Footnotes:

1. In the English translation from the Sanskrit the numbers are given in that language, Eka, Chatur, etc., etc. It was thought best to give them in English.

2. Verse 1 of Stanza VI. is of a far later date than the other Stanzas, though still very ancient. The old text of this verse, having names entirely unknown to the Orientalists would give no clue to the student.

3. It is stated in Book II., ch. viii., of Vishnu Purana: “By immortality is meant existence to the end of the Kalpa;” and Wilson, the translator, remarks in a footnote: “This, according to the Vedas, is all that is to be understood of the immortality (or eternity) of the gods; they perish at the end of universal dissolution (or Pralaya).” And Esoteric philosophy says: They “perish” not, but are re-absorbed.

4. Nippang in China; Neibban in Burmah; or Moksha in India.

5. The “12” Nidanas (in Tibetan Ten-brel chug-nyi) the chief causes of existence, effects generated by a concatenation of causes produced (see Comment. II).

6. See Wassilief on Buddhism, pp. 97-950.

7. That which is called “wheel” is the symbolical expression for a world or globe, which shows that the ancients were aware that our Earth was a revolving globe, not a motionless square as some Christian Fathers taught. The “Great Wheel” is the whole duration of our Cycle of being, or Maha Kalpa, i.e., the whole revolution of our special chain of seven planets or Spheres from beginning to end; the “Small Wheels” meaning the Rounds, of which there are also Seven.

8. See Dzungarian “Mani Kumbum,” the “Book of the 10,000 Precepts.” Also consult Wassilief’s “Der Buddhismus,” pp. 327 and 357, etc.

9. In clearer words: “One has to acquire true Self-Consciousness in order to understand Samvriti, or the ‘origin of delusion.’ ” Paramartha is the synonym of the Sanskrit term Svasam-vedana, or “the reflection which analyses itself.” There is a difference in the interpretation of the meaning of “Paramartha” between the Yogacharyas and the Madhyamikas, neither of whom, however, explain the real and true esoteric sense of the expression. See further, sloka No. 9.

10. In India it is called “The Eye of Siva,” but beyond the great range it is known as “Dangma’s opened eye” in esoteric phraseology.

11. Dangma means a purified soul, one who has become a Jivanmukta, the highest adept, or rather a Mahatma so-called. His “opened eye” is the inner spiritual eye of the seer, and the faculty which manifests through it is not clairvoyance as ordinarily understood, i.e., the power of seeing at a distance, but rather the faculty of spiritual intuition, through which direct and certain knowledge is obtainable. This faculty is intimately connected with the “third eye,” which mythological tradition ascribes to certain races of men. Fuller explanations will be found in Book II.

12. And yet, one, claiming authority, namely, Sir Monier Williams, Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, has just denied this fact. This is what he taught his audience, on June the 4th, 1888, in his annual address before the Victoria Institute of Great Britain: “Originally, Buddhism set its face against all solitary asceticism . . . to attain sublime heights of knowledge. It had no occult, no esoteric system of doctrine . . . withheld from ordinary men” (!!) And, again: “. . . When Gautama Buddha began his career, the later and lower form of Yoga seems to have been little known.” And then, contradicting himself, the learned lecturer forthwith informs his audience that “We learn from Lalita-Vistara that various forms of bodily torture, self-maceration, and austerity were common in Gautama’s time.” (!!) But the lecturer seems quite unaware that this kind of torture and self-maceration is precisely the lower form of Yoga, Hatha Yoga, which was “little known” and yet so “common” in Gautama’s time.

13. It is even argued that all the Six Darsanas (Schools of philosophy) show traces of Buddha’s influence, being either taken from Buddhism or due to Greek teaching! (See Weber, Max Muller, etc.) We labour under the impression that Colebrooke, “the highest authority” in such matters, had long ago settled the question by showing, that “the Hindus were in this instance the teachers, not the learners.”

14. “Paramartha” is self-consciousness in Sanskrit, Svasamvedana, or the “self-analysing reflection” — from two words, parama (above everything) and artha (comprehension), Satya meaning absolute true being, or Esse. In Tibetan Paramarthasatya is Dondampaidenpa. The opposite of this absolute reality, or actuality, is Samvritisatya — the relative truth only — “Samvriti” meaning “false conception” and being the origin of illusion, Maya; in Tibetan Kundzabchi-denpa, “illusion-creating appearance.”

15. Aryasanga was a pre-Christian Adept and founder of a Buddhist esoteric school, though Csoma di Koros places him, for some reasons of his own, in the seventh A.D. There was another Aryasanga, who lived during the first centuries of our era and the Hungarian scholar most probably confuses the two.

