The Eleusinian Mysteries were no more. Yet it was these which gave their
principal features to the Neo‐platonic school of Ammonius Saccas, for the
Eclectic System was chiefly characterised by its Theurgy and ecstasis. It
was Iamblichus who added to it the Egyptian doctrine of Theurgy with its
practices, and Porphyry, the Jew, who opposed this new element. The
school, however, with but few exceptions, practised asceticism and
contemplation, its mystics passing through a discipline as rigorous as
that of the Hindu devotee. Their efforts never tended so much to develop
the successful practice of thaumaturgy, necromancy or sorcery—such as they
are now accused of—as to evolve the higher faculties of the inner man, the
Spiritual Ego. The school held that a number of spiritual beings, denizens
of spheres quite independent of the earth and of the human cycle, were
mediators between the “Gods” and men, and even between man and the Supreme
Soul. To put it in plainer language, the soul of man became, owing to the
help of the Planetary Spirits, “recipient of the soul of the world” as
Emerson puts it. Apollonius of Tyana asserted his possession of such a
power in these words (quoted by Professor Wilder in his _Neo‐Platonism_):
I can see the present and the future in a clear mirror. The sage
[Adept] need not wait for the vapours of the earth and the
corruption of the air to foresee plagues and fevers; he must know
them later than God, but earlier than the people. The _theoi_ or
gods see the future; common men, the present; sages, that which is
about to take place. My peculiar abstemious mode of living
produces such an acuteness of the senses, or creates some other
faculty, so that the greatest and most remarkable things may be
performed.(549)
Professor A. Wilder’s comment thereupon is remarkable:
This is what may be termed _spiritual photography_. The soul is
the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present,
are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond
our everyday world of limits, all is as one day or state—the past
and future comprised in the present. Probably this is the “great
day,” the “_last_ day,” the “day of the Lord,” of the Bible
writers—the day into which everyone passes by death or _ecstasis_.
Then the soul is freed from the constraint of the body, and its
nobler part is united to higher nature and becomes partaker in the
wisdom and foreknowledge of the higher beings.(550)
How far the system practised by the Neo‐Platonists was identical with that
of the old and the modern Vedântins may be inferred from what Dr. A.
Wilder says of the Alexandrian Theosophists.
The anterior idea of the New Platonists was that of a single
Supreme Essence.... All the old philosophies contained the
doctrine that θεοὶ, _theoi_, gods or disposers, angels, demons,
and other spiritual agencies, emanated from the Supreme Being.
Ammonius accepted the doctrine of the Books of Hermes, that from
the divine All proceeded the Divine Wisdom or Amun; that from
Wisdom proceeded the Demiurge or Creator; and from, the Creator,
the subordinate spiritual beings; the world and its peoples being
the last. The first is contained in the second, the first and
second in the third, and so on through the entire series.(551)
This is a perfect echo of the belief of the Vedântins, and it proceeds
directly from the secret teachings of the East. The same author says:
Akin to this is the doctrine of the Jewish Kabala which was taught
by the Pharsi or Pharisees, who probably borrowed it, as their
sectarian designation would seem to indicate, from the Magians of
Persia. It is substantially embodied in the following synopsis.
