It is the spiritual evolution of the _inner_, immortal Man that forms the
fundamental tenet of the Occult Sciences. To realize even distantly such a
process, the student has to believe (_a_) in the One Universal Life,
independent of Matter (or what Science regards as Matter); and (_b_) in
the individual Intelligences that animate the various manifestations of
this Principle. Mr. Huxley does not believe in Vital Force; others
Scientists do. Dr. J. H. Hutchinson Stirling’s work _As regards
Protoplasm_ has made no small havoc of this dogmatic negation. Professor
Beale’s decision also is in favour of a Vital Principle; and Dr. B. W.
Richardson’s lectures on Nervous Ether have been sufficiently quoted.
Thus, opinions are divided.
The One Life is closely related to the One Law which governs the World of
Being—KARMA. Exoterically, this is simply and literally “action,” or
rather an “effect‐producing cause.” Esoterically, it is quite a different
thing in its far‐reaching moral effects. It is the unerring LAW OF
RETRIBUTION. To say to those ignorant of the real significance,
characteristics, and awful importance of this eternal immutable Law, that
no theological definition of a Personal Deity can give an idea of this
impersonal, yet ever present and active Principle, is to speak in vain.
Nor can it be called Providence. For Providence, with the Theists—the
Protestant Christians, at any rate—rejoices in a personal male gender,
while with the Roman Catholics it is a female potency. “Divine Providence
tempers His blessings to secure their better effects,” Wogan tells us.
Indeed “He” tempers them, which Karma—a sexless principle—does not.
Throughout the first two Parts, it has been shown that, at the first
flutter of renascent life, Svabhâvat, “_the Mutable Radiance of the
Immutable Darkness unconscious in Eternity_,” passes, at every new rebirth
of Kosmos, from an inactive state into one of intense activity; that it
differentiates, and then begins its work through that differentiation.
This work is KARMA.
The Cycles are also subservient to the effects produced by this activity.
_The one Cosmic Atom becomes seven Atoms on the plane of Matter, and each
is transformed into a centre of energy; that same Atom becomes seven Rays
on the plane of Spirit; and the seven creative Forces of Nature, radiating
from the Root‐Essence ... follow, one the right, the other the left path,
separate till the end of the Kalpa, and yet in close embrace. What unites
them? Karma._
The Atoms emanated from the Central Point emanate in their turn new
centres of energy, which, under the potential breath of Fohat, begin their
work from within without, and multiply other minor centres. These, in the
course of evolution and involution, form in their turn the roots or
developing causes of new effects, from worlds and “man‐bearing” globes,
down to the genera, species, and classes of all the seven kingdoms, of
which we know only _four_. For as says the _Book of the Aphorisms of Tson‐
ka‐pa_:
The blessed workers have received the Thyan‐kam, in the eternity.
Thyan‐kam is the power or knowledge of guiding the impulses of Cosmic
Energy in the right direction.
The true Buddhist, recognizing no “personal God,” nor any “Father” and
“Creator of Heaven and Earth,” still believes in an _Absolute
Consciousness_, Adi‐Buddhi; and the Buddhist Philosopher _knows_ that
there are Planetary Spirits, the Dhyân Chohans. But though he admits of
“Spiritual Lives,” yet, as they are temporary in eternity, even they,
according to his Philosophy, are “the Mâyâ of the Day,” the Illusion of a
“Day of Brahmâ,” a short Manvantara of 4,320,000,000 years. The Yin‐Sin is
not for the speculations of men, for the Lord Buddha has strongly
prohibited all such enquiry. If the Dhyân Chohans and all the Invisible
Beings—the Seven Centres and their direct Emanations, the minor centres of
Energy—are the direct reflex of the One Light, yet men are far removed
from these, since the whole of the visible Kosmos consists of “_self‐
produced_ beings, the creatures of Karma.” Thus regarding a personal God
“as only a gigantic shadow thrown upon the void of space by the
imagination of ignorant men,”(1096) they teach that only “two things are
[objectively] eternal, namely Âkâsha and Nirvâna”; and that these are
_one_ in reality, and but a Mâyâ when divided.