16. “The indiscreet cause which is uniform, and both cause and effect, and which those who are acquainted with first principles call Pradhana and Prakriti, is the incognizable Brahma who was before all” (Vayu Purana); i.e., Brahma does not put forth evolution itself or create, but only exhibits various aspects of itself, one of which is Prakriti, an aspect of Pradhana.

17.  Finite Self-consciousness, I mean. For how can the absolute attain it otherwise than as simply an aspect, the highest of which known to us is human consciousness?

18.  See Schwegler’s “Handbook of the History of Philosophy” in Sterling’s translation, p. 28.

19.  Vajra — diamond-holder. In Tibetan Dorjesempa; sempa meaning the soul, its adamantine quality referring to its indestructibility in the hereafter. The explanation with regard to the “Anupadaka” given in the Kala Chakra, the first in the Gyu(t) division of the Kanjur, is half esoteric. It has misled the Orientalists into erroneous speculations with respect to the Dhyani-Buddhas and their earthly correspondencies, the Manushi-Buddhas. The real tenet is hinted at in a subsequent Volume, (see “The Mystery about Buddha”), and will be more fully explained in its proper place.

20. To quote Hegel again, who with Schelling practically accepted the Pantheistic conception of periodical Avatars (special incarnations of the World-Spirit in Man, as seen in the case of all the great religious reformers) . . . . “the essence of man is spirit . . . . only by stripping himself of his finiteness and surrendering himself to pure self-consciousness does he attain the truth. Christ-man, as man in whom the Unity of God-man (identity of the individual with the Universal consciousness as taught by the Vedantins and some Adwaitees) appeared, has, in his death and history generally, himself presented the eternal history of Spirit — a history which every man has to accomplish in himself, in order to exist as Spirit.” — Philosophy of History. Sibree’s English translation, p. 340.

21.  “Mother of the Gods,” Aditi, or Cosmic Space. In the Zohar, she is called Sephira the Mother of the Sephiroth, and Shekinah in her primordial form, in abscondito.

22.  Hence Non-being is “Absolute Being,” in esoteric philosophy. In the tenets of the latter even Adi-Budha (first or primeval wisdom) is, while manifested, in one sense an illusion, Maya, since all the gods, including Brahma, have to die at the end of the “Age of Brahma”; the abstraction called Parabrahm alone — whether we call it Ensoph, or Herbert Spencer’s Unknowable — being “the One Absolute” Reality. The One secondless Existence is adwaita, “Without a Second,” and all the rest is Maya, teaches the Adwaita philosophy.

23.  An unpoetical term, yet still very graphic. (See foot-note to Stanza III.)

24.  Even in Christianity. (See Part II., “Primordial Substance and Divine Thought.”)

25. Gross, “The Heathen Religion,” p. 195.

26.  A Vedantin of the Visishtadwaita philosophy would say that, though the only independent Reality, Parabrahmam is inseparable from his trinity. That He is three, “Parabrahmam, Chit, and Achit,” the last two being dependent realities unable to exist separately; or, to make it clearer, Parabrahmam is the substance — changeless, eternal, and incognizable — and Chit (Atma), and Achit (Anatma) are its qualities, as form and colour are the qualities of any object. The two are the garment, or body, or rather attribute (Sarira) of Parabrahmam. But an Occultist would find much to say against this claim, and so would the Adwaitee Vedantin.

27.  Number, truly; but never Motion. It is Motion which begets the Logos, the Word, in occultism.

28.  The “Fourteen precious things.” The narrative or allegory is found in the Satapatha Brahmana and others. The Japanese Secret Science of the Buddhist Mystics, the Yamabooshi, has “seven precious things.” We will speak of them, hereafter.

29.  The original for Understanding is Sattva, which Sankara (acharya) renders antahkarana. “Refined,” he says, “by sacrifices and other sanctifying operations.” In the Katha, at p. 148, Sattva is said by Sankara to mean buddhi — a common use of the word. (“The Bhagavatgita with The Sanatsugatiya and The Anugita,” translated by Kashinath Trimbak Telang, M.A.; edited by Max Muller.) Whatever meaning various schools may give the term, Sattva is the name given among Occult students of the Aryasanga School to the dual Monad or Atma-buddhi, and Atma-buddhi on this plane corresponds to Parabrahm and Mulaprakriti on the higher plane.

