the _Unseen Universe_, as to the positive effect produced upon the
universal ether by so small a cause as the evolution of thought in a
single human brain, how reasonable will it not appear that the terrific
impulses imparted to this common medium by the sweep of the myriad
blazing orbs that are rushing through “the interstellar depths,” should
affect us and the earth upon which we live, in a powerful degree? If
astronomers cannot explain to us the occult law by which the drifting
particles of cosmic matter aggregate into worlds, and then take their
places in the majestic procession which is ceaselessly moving around
some central point of attraction, how can any one assume to say what
mystic influences may or may not be darting through space and affecting
the issues of life upon this and other planets? Almost nothing is known
of the laws of magnetism and the other imponderable agents; almost
nothing of their effects upon our bodies and minds; even that which is
known and moreover perfectly demonstrated, is attributed to chance, and
curious _coincidences_. But we do know, by these coincidences,[455]
that “there are periods when certain diseases, propensities, fortunes,
and misfortunes of humanity are more rife than at others.” There are
times of epidemic in moral and physical affairs. In one epoch “the
spirit of religious controversy will arouse the most ferocious passions
of which human nature is susceptible, provoking mutual persecution,
bloodshed, and wars; at another, an epidemic of resistance to
constituted authority will spread over half the world (as in the year
1848), rapid and simultaneous as the most virulent bodily disorder.”
Again, the _collective character_ of mental phenomena is illustrated
by an anomalous psychological condition invading and dominating
over thousands upon thousands, depriving them of everything but
automatic action, and giving rise to the popular opinion of demoniacal
possession, an opinion in some sense justified by the satanic passions,
emotions, and acts which accompany the condition. At one period, the
aggregate tendency is to retirement and contemplation; hence, the
countless votaries of monachism and anchoretism; at another the mania
is directed toward _action_, having for its proposed end some utopian
scheme, equally impracticable and useless; hence, the myriads who have
forsaken their kindred, their homes, and their country, to seek a land
whose stones were gold, or to wage exterminating war for the possession
of worthless cities and trackless deserts.[456]
The author from whom the above is quoted says that “the seeds of vice {275}
and crime appear to be sown under the surface of society, and to
spring up and bring forth fruit with appalling rapidity and paralyzing
succession.”
In the presence of these striking phenomena science stands speechless;
she does not even attempt to conjecture as to their cause, and
naturally, for she has not yet learned to look outside of this ball
of dirt upon which we live, and its heavy atmosphere, for the hidden
influences which are affecting us day by day, and even minute by
minute. But the ancients, whose “ignorance” is assumed by Mr. Proctor,
fully realized the fact that the reciprocal relations between the
planetary bodies is as perfect as those between the corpuscles of the
blood, which float in a common fluid; and that each one is affected
by the combined influences of all the rest, as each in its turn
affects each of the others. As the planets differ in size, distance,
and activity, so differ in intensity their impulses upon the ether or
astral light, and the magnetic and other subtile forces radiated by
them in certain aspects of the heavens. Music is the combination and
modulation of sounds, and sound is the effect produced by the vibration
of the ether. Now, if the impulses communicated to the ether by the
different planets may be likened to the tones produced by the different
notes of a musical instrument, it is not difficult to conceive that
the Pythagorean “music of the spheres” is something more than a mere
fancy, and that certain planetary aspects may imply disturbances in
the ether of our planet, and certain others rest and harmony. Certain
kinds of music throw us into frenzy; some exalt the soul to religious
aspirations. In fine, there is scarcely a human creation which does
not respond to certain vibrations of the atmosphere. It is the same
with colors; some excite us, some soothe and please. The nun clothes
herself in black to typify the despondency of a faith crushed under the
sense of original sin; the bride robes herself in white; red inflames
the anger of certain animals. If we and the animals are affected
by vibrations acting upon a very minute scale, why may we not be
influenced in the mass by vibrations acting upon a grand scale as the
effect of combined stellar influences?
“We know,” says Dr. Elam, “that certain pathological conditions
have a tendency to become epidemic, _influenced by causes not yet
investigated_.... We see how strong is the tendency of opinion once
promulgated to run into an epidemic form—no opinion, no delusion, is
too absurd to assume this collective character. We observe, also,
how remarkably the same ideas reproduce themselves and _reappear in
successive ages_; ... no crime is too horrible to become popular,
homicide, infanticide, suicide, poisoning, or any other diabolical {276}
human conception. ... In epidemics, the cause of the rapid spread at
that particular period _remains a mystery_!”
These few lines contain an undeniable _psychological_ fact, sketched
with a masterly pen, and at the same time a _half_-confession of utter
ignorance—“_Causes not yet investigated_.” Why not be honest and add at
once, “_impossible_ to investigate with present scientific methods?”
Noticing an epidemic of incendiarism, Dr. Elam quotes from the _Annales
d’Hygiene Publique_ the following cases: “A girl about seventeen years
of age was arrested on suspicion ... she confessed that twice she had
set fire to dwellings by _instinct_, by _irresistible necessity_.... A
boy about eighteen committed many acts of this nature. He was not moved
by any passion, but the bursting-out of the flames excited a profoundly
pleasing emotion.”
Who but has noticed in the columns of the daily press similar
incidents? They meet the eye constantly. In cases of murder, of every
description, and of other crimes of a diabolical character, the act
is attributed, in nine cases out of ten, by the offenders themselves,
to _irresistible obsessions_. “_Something_ whispered constantly in
my ear.... _Somebody_ was incessantly pushing and leading me on.”
Such are the too-frequent confessions of the criminals. Physicians
attribute them to hallucinations of disordered brains, and call the
homicidal impulse temporary _lunacy_. But is lunacy itself well
understood by any psychologist? Has its cause ever been brought under a
hypothesis capable of withstanding the challenge of an uncompromising
investigator? Let the controversial works of our contemporary alienists
answer for themselves.
Plato acknowledges man to be the toy of the element of necessity, which
he enters upon in appearing in this world of matter; he is influenced
by external causes, and these causes are _daimonia_, like that of
Socrates. Happy is the man physically pure, for if his _external_
soul (body) is pure, it will strengthen the second one (astral body),
or the soul which is termed by him the _higher mortal soul_, which
though liable to err from its own motives, will always side with reason
against the animal proclivities of the body. The lusts of man arise in
consequence of his perishable material body, so do other diseases; but
though he regards crimes as _involuntary_ sometimes, for they result
like bodily disease from external causes, Plato clearly makes a wide
distinction between these _causes_. The fatalism which he concedes
to humanity, does not preclude the possibility of avoiding them, for
though pain, fear, anger, and other feelings are given to men by
_necessity_, “if they conquered these they would live righteously,
and if they were conquered by them, _unrighteously_.”[457] The {277}
_dual_ man, _i. e._, one from whom the divine _immortal_ spirit has
departed, leaving but the animal form and astral body (Plato’s higher
_mortal_ soul), is left merely to his _instincts_, for he was conquered
by all the evils entailed on matter; hence, he becomes a docile
tool in the hands of the _invisibles_—beings of sublimated matter,
hovering in our atmosphere, and ever ready to inspire those who are
deservedly deserted by their _immortal_ counsellor, the Divine Spirit,
called by Plato “genius.”[458] According to this great philosopher
and initiate, one “who lived well during his appointed time would
return to the habitation _of his star_, and there have a blessed and
suitable existence. But if he failed in attaining this in the second
generation he would pass _into a woman_—become helpless and weak as
a woman;[459] and should he not cease from evil in that condition,
he would be changed into some brute, which resembled him in his evil
ways, and would not cease from his toils and transformations until he
followed the original principle of sameness and likeness within him,
and overcame, by the help of reason, the latter secretions of turbulent
and irrational _elements_ (elementary dæmons) composed of fire and air,
and water and earth, and returned to the form of his first and better
nature.”[460]
But Dr. Elam thinks otherwise. On page 194 of his book, _A Physician’s
Problems_, he says that the cause of the rapid spread of certain
epidemics of disease which he is noticing “remains a mystery;” but as
regards the incendiarism he remarks that “in all this we find nothing
mysterious,” though the epidemic is strongly developed. Strange
contradiction! De Quincey, in his paper, entitled _Murder Considered as
One of the Fine Arts_, treats of the epidemic of assassination, between
1588 and 1635, by which seven of the most distinguished characters of {278}
the time lost their lives at the hands of assassins, and neither he,
nor any other commentator has been able to explain the mysterious cause
of this homicidal mania.
If we press these gentlemen for an explanation, which as pretended
philosophers they are bound to give us, we are answered that it is a
great deal more _scientific_ to assign for such epidemics “agitation of
the mind,” “ ... a time of political excitement (1830)“ ” ... imitation
and impulse,“ ” ... excitable and idle boys,“ and ”_hysterical_ girls,”
than to be absurdly seeking for the verification of superstitious
traditions in a hypothetical astral light. It seems to us that if,
by some providential fatality, _hysteria_ were to disappear entirely
from the human system, the medical fraternity would be entirely at a
loss for explanations of a large class of phenomena now conveniently
classified under the head of “normal symptoms of certain pathological
conditions of the nervous centres.” Hysteria has been hitherto the
sheet-anchor of skeptical pathologists. Does a dirty peasant-girl begin
suddenly to speak with fluency different foreign languages hitherto
unfamiliar to her, and to write poetry—“hysterics!” Is a medium
levitated, in full view of a dozen of witnesses, and carried out of one
third-story window and brought back through another—“disturbance of the
nervous centres, followed by a _collective_ hysterical delusion.”[461]
A Scotch terrier, caught in the room during a manifestation, is hurled
by an invisible hand across the room, breaks to pieces, in his _salto
mortali_, a chandelier, under a ceiling eighteen feet high, to fall
down killed[462]—“_canine hallucination_!”
“True science has no belief,” says Dr. Fenwick, in Bulwer-Lytton’s
_Strange Story_; “true science knows but three states of mind: denial,
conviction, and the vast interval between the two, which is not belief,
but the _suspension of judgment_.” Such, perhaps, was true science in
Dr. Fenwick’s days. But the true science of our modern times proceeds
otherwise; it either denies point-blank, without any preliminary
investigation, or sits in the interim, between denial and conviction,
and, dictionary in hand, invents new Græco-Latin appellations for
non-existing kinds of hysteria!
How often have powerful clairvoyants and adepts in mesmerism
described the epidemics and _physical_ (though to others invisible)
manifestations which science attributes to epilepsy, hæmato-nervous
disorders, and what not, of _somatic origin_, as their lucid vision
saw them in the astral light. They affirm that the “electric waves”
were in violent perturbation, and that they discerned a direct relation
between this ethereal disturbance and the mental or physical epidemic {279}
then raging. But science has heeded them not, but gone on with her
encyclopædic labor of devising new names for old things.
“History,” says Du Potet, the prince of French mesmerists, “keeps but
too well the sad records of sorcery. These facts were but too real, and
lent themselves but too readily to dreadful malpractices of the art, to
monstrous abuse!... But how did I come to find out that art? Where did
I learn it? In my thoughts? no; it is _nature_ herself which discovered
to me the secret. And how? By producing before my own eyes, without
waiting for me to search for it, indisputable facts of sorcery and
magic.... What is, after all, somnambulistic sleep? _A result of the
potency of magic._ And what is it which determines these attractions,
these _sudden impulses_, these raving epidemics, rages, antipathies,
crises;—these convulsions which _you can make durable_?... what is it
which determines them, if not the _very principle_ we employ, the agent
_so decidedly well known to the ancients_? What you call nervous fluid
or _magnetism_, the men of old called _occult power_, or the potency of
the soul, subjection, MAGIC!”
“Magic is based on the existence of a mixed world placed _without_, not
_within_ us; and with which we can enter in communication by the use of
certain arts and practices.... An element _existing in nature_, unknown
to most men, gets hold of a person and withers and breaks him down,
as the fearful hurricane does a bulrush; it scatters men far away, it
strikes them in a _thousand places_ at _the same time_, without their
perceiving the invisible foe, or being able to protect themselves ...
all this is _demonstrated_; but that this element could choose friends
and select _favorites_, obey their _thoughts_, answer to the human
voice, and understand the meaning of _traced signs_, that is what
people cannot realize, and _what their reason rejects_, and that is
_what I saw_; and I say it here most emphatically, that for me it is a
fact and _a truth_ demonstrated for ever.”[463]
“If I entered into greater details, one could readily understand that
there do exist _around_ us, _as in ourselves_, mysterious beings who
have _power_ and _shape_, who enter and go out at will, notwithstanding
the well-closed doors.”[464] Further, the great mesmerizer teaches
us that the faculty of directing this fluid is a “physical property,
resulting from our organization ... it passes through all bodies ...
everything can be used as a conductor for magical operations, and
it will retain the power of producing effects in its turn.” This is
the theory common to all hermetic philosophers. Such is the power of
the fluid, “that _no chemical or physical forces are able to destroy
it_.... There is very little analogy between the imponderable fluids {280}
known to physicists and this animal magnetic fluid.”[465]
If we now refer to mediæval ages, we find, among others, Cornelius
Agrippa telling us precisely the same: “The ever-changing universal
force, the ‘soul of the world,’ can fecundate anything by infusing in
it its own celestial properties. Arranged according to the formula
taught by _science_, these objects receive the gift of communicating
to us their virtue. It is sufficient to wear them, to feel them
immediately operating on the soul as on the body.... Human soul
possesses, from the fact of its being of the same essence as all
creation, a _marvellous power_. One who possesses the secret is enabled
to rise in science and knowledge as high as his imagination will carry
him; but he does that only on the condition of becoming closely united
to this universal force.... Truth, even the future, can be then made
ever present to the eyes of the soul; and this fact has been many
times demonstrated by things coming to pass as they were seen and
described beforehand ... time and space vanish before the eagle eye of
the immortal soul ... her power becomes boundless ... she can shoot
through space and envelop with her presence a man, _no matter at what
distance_; she can plunge and penetrate him through, and make him hear
the voice of the person she belongs to, as if that person were in the
room.”[466]
If unwilling to seek for proof or receive information from
mediæval, hermetic philosophy, we may go still further back into
antiquity, and select, out of the great body of philosophers of the
pre-Christian ages, one who can least be accused of superstition and
credulity—Cicero. Speaking of those whom he calls _gods_, and who are
either human or atmospheric spirits, “We know,” says the old orator,
“that of all living beings man is the best formed, and, as the gods
belong to this number, they must have a human form.... I do not mean
to say that the gods have body and blood in them; but I say that they
_seem_ as if they had bodies with blood in them.... Epicurus, for whom
hidden things were as tangible as if he had touched them with his
finger, teaches us that gods are not generally visible, but that they
are _intelligible_; that they are not bodies having a certain solidity
... but that we can recognize them by their _passing_ images; that
as there are _atoms_ enough in the infinite space _to produce such
images_, these are produced before us ... and make us realize what are
these happy, immortal beings.”[467]
“When the initiate,” says Levi, in his turn, “has become quite {281}
_lucide_, he communicates and directs at will the _magnetic_
vibrations in the mass of astral light.... Transformed in human light
at the moment of the conception, _it_ (the light) becomes the _first
envelope of the soul_; by combination with the subtlest fluids it
forms an ethereal body, or the _sidereal phantom_, which is entirely
disengaged _only_ at the moment of death.”[468] To project this
ethereal body, at no matter what distance; to render it more objective
and tangible by condensing over its fluidic form the waves of the
parent essence, is the great secret of the adept-_magician_.