Everything has come out of Âkâsha [or Svabhâvat on our earth] in
obedience to a law of motion inherent in it, and after a certain
existence passes away. No thing ever came out of nothing. We do
not believe in miracles; hence we deny creation and cannot
conceive of a creator.(1097)
If a Vedântic Brahman of the Advaita Sect, were asked whether he believed
in the existence of God, he would probably answer, as Jacolliot was
answered—“I am myself ‘God’;” while a Buddhist (a Sinhalese especially)
would simply laugh, and say in reply, “There is no God; no Creation.” Yet
the root Philosophy of both Advaita and Buddhist scholars is _identical_,
and both have the same respect for animal life, for both believe that
every creature on Earth, however small and humble, “is an immortal portion
of the immortal Matter”—Matter having with them quite another significance
from that which it has with either Christian or Materialist—and that every
creature is subject to Karma.
The answer of the Brâhman would have suggested itself to every ancient
Philosopher, Kabalist, and Gnostic of the early days. It contains the very
spirit of the Delphic and Kabalistic commandments, for Esoteric Philosophy
solved, ages ago, the problem of what man _was_, _is_, and _will be_; his
origin, life‐cycle—interminable in its duration of successive incarnations
or rebirths—and his final absorption into the Source from which he
started.
But it is not Physical Science that we can ever ask to read man for us, as
the riddle of the Past, or of the Future; since no Philosopher can tell us
even what man is, as known to both Physiology and Psychology. In doubt
whether man was a God or a beast, Science has now connected him with the
latter and derives him from an animal. Certainly the task of analyzing and
classifying the human being as a _terrestrial animal_ may be left to
Science, which Occultists, of all men, regard with veneration and respect.
They recognize its ground and the wonderful work it has done, the progress
achieved in Physiology, and even—to a degree—in Biology. But man’s
_inner_, spiritual, psychic, or even moral, nature cannot be left to the
tender mercies of an ingrained Materialism; for not even the higher
psychological Philosophy of the West is able, in its present
incompleteness and tendency towards a decided Agnosticism, to do justice
to the inner man; especially to his higher capacities and perceptions, and
to those states of consciousness, across the road to which such
authorities as Mill draw a strong line, saying “So far, and no farther
shalt thou go.”
No Occultist would deny that man—together with the elephant and the
microbe, the crocodile and the lizard, the blade of grass and the
crystal—is, in his physical formation, the simple product of the
evolutionary forces of Nature through a numberless series of
transformations; but he puts the case differently.
It is not against zoölogical and anthropological discoveries, based on the
fossils of man and animal, that every Mystic and believer in a Divine Soul
inwardly revolts, but only against the uncalled‐for conclusions built on
preconceived theories and made to fit in with certain prejudices. The
premisses of Scientists may or may not be always true; and as some of
these theories live but a short life, the deductions therefrom must ever
be one‐sided with materialistic Evolutionists. Yet it is on the strength
of such very ephemeral authority, that most of the men of Science
frequently receive honours where they deserve them the least.(1098)
To make the working of Karma—in the periodical renovations of the
Universe—more evident and intelligible to the student when he arrives at
the origin and evolution of man, he has now to examine with us the
Esoteric bearing of the Karmic Cycles upon Universal Ethics. The question
is, do those mysterious divisions of time, called Yugas and Kalpas by the
Hindûs, and so very graphically, κύκλοι, cycles, rings or circles, by the
Greeks, have any bearing upon, or any direct connection with, human life?
Even exoteric Philosophy explains that these perpetual circles of time are
ever returning on themselves, periodically and intelligently, in Space and
Eternity. There are “Cycles of Matter,”(1099) and there are “Cycles of
Spiritual Evolution,” and racial, national, and individual Cycles. May not
Esoteric speculation allow us a still deeper insight into their workings?
This idea is beautifully expressed in a very clever scientific work.