30.  Amrita is “immortality.”

31.  See Commentary No. 1 to this Stanza.

32.  See “Kwan-Shai-Yin.” The real name from the text cannot be given.

33.  Lanoo is a student, a chela who studies practical Esotericism.

34.  “Tri-dasa,” or three times ten (30), alludes to the Vedic deities, in round numbers, or more accurately 33 — a sacred number. They are the 12 Adityas, the 8 Vasus, the 11 Rudras, and 2 Aswins — the twin sons of the Sun and the Sky. This is the root-number of the Hindu Pantheon, which enumerates 33 crores or over three hundred millions of gods and goddesses.

35.  Hence all the higher gods of antiquity are all “Sons of the Mother” before they become those of the “Father.” The Logoi, like Jupiter or Zeus, Son of Kronos-Saturn, “Infinite Time” (or Kala), in their origin were represented as male-female. Zeus is said to be the “beautiful Virgin,” and Venus is made bearded. Apollo is originally bisexual, so is Brahma-Vach in Manu and the Puranas. Osiris is interchangeable with Isis, and Horus is of both sexes. Finally St. John’s vision in Revelation, that of the Logos, who is now connected with Jesus — is hermaphrodite, for he is described as having female breasts. So is the Tetragrammaton = Jehovah. But there are two Avalokiteshwaras in Esotericism; the first and the second Logos.

36.  No religious symbol can escape profanation and even derision in our days of politics and Science. In Southern India the writer has seen a converted native making pujah with offerings before a statue of Jesus clad in woman’s clothes and with a ring in his nose. When asking the meaning of the masquerade we were answered that it was Jesu-Maria blended in one, and that it was done by the permission of the Padri, as the zealous convert had no money to purchase two statues or “idols” as they, very properly, were called by a witness — another but a non-converted Hindu. Blasphemous this will appear to a dogmatic Christian, but the Theosophist and the Occultist must award the palm of logic to the converted Hindu. The esoteric Christos in the gnosis is, of course, sexless, but in exoteric theology he is male and female.

37.  The Gnostic Sophia, “Wisdom” who is “the Mother” of the Ogdoad (Aditi, in a certain sense, with her eight sons), is the Holy Ghost and the Creator of all, as in the ancient systems. The “father” is a far later invention. The earliest manifested Logos was female everywhere — the mother of the seven planetary powers.

38.  See “Chinese Buddhism,” by the Rev. J. C. Edkins, who always gives correct facts, although his conclusions are very frequently erroneous.

39.  Like the logoi and the Hierarchies of Powers, however, the “Serpents” have to be distinguished one from the other. Sesha or Ananta, “the couch of Vishnu,” is an allegorical abstraction, symbolizing infinite Time in Space, which contains the germ and throws off periodically the efflorescence of this germ, the manifested Universe; whereas, the gnostic Ophis contained the same triple symbolism in its seven vowels as the One, Three and Seven-syllabled Oeaohoo of the Archaic doctrine; i.e., the One Unmanifested Logos, the Second manifested, the triangle concreting into the Quaternary or Tetragrammaton, and the rays of the latter on the material plane.

40.  The Astral Light, or the Ether, of the ancient pagans (for the name of Astral Light is quite modern) is Spirit-Matter. Beginning with the pure spiritual plane, it becomes grosser as it descends until it becomes the Maya or the tempting and deceitful serpent on our plane.

41.  By “God, the Father,” the seventh principle in Man and Kosmos are here unmistakeably meant, this principle being inseparable in its Esse and Nature from the seventh Cosmic principle. In one sense it is the Logos of the Greeks and the Avalokiteswara of the esoteric Buddhists.

42.  In the Egyptian as in the Indian theogony there was a concealed deity, the one, and the creative, androgynous god. Thus Shoo is the god of creation and Osiris is, in his original primary form, the “god whose name is unknown.” (See Mariette’s Abydos II., p. 63, and Vol. III., pp. 413, 414, No. 1122.)

43.  See next note.

44.  Od is the pure life-giving Light, or magnetic fluid; Ob the messenger of death used by the sorcerers, the nefarious evil fluid; Aour is the synthesis of the two, Astral Light proper. Can the Philologists tell why Od — a term used by Reichenbach to denominate the vital fluid — is also a Tibetan word meaning light, brightness, radiancy? It equally means “Sky” in an occult sense. Whence the root of the word? But Akasa is not quite Ether, but far higher than that, as will be shown.

45.  This is again similar to the doctrine of Fichte and German Pantheists. The former reveres Jesus as the great teacher who inculcated the unity of the spirit of man with the God-Spirit (the Adwaita doctrine) or universal Principle. It is difficult to find a single speculation in Western metaphysics which has not been anticipated by Archaic Eastern philosophy. From Kant to Herbert Spencer, it is all a more or less distorted echo of the Dwaita, Adwaita, and Vedantic doctrines generally.