Theurgical magic is the last expression of occult psychological
science. The Academicians reject it as the hallucination of diseased
brains, or brand it with the opprobrium of charlatanry. We deny to them
most emphatically the right of expressing their opinion on a subject
which they have never investigated. They have no more right, in their
present state of knowledge, to judge of magic and Spiritualism than
a Fiji islander to venture his opinion about the labors of Faraday
or Agassiz. About all they can do on any one day is to correct the
errors of the preceding day. Nearly three thousand years ago, earlier
than the days of Pythagoras, the ancient philosophers claimed that
light was ponderable—hence _matter_, and that light was force. The
corpuscular theory, owing to certain Newtonian failures to account for
it, was laughed down, and the undulatory theory, which proclaimed light
_imponderable_, accepted. And now the world is startled by Mr. Crookes
_weighing_ light with his radiometer! The Pythagoreans held that
neither the sun nor the stars were the _sources_ of light and heat,
and that the former was but an agent; but the modern schools teach the
contrary.
The same may be said respecting the Newtonian law of gravitation.
Following strictly the Pythagorean doctrine, Plato held that
gravitation was not merely a law of the magnetic attraction of
lesser bodies to larger ones, but a magnetic repulsion of similars
and attraction of dissimilars. “Things brought together,” says he,
“contrary to nature, are naturally at war, and repel one another.”[469]
This cannot be taken to mean that repulsion occurs of necessity between
bodies of dissimilar properties, but simply that when naturally
antagonistic bodies are brought together they repel one another. The
researches of Bart and Schweigger leave us in little or no doubt
that the ancients were well acquainted with the mutual attractions
of iron and the lodestone, as well as with the positive and negative
properties of electricity, by whatever name they may have called it. {282}
The reciprocal magnetic relations of the planetary orbs, which are
all magnets, was with them an accepted fact, and aërolites were not
only called by them magnetic stones, but used in the Mysteries for
purposes to which we now apply the magnet. When, therefore, Professor
A. M. Mayer, of the Stevens Institute of Technology, in 1872, told the
Yale Scientific Club that the earth is a great magnet, and that “on
any sudden agitation of the sun’s surface the magnetism of the earth
receives a profound disturbance in its equilibrium, causing fitful
tremors in the magnets of our observatories, and producing those grand
outbursts of the polar lights, whose lambent flames dance in rhythm to
the quivering needle,”[470] he only restated, in good English, what
was taught in good Doric untold centuries before the first Christian
philosopher saw the light.
The prodigies accomplished by the priests of theurgical magic are
so well authenticated, and the evidence—if human testimony is worth
anything at all—is so overwhelming, that, rather than confess that the
Pagan theurgists far outrivalled the Christians in miracles, Sir David
Brewster piously concedes to the former the greatest proficiency in
physics, and everything that pertains to natural philosophy. Science
finds herself in a very disagreeable dilemma. She must either confess
that the ancient physicists were superior in knowledge to her modern
representatives, or that there exists something in nature beyond
physical science, and that _spirit_ possesses powers of which our
philosophers never dreamed.
“The mistake we make in some science we have specially cultivated,”
says Bulwer-Lytton, “is often only to be seen by the light of a
separate science as especially cultivated by another.”[471]
Nothing can be easier accounted for than the highest possibilities of
magic. By the radiant light of the universal magnetic ocean, whose
electric waves bind the cosmos together, and in their ceaseless
motion penetrate every atom and molecule of the boundless creation,
the disciples of mesmerism—howbeit insufficient their various
experiments—intuitionally perceive the alpha and omega of the great
mystery. Alone, the study of this agent, which is the divine breath,
can unlock the secrets of psychology and physiology, of cosmical and
spiritual phenomena.
“Magic,” says Psellus, “formed the last part of the sacerdotal science.
It investigated the nature, power, and quality of everything sublunary;
of the elements and their parts, of animals, all various plants and
their fruits, of stones and herbs. In short, it explored the essence
and power of everything. From hence, therefore, it produced its {283}
effects And it formed _statues_ (magnetized) which procure health, and
made all various figures and things (talismans) which could equally
become the instruments of disease as well as of health. Often, too,
celestial fire is made to appear through magic, and then statues laugh
and lamps are spontaneously enkindled.”[472]
If Galvani’s modern discovery can set in motion the limbs of a dead
frog, and force a dead man’s face to express, by the distortion of
its features, the most varied emotions, from joy to diabolical rage,
despair, and horror, the Pagan priests, unless the combined evidence
of the most trustworthy men of antiquity is not to be relied upon,
accomplished the still greater wonders of making their stone and metal
statues to sweat and laugh. The _celestial_, pure fire of the Pagan
altar was electricity drawn from the astral light. Statues, therefore,
if properly prepared, might, without any accusation of superstition,
be allowed to have the property of imparting health and disease by
contact, as well as any modern galvanic belt, or overcharged battery.
Scholastic skeptics, as well as ignorant materialists, have greatly
amused themselves for the last two centuries over the _absurdities_
attributed to Pythagoras by his biographer, Iamblichus. The Samian
philosopher is said to have persuaded a she-bear to give up eating
human flesh; to have forced a white eagle to descend to him from
the clouds, and to have subdued him by stroking him gently with the
hand, and by talking to him. On another occasion, Pythagoras actually
persuaded an ox to renounce eating beans, by merely whispering in the
animal’s ear![473] Oh, ignorance and superstition of our forefathers,
how ridiculous they appear in the eyes of our enlightened generations!
Let us, however, analyze this absurdity. Every day we see unlettered
men, proprietors of strolling menageries, taming and completely
subduing the most ferocious animals, merely by the power of their
irresistible will. Nay, we have at the present moment in Europe several
young and physically-weak girls, under twenty years of age, fearlessly
doing the same thing. Every one has either witnessed or heard of the
seemingly magical power of some mesmerizers and psychologists. They are
able to subjugate their patients for any length of time. Regazzoni,
the mesmerist who excited such wonder in France and London, has
achieved far more extraordinary feats than what is above attributed to
Pythagoras. Why, then, accuse the ancient biographers of such men as
Pythagoras and Apollonius of Tyana of either wilful misrepresentation
or absurd superstition? When we realize that the majority of those {284}
who are so skeptical as to the magical powers possessed by the ancient
philosophers, who laugh at the old theogonies and the fallacies of
mythology, nevertheless have an implicit faith in the records and
inspiration of their Bible, hardly daring to doubt even that monstrous
absurdity that Joshua arrested the course of the sun, we may well
say _Amen_ to Godfrey Higgins’ just rebuke: “When I find,” he says,
“learned men believing _Genesis literally_, which the ancients, with
all their failings, had too much sense to receive except allegorically,
I am tempted to doubt the reality of the improvement of the human
mind.”[474]
One of the very few commentators on old Greek and Latin authors,
who have given their just dues to the ancients for their mental
development, is Thomas Taylor. In his translation of Iamblichus’ _Life
of Pythagoras_, we find him remarking as follows: “Since Pythagoras,
as Iamblichus informs us, was initiated in all the Mysteries of Byblus
and Tyre, in the sacred operations of the Syrians, and in the Mysteries
of the Phœnicians, and also that he spent two and twenty years in the
adyta of temples in Egypt, associated with the magians in Babylon, and
was instructed by them in their venerable knowledge, it is not at all
wonderful that he was skilled in magic, or theurgy, and was therefore
able to perform things which surpass merely human power, and which
appear to be perfectly incredible to the vulgar.”[475]
The universal ether was not, in their eyes, simply a something
stretching, tenantless, throughout the expanse of heaven; it was a
boundless ocean peopled like our familiar seas with monstrous and minor
creatures, and having in its every molecule the germs of life. Like the
finny tribes which swarm in our oceans and smaller bodies of water,
each kind having its _habitat_ in some spot to which it is curiously
adapted, some friendly and some inimical to man, some pleasant and
some frightful to behold, some seeking the refuge of quiet nooks and
land-locked harbors, and some traversing great areas of water, the
various races of the _elemental_ spirits were believed by them to
inhabit the different portions of the great ethereal ocean, and to be
exactly adapted to their respective conditions. If we will only bear in
mind the fact that the rushing of planets through space must create as
absolute a disturbance in this plastic and attenuated medium, as the
passage of a cannon shot does in the air or that of a steamer in the
water, and on a cosmic scale, we can understand that certain planetary
aspects, admitting our premises to be true, may produce much more
violent agitation and cause much stronger currents to flow in a given
direction, than others. With the same premises conceded, we may also
see why, by such various aspects of the stars, shoals of friendly or {285}
hostile “elementals” might be poured in upon our atmosphere, or some
particular portion of it, and make the fact appreciable by the effects
which ensue.
According to the ancient doctrines, the soulless elemental spirits
were evolved by the ceaseless motion inherent in the astral light.
Light is force, and the latter is produced by the _will_. As this will
proceeds from an intelligence which cannot err, for it has nothing of
the material organs of _human_ thought in it, being the superfine pure
emanation of the highest divinity itself—(Plato’s “Father”) it proceeds
from the beginning of time, according to immutable laws, to evolve the
elementary fabric requisite for subsequent generations of what we term
human races. All of the latter, whether belonging to this planet or to
some other of the myriads in space, have their earthly bodies evolved
in the matrix out of the bodies of a certain class of these elemental
beings which have passed away in the invisible worlds. In the ancient
philosophy there was no missing link to be supplied by what Tyndall
calls an “educated imagination;” no hiatus to be filled with volumes
of materialistic speculations made necessary by the absurd attempt
to solve an equation with but one set of quantities; our “ignorant”
ancestors traced the law of evolution throughout the whole universe. As
by gradual progression from the star-cloudlet to the development of the
physical body of man, the rule holds good, so from the universal ether
to the incarnate human spirit, they traced one uninterrupted series
of entities. These evolutions were from the world of spirit into the
world of gross matter; and through that back again to the source of all
things. The “descent of species” was to them a descent from the spirit,
primal source of all, to the “degradation of matter.” In this complete
chain of unfoldings the elementary, spiritual beings had as distinct
a place, midway between the extremes, as Mr. Darwin’s missing-link
between the ape and man.
No author in the world of literature ever gave a more truthful or more
poetical description of these beings than Sir E. Bulwer-Lytton, the
author of _Zanoni_. Now, himself “a thing not of matter” but an “Idea
of joy and light,” his words sound more like the faithful echo of
memory than the exuberant outflow of mere imagination.
“Man is arrogant in proportion of his ignorance,” he makes the wise
Mejnour say to Glyndon. “For several ages he saw in the countless
worlds that sparkle through space like the bubbles of a shoreless
ocean, only the petty candles ... that Providence has been pleased to
light for no other purpose but to make the night more agreeable to
man.... Astronomy has corrected this delusion of human vanity, and man
now reluctantly confesses that the stars are worlds, larger and more
glorious than his own.... Everywhere, then, in this immense design, {286}
science brings new life to light.... Reasoning, then, by evident
analogy, if not a leaf, if not a drop of water, but is, no less than
yonder star, a habitable and breathing world—nay, if even man himself,
is a world to other lives, and millions and myriads dwell in the rivers
of his blood, and inhabit man’s frame, as man inhabits earth—common
sense (if our schoolmen had it) would suffice to teach that the
circumfluent infinite which you call space—the boundless impalpable
which divides earth from the moon and stars—is filled also with its
correspondent and appropriate life. Is it not a visible absurdity to
suppose that being is crowded upon every leaf, and yet absent from
the immensities of space! The law of the great system forbids the
waste even of an atom; it knows no spot where something of life does
not breathe.... Well, then, can you conceive that space, which is the
infinite itself, is alone a waste, is alone lifeless, is less useful to
the one design of universal being ... than the peopled leaf, than the
swarming globule? The microscope shows you the creatures on the leaf;
_no mechanical tube is yet invented to discover the nobler and more
gifted things that hover in the illimitable air_. Yet between these
last and man is a mysterious _and terrible affinity_.... But first,
to penetrate this barrier, the soul with which you listen must be
sharpened by intense enthusiasm, purified from all earthly desires....
When thus prepared, science can be brought to aid it; the sight itself
may be rendered more subtile, the nerves more acute, the spirit more
alive and outward, and the element itself—the air the space—may be
made, by certain secrets of the higher chemistry, more palpable and
clear. And this, too, is not _magic_ as the credulous call it; as I
have so often said before, magic (a science that violates nature)
exists not; it is _but the science by which nature can be controlled_.
Now, in space there are millions of beings, _not literally spiritual_,
for they have all, like the animalcula unseen by the naked eye, certain
forms of matter, though matter so delicate, air-drawn, and subtile,
that it is, as it were, but a film, a gossamer, that clothes the
spirit.... Yet, in truth, these races differ most widely ... some of
surpassing wisdom, some of horrible malignity; some hostile as fiends
to men, others gentle as messengers between earth and heaven.... Amid
the dwellers of the threshold is one, too, surpassing in malignity and
hatred all her tribe; one whose eyes have paralyzed the bravest, and
whose power increases over the spirit precisely in proportion to its
fear.”[476]
Such is the insufficient sketch of elemental beings void of divine
spirit, given by one whom many with reason believed to know more than
he was prepared to admit in the face of an incredulous public.
In the following chapter we will contrive to explain some of the {287}
esoteric speculations of the initiates of the sanctuary, as to
what man was, is, and may yet be. The doctrines they taught in the
Mysteries—the source from which sprung the Old and partially the New
Testament, belonged to the most advanced notions of morality, and
religious _revelations_. While the literal meaning was abandoned to
the fanaticism of the unreasoning lower classes of society, the higher
ones, the majority of which consisted of _Initiates_, pursued their
studies in the solemn silence of the temples, and their worship of the
_one_ God of Heaven.
