters of philosophy.” The great Humboldt

remarks that “a presumptuous skepticism that rejects facts without

examination of their truth is, in some respects, more injurious than

unquestioning credulity.”

These men have proved untrue to their own teachings. The opportunity

afforded them by the opening of the Orient, to investigate for

themselves the phenomena alleged by every traveller to take place

in those countries, has been rejected. Did our physiologists and

pathologists ever so much as think of availing themselves of it to

settle this most momentous subject of human thought? Oh, no; for

they would never dare. It is not to be expected that the principal

Academicians of Europe and America should undertake a joint journey

to Thibet and India, and investigate the fakir marvel on the spot!

And were one of them to go as a solitary pilgrim and witness all the

miracles of creation, in that land of wonders, who, of his colleagues,

could be expected to believe his testimony?

It would be as tedious as superfluous to begin a restatement of facts,

so forcibly put by others. Mr. Wallace and W. Howitt,[371] have

repeatedly and cleverly described the thousand and one absurd errors

into which the learned societies of France and England have fallen,

through their blind skepticism. If Cuvier could throw aside the fossil

excavated in 1828 by Boué, the French geologist, only because the

anatomist thought himself wiser than his colleague, and would not

believe that human skeletons could be found eighty feet deep in the mud

of the Rhine; and if the French Academy could discredit the assertions

of Boucher de Perthes, in 1846, only to be criticised in its turn in

1860, when the truth of de Perthes’ discoveries and observations was

fully confirmed by the whole body of geologists finding flint weapons

in the drift-gravels of northern France; and if McEnery’s testimony, in

1825, to the fact that he had discovered worked flints, together with

the remains of extinct animals, in Kent’s Hole Cavern[372] was laughed {224}

at; and that of Godwin Austen to the same effect, in 1840, ridiculed

still more, if that were possible; and all that excess of scientific

skepticism and merriment could, in 1865, finally come to grief, and

be shown to have been entirely uncalled for; when—says Mr. Wallace

“all the previous reports for forty years were confirmed and shown to

be even less wonderful than the reality;“who can be so credulous as

to believe in the infallibility of our science? And why wonder at the

exhibition of such a lack of moral courage in individual members of

this great and stubborn body known as modern science?

Thus fact after fact has been discredited. From all sides we hear

constant complaints. “Very little is known of psychology!” sighs

one F. R. S. “We must confess that we know little, if anything, in

physiology,” says another. “Of all sciences, there is none which rests

upon so uncertain a basis as medicine,” reluctantly testifies a third.

“What do we know about the presumed nervous fluids?... Nothing, as

yet,” puts in a fourth one; and so on in every branch of science. And,

meanwhile, phenomena, surpassing in interest all others of nature, and

to be solved only by physiology, psychology, and the “as yet unknown”

fluids, are either rejected as delusions, or, if even true, “do not

interest” scientists. Or, what is still worse, when a _subject_, whose

organism exhibits in itself the most important features of such occult

though natural potencies, offers his person for an investigation,

instead of an honest experiment being attempted with him he finds

himself entrapped by a scientist (?) and paid for his trouble with a

sentence of three months’ imprisonment! This is indeed promising.

It is easy to comprehend that a fact given in 1731, testifying to

another fact which happened during the papacy of Paul III., for

instance, is disbelieved in 1876. And when scientists are told that

the Romans preserved lights in their sepulchres for countless years

by the _oiliness of gold_; and that one of such ever-burning lamps

was found brightly burning in the tomb of Tullia, the daughter of

Cicero, notwithstanding that the tomb had been shut up fifteen hundred

and fifty years,[373]—they have a certain right to doubt, and even

disbelieve the statement, until they assure themselves, on the evidence

of their own senses, that such a thing is possible. In such a case they

can reject the testimony of all the ancient and mediæval philosophers.

The burial of living fakirs and their subsequent resuscitation, after

thirty days of inhumation, may have a suspicious look to them. So also

with the self-infliction of mortal wounds, and the exhibition of their

own bowels to the persons present by various lamas, who heal such

wounds almost instantaneously.

For certain men who deny the evidence of their own senses as to {225}

phenomena produced in their own country, and before numerous witnesses,

the narratives to be found in classical books, and in the notes of

travellers, must of course seem absurd. But what we will never be able

to understand is the collective stubbornness of the Academies, in the

face of such bitter lessons in the past, to these institutions which

have so often “darkened counsel by words without knowledge.” Like the

Lord answering Job “out of the whirlwind,” magic can say to modern

science: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?

declare, if thou hast understanding!” And, who art thou who dare say to

nature, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further; and here shall thy

proud waves be stayed?”

But what matters it if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena

taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism

were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and

resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travellers; and

lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel

themselves, and find themselves all the better for it; and the denials

of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to extinguish the

perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of

India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev.

S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the

kingdom of Travancore, South India, “there is a deep well inside the

temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in

another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp,

which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning,” says this

missionary in his description of the place. Catholic missionaries

attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services

of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact,

and makes no commentary. The Abbé Huc has seen and examined one of

such lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to

win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines. No

more can be denied the wonders seen by Captain Lane in Egypt; the

Benares experiences of Jacolliot and those of Sir Charles Napier;

the levitations of human beings in broad daylight, and which can be

accounted for only on the explanation given in the Introductory chapter

of the present work.[374] Such levitations are testified to—besides Mr.

Crookes—by Professor Perty, who shows them produced in open air, and

lasting sometimes twenty minutes; all these phenomena and many more

have happened, do, and will happen in every country of this globe, and

that in spite of all the skeptics and scientists that ever were evolved

out of the Silurian mud.

Among the ridiculed claims of alchemy is that of the _perpetual_ lamps. {226}

If we tell the reader that we have seen such, we may be asked—in

case that the sincerity of our personal belief is not questioned—how

we can tell that the lamps we have observed are perpetual, as the

period of our observation was but limited? Simply that, as we know the

ingredients employed, and the manner of their construction, and the

natural law applicable to the case, we are confident that our statement

can be corroborated upon investigation in the proper quarter. What that

quarter is, and from whom that knowledge can be learned, our critics

must discover, by taking the pains we did. Meanwhile, however, we will

quote a few of the 173 authorities who have written upon the subject.

None of these, as we recollect, have asserted that these sepulchral

lamps would burn perpetually, but only for an indefinite number of

years, and instances are recorded of their continuing alight for many

centuries. It will not be denied that, if there is a natural law by

which a lamp can be made without replenishment to burn ten years,

there is no reason why the same law could not cause the combustion to

continue one hundred or one thousand years.

Among the many well-known personages who firmly believed and

strenuously asserted that such sepulchral lamps burned for several

hundreds of years, and would have continued to burn _may be_ forever,

had they not been extinguished, or the vessels broken by some accident,

we may reckon the following names: Clemens Alexandrinus, Hermolaus

Barbarus, Appian, Burattinus, Citesius, Cœlius, Foxius, Costæus,

Casalius, Cedrenus, Delrius, Ericius, Gesnerus, Jacobonus, Leander,

Libavius, Lazius, P. de la Mirandolla, Philalethes, Licetus, Maiolus,

Maturantius, Baptista Porta, Pancirollus, Ruscellius, Scardonius,

Ludovicus Vives, Volateranus, Paracelsus, several Arabian alchemists,

and finally, Pliny, Solinus, Kircher, and Albertus Magnus.

The discovery is claimed by the ancient Egyptians, those sons of the

Land of Chemistry.[375] At least, they were a people who used these

lamps far more than any other nation, on account of their religious

doctrines. The astral soul of the mummy was believed to be lingering

about the body for the whole space of the three thousand years of

the circle of necessity. Attached to it by a magnetic thread, which

could be broken but by its own exertion, the Egyptians hoped that the

ever-burning lamp, symbol of their incorruptible and immortal spirit,

would at last decide the more material soul to part with its earthly

dwelling, and unite forever with its divine SELF. Therefore lamps were

hung in the sepulchres of the rich. Such lamps are often found in the {227}

subterranean caves of the dead, and Licetus has written a large folio

to prove that in his time, whenever a sepulchre was opened, a burning

lamp was found within the tomb, but was instantaneously extinguished

on account of the _desecration_. T. Livius, Burattinus, and Michael

Schatta, in their letters to Kircher,[376] affirm that they found many

lamps in the subterranean caves of old Memphis. Pausanias speaks of

the golden lamp in the temple of Minerva at Athens, which he says was

the workmanship of Callimachus, and burnt a whole year. Plutarch[377]

affirms that he saw one in the temple of Jupiter Amun, and that the

priests assured him that it had burnt continually for years, and though

it stood in the open air, neither wind nor water could extinguish it.

St. Augustine, the Catholic authority, also describes a lamp in the

fane of Venus, of the same nature as the others, unextinguishable

either by the strongest wind or by water. A lamp was found at Edessa,

says Kedrenus, “which, being hidden at the top of a certain gate,

burned 500 years.” But of all such lamps, the one mentioned by Olybius

Maximus of Padua is by far the more wonderful. It was found near

Attestè, and Scardeonius[378] gives a glowing description of it: “In a

large earthen urn was contained a lesser, and in that a burning lamp,

which had continued so for 1500 years, by means of a most pure liquor

contained in two bottles, one of gold and the other of silver. These

are in the custody of Franciscus Maturantius, and are by him valued at

an exceeding rate.”

Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere

unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the

impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these

inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages

of “miracles,” the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of

Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently

regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the

former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a

_divine_, miraculous power, and that the light of the latter, made by

“heathen” art, was supported by the wiles of the devil. Kircher and

Licetus show that they were ordered in these two diverse ways. The lamp

at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over

the door of a church, was preserved by the “_power of God_,” who “hath

made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light.” As

to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the

devil, “who deceives us in a thousand ways.” What more easy for Satan

to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who {228}

first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted by all

good Christians during the Papacy of Paul III., when upon opening a

tomb in the Appian Way, at Rome, there was found the entire body of a

young girl swimming in a bright liquor which had so well preserved it,

that the face was beautiful and like life itself. At her feet burned

a lamp, whose flame vanished upon opening the sepulchre. From some

engraved signs it was found to have been buried for over 1500 years,

and supposed to have been the body of Tulliola, or Tullia, Cicero’s

daughter.[379]

Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible,

alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be

permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted

lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual

for want of food. Alchemists, on the other hand, deny that all the

nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into

vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only

resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove

inextinguishable by either wind or water. In an old chemical work

of the year 1700, called ΝΕΚΡΟΚΗΔΕΙΑ, the author gives a number of

refutations of the claims of various alchemists. But though he denies

that a fire can be made to burn _perpetually_, he is half-inclined to

believe it possible that a lamp should burn several hundred years.

Besides, we have a mass of testimony from alchemists who devoted years

to these experiments and came to the conclusion that it was possible.

There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury;

also of naphtha, petroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also

name the oil of camphor and amber, the _Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus_,

the _Lapis Carystius_, _Cyprius_, and _Linum vivum seu Creteum_, as

employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared

either of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is

the fittest _pabulum_ for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold

wastes the least when either heated or melted, and, moreover, can be

made to reäbsorb its oily humidity as soon as exhaled, so continuously

feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert

that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the

Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the “Lord” to burn on the

tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. “And thou shalt command the

children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil-olive beaten for the

light, _to cause the lamp to burn always_” (Exod. xxvii. 20).

Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on {229}

page 44 of his work mentions a preparation of quicksilver filtrated

seven times through white sand by fire, of which, he says, lamps were

made that would burn perpetually. Both Maturantius and Citesius firmly

believe that such a work can be done by a purely chemical process. This

liquor of quicksilver was known among alchemists as _Aqua Mercurialis_,

_Materia Metallorum_, _Perpetua Dispositio_, and _Materia prima Artis_,

also _Oleum Vitri_. Tritenheim and Bartolomeo Korndorf both made

preparations for the inextinguishable fire, and left their recipes for

it.[380]

Asbestos, which was known to the Greeks under the name of Ασβεστος, or

_inextinguishable_, is a kind of stone, which once set on fire cannot {230}

be quenched, as Pliny and Solinus tell us. Albertus Magnus describes it

as a stone of an iron color, found mostly in Arabia. It is generally

found covered with a hardly-perceptible oleaginous moisture, which

upon being approached with a lighted candle will immediately catch

fire. Many were the experiments made by chemists to extract from it

this indissoluble oil, but they are alleged to have all failed. But,

are our chemists prepared to say that the above operation is utterly

impracticable? If this oil could once be extracted there can be no

question but it would afford a perpetual fuel. The ancients might

well boast of having had the secret of it, for, we repeat, there

are experimenters living at this day who have done so successfully.

Chemists who have vainly tried it, have asserted that the fluid or

liquor chemically extracted from that stone was more of a watery

than oily nature, and so impure and feculent that it could not burn;

others affirmed, on the contrary, that the oil, as soon as exposed

to the air, became so thick and solid that it would hardly flow, and

when lighted emitted no flame, but escaped in dark smoke; whereas the

lamps of the ancients are alleged to have burned with the purest and

brightest flame, without emitting the slightest smoke. Kircher, who

shows the practicability of purifying it, thinks it so difficult as to

be accessible only to the highest adepts of alchemy.

St. Augustine, who attributes the whole of these arts to the Christian

scape-goat, the devil, is flatly contradicted by Ludovicus Vives,[381]

who shows that all such would-be magical operations are the work

of man’s industry and deep study of the hidden secrets of nature,

wonderful and miraculous as they may seem. Podocattarus, a Cypriote

knight,[382] had both flax and linen made out of another asbestos,

which _Porcacchius_ says[383] he saw at the house of this knight. Pliny

calls this flax _linum vinum_, and Indian flax, and says it is done

out of _asbeston sive asbestinum_, a kind of flax of which they made

cloth that was to be cleaned by throwing it in the fire. He adds that

it was as precious as pearls and diamonds, for not only was it very

rarely found but exceedingly difficult to be woven, on account of the

shortness of the threads. Being beaten flat with a hammer, it is soaked

in warm water, and when dried its filaments can be easily divided into

threads like flax and woven into cloth. Pliny asserts he has seen some

towels made of it, and assisted in an experiment of purifying them by

fire. Baptista Porta also states that he found the same, at Venice,

in the hands of a Cyprian lady; he calls this discovery of Alchemy a

_secretum optimum_.

Dr. Grew, in his description of the curiosities in Gresham College {231}

(seventeenth century), believes the art, as well as the use of such

linen, altogether lost, but it appears that it was not quite so, for

we find the Museum Septalius boasting of the possession of thread,

ropes, paper, and net-work done of this material as late as 1726;

some of these articles made, moreover, by the own hand of Septalius,

as we learn in Greenhill’s _Art of Embalming_, p. 361. “Grew,” says

the author, “seems to make _Asbestinus Lapis_ and _Amianthus_ all

one, and calls them in English the thrum-stone;” he says it grows in

short threads or thrums, from about a quarter of an inch to an inch in

length, parallel and glossy, as fine as those small, single threads

the silk-worms spin, and very flexible like to flax or tow. That the

secret is not altogether lost is proved by the fact that some Buddhist

convents in China and Thibet are in possession of it. Whether made

of the fibre of one or the other of such stones, we cannot say, but

we have seen in a monastery of female Talapoins, a yellow gown, such

as the Buddhist monks wear, thrown into a large pit, full of glowing

coals, and taken out two hours afterward as clear as if it had been

washed with soap and water.

Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and

America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various

industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and

fire-proof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York

harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of

several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος

(undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like

lustre.

The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone

also, which they called _Lapis Carystius_. The inhabitants of the city

of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as _Matthæus Raderus_

says in his work[384] that they “kemb’d, spun, and wove this downy

stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they

purified again with fire instead of water.” Pausanias, in _Atticus_,

and Plutarch[385] also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from

this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his

time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by

the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have

been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms

that he has seen quite a number of them.

Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a “pabulum for fire may be

given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after

a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale {232}

but strongly resist the fire, nor the fire consume the matter, but be

restrained by it, as it were with a chain, from flying upward.” To

this, Sir Thomas Brown,[386] speaking of lamps which have burned many

hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that “this proceeds

from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to

suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not

continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been

spent and wasted by the fire.” But he adds, “the art of preparing this

inconsumable oil is lost.”

Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should

be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.

We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of

investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we

not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts

going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better

opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena

have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by

the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these

phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley

wrote: “I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much

trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have

known) much annoyance.... I take no interest in the subject ... but

supposing the phenomena to be genuine—they do not interest me.”[387]

Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence:

“When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical

laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced.”[388]

Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results

at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the

opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion.[389] Professor

Carpenter writes, “I have satisfied myself by personal investigation,

that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (_i. e._, spiritual

manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many

others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite

genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study

... the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication

_ab-extra_, but depend upon the _subjective_ condition of the

individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological

laws ... the process to which I have given the name ‘_unconscious

cerebration_’ ... performs a large part in the production of the {233}

phenomena known as spiritualistic.”[390]

And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact

science, that _unconscious cerebration_ has acquired the faculty of

making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform

various clownish tricks!

So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans

have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University

warned the public against investigating this subject, which “corrupts

the morals and degrades the intellect.” They called it, furthermore,

“a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of

man and the purity of woman.” Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the

great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated

spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared _non

compos mentis_; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers

addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this

country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses,

they, like the guests bidden to the supper, “with one consent, began to

make excuses.”

Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall,

and the “unconscious cerebration” of Carpenter, many a scientist as

noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject,

and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another

scientist, and a great author—although not a spiritualist—bears this

honorable testimony: “That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit

the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in

all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but

participated in by the intelligent.... If human testimony on such

subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from

the remotest ages to the present time, as _extensive and unimpeachable

as is to be found_ in support of anything whatever.”[391]

Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any

amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science

accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.

“Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn’d

Firm concord holds,—_men_ only disagree

Of creatures rational....”[392]

How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of

the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same source? {234}

Clearly, this is but one more corroboration of the truism that no two

men see the same thing exactly alike. This idea is admirably formulated

by Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, in a letter to the Dialectical Society.

“I have long,” says he, “been convinced, by the experience of my

life as a pioneer in several heterodoxies which are rapidly becoming

orthodoxies, that nearly all truth is temperamental to us, or given

in the affections and intuitions, and that discussion and inquiry do

little more than feed temperament.”

This profound observer might have added to his experience that of

Bacon, who remarks that “ ... a _little_ philosophy inclineth a man’s

mind to atheism, but _depth_ in philosophy bringeth man’s mind about to

religion.”

Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day

which “ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid

evidence;” and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the

ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based

upon evidence quite “as valid” as that which supports the pretensions

of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In

the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of

electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of

Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six

centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered

the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of

Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have

thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based

on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult

properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists

of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace.

Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phœnician—the

oldest of historians—tell us that these Mysteries originated in the

night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to

the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a

most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette’s _Monuments d’Antiquité

Figurés_, in which, like the “erect-haired Pan,” all the figures have

their hair streaming out in every direction—except the central figure

of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other,

a kneeling man.[393] The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently

represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not

so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to

be ornamented with cuts of _electrified_ heads, with hair standing {235}

out in all directions, under the influence of the electric fluid.

Schweigger shows that a _lost natural philosophy of antiquity_ was

connected with the most important religious ceremonies. He demonstrates

in the amplest manner, that _magic_ in the prehistoric periods had a

part in the mysteries and that the greatest phenomena, the so-called

miracles—whether Pagan, Jewish, or Christian—rested in fact on the

arcane knowledge of the ancient priests of physics and all the branches

of chemistry, or rather alchemy.

In chapter xi., which is entirely devoted to the wonderful achievements

of the ancients, we propose to demonstrate our assertions more fully.

We will show, on the evidence of the most trustworthy classics, that

at a period far anterior to the siege of Troy, the learned priests of

the sanctuaries were thoroughly acquainted with electricity and even

lightning-conductors. We will now add but a few more words before

closing the subject.

The theurgists so well understood the minutest properties of magnetism,

that, without possessing the lost key to their arcana, but depending

wholly upon what was known in their modern days of electro-magnetism,

Schweigger and Ennemoser have been able to trace the identity of the

“twin brothers,” the Dioskuri, with the polarity of electricity and

magnetism. Symbolical myths, previously supposed to be meaningless

fictions, are now found to be “the cleverest and at the same time most

profound expressions of a strictly scientifically defined truth of

nature,” according to Ennemoser.[394]

Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century

and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction

of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but

a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious

sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival

with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded

glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the

wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament

the coquettish fickleness of “forces” which play so provokingly at

hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life,

called by them “force-correlation.” Proclaiming matter sole and

autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly

divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great

throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to

make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping

at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they {236}

utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its legitimate

sovereign, this throne is but a whitened sepulchre, inside of which

all is rottenness and corruption! That matter without the spirit which

vivifies it, and of which it is but the “gross purgation,” to use a

hermetic expression, is nothing but a soulless corpse, whose limbs, in

order to be moved in predetermined directions, require an intelligent

operator at the great galvanic battery called LIFE!

In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior

to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that

brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars

to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that

tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant

and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in

human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament,

and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of

every truth in nature.

The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a

superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of

which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various

commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions

of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves

to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than

vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply

generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given

nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the

human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature

of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the

least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of

this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles,

seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone

of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the _Timæus_,

honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher “hardly allows

to his notions the merit of being ‘the dead men’s bones’ out of which

he has himself risen to a higher knowledge;”[395] forgetting how much

the metaphysics of olden times has helped the “physical” sciences of

the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency

and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in

Plato’s works, we analyze them carefully, the _Timæus_, alone, will

be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new

discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are

clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly

defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern science; for {237}

according to Prof. Jowett, the specific discovery that the blood flows

out at one side of the heart through the arteries, and returns through

the veins at the other, was unknown to him, though Plato was perfectly

aware “that blood is a fluid in constant motion.”

