Writings
of H P Blavatsky
Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24 -1DL
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831 – 1891)
The Founder of Modern Theosophy
By
H
P Blavatsky
O ye Lords of Truth who are
cycling in eternity . . . save me from the annihilation in this Region of the Two
Truths. Egyptian Ritual of the Dead
THAT the world moves in
cycles, and events repeat themselves therein, is an old, yet ever new truism.
It is new to most, firstly, because it belongs to a distinct group of occult
aphorisms in partibus infidelium, and our present-day Rabbis and Pharisees will
accept nothing coming from that Nazareth; secondly, because those who will
swallow a camel of whatever size, provided it hails from orthodox or accepted
authorities, will strain and kick at the smallest gnat, if only its buzz comes
from theosophical regions. Yet this proposition about the world cycles and
ever-recurring events, is a very correct one. It is one, moreover, that people
could easily verify for themselves. Of course, the people meant here are men who
do their own thinking; not those others who are satisfied to remain, from birth
till death, pinned, like a thistle fastened to the coat-tail of a country
parson, to the beliefs and thoughts of the goody-goody majority.
We cannot agree with a writer
(was it Gilpin?) who said that the grandest truths are often rejected, not so
much for want of direct evidence, as for want of inclination to search for it.
This applies but to a few. Nine-tenths of the people will reject the most
overwhelming evidence, even if it be brought to them without any trouble to
themselves, only because it happens to clash with their personal interests or
prejudices; especially if it comes from unpopular quarters. We are living in a
highly moral atmosphere, high sounding in words. Put to the test of practice,
however, the morality of this age in point of genuineness and reality is of the
nature of the black skin of the negro minstrel: assumed for show and pay, and
washed off at the close of every performance. In sober truth, our opponents
advocates of official science, defenders of orthodox religion, and the tutti
quanti of the detractors of Theosophy who claim to oppose our works on grounds
of scientific evidence, public good and truth, strongly resemble advocates in
our courts of law miscalled of justice. These in their defence of robbers and
murderers, forgers and adulterers, deem it to be their duty to browbeat,
confuse and bespatter all who bear witness against their clients, and will
ignore, or if possible, suppress, all evidence which goes to incriminate them.
Let ancient Wisdom step into the witness-box herself, and prove that the goods
found in the possession of the prisoner at the bar, were taken from her own
strong-box; and she will find herself accused of all manner of crimes, fortunate
if she escape being branded as a common fraud, and told that she is no better
than she should be.
What member of our Society can
wonder then, that in this our age, pre-eminently one of shams and shows, the
theosophists’ teachings so (mis-) called, seem to
be the most unpopular of all the systems now to the fore; or that materialism
and theology, science and modern philosophy, have arrayed themselves in holy
alliance against theosophical studies perhaps because all the former are based
on chips and broken-up fragments of that primordial system. Cotton complains
somewhere, that the metaphysicians have been learning their lesson for the last
four (?) thousand years, and that it is now high time that they should begin to
teach something. But, no sooner is the possibility of such studies offered,
with the complete evidence into the bargain that they belong to the oldest
doctrine of the metaphysical philosophy of mankind, than, instead of giving
them a fair hearing at least, the majority of the complainers turn away with a
sneer and the cool remark: Oh, you must have invented all you say yourself!
Dear ladies and gentlemen, has
it ever occurred to you, how truly grand and almost divine would be that man or
woman, who, at this time of the life of mankind, could invent anything, or
discover that which had not been invented and known ages before? The charge of
being such an inventor would only entitle the accused to the choicest honours.