The speculations of Plato, in the _Banquet_, on the creation of the
primordial men, and the essay on Cosmogony in the _Timæus_, must be
taken allegorically, if we accept them at all. It is this hidden
Pythagorean meaning in _Timæus_, _Cratylus_, and _Parmenides_, and a
few other trilogies and dialogues, that the Neo-platonists ventured to
expound, as far as the theurgical vow of secresy would allow them. The
Pythagorean doctrine that _God is the universal mind diffused through
all things_, and the dogma of the soul’s immortality, are the leading
features in these apparently incongruous teachings. His piety and the
great veneration Plato felt for the MYSTERIES, are sufficient warrant
that he would not allow his indiscretion to get the better of that
deep sense of responsibility which is felt by every adept. “Constantly
perfecting himself in perfect MYSTERIES, a man in them alone becomes
truly perfect,” says he in the _Phædrus_.[477]
He took no pains to conceal his displeasure that the Mysteries had
become less secret than formerly. Instead of profaning them by putting
them within the reach of the multitude, he would have guarded them
with jealous care against all but the most earnest and worthy of
his disciples.[478] While mentioning the gods, on every page, his
monotheism is unquestionable, for the whole thread of his discourse
indicates that by the term _gods_ be means a class of beings far
lower in the scale than deities, and but one grade higher than men.
Even Josephus perceived and acknowledged this fact, despite the
natural prejudice of his race. In his famous onslaught upon Apion,
this historian says:[479] “Those, however, among the Greeks who
philosophized _in accordance with truth_, were not ignorant of anything
... nor did they fail to perceive the chilling superficialities of the {288}
mythical allegories, on which account they justly despised them....
By which thing Plato, being moved, says it is not necessary to admit
any one of the other poets into ‘the Commonwealth,’ and _he dismisses
Homer_ blandly, after having crowned him and pouring unguent upon
him, in order that indeed he should not destroy, by _his myths_, the
_orthodox belief respecting one God_.”
Those who can discern the true spirit of Plato’s philosophy, will
hardly be satisfied with the estimate of the same which Jowett lays
before his readers. He tells us that the influence exercised upon
posterity by the _Timæus_ is partly due to a misunderstanding of the
doctrine of its author by the Neo-platonists. He would have us believe
that the hidden meanings which they found in this _Dialogue_, are
“quite at variance with the spirit of Plato.” This is equivalent to the
assumption that Jowett understands what this spirit really was; whereas
his criticism upon this particular topic rather indicates that he did
not penetrate it at all. If, as he tells us, the Christians seem to
find in his work their trinity, the word, the church, and the creation
of the world, in a Jewish sense, it is because all this _is_ there, and
therefore it is but natural that they should have found it. The outward
building is the same; but the spirit which animated the dead letter
of the philosopher’s teaching has fled, and we would seek for it in
vain through the arid dogmas of Christian theology. The Sphinx is the
same now, as it was four centuries before the Christian era; but the
Œdipus is no more. He is slain because he has given to the world that
which the world was not ripe enough to receive. He was the embodiment
of truth, and he had to die, as every grand truth has to, before, like
the Phœnix of old, it revives from its own ashes. Every translator of
Plato’s works remarked the strange similarity between the philosophy of
the esoterists and the Christian doctrines, and each of them has tried
to interpret it in accordance with his own religious feelings. So Cory,
in his _Ancient Fragments_, tries to prove that it is but an outward
resemblance; and does his best to lower the Pythagorean Monad in the
public estimation and exalt upon its ruins the later anthropomorphic
deity. Taylor, advocating the former, acts as unceremoniously with the
Mosaic God. Zeller boldly laughs at the pretensions of the Fathers
of the Church, who, notwithstanding history and its chronology, and
whether people will have it or not, insist that Plato and his school
have robbed Christianity of its leading features. It is as fortunate
for us as it is unfortunate for the Roman Church that such clever
sleight-of-hand as that resorted to by Eusebius is rather difficult
in our century. It was easier to pervert chronology “for the sake
of making synchronisms,” in the days of the Bishop of Cæsarea, than
it is now, and while history exists, no one can help people knowing
that Plato lived 600 years before Irenæus took it into his head to {289}
establish a _new_ doctrine from the ruins of Plato’s older Academy.
This doctrine of God being the universal mind diffused through all
things, underlies all ancient philosophies. The Buddhistic tenets
which can never be better comprehended than when studying the
Pythagorean philosophy—its faithful reflection—are derived from this
source as well as the Brahmanical religion and early Christianity.
The purifying process of transmigrations—the metempsychoses—however
grossly anthropomorphized at a later period, must only be regarded as
a supplementary doctrine, disfigured by theological sophistry with
the object of getting a firmer hold upon believers through a popular
superstition. Neither Gautama Buddha nor Pythagoras intended to teach
this purely-metaphysical allegory _literally_. Esoterically, it is
explained in the “Mystery” of the _Kounboum_,[480] and relates to
the purely spiritual peregrinations of the human soul. It is not in
the dead letter of Buddhistical sacred literature that scholars may
hope to find the true solution of its metaphysical subtilties. The
latter weary the power of thought by the inconceivable profundity of
its ratiocination; and the student is never farther from truth than
when he believes himself nearest its discovery. The mastery of every
doctrine of the perplexing Buddhist system can be attained only by
proceeding strictly according to the Pythagorean and Platonic method;
from universals down to particulars. The key to it lies in the refined
and mystical tenets of the spiritual influx of divine life. “Whoever is
unacquainted with my law,” says Buddha, “and dies in that state, must
return to the earth till he becomes a perfect Samanean. To achieve this
object, he must destroy within himself the trinity of _Maya_.[481] He
must extinguish his passions, unite and identify himself with _the law_
(the teaching of the secret doctrine), and comprehend the religion of
_annihilation_.”
Here, annihilation refers but to _matter_, that of the visible as
well as of the invisible body; for the astral soul (_perisprit_) is
still matter, however sublimated. The same book says that what Fo
(Buddha) meant to say was, that “the primitive substance is eternal
and unchangeable. Its highest revelation is the pure, luminous ether,
the boundless infinite space, not a void resulting from the absence
of forms, but, on the contrary, _the foundation of all forms_, and
anterior to them. “But the very presence of _forms_ denotes it to be
the creation of _Maya_, and all her works are as nothing before the
_uncreated_ being, SPIRIT, in whose profound and sacred repose all
motion must cease forever.”
Thus _annihilation_ means, with the Buddhistical philosophy, only a {290}
dispersion of matter, in whatever form or _semblance_ of form it may
be; for everything that bears a shape was created, and thus must sooner
or later perish, _i.e._, change that shape; therefore, as something
temporary, though seeming to be permanent, it is but an illusion,
_Maya_; for, as eternity has neither beginning nor end, the more or
less prolonged duration of some particular form passes, as it were,
like an instantaneous flash of lightning. Before we have the time to
realize that we have seen it, it is gone and passed away for ever;
hence, even our astral bodies, pure ether, are but illusions of matter,
so long as they retain their terrestrial outline. The latter changes,
says the Buddhist, according to the merits or demerits of the person
during his lifetime, and this is metempsychosis. When the spiritual
_entity_ breaks loose for ever from every particle of matter, then
only it enters upon the eternal and unchangeable Nirvana. He exists in
spirit, in _nothing_; as a form, a shape, a semblance, he is completely
_annihilated_, and thus will die no more, for spirit alone is no
_Maya_, but the only REALITY in an illusionary universe of ever-passing
forms.
It is upon this Buddhist doctrine that the Pythagoreans grounded the
principal tenets of their philosophy. “Can that spirit, which gives
life and motion, and partakes of the nature of light, be reduced to
nonentity?” they ask. “Can that sensitive spirit in brutes which
exercises memory, one of the rational faculties, die, and become
nothing?” And Whitelock Bulstrode, in his able defence of Pythagoras,
expounds this doctrine by adding: “If you say, they (the brutes)
breathe their spirits into the air, and there vanish, that is all
I contend for. The air, indeed, is the proper place to receive
them, being, according to Laertius, full of souls; and, according
to Epicurus, full of atoms, the principles of all things; for even
this place wherein we walk and birds fly has so much of a spiritual
nature, that it is invisible, and, therefore, may well be the receiver
of forms, since the forms of all bodies are so; we can only see and
hear its effects; the air itself is too fine, and above the capacity
of the age. What then is the ether in the region above, and what are
the influences or forms that descend from thence?” The _spirits_ of
creatures, the Pythagoreans hold, who are emanations of the most
sublimated portions of ether, emanations, BREATHS, _but not forms_.
Ether is incorruptible, all philosophers agree in that; and what is
incorruptible _is so far from being annihilated_ when it gets rid of
the _form_, that it lays a good claim to IMMORTALITY. “But what is that
which has no body, no _form_; which is imponderable, invisible and
indivisible; that which exists and yet _is not_?” ask the Buddhists.
“It is Nirvana,” is the answer. It is NOTHING, not a region, but rather {291}
a state. When once Nirvana is reached, man is exempt from the effects
of the “four truths;” for an effect can only be produced through a
certain cause, and every cause is _annihilated_ in this state.
These “four truths” are the foundation of the whole Buddhist doctrine
of Nirvana. They are, says the book of _Pradjuâ Pâramitâ_,[482] 1.
The existence of pain. 2. The production of pain. 3. The annihilation
of pain. 4. The way to the annihilation of pain. What is the source
of pain?—Existence. Birth existing, decrepitude and death ensue; for
wherever there is a form, there is a _cause_ for pain and suffering.
_Spirit_ alone has no form, and therefore _cannot be said to exist_.
Whenever man (the ethereal, inner man) reaches that point when he
becomes utterly spiritual, hence, formless, he has reached a state of
perfect bliss. MAN as an objective being becomes annihilated, but the
spiritual entity with its subjective life, will live for ever, for
spirit is incorruptible and immortal.
It is by the spirit of the teachings of both Buddha and Pythagoras,
that we can so easily recognize the identity of their doctrines.
The all-pervading, universal soul, the _Anima Mundi_, is Nirvana;
and Buddha, as a generic name, is the anthropomorphized _monad_ of
Pythagoras. When resting in Nirvana, the final bliss, Buddha is the
silent monad, dwelling in darkness and silence; he is also the formless
Brahm, the sublime but _unknowable_ Deity, which pervades invisibly the
whole universe. Whenever it is manifested, desiring to impress itself
upon humanity in a shape intelligent to our intellect, whether we call
it an _avatar_, or a King Messiah, or a _permutation_ of Divine Spirit,
_Logos_, Christos, it is all one and the same thing. In each case it
is “the Father,” who is in the _Son_, and the Son in “the Father.” The
immortal spirit overshadows the mortal man. It enters into him, and
pervading his whole being, makes of him a god, who descends into his
earthly tabernacle. Every man may become a Buddha, says the doctrine.
And so throughout the interminable series of ages we find now and then
men who more or less succeed in _uniting_ themselves “with God,” as the
expression goes, with their _own spirit_, as we ought to translate. The
Buddhists call such men _Arhat_. An Arhat is next to a Buddha, and none
is equal to him either in _infused_ science, or _miraculous_ powers.
Certain fakirs demonstrate the theory well in practice, as Jacolliot
has proved.
Even the so-called _fabulous_ narratives of certain Buddhistical
books, when stripped of their allegorical meaning, are found to be the
secret doctrines taught by Pythagoras. In the Pali Books called the
_Jutakâs_, are given the 550 incarnations or metempsychoses of Buddha. {292}
They narrate how he has appeared in every form of animal life, and
animated every sentient being on earth, from infinitesimal insect to
the bird, the beast, and finally man, the microcosmic image of God on
earth. Must this be taken _literally_; is it intended as a description
of the _actual_ transformations and existence of one and the same
individual immortal, divine spirit, which by turns has animated every
kind of sentient being? Ought we not rather to understand, with
Buddhist metaphysicians, that though the individual human spirits are
numberless, collectively they are one, as every drop of water drawn out
of the ocean, metaphorically speaking, may have an individual existence
and still be one with the rest of the drops going to form that ocean;
for each human spirit is a scintilla of the one all-pervading light?
That this divine spirit animates the flower, the particle of granite on
the mountain side, the lion, the man? Egyptian Hierophants, like the
Brahmans, and the Buddhists of the East, and some Greek philosophers,
maintained originally that the same spirit that animates the particle
of dust, lurking latent in it, animates man, manifesting itself in him
in its highest state of activity. The doctrine, also, of a gradual
refusion of the human _soul_ into the essence of the primeval parent
spirit, was universal at one time. But this doctrine never implied
annihilation of the higher spiritual _ego_—only the dispersion of the
_external forms_ of man, after his terrestrial death, as well as during
his abode on earth. Who is better fitted to impart to us the mysteries
of after-death, so erroneously thought impenetrable, than those men
who having, through self-discipline and purity of life and purpose,
succeeded in uniting themselves with their “God,” were afforded _some_
glimpses, however imperfect, of the great truth.[483] And these seers
tell us strange stories about the _variety_ of forms assumed by
disembodied astral souls; forms of which each one is a spiritual though
concrete reflection of the abstract state of the mind, and thoughts of
the once living man.
To accuse Buddhistical philosophy of rejecting a Supreme Being—God,
and the soul’s immortality, of atheism, in short, on the ground that
according to their doctrines, Nirvana means _annihilation_, and
_Svabhâvât is_ NOT _a person, but nothing_, is simply absurd. The En
(or Ayîn) of the Jewish En-Soph, also means _nihil_ or _nothing_, that
which is not (_quo ad nos_); but no one has ever ventured to twit the
Jews with atheism. In both cases the real meaning of the term _nothing_
carries with it the idea that God is _not a thing_, not a concrete or
visible Being to which a name expressive of _any_ object known to us on
earth may be applied with propriety.
CHAPTER IX. {293}
“Thou can’st not call that madness of which thou art proved to
know nothing.”—TERTULLIAN: _Apology_
“This is not a matter of to-day,
Or yesterday, but hath been from all times;
And none hath told us whence it came or how!”—SOPHOCLES.
“Belief in the supernatural is a fact natural, primitive,
universal, and constant in the life and history of the human
race. Unbelief in the supernatural begets materialism;
materialism, sensuality; sensuality, social convulsions, amid
whose storms man again learns to believe and pray.”—GUIZOT.
“If any one think these things incredible, let him keep his
opinions to himself, and not contradict those who, by such
events, are incited to the study of virtue.”—JOSEPHUS.