Plato’s method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals

to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the

permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the

majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great

scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements

of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty

details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and

demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of

the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy

of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things

of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the

dullest of Plato’s disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws

and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and

control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most

learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.

This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato’s

translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns

indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their

alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an

inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the

idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual

splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should,

in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright

luminary to be totally eclipsed.

The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in

the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of

mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable

to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the

changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further

for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest

scientific authorities themselves.

It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional

position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the

face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than

their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a

laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor

Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in

the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato’s works,

speaking of “the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole,” {238}

gives them the following credit: 1. “That the nebular theory was the

received belief of the early physicists.” Therefore it could not have

rested, as Draper asserts,[396] upon the telescopic discovery made

by Herschel I. 2. “That the development of animals out of frogs who

came to land, and of man out of the animals, was held by Anaximenes

in the sixth century before Christ.” The professor might have added

that this theory antedated Anaximenes by some thousands of years,

perhaps; that it was an accepted doctrine among Chaldeans, and that

Darwin’s evolution of species and monkey theory are of an antediluvian

origin. 3. “ ... that, even by Philolaus and the early Pythagoreans,

the earth was held to be a body like the other stars revolving in

space.”[397] Thus Galileo, studying some Pythagorean fragments, which

are shown by Reuchlin to have yet existed in the days of the Florentine

mathematician;[398] being, moreover, familiar with the doctrines of

the old philosophers, but reässerted an astronomical doctrine which

prevailed in India at the remotest antiquity. 4. The ancients “

... thought that there was a sex in plants as well as in animals.”

Thus our modern naturalists had but to follow in the steps of their

predecessors. 5. “That musical notes depended on the relative length or

tension of the strings from which they were emitted, and were measured

by ratios of number.” 6. “That mathematical laws pervaded the world

and even qualitative differences were supposed to have their origin

in number;” and 7, “the annihilation of matter was denied by them,

and held to be a _transformation_ only.”[399] “Although one of these

discoveries might have been supposed to be a happy guess,” adds Mr.

Jowett, “we can hardly attribute them all to mere coincidences.”[400]

In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and

proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the

correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material

form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in

the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding {239}

the arch of their philosophical system with a keystone at once perfect

and immovable. If science has made such colossal strides during these

latter days—if we have such clearer ideas of natural law than the

ancients—why are our inquiries as to the nature and source of life

unanswered? If the modern laboratory is so much richer in the fruits

of experimental research than those of the olden time, how comes it

that we make no step except on paths that were trodden long before the

Christian era? How does it happen that the most advanced standpoint

that has been reached in our times only enables us to see in the dim

distance up the Alpine path of knowledge the monumental proofs that

earlier explorers have left to mark the plateaux they had reached and

occupied?

If modern masters are so much in advance of the old ones, why do they

not restore to us the lost arts of our postdiluvian forefathers? Why do

they not give us the unfading colors of Luxor—the Tyrian purple; the

bright vermilion and dazzling blue which decorate the walls of this

place, and are as bright as on the first day of their application? The

indestructible cement of the pyramids and of ancient aqueducts; the

Damascus blade, which can be turned like a corkscrew in its scabbard

without breaking; the gorgeous, unparalleled tints of the stained glass

that is found amid the dust of old ruins and beams in the windows of

ancient cathedrals; and the secret of the true malleable glass? And

if chemistry is so little able to rival even with the early mediæval

ages in some arts, why boast of achievements which, according to strong

probability, were perfectly known thousands of years ago? The more

archæology and philology advance, the more humiliating to our pride are

the discoveries which are daily made, the more glorious testimony do

they bear in behalf of those who, perhaps on account of the distance

of their remote antiquity, have been until now considered ignorant

flounderers in the deepest mire of superstition.

Why should we forget that, ages before the prow of the adventurous

Genoese clove the Western waters, the Phœnician vessels had

circumnavigated the globe, and spread civilization in regions now

silent and deserted? What archæologist will dare assert that the same

hand which planned the Pyramids of Egypt, Karnak, and the thousand

ruins now crumbling to oblivion on the sandy banks of the Nile, did

_not_ erect the monumental Nagkon-Wat of Cambodia? or trace the

hieroglyphics on the obelisks and doors of the deserted Indian village,

newly discovered in British Columbia by Lord Dufferin? or those on the

ruins of Palenque and Uxmal, of Central America? Do not the relics we

treasure in our museums—last mementos of the long “lost arts” speak

loudly in favor of ancient civilization? And do they not prove, over

and over again, that nations and continents that have passed away have {240}

buried along with them arts and sciences, which neither the first

crucible ever heated in a mediæval cloister, nor the last cracked by a

modern chemist have revived, nor will—at least, in the present century.

“They were not without some knowledge of optics,” Professor Draper

magnanimously concedes to the ancients; others positively deny to them

even that little. “The convex lens found at Nimroud shows that they

were not unacquainted with magnifying instruments.”[401] Indeed? If

they were not, all the classical authors must have lied. For, when

Cicero tells us that he had seen the entire _Iliad_ written on skin

of such a miniature size, that it could easily be rolled up inside a

nut-shell, and Pliny asserts that Nero had a ring with a small glass

in it, through which he watched the performance of the gladiators at

a distance—could audacity go farther? Truly, when we are told that

Mauritius could see from the promontory of Sicily over the entire

sea to the coast of Africa, with an instrument called _nauscopite_,

we must either think that all these witnesses lied, or that the

ancients were more than slightly acquainted with optics and magnifying

glasses. Wendell Phillips states that he has a friend who possesses an

extraordinary ring “perhaps three-quarters of an inch in diameter, and

on it is the naked figure of the god Hercules. By the aid of glasses,

you can distinguish the interlacing muscles, and _count every separate

hair on the eyebrows_.... Rawlinson brought home a stone about twenty

inches long and ten wide, containing an entire treatise on mathematics.

It would be perfectly illegible without glasses.... In Dr. Abbott’s

Museum, there is a ring of Cheops, to which Bunsen assigns 500 B.C. The

signet of the ring is about the size of a quarter of a dollar, and the

engraving is _invisible_ without the aid of glasses.... At Parma, they

will show you a gem once worn on the finger of Michael Angelo, of which

the engraving is 2,000 years old, and on which there are the figures of

_seven_ women. You must have the aid of powerful glasses in order to

distinguish the forms at all.... So the microscope,” adds the learned

lecturer, “instead of dating from our time, finds its brothers in the

Books of Moses—and these are infant brothers.“

The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely

“_some_ knowledge of optics.” Therefore, totally disagreeing in this

particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper’s

_Conflict_ in his _Unseen World_, the only fault we find with the

admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes

uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order

to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through {241}

convex lenses; whenever talking of the knowledge of the ancients, he

evidently sees things through _concave_ ones.

It is simply worthy of admiration to follow in various modern works

the cautious attempts of both pious Christians and skeptical, albeit

very learned men, to draw a line of demarcation between what we are

and what we are not to believe, in ancient authors. No credit is ever

allowed them without being followed by a qualifying caution. If Strabo

tells us that ancient Nineveh was forty-seven miles in circumference,

and his testimony is accepted, why should it be otherwise the moment

he testifies to the accomplishment of Sibylline prophecies? Where is

the common sense in calling Herodotus the “Father of History,” and

then accusing him, in the same breath, of silly gibberish, whenever he

recounts marvellous manifestations, of which he was an eye-witness?

Perhaps, after all, such a caution is more than ever necessary, now

that our epoch has been christened the Century of Discovery. The

disenchantment may prove too cruel for Europe. Gunpowder, which has

long been thought an invention of Bacon and Schwartz, is now shown

in the school-books to have been used by the Chinese for levelling

hills and blasting rocks, centuries before our era. “In the Museum

of Alexandria,” says Draper, “there was a machine invented by Hero,

the mathematician, a little more than 100 years B.C. It revolved by

the agency of steam, and was of the form that we should now call a

reaction-engine.... Chance had nothing to do with the invention of the

modern steam-engine.”[402] Europe prides herself upon the discoveries

of Copernicus and Galileo, and now we are told that the astronomical

observations of the Chaldeans extend back to within a hundred years of

the flood; and Bunsen fixes the flood at not less than 10,000 years

before our era.[403] Moreover, a Chinese emperor, more than 2,000 years

before the birth of Christ (_i. e._, before Moses) put to death his two

chief astronomers for not predicting an eclipse of the sun.

It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as

to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries

of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially

the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is “the

most important discovery of the present century,” as Sir William

Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the

British Association. But, this “important discovery” is no discovery

after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be

found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of {242}

prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered in the dreamy

speculations of Vedic theology, in the doctrine of emanation and

absorption, the nirvana in short. John Erigena outlined it in his bold

philosophy in the eighth century, and we invite any one to read his _De

Divisione Naturæ_, who would convince himself of this truth. Science

tells that when the theory of the indestructibility of matter (also

a very, very old idea of Demokritus, by the way) was demonstrated,

it became necessary to extend it to force. No material particle can

ever be lost; no part of the force existing in nature can vanish;

hence, force was likewise proved indestructible, and its various

manifestations or forces, under divers aspects, were shown to be

mutually convertible, and but different modes of motion of the material

particles. And thus was rediscovered the force-correlation. Mr. Grove,

so far back as 1842, gave to each of these forces, such as heat,

electricity, magnetism, and light, the character of convertibility;

making them capable of being at one moment a cause, and at the next an

effect.[404] But whence come these forces, and whither do they go, when

we lose sight of them? On this point science is silent.

The theory of “force-correlation,” though it may be in the minds of

our contemporaries “the greatest discovery of the age,” can account

for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither

can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible,

and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to

explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular

are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the _Timæus_ the

primary and secondary qualities of matter,[405] and the feebleness of

human intellect, makes Timæus say: “God knows the original qualities

of things; man can only hope to attain to probability.” We have but

to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find

precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not

allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may

be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient

Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely

that law. The Τὸ Ὀν the primordial point in the boundless circle,

“whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere,” emanating

from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe

under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and,

after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic

“_nothing_”), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as

gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption

into Nirvana[406]—what else is this but correlation of forces?

Science tells us that heat may be shown to develop electricity, {243}

electricity produce heat; and magnetism to evolve electricity, and

_vice versa_. Motion, they tell us, results from motion itself, and so

on, _ad infinitum_. This is the A B C of occultism and of the earliest

alchemists. The indestructibility of matter and force being discovered

and proved, the great problem of eternity is solved. What need have

we more of spirit? its uselessness is henceforth scientifically

demonstrated!

Thus modern philosophers may be said not to have gone one step beyond

what the priests of Samothrace, the Hindus, and even the Christian

Gnostics well knew. The former have shown it in that wonderfully

ingenious mythos of the Dioskuri, or “the sons of heaven;” the twin

brothers, spoken of by Schweigger, “who constantly die and return

to life together, while it is absolutely necessary _that one should

die that the other may live_.” They knew as well as our physicists,

that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into

another force. Though archæology may not have discovered any ancient

apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed

with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all

the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter

and force—plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual

fire—or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of

whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.

In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following

account: “In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that

beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine;

so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain

alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things

manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist

in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy

and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are

subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial

regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial

manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene

condition.”

Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities {244}

of plants, minerals, and animals, all of which are well known to our

naturalists, but none of which are explained. Such are the rotatory

motion of the sunflower, of the heliotrope, of the lotos—which, before

the rising of the sun, folds its leaves, drawing the petals within

itself, so to say, then expands them gradually, as the sun rises,

and draws them in again as it descends to the west—of the sun and

lunar stones and the helioselenus, of the cock and lion, and other

animals. “Now the ancients,” he says, “having contemplated this mutual

sympathy of things (celestial and terrestrial) applied them for occult

purposes, both celestial and terrene natures, by means of which,

through a certain similitude, they deduced divine virtues into this

inferior abode.... All things are full of divine natures; terrestrial

natures receiving the plenitude of such as are celestial, but celestial

of _super_celestial essences, while every order of things proceeds

gradually in a beautiful descent from _the highest to the lowest_.[407]

For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of

things, are afterwards dilated in descending, _various souls being

distributed under their various ruling divinities_.”[408]

Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but

science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our

scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is

firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between

organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four

kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science

calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediæval hermetists called

magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is

understood by Plato and explained in _Timæus_ as the attraction of

lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the

latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of

gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that _gravity causes all

bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their

weight_, the difference being caused by some other _unknown_ agency,

would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to _magnetism_ than to

gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance

than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties

of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their

mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these,

traced to the _spiritual_ principle which pervades and animates all

things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle

to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge

of natural law—this _was_ and _is_ the basis of magic.

In his notes on _Ghosts and Goblins_, when reviewing some facts adduced {245}

by certain illustrious defenders of the spiritual phenomena, such

as Professor de Morgan, Mr. Robert Dale Owen, and Mr. Wallace among

others—Mr. Richard A. Proctor says that he “cannot see any force in

the following remarks by Professor Wallace: ‘How is such evidence as

this,’ he (Wallace) says, speaking of one of Owen’s stories, ‘refuted

or explained away? Scores, and even hundreds, of equally-attested facts

are on record, but no attempt is made to explain them. They are simply

ignored, and in many cases admitted to be inexplicable.’” To this

Mr. Proctor jocularly replies that as “our philosophers declare that

they have long ago decided these ghost stories to be all delusions;

_therefore_ they need only be ignored; and they feel much ‘worritted’

that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of

whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that

the former verdict was contrary to the evidence.”

“All this,” he goes on to say, “affords excellent reason why the

‘converts’ should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more

to the purpose must be urged before ‘the philosophers’ can be expected

to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to

be shown that _the well-being of the human race is to some important

degree concerned in the matter_, whereas the trivial nature of all

ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!”

Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of

authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show

with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed

subject of “Ghosts and Goblins.” She quotes from a Washington paper a

report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April

29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who

was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as

for his life-long labors for science, “was _bullied_ into silence” by

Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism.

“The impertinent action of one of the members of the ‘American

Scientific Association,’” says the authoress, “was sanctioned by the

majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all

of them in their proceedings.”[409] On the following morning, in the

report of the session, the _Spiritual Telegraph_ thus commented upon

the events:

“It would seem that a subject like this” (presented by Professor Hare)

was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of ‘science.’ But

the ‘American Association for the Promotion of Science’,[410] decided {246}

that it was either unworthy of their attention or dangerous for them to

meddle with, and so they voted to put the invitation on the table....

We cannot omit in this connection to mention that the ‘American

Association for _the Promotion of Science_’ held a very learned,

extended, grave, and profound discussion at the same session, _upon the

cause why ‘roosters crow between twelve and one o’clock at night_!’

A subject worthy of philosophers; and one, moreover, which must have

been shown to effect “the well-being of the human race” in a _very_

“_important_ degree.”

It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a

mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that

of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule.

Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show

the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick

simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal

day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been

known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and

died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak,

it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an “effect of the

imagination;” the latter a “curious coincidence.”

Max Müller gives a number of such cases in his essay _On Manners and

Customs_. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America,

in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it

among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing

Tyler’s _Researches into the Early History of Mankind_, a work in

which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the

great philologist very justly remarks the following: “If it occurred

in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan

property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains

but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and

native American story-tellers ... or to inquire whether there is not

some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy

between the life of flowers and the life of man.”

The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the

superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very

idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even

stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that

which they cannot well deny. The author of the _Asclepian Dialogue_

furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present

period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as {247}

then, “there is a lamentable departure of divinity from man, when

nothing worthy of heaven or celestial concerns is heard or believed,

and when every divine voice is by a _necessary_ silence dumb.”[411] Or,

as the Emperor Julian has it, “the _little_ soul” of the skeptic “is

indeed acute, but sees nothing with a vision healthy and sound.”

_We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state._

Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every

cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the

spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony

with the divine nature, he says; “but their parts,” owing to a too

close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the _earthly_

(which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), “are sometimes

according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature.” When those

circulations—which Eliphas Levi calls “currents of the astral light” in

the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take

place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything

pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of

plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the “superior

natures,” and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with

these “inferior” ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose

their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of

mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers

of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth

century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so

irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the

nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain

alone _philosophizes_.

_Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of

the sacerdotal savant._ Though the focus was jealously guarded in the

sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how

are we to account for the extraordinary identity of “superstitions,”

customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs

so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly

the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern

nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the

aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of

the ancient Pythagorean maxims, “Do not stir the fire with a sword,”

as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest

connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found

this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A

Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into

the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear {248}

of cutting the “head of the fire.” The Kamtchadal of North-eastern

Asia consider it a great sin so to do. The Sioux Indians of North

America dare not touch the fire with either needle, knife, or any sharp

instrument. The Kalmucks entertain the same dread; and an Abyssinian

would rather bury his bare arms to the elbows in blazing coals than

use a knife or axe near them. All these facts Tyler also calls “simply

curious coincidences.” Max Müller, however, thinks that they lose much

of their force by the fact “of the Pythagorean doctrine being at the

bottom of it.”

Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has

a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning,

expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which

is explained by Iamblichus in his _Life of Pythagoras_. This “Dig

not fire with a sword,” is the ninth symbol in the _Protreptics_ of

this Neo-platonist. “This symbol,” he says, “exhorts to prudence.” It

shows “the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire

and wrath—not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words

you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer

yourself.... Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol.

For, he says, ‘It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is

necessary to be done redeems the soul.’ And this he says truly. For

many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul,

and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue

and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger

being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of

intellect.”[412]

We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality

of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon

the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers—Tyndall,

Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love

for the “men of old” the primitive sages—we were always afraid to

trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who

deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected

reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public

opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able

articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of

such can be found in the _National Quarterly Review_ of December,

1875, entitled “Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers.” It is a

very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of

our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter,

the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into

existence, etc. “The religious world has been much startled,” the

author proceeds to say, “and not a little excited by the utterances {249}

of men like Spencer, Tyndall, Huxley, Proctor, and a few others of the

same school.” Admitting very cheerfully how much science owes to each

of those gentlemen, nevertheless the author “most emphatically” denies

that they have made any discoveries at all. There is nothing new in

the speculations, even of the most advanced of them; nothing which was

not known and taught, in one form or another, thousands of years ago.

He does not say that these scientists “put forward their theories as

their own discoveries, but they leave the fact to be implied, and the

newspapers do the rest.... The public, which has neither time nor the

inclination to examine the facts, adopts the faith of the newspapers

... and wonders what will come next! ... The supposed originators of

such startling theories are assailed in the newspapers. Sometimes the

obnoxious scientists undertake to defend themselves, but we cannot

recall a single instance in which they have candidly said, ‘Gentlemen,

be not angry with us; we are merely _revamping_ stories which are

nearly as old as the mountains.’” This would have been the simple

truth; “but even scientists or philosophers,” adds the author, “are not

always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they

think may secure niches for them among the immortal ones.”[413]

Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles,

the “infallible popes” on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules,

primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels

for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and

Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the

latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let

alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the _atomic_

philosopher. In the same _Review_ we find this very startling

denunciation:

“Who, _among the innocent_, has not been astonished, even within the

last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What

an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in

their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we

have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon

Playfair translated into English the most ‘advanced’ of Baron Liebig’s

works.”[414]

“Another recent utterance,” he says, “which startled a large number

of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express,

or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the

substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its

kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. {250}

Thus, for instance, that scientist proclaims: “Physiology has

sufficiently decisive grounds for the opinions, that _every thought,

every sensation_ is accompanied by a change in the composition of the

_substance of the brain_; that every motion, every manifestation of

force is the result of a transformation of the structure or of its

substance.[415]

Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace,

almost to a page, the whole of Liebig’s speculations, interlined now

and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan

philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great

authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered

in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent

phraseology so pre-eminently his own.

Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and

all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of

Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of

_Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit_, and even in Herder’s _Philosophy

of History_.

“Priestley,” adds the author, “was not molested by government, simply

because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic

views from the house-top. This philosopher ... was the author of from

seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen.” It is in

these works that “he puts forward those identical ideas which have

been declared so ‘startling,’ ‘bold,’ etc., as the utterances of our

present-day philosophers.”

“Our readers,” he proceeds to say, “remember what an excitement has

been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as

to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others

that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new.” “An idea,”

says Plutarch, “is a _being_ incorporeal, which has no subsistence by

itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and _becomes

the cause of its manifestation_” (_De Placitio Philosophorum_).

Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in

materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his “protoplasm,” but a

_rechauffé_ of the speculations of the Hindu Swâbhâvikas or Pantheists,

who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are

born from Swâbhâva or their own nature?[416] As to Epicurus, this

is what Lucretius makes him say: “The soul, thus produced, must be

_material_, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because

it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by

material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with

its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to {251}

man or brute, must die with its death.” Nevertheless, we would remind

the reader that Epicurus is here speaking of the _Astral Soul_, not of

Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley’s

“mutton-protoplasm” is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its

birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.

Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of

depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes

his essay by remarking, “We merely want to show that, at least,

that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and

enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the ‘advanced’

thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those

do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake

to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be

much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above

all, much less plagiarism, than there is.”[417]

Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our

modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul’s

immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists—to use

an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth—are afraid that if they admit

spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is

nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep

out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists,

skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus,

who rejected the soul’s immortality, believed still in a God, and

Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preëxistence

and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all

the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon

it the doctrine of their _machagistia_. The _Chaldean Oracles_, on

which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded

and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus,

Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boëthius, Virgil,

Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius,

Origen, and, finally, _Aristotle_ himself, far from denying our

immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius,

“who were no friends to the soul’s immortality,” as says Henry More,

“Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a

distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence,

and that “it does preëxist before it comes into the body.”[418]

Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a

sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which {252}

he lived, applies with still more justice to our period of utter

skepticism. “I have heard,” writes this eminent man, “I have heard and

read of myriads of good jokes on the ignorance of the ancients, who

were always seeing spirits everywhere; methinks that we are a great

deal more imbecile than our forefathers, in never perceiving any such

now, anywhere.”[419]

CHAPTER VIII. {253}

“Think not my magic wonders wrought by aid

Of Stygian angels summoned up from Hell;

Scorned and accursed by those who have essay’d

Her gloomy Divs and Afrites to compel.