For show us, if you can, that mortal who in the historical cycle of our human
race has taught the world something entirely new. To the proud pretensions of
this age, Occultism the real Eastern Occultism, or the so-called Esoteric
Doctrine answers through its ablest students: Indeed all your boasted knowledge
is but the reflex action of the by-gone Past. At best, you are but the modern
popularisers of very ancient ideas. Consciously and unconsciously you have
pilfered from old classics and philosophers, who were themselves but the
superficial recorders cautious and incomplete, owing to the terrible penalties
for divulging the secrets of initiation taught during the mysteries of the
primæval Wisdom. Avaunt! your modern. sciences and speculations are but the
réchauffé dishes of antiquity; the dead bones (served with a sauce piquante of
crass materialism, to disguise them) of the intellectual repasts of the gods.
Ragonwas right in saying in his Maçonnerie Occulte, that Humanity only seems to
progress in achieving one discovery after the other, a sin truth, it only finds
that which it had lost. Most of our modern inventions for which we claim such
glory, are, after all, things people were acquainted with three and four
thousand years back.1 Lost to us through wars, floods and fire, their very
existence became obliterated from the memory of man. And now modern thinkers
begin to rediscover them once more.
Allow us to recapitulate a few
of such things and thus refresh your memory.
Deny, if you can, that the
most important of our present sciences were known to the ancients. It is not
Eastern literature only, and the whole cycle of those esoteric teachings which
an overzealous Christian Kabalist, in France, has just dubbed the accursed
sciences that will give you a flat denial, but profane classical literature, as
well. The proof is easy.
Are not physics and natural
sciences but an amplified reproduction of the works of Anaxagoras, of
Empedocles, Democritus and others? All that is taught now, was taught by these
philosophers then. For they maintained even in the fragments of their works
still extant that the Universe is composed of eternal atoms which, moved by a
subtle internal Fire, combine in millions of various ways. With them, this Fire
was the divine Breath of the Universal Mind, but now, it has become with the
modern philosophers no better than a blind and senseless Force. Furthermore
they taught that there was neither Life nor Death, but only a constant
destruction of form, produced by perpetual physical transformations. This has
now become by intellectual transformation, that which is known as the physical
correlation of forces, conservation of energy, law of continuity, and what not,
in the vocabulary of modern Science. But what’s in a
name, or in new-fangled words and compound terms, once that the identity of the
essential ideas is established?
Was not Descartes indebted for
his original theories to the old Masters, to Leucippus and Democritus,
Lucretius, Anaxagoras and Epicurus? These taught that the celestial bodies were
formed of a multitude of atoms, whose vortical motion existed from eternity;
which met, and, rotating together, the heaviest were drawn to the centres, the
lightest to the circumferences; each of these concretions was carried away in a
fluidic matter, which, receiving from this rotation an impulse, the stronger
communicated it to the weaker concretions. This seems a tolerably close
description of the Cartesian theory of Elemental Vortices taken from Anaxagoras
and some others; and it does look most suspiciously like the vortical atoms of
Sir W. Thomson!
Even Sir Isaac Newton, the
greatest among the great, is found constantly mirroring a dozen or so of old
philosophers. In reading his works one sees floating in the air the pale images
of the same Anaxagoras and Democritus, of Pythagoras, Aristotle, Timæus of
Locris, Lucretius, Macrobius, and even our old friend Plutarch. All these have
maintained one or the other of these propositions, (1) that the smallest of the
particles of matter would be sufficient owing to its infinite divisibility to
fill infinite space; (2) that there exist two Forces emanated from the
Universal Soul, combined in numerical proportions (the centripetal and
centrifugal forces, of the latter day scientific saints); (3) that there was a
mutual attraction of bodies, which attraction causes the latter to, what we now
call, gravitate and keeps them within their respective spheres; (4) they hinted
most unmistakably at the relation existing between the weight and the density,
or the quantity of matter contained in a unit of mass; and (5) taught that the
attraction (gravitation) of the planets toward the Sun is in reciprocal
proportion to their distance from that luminary.