The possibility of rising to a comprehension of a system of
coördination so far outreaching in time and space all range of
human observations, is a circumstance which signalizes the power
of man to transcend the limitations of changing and inconsistent
matter, and assert his superiority over all insentient and
perishable forms of being. There is a method in the succession of
events, and in the relation of coëxistent things, which the mind
of man seizes hold of; and by means of this as a clue, he runs
back or forward over æons of material history of which human
experience can never testify. Events germinate and unfold. They
have a past which is connected with their present, and we feel a
well‐justified confidence that a future is appointed which will be
similarly connected with the present and the past. This continuity
and unity of history repeat themselves before our eyes in all
conceivable stages of progress. The phenomena furnish us the
grounds for the generalization of two laws which are truly
_principles of scientific divination_, by which alone the human
mind penetrates the sealed records of the past and the unopened
pages of the future. The first of these is the law of evolution,
or, to phrase it for our purpose, _the law of correlated
successiveness or organized history in the individual_,
illustrated in the changing phases of every single maturing system
of results.... These thoughts summon into our immediate presence
the measureless past and the measureless future of material
history. They seem almost to open vistas through infinity, and to
endow the human intellect with an existence and a vision exempt
from the limitations of time and space and finite causation, and
lift it up towards a sublime apprehension of the Supreme
Intelligence whose dwelling place is eternity.(1100)
According to the teachings, Mâyâ—the illusive appearance of the
marshalling of events and actions on this Earth—changes, varying with
nations and places. But the chief features of one’s life are always in
accordance with the “Constellation” under which one is born, or, we should
say, with the characteristics of its animating principle or the Deity that
presides over it, whether we call it a Dhyân Chohan, as in Asia, or an
Archangel, as with the Greek and Latin Churches. In ancient Symbolism it
was always the Sun—though the Spiritual, not the visible, Sun was
meant—that was supposed to send forth the chief Saviours and Avatâras.
Hence the connecting link between the Buddhas, the Avatâras, and so many
other incarnations of the highest Seven. The closer the approach to one’s
Prototype, in “Heaven,” the better for the mortal whose Personality was
chosen, by his own _personal_ Deity (the Seventh Principle), as its
terrestrial abode. For, with every effort of will toward purification and
unity with that “Self‐God,” one of the lower Rays breaks, and the
spiritual entity of man is drawn higher and ever higher to the Ray that
supersedes the first, until, from Ray to Ray, the Inner Man is drawn into
the one and highest Beam of the Parent‐Sun. Thus, “the events of humanity
_do_ run coördinately with the number forms,” since the single units of
that humanity proceed one and all from the same source—the Central Sun and
its _shadow_, the visible. For the equinoxes and solstices, the periods
and various phases of the solar course, astronomically and numerically
expressed, are only the concrete symbols of the eternally living verity,
though they do seem _abstract ideas_ to uninitiated mortals. And this
explains the extraordinary numerical coincidences with geometrical
relations, shown by several authors.
Yes; “our destiny _is_ written in the stars”! Only, the closer the union
between the mortal reflection Man and his celestial Prototype, the less
dangerous the external conditions and subsequent reïncarnations—which
neither Buddhas nor Christs can escape. This is not superstition, least of
all is it _fatalism_. The latter implies a blind course of some still
blinder power, but man is a free agent during his stay on earth. He cannot
escape his _ruling_ Destiny, but he has the choice of two paths that lead
him in that direction, and he can reach the goal of misery—if such is
decreed to him—either in the snowy white robes of the martyr, or in the
soiled garments of a volunteer in the iniquitous course; for there are
_external_ and _internal conditions_ which affect the determination of our
will upon our actions, and it is in our power to follow either of the two.
Those who believe in Karma have to believe in Destiny, which, from birth
to death, every man weaves thread by thread round himself, as a spider his
web; and this Destiny is guided either by the heavenly voice of the
invisible Prototype outside of us, or by our more intimate _astral_, or
inner man, who is but too often the evil genius of the embodied entity
called man. Both these lead on the outward man, but one of them must
prevail; and from the very beginning of the invisible affray the stern and
implacable _Law of Compensation_ steps in and takes its course, faithfully
following the fluctuations of the fight. When the last strand is woven,
and man is seemingly enwrapped in the network of his own doing, then he
finds himself completely under the empire of this _self‐made_ Destiny. It
then either fixes him like the inert shell against the immovable rock, or
carries him away like a feather in a whirlwind raised by his own actions,
and this is—KARMA.