From the Platonic and Pythagorean views of matter and force, we
will now turn to the kabalistic philosophy of the origin of man,
and compare it with the theory of natural selection enunciated by
Darwin and Wallace. It may be that we shall find as much reason to
credit the ancients with originality in this direction as in that
which we have been considering. To our mind, no stronger proof of the
theory of cyclical progression need be required than the comparative
enlightenment of former ages and that of the Patristic Church, as
regards the form of the earth, and the movements of the planetary
system. Even were other evidence wanting, the ignorance of Augustine
and Lactantius, misleading the whole of Christendom upon these
questions until the period of Galileo, would mark the eclipses through
which human knowledge passes from age to age.
The “coats of skin,” mentioned in the third chapter of _Genesis_ as
given to Adam and Eve, are explained by certain ancient philosophers
to mean the fleshy bodies with which, in the progress of the cycles,
the progenitors of the race became clothed. They maintained that the
godlike physical form became grosser and grosser, until the bottom of
what may be termed the last spiritual cycle was reached, and mankind
entered upon the ascending arc of the first human cycle. Then began
an uninterrupted series of cycles or _yogas_; the precise number of
years of which each of them consisted remaining an inviolable mystery
within the precincts of the sanctuaries and disclosed only to the
initiates. As soon as humanity entered upon a new one, the stone age,
with which the preceding cycle had closed, began to gradually merge
into the following and next higher age. With each successive age, or {294}
epoch, men grew more refined, until the acme of perfection possible in
that particular cycle had been reached. Then the receding wave of time
carried back with it the vestiges of human, social, and intellectual
progress. Cycle succeeded cycle, by imperceptible transitions;
highly-civilized flourishing nations, waxed in power, attained the
climax of development, waned, and became extinct; and mankind, when the
end of the lower cyclic arc was reached, was replunged into barbarism
as at the start. Kingdoms have crumbled and nation succeeded nation
from the beginning until our day, the races alternately mounting to
the highest and descending to the lowest points of development. Draper
observes that there is no reason to suppose that any one cycle applied
to the whole human race. On the contrary, while man in one portion of
the planet was in a condition of retrogression, in another he might be
progressing in enlightenment and civilization.
How analogous this theory is to the law of planetary motion, which
causes the individual orbs to rotate on their axes; the several systems
to move around their respective suns; and the whole stellar host to
follow a common path around a common centre! Life and death, light and
darkness, day and night on the planet, as it turns about its axis and
traverses the zodiacal circle representing the lesser and the greater
cycles.[484] Remember the Hermetic axiom:—“As above, so below; as in
heaven, so on earth.”
Mr. Alfred R. Wallace argues with sound logic, that the development
of man has been more marked in his mental organization than in his
external form. Man, he conceives to differ from the animal, by
being able to undergo great changes of conditions and of his entire
environment, without very marked alterations in bodily form and
structure. The changes of climate he meets with a corresponding
alteration in his clothing, shelter, weapons, and implements of
husbandry. His body may become less hairy, more erect, and of a
different color and proportions; “the head and face is immediately
connected with the organ of the mind, and as being the medium,
expressing the most refined motions of his nature,” alone change with
the development of his intellect. There was a time when “he had not yet
acquired that wonderfully-developed brain, the organ of the mind, which
now, even in his lowest examples, raises him far above the highest
brutes, at a period when he had the form, but hardly the nature of
man, when he neither possessed human speech nor sympathetic and moral
feelings.” Further, Mr. Wallace says that “Man may have been—indeed, {295}
I believe _must have been_, once a homogeneous race ... in man, the
hairy covering of the body has almost entirely disappeared.“ Of the
cave men of Les Eyzies, Mr. Wallace remarks further ” ... the great
breadth of the face, the enormous development of the ascending ramus of
the lower jaw ... indicate enormous muscular power and the habits of a
savage and brutal race.”
Such are the glimpses which anthropology affords us of men, either
arrived at the bottom of a cycle or starting in a new one. Let
us see how far they are corroborated by clairvoyant psychometry.
Professor Denton submitted a fragment of fossilized bone to his wife’s
examination, without giving Mrs. Denton any hint as to what the
article was. It immediately called up to her pictures of people and
scenes which he thinks belonged to the stone age. She saw men closely
resembling monkeys, with a body very hairy, and “as if the natural
hair answered the purpose of clothing.” “I question whether he can
stand perfectly upright; his hip-joints appear to be so formed, he
cannot,” she added. “Occasionally I see part of the body of one of
those beings that looks comparatively smooth. I can see the skin, which
is lighter colored ... I do not know whether he belongs to the same
period.... At a distance the face seems flat; the lower part of it
is heavy; they have what I suppose would be called prognathous jaws.
The frontal region of the head is low, and the lower portion of it is
very prominent, forming a round ridge across the forehead, immediately
above the eyebrows.... Now I see a face that looks like that of a human
being, though there is a monkey-like appearance about it. All these
seem of that kind, having long arms and hairy bodies.”[485]
Whether or not the men of science are willing to concede the
correctness of the Hermetic theory of the physical evolution of man
from higher and more spiritual natures, they themselves show us how
the race has progressed from the lowest observed point to its present
development. And, as all nature seems to be made up of analogies, is
it unreasonable to affirm that the same progressive development of
individual forms has prevailed among the inhabitants of the _unseen_
universe? If such marvellous effects have been caused by evolution upon
our little insignificant planet, producing reasoning and intuitive men
from some higher type of the ape family, why suppose that the boundless
realms of space are inhabited only by disembodied _angelic_ forms?
Why not give place in that vast domain to the spiritual duplicates
of these hairy, long-armed and half-reasoning ancestors, their
predecessors, and all their successors, down to our time? Of course,
the spiritual parts of such primeval members of the human family would {296}
be as uncouth and undeveloped as were their physical bodies. While
they made no attempt to calculate the duration of the “grand cycle,”
the Hermetic philosophers yet maintained that, according to the cyclic
law, the living human race must inevitably and collectively return
one day to that point of departure, where man was first clothed with
“coats of skin;” or, to express it more clearly, the human race must,
in accordance with the law of evolution, be finally _physically_
spiritualized. Unless Messrs. Darwin and Huxley are prepared to prove
that the man of our century has attained, as a physical and moral
animal, the acme of perfection, and evolution, having reached its apex,
must stop all further progress with the modern genus, _Homo_, we do not
see how they can possibly confute such a logical deduction.
In his lecture on _The Action of Natural Selection on Man_, Mr.
Alfred R. Wallace concludes his demonstrations as to the development
of human races under that law of selection by saying that, if his
conclusions are just, “it must inevitably follow that the higher—the
more intellectual and moral—must displace the lower and more degraded
races; and the power of ‘natural selection,’ still acting on his mental
organization, must ever lead to the more perfect adaptation of man’s
higher faculties to the condition of surrounding nature, and to the
exigencies of the social state. While his external form will probably
ever remain unchanged, except in the development of that perfect beauty
... refined and ennobled by the highest intellectual faculties and
sympathetic emotions, his mental constitution may continue to advance
and improve, till the world is again inhabited by a single, nearly
homogeneous race, no individual of which will be inferior _to the
noblest specimens of existing humanity_.” Sober, scientific methods and
cautiousness in hypothetical possibilities have evidently their share
in this expression of the opinions of the great anthropologist. Still,
what he says above clashes in no way with our kabalistic assertions.
Allow to ever-progressing nature, to the great law of the “survival of
the fittest,” one step beyond Mr. Wallace’s deductions, and we have in
future the possibility—nay, the assurance of a race, which, like the
Vril-ya of Bulwer-Lytton’s _Coming Race_, will be but one remove from
the primitive “Sons of God.”
It will be observed that this philosophy of cycles, which was
allegorized by the Egyptian Hierophants in the “circle of necessity,”
explains at the same time the allegory of the “Fall of man.” According
to the Arabian descriptions, each of the seven chambers of the
Pyramids—those grandest of all cosmic symbols—was known by the name of
a planet. The peculiar architecture of the Pyramids shows in itself
the drift of the metaphysical thought of their builders. The apex is
lost in the clear blue sky of the land of the Pharaohs, and typifies {297}
the primordial point lost in the unseen universe from whence started
the first race of the spiritual prototypes of man. Each mummy, from
the moment that it was embalmed, lost its physical individuality
in one sense; it symbolized the human race. Placed in such a way
as was best calculated to aid the exit of the “soul,” the latter
had to pass through the seven planetary chambers before it made its
exit through the symbolical apex. Each chamber typified, at the same
time, one of the seven spheres, and one of the seven higher types of
physico-spiritual humanity alleged to be above our own. Every 3,000
years, the soul, representative of its race, had to return to its
primal point of departure before it underwent another evolution into a
more perfected spiritual and physical transformation. We must go deep
indeed into the abstruse metaphysics of Oriental mysticism before we
can realize fully the infinitude of the subjects that were embraced at
one sweep by the majestic thought of its exponents.
Starting as a pure and perfect spiritual being, the Adam of the second
chapter of _Genesis_, not satisfied with the position allotted to him
by the Demiurgus (who is the eldest first-begotten, the Adam-Kadmon),
Adam the second, the “man of dust,” strives in his pride to become
Creator in his turn. Evolved out of the androgynous Kadmon, this
Adam is himself an androgyn; for, according to the oldest beliefs
presented allegorically in Plato’s _Timæus_, the prototypes of our
races were all enclosed in the microcosmic tree which grew and
developed within and under the great mundane or macrocosmic tree.
Divine spirit being considered a unity, however numerous the rays of
the great spiritual sun, man has still had his origin like all other
forms, whether organic or otherwise, in this one Fount of Eternal
Light. Were we even to reject the hypothesis of an androgynous man, in
connection with physical evolution, the significance of the allegory
in its spiritual sense, would remain unimpaired. So long as the first
god-man, symbolizing the two first principles of creation, the dual
male and female element, had no thought of good and evil he could
not hypostasize “woman,” for she was in him as he was in her. It was
only when, as a result of the evil hints of the serpent, _matter_,
the latter condensed itself and cooled on the spiritual man in its
contact with the elements, that the fruits of the man-tree—who is
himself that tree of knowledge—appeared to his view. From this moment
the androgynal union ceased, man evolved out of himself the woman as a
separate entity. They have broken the thread between pure spirit and
pure matter. Henceforth they will create no more _spiritually_, and
by the sole power of their will; man has become a physical creator,
and the kingdom of spirit can be won only by a long imprisonment in
matter. The meaning of Gogard, the Hellenic tree of life, the sacred {298}
oak among whose luxuriant branches a serpent dwells, and _cannot_ be
dislodged,[486] thus becomes apparent. Creeping out from the primordial
_ilus_, the mundane snake grows more material and waxes in strength and
power with every new evolution.
The Adam Primus, or Kadmon, the Logos of the Jewish mystics, is the
same as the Grecian Prometheus, who seeks to rival with the divine
wisdom; he is also the Pimander of Hermes, or the POWER OF THE THOUGHT
DIVINE, in its most spiritual aspect, for he was less hypostasized by
the Egyptians than the two former. These all create men, but fail in
their final object. Desiring to endow man with an immortal spirit, in
order that by linking the trinity in one, he might gradually return to
his primal spiritual state without losing his individuality, Prometheus
fails in his attempt to steal the _divine_ fire, and is sentenced to
expiate his crime on Mount Kazbeck. Prometheus is also the _Logos_ of
the ancient Greeks, as well as Herakles. In the _Codex Nazaræus_[487]
we see Bahak-Zivo deserting the heaven of his father, confessing that
though he is the father of the genii, he is unable to “construct
creatures,” for he is equally unacquainted with Orcus as with “the
consuming fire which is wanting in light.” And Fetahil, one of the
“powers,” sits in the “mud” (matter) and wonders why the living fire is
so changed.
All of these _Logoi_ strove to endow man with the immortal spirit,
failed, and nearly all are represented as being punished for the
attempt by severe sentences. Those of the early Christian Fathers
who like Origen and Clemens Alexandrinus, were well versed in Pagan
symbology, having begun their careers as philosophers, felt very much
embarrassed. They could not deny the anticipation of their doctrines in
the oldest myths. The latest _Logos_, according to their teachings, had
also appeared in order to show mankind the way to immortality; and in
his desire to endow the world with eternal life through the Pentecostal
fire, had lost his life agreeably to the traditional programme. Thus
was originated the very awkward explanation of which our modern clergy
freely avail themselves, that all these mythic types show the prophetic
spirit which, through the Lord’s mercy, was afforded even to the
heathen idolaters! The Pagans, they assert, had presented in their
imagery the great drama of Calvary—hence the resemblance. On the other
hand, the philosophers maintained, with unassailable logic, that the
pious fathers had simply helped themselves to a ready-made groundwork,
either finding it easier than to exert their own imagination, or
because of the greater number of ignorant proselytes who were attracted {299}
to the new doctrine by such an extraordinary resemblance with
their mythologies, at least as far as the outward form of the most
fundamental doctrines goes.
The allegory of the Fall of man and the fire of Prometheus is also
another version of the myth of the rebellion of the proud Lucifer,
hurled down to the bottomless pit—Orcus. In the religion of the
Brahmans, Moisasure, the Hindu Lucifer, becomes envious of the
Creator’s resplendent light, and at the head of a legion of inferior
spirits rebels against Brahma, and declares war against him. Like
Hercules, the faithful Titan, who helps Jupiter and restores to him his
throne, Siva, the third person of the Hindu trinity, hurls them all
from the celestial abode in Honderah, the region of eternal darkness.
But here the fallen angels are made to repent of their evil deed,
and in the Hindu doctrine they are all afforded the opportunity to
progress. In the Greek fiction, Hercules, the Sun-god, descends to
Hades to deliver the victims from their tortures; and the Christian
Church also makes her incarnate god descend to the dreary Plutonic
regions and overcome the rebellious ex-archangel. In their turn the
kabalists explain the allegory in a semi-scientific way. Adam the
second, or the first-created race which Plato calls gods, and the Bible
the Elohim, was not triple in his nature like the earthly man: _i.e._,
he was not composed of soul, spirit, and body, but was a compound of
sublimated astral elements into which the “Father” had breathed an
immortal, divine spirit. The latter, by reason of its godlike essence,
was ever struggling to liberate itself from the bonds of even that
flimsy prison; hence the “sons of God,” in their imprudent efforts,
were the first to trace a future model for the cyclic law. But, man
must not be “like one of us,” says the Creative Deity, one of the
Elohim “intrusted with the fabrication of the lower animal.”[488] And
thus it was, when the men of the first race had reached the summit of
the first cycle, they lost their balance, and their second envelope,
the grosser clothing (astral body), dragged them down the opposite arc.