Finally, is it not a
historical fact that the rotation of the Earth and the heliocentric system were
taught by Pythagoras not to speak of Hicetas, Heraclides, Ecphantus,
&c.,--over 2,000 years before the despairing and now famous cry of Galileo,
E pur, se muove? Did not the priests of Etruria and the Indian Rishis still
earlier, know how to attract lightning, ages upon ages before even the astral
Sir B. Franklin was formed in space? Euclid is honoured to this day perhaps,
because one cannot juggle as easily with mathematics and figures, as with
symbols and words bearing on unprovable hypotheses. Archimedes had probably
forgotten more in his day, than our modern mathematicians, astronomers,
geometricians, mechanicians, hydrostaticians and opticians ever knew. Without
Archytas, the disciple of Pythagoras, the application of the theory of
mathematics to practical purposes would, perchance, remain still unknown to our
grand era of inventions and machinery. Needless to remind the reader of that
which the Aryans knew, as it is already recorded in the Theosophist and other
works obtainable in
Wise was Solomon in saying
that there is no new thing under the Sun; and that everything that is hath been
already of old time, which was before us save, perhaps, the theosophical
doctrines which the humble writer of the present is charged by some with having
invented. The prime origin of this (very complimentary) accusation is due to
the kind efforts of the S. P. R. It is the more considerate and kind of this
world famous, and learned Society of Researches, as its scribes seem utterly
incapable of inventing anything original themselves even in the way of manufacturing
a commonplace illustration. If the inquisitive reader turns to the article
which follows, he will have the satisfaction of finding a curious proof of this
fact, in a reprint from old Izaak Walton’s
Lives, which our contributor has entitled Mrs. Donne’s
Astral Body. Thus even the scientifically accurate
In short, it may be said of
the scientific theories, that those which are true are not new; and those which
are new are not true, or are at least, very dubious. It is easy to hide behind merely
working hypotheses, but less easy to maintain their plausibility in the face of
logic and philosophy. To make short work of a very big subject, we have but to
institute a brief comparison between the old and the new teachings. That which
modern science would make us believe, is this: the atoms possess innate and
immutable properties. That which Esoteric, and also exoteric, Eastern
philosophy calls divine Spirit Substance (Purusha Prakriti) or eternal
Spirit-matter, one inseparable from the other, modern Science calls Force and
Matter, adding as we do (for it is a Vedantic conception), that, the two being
inseparable, matter is but an abstraction (an illusion rather). The properties
of matter are, by the Eastern Occultists, summed up in, or brought down to,
attraction and repulsion; by the Scientists, to gravitation and affinities.
According to this teaching, the properties of complex combinations are but the
necessary results of the composition of elementary properties; the most complex
existences being the physico-chemical automata, called men. Matter from being
primarily scattered and inanimate, begets life, sensation, emotions and will,
after a whole series of consecutive gropings. The latter non-felicitous
expression (belonging to Mr. Tyndall), forced the philosophical writer,
Delboeuf2, to criticize the English Scientist in very disrespectful terms, and
forces us in our turn, to agree with the former. Matter, or anything equally
conditioned, once that it is declared to be subject to immutable laws, cannot
grope. But this is a trifle when compared with dead or inanimate matter,
producing life, and even psychic phenomena of the highest mentality! Finally, a
rigid determinism reigns over all nature. All that which has once happened to
our automatical Universe, had to happen, as the future of that Universe is
traced in the smallest of its particles or atoms. Return these atoms, they say,
to the same position and order they were in at the first moment of the
evolution of the physical Kosmos, and the same universal phenomena will be
repeated in precisely the same order, and the Universe will once more return to
its present conditions. To this, logic and philosophy answer that it cannot be
so, as the properties of the particles vary and are changeable. If the atoms
are eternal and matter indestructible, these atoms can never have been born;
hence, they can have nothing innate in them. Theirs is the one homogeneous (and
we add divine) substance, while compound molecules receive their properties, at
the beginning of the life cycles or manvantaras, from within without. Organisms
cannot have been developed from dead or inanimate matter, as, firstly, such
matter does not exist, and secondly, philosophy proving it conclusively, the
Universe is not subjected to fatality. As Occult Science teaches that the
universal process of differentiation begins anew after every period of
Maha-pralaya, there is no reason to think that it would slavishly and blindly
repeat itself. Immutable laws last only from the incipient to the last stage of
the universal life, being simply the effects of primordial, intelligent and
entirely free action. For Theosophists, as also for Dr. Pirogoff, Delboeuf and
many a great independent modern thinker, it is the Universal (and to us
impersonal because infinite) Mind, which is the true and primordial Demiurge.