The Divine Being is the All, the source of all existence, the
Infinite; and He cannot be known. The Universe reveals Him, and
subsists by Him. At the beginning His effulgence went forth
everywhere.(552) Eventually He retired within Himself and so
formed around Him a vacant space. Into this He transmitted His
first Emanation, a Ray, containing in it the generative and
conceptive power, and hence the name IE, or Jah. This in its turn
produced the _tikkun_, the _pattern_ or idea of form; and in this
emanation, which also contained the male and female, or generative
and conceptive potencies, were the three primitive forces of
Light, Spirit and Life. This Tikkun is united to the Ray, or first
emanation, and pervaded by it: and by that union is also in
perpetual communication with the infinite source. It is the
pattern, the primitive man, the Adam Kadmon, the _macrocosm_ of
Pythagoras and other philosophers. From it proceeded the
_Sephiroth_.... From the Sephiroth in turn emanated the four
worlds, each proceeding out of the one immediately above it, and
the lower one enveloping its superior. These worlds became less
pure as they descended in the scale, the lowest of all being the
material world.(553)
This veiled enunciation of the Secret Teaching will be clear to our
readers by this time. These worlds are:
_Aziluth_ is peopled with the purest emanations [the First, almost
spiritual, Race of the human beings that were to inhabit] the
Fourth; the second, _Beriah_, by a lower order, the servants of
the former [the second Race]; the third, _Jesirah_, by the
cherubim and seraphim, the Elohim and B’ni Elohim [“Sons of Gods”
or _Elohim_, our Third Race]. The fourth world, _Asiah_, is
inhabited by the Klipputh, of whom Belial is chief [the Atlantean
Sorcerers].(554)
These worlds are all the earthly duplicates of their heavenly prototypes,
the mortal and temporary reflections and shadows of the more durable, if
not eternal, races dwelling in other, to us, invisible worlds. The souls
of the men of our Fifth Race derive their elements from these four
worlds—Root Races—that preceded ours: namely, our intellect, Manas, the
fifth principle, our passions and mental and corporeal appetites. A
conflict having arisen, called “war in heaven,” among our prototypical
worlds, war came to pass, æons later, between the Atlanteans(555) of
Asiah, and those of the third Root Race, the B’ni Elohim or the “Sons of
God,”(556) and then evil and wickedness were intensified. Mankind (in the
last sub‐race of the third Root Race) having
Sinned in their first parent [a physiological allegory, truly!]
from whose soul every human soul is an emanation,
says the _Zohar_, men were “exiled” into more material bodies to
Expiate that sin and become proficient in goodness.
To accomplish the cycle of necessity, rather, explains the doctrine; to
progress on their task of evolution, from which task none of us can be
freed, neither by death nor suicide, for each of us have to pass through
the “Valley of Thorns” before he emerges into the plains of divine light
and rest. And thus men will continue to be born in new bodies
Till they have become sufficiently pure to enter a higher form of
existence.
This means only that Mankind, from the First down to the last, or Seventh
Race, is composed of one and the same company of actors, who have
descended from higher spheres to perform their artistic tour on this our
planet, Earth. Starting as pure spirits on our downward journey around the
world (verily!) with the knowledge of truth—now feebly echoed in the
Occult Doctrines—inherent in us, cyclic law brings us down to the reversed
apex of matter, which is lost down here on earth and the bottom of which
we have already struck; and then, the same law of spiritual gravity will
make us slowly ascend to still higher, still purer spheres than those we
started from.
Foresight, prophecy, oracular powers! Illusive fancies of man’s dwarfed
perceptions, which see actual images in reflections and shadows, and
mistake past actualities for prophetic images of a future that has no room
in Eternity. Our macrocosm and its smallest microcosm, man, are both
repeating the same play of universal and individual events at each
station, as on every stage on which Karma leads them to enact their
respective dramas of life. False prophets could have no existence had
there been no true prophets. And so there were, and many of both classes,
and in all ages. Only, none of these ever saw anything but that which had
already come to pass, and had been before prototypically enacted in higher
spheres—if the event foretold related to national or public weal or woe—or
in some preceding life, if it concerned only an individual, for every such
event is stamped as an indelible record of the Past and Future, which are
only, after all, the ever Present in Eternity. The “worlds” and the
purifications spoken of in the _Zohar_ and other Kabalistic books, relate
to our globe and races no more and no less than they relate to other
globes and other races that have preceded our own in the great cycle. It
was such fundamental truths as these that were performed in allegorical
plays and images during the Mysteries, the last Act of which, the Epilogue
for the Mystæ, was the _anastasis_ or “continued existence,” as also the
“Soul transformation.”