46.  Whether the genus of the bird be cygnus, anser, or pelecanus, it is no matter, as it is an aquatic bird floating or moving on the waters like the Spirit, and then issuing from those waters to give birth to other beings. The true significance of the symbol of the Eighteenth Degree of the Rose-Croix is precisely this, though poetised later on into the motherly feeling of the Pelican rending its bosom to feed its seven little ones with its blood.

47.  The reason why Moses forbids eating the pelican and swan, classing the two among the unclean fowls, and permits eating “bald locusts, beetles, and the grasshopper after his kind” (Leviticus xi. and Deuteronomy xiv.) is a purely physiological one, and has to do with mystic symbology only in so far as the word “unclean,” like every other word, ought not to be read and understood literally, as it is esoteric like all the rest, and may as well mean “holy” as not. It is a blind, very suggestive in connection with certain superstitions — e.g., that of the Russian people who will not use the pigeon for food; not because it is “unclean,” but because the “Holy Ghost” is credited with having appeared under the form of a Dove.

48.  Not the Mediaeval Alchemists, but the Magi and Fire-Worshippers, from whom the Rosicrucians or the Philosophers per ignem, the successors of the theurgists borrowed all their ideas concerning Fire, as a mystic and divine element.

49.  [[Para]], “beyond,” outside.

50.  Each of these and many more are probably the missing links of chemistry. They are known by other names in Alchemy and to the Occultists who practise in phenomenal powers. It is by combining and recombining in a certain way (or dissociating) the “Elements” by means of astral fire that the greatest phenomena are produced.

51.  This is said in the sense that the flame from a fire is endless, and that the lights of the whole Universe could be lit at one simple rush-light without diminishing its flame.

52.  The 4, represented in the Occult numerals by the Tetraktis, the Sacred or Perfect Square, is a Sacred Number with the mystics of every nation and race. It has one and the same significance in Brahmanism, Buddhism, the Kabala and in the Egyptian, Chaldean and other numerical systems.

53.  In the Kabala the same numbers are a value of Jehovah, viz., 1065, since the numerical values of the three letters which compose his name — Jod, Vau and twice He — are respectively 10 ( ), 6 ( ) and 5 ( ); or again thrice seven, 21. “Ten is the Mother of the Soul, for Life and Light are therein united,” says Hermes. “For number one is born of the Spirit and the number ten from matter (chaos, feminine); the unity has made the ten, the ten the unity” (Book of the Keys). By the means of the Temura, the anagrammatical method of the Kabala, and the knowledge of 1065 (21), a universal science may be obtained regarding Kosmos and its mysteries” (Rabbi Yogel). The Rabbis regard the numbers 10, 6, and 5 as the most sacred of all.

54.  The reader may be told that an American Kabalist has now discovered the same number for the Elohim. It came to the Jews from Chaldaea. See “Hebrew Metrology” in the Masonic Review, July, 1885, McMillan Lodge, No. 141.

55.  We find the same expression in Egypt. Mout signifies, for one thing, “Mother,” and shows the character assigned to her in the triad of that country. “She was no less the mother than the wife of Ammon, one of the principle titles of the god being “the husband of his mother.” The goddess Mout, or Mut, is addressed as “our lady,” the “queen of Heaven” and of “the Earth,” thus “sharing these titles with the other mother goddesses, Isis, Hathor, etc.” (Maspero).

56.  This is the literal translation from the IXth and Xth Sections: “Ten numbers without what? One: the spirit of the living God . . . . who liveth in eternities! Voice and Spirit and Word, and this is the Holy Spirit. Two: Spirit out of Spirit. He designed and hewed therewith twenty-two letters of foundation, three Mothers and seven double and Twelve single, and one spirit out of them. Three: Water out of spirit; he designed and hewed with them the barren and the void, mud and earth. He designed them as a flowerbed, hewed them as a wall, covered them as a paving. Four: Fire out of water. He designed and hewed therewith the throne of glory and the wheels, and the seraphim and the holy animals and the ministering angels, and of the three He founded his dwelling, as it is said, He makes his angels spirits and his servants fiery flames!” Which words “founded his dwelling” show clearly that in the Kabala, as in India, the Deity was considered as the Universe, and was not, in his origin, the extra-cosmic God he is now.

57.  The literal signification of the word is, among the Eastern Occultists of the North, a circular wind, whirlwind; but in this instance, it is a term to denote the ceaseless and eternal Cosmic Motion; or rather the Force that moves it, which Force is tacitly accepted as the Deity but never named. It is the eternal Karana, the ever-acting Cause.