What better illustrates the
theory of cycles, than the following fact? Nearly 700 years B.C., in the
schools of Thales and Pythagoras, was taught the doctrine of the true motion of
the earth, its form and the whole heliocentric system. And in 317 A.D.
Lactantius, the preceptor of Crispus Cæsar, the son of the Emperor Constantine,
is found teaching his pupil that the earth was a plane surrounded by the sky,
itself composed of fire and water! Moreover, the venerable Church Father warned
his pupil against the heretical doctrine of the earth’s
globular form, as the Cambridge and Oxford Father Dons warn their students now,
against the pernicious and superstitious doctrines of Theosophy such as
Universal Mind, Re-incarnation and so on. There is a resolution tacitly
accepted by the members of the T. S. for the adoption of a proverb of King
Solomon, paraphrased for our daily use: A scientist is wiser in his own conceit
than seven Theosophists that can render a reason. No time, therefore, should be
lost in arguing with them; but no endeavour, on the other hand, should be
neglected to show up their mistakes and blunders. The scientific conceit of the
Orientalists especially of the youngest branch of these the Assyriologists and
the Egyptologists is indeed phenomenal. Hitherto, some credit was given to the
ancients to their philosophers and Initiates, at any rate of knowing a few
things that the moderns could not rediscover. But now even the greatest
Initiates are represented to the public as fools. Here is an instance. On pages
15, 16 and 17 (Introduction) in the Hibbert Lectures of 1887 by Prof. Sayce, on
The Ancient Babylonians, the reader is brought face to face with a conundrum
that may well stagger the unsophisticated admirer of modern learning.
Complaining of the difficulties and obstacles that meet the Assyriologist at
every step of his studies; after giving the dreary catalogue of the formidable
struggles of the interpreter to make sense of the inscriptions from broken
fragments of clay tiles; the Professor goes on to confess that the scholar who
has to read these cuneiform characters, is often likely to put a false
construction upon isolated passages, the context of which must be supplied from
conjecture (p. 14). Notwithstanding all this, the learned lecturer places the
modern Assyriologist higher than the ancient Babylonian Initiate, in the
knowledge of symbols and his own religion!
The passage deserves to be
quoted in toto:
It is true that many of the sacred
texts were so written as to be intelligible only to the initiated; but the
initiated were provided with keys and glosses, many of which are in our
hands(?) . . . We can penetrate into the real meaning of documents which to him
(the ordinary Babylonian) were a sealed book. Nay, more than this, the
researches that have been made during the last half-century into the creed and
beliefs of the nations of the world both past and present, have given us a clue
to the interpretation of these documents which even the initiated priests did
not possess.
The above (the italics being
our own) may be better appreciated when thrown into a syllogistic form.
Major premise: The ancient
Initiates had keys and glosses to their esoteric texts, of which they were the
INVENTORS.
Minor premise: Our
Orientalists have many of these keys.
Conclusion: Ergo, the
Orientalists have a clue which the Initiates themselves did not possess!!
Into what were the Initiates,
in such a case, initiated?--and who invented the blinds, we ask.
Few Orientalists could answer
this query. We are more generous, however; and may show in our next that, into
which our modest Orientalists have never yet been initiated all their alleged
clues to the contrary.