But by perception of the secret powers

Of mineral springs, in nature’s inmost cell,

Of herbs in curtain of her greenest bowers,

And of the moving stars o’er mountain tops and towers.”

—TASSO, Canto XIV., xliii.

“Who dares think _one_ thing and _another_ tell

My heart detests him as the gates of Hell!”—POPE.

“If man ceases to exist when he disappears in the grave, you

must be compelled to affirm that he is the only creature in

existence whom nature or providence has condescended to deceive

and cheat by capacities for which there are no available

objects.”—BULWER-LYTTON: _Strange Story_.

The preface of Richard A. Proctor’s latest work on astronomy, entitled

_Our Place among Infinities_, contains the following extraordinary

words: “It was their ignorance of the earth’s place among infinities,

which led the ancients to regard the heavenly bodies as ruling

favorably or adversely the fates of men and nations, and to dedicate

the days in sets of seven to the seven planets of their astrological

system.”

Mr. Proctor makes two distinct assertions in this sentence: 1. That

the ancients were ignorant of the earth’s place among infinities; and

2, That they regarded the heavenly bodies as ruling, favorably or

adversely, the fates of men and nations.[420] We are very confident

that there is at least good reason to suspect that the ancients were

familiar with the movements, emplacement, and mutual relations of the

heavenly bodies. The testimony of Plutarch, Professor Draper, and

Jowett, are sufficiently explicit. But we would ask Mr. Proctor how it

happens, if the ancient astronomers were so ignorant of the law of the

birth and death of worlds that, in the fragmentary bits which the hand

of time has spared us of ancient lore there should be—albeit couched in

obscure language—so much information which the most recent discoveries

of science have verified? Beginning with the tenth page of the work {254}

under notice, Mr. Proctor sketches for us the theory of the formation

of our earth, and the successive changes through which it passed until

it became habitable for man. In vivid colors he depicts the gradual

accretion of cosmic matter into gaseous spheres surrounded with “a

liquid non-permanent shell;” the condensation of both; the ultimate

solidification of the external crust; the slow cooling of the mass;

the chemical results following the action of intense heat upon the

primitive earthy matter; the formation of soils and their distribution;

the change in the constitution of the atmosphere; the appearance of

vegetation and animal life; and, finally, the advent of man.

Now, let us turn to the oldest written records left us by the

Chaldeans, the Hermetic _Book of Numbers_,[421] and see what we

shall find in the allegorical language of Hermes, Kadmus, or Thuti,

the thrice great Trismegistus. “In the beginning of time the great

invisible one had his holy hands full of celestial matter which he

scattered throughout the infinity; and lo, behold! it became balls of

fire and balls of clay; and they scattered like the moving metal[422]

into many smaller balls, and began their ceaseless turning; and some

of them which were balls of fire became balls of clay; and the balls

of clay became balls of fire; and the balls of fire were waiting their

time to become balls of clay; and the others envied them and bided

their time to become balls of pure divine fire.”

Could any one ask a clearer definition of the cosmic changes which Mr.

Proctor so elegantly expounds?

Here we have the distribution of matter throughout space; then its

concentration into the spherical form; the separation of smaller

spheres from the greater ones; axial rotation; the gradual change of

orbs from the incandescent to the earthy consistence; and, finally,

the total loss of heat which marks their entrance into the stage of

planetary death. The change of the balls of clay into balls of fire

would be understood by materialists to indicate some such phenomenon

as the sudden ignition of the star in Cassiopeia, A.D. 1572, and the

one in Serpentarius, in 1604, which was noted by Kepler. But, do the

Chaldeans evince in this expression a profounder philosophy than of

our day? Does this change into balls of “pure divine fire” signify a {255}

continuous planetary existence, correspondent with the spirit-life

of man, beyond the awful mystery of death? If worlds have, as the

astronomers tell us, their periods of embryo, infancy, adolescence,

maturity, decadence, and death, may they not, like man, have their

continued existence in a sublimated, ethereal, or spiritual form? The

magians so affirm. They tell us that the fecund mother Earth is subject

to the same laws as every one of her children. At her appointed time

she brings forth all created things; in the fulness of her days she

is gathered to the tomb of worlds. Her gross, material body slowly

parts with its atoms under the inexorable law which demands their

new arrangement in other combinations. Her own perfected vivifying

spirit obeys the eternal attraction which draws it toward that central

spiritual sun from which it was originally evolved, and which we

vaguely know under the name of GOD.

“And the heaven was visible in seven circles, and the planets appeared

with all their signs, in star-form, and the stars were divided and

numbered with the rulers that were in them, and their _revolving_

course was bounded with _the air_, and borne with a circular course,

through the agency of the divine SPIRIT.”[423]

We challenge any one to indicate a single passage in the works of

Hermes which proves him guilty of that crowning absurdity of the Church

of Rome which assumed, upon the geocentric theory of astronomy, that

the heavenly bodies were made for our use and pleasure, and that it

was worth while for the only son of God to descend upon this cosmic

mote and die in expiation for our sins! Mr. Proctor tells us of a

liquid non-permanent shell of uncongealed matter enclosing a “viscous

plastic ocean,” within which “there is another interior _solid globe_

rotating.” We, on our part, turn to the _Magia Adamica_ of Eugenius

Philalethes, published in 1650, and at page 12, we find him quoting

from Trismegistus in the following terms: “Hermes affirmeth that in

the _Beginning_ the earth was a quackmire or quivering kind of jelly,

it being nothing else but _water congealed_ by the incubation and heat

of the divine spirit; _cum adhuc_ (sayeth he) _Terra tremula esset,

Lucente sole compacta esto_.”

In the same work, Philalethes, speaking in his quaint, symbolical way,

says, “The earth is invisible ... on my soul it is so, and which is

more, the _eye_ of _man_ never _saw_ the _earth_, nor can it be _seen_

without _art_. To make this _element invisible_, is the _greatest

secret_ in _magic_ ... as for this _fœculent_, gross _body_ upon _which

we walk_, it is a _compost_, and no earth _but it hath earth in it_,

... in a word all the _elements_ are _visible_ but _one_, namely the

_earth_, and when thou hast attained to so much _perfection_ as to {256}

know why _God_ hath placed the _earth in abscondito_,[424] thou hast

an excellent figure whereby to know _God Himself_, and how He is

_visible_, how _invisible_.”[425]

Ages before our savants of the nineteenth century came into existence,

a wise man of the Orient thus expressed himself, in addressing the

invisible Deity: “For thy Almighty Hand, that made the world of

_formless matter_.”[426]

There is much more contained in this language than we are willing

to explain, but we will say that the secret is worth the seeking;

perhaps in this formless matter, the _pre_-Adamite earth, is contained

a “potency” with which Messrs. Tyndall and Huxley would be glad to

acquaint themselves.

But to descend from universals to particulars, from the ancient {257}

theory of planetary evolution to the evolution of plant and animal

life, as opposed to the theory of special creation, what does Mr.

Proctor call the following language of Hermes but an anticipation of

the modern theory of evolution of species? “When God had filled his

powerful hands with those things which are in nature, and in that which

compasseth nature, then shutting them close again, he said: ‘Receive

from me, O holy earth! that art ordained to be the _mother of all_,

lest thou shouldst want anything;’ when presently opening such hands

as it becomes a God to have, he poured down all that was necessary

to the constitution of things.” Here we have primeval matter imbued

with “the promise and potency of every future form of life,” and the

earth declared to be the predestined mother of everything that should

thenceforth spring from her bosom.

More definite is the language of Marcus Antoninus in his discourse to

himself. “The nature of the universe delights not in anything so much

as to alter all things, and present them under another form. This is

her conceit to play one game and begin another. Matter is placed before

her like a piece of wax and she shapes it to all forms and figures. Now

she makes _a bird, then out of the bird a beast_—now a _flower_, then a

frog, and she is pleased with her own magical performances as men are

with their own fancies.”[427]

Before any of our modern teachers thought of evolution, the ancients

taught us, through Hermes, that nothing can be abrupt in nature; that

she never proceeds by jumps and starts, that everything in her works is

slow harmony, and that there is nothing sudden—not even violent death.

The slow development from preëxisting forms was a doctrine with

the Rosicrucian Illuminati. The _Tres Matres_ showed Hermes the

mysterious progress of their work, before they condescended to reveal

themselves to mediæval alchemists. Now, in the Hermetic dialect,

these three mothers are the symbol of light, heat, and electricity,

or magnetism, the two latter being as convertible as the whole of

the forces or agents which have a place assigned them in the modern

“Force-correlation.” Synesius mentions books of stone which he found in

the temple of Memphis, on which was engraved the following sentence:

“One _nature_ delights in another, one nature overcomes another, one

nature overrules another, and the whole of them are _one_.”

The inherent restlessness of matter is embodied in the saying of

Hermes: “Action is the life of Phta;” and Orpheus calls nature

Πολυμήχανος μάτηρ, “the mother that makes many things,” or the

ingenious, the contriving, the inventive mother.

Mr. Proctor says: “All that _that is upon and within the earth, all {258}

vegetable forms and_ all animal forms, our bodies, our brains, are

formed of materials which have been drawn in from those depths of

space surrounding us on all sides.” The Hermetists and the later

Rosicrucians held that all things visible and invisible were produced

by the contention of light with darkness, and that every particle

of matter contains within itself a spark of the divine essence—or

light, _spirit_—which, through its tendency to free itself from its

entanglement and return to the central source, produced motion in the

particles, and from motion forms were born. Says Hargrave Jennings,

quoting Robertus di Fluctibus: “Thus all minerals in this spark of life

have the rudimentary possibility of plants and growing organisms; thus

all plants have rudimentary sensations which might (in the ages) enable

them to perfect and transmute into locomotive new creatures, lesser or

higher in their grade, or nobler or meaner in their functions; thus all

plants, and all vegetation might pass off (by side roads) into more

distinguished highways as it were, of independent, completer advance,

allowing their original spark of light to expand and thrill with higher

and more vivid force, and to urge forward with more abounding, informed

purpose, all wrought by planetary influence directed by the unseen

spirits (or workers) of the great original architect.”[428]

_Light_—the first mentioned in _Genesis_, is termed by the kabalists,

Sephira, or the Divine _Intelligence_, the mother of all the Sephiroth,

while the _Concealed Wisdom_ is the father. Light is the first

begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life,

says the evangelist. Both are electricity—the life-principle, the

_anima mundi_, pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all

things. Light is the great Protean magician, and under the Divine

Will of the architect, its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth

to every form as well as to every living being. From its swelling,

electric bosom, springs _matter_ and _spirit_. Within its beams lie

the beginnings of all physical and chemical action, and of all cosmic

and spiritual phenomena; it vitalizes and disorganizes; it gives life

and produces death, and from its primordial point gradually emerged

into existence the myriads of worlds, visible and invisible celestial

bodies. It was at the ray of this _First_ mother, one in three, that

God, according to Plato, “lighted a fire, which we now call the

sun,”[429] and, which is _not_ the cause of either light or heat, but

merely the focus, or, as we might say, the lens, by which the rays of

the primordial light become materialized, are concentrated upon our

solar system, and produce all the correlations of forces.