Hence, the author of _Neo‐platonism and Alchemy_ shows us that all such
Eclectic doctrines were strongly reflected in the _Epistles_ of Paul, and
were
Inculcated more or less among the Churches. Hence, such passages
as these “Ye were dead in errors and sins; ye walked according to
the _æon_ of this world, according to the _archon_ that has the
domination of the air.” “We wrestle not against flesh and blood,
but against the dominations, against potencies, against the lords
of darkness, and against the mischievousness of spirits in the
empyrean regions.” But Paul was evidently hostile to the effort to
blend his gospel with the gnostic ideas of the Hebrew‐Egyptian
school, as seems to have been attempted at Ephesus; and
accordingly, wrote to Timothy, his favourite disciple, “Keep safe
the precious charge entrusted to thee; and reject the new
doctrines and the antagonistic principles of the gnosis, falsely
so‐called, of which some have made profession and gone astray from
the faith.”(557)
But as the Gnosis is the Science pertaining to our Higher Self, as blind
faith is a matter of temperament and emotionalism, and as Paul’s doctrine
was still newer and his interpretations far more thickly veiled, to keep
the inner truths hidden far away from the Gnostic, preference has been
given to the former by every earnest seeker after truth.
Besides this, the great Teachers who professed the so‐called “false
Gnosis” were very numerous in the days of the Apostles, and were as great
as any converted Rabbi could be. If Porphyry, the Jew Malek, went against
Theurgy on account of old traditional recollections, there were other
teachers who practised it. Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus were all
thaumaturgists, and the latter
Elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors
into a complete system. (558)
As to Ammonius,
Countenanced by Clemens and Athenagoras, in the Church, and by
learned men of the Synagogue, the Academy, and the Grove, he
fulfilled his labour by teaching a common doctrine for all.(559)
Thus it is not Judaism and Christianity that re‐modelled the ancient Pagan
Wisdom, but rather the latter that put its heathen curb, quietly and
insensibly, on the new faith; and this, moreover, was still further
influenced by the Eclectic Theosophical system, the direct emanation of
the Wisdom Religion. All that is grand and noble in Christian theology
comes from Neo‐Platonism. It is too well‐known to now need much repetition
that Ammonius Saccas, the God‐taught (_theodidaktos_) and the lover of the
truth (_philalethes_), in establishing his school, made a direct attempt
to benefit the world by teaching those portions of the Secret Science that
were permitted by its direct guardians to be revealed in those days.(560)
The modern movement of our own Theosophical Society was begun on the same
principles; for the Neo‐Platonic school of Ammonius aimed, as we do, at
the reconcilement of all sects and peoples, under the once common faith of
the Golden Age, trying to induce the nations to lay aside their
contentions—in religious matters at any rate—by proving to them that their
various beliefs are all the more or less legitimate children of one common
parent, the Wisdom Religion.
Nor was the Eclectic Theosophical system—as some writers inspired by Rome
would make the world believe—developed only during the third century of
our era; but it belongs to a much earlier age, as has been shown by
Diogenes Laertius. He traces it to the beginning of the dynasty of the
Ptolemies; to the great seer and prophet, the Egyptian Priest Pot‐Amun, of
the temple of the God of that name—for Amun is the God of Wisdom. Unto
that day the communication between the Adepts of Upper India and Bactria
and the Philosophers of the West had never ceased.
Under Philadelphus ... the Hellenic teachers became rivals of the
College of Rabbis of Babylon. The Buddhistic, Vedântic and Magian
systems were expounded along with the philosophies of Greece....
Aristobulus, the Jew, declared that the ethics of Aristotle were
derived from the law of Moses (!); and Philo, after him, attempted
to interpret the Pentateuch in accordance with the doctrines of
Pythagoras and the Academy. In Josephus it is said that, in the
Book of the Genesis, Moses wrote philosophically—that is, in the
figurative style; and the Essenes of Carmel were reproduced in the
Therapeutæ of Egypt, who, in turn, were declared by Eusebius to be
identical with the Christians, though they actually existed long
before the Christian era. Indeed, in its turn, Christianity also
was taught at Alexandria, and underwent an analogous
metamorphosis. Pantænus, Athenagoras and Clement were thoroughly
instructed in the Platonic philosophy, and comprehended its
essential unity with the oriental systems.(561)
Ammonius, though the son of Christian parents, was a _lover_ of the truth,
a true Philaletheian foremost of all. He set his heart upon the work of
reconciling the different systems into a harmonious whole, for he had
already perceived the tendency of Christianity to raise itself on the
hecatomb which it had constructed out of all other creeds and faiths. What
says history?