II
Go to, let
us go down and there confound
their
language that
they may not understand
one another’s
speech . . . Genesis
HAVING done with modern
physical Sciences we next turn to Western philosophies and religions. Every one
of these is equally based upon, and derives its theories and doctrines from
heathen, and moreover, exoteric thought. This can easily be traced from
Schopenhauer and Mr. Herbert Spencer, down to Hypnotism and so-called Mental
Science. The German philosophers modernize Buddhism; the English are inspired
by Vedantism; while the French, borrowing from both, add to them Plato, in a
Phrygian cap, and occasionally, as with Auguste Comte, the weird sex-worship or
Mariolatry of the old Roman Catholic ecstatics and visionaries. New systems,
yclept philosophical, new sects and societies, spring up now-a-days in every
corner of our civilized lands. But even the highest among them agree on no one
point, though each claims supremacy. This, because no science, no philosophy
being at best, but a fragment broken from the WISDOM RELIGION can stand alone,
or be complete in itself. Truth, to be complete, must represent an unbroken
continuity. It must have no gaps, no missing links. And which of our modern
religions, sciences or philosophies, is free from such defects? Truth is One.
Even as the palest reflection of the Absolute, it can be no more dual than is
absoluteness itself, nor can it have two aspects. But such truth is not for the
majorities, in our world of illusion especially for those minds which are
devoid of the noëtic element. These have to substitute for the high spiritual
and quasi absolute truth the relative one, which having two sides or aspects,
both conditioned by appearances, lead our brain-minds one to intellectual
scientific materialism, the other to materialistic or anthropomorphic
religiosity. But even that kind of truth, in order to offer a coherent and
complete system of something, has, while naturally clashing with its opposite,
to offer no gaps and contradictions, no broken or missing links, in the special
system or doctrine it undertakes to represent.
And here a slight digression
must come in. We are sure to be told by some, that this is precisely the
objection taken to theosophical expositions, from
Nor has a materialist any
right to the appellation, since it means a lover of Wisdom, and Pythagoras, who
was the first to coin the compound term, never limited Wisdom to this earth.
One who affirms that the Universe and Man are objects of the senses only, and
who fatally chains thought within the region of senseless matter, as do the
Darwinian evolutionists, is at best a sophiaphobe when not a philosophaster
never a philosopher.
Therefore is it that in this
age of Materialism, Agnosticism, Evolutionism, and false Idealism, there is not
a system, however intellectually expounded, that can stand on its own legs, or
fail to be criticized by an exponent from another school of thought as
materialistic as itself; even Mr. Herbert Spencer, the greatest of all, is
unable to answer some criticisms. Many are those who remember the fierce
polemics that raged a few years ago in the English and American journals
between the Evolutionists on the one hand and the Positivists on the other. The
subject of the dispute was with regard to the attitude and relation that the
theory of evolution would bear to religion. Mr. F. Harrison, the Apostle of
Positivism, charged Mr. Herbert Spencer with restricting religion to the realm
of reason, forgetting that feeling and not the cognizing faculty, played the
most important part in it. The erroneousness and insufficiency of the ideas on
the Unknowable as developed in Mr. Spencer’s works
were also taken to task by Mr. Harrison. The idea was erroneous, he held, be
cause it was based on the acceptation of the metaphysical absolute. It was
insufficient, he argued, because it brought deity down to an empty abstraction,
void of any meaning.3 To this the great English writer replied, that he had
never thought of offering his Unknowable and Incognizable, as a subject for
religious worship. Then stepped into the arena, the respective admirers and defenders
of Messrs. Spencer and Harrison, some defending the material metaphysics of the
former thinker (if we may be permitted to use this paradoxical yet correct
definition of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s
philosophy), others, the arguments of the Godless and Christless Roman
Catholicism of Auguste Comte,4 both sides giving and receiving very hard blows.