A Materialist, treating of the periodical creations of our globe, has
expressed it in a single sentence:
The whole _past_ of the earth is nothing but an unfolded
_present_.
The writer was Büchner, who little suspected that he was repeating an
axiom of the Occultists. It is quite true also, as Burmeister remarks,
that:
The historical investigation of the development of the earth has
proved that _now_ and _then_ rest upon the same base; that the
past has been developed in the same manner as the present rolls
on; and that the forces which were in action ever remained the
same.(1101)
The Forces—their Noumena rather—are the same, of course; therefore, the
phenomenal Forces must be the same also. But how can any one feel so sure
that the attributes of Matter have not altered under the hand of Protean
Evolution? How can any Materialist assert with such confidence, as is done
by Rossmassler, that:
This eternal conformity in the essence of phenomena renders it
certain that fire and water possessed at all times the same powers
and ever will possess them.
Who are they “that darken counsel with words without knowledge,” and where
were the Huxleys and Büchners when the foundations of the Earth were laid
by the Great Law? This same homogeneity of Matter and immutability of
natural laws, which are so much insisted upon by Materialism, are a
fundamental principle of the Occult Philosophy; but this unity rests upon
the inseparability of Spirit from Matter, and, if the two were once
divorced, the whole Kosmos would fall back into Chaos and Non‐being.
Therefore, it is absolutely _false_, and but an additional demonstration
of the great conceit of our age, to assert, as men of Science do, that all
the great geological changes and terrible convulsions of the past have
been produced _by ordinary and known physical Forces_. For these Forces
were but the tools and final means for the accomplishment of certain
purposes, acting periodically, and apparently mechanically, through an
inward impulse mixed up with, but beyond their material nature. There is a
purpose in every important act of Nature, whose acts are all cyclic and
periodical. But spiritual Forces having been usually confused with the
purely physical, the former are denied by, and therefore, because left
unexamined, have to remain unknown to Science.(1102) Says Hegel:
The history of the World begins with its general aim, the
realization of the Idea of Spirit—only in an _implicit_ form (_an
sich_), that is, as Nature; a hidden, most profoundly hidden
unconscious instinct, and the whole process of History ... is
directed to rendering this unconscious impulse a conscious one.
Thus appearing in the form of merely natural existence, natural
will—that which has been called the subjective side—physical
craving, instinct, passion, private interest, as also opinion and
subjective conception—spontaneously present themselves at the very
commencement. This vast congeries of volitions, interests and
activities constitute the instruments and means of the World‐
Spirit for attaining its object; bringing it to consciousness and
realizing it. And this aim is none other than finding
itself—coming to itself—and contemplating itself in concrete
actuality. But that those manifestations of vitality on the part
of individuals and peoples, in which they seek and satisfy their
own purposes, are at the same time the means and instruments of a
higher and broader purpose of which they know nothing—which they
realize unconsciously—might be made a matter of question; rather
has been questioned ... on this point I announced my view at the
very outset, and asserted our hypothesis ... and our belief that
Reason governs the World and has consequently governed its
history. In relation to this independently universal and
substantial existence—all else is subordinate, subservient to it,
and the means for its development.(1103)
No Metaphysician or Theosophist could demur to these truths, which are all
embodied in Esoteric Teachings. There _is_ a predestination in the
geological life of our globe, as in the history, past and future, of races
and nations. This is closely connected with what we call Karma, and what
Western Pantheists called Nemesis and Cycles. The law of evolution is now
carrying us along the ascending arc of _our_ cycle, when the effects will
be once more re‐merged into, and re‐become the now neutralized causes, and
all things affected by the former will have regained their original
harmony. This will be the cycle of our special Round, a moment in the
duration of the Great Cycle, or Mahâyuga.