This kabalistic version of the sons of God (or of light) is given in
the _Codex Nazaræus_. Bahak-Zivo, the “father of genii, is ordered to
‘construct creatures.’” But, as he is “ignorant of Orcus,” he fails to
do so and calls in Fetahil a still purer spirit to his aid, who fails
still worse.
Then steps on the stage of creation the “spirit”[489] (which properly
ought to be translated “soul,” for it is the _anima mundi_, and which {300}
with the Nazarenes and the Gnostics was _feminine_), and perceiving
that for Fetahil,[490] the _newest man_ (the latest), the splendor
was “changed,” and that for splendor existed “decrease and damage,”
awakes Karabtanos,[491] “who was frantic and _without sense and
judgment_,” and says to him: “Arise; see, the splendor (light) of the
_newest_ man (Fetahil) has failed (to produce or create men), the
decrease of this splendor is visible. Rise up, come with thy MOTHER
(the _spiritus_) and free thee from limits by which thou art held,
and those more ample than the whole world.” After which follows the
union of the frantic and blind matter, guided by the insinuations of
the spirit (not the _Divine_ breath, but the _Astral_ spirit, which
by its double essence is already tainted with matter) and the offer
of the MOTHER being accepted the Spiritus conceives “Seven Figures,”
which Irenæus is disposed to take for the seven _stellars_ (planets)
but which represent the seven _capital sins_, the progeny of an astral
soul separated from its divine source (spirit) and _matter_, the blind
demon of concupiscence. Seeing this, Fetahil extends his hand toward
the abyss of matter, and says: ‘Let the earth exist, just as the abode
of the powers has existed.’” Dipping his hand in the chaos, which he
condenses, he creates our planet.[492]
Then the _Codex_ proceeds to tell how Bahak-Zivo was separated from
the Spiritus, and the genii, or angels, from the rebels.[493] Then
Mano[494] (the greatest), who dwells with the _greatest_ FERHO, calls
Kebar-Zivo (known also by the name of Nebat-Iavar bar Iufin-Ifafin),
Helm and _Vine_ of the food of life,[495] he being the _third life_,
and, commiserating the rebellious and foolish genii, on account of the
magnitude of their ambition, says: “Lord of the genii[496] (Æons),
see what the genii, the rebellious angels do, and about what they are
consulting.[497] They say, “Let us call forth the world, and let us
call the ‘powers’ into existence. The genii are the _Principes_, the
‘sons of Light,’ but thou art the ‘_Messenger of Life_.’”[498]
And in order to counteract the influence of the seven “badly disposed” {301}
principles, the progeny of _Spiritus_, CABAR ZIO, the mighty Lord
of Splendor, procreates _seven other lives_ (the cardinal virtues)
who shine in their own form and light “from on high”[499] and thus
reëstablishes the balance between good and evil, light and darkness.
But this creation of beings, without the requisite influx of divine
pure breath in them, which was known among the kabalists as the “Living
Fire,” produced but creatures of matter and astral light.[500] Thus
were generated the animals which preceded man on this earth. The
spiritual beings, the “sons of light,” those who remained faithful to
the great _Ferho_ (the First Cause of all), constitute the celestial or
angelic hierarchy, the Adonim, and the legions of the _never-embodied_
spiritual men. The followers of the rebellious and foolish genii, and
the descendants of the “witless” seven spirits begotten by “Karabtanos”
and the “spiritus,” became, in course of time, the “men of our
planet,”[501] after having previously passed through every “creation”
of every one of the elements. From this stage of life they have been
traced by Darwin, who shows us how our _highest_ forms have been
evolved out of the _lowest_. Anthropology dares not follow the kabalist
in his metaphysical flights _beyond_ this planet, and it is doubtful if
its teachers have the courage to search for the _missing link_ in the
old kabalistic manuscripts.
Thus was set in motion the _first cycle_, which in its rotations
_downward_, brought an infinitesimal part of the created _lives_ to our
planet of _mud_. Arrived at the lowest point of the arc of the cycle
which directly preceded life on this earth, the pure divine spark still
lingering in the Adam made an effort to separate itself from the astral
spirit, for “man was falling gradually into generation,” and the fleshy
coat was becoming with every action more and more dense.
And now comes a mystery, a _Sod_;[502] a secret which Rabbi {302}
Simeon[503] imparted but to very few initiates. It was enacted once
every seven years during the Mysteries of Samothrace, and the records
of it are found self-printed on the leaves of the Thibetan sacred tree,
the mysterious KOUNBOUM, in the Lamasery of the holy adepts.[504]
In the shoreless ocean of space radiates the central, spiritual,
and _Invisible_ sun. The universe is his body, spirit and soul; and
after this ideal model are framed ALL THINGS. These three emanations
are the three lives, the three degrees of the gnostic _Pleroma_,
the three “Kabalistic Faces,” for the ANCIENT of the ancient, the
holy of the aged, the great En-Soph, “has a form and then he has no
form.” The invisible “assumed a form when he called the universe into
existence,”[505] says the _Sohar_, the Book of splendor. The _first_
light is His soul, the Infinite, Boundless, and Immortal breath; under
the efflux of which the universe heaves its mighty bosom, infusing
_Intelligent_ life throughout creation. The _second_ emanation
condenses cometary matter and produces forms within the cosmic circle;
sets the countless worlds floating in the electric space, and infuses
the _unintelligent_, blind life-principle into every form. The third,
produces the whole universe of physical matter; and as it keeps
gradually receding from the Central Divine Light its brightness wanes
and it becomes DARKNESS and the BAD—pure matter, the “gross purgations
of the celestial fire” of the Hermetists.
When the Central Invisible (the Lord Ferho) saw the efforts of the
divine _Scintilla_, unwilling to be dragged lower down into the
degradation of matter, to liberate itself, he permitted it to shoot
out from itself a _monad_, over which, attached to it as by the finest
thread, the Divine Scintilla (the soul) had to watch during its
ceaseless peregrinations from one form to another. Thus the monad was
shot down into the first form of matter and became encased in stone;
then, in course of time, through the combined efforts of _living fire_
and _living water_, both of which shone their _reflection_ upon the
stone, the monad crept out of its prison to sunlight as a lichen. From
change to change it went higher and higher; the monad, with every
new transformation borrowing more of the radiance of its parent,
_Scintilla_, which approached it nearer at every transmigration.
For “the First Cause, had willed it to proceed in this order;” and
destined it to creep on higher until its physical form became once more
the Adam _of dust_, shaped in the image of the Adam Kadmon. Before
undergoing its last earthly transformation, the external covering of
the monad, from the moment of its conception as an embryo, passes in
turn, once more, through the phases of the several kingdoms. In its {303}
fluidic prison it assumes a vague resemblance at various periods of the
gestation to plant, reptile, bird, and animal, until it becomes a human
embryo.[506] At the birth of the future man, the monad, radiating with
all the glory of its immortal parent which watches it from the seventh
sphere, becomes _senseless_.[507] It loses all recollection of the
past, and returns to consciousness but gradually, when the instinct of
childhood gives way to reason and intelligence. After the separation
between the life-principle (astral spirit) and the body takes place,
the liberated soul—Monad, exultingly rejoins the mother and father
spirit, the radiant Augoeides, and the two, merged into one, forever
form, with a glory proportioned to the spiritual purity of the past
earth-life, the Adam who has completed the circle of necessity, and is
freed from the last vestige of his physical encasement. Henceforth,
growing more and more radiant at each step of his upward progress, he
mounts the shining path that ends at the point from which he started
around the GRAND CYCLE.
The whole Darwinian theory of natural selection is included in the
first six chapters of the book of _Genesis_. The “Man” of chapter i.
is radically different from the “Adam” of chapter ii., for the former
was created “male and female” that is, bi-sexed—and in the image of God;
while the latter, according to verse seven, was formed of the dust of
the ground, and became “a living soul,” after the Lord God “breathed
into his nostrils the breath of life.” Moreover, _this Adam_ was a
male being, and in verse twenty we are told that “there was not found
a helpmeet for him.” The Adonai, being pure spiritual entities, had no
sex, or rather had both sexes united in themselves, like their Creator;
and the ancients understood this so well that they represented many of
their deities as of dual sex. The Biblical student must either accept
this interpretation, or make the passages in the two chapters alluded
to absurdly contradict each other. It was such literal acceptance of
passages that warranted the atheists in covering the Mosaic account
with ridicule, and it is the dead letter of the old text that begets
the materialism of our age. Not only are these two races of beings thus
clearly indicated in _Genesis_, but even a third and a fourth one are
ushered before the reader in chapter iv., where the “sons of God” and
the race of “giants” are spoken of.
As we write, there appears in an American paper, _The Kansas City
Times_, an account of important discoveries of the remains of a
prehistorical _race of giants_, which corroborates the statements of
the kabalists and the Bible allegories at the same time. It is worth
preserving:
“In his researches among the forests of Western Missouri, Judge E. {304}
P. West has discovered a number of conical-shaped mounds, similar
in construction to those found in Ohio and Kentucky. These mounds
are found upon the high bluffs overlooking the Missouri River, the
largest and more prominent being found in Tennessee, Mississippi, and
Louisiana. Until about three weeks ago it was not suspected that the
mound builders had made this region their home in the prehistoric
days; but now it is discovered that this strange and extinct race once
occupied this land, and have left an extensive graveyard in a number of
high mounds upon the Clay County bluffs.
“As yet, only one of these mounds has been opened. Judge West
discovered a skeleton about two weeks ago, and made a report to other
members of the society. They accompanied him to the mound, and not far
from the surface excavated and took out the remains of two skeletons.
The bones are very large—so large, in fact, when compared with an
ordinary skeleton of modern date, they appear to have formed part of
a giant. The head bones, such as have not rotted away, are monstrous
in size. The lower jaw of one skeleton is in a state of preservation,
and is double the size of the jaw of a civilized person. The teeth in
this jaw-bone are large, and appear to have been ground down and worn
away by contact with roots and carnivorous food. The jaw-bone indicates
immense muscular strength. The thigh-bone, when compared with that of
an ordinary modern skeleton, looks like that of a horse. The length,
thickness, and muscular development are remarkable. But the most
peculiar part about the skeleton is the frontal bone. It is very low,
and differs radically from any ever seen in this section before. It
forms one thick ridge of bone about one inch wide, extending across the
eyes. It is a narrow but rather heavy ridge of bone which, instead of
extending upward, as it does now in these days of civilization, receded
back from the eyebrows, forming a flat head, and thus indicates a very
low order of mankind. It is the opinion of the scientific gentlemen
who are making these discoveries that these bones are the remains of
a prehistoric race of men. They do not resemble the present existing
race of Indians, nor are the mounds constructed upon any pattern or
model known to have been in use by any race of men now in existence in
America. The bodies are discovered in a sitting posture in the mounds,
and among the bones are found stone weapons, such as flint knives,
flint scrapers, and all of them different in shape to the arrow-heads,
war-hatchets, and other stone tools and weapons known to have been
in use by the aboriginal Indians of this land when discovered by the
whites. The gentlemen who have these curious bones in charge have
deposited them with Dr. Foe, on Main street. It is their intention
to make further and closer researches in the mounds on the bluffs {305}
opposite this city. They will make a report of their labors at the next
meeting of the Academy of Science, by which time they expect to be
able to make some definite report as to their opinions. It is pretty
definitely settled, however, that the skeletons are those of a race of
men not now in existence.”
The author of a recent and very elaborate work[508] finds some cause
for merriment over the union of the sons of God with the “daughters of
men,” who _were fair_, as alluded to in _Genesis_, and described at
great length in that wonderful legend, the _Book of Enoch_. More is
the pity, that our most learned and liberal men do not employ their
close and merciless logic to repair its one-sidedness by seeking
the true spirit which dictated these allegories of old. This spirit
was certainly more _scientific_ than skeptics are yet prepared to
admit. But with every year some new discovery may corroborate their
assertions, until the whole of antiquity is vindicated.
One thing, at least, has been shown in the Hebrew text, viz.: that
there was one race of purely physical creatures, another purely
spiritual. The evolution and “transformation of species” required to
fill the gap between the two has been left to abler anthropologists.
We can only repeat the philosophy of men of old, which says that the
union of these two races produced a third—the Adamite race. Sharing
the natures of both its parents, it is equally adapted to an existence
in the material and spiritual worlds. Allied to the physical half of
man’s nature is reason, which enables him to maintain his supremacy
over the lower animals, and to subjugate nature to his uses. Allied
to his spiritual part is his _conscience_, which will serve as his
unerring guide through the besetments of the senses; for conscience is
that instantaneous perception between right and wrong, which can only
be exercised by the spirit, which, being a portion of the Divine Wisdom
and Purity, is absolutely pure and wise. Its promptings are independent
of reason, and it can only manifest itself clearly, when unhampered by
the baser attractions of our dual nature.
Reason being a faculty of our physical brain, one which is justly
defined as that of deducing inferences from premises, and being
wholly dependent on the evidence of other senses, cannot be a quality
pertaining directly to our divine spirit. The latter _knows_—hence,
all reasoning which implies discussion and argument would be useless.
So an entity, which, if it must be considered as a direct emanation
from the eternal Spirit of wisdom, has to be viewed as possessed of {306}
the same attributes as the essence or the whole of which it is a
part. Therefore, it is with a certain degree of logic that the ancient
theurgists maintained that the _rational_ part of man’s soul (spirit)
never entered wholly into the man’s body, but only overshadowed him
more or less through the _irrational_ or astral soul, which serves
as an intermediatory agent, or a medium between spirit and body. The
man who has conquered matter sufficiently to relieve the direct light
from his shining _Augoeides_, feels truth intuitionally; he could not
err in his judgment, notwithstanding all the sophisms suggested by
cold reason, for he is ILLUMINATED. Hence, prophecy, vaticination,
and the so-called Divine inspiration are simply the effects of this
illumination from above by our own immortal spirit.
Swedenborg, following the mystical doctrines of the Hermetic
philosophers, devoted a number of volumes to the elucidation of
the “internal sense” of _Genesis_. Swedenborg was undoubtedly a
“natural-born magician,” a seer; he was _not_ an _adept_. Thus, however
closely he may have followed the apparent method of interpretation
used by the alchemists and mystic writers, he partially failed; the
more so, that the model chosen by him in this method was one who,
albeit a great alchemist, was no more of an adept than the Swedish
seer himself, in the fullest sense of the word. Eugenius Philalethes
had never attained “the highest pyrotechny,” to use the diction of the
mystic philosophers. But, although both have missed the whole truth in
its details, Swedenborg has virtually given the same interpretation
of the first chapter of _Genesis_ as the Hermetic philosophers.