58.  Anugita forms part of the Asvamedha Parvan of the “Mahabharata.” The translator of the Bhagavatgita, edited by Max Muller, regards it as a continuation of the Bhagavatgita. Its original is one of the oldest Upanishads.

59.  This shows the modern metaphysicians, added to all past and present Haegels, Berkeleys, Schopenhauers, Hartmanns, Herbert Spencers, and even the modern Hylo-Idealists to boot, no better than the pale copyists of hoary antiquity.

60.  It is the knowledge of this law that permits and helps the Arhat to perform his Siddhis, or various phenomena, such as disintegration of matter, the transport of objects from one place to another.

61.  These are ancient Commentaries attached with modern Glossaries to the Stanzas, as the Commentaries in their symbolical language are usually as difficult to understand as the Stanzas themselves.

62.  In a polemical scientific work, “The Modern Genesis,” the author, the Rev. W. B. Slaughter, criticising the position assumed by the astronomers, asks: — “It is to be regretted that the advocates of this (nebular) theory have not entered more largely into the discussion of it (the beginning of rotation). No one condescends to give us the rationale of it. How does the process of cooling and contracting the mass impart to it a rotatory motion?” The question is amply treated in the Addendum. It is not materialistic science that can ever solve it. “Motion is eternal in the unmanifested, and periodical in the manifest,” says an Occult teaching. It is “when heat caused by the descent of flame into primordial matter causes its particles to move, which motion becomes Whirlwind.” A drop of liquid assumes a spheroidal form owing to its atoms moving around themselves in their ultimate, unresolvable, and noumenal essence; unresolvable for physical science, at any rate.

63.  Which makes ten, or the perfect number applied to the “Creator,” the name given to the totality of the Creators blended by the Monotheists into One, as the “Elohim,” Adam Kadmon or Sephira — the Crown — are the androgyne synthesis of the 10 Sephiroth, who stand for the symbol of the manifested Universe in the popularised Kabala. The esoteric Kabalists, however, following the Eastern Occultists, divide the upper Sephirothal triangle from the rest (or Sephira, Chochmah and Binah), which leaves seven Sephiroth. As for Svabhavat, the Orientalists explain the term as meaning the Universal plastic matter diffused through Space, with, perhaps, half an eye to the Ether of Science. But the Occultists identify it with “father-mother” on the mystic plane. (Vide supra.)

64.  “In union with the Spirit and the Voice,” referring to the Abstract Thought and concrete Voice, or the manifestation thereof, the effect of the Cause. Adam Kadmon or Tetragrammaton is the Logos in the Kabala; therefore this triad answers in the latter to the highest triangle of Kether, Chochmah and Binah, the last a female potency and at the same time the male Jehovah, as partaking of the nature of Chochmah, or the male Wisdom.

65.  The Secret Doctrine teaches that the Sun is a central Star and not a planet. Yet the Ancients knew of and worshipped seven great gods, excluding the Sun and Earth. Which was that “Mystery God” they set apart? Of course not Uranus, discovered only by Herschel in 1781. But could it not be known by another name? Says the author of “Maconnerie Occulte”: — “Occult Sciences having discovered through astronomical calculations that the number of the planets must be seven, the ancients were led to introduce the Sun into the scale of the celestial harmonies, and make him occupy the vacant place. Thus, every time they perceived an influence that pertained to none of the six planets known, they attributed it to the Sun. The error only seems important, but was not so in practical results, if the ancient astrologers replaced Uranus by the Sun, which is a central Star relatively motionless, turning only on its axis and regulating time and measure; and which cannot be turned aside from its true functions.” . . . . . . The nomenclature of the days of the week is thus faulty. “The Sun-Day ought to be Uranus-day (Urani dies, Urandi),” adds the learned writer, Ragon.

66.  Planetary System.

67.  “The Sun rotates on his axis always in the same direction in which the planets revolve in their respective orbits,” astronomy teaches us.

68.  This Essence of Cometary matter, Occult Science teaches, is totally different from any of the chemical or physical characteristics with which modern science is acquainted. It is homogeneous in its primitive form beyond the Solar Systems, and differentiates entirely once it crosses the boundaries of our Earth’s region, vitiated by the atmospheres of the planets and the already compound matter of the interplanetary stuff, heterogeneous only in our manifested world.

69.  Manas — the Mind-Principle, or the human Soul.

70.  Buddhi — the divine Soul.

71.  Very similar ideas in Mr. W. Mattieu Williams’ “The Fuel of the Sun;” in Dr. C. William Siemens’ “On the Conservation of Solar Energy” (Nature, XXV., p. 440-444, March 9, 1882); and also in Dr. P. Martin Duncan’s “Address of the President of the Geological Society,” London, May, 1877.