So much for the first of Mr. Proctor’s two propositions; now for the {259}

second.

The work which we have been noticing, comprises a series of twelve

essays, of which the last is entitled _Thoughts on Astrology_. The

author treats the subject with so much more consideration than is

the custom of men of his class, that it is evident he has given it

thoughtful attention. In fact, he goes so far as to say that, “If

we consider the matter aright, we must concede ... that of all the

errors into which men have fallen in their desire to penetrate into

futurity, astrology is the most respectable, we may even say the most

reasonable.”[430]

He admits that “The heavenly bodies _do_ rule the fates of men and

nations in the most unmistakable manner, seeing that without the

controlling and beneficent influences of the chief among those orbs—the

sun—every living creature on the earth must perish.“[431] He admits,

also, the influence of the moon, and sees nothing strange in the

ancients reasoning by analogy, that if two among these heavenly bodies

were thus potent in terrestrial influences, it was ” ... natural that

the other moving bodies known to the ancients, should be thought to

possess also their special powers.”[432] Indeed, the professor sees

nothing unreasonable in their supposition that the influences exerted

by the slower moving planets “might be even more potent than those of

the sun himself.” Mr. Proctor thinks that the system of astrology “was

formed gradually and perhaps tentatively.” Some influences may have

been inferred from observed events, the fate of this or that king or

chief, guiding astrologers in assigning particular influences to such

planetary aspects as were presented at the time of his nativity. Others

may have been invented, and afterward have found general acceptance,

because confirmed by some _curious coincidences_.

A witty joke may sound very prettily, even in a learned treatise, and

the word “coincidence” may be applied to anything we are unwilling to

accept. But a sophism is not a truism; still less is it a mathematical

demonstration, which alone ought to serve as a beacon—to astronomers,

at least. Astrology is a science _as infallible_ as astronomy itself,

with the condition, however, that its interpreters must be equally

infallible; and it is this condition, _sine qua non_, so very difficult

of realization, that has always proved a stumbling-block to both.

Astrology is to exact astronomy what psychology is to exact physiology.

In astrology and psychology one has to step beyond the visible world of

matter, and enter into the domain of transcendent spirit. It is the old

struggle between the Platonic and Aristotelean schools, and it is not {260}

in our century of Sadducean skepticism that the former will prevail

over the latter. Mr. Proctor, in his professional capacity, is like the

uncharitable person of the Sermon on the Mount, who is ever ready to

attract public attention to the mote in his despised neighbor’s eye,

and overlook the beam in his own. Were we to record the failures and

ridiculous blunders of astronomers, we are afraid they would outnumber

by far those of the astrologers. Present events fully vindicate

Nostradamus, who has been so much ridiculed by our skeptics. In an old

book of prophecies, published in the fifteenth century (an edition of

1453), we read the following, among other astrological predictions:[433]

“In twice two hundred years, the Bear

The Crescent will assail;

But if the Cock and Bull unite,

The Bear will not prevail.

In twice ten years again—

Let Islam know and fear—

The Cross shall stand, the Crescent wane,

Dissolve, and disappear.”

In just twice two hundred years from the date of that prophecy, we

had the Crimean war, during which the alliance of the Gallic Cock and

English Bull interfered with the political designs of the Russian Bear.

In 1856 the war was ended, and Turkey, or the Crescent, closely escaped

destruction. In the present year (1876) the most unexpected events of a

political character have just taken place, and _twice ten years_ have

elapsed since peace was proclaimed. Everything seems to bid fair for a

fulfilment of the old prophecy; the future will tell whether the Moslem

Crescent, which seems, indeed, to be _waning_, will irrevocably “wane,

dissolve, and disappear,” as the outcome of the present troubles.

In explaining away the heterodox facts which he appears to have

encountered in his pursuit of knowledge, Mr. Proctor is obliged more

than once in his work, to fall back upon these “curious coincidences.”

One of the most curious of these is stated by him in a foot-note (page

301) as follows: “I do not here dwell on the curious coincidence—if,

indeed, Chaldean astrologers had not discovered the ring of Saturn—that

they showed the god corresponding within a ring and _triple_.... Very

moderate optical knowledge—such, indeed, as we may fairly infer from {261}

the presence of optical instruments among Assyrian remains—might

have led to the discovery of Saturnal rings and Jupiter’s moons....

Bel, the Assyrian Jupiter,” he adds, “was represented sometimes with

four star-tipped wings. _But it is possible that these are mere

coincidences._”

In short, Mr. Proctor’s theory of coincidence becomes finally more

suggestive of miracle than the facts themselves. For coincidences our

friends the skeptics appear to have an unappeasable appetite. We have

brought sufficient testimony in the preceding chapter to show that the

ancients must have used as good optical instruments as we have now.

Were the instruments in possession of Nebuchadnezzar of such moderate

power, and the knowledge of his astronomers so very contemptible,

when, according to Rawlinson’s reading of the tiles, the Birs-Nimrud,

or temple of Borsippa, had seven stages, symbolical of the concentric

circles of the seven spheres, each built of tiles and metals to

correspond with the color of the ruling planet of the sphere typified?

Is it a coincidence again, that they should have appropriated to each

planet the color which our latest telescopic discoveries show to be

the real one?[434] Or is it again a coincidence, that Plato should

have indicated in the _Timæus_ his knowledge of the indestructibility

of matter, of conservation of energy, and correlation of forces? “The

latest word of modern philosophy,” says Jowett, “is continuity and

development, but to Plato _this is the beginning and foundation of

science_.”[435]

The radical element of the oldest religions was essentially

_sabaistic_; and we maintain that their myths and allegories—if once

correctly and thoroughly interpreted, will dovetail with the most exact

astronomical notions of our day. We will say more; there is hardly a

scientific law—whether pertaining to physical astronomy or physical

geography—that could not be easily pointed out in the ingenious

combinations of their fables. They allegorized the most important as

well as the most trifling causes of the celestial motions; the nature

of every phenomenon was personified; and in the mythical biographies

of the Olympic gods and goddesses, one well acquainted with the

latest principles of physics and chemistry can find their causes,

inter-agencies, and mutual relations embodied in the deportment and

course of action of the fickle deities. The atmospheric electricity

in its neutral and latent states is embodied usually in demi-gods and

goddesses, whose scene of action is more limited to earth and who, in

their occasional flights to the higher deific regions, display their

electric tempers always _in strict proportion with the increase of

distance from the earth’s surface_: the weapons of Hercules and Thor {262}

were never more mortal than when the gods soared into the clouds. We

must bear in mind that before the time when the Olympian Jupiter was

anthropomorphized by the genius of Pheidias into the Omnipotent God,

the _Maximus_, the God of gods, and thus abandoned to the adoration of

the multitudes, in the earliest and abstruse science of symbology he

embodied in his person and attributes the whole of the cosmic forces.

The Myth was less metaphysical and complicated, but more truly eloquent

as an expression of natural philosophy. Zeus, the male element of the

creation with Chthonia—Vesta (the earth), and Metis (the water) the

first of the Oceanides (the feminine principles)—was viewed according

to Porphyry and Proclus as the _zōŏn-ek-zōōn_, the chief of living

beings. In the Orphic theology, the oldest of all, metaphysically

speaking, he represented both the _potentia_ and _actus_, the

unrevealed _cause_ and the Demiurg, or the active creator as an

emanation from the invisible potency. In the latter demiurgic capacity,

in conjunction with his consorts, we find in him all the mightiest

agents of cosmic evolution—chemical affinity, atmospheric electricity,

attraction, and repulsion.

It is in following his representations in this physical qualification

that we discover how well acquainted were the ancients with all the

doctrines of physical science in their modern development. Later, in

the Pythagorean speculations, Zeus became the metaphysical trinity;

the monad evolving from its invisible SELF the _active_ cause, effect,

and intelligent will, the whole forming the _Tetractis_. Still later

we find the earlier Neo-platonists leaving the primal monad aside,

on the ground of its utter incomprehensibleness to human intellect,

speculating merely on the _demiurgic triad_ of this deity as visible

and intelligible in its effects; and thus the metaphysical continuation

by Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, and other philosophers of this view of

Zeus the father, Zeus _Poseidon_, or _dunamis_, the son and power, and

the spirit or _nous_. This triad was also accepted as a whole by the

Irenæic school of the second century; the more substantial difference

between the doctrines of the Neo-platonists and the Christians being

merely the forcible amalgamation by the latter of the incomprehensible

monad with its actualized creative trinity.

In his astronomical aspect Zeus-Dionysus has his origin in the zodiac,

the ancient solar year. In Libya he assumed the form of a ram, and is

identical with the Egyptian Amun, who begat Osiris, the taurian god.

Osiris is also a personified emanation of the Father-Sun, and himself

the Sun in Taurus. The Parent-Sun being the Sun in Aries. As the

latter, Jupiter, is in the guise of a ram, and as Jupiter-Dionysus or

Jupiter-Osiris, he is the bull. This animal is, as it is well known,

the symbol of the creative power; moreover the Kabala explains, through {263}

the medium of one of its chief expounders, Simon-Ben-Iochai,[436] the

origin of this strange worship of the bulls and cows. It is neither

Darwin nor Huxley—the founders of the doctrine of evolution and its

necessary complement, the transformation of species—that can find

anything against the rationality of this symbol, except, perhaps, a

natural feeling of uneasiness upon finding that they were preceded by

the ancients even in this particular modern discovery. Elsewhere, we

will give the doctrine of the kabalists as taught by Simon-Ben-Iochai.

It may be easily proved that from time immemorial Saturn or Kronos,

whose ring, most positively, _was_ discovered by the Chaldean

astrologers, and whose symbolism is no “coincidence,” was considered

the father of Zeus, before the latter became himself the father of

all the gods, and was the highest deity. He was the Bel or Baal of

the Chaldeans, and originally imported among them by the Akkadians.

Rawlinson insists that the latter came from Armenia; but if so, how can

we account for the fact that Bel is but a Babylonian personification

of the Hindu Siva, or Bala, the fire-god, the omnipotent creative, and

at the same time, destroying Deity, in many senses higher than Brahma

himself?

“Zeus,” says an Orphic hymn, “is the first and the last, the head, and

the extremities; from him have proceeded all things. He is a man and an

immortal nymph (male and female element); the soul of all things; and

the principal motor in fire; he is the sun and the moon; the fountain

of the ocean; the demiurgus of the universe; one power, one God; the

mighty creator and governor of the cosmos. Everything, fire, water,

earth, ether, night, the heavens, Metis, the primeval architecturess

(the Sophia of the Gnostics, and the Sephira of the Kabalists), the

beautiful Eros, Cupid, all is included within the vast dimensions of

his glorious body!”[437]

This short hymn of laudation contains within itself the groundwork of

every mythopœic conception. The imagination of the ancients proved

as boundless as the visible manifestations of the Deity itself which

afforded them the themes for their allegories. Still the latter,

exuberant as they seem, never departed from the two principal ideas

which may be ever found running parallel in their sacred imagery;

a strict adherence to the physical as well as moral or spiritual

aspect of natural law. Their metaphysical researches never clashed

with scientific truths, and their religions may be truly termed the

psycho-physiological creeds of the priests and scientists, who built

them on the traditions of the infant-world, such as the unsophisticated

minds of the primitive races received them, and on their own

experimental knowledge, hoary with all the wisdom of the intervening

ages.