The ecclesiastical historian, Mosheim, declares that
Ammonius, conceiving that not only the philosophers of Greece, but
also all those of the different barbarous nations, were perfectly
in unison with each other with regard to every essential point,
made it his business so to temper and expound the tenets of all
these various sects, as to make it appear they had all of them
originated from one and the same source, and all tended to one and
the same end. Again, Mosheim says that Ammonius taught that the
religion of the multitude went hand in hand with philosophy, and
with her had shared the fate of being by degrees corrupted and
obscured with mere human conceits, superstition, and lies; that it
ought, therefore, to be brought back to its original purity by
purging it of this dross and expounding it upon philosophical
principles; and that the whole which Christ had in view was to
reinstate and restore to its primitive integrity the Wisdom of the
Ancients.(562)
Now what was that “Wisdom of the Ancients” that the Founder of
Christianity “had in view”? The system taught by Ammonius in his Eclectic
Theosophical School was made of the crumbs permitted to be gathered from
the antediluvian lore; those Neo‐Platonic teachings are described in the
_Edinburgh Encyclopædia_ as follows:
He [Ammonius] adopted the doctrines which were received in Egypt
concerning the Universe and the Deity, considered as constituting
one great whole; concerning the eternity of the world, the nature
of souls, the empire of Providence [Karma] and the government of
the world by demons [_daimons_ or spirits, archangels]. He also
established a system of moral discipline which allowed the people
in general to live according to the laws of their country and the
dictates of nature; but required the wise to exalt their minds by
contemplation, and to mortify the body,(563) so that they might be
capable of enjoying the presence and assistance of the demons
[including their own _daimon_ or Seventh Principle] ... and
ascending after death to the presence of the Supreme [Soul]
Parent. In order to reconcile the popular religions, and
particularly the Christian, with this new system, he made the
whole history of the heathen gods an allegory, maintaining that
they were only celestial ministers(564) entitled to an inferior
kind of worship; and he acknowledged that Jesus Christ was an
excellent man and the friend of God, but alleged that it was not
his design entirely to abolish the worship of demons,(565) and
that his only intention was to purify the ancient religion.
No more could be declared except for those Philaletheians who were
initiated, “persons duly instructed and disciplined” to whom Ammonius
communicated his more important doctrines,
Imposing on them the obligations of secrecy, as was done before
him by Zoroaster and Pythagoras, and in the Mysteries [where an
oath was required from the neophytes or catechumens not to divulge
what they had learned]. The great Pythagoras divided his teachings
into exoteric and esoteric.(566)
Has not Jesus done the same, since He declared to His disciples that to
them it was given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, whereas
to the multitudes it was not given, and therefore He spoke in parables
which had a two‐fold meaning?
Dr. A. Wilder proceeds:
Thus Ammonius found his work ready to his hand. His deep spiritual
intuition, his extensive learning, and his familiarity with the
Christian fathers, Pantænus, Clement and Athenagoras, and with the
most erudite philosophers of the time, all fitted him for the
labour he performed so thoroughly.... The results of his
ministration are perceptible at the present day in every country
of the Christian world; every prominent system of doctrine now
bearing the marks of his plastic hand. Every ancient philosophy
has had its votaries among the moderns; and even Judaism, oldest
of them all, has taken upon itself changes which were suggested by
the “God‐taught” Alexandrian.(567)
The Neo‐Platonic School of Alexandria founded by Ammonius—the prototype
proposed for the Theosophical Society—taught Theurgy and Magic, as much as
they were taught in the days of Pythagoras, and by others far earlier than
his period. For Proclus says that the doctrines of Orpheus, who was an
Indian and came from India, were the origin of the systems afterwards
promulgated.