Thus, Count d’Alviella of
It is not to discuss the
relative merits of materialistic Evolutionism, or of Positivism either, that
the two English thinkers are brought forward; but simply to point, as an
illustration, to the Babel-like confusion of modern thought. While the
Evolutionists (of Herbert Spencer’s
school) maintain that the historical evolution of the religious feeling
consists in the constant abstraction of the attributes of Deity, and their
final separation from the primitive concrete conceptions this process rejoicing
in the easy-going triple compound of deanthropomorphization, or the
disappearance of human attributes the Comtists on their side hold to another
version. They affirm that fetishism, or the direct worship of nature, was the
primitive religion of man, a too protracted-evolution alone having landed it in
anthropomorphism. Their Deity is Humanity and the God they worship, Mankind, as
far as we understand them. The only way, therefore, of settling the dispute, is
to ascertain which of the two philosophical and scientific theories, is the
less pernicious and the more probable. Is it true to say, as d’Alviella
assures us, that Mr. Spencer’s Unknowable contains all the
elements necessary to religion; and, as that remarkable writer is alleged to
imply, that religious feeling tends to free itself from every moral element;
or, shall we accept the other extremity and agree with the Comtists, that
gradually, religion will blend itself with, merge into, and disappear in
altruism and its service to Humanity?
Useless to say that Theosophy,
while rejecting the one-sided-ness and therefore the limitation in both ideas,
is alone able to reconcile the two, i.e., the Evolutionists and the Positivists
on both metaphysical and practical lines. How to do this it is no there the
place to say, as every Theosophist acquainted with the main tenets of the
Esoteric Philosophy can do it for himself. We believe in an impersonal
Unknowable and know well that the ABSOLUTE, or Absoluteness, can have nought to
do with worship on anthropomorphic lines; Theosophy rejects the Spencerian He
and substitutes the impersonal IT for the personal pronoun, whenever speaking
of the Absolute and the Unknowable. And it teaches, as foremost of all virtues,
altruism and self-sacrifice, brotherhood and compassion for every living
creature, without, for all that, worshipping Man or Humanity. In the
Positivist, more-over, who admits of no immortal soul in men, believes in no
future life or reincarnation, such a worship becomes worse than fetishism: it is
Zoolatry, the worship of the animals. For that alone which constitutes the real
Man is, in the words of Carlyle, the essence of our being, the mystery in us
that calls itself ‘I’-- . .
. a breath of Heaven; the Highest Being reveals himself in man. This denied,
man is but an animal the shame and scandal of the Universe, as Pascal puts it.
It is the old, old story, the
struggle of matter and spirit, the survival of the unfittest, because of the
strongest and most material. But the period when nascent Humanity, following
the law of the natural and dual evolution, was descending along with spirit
into matter is closed. We (Humanity) are now helping matter to ascend toward
spirit; and to do that we have to help substance to disenthral itself from the
viscous grip of sense. We, of the fifth Root Race, are the direct descendants
of the primeval Humanity of that Race; those, who on this side of the Flood
tried, by commemorating it, to save the antediluvian Truth and Wisdom, and were
worsted in our efforts by the dark genius of the Earth the spirit of matter,
whom the Gnostics called Ildabaoth and the Jews Jehovah. Think ye, that even
the Bible of Moses, the book you know so well and understand so badly, has left
this claim of the Ancient Doctrine without witness? It has not. Allow us to
close with a (to you) familiar passage, only interpreted in its true light.
In the beginning of time, or
rather, in the childhood of the fifth Race, the whole earth was of one lip and
of one speech, saith chapter XI of Genesis. Read esoterically, this means that
mankind had one universal doctrine, a philosophy, common to all; and that men
were bound by one religion, whether this term be derived from the Latin word
relegere, to gather, or be united in speech or in thought, from religens,
revering the gods, or, from religare, to be bound fast together. Take it one
way or the other, it means most undeniably and plainly that our forefathers
from beyond the flood accepted in common one truth i.e., they believed in that
aggregate of subjective and objective facts which form the consistent, logical
and harmonious whole called by us the Wisdom Religion.