72.  See “Comparative Geology,” by Alexander Winchell, LL.D., p. 56.

73.  When we speak of Neptune it is not as an Occultist but as a European. The true Eastern Occultist will maintain that, whereas there are many yet undiscovered planets in our system, Neptune does not belong to it, his apparent connection with our sun and the influence of the latter upon Neptune notwithstanding. This connection is mayavic, imaginary, they say.

74.  These are the four “Immortals” which are mentioned in Atharva Veda as the “Watchers” or Guardians of the four quarters of the sky (see ch. lxxvi., 1-4, et seq.).

75.  “Conflict between Religion and Science.” — Draper, pp. 132 and 133.

76.  Les Mysteres de l’Horoscope, p. XI.

77.  The difference between the “Builders,” the Planetary Spirits, and the Lipika must not be lost sight of. (See Nos. 5 and 6 of this Commentary.)

78.  See A. P. Sinnett’s “Esoteric Buddhism,” 5th annotated edition, pp. 171-173.

79.  The first and greatest Reformer who founded the “Yellow-Caps,” Gyalugpas. He was born in the year 1355 A.D. in Amdo, and was the Avatar of Amitabha, the celestial name of Gautama Buddha.

80.  Mr. Subba Row seems to identify him with, and to call him, the Logos. (See his four lectures on the “Bhagavadgita” in the Theosophist.)

81.  In 1882 the President of the Theosophical Society, Col. Olcott, was taken to task for asserting in one of his lectures that Electricity is matter. Such, nevertheless, is the teaching of the Occult Doctrine. “Force,” “Energy,” may be a better name for it, so long as European Science knows so little about its true nature; yet matter it is, as much as Ether is matter, since it is as atomic, though several removes from the latter. It seems ridiculous to argue that because a thing is imponderable to Science, therefore it cannot be called matter. Electricity is “immaterial” in the sense that its molecules are not subject to perception and experiment; yet it may be — and Occultism says it is — atomic; therefore it is matter. But even supposing it were unscientific to speak of it in such terms, once Electricity is called in Science a source of Energy, Energy simply, and a Force — where is that Force or that Energy which can be thought of without thinking of matter? Maxwell, a mathematician and one of the greatest authorities upon Electricity and its phenomena, said, years ago, that Electricity was matter, not motion merely. “If we accept the hypothesis that the elementary substances are composed of atoms we cannot avoid concluding that electricity also, positive as well as negative, is divided into definite elementary portions, which behave like atoms of electricity.” (Helmholtz, Faraday Lecture, 1881). We will go further than that, and assert that Electricity is not only Substance but that it is an emanation from an Entity, which is neither God nor Devil, but one of the numberless Entities that rule and guide our world according to the eternal Law of Karma. (See the Addendum to this Book.)

82.  It is well known that sand, when placed on a metal plate in vibration assumes a series of regular curved figures of various descriptions. Can Science give a complete explanation of this fact?

83.  The numbers 3, 5, and 7 are prominent in speculative masonry, as shown in “Isis.” A mason writes: — “There are the 3, 5, and 7 steps to show a circular walk. The three faces of 3, 3; 5, 3; and 7, 3; etc., etc. Sometimes it comes in this form — 753/2 = 376.5 and 7635/2 = 3817.5 and the ratio of 20612/6561 feet for cubit measure gives the Great Pyramid measures,” etc., etc. Three, five and seven are mystical numbers, and the last and the first are as greatly honoured by Masons as by the Parsis — the triangle being a symbol of Deity everywhere. (See the Masonic Cyclopedia, and “Pythagorean Triangle,” Oliver.) As a matter of course, doctors of divinity (Cassel, for instance) show the Zohar explaining and supporting the Christian trinity (!). It is the latter, however, that had its origin from the of the Heathen, in the Archaic Occultism and Symbology. The three strides relate metaphysically to the descent of Spirit into matter, of the Logos falling as a ray into the Spirit, then into the Soul, and finally into the human physical form of man, in which it becomes Life.

84.  Ormazd is the Logos, the “First Born” and the Sun.

85.  This was the symbol of the “Holy of Holies,” the 3 and the 4 of sexual separation. Nearly every one of the 22 Hebrew letters are merely phallic symbols. Of the two letters — as shown above — one, the ayin, is a negative female letter, symbolically an eye; the other a male letter, tza, a fish-hook or a dart.