The seer, as well as the initiates, notwithstanding their veiled
phraseology, clearly show that the first chapters of _Genesis_ relate
to the _regeneration_, or a new birth of man, not to the creation of
our universe and its crown work—MAN. The fact that the terms of the
alchemists, such as _salt_, _sulphur_, and _mercury_ are transformed by
Swedenborg into _ens_, _cause_, and _effect_,[509] does not affect the
underlying idea of solving the problems of the Mosaic books by the only
possible method—that used by the Hermetists—that of correspondences.
His doctrine of correspondence, or Hermetic symbolism, is that
of Pythagoras and of the kabalists—“as above, so below.” It is
also that of the Buddhist philosophers, who, in their still more
abstract metaphysics, inverting the usual mode of definition
given by our _erudite_ scholars, call the invisible types the
only reality, and everything else the effects of the causes, or
visible prototypes—_illusions_. However contradictory their various
elucidations of the _Pentateuch_ may appear _on their surface_, every
one of them tends to show that the sacred literature of every country,
the _Bible_ as much as the _Vedas_ or the Buddhist _Scriptures_, can {307}
only be understood and thoroughly sifted by the light of Hermetic
philosophy. The great sages of antiquity, those of the mediæval ages,
and the mystical writers of our more modern times also, were all
_Hermetists_. Whether the light of truth had illuminated them through
their faculty of intuition, or as a consequence of study and regular
initiation, virtually, they had accepted the method and followed the
path traced to them by such men as Moses, Gautama-Buddha, and Jesus.
The truth, symbolized by some alchemists as _dew from heaven_, had
descended into their hearts, and they had all gathered it upon the
_tops of mountains_, after having spread CLEAN _linen cloths_ to
receive it; and thus, in one sense, they had secured, each for himself,
and in his own way, the _universal solvent_. How much they were allowed
to share it with the public is another question. That veil, which is
alleged to have covered the face of Moses, when, after descending from
Sinai, he taught his people the Word of God, cannot be withdrawn at
the will of the teacher only. It depends on the listeners, whether
they will also remove the veil which is “upon their hearts.” Paul says
it plainly; and his words addressed to the Corinthians can be applied
to every man or woman, and of any age in the history of the world. If
“their minds are blinded” by the shining skin of divine truth, whether
the Hermetic veil be withdrawn or not from the face of the teacher, it
cannot be taken away from their heart unless “it _shall turn to the
Lord_.” But the latter appellation must not be applied to either of the
three anthropomorphized personages of the Trinity, but to the “Lord,”
as understood by Swedenborg and the Hermetic philosophers—the Lord, who
is Life and MAN.
The everlasting conflict between the world-religions—Christianity,
Judaism, Brahmanism, Paganism, Buddhism, proceeds from this one source:
Truth is known but to the few; the rest, unwilling to withdraw the
veil from their own hearts, imagine it blinding the eyes of their
neighbor. The god of every exoteric religion, including Christianity,
notwithstanding its pretensions to mystery, is an idol, a fiction,
and cannot be anything else. Moses, _closely-veiled_, speaks to
the stiff-necked multitudes of Jehovah, the cruel, anthropomorphic
deity, as of the highest God, burying deep in the bottom of his
heart that truth which cannot be “either spoken of or revealed.”
Kapila cuts with the sharp sword of his sarcasms the Brahman-Yoggins,
who in their mystical visions pretend to see the HIGHEST _one_.
Gautama-Buddha conceals, under an impenetrable cloak of metaphysical
subtilties, the verity, and is regarded by posterity as _an atheist_.
Pythagoras, with his allegorical mysticism and metempsychosis, is
held for a clever impostor, and is succeeded in the same estimation
by other philosophers, like Apollonius and Plotinus, who are
generally spoken of as visionaries, if not charlatans. Plato, whose {308}
writings were never read by the majority of our _great_ scholars but
superficially, is accused by many of his translators of absurdities
and puerilities, and even of being ignorant of his own language;[510]
most likely for saying, in reference to the Supreme, that “a matter
of that kind cannot be expressed by words, like other things to be
learned;”[511] and making Protagoras lay too much stress on the use
of “veils.” We could fill a whole volume with names of misunderstood
sages, whose writings—only because our materialistic critics feel
unable to lift the “veil,” which shrouds them—pass off in a current
way for mystical absurdities. The most important feature of this
seemingly imcomprehensible mystery lies perhaps in the inveterate
habit of the majority of readers to judge a work by its words and
insufficiently-expressed ideas, leaving the spirit of it out of
the question. Philosophers of quite different schools may be often
found to use a multitude of different expressions, some dark and
metaphorical—all figurative, and yet treating of the same subject.
Like the thousand divergent rays of a globe of fire, every ray leads,
nevertheless, to the central point, so every mystic philosopher,
whether he be a devotedly pious enthusiast like Henry More; an
irascible alchemist, using a Billingsgate phraseology—like his
adversary, Eugenius Philalethes; or an _atheist_ (?) like Spinoza,
all had one and the same object in view—MAN. It is Spinoza, however,
who furnishes perhaps the truest key to a portion of this unwritten
secret. While Moses forbids “graven images” of Him whose name is not
to be taken in vain, Spinoza goes farther. He clearly infers that God
must not be so much as _described_. Human language is totally unfit to
give an idea of this “Being” who is altogether unique. Whether it is
Spinoza or the Christian theology that is more right in their premises
and conclusion, we leave the reader to judge for himself. Every attempt
to the contrary leads a nation to anthropomorphize the deity in whom
it believes, and the result is that given by Swedenborg. Instead of
stating that God made man after his own image, we ought in truth to say
that “man _imagines_ God after his image,”[512] forgetting that he has
set up his own reflection for worship.
Where, then, lies the true, real secret so much talked about by the
Hermetists? That there was and there is a secret, no candid student
of esoteric literature will ever doubt. Men of genius—as many of the
Hermetic philosophers undeniably were—would not have made fools of
themselves by trying to fool others for several thousand consecutive
years. That this great secret, commonly termed “the philosopher’s
stone,” had a spiritual as well as a physical meaning attached to
it, was suspected in all ages. The author of _Remarks on Alchemy
and the Alchemists_ very truly observes that the subject of the {309}
Hermetic art is MAN, and the object of the art is the perfection of
man.[513] But we cannot agree with him that only those whom he terms
“money-loving sots,” ever attempted to carry a purely _moral_ design
(of the alchemists) into the field of physical science. The fact
alone that man, in their eyes, is a trinity, which they divide into
_Sol_, water of _mercury_, and _sulphur_, which is the _secret fire_,
or, to speak plain, into _body_, _soul_, and _spirit_, shows that
there is a physical side to the question. Man is the philosopher’s
_stone_ spiritually—“_a triune or trinity in unity_,” as Philalethes
expresses it. But he is also that stone physically. The latter is but
the effect of the cause, and the cause is the universal solvent of
everything—divine spirit. Man is a correlation of chemical physical
forces, as well as a correlation of spiritual powers. The latter react
on the physical powers of man in proportion to the development of the
earthly man. “The work is carried to perfection according to the virtue
of a body, soul, and spirit,” says an alchemist; “for the body would
never be penetrable were it not for the _spirit_, nor would the spirit
be permanent in its supra-perfect _tincture_, were it not for the body;
nor could these two act one upon another without the soul, _for the
spirit is an invisible thing_, nor doth it ever appear without another
GARMENT, which garment is the SOUL.”[514]
The “philosophers by fire” asserted, through their chief, Robert
Fludd, that sympathy is the offspring of light, and “antipathy hath
its beginning from darkness.” Moreover, they taught, with other
kabalists, that “contrarieties in nature doth proceed from one eternal
essence, or from the root of all things.” Thus, the first cause is the
parent-source of good as well as of evil. The creator—who is _not_
the Highest God—is the father of matter, which is _bad_, as well as
of spirit, which, emanating from the highest, invisible cause, passes
through him like through a vehicle, and pervades the whole universe.
“It is most certain,” remarks Robertus di Fluctibus (Robert Fludd),
“that, as there are an infinity of _visible_ creatures, so there
is an endless variety of invisible ones, of divers natures, in the
universal machine. Through the mysterious name of God, which Moses was
so desirous of him (Jehova) to hear and know, when he received from
him this answer, _Jehova is my everlasting name_. As for the other
name, it is so pure and simple that it _cannot be articulated, or
compounded, or truly expressed by man’s voice_ ... all the other names
are wholly comprehended within it, for it contains the property as well
of _Nolunty_ as _volunty_, of privation as position, of death as life,
of cursing as blessing, of evil as good (though nothing ideally is {310}
bad in him), of hatred and discord, and consequently of sympathy and
antipathy.”[515]
Lowest in the scale of being are those invisible creatures called by
the kabalists the “elementary.” There are three distinct classes of
these. The highest, in intelligence and cunning, are the so-called
terrestrial spirits, of which we will speak more categorically in other
parts of this work. Suffice to say, for the present, that they are the
_larvæ_, or shadows of those who have lived on earth, have refused
all spiritual light, remained and died deeply immersed in the mire of
matter, and from whose sinful souls the immortal spirit has gradually
separated. The second class is composed of the invisible antitypes of
the men _to be_ born. No form can come into objective existence—from
the highest to the lowest—before the abstract ideal of this form—or, as
Aristotle would call it, the _privation_ of this form—is called forth.
Before an artist paints a picture every feature of it exists already in
his imagination; to have enabled us to discern a watch, this particular
watch must have existed in its abstract form in the watchmaker’s mind.
So with future men.
According to Aristotle’s doctrine, there are three principles of
natural bodies: privation, matter, and form. These principles may be
applied in this particular case. The privation of the child which is to
be we will locate in the invisible mind of the great Architect of the
Universe—privation not being considered in the Aristotelic philosophy
as a principle in the composition of bodies, but as an external
property in their production; for the production is a change by which
the matter passes from the shape it has not to that which it assumes.
Though the privation of the unborn child’s form, as well as of the
future form of the unmade watch, is that which is neither substance
nor extension nor quality as yet, nor any kind of existence, it is
still something which _is_, though its outlines, in order to be, must
acquire an objective form—the abstract must become concrete, in short.
Thus, as soon as this privation of matter is transmitted by energy to
universal ether, it becomes a material form, however sublimated. If
modern science teaches that _human_ thought “affects the matter of
another universe simultaneously with this,” how can he who believes in
an Intelligent First Cause, deny that the divine thought is equally
transmitted, by the same law of energy, to our common mediator, the
universal ether—the world-soul? And, if so, then it must follow that
once there the divine thought manifests itself objectively, energy
faithfully reproducing the outlines of that whose “privation” was first
born in the divine mind. Only it must not be understood that this
_thought_ creates matter. No; it creates but the design for the future {311}
form; the matter which serves to make this design having always been
in existence, and having been prepared to form a human body, through
a series of progressive transformations, as the result of evolution.
Forms pass; ideas that created them and the material which gave them
objectiveness, remain. These models, as yet devoid of immortal spirits,
are “elementals,“properly speaking, _psychic embryos_—which, when
their time arrives, die out of the invisible world, and are born into
this visible one as human infants, receiving in _transitu_ that divine
breath called spirit which completes the perfect man. This class cannot
communicate _objectively_ with men.
The third class are the “elementals” proper, which never evolve into
human beings, but occupy, as it were, a specific step of the ladder
of being, and, by comparison with the others, may properly be called
nature-spirits, or cosmic agents of nature, each being confined to its
own element and never transgressing the bounds of others. These are
what Tertullian called the “princes of the powers of the air.”
This class is believed to possess but one of the three attributes of
man. They have neither immortal spirits nor tangible bodies; only
astral forms, which partake, in a distinguishing degree, of the element
to which they belong and also of the ether. They are a combination
of sublimated matter and a rudimental mind. Some are changeless, but
still have no separate individuality, acting collectively, so to say.
Others, of certain elements and species, change form under a fixed law
which kabalists explain. The most solid of their bodies is ordinarily
just immaterial enough to escape perception by our physical eyesight,
but not so unsubstantial but that they can be perfectly recognized by
the inner, or clairvoyant vision. They not only exist and can all live
in ether, but can handle and direct it for the production of physical
effects, as readily as we can compress air or water for the same
purpose by pneumatic and hydraulic apparatus; in which occupation they
are readily helped by the “human elementary.” More than this; they can
so condense it as to make to themselves tangible bodies, which by their
Protean powers they can cause to assume such likeness as they choose,
by taking as their models the portraits they find stamped in the memory
of the persons present. It is not necessary that the sitter should be
thinking at the moment of the one represented. His image may have faded
many years before. The mind receives indelible impression even from
chance acquaintance or persons encountered but once. As a few seconds
exposure of the sensitized photograph plate is all that is requisite to
preserve indefinitely the image of the sitter, so is it with the mind.
According to the doctrine of Proclus, the uppermost regions from the
zenith of the universe to the moon belonged to the gods or planetary {312}
spirits, according to their hierarchies and classes. The highest among
them were the twelve _ŭper-ouranioi_, or supercelestial gods, having
whole legions of subordinate demons at their command. They are followed
next in rank and power by the _egkosmioi_, the intercosmic gods, each
of these presiding over a great number of demons, to whom they impart
their power and change it from one to another at will. These are
evidently the personified forces of nature in their mutual correlation,
the latter being represented by the third class or the “elementals” we
have just described.
Further on he shows, on the principle of the Hermetic axiom—of types,
and prototypes—that the lower spheres have their subdivisions and
classes of beings as well as the upper celestial ones, the former
being always subordinate to the higher ones. He held that the four
elements are all filled with _demons_, maintaining with Aristotle
that the universe is full, and that there is no void in nature.
The demons of the earth, air, fire, and water are of an elastic,
ethereal, semi-corporeal essence. It is these classes which officiate
as intermediate agents between the gods and men. Although lower in
intelligence than the _sixth_ order of the higher demons, these beings
preside directly over the elements and organic life. They direct
the growth, the inflorescence, the properties, and various changes
of plants. They are the personified ideas or virtues shed from the
heavenly _ulê_ into the inorganic matter; and, as the vegetable
kingdom is one remove higher than the mineral, these emanations from
the celestial gods take form and being in the plant, they become _its
soul_. It is that which Aristotle’s doctrine terms the _form_ in the
three principles of natural bodies, classified by him as privation,
matter, and form. His philosophy teaches that besides the original
matter, another principle is necessary to complete the triune nature
of every particle, and this is form; an invisible, but still, in an
ontological sense of the word, a substantial being, really distinct
from matter proper. Thus, in an animal or a plant, besides the bones,
the flesh, the nerves, the brains, and the blood, in the former, and
besides the pulpy matter, tissues, fibres, and juice in the latter,
which blood and juice, by circulating through the veins and fibres,
nourishes all parts of both animal and plant; and besides the animal
spirits, which are the principles of motion; and the chemical energy
which is transformed into vital force in the green leaf, there must be
a substantial form, which Aristotle called in the horse, the _horse’s
soul_; Proclus, the _demon_ of every mineral, plant, or animal, and the
mediæval philosophers, the _elementary spirits_ of the four kingdoms.