Now, reading the first nine
verses of chapter XI between the lines, we get the following information. Wise
in their generation, our early fathers were evidently acquainted with the
imperishable truism which teaches that in union alone lies strength in union of
thought as well as in that of nations, of course. Therefore, lest in disunion
they should be scattered upon the face of the earth, and their Wisdom-religion
should, in consequence, be broken up into a thousand fragments; and lest they,
themselves, instead of towering as hitherto, through knowledge, heavenward,
should, through blind faith begin gravitating earthward the wise men, who journeyed
from the East, devised a plan. In those days temples were sites of learning,
not of superstition; priests taught divine Wisdom, not man-invented dogmas, and
the ultima thule of their religious activity did not centre in the contribution
box, as at present. Thus ’Go to,’ they
said, ‘let us build a city and a tower,
whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make a name.’ And
they made burnt brick and used it for stone, and built therewith a city and a
tower.
So far, this is a very old story,
known as well to a Sunday school ragamuffin as to Mr. Gladstone. Both believe
very sincerely that these descendants of the accursed Ham were proud sinners
whose object was like that of the Titans, to insult and dethrone Zeus-Jehovah,
by reaching heaven, the supposed abode of both. But since we find the story
told in the revealed6 Scripts, it must, like all the rest in them, have its
esoteric interpretation. In this, Occult symbolism will help us. All the
expressions that we have italicized, when read in the original Hebrew and
according to the canons of esoteric symbolism, will yield quite a different
construction. Thus:
1. And the whole earth (mankind),
was of one lip (i.e., proclaimed the same teachings) and of the same words not
of speech as in the authorized version.
Now the Kabalistic meaning of
the term words and word may be found in the Zohar and also in the Talmud. Words
(Dabarim) mean powers, and word, in the singular, is a synonym of Wisdom; e.g.,
By the uttering of ten words was the world created--(Talmud Pirkey Aboth c. 5.,
Mish. I). Herethe words refer to the ten Sephiroth, Builders of the Universe.
Again: By the Word, (Wisdom, Logos) of YHVH were the Heavens made (ibid.).
2-4. And the man7 (the chief
leader) said to his neighbour, ‘Go to,
let us make bricks (disciples) and burn them to a burning (initiate, fill them
with sacred fire), let us build us a city (establish mysteries and teach the
Doctrine8) and a tower (Ziggurrat, a sacred temple tower) whose top may reach
unto heaven’
(the highest limit reachable in space). The great tower of Nebo, of Nabi
on the temple of Bel, was called the house of the seven spheres of heaven and
earth, and the house of the stronghold (or strength, tagimut) and the
foundation stone of heaven and earth.
Occult symbology teaches, that
to burn bricks for a city means to train disciples for magic, a hewn stone
signifying a full Initiate, Petra the Greek and Kephas the Aramaic word for
stone, having the same meaning, viz., interpreter of the Mysteries, a Hierophant.
The supreme initiation was referred to as the burning with great burning. Thus,
the bricks are fallen, but we will build (anew) with hewn stones of Isaiah
becomes clear. For the true interpretation of the four last verses of the
genetic allegory about the supposed confusion of tongues we may turn to the
legendary version of the Yezidis and read verses 5, 6, 7, and 8 in Genesis, ch.
xi, esoterically:
And Adonai (the Lord) came
down and said: ‘Behold, the people is one (the people
are united in thought and deed) and they have one lip (doctrine).’
And now they begin to spread it and ‘nothing
will be restrained from them (they will have full magic powers and get all they
want by such power, Kriyasakti,) that they have imagined’.