What Orpheus delivered in hidden allegories, Pythagoras learned
when he was initiated into the Orphic Mysteries; and Plato next
received a perfect knowledge of them from Orphic and Pythagorean
writings.(568)
The Philaletheians had their division into neophytes (_chelas_) and
Initiates, or Masters; and the eclectic system was characterised by three
distinct features, which are purely Vedântic; a Supreme Essence, One and
Universal; the eternity and indivisibility of the human spirit; and
Theurgy, which is Mantricism. So also, as we have seen, they had their
secret or Esoteric teachings like any other mystic school. Nor were they
allowed to reveal anything of their secret tenets, any more than were the
Initiates of the Mysteries. Only the penalties incurred by the revealers
of the secrets of the latter were far more terrible, and this prohibition
has survived to this day, not only in India, but even among the Jewish
Kabalists in Asia.(569)
One of the reasons for such secrecy may be the undoubtedly serious
difficulties and hardships of chelaship, and the dangers attending
Initiation. The modern candidate has, like his predecessor of old, to
either conquer or die; when, which is still worse, he does not lose his
reason. There is no danger to him who is true and sincere, and,
especially, unselfish. For he is thus prepared beforehand to meet any
temptation.
He, who fully recognised the power of his immortal spirit, and
never doubted for one moment its omnipotent protection, had naught
to fear. But woe to the candidate in whom the slightest physical
fear—sickly child of matter—made him lose sight and faith in his
own invulnerability. He who was not wholly confident of his moral
fitness to accept the burden of these tremendous secrets was
doomed.(570)
There were no such dangers in Neo‐Platonic Initiations. The selfish and
the unworthy failed in their object, and in the failure was the
punishment. The chief aim was “reunion of the part with the _all_.” This
All was One, with numberless names. Whether called _Dui_, the “bright Lord
of Heaven” by the Âryan; _Iao_, by the Chaldæan and Kabalist; _Iabe_ by
the Samaritan; the _Tiu_ or _Tuisco_ by the Northman; _Duw_ by the Briton;
_Zeus_, by the Thracian or _Jupiter_ by the Roman—it was _the_ Being, the
_Facit_, One and Supreme,(571) the unborn and the inexhaustible source of
every emanation, the fountain of life and light eternal, a Ray of which
every one of us carries in him on this earth. The knowledge of this
Mystery had reached the Neo‐Platonists from India through Pythagoras, and
still later through Apollonius of Tyana and the rules and methods for
producing ecstasy had come from the same lore of the divine Vidyâ, the
Gnosis. For Âryavarta, the bright focus into which had been poured in the
beginning of time the flames of Divine Wisdom, had become the centre from
which radiated the “tongues of fire” into every portion of the globe. What
was Samâdhi but that
Sublime ecstasy, in which state things divine and the mysteries of
Nature are revealed to us,
of which Porphyry speaks?
The efflux from the divine soul is imparted to the human spirit in
unreserved abundance, accomplishing for the soul a union with the
divine, and enabling it while in the body to be partaker of the
life which is not in the body,
he explains elsewhere.
Thus under the title of Magic was taught every Science, physical and
metaphysical, natural or deemed supernatural by those who are ignorant of
the omnipresence and universality of Nature.
Divine Magic makes of man a God; human magic creates a new fiend.