All this is held in our century as metaphysics and gross superstition.
Still, on strictly ontological principles, there is, in these old
hypotheses, some shadow of probability, some clew to the perplexing {313}
“missing links” of exact science. The latter has become so dogmatical
of late, that all that lies beyond the ken of _inductive_ science
is termed imaginary; and we find Professor Joseph Le Conte stating
that some of the best scientists “ridicule the use of the term ‘vital
force,’ or vitality, as a remnant _of superstition_.”[516] De Candolle
suggests the term “vital movement,” instead of vital force;[517]
thus preparing for a final scientific leap which will transform the
immortal, thinking man, into an automaton with a clock-work inside him.
“But,” objects Le Conte, “can we conceive of movement without force?
And if the movement is peculiar, so also is _the form of force_.”
In the Jewish _Kabala_, the nature-spirits were known under the
general name of _Shedim_ and divided into four classes. The Persians
called them all _devs_; the Greeks, indistinctly designated them as
_demons_; the Egyptians knew them as _afrites_. The ancient Mexicans,
says Kaiser, believed in numerous spirit-abodes, into one of which the
shades of innocent children were placed until final disposal; into
another, situated in the sun, ascended the valiant souls of heroes;
while the hideous spectres of incorrigible sinners were sentenced to
wander and despair in subterranean caves, held in the bonds of the
earth atmosphere, unwilling and unable to liberate themselves. They
passed their time in communicating with mortals, and frightening those
who could see them. Some of the African tribes know them as _Yowahoos_.
In the Indian Pantheon there are no less than 330,000,000 of various
kinds of spirits, including elementals, which latter were termed by
the Brahmans the Daityas. These beings are known by the adepts to be
attracted toward certain quarters of the heavens by something of the
same mysterious property which makes the magnetic needle turn toward
the north, and certain plants to obey the same attraction. The various
races are also believed to have a special sympathy with certain human
temperaments, and to more readily exert power over such than others.
Thus, a bilious, lymphatic, nervous, or sanguine person would be
affected favorably or otherwise by conditions of the astral light,
resulting from the different aspects of the planetary bodies. Having
reached this general principle, after recorded observations extending
over an indefinite series of years, or ages, the adept astrologer
would require only to know what the planetary aspects were at a given
anterior date, and to apply his knowledge of the succeeding changes in
the heavenly bodies, to be able to trace, with approximate accuracy,
the varying fortunes of the personage whose horoscope was required, {314}
and even to predict the future. The accuracy of the horoscope would
depend, of course, no less upon the astrologer’s knowledge of the
occult forces and races of nature, than upon his astronomical erudition.
Eliphas Levi expounds with reasonable clearness, in his _Dogme et
Rituel de la Haute Magie_, the law of reciprocal influences between
the planets and their combined effect upon the mineral, vegetable, and
animal kingdoms, as well as upon ourselves. He states that the astral
atmosphere is as constantly changing from day to day, and from hour
to hour, as the air we breathe. He quotes approvingly the doctrine
of Paracelsus that every man, animal, and plant bears external and
internal evidences of the influences dominant at the moment of germinal
development. He repeats the old kabalistic doctrine, that nothing is
unimportant in nature, and that even so small a thing as the birth
of one child upon our insignificant planet has its effect upon the
universe, as the whole universe has its own reäctive influence upon him.
“The stars,” he remarks, “are linked to each other by attractions which
hold them in equilibrium and cause them to move with regularity through
space. This net-work of light stretches from all the spheres to all
the spheres, and there is not a point upon any planet to which is not
attached one of these indestructible threads. The precise locality, as
well as the hour of birth, should then be calculated by the true adept
in astrology; then, when he shall have made the exact calculation of
the astral influences, it remains for him to count the chances of his
position in life, the helps or hindrances he is likely to encounter ...
and his natural impulses toward the accomplishment of his destiny.” He
also asserts that the individual force of the person, as indicating his
ability to conquer difficulties and subdue unfavorable propensities,
and so carve out his fortune, or to passively await what blind fate may
bring, must be taken into account.
A consideration of the subject from the standpoint of the ancients,
affords us, it will be seen, a very different view from that taken
by Professor Tyndall in his famous Belfast address. “To supersensual
beings,” says he, “which, however potent and invisible, were nothing
but species of _human creatures_, perhaps raised from among mankind,
and retaining all human passions and appetites, were handed over the
rule and governance of natural phenomena.”
To enforce his point, Mr. Tyndall conveniently quotes from Euripides
the familiar passage in Hume: “The gods toss all into confusion, mix
everything with its reverse, that all of us, from our ignorance and
uncertainty, may pay them the more worship and reverence.” Although
enunciating in _Chrysippus_ several Pythagorean doctrines, Euripides
is considered by every ancient writer as heterodox, therefore the {315}
quotation proceeding from this philosopher does not at all strengthen
Mr. Tyndall’s argument.
As to the _human_ spirit, the notions of the older philosophers and
mediæval kabalists while differing in some particulars, agreed on the
whole; so that the doctrine of one may be viewed as the doctrine of the
other. The most substantial difference consisted in the location of the
immortal or divine spirit of man. While the ancient Neo-platonists held
that the Augoeides never descends hypostatically into the living man,
but only sheds more or less its radiance on the inner man—the astral
soul—the kabalists of the middle ages maintained that the spirit,
detaching itself from the ocean of light and spirit, entered into man’s
soul, where it remained through life imprisoned in the astral capsule.
This difference was the result of the belief of Christian kabalists,
more or less, in the dead letter of the allegory of the fall of man.
The soul, they said, became, through the fall of Adam, contaminated
with the world of matter, or Satan. Before it could appear with its
enclosed divine spirit in the presence of the Eternal, it had to
purify itself of the impurities of darkness. They compared “the spirit
imprisoned within the soul to a drop of water enclosed within a capsule
of gelatine and thrown in the ocean; so long as the capsule remains
whole the drop of water remains isolated; break the envelope and the
drop becomes a part of the ocean—its individual existence has ceased.
So it is with the spirit. As long as it is enclosed in its plastic
mediator, or soul, it has an individual existence. Destroy the capsule,
a result which may occur from the agonies of withered conscience,
crime, and moral disease, and the spirit returns back to its original
abode. Its individuality is gone.”
On the other hand, the philosophers who explained the “fall into
generation” in their own way, viewed spirit as something wholly
distinct from the soul. They allowed its presence in the astral capsule
only so far as the spiritual emanations or rays of the “shining
one” were concerned. Man and soul had to conquer their immortality
by ascending toward the unity with which, if successful, they were
finally linked, and into which they were absorbed, so to say. The
individualization of man after death depended on the spirit, not on
his soul and body. Although the word “personality,” in the sense in
which it is usually understood, is an absurdity, if applied literally
to our immortal essence, still the latter is a distinct entity,
immortal and eternal, _per se_; and, as in the case of criminals beyond
redemption, when the shining thread which links the spirit to the
soul, from the moment of the birth of a child, is violently snapped,
and the disembodied entity is left to share the fate of the lower
animals, to gradually dissolve into ether, and have its individuality
annihilated—even then the spirit remains a distinct being. It becomes {316}
a planetary spirit, an angel; for _the gods of the Pagan or the
archangels of the Christian_, the direct emanations of the First Cause,
notwithstanding the hazardous statement of Swedenborg, _never were or
will be men_, on our planet, at least.
This specialization has been in all ages the stumbling-block of
metaphysicians. The whole esoterism of the Buddhistical philosophy
is based on this mysterious teaching, understood by so few persons,
and so totally misrepresented by many of the most learned scholars.
Even metaphysicians are too inclined to confound the effect with the
cause. A person may have won his immortal life, and remain the same
_inner-self_ he was on earth, throughout eternity; but this does not
imply necessarily that he must either remain the Mr. Smith or Brown he
was on earth, or lose his individuality. Therefore, the astral soul and
terrestrial body of man may, in the dark Hereafter, be absorbed into
the cosmical ocean of sublimated elements, and cease to feel his _ego_,
if this _ego_ did not deserve to soar higher; and the divine spirit
still remain an unchanged entity, though this terrestrial experience of
his emanations may be totally obliterated at the instant of separation
from the unworthy vehicle.
If the “spirit,” or the divine portion of the soul, is preëxistent as
a distinct being from all eternity, as Origen, Synesius, and other
Christian fathers and philosophers taught, and if it is the same, and
nothing more than the metaphysically-objective soul, how can it be
otherwise than eternal? And what matters it in such a case, whether man
leads an animal or a pure life, if, do what he may, he can never lose
his individuality? This doctrine is as pernicious in its consequences
as that of vicarious atonement. Had the latter dogma, in company with
the false idea that we are all immortal, been demonstrated to the
world in its true light, humanity would have been bettered by its
propagation. Crime and sin would be avoided, not for fear of earthly
punishment, or of a ridiculous hell, but for the sake of that which
lies the most deeply rooted in our inner nature—the desire of an
individual and distinct life in the hereafter, the positive assurance
that we cannot win it unless we “take the kingdom of heaven by
violence,” and the conviction that neither human prayers nor the blood
of another man will save us from individual destruction after death,
unless we firmly link ourselves during our terrestrial life with our
own immortal spirit—our GOD.
Pythagoras, Plato, Timæus of Locris, and the whole Alexandrian school
derived the soul from the universal World-Soul; and the latter was,
according to their own teachings—ether; something of such a fine nature
as to be perceived only by our inner sight. Therefore, it cannot be the
essence of the Monas, or _cause_, because the _anima mundi_ is but the
effect, the objective emanation of the former. Both the human spirit {317}
and soul are preëxistent. But, while the former exists as a distinct
entity, an individualization, the soul exists as preëxisting matter, an
unscient portion of an intelligent whole. Both were originally formed
from the Eternal Ocean of Light; but as the theosophists expressed
it, there is a visible as well as invisible spirit in fire. They
made a difference between the _anima bruta_ and the _anima divina_.
Empedocles firmly believed all men and animals to possess two souls;
and in Aristotle we find that he calls one the reasoning soul—νοῦς,
and the other, the animal soul—ψυχή. According to these philosophers,
the reasoning soul comes from _without_ the universal soul, and the
other from _within_. This divine and superior region, in which they
located the invisible and supreme deity, was considered by them (by
Aristotle himself) as a fifth element, purely spiritual and divine,
whereas the _anima mundi_ proper was considered as composed of a
fine, igneous, and ethereal nature spread throughout the universe, in
short—ether. The Stoics, the greatest materialists of ancient days,
excepted the Invisible God and Divine Soul (Spirit) from any such a
corporeal nature. Their modern commentators and admirers, greedily
seizing the opportunity, built on this ground the supposition that the
Stoics believed in neither God nor soul. But Epicurus, whose doctrine
militating directly against the agency of a Supreme Being and gods,
in the formation or government of the world, placed him far above the
Stoics in atheism and materialism, taught, nevertheless, that the soul
is of a fine, tender essence, formed from the smoothest, roundest, and
finest atoms, which description still brings us to the same sublimated
ether. Arnobius, Tertullian, Irenæus, and Origen, notwithstanding their
Christianity, believed, with the more modern Spinoza and Hobbes, that
the soul was corporeal, though of a very fine nature.
This doctrine of the possibility of losing one’s soul and, hence,
individuality, militates with the ideal theories and progressive ideas
of some spiritualists, though Swedenborg fully adopts it. They will
never accept the kabalistic doctrine which teaches that it is only
through observing the law of harmony that individual life hereafter can
be obtained; and that the farther the inner and outer man deviate from
this fount of harmony, whose source lies in our divine spirit, the more
difficult it is to regain the ground.
But while the spiritualists and other adherents of Christianity have
little if any perception of this fact of the possible death and
obliteration of the human personality by the separation of the immortal
part from the perishable, the Swedenborgians fully comprehend it. One
of the most respected ministers of the New Church, the Rev. Chauncey
Giles, D.D., of New York, recently elucidated the subject in a public
discourse as follows: Physical death, or the death of the body, was a {318}
provision of the divine economy for the benefit of man, a provision
by means of which he attained the higher ends of his being. But there
is another death which is the interruption of the divine order and
the destruction of every human element in man’s nature, and every
possibility of human happiness. This is the spiritual death, which
takes place before the dissolution of the body. “There may be a vast
development of man’s natural mind without that development being
accompanied by a particle of love of God, or of unselfish love of
man.” When one falls into a love of self and love of the world, with
its pleasures, losing the divine love of God and of the neighbor, he
falls from life to death. The higher principles which constitute the
essential elements of his humanity perish, and he lives only on the
natural plane of his faculties. Physically he exists, spiritually
he is dead. To all that pertain to the higher and the only enduring
phase of existence he is as much dead as his body becomes dead to all
the activities, delights, and sensations of the world when the spirit
has left it. This spiritual death results from disobedience of the
laws of spiritual life, which is followed by the same penalty as the
disobedience of the laws of the natural life. But the spiritually dead
have still their delights; they have their intellectual endowments and
power, and intense activities. All the animal delights are theirs, and
to multitudes of men and women these constitute the highest ideal of
human happiness. The tireless pursuit of riches, of the amusements and
entertainments of social life; the cultivation of graces of manner,
of taste in dress, of social preferment, of scientific distinction,
intoxicate and enrapture these dead-alive; but, the eloquent preacher
remarks, “these creatures, with all their graces, rich attire, and
brilliant accomplishments, are dead in the eye of the Lord and the
angels, and when measured by the only true and immutable standard have
no more genuine life than skeletons whose flesh has turned to dust.” A
high development of the intellectual faculties does not imply spiritual
and true life. Many of our greatest scientists are but animate
corpses—they have no spiritual sight because their spirits have left
them. So we might go through all ages, examine all occupations, weigh
all human attainments, and investigate all forms of society, and we
would find these _spiritually dead_ everywhere.