As the sun, what better image could be found for Jupiter emitting {264}

his golden rays than to personify this emanation in Diana, the

all-illuminating virgin Artemis, whose oldest name was Diktynna,

literally the emitted _ray_, from the word _dikein_. The moon is

non-luminous, and it shines only by the reflected light of the

sun; hence, the imagery of his daughter, the goddess of the moon,

and herself, Luna, Astartè, or Diana. As the Cretan Diktynna, she

wears a wreath made of the magic plant _diktamnon_, or _dictamnus_,

the evergreen shrub whose contact is said, at the same time, to

develop somnambulism and cure finally of it; and, as Eilithyia and

Juno Pronuba, she is the goddess who presides over births; she

is an Æsculapian deity, and the use of the dictamnus-wreath, in

association with the moon, shows once more the profound observation

of the ancients. This plant is known in botany as possessing strongly

sedative properties; it grows on Mount Dicte, a Cretan mountain, in

great abundance; on the other hand, the moon, according to the best

authorities on animal magnetism, acts upon the juices and ganglionic

system, or nerve-cells, the seat from whence proceed all the

nerve-fibres which play such a prominent part in mesmerization. During

childbirth the Cretan women were covered with this plant, and its

roots were administered as best calculated to soothe acute pain, and

allay the irritability so dangerous at this period. They were placed,

moreover, within the precincts of the temple sacred to the goddess,

and, if possible, under the direct rays of the resplendent daughter of

Jupiter—the bright and warm Eastern moon.

The Hindu Brahmans and Buddhists have complicated theories on the

influence of the sun and moon (the male and female elements), as

containing the negative and positive principles, the opposites of the

magnetic polarity. “The influence of the moon on women is well known,”

write all the old authors on magnetism; and Ennemoser, as well as Du

Potet, confirm the theories of the Hindu seers in every particular.

The marked respect paid by the Buddhists to the sapphire-stone—which

was also sacred to Luna, in every other country—may be found based

on something more scientifically exact than a mere groundless

superstition. They ascribed to it a sacred magical power, which every

student of psychological mesmerism will readily understand, for its

polished and deep-blue surface produces extraordinary somnambulic

phenomena. The varied influence of the prismatic colors on the growth

of vegetation, and especially that of the “blue ray,” has been

recognized but recently. The Academicians quarrelled over the unequal

heating power of the prismatic rays until a series of experimental

demonstrations by General Pleasonton, proved that under the blue ray,

the most electric of all, animal and vegetable growth was increased to {265}

a magical proportion. Thus Amoretti’s investigations of the electric

polarity of precious stones show that the diamond, the garnet, the

amethyst, are -E., while the sapphire is +E.[438] Thus, we are enabled

to show that the latest experiments of science only corroborate that

which was known to the Hindu sages before any of the modern academies

were founded. An old Hindu legend says that Brahma-Prajapâti, having

fallen in love with his own daughter, _Ushâs_ (Heaven, sometimes the

Dawn also), assumed the form of a buck (_ris’ya_) and Ushâs that

of a female deer (_rôhit_) and thus committed the first sin.[439]

Upon seeing such a desecration, the gods felt so terrified, that

uniting their most fearful-looking bodies—each god possessing as many

bodies as he desires—they produced Bhûtavan (the spirit of evil),

who was created by them on purpose to destroy the _incarnation_ of

the first sin committed by the Brahma himself. Upon seeing this,

Brahma-Hiranyagarbha[440] repented bitterly and began repeating the

Mantras, or prayers of purification, and, in his grief, dropped on

earth a tear, the _hottest_ that ever fell from an eye; and from it was

formed the first sapphire.

This half-sacred, half-popular legend shows that the Hindus knew which

was the most electric of all the prismatic colors; moreover, the

particular influence of the sapphire-stone was as well defined as that

of all the other minerals. Orpheus teaches how it is possible to affect

a whole audience by means of a lodestone; Pythagoras pays a particular

attention to the color and nature of precious stones; while Apollonius

of Tyana imparts to his disciples the secret virtues of each, and

changes his jewelled rings daily, using a particular stone for every

day of the month and according to the laws of judicial astrology. The

Buddhists assert that the sapphire produces peace of mind, equanimity,

and chases all evil thoughts by establishing a healthy circulation in

man. So does an electric battery, with its well-directed fluid, say

our electricians. “The sapphire,” say the Buddhists, “will open barred

doors and dwellings (for the spirit of man); it produces a desire for

prayer, and brings with it more peace than any other gem; but he who

would wear it must lead a pure and holy life.”[441]

Diana-Luna is the daughter of Zeus by Proserpina, who represents

the Earth in her active labor, and, according to Hesiod, as Diana {266}

Eilythia-Lucina she is Juno’s daughter. But Juno, devoured by Kronos or

Saturn, and restored back to life by the Oceanid Metis, is also known

as the Earth. Saturn, as the evolution of Time, swallows the earth

in one of the ante-historical cataclysms, and it is only when Metis

(the waters) by retreating in her many beds, frees the continent, that

Juno is said to be restored to her first shape. The idea is expressed

in the 9th and 10th verses of the first chapter of _Genesis_. In the

frequent matrimonial quarrels between Juno and Jupiter, Diana is always

represented as turning her back on her mother and smiling upon her

father, though she chides him for his numerous frolics. The Thessalian

magicians are said to have been obliged, during such eclipses, to

draw her attention to the earth by the power of their spells and

incantations, and the Babylonian astrologers and magi never desisted

in their spells until they brought about a reconciliation between the

irritated couple, after which Juno “radiantly smiled on the bright

goddess” Diana, who, encircling her brow with her crescent, returned to

her hunting-place in the mountains.

It seems to us that the fable illustrates the different phases of the

moon. We, the inhabitants of the earth, never see but one-half of our

bright satellite, who thus turns _her back_ to her mother Juno. The

sun, the moon, and the earth are constantly changing positions with

relation to each other. With the _new_ moon there is constantly a

change of weather; and sometimes the wind and storms may well suggest

a quarrel between the sun and earth, especially when the former is

concealed by grumbling thunder-clouds. Furthermore, the new moon, when

her dark side is turned toward us, is invisible; and it is only after a

_reconciliation_ between the sun and the earth, that a bright crescent

becomes visible on the side nearest to the sun, though this time Luna

is not illuminated by sunlight _directly_ received, but by sunlight

reflected from the earth to the moon, and by her reflected back to us.

Hence, the Chaldean astrologers and the magicians of Thessaly, who

probably watched and determined as accurately as a Babinet the course

of the celestial bodies, were said by their enchantments to force the

moon to descend on earth, _i.e._, to show her crescent, which she could

do but after receiving the “radiant smile” from her mother-earth, who

put it on after the conjugal reconciliation. Diana-Luna, having adorned

her head with her crescent, returns back to hunt in _her mountains_.

As to calling in question the intrinsic knowledge of the ancients

on the ground of their “_superstitious_ deductions from natural

phenomena,” it is as appropriate as it would be if, five hundred years

hence, our descendents should regard the pupils of Professor Balfour

Stewart as _ancient_ ignoramuses, and himself a shallow philosopher.

If modern science, in the person of this gentleman, can condescend to {267}

make experiments to determine whether the appearance of the spots on

the sun’s surface is in any way connected with the potatoe disease,

and finds _it is_; and that, moreover, “the earth is very seriously

affected by what takes place in the sun,”[442] why should the ancient

astrologers be held up as either fools or arrant knaves? There is the

same relation between natural and judicial or judiciary astrology, as

between physiology and psychology, the physical and the moral. If in

later centuries these sciences were degraded into charlatanry by some

money-making impostors, is it just to extend the accusation to those

mighty men of old who, by their persevering studies and holy lives,

bestowed an immortal name upon Chaldea and Babylonia? Surely those who

are now found to have made correct astronomical observations ranging

back to “within 100 years from the flood,” from the top observatory

of the “cloud-encompassed Bel,” as Prof. Draper has it, can hardly be

considered impostors. If their mode of impressing upon the popular

minds the great astronomical truths differed from the “system of

education” of our present century and appears ridiculous to some, the

question still remains unanswered: which of the two systems was the

best? With them science went hand in hand with religion, and the idea

of God was inseparable from that of his works. And while in the present

century there is not one person out of ten thousand who knows, if he

ever knew the fact at all, that the planet Uranus is _next_ to Saturn,

and revolves about the sun in eighty-four years; and that Saturn is

_next_ to Jupiter, and takes twenty-nine and a half years to make one

complete revolution in its orbit; while Jupiter performs his revolution

in twelve years; the uneducated masses of Babylon and Greece, having

impressed on their minds that Uranus was the father of Saturn, and

Saturn that of Jupiter, considering them furthermore deities as well as

all their satellites and attendants, we may perhaps infer from it, that

while Europeans only discovered Uranus in 1781, a curious coincidence

is to be noticed in the above myths.

We have but to open the most common book on astrology, and compare the

descriptions embraced in the _Fable of the Twelve Houses_ with the

most modern discoveries of science as to the nature of the planets

and the elements in each star, to see that without any spectroscope

the ancients were perfectly well acquainted with the same. Unless

the fact is again regarded as “a coincidence,” we can learn, to a

certain extent, of the degree of the solar heat, light, and nature of

the planets by simply studying their symbolic representations in the

Olympic gods, and the twelve signs of the zodiac, to each of which in

astrology is attributed a particular quality. If the goddesses of our {268}

own planet vary in no particular from other gods and goddesses, but

all have a like physical nature, does not this imply that the sentinels

who watched from the top of Bel’s tower, by day as well as by night,

holding communion with the euhemerized deities, had remarked, before

ourselves, the physical unity of the universe and the fact that the

planets above are made of precisely the same chemical elements as our

own. The sun in Aries, Jupiter, is shown in astrology as a masculine,

diurnal, cardinal, equinoctial, easterly sign, hot and dry, and

answers perfectly to the character attributed to the fickle “Father

of the gods.” When angry Zeus-Akrios snatches from his fiery belt the

thunderbolts which he hurls forth from heaven, he rends the clouds and

descends as Jupiter _Pluvius_ in torrents of rain. He is the greatest

and highest of gods, and his movements are as rapid as lightning

itself. The planet Jupiter is known to revolve on its axis so rapidly

that the point of its equator turns at the rate of 450 miles a minute.

An immense excess of centrifugal force at the equator is believed to

have caused the planet to become extremely flattened at the poles; and

in Crete the personified god Jupiter was represented without ears. The

planet Jupiter’s disk is crossed by dark belts; varying in breadth,

they appear to be connected with its rotation on its axis, and are

produced by disturbances in its atmosphere. The face of Father Zeus,

says Hesiod, became spotted with rage when he beheld the Titans ready

to rebel.