86.  We are told by a Kabalist, who in a work not yet published contrasts the Kabala and Zohar with Aryan Esotericism, that “The Hebrew clear, short, terse and exact modes far and beyond measure surpass the toddling word-talk of the Hindus — just as by parallelisms the Psalmist says, ‘My mouth speaks with my tongue, I know not thy numbers’ (lxxi., 15). . . . The Hindu Glyph shows by its insufficiency in the large admixture of adventitious sides the same borrowed plumage that the Greeks (the lying Greeks) had, and that Masonry has: which in the rough monosyllabic (and apparent) poverty of the Hebrew, shows the latter to have come down from a far more remote antiquity than any of these, and to have been the source (!?), or nearer the old original source than any of them.” This is entirely erroneous. Our learned brother and correspondent judges apparently the Hindu religious systems by their Shastras and Puranas, probably the latter, and in their modern translation moreover, which is disfigured out of all recognition, by the Orientalists. It is to their philosophical systems that one has to turn, to their esoteric teaching, if he would make a point of comparison. No doubt the symbology of the Pentateuch and even of the New Testament, comes from the same source. But surely the Pyramid of Cheops, whose measurements are all found repeated by Professor Piazzi Smythe in Solomon’s alleged and mythical temple, is not of a later date than the Mosaic books? Hence, if there is any such great identity as claimed, it must be due to servile copying on the part of the Jews, not on that of the Egyptians. The Jewish glyphs — and even their language, the Hebrew — are not original. They are borrowed from the Egyptians, from whom Moses got his Wisdom; from the Coptic, the probable kinsman, if not parent, of the old Phoenician and from the Hyksos, their (alleged) ancestors, as Josephus shows in his “Against Apion,” I., 25. Aye; but who are the Hyksos shepherds? And who the Egyptians? History knows nothing of the question, and speculates and theorizes out of the depths of the respective consciousnesses of her historians. (See Isis Unveiled, vol. II., p. 430-438.) “Khamism, or old Coptic,” says Bunsen, “is from Western Asia, and contains some germ of the Semitic, thus bearing witness to the primitive cognate unity of the Aryan and Semitic races”; and he places the great events in Egypt 9,000 years B.C. The fact is that in archaic Esotericism and Aryan thought we find a grand philosophy, whereas in the Hebrew records we find only the most surprising ingenuity in inventing apotheoses for phallic worship and sexual theogony.

87.  It may be asked, as also the writer has not failed to ask, “Who is there to ascertain the difference in that motion, since all nature is reduced to its primal essence, and there can be no one — not even one of the Dhyani-Chohans, who are all in Nirvana — to see it?” The answer to this is: “Everything in Nature has to be judged by analogy. Though the highest Deities (Archangels or Dhyani-Buddhas) are unable to penetrate the mysteries too far beyond our planetary system and the visible Kosmos, yet there were great seers and prophets in olden times who were enabled to perceive the mystery of Breath and Motion retrospectively, when the systems of worlds were at rest and plunged in their periodic sleep.”

88.  “The doctrine of the rotation of the earth about an axis is taught by the Pythagorean Hicetas, probably as early as 500 B.C. It was also taught by his pupil Ecphantus, and by Heraclides, a pupil of Plato. The immobility of the Sun and the orbital rotation of the earth were shown by Aristarchus of Samos as early as 281 B.C. to be suppositions accordant with facts of observation. The Heliocentric theory was taught about 150 B.C., by Seleucus of Seleucia on the Tigris. — [It was taught 500 B.C. by Pythagoras. — H.P.B.] It is said also that Archimedes, in a work entitled Psammites, inculcated the Heliocentric theory. The sphericity of the earth was distinctly taught by Aristotle, who appealed for proof to the figure of the Earth’s shadow on the moon in eclipses (Aristotle, De Coelo, lib. II, cap. XIV.). The same idea was defended by Pliny (Nat. Hist., II., 65). These views seem to have been lost from knowledge for more than a thousand years. . . .” (Comparative Geology, Part IV., “Pre-Kantian Speculation,” p. 551, by Alex. Winchell, LL.D.).

89. That Swedenborg, who could not possibly have known anything of the esoteric ideas of Buddhism, came independently near the Occult teaching in his general conceptions, is shown by his essay on the Vortical Theory. In Clissold’s translation of it, quoted by Prof. Winchell, we find the following resume: — “The first Cause is the Infinite or Unlimited. This gives existence to the First Finite or Limited.” (The Logos in His manifestation and the Universe.) “That which produces a limit is analogous to motion. (See first Stanza, supra.) The limit produced is a point, the Essence of which is Motion; but being without parts, this Essence is not actual Motion, but only a connatus to it.” (In our Doctrine it is not a “connatus,” but a change from eternal vibration in the unmanifested, to Vortical Motion in the phenomenal or manifested World). . . “From this first proceed Extension, Space, Figure, and Succession, or Time. As in Geometry a point generates a line, a line a surface, and a surface a solid, so here the connatus of a point tends towards lines, surfaces and solids. In other words, the Universe is contained in ovo in the first natural point . . . the Motion toward which the connatus tends, is circular, since the circle is the most perfect of all figures . . . The most perfect figure of a Motion . . . must be the perpetually circular, that is to say, it must proceed from the centre to the periphery and from the periphery to the centre.” (Quoted from Principia Rerum Naturalia.) This is Occultism pure and simple.