We wrote in _Isis Unveiled_:
In the oldest documents now in the possession of the World—the
_Vedas_ and the older laws of Manu—we find many magical rites
practised and permitted by the Brâhmans.(572) Tibet, Japan, and
China, teach in the present age that which was taught by the
oldest Chaldæans. The clergy of these respective countries prove
moreover what they teach—namely, that the practice of moral and
physical purity, and of certain austerities, developes the vital
soul‐power of self‐illumination. Affording to man the control over
his own immortal spirit, it gives him truly magical powers over
the elementary spirits inferior to himself. In the West we find
magic of as high an antiquity as in the East. The Druids of Great
Britain practised it in the silent crypts of their deep caves; and
Pliny devotes many a chapter to the “wisdom”(573) of the leaders
of the Celts. The Semothees—the Druids of the Gauls—expounded the
physical as well as the spiritual sciences. They taught the
secrets of the universe, the harmonious progress of the heavenly
bodies, the formation of the earth, and above all—the immortality
of the Soul.(574) In their sacred groves—natural academies built
by the hand of the Invisible Architect—the initiates assembled at
the still hour of midnight, to learn about what man once was, and
what he will be.(575) They needed no artificial illumination, nor
life‐drawing gas, to light up their temples, for the chaste
goddess of night beamed her most silvery rays on their oak‐crowned
heads; and their white‐robed sacred bards knew how to converse
with the solitary queen of the starry vault.(576)
During the palmy days of Neo‐Platonism these Bards were no more, for their
cycle had run its course, and the last of the Druids had perished at
Bibractis and Alesia. But the Neo‐Platonic school was for a long time
successful, powerful and prosperous. Still, while adopting Âryan Wisdom in
its doctrines, the school failed to follow the wisdom of the Brâhmans in
practice. It showed its moral and intellectual superiority too openly,
caring too much for the great and powerful of this earth. While the
Brâhmans and their great Yogîs—experts in matters of philosophy,
metaphysics, astronomy, morals and religion—preserved their dignity under
the sway of the most powerful princes, remained aloof from the world and
would not condescend to visit them or ask for the slightest favour,(577)
the Emperors Alexander, Severus, and Julian, and the greatest among the
aristocracy of the land, embraced the tenets of the Neo‐Platonists, who
mixed freely with the world. The system flourished for several centuries
and comprised within the ranks of its followers the ablest and most
learned among the men of the time; Hypatia, the teacher of the Bishop
Synesius, was one of the ornaments of the School until the fatal and
shameful day when she was murdered by the Christian mob at the instigation
of Bishop Cyril of Alexandria. The school was finally removed to Athens,
and closed by order of the Emperor Justinian.
How accurate is Dr. Wilder’s remark that
Modern writers have commented upon the peculiar views of the Neo‐
Platonists upon these [metaphysical] subjects, seldom representing
them correctly, even if this was desired or intended.(578)
The few speculations on the sublunary, material, and spiritual universes
that they did put into writing—Ammonius never having himself written a
line, after the wont of reformers—could not enable posterity to judge them
rightly, even had not the early Christian Vandals, the later crusaders,
and the fanatics of the Middle Ages, destroyed three parts of that which
remained of the Alexandrian Library and its later schools.
Professor Draper shows that Cardinal Ximenes alone
Delivered to the flames in the squares of Granada eighty thousand
Arabic manuscripts, many of them translations of classical
authors.
In the Vatican Library, whole passages in the most rare and precious
treatises of the Ancients were found erased and blotted out, “for the sake
of interlining them with absurd psalmodies!” Moreover it is well known
that over thirty‐six volumes written by Porphyry were burnt and otherwise
destroyed by the “Fathers.” Most of the little that is known of the
doctrines of the Eclectics is found in the writings of Plotinus and of
those same Church Fathers.
Says the author of _Neo‐Platonism_:
What Plato was to Socrates, and the Apostle John to the head of
the Christian faith, Plotinus became to the God‐taught Ammonius.
To Plotinus, Origenes, and Longinus we are indebted for what is
known of the Philaletheian system. They were duly instructed,
initiated and entrusted with the interior doctrines.(579)
This accounts marvellously for Origen’s calling people “idiots” who
believe in the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve fables; as also for the
fact that so few of the writings of that Church Father have passed to
posterity. Between the secrecy imposed, the vows of silence and that which
was maliciously destroyed by every foul means, it is indeed miraculous
that even so much of the Philaletheian tenets has reached the world.