The fine philosophical remarks of Hegel are found to have their
application in the teachings of Occult Science, which shows Nature ever
acting with a given purpose, whose results are always dual. This was
stated in our first Occult volumes, in the following words:
As our Planet revolves once every year around the Sun, and at the
same time turns once in every twenty‐four hours upon its own axis,
thus traversing minor circles within a larger one, so is the work
of the smaller cyclic periods accomplished and recommenced within
the Great Saros. The revolution of the physical world, according
to the ancient doctrine, is attended by a like revolution in the
world of intellect—the spiritual evolution of the world proceeding
in cycles, like the physical one. Thus we see in history a regular
alternation of ebb and flow in the tide of human progress. The
great kingdoms and empires of the world, after reaching the
culmination of their greatness, descend again, in accordance with
the same law by which they ascended; till, having reached the
lowest point, humanity reässerts itself and mounts up once more,
the height of its attainment being, by this law of ascending
progression by cycles, somewhat higher than the point from which
it had before descended.(1104)
But these cycles—wheels within wheels, so comprehensively and ingeniously
symbolized by the various Manus and Rishis in India, and by the Kabiri in
the West(1105)—_do not affect all mankind at one and the same time_.
Hence, as we see, the difficulty of comprehending, and of discriminating
between them, with regard to their physical and spiritual effects, without
having thoroughly mastered their relations with, and action upon, the
respective positions of nations and races, in their destiny and evolution.
This system cannot be comprehended if the spiritual action of these
periods—_preördained_, so to say, by Karmic law—is separated from their
physical course. The calculations of the best Astrologers would fail, or
at any rate remain imperfect, unless this dual action is thoroughly taken
into consideration and mastered upon these lines. And this mastery can be
achieved only through INITIATION.
The Grand Cycle includes the progress of mankind from the appearance of
primordial man of ethereal form. It runs through the inner Cycles of man’s
progressive evolution from the ethereal down to the semi‐ethereal and
purely physical; down to the redemption of man from his “coat of skin” and
matter, after which it continues running its course downward and then
upward again, to meet at the culmination of a Round, when the Manvantaric
Serpent “swallows its tail” and seven Minor Cycles are passed. These are
the great Racial Cycles which affect equally all the nations and tribes
included in that special Race; but there are minor and national, as well
as tribal, Cycles within these, which run their course independently of
each other. They are called in Eastern Esotericism the Karmic Cycles. In
the West—since Pagan Wisdom has been repudiated as having grown from and
been developed by the Dark Powers, supposed to be at constant war with and
in opposition to the little tribal Jehovah—the full and awful significance
of the Greek Nemesis, or Karma, has been entirely forgotten. Otherwise
Christians would have better realized the profound truth that Nemesis is
without attributes; that while the dreaded Goddess is absolute and
immutable as a Principle, it is we ourselves—nations and individuals—who
propel it to action and give the impulse to its direction. Karma‐Nemesis
is the creator of nations and mortals, but once created, it is they who
make of her either a Fury or a rewarding Angel. Yea—
Wise are they who worship Nemesis(1106)
—as the Chorus tells Prometheus. And as unwise they, who believe that the
Goddess may be propitiated by any sacrifices and prayers, or have her
wheel diverted from the path it has once taken. “The triform Fates and
ever mindful Furies” are her attributes only on Earth, and begotten by
ourselves. There is no return from the paths she cycles over; yet those
paths are of our own making, for it is we, collectively or individually,
who prepare them. Karma‐Nemesis is the synonym of Providence, _minus_
design, goodness, and every other _finite_ attribute and qualification, so
unphilosophically attributed to the latter. An Occultist or a Philosopher
will not speak of the goodness or cruelty of Providence; but, identifying
it with Karma‐Nemesis, he will nevertheless teach that it guards the good
and watches over them in this, as in future lives; and that it punishes
the evil‐doer—aye, even to his seventh rebirth—so long, indeed, as the
effect of his having thrown into perturbation even the smallest atom in
the Infinite World of Harmony has not been finally reädjusted. For the
only decree of Karma—an eternal and immutable decree—is absolute Harmony
in the world of Matter as it is in the world of Spirit. It is not,
therefore, Karma that rewards or punishes, but it is we who reward or
punish ourselves, according as we work with, through and along with
Nature, abiding by the laws on which that harmony depends, or—breaking
them.