Pythagoras taught that the entire universe is one vast system
of mathematically correct combinations. Plato shows the deity
_geometrizing_. The world is sustained by the same law of equilibrium
and harmony upon which it was built. The centripetal force could not
manifest itself without the centrifugal in the harmonious revolutions
of the spheres; all forms are the product of this dual force in
nature. Thus, to illustrate our case, we may designate the spirit as
the centrifugal, and the soul as the centripetal, spiritual energies. {319}
When in perfect harmony, both forces produce one result; break or
damage the centripetal motion of the earthly soul tending toward the
centre which attracts it; arrest its progress by clogging it with a
heavier weight of matter than it can bear, and the harmony of the
whole, which was its life, is destroyed. Individual life can only be
continued if sustained by this two-fold force. The least deviation from
harmony damages it; when it is destroyed beyond redemption the forces
separate and the form is gradually annihilated. After the death of the
depraved and the wicked, arrives the critical moment. If during life
the ultimate and desperate effort of the inner-self to reunite itself
with the faintly-glimmering ray of its divine parent is neglected; if
this ray is allowed to be more and more shut out by the thickening
crust of matter, the soul, once freed from the body, follows its
earthly attractions, and is magnetically drawn into and held within the
dense fogs of the material atmosphere. Then it begins to sink lower
and lower, until it finds itself, when returned to consciousness, in
what the ancients termed _Hades_. The annihilation of such a soul is
never instantaneous; it may last centuries, perhaps; for nature never
proceeds by jumps and starts, and the astral soul being formed of
elements, the law of evolution must bide its time. Then begins the
fearful law of compensation, the _Yin-youan_ of the Buddhists.
This class of spirits are called the “terrestrial” or “_earthly_
elementary,” in contradistinction to the other classes, as we have
shown in the introductory chapter. In the East they are known as the
“Brothers of the Shadow.” Cunning, low, vindictive, and seeking to
retaliate their sufferings upon humanity, they become, until final
annihilation, vampires, ghouls, and prominent actors. These are the
leading “stars” on the great spiritual stage of “materialization,”
which phenomena they perform with the help of the more intelligent of
the genuine-born “elemental” creatures, which hover around and welcome
them with delight in their own spheres. Henry Kunrath, the great German
kabalist, has on a plate of his rare work, _Amphitheatri Sapientiæ
Æternæ_, representations of the four classes of these human “elementary
spirits.” Once past the threshold of the sanctuary of initiation, once
that an adept has lifted the “Veil of Isis,” the mysterious and jealous
goddess, he has nothing to fear; but till then he is in constant danger.
Although Aristotle himself, anticipating the modern physiologists,
regarded the human mind as a material substance, and ridiculed the
hylozoïsts, nevertheless he fully believed in the existence of a
“double” soul, or spirit and soul.[518] He laughed at Strabo for
believing that any particles of matter, _per se_, could have life {320}
and intellect in themselves sufficient to fashion by degrees such a
multiform world as ours.[519] Aristotle is indebted for the sublime
morality of his Nichomachean Ethics to a thorough study of the
_Pythagoric Ethical Fragments_; for the latter can be easily shown to
have been the source at which he gathered his ideas, though he might
not have sworn “by him who the tetractys found.”[520] Finally, what
do we know so certain about Aristotle? His philosophy is so abstruse
that he constantly leaves his reader to supply by the imagination
the missing links of his logical deductions. Moreover, we know that
before his works ever reached our scholars, who delight in his
seemingly atheistical arguments in support of his doctrine of fate,
these works passed through too many hands to have remained immaculate.
From Theophrastus, his legator, they passed to Neleus, whose heirs
kept them mouldering in subterranean caves for nearly 150 years;[521]
after which, we learn that his manuscripts were copied and much
augmented by Apellicon of Theos, who supplied such paragraphs as had
become illegible, by conjectures of his own, probably many of these
drawn from the depths of his inner consciousness. Our scholars of the
nineteenth century might certainly profit well by Aristotle’s example,
were they as anxious to imitate him practically as they are to throw
his inductive method and materialistic theories at the head of the
Platonists. We invite them to collect _facts_ as carefully as he did,
instead of denying those they know nothing about.
What we have said in the introductory chapter and elsewhere, of mediums
and the tendency of their mediumship, is not based upon conjecture,
but upon actual experience and observation. There is scarcely one
phase of mediumship, of either kind, that we have not seen exemplified
during the past twenty-five years, in various countries. India, Thibet,
Borneo, Siam, Egypt, Asia Minor, America (North and South), and other
parts of the world, have each displayed to us its peculiar phase of
mediumistic phenomena and magical power. Our varied experience has
taught us two important truths, viz.: that for the exercise of the
latter personal purity and the exercise of a trained and indomitable
will-power are indispensable; and that spiritualists can never assure
themselves of the genuineness of mediumistic manifestations, unless
they occur in the light and under such reasonable test conditions as
would make an attempted fraud instantly noticed.
For fear of being misunderstood, we would remark that while, as a rule,
physical phenomena are produced by the nature-spirits, of their own {321}
motion and to please their own fancy, still good disembodied human
spirits, under _exceptional_ circumstances, such as the aspiration
of a pure heart or the occurrence of some favoring emergency, can
manifest their presence by any of the phenomena _except personal
materialization_. But it must be a mighty attraction indeed to draw a
pure, disembodied spirit from its radiant home into the foul atmosphere
from which it escaped upon leaving its earthly body.
Magi and theurgic philosophers objected most severely to the “evocation
of souls.” “Bring her (the soul) not forth, lest in departing she
retain something,” says Psellus.[522]
“It becomes you not to behold them _before your body is initiated_,
Since, by always alluring, they seduce the souls of the uninitiated,”
says the same philosopher, in another passage.[523]
They objected to it for several good reasons. 1. “It is extremely
difficult to distinguish a good dæmon from a bad one,” says Iamblichus.
2. If a human soul succeeds in penetrating the density of the earth’s
atmosphere—always oppressive to her, often hateful—still there is a
danger the soul is unable to come into proximity with the material
world without that she cannot avoid; “departing, she _retains_
something,” that is to say, contaminating her purity, for which she
has to suffer more or less after her departure. Therefore, the true
theurgist will avoid causing any more suffering to this pure denizen
of the higher sphere than is absolutely required by the interests of
humanity. It is only the practitioner of black magic who compels the
presence, by the powerful incantations of necromancy, of the tainted
souls of such as have lived bad lives, and are ready to aid his selfish
designs. Of intercourse with the Augoeides, through the mediumistic
powers of _subjective_ mediums, we elsewhere speak. The theurgists
employed chemicals and mineral substances to chase away evil spirits.
Of the latter, a stone called Μνίζουριν was one of the most powerful
agents.
“When you shall see a _terrestrial_ demon approaching,
Exclaim, and sacrifice the stone Mnizurin,”
exclaims a Zoroastrian oracle (_Psel._, 40).
And now, to descend from the eminence of theurgico-magian poetry to the
“unconscious” magic of our present century, and the prose of a modern
kabalist, we will review it in the following:
In Dr. Morin’s _Journal de Magnétisme_, published a few years since {322}
in Paris, at a time when the “table-turning” was raging in France, a
curious letter was published.
“Believe me, sir,” wrote the anonymous correspondent, “that there are
no spirits, no ghosts, no angels, no demons _enclosed in a table_; but,
all of these can be found there, nevertheless, for that depends on _our
own wills_ and our imaginations.... This MENSAbulism[524] is an ancient
phenomenon ... misunderstood by us moderns, but natural, for all that,
and which pertains to physics and psychology; unfortunately, it had
to remain incomprehensible until the discovery of electricity and
heliography, as, to explain a fact of spiritual nature, we are obliged
to base ourselves on a corresponding fact of a material order....
“As we all know, the daguerreotype-plate may be impressed, not only
by objects, but also by their reflections. Well, the phenomenon in
question, which ought to be named _mental photography_, produces,
besides _realities_, the dreams of our imagination, with such a
fidelity that very often we become unable to distinguish a copy taken
from _one present_, from a negative obtained of an _image_....
“The _magnetization_ of a table or of a person is absolutely identical
in its results; it is the saturation of a foreign body by either the
_intelligent_ vital electricity, or the thought of the magnetizer and
those present.”
Nothing can give a better or a more just idea of it than the electric
battery gathering the fluid on its conductor, to obtain thereof a
_brute_ force which manifests itself in sparks of light, etc. Thus,
the electricity accumulated on an isolated body acquires a power
of reaction equal to the action, either for charging, magnetizing,
decomposing, inflaming, or for discharging its vibrations far away.
These are the visible effects of the _blind_, or crude electricity
produced by blind elements—the word blind being used by the table
itself in contradistinction to the _intelligent_ electricity. But there
evidently exists a corresponding electricity produced by the cerebral
pile of man; this _soul-electricity_, this spiritual and universal
ether, which is the _ambient, middle nature of the metaphysical
universe_, or rather of the _incorporeal_ universe, has to be studied
before it is admitted by science, which, having no idea of it, will
never know anything of the great phenomenon of life until she does.
“It appears that to manifest itself the cerebral electricity requires
the help of the ordinary statical electricity; when the latter is
lacking in the atmosphere—when the air is very damp, for instance—you
can get little or nothing of either tables or mediums....
“There is no need for the ideas to be formulated very precisely in the {323}
brains of the persons present; the _table_ discovers and formulates
them _itself_, in either prose or verse, but always correctly; the
table requires time to compose a verse; it begins, then it erases a
word, corrects it, and sometimes sends back the epigram to our address
... if the persons present are in sympathy with each other, _it_ jokes
and laughs with us as any living person could. As to the things of the
exterior world, it has to content itself with conjectures, as well as
ourselves; _it_ (the table) composes little philosophical systems,
discusses and maintains them as the most cunning rhetorician might. In
short, it creates itself a conscience and a reason properly belonging
to itself, but with the materials it finds in us....
“The Americans are persuaded that they talk with their dead; some think
(more truly) that these are _spirits_; others take them for angels;
others again for devils ... (the _intelligence_) assuming the shape
which fits the conviction and preconceived opinion of every one; so
did the initiates of the temples of Serapis, of Delphi, and other
theurgico-medical establishments of the same kind. They were convinced
beforehand that they would communicate with their gods; and _they_
never failed.
“We, who well know the value of the phenomenon ... are perfectly sure
that after having charged the table with our magnetic _efflux_, we have
called to life, or created an intelligence analogous to our own, which
like ourselves is endowed with a free will, can talk and discuss with
us, with a degree of superior lucidity, considering that the resultant
is stronger than the individual, or rather the whole is larger than a
part of it.... We must not accuse Herodotus of telling us fibs when he
records the most extraordinary circumstances, for we must hold them to
be as true and correct as the rest of historical facts which are to be
found in all the Pagan writers of antiquity....
“The phenomenon is as old as the world.... The priests of India and
China practiced it before the Egyptians and the Greeks. The savages
and the Esquimaux know it well. It is the phenomenon of Faith, sole
source of every prodigy,” and it will be done to you according to _your
faith_. The one who enunciated this profound doctrine was verily the
incarnated word of Truth; he neither deceived himself, nor wanted to
deceive others; he expounded an axiom which we now repeat, without much
hope of seeing it accepted.
“Man is a microcosm, or a little world; he carries in him a fragment of
the great _All_, in a chaotic state. The task of our half-gods is to
disentangle from it the share belonging to them by an incessant mental
and material labor. They have their task to do, the perpetual invention
of new products, of new moralities, and the proper arrangement of the
crude and formless material furnished them by the Creator, who created {324}
them in His own image, that they should create in their turn and so
complete here the work of the Creation; an immense labor which can be
achieved only when the _whole_ will become so perfect, that it will be
like unto God Himself, and thus able to survive to itself. We are very
far yet from that final moment, for we can say that everything is to be
done, to be undone, and _outdone_ as yet on our globe, institutions,
machinery, and products.
“_Mens non solum agitat sed creat molem._
“We live in this life, in an ambient, intellectual centre, which
entertains between human beings and things a necessary and perpetual
solidarity; every brain is a ganglion, a station of a universal
_neurological_ telegraphy in constant rapport with the central and
other stations by the vibrations of thought.
“The spiritual sun shines for souls as the material sun shines for
bodies, for the universe _is double_ and follows the law of couples.
The ignorant operator interprets erroneously the divine dispatches, and
often delivers them in a false and ridiculous manner. Thus study and
true science alone can destroy the superstitions and nonsense spread by
the ignorant interpreters placed at the _stations of teaching_ among
every people in this world. These blind interpreters of the _Verbum_,
the WORD, have always tried to impose on their pupils the obligation to
swear to everything without examination in _verba magistri_.
“Alas! we could wish for nothing better were they to translate
correctly the _inner_ voices, which voices never deceive but those who
have _false spirits_ in them. ‘It is our duty,’ they say, ‘to interpret
oracles; it is we who have received the exclusive mission for it from
heaven, _spiritus flat ubi vult_, and it blows on us alone....’
“It blows _on every one_, and the rays of the spiritual light
illuminate every conscience; and when all the bodies and all the minds
will reflect equally this dual light, people will see a great deal
clearer than they do now.”
We have translated and quoted the above fragments for their great
originality and truthfulness. We know the writer; fame proclaims him a
great kabalist, and a few friends know him as a truthful and honest man.
The letter shows, moreover, that the writer has well and carefully
studied the chameleon-like nature of the intelligences presiding over
spiritual circles. That they are of the same kind and race as those
so frequently mentioned in antiquity, admits of as little doubt as
that the present generation of men are of the same nature as were
human beings in the days of Moses. Subjective manifestations proceed, {325}
under harmonious conditions, from those beings which were known as
the “good demons” in days of old. Sometimes, but rarely, the planetary
spirits—beings of another race than our own—produce them; sometimes the
spirits of our translated and beloved friends; sometimes nature-spirits
of one or more of the countless tribes; but most frequently of all
terrestrial elementary spirits, disembodied evil men, the Diakka of A.
Jackson Davis.
We do not forget what we have elsewhere written about _subjective_ and
_objective_ mediumistic phenomena. We keep the distinction always in
mind. There are good and bad of both classes. An impure medium will
attract to his impure inner self, the vicious, depraved, malignant
influences as inevitably as one that is pure draws only those that are
good and pure. Of the latter kind of medium where can a nobler example
be found than the gentle Baroness Adelma von Vay, of Austria (born
Countess Wurmbrandt), who is described to us by a correspondent as “the
Providence of her neighborhood?” She uses her mediumistic power to heal
the sick and comfort the afflicted. To the rich she is a phenomenon;
but to the poor a ministering angel. For many years she has seen and
recognized the nature-spirits or cosmic elementaries, and found them
always friendly. But this was because she was a pure, good woman. Other
correspondents of the Theosophical Society have not fared so well at
the hands of these apish and impish beings. The Havanna case, elsewhere
described, is an example.