In Mr. Proctor’s book, astronomers seem especially doomed by Providence

to encounter all kinds of curious “coincidences,” for he gives us

many cases out of the “multitude,” and even of the “_thousands_ of

facts [sic].” To this list we may add the army of Egyptologists and

archæologists who of late have been the chosen pets of the capricious

_Dame Chance_, who, moreover, generally selects “well-to-do Arabs”

and other Eastern gentlemen, to play the part of benevolent _genii_

to Oriental scholars in difficulties. Professor Ebers is one of the

latest favored ones. It is a well-known fact, that whenever Champollion

needed important links, he fell in with them in the most various and

unexpected ways.

Voltaire, the greatest of “infidels” of the eighteenth century, used

to say, that if there were no God, people would have to invent one.

Volney, another “materialist,” nowhere throughout his numerous writings

denies the existence of God. On the contrary, he plainly asserts

several times that the universe is the work of the “All-wise,” and is

convinced that there is a Supreme Agent, a universal and identical

Artificer, designated by the name of God.[443] Voltaire becomes, toward

the end of his life, Pythagorical, and concludes by saying: “I have {269}

consumed forty years of my pilgrimage ... seeking the philosopher’s

stone called truth. I have consulted all the adepts of antiquity,

Epicurus and Augustine, Plato and Malebranche, and I still remain in

ignorance.... All that I have been able to obtain by comparing and

combining the system of Plato, of the tutor of Alexander, Pythagoras,

and the Oriental, is this: _Chance is a word void of sense_. The world

is arranged according to mathematical laws.”[444]

It is pertinent for us to suggest that Mr. Proctor’s stumbling-block is

that which trips the feet of all materialistic scientists, whose views

he but repeats; he confounds the physical and spiritual operations of

nature. His very theory of the probable inductive reasoning of the

ancients as to the subtile influences of the more remote planets, by

comparison with the familiar and potent effects of the sun and moon

upon our earth, shows the drift of his mind. Because science _affirms_

that the sun imparts physical _heat_ and _light_ to us, and the moon

affects the tides, he thinks that the ancients must have regarded the

other heavenly bodies as exerting the same kind of influence upon us

physically, and indirectly upon our fortunes.[445] And here we must

permit ourselves a digression.

How the ancients regarded the heavenly bodies is very hard to

determine, for one unacquainted with the esoteric explanation of their

doctrines. While philology and comparative theology have begun the

arduous work of analysis, they have as yet arrived at meagre results.

The allegorical form of speech has often led our commentators so far

astray, that they have confounded causes with effects, and _vice

versa_. In the baffling phenomenon of force-correlation, even our

greatest scientists would find it very hard to explain which of these

forces is the cause, and which the effect, since each may be both by

turns, and convertible. Thus, if we should inquire of the physicists,

“Is it light which generates heat, or the latter which produces

light?” we would in all probability be answered that it is certainly

light which creates heat. Very well; but how? did the great Artificer

first produce light, or did He first construct the sun, which is said

to be the sole dispenser of light, and, consequently, heat? These

questions may appear at first glance indicative of ignorance; but,

perhaps, if we ponder them deeply, they will assume another appearance.

In _Genesis_, the “Lord” first creates _light_, and three days and

three nights are alleged to pass away before He creates the sun, the

moon, and the stars. This gross blunder against _exact_ science has

created much merriment among materialists. And they certainly would

be warranted in laughing, if their doctrine that our light and heat {270}

are derived from the sun were unassailable. Until recently, nothing

has happened to upset this theory, which, for lack of a better one,

according to the expression of a preacher, “reigns sovereign in the

Empire of Hypothesis.” The ancient sun-worshippers regarded the Great

Spirit as a nature-god, identical with nature, and the sun as the

deity, “in whom the Lord of life dwells.” Gama is the sun, according

to the Hindu theology, and “The sun is the source of the souls and of

_all life_.”[446] Agni, the “Divine Fire,” the deity of the Hindu,

is the sun,[447] for the fire and sun are the same. Ormazd is light,

the Sun-God, or the Life-giver. In the Hindu philosophy, “The souls

issue from the soul of the world, and return to it as sparks to the

fire.”[448] But, in another place, it is said that “_The Sun_ is the

soul _of all things_; all has proceeded out of it, and will return to

it,”[449] which shows that the sun is meant allegorically here, and

refers to the _central_, invisible sun, GOD, whose first manifestation

was Sephira, the emanation of En-Soph—Light, in short.

“And I looked, and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great

cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it,”

says Ezekiel (i. 4, 22, etc.), “ ... and the likeness of a throne ...

and as the appearance of a man above upon it ... and I saw as it were

the appearance _of fire_ and it had brightness round about it.” And

Daniel speaks of the “ancient of days,” the kabalistic En-Soph, whose

throne was “the fiery flame, his wheels burning fire.... A fiery stream

issued and came forth from before him.”[450] Like the Pagan Saturn, who

had his castle of flame in the seventh heaven, the Jewish Jehovah had

his “castle of fire over the seventh heavens.”[451]

If the limited space of the present work would permit we might easily

show that none of the ancients, the sun-worshippers included, regarded

our visible sun otherwise than as an emblem of their metaphysical

invisible central sun-god. Moreover, they did _not_ believe what our

modern science teaches us, namely, that light and heat proceed from

_our_ sun, and that it is this planet which imparts all life to our

visible nature. “His radiance is undecaying,” says the _Rig-Veda_,

“the intensely-shining, all-pervading, unceasing, undecaying rays of

Agni desist not, neither night nor day.” This evidently related to the

spiritual, central sun, whose rays are all-pervading and unceasing, the

eternal and boundless life-giver. HE the _Point_; the centre (which is

everywhere) of the circle (which is nowhere), the ethereal, spiritual

fire, the soul and spirit of the all-pervading, mysterious ether; the

despair and puzzle of the materialist, who will some day find that that {271}

which causes the numberless cosmic forces to manifest themselves in

eternal correlation is but a divine electricity, or rather _galvanism_,

and that the sun is but one of the myriad _magnets_ disseminated

through space—a reflector—as General Pleasonton has it. That the

sun has no more heat in it than the moon or the space-crowding host

of sparkling stars. That there is no _gravitation_ in the Newtonian

sense,[452] but only magnetic attraction and repulsion; and that it

is by their magnetism that the planets of the solar system have their

motions regulated in their respective orbits by the still more powerful

magnetism of the sun, not by their weight or gravitation. This and much

more they may learn; but, until then we must be content with being

merely laughed at, instead of being burned alive for impiety, or shut

up in an insane asylum.

The laws of Manu are the doctrines of Plato, Philo, Zoroaster,

Pythagoras, and of the Kabala. The esoterism of every religion may

be solved by the latter. The kabalistic doctrine of the allegorical

Father and Son, or Πατηρ and Λογος is identical with the groundwork of

Buddhism. Moses could not reveal to the multitude the sublime secrets

of religious speculation, nor the cosmogony of the universe; the whole

resting upon the Hindu _Illusion_, a clever mask veiling the _Sanctum

Sanctorum_, and which has misled so many theological commentators.[453]

The kabalistic heresies receive an unexpected support in the heterodox {272}

theories of General Pleasonton. According to his opinions (which he

supports on far more unimpeachable facts than orthodox scientists

theirs) the space between the sun and the earth must be filled with a

material medium, which, so far as we can judge from his description,

answers to our kabalistic astral light. The passage of light through

this must produce enormous friction. Friction generates electricity,

and it is this electricity and its correlative magnetism which forms

those tremendous forces of nature that produce in, on, and about our

planet the various changes which we everywhere encounter. He proves

that terrestrial heat _cannot_ be directly derived from the sun, for

heat _ascends_. The force by which heat is effected is a repellent

one, he says, and as it is associated with positive electricity, it is

attracted to the upper atmosphere by its negative electricity, always

associated with cold, which is opposed to positive electricity. He

strengthens his position by showing that the earth, which when covered

with snow cannot be affected by the sun’s rays, is warmest where the

snow is deepest. This he explains upon the theory that the radiation of

heat from the interior of the earth, positively electrified, meeting at

the _surface_ of the earth with the snow in contact with it, negatively

electrified, produces the heat.

Thus he shows that it is not at all to the sun that we are indebted for

light and heat; that light is a creation _sui generis_, which sprung

into existence at the instant when the Deity _willed_, and uttered the

fiat: “Let there be light;” and that it is this independent material

agent which produces heat _by friction_, on account of its enormous

and incessant velocity. In short, it is the first kabalistic emanation

to which General Pleasonton introduces us, that Sephira or divine

_Intelligence_ (the female principle), which, in unity with En-Soph,

or divine wisdom (male principle) produced every thing visible and

invisible. He laughs at the current theory of the incandescence of the

sun and its gaseous substance. The reflection from the photosphere

of the sun, he says, passing through planetary and stellar spaces,

must have thus created a vast amount of electricity and magnetism.

Electricity, by the union of its opposite polarities, evolves heat and

imparts magnetism to all substances capable of receiving it. The sun,

planets, stars, and nebulæ are all magnets, etc.

If this courageous gentleman should prove his case, future generations

will have but little disposition to laugh at Paracelsus and his

sidereal or astral light, and at his doctrine of the magnetic influence {273}

exercised by the stars and planets upon every living creature, plant,

or mineral of our globe. Moreover, if the Pleasonton hypothesis is

established, the transcendent glory of Professor Tyndall will be

rather obscured. According to public opinion, the General makes a

terrible onslaught on the learned physicist, for attributing to the sun

calorific effects experienced by him in an Alpine ramble, that were

simply due to his own vital electricity.[454]

The prevalence of such revolutionary ideas in science, embolden us

to ask the representatives of science whether they can explain _why_

the tides follow the moon in her circling motion? The fact is, they

cannot demonstrate even so familiar a phenomenon as this, one that has

no mystery for even the neophytes in alchemy and magic. We would also

like to learn whether they are equally incapable of telling us why the

moon’s rays are so poisonous, even fatal, to some organisms; why in

some parts of Africa and India a person sleeping in the moonlight is

often made insane; why the crises of certain diseases correspond with

lunar changes; why somnambulists are more affected at her full; and

why gardeners, farmers, and woodmen cling so tenaciously to the idea

that vegetation is affected by lunar influences? Several of the mimosæ

alternately open and close their petals as the full moon emerges from

or is obscured by clouds. And the Hindus of Travancore have a popular

but extremely suggestive proverb which says: “Soft words are better

than harsh; the sea is attracted by the cool moon and not by the hot

sun.” Perhaps the one man or the many men who launched this proverb on

the world knew more about the cause of such attraction of the waters

by the moon than we do. Thus if science cannot explain the cause of

this physical influence, what can she know of the moral and occult

influences that may be exercised by the celestial bodies on men and

their destiny; and why contradict that which it is impossible for her

to prove false? If certain aspects of the moon effect tangible results

so familiar in the experience of men throughout all time, what violence

are we doing to logic in assuming the possibility that a certain

combination of sidereal influences may also be more or less potential?