Nor would the ways of Karma be inscrutable were men to work in union and
harmony, instead of disunion and strife. For our ignorance of these
ways—which one portion of mankind calls the ways of Providence, dark and
intricate, while another sees in them the action of blind Fatalism, and a
third, simple Chance, with neither Gods nor Devils to guide them—would
surely disappear, if we would but attribute all of them to their correct
cause. With right knowledge, or at any rate with a confident conviction
that our neighbours would no more work to hurt us than we would think of
harming them, two‐thirds of the world’s evil would vanish into thin air.
Were no man to hurt his brother, Karma‐Nemesis would have neither cause to
work for, nor weapons to act through. It is the constant presence in our
midst of every element of strife and opposition, and the division of
races, nations, tribes, societies and individuals into Cains and Abels,
wolves and lambs, that is the chief cause of the “ways of Providence.” We
cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands,
while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal high road of
respectability and duty, and then we complain because these windings are
so intricate and so dark. We stand bewildered before the mystery of our
own making, and the riddles of life that _we will not_ solve, and then
accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us. But verily there is not an
accident in our lives, not a misshapen day, or a misfortune, that could
not be traced back to our own doings in this or in another life. If one
breaks the laws of Harmony, or, as a theosophical writer expresses it, the
“laws of life,” one must be prepared to fall into the chaos oneself has
produced. For, according to the same writer:
The only conclusion one can come to is that these laws of life are
their own avengers; and consequently that every avenging angel is
only a typified representation of their reäction.
Therefore, if any one is helpless before these immutable laws, it is not
ourselves, the artificers of our destinies, but rather those Angels, the
guardians of Harmony. Karma‐Nemesis is no more than the spiritual
dynamical effect of causes produced, and forces awakened into activity, by
our own actions. It is a law of Occult dynamics that “a given amount of
energy expended on the spiritual or astral plane is productive of far
greater results than the same amount expended on the physical objective
plane of existence.”
This condition of things will last till man’s spiritual intuitions are
fully opened, and this will not be until we fairly cast off our thick
coats of Matter; until we begin acting from _within_, instead of ever
following impulses from _without_, impulses produced by our physical
senses and gross selfish body. Until then the only palliatives for the
evils of life are union and harmony—a Brotherhood _in actu_, and Altruism
not simply in name. The suppression of one single bad _cause_ will
suppress not one, but many bad effects. And if a Brotherhood, or even a
number of Brotherhoods, may not be able to prevent nations from
occasionally cutting each other’s throats, still unity in thought and
action, and philosophical research into the mysteries of being, will
always prevent some persons, who are trying to comprehend that which has
hitherto remained to them a riddle, from creating additional causes of
mischief in a world already so full of woe and evil. Knowledge of Karma
gives the conviction that if
... virtue in distress, and vice in triumph
Make atheists of mankind,(1107)
it is only because mankind has ever shut its eyes to the great truth that
man is himself his own saviour and his own destroyer. He need not accuse
Heaven and the Gods, Fates and Providence, of the apparent injustice that
reigns in the midst of humanity. But let him rather remember and repeat
this fragment of Grecian wisdom, which warns man to forbear accusing
_That_ which
Just, though mysterious, leads us on unerring
Through ways unmark’d from guilt to punishment;
and such are now the ways on which the great European nations move onward.
Every nation and tribe of the Western Âryans, like their Eastern brethren
of the Fifth Race, has had its Golden and its Iron Age, its period of
comparative irresponsibility, or its Satya Age of purity, and now, several
of them have reached their Iron Age, the Kali Yuga, an age black with
horrors.
On the other hand, it is true that the exoteric Cycles of every nation
have been rightly derived from, and shown to depend on, sidereal motions.
The latter are inseparably blended with the destinies of nations and men.
But, in the purely physical sense, Europe knows of no Cycles other than
the astronomical, and it makes its computations accordingly. Nor will it
hear of any other than _imaginary_ circles or circuits in the starry
heavens that gird them,
With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er
Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.