And now what are the Yezidis and
their version and what is Ad-onai? Ad is the Lord, their ancestral god; and the
Yezidis are a heretical Mussulman sect, scattered over
This is more logical than to
attribute to one’s God, the All-good, such ungodly
tricks as are fathered upon him in the Bible. Moreover, the legend about the
And so ought to weep all the
philosophers and lovers of Ancient Wisdom; for it is since then that the
thousand and one exoteric substitutes for the one true Doctrine or lip had
their beginning, obscuring more and more the intellects of men, and shedding
innocent blood in fierce fanaticism. Had our modern philosophers studied,
instead of sneering at, the old Books of Wisdom say the Kabala they would have
found that which would have unveiled to them many a secret of ancient Church
and State. As they have not, however, the result is evident. The dark cycle of
Kali Yug has brought back a
The slack sail shifts from
side to side;
The boat untrimm’d
admits the tide;
Borne down adrift, at random
toss’d,
The oar breaks short, . . .
the rudder’s lost
Lucifer, January, February,
1891
1 The learned Belgian Mason
would be nearer the mark by adding a few more ciphers to his four thousand
years.
2 In the Revue Philosophique
of 1883, where he translates such gropings by atonements successifs.
3 As the above is repeated
from memory. it does not claim to be quoted with verbal exactitude, but only to
give the gist of the argument.
4 The epithet is Mr. Huxley’s.
In his lecture in Edinburgh in 1868, On the Physical Basis of Life, this great
opponent remarked that Auguste Comte’s
philosophy in practice might be compendiously described as Catholicism minus
Christianity, and antagonistic to the very essence of Science.
5 Professor of Ecclesiastical
History at the
6 A curious and rather
unfortunate word to use, since, as a translation from the Latin revelare, it
signifies diametrically the opposite of the now accepted meaning in English.
For the word to reveal or revealed is derived from the Latin revelare, to
reveil and rot to reveal, i.e., from re again or back and velare to veil, or to
hide something, from the word velum or a vail (or veil), a cover. Thus, instead
of unvailing, or revealing, Moses has truly only reveiled once more the
Egypto-Chaldean theological legends and allegories, into which, as one learned
in all the Wisdom of
7 This is translated from the
Hebrew original. Chief-leader (Rab-Mag) meaning literally Teacher-Magician,
Master or Guru, as Daniel is shown to have been in
8 Some Homeric heroes also
when they are said, like Laomedon, Priam’s
father, to have built cities, were in reality establishing the Mysteries and
introducing the Wisdom-Religion in foreign lands.
9 It is commanded in
Ecclesiasticus XXI, 30, not to curse Satan, lest one should forfeit his own
life. Why? Because in their permutations the Lord God, Moses, and Satan are
one. The name the Jews gave while in Babylon to their exoteric God, the
substitute for the true Deity of which they never spoke or wrote, was the
Assyrian Mosheh or Adar, the god of the scorching sun (the Lord thy God is a
consuming flame verily!) and therefore, Mosheh or Moses, shone also. In
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Preface
Theosophy and the Masters General Principles
The Earth Chain Body and Astral Body Kama – Desire
Manas Of Reincarnation Reincarnation Continued
Karma Kama Loka
Devachan
Cycles
Arguments Supporting Reincarnation
Differentiation Of Species Missing Links
Psychic Laws, Forces, and Phenomena
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What is Theosophy ? Theosophy Defined (More Detail)
Three Fundamental Propositions Key Concepts of Theosophy
Cosmogenesis Anthropogenesis Root Races
Ascended Masters After Death States
The Seven Principles of Man Karma
Reincarnation Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Colonel Henry Steel Olcott William Quan Judge
The Start of the Theosophical
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History of the Theosophical
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History of the Theosophical
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The Three Objectives of the Theosophical
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Glossaries of Theosophical Terms
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A Modern Revival of Ancient Wisdom
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The Secret Doctrine – Volume 3
A compilation of H P Blavatsky’s
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Esoteric Christianity or the Lesser Mysteries
The Early Teachings of The Masters
A Collection of Fugitive Fragments
Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy
Mystical,
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In the Twilight”
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Letters and
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An Outstanding
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By a student of
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Elementary Theosophy Who is the Man? Body and Soul
Body, Soul and Spirit Reincarnation Karma
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