But with the Pagans—of whom Coleridge rightly says, “Time, cyclical time,
was their abstraction of the Deity,” that “Deity” manifesting coördinately
with, and only through, Karma, and being that Karma‐Nemesis itself—the
Cycles meant something more than a mere succession of events, or a
periodical space of time of more or less prolonged duration. For they were
generally marked with recurrences of a more varied and intellectual
character than are exhibited in the periodical return of seasons or of
certain constellations. Modern wisdom is satisfied with astronomical
computations and prophecies, based on unerring mathematical laws. Ancient
Wisdom added to the cold shell of Astronomy the vivifying elements of its
soul and spirit—Astrology. And, as the sidereal motions _do_ regulate and
determine other events on Earth besides potatoes and the periodical
diseases of that useful vegetable—a statement which, not being amenable to
scientific explanation, is merely derided, while none the less
accepted—these events have to submit to predetermination, by simple
astronomical computations. Believers in Astrology will understand our
meaning, sceptics will laugh at the belief and mock the idea. Thus they
shut their eyes, ostrich‐like, to their own fate.(1108)
This because their little _historical_ period, so called, allows them no
margin for comparison. Sidereal heaven is before them; and though their
spiritual vision is still unopened, and the atmospheric dust of
terrestrial origin seals their sight and chains it within the limits of
physical systems, still they do not fail to perceive the movements and
note the behaviour of meteors and comets. They record the periodical
advents of those wanderers and “flaming messengers,” and prophesy, in
consequence, earthquakes, meteoric showers, the apparition of certain
stars, comets, etc. Are they, then, soothsayers after all? No; they are
learned Astronomers.
Why, then, should Occultists and Astrologers, as learned as these
Astronomers, be disbelieved when they prophesy the return of some cyclic
event on the same mathematical principles? Why should the claim that they
_know_ this return be ridiculed? Their forefathers and predecessors,
having recorded the recurrence of such events in their time and day,
throughout a period embracing hundreds of thousands of years, the
conjunction of the same constellations must necessarily produce, if not
quite the same, at any rate similar, effects. Are the prophecies to be
derided, because of the claim made for hundreds of thousands of years of
observation, and for millions of years for the human Races? In its turn,
Modern Science is laughed at by those who hold to Biblical chronology, for
its far more modest geological and anthropological figures. Thus Karma
adjusts even human laughter, at the mutual expense of sects, learned
societies, and individuals. Yet in the prognostication of _such_ future
events, at any rate, all foretold on the authority of cyclic recurrences,
no psychic phenomenon is involved. It is neither _prevision_, nor
_prophecy_; any more than is the signalling of a comet or star, several
years before its appearance. It is simply knowledge, and mathematically
correct computations, which enable the _Wise Men of the East_ to foretell,
for instance, that England is on the eve of such or another catastrophe;
that France is nearing such a point of her Cycle; and that Europe in
general is threatened with, or rather is on the eve of, a cataclysm, to
which her own Cycle of racial Karma _has led her_. Our view of the
reliability of the information depends, of course, on our acceptation or
rejection of the claim for a tremendous period of historical observation.
Eastern Initiates maintain that they have preserved records of racial
development and of events of universal import ever since the beginning of
the Fourth Race—their knowledge of events preceding that epoch being
traditional. Moreover, those who believe in Seership and in Occult Powers
will have no difficulty in crediting the general character, at least, of
the information given, even if it be traditional, once the tradition is
checked and corrected by clairvoyance and Esoteric Knowledge. But in the
present case no such metaphysical belief is claimed as our chief
dependence, for proof is given—on what, to every Occultist, is quite
scientific evidence—the records preserved through the Zodiac for
incalculable ages.
It is now amply proved that even horoscopes and judiciary Astrology are
not quite based on fiction, and that Stars and Constellations,
consequently, have an occult and mysterious influence on, and connection
with, individuals. And if with the latter, why not with nations, races,
and mankind as a whole? This, again, is a claim made on the authority of
the Zodiacal records. We shall then enquire how far the Zodiac was known
to the Ancients, and how far it is forgotten by the Moderns.