90.  In the Rig Veda we find the names Brahmanaspati and Brihaspati alternating and equivalent to each other. Also see “Brihad Upanishad”; Brihaspati is a deity called “the Father of the gods.”

91.  The four aspects are the body, its life or vitality, and the “Double” of the body, the triad which disappears with the death of the person, and the Kama-rupa which disintegrates in Kama-loka.

92.  Says the scholarly Vossius, in his Theol. Cir. I. VII.: “Though St. Augustine has said that every visible thing in this world had an angelic virtue as an overseer near it, it is not individuals but entire species of things that must be understood, each such species having indeed its particular angel to watch it. He is at one in this with all the philosophers . . . For us these angels are spirits separated from the objects . . . whereas for the philosophers (pagan) they were gods.” Considering the Ritual established by the Roman Catholic Church for “Spirits of the Stars,” the latter look suspiciously like “Gods,” and were no more honoured and prayed to by the ancient and modern pagan rabble than they are now at Rome by the highly cultured Catholic Christians.

93.  Not of course in the sense of the German Materialist Moleschott, who assures us that “Thought is the movement of matter,” a statement of almost unequalled absurdity. Mental states and bodily states are utterly contrasted as such. But that does not affect the position that every thought, in addition to its physical accompaniment (brain-change), exhibits an objective — though to us supersensuously objective — aspect on the astral plane. (See “The Occult World,” pp. 89, 90.)

94.  The views of our present-day scientific thinkers as to the relations between mind and matter may be reduced to two hypotheses. These show that both views equally exclude the possibility of an independent Soul, distinct from the physical brain through which it functions. They are: —

(1.) Materialism, the theory which regards mental phenomena as the product of molecular change in the brain; i.e., as the outcome of a transformation of motion into feeling (!). The cruder school once went so far as to identify mind with a “peculiar mode of motion” (!!), but this view is now happily regarded as absurd by most of the men of science themselves.

(2.) Monism, or the Single Substance Doctrine, is the more subtle form of negative psychology, which one of its advocates, Professor Bain, ably terms “guarded Materialism.” This doctrine, which commands a very wide assent, counting among its upholders such men as Lewis, Spencer, Ferrier, and others, while positing thought and mental phenomena generally as radically contrasted with matter, regards both as equal to the two sides, or aspects, of one and the same substance in some of its conditions. Thought as thought, they say, is utterly contrasted with material phenomena, but it must be also regarded as only “the subjective side of nervous motion” whatever our learned men may mean by this.

95.  Thus the sentence, “Natura Elementorum obtinet revelationem Dei,” (In Clemens’s Stromata, R. IV., para. 6), is applicable to both or neither. Consult the Zends, vol II., p. 228, and Plutarch De Iside, as compared by Layard, Academie des Inscriptions, 1854, Vol. XV.

96.  The Hindus happen to divide the world into seven continents, exoterically as esoterically; and their four cosmic Devas are eight, presiding over the eight points of the compass and not the Continents. (Compare “Chinese Buddhism,” p. 216.)

97.  The Angels recognised by the Roman Catholic Church who correspond to these “Faces” were with the Ophites: — Dragon — Raphael; Lion — Michael; Bull, or ox — Uriel; and Eagle — Gabriel. The four keep company with the four Evangelists, and preface the Gospels.

98.  The Jews, save the Kabalists, having no names for East, West, South, and North, expressed the idea by words signifying before, behind, right and left, and very often confounded the terms exoterically, thus making the blinds in the Bible more confused and difficult to interpret. Add to this the fact that out of the forty-seven translators of King James I. of England’s Bible “only three understood Hebrew, and of these two died before the Psalms were translated” (Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia), and one may easily understand what reliance can be placed on the English version of the Bible. In this work the Douay Roman Catholic version is generally followed.

99.  The Symbol for Sacred and Secret Knowledge was universally in antiquity, a Tree, by which a Scripture or a Record was also meant. Hence the word Lipika, the  “writers” or scribes; the “Dragons,” symbols of wisdom, who guard the Trees of Knowledge; the “golden” apple Tree of the Hesperides; the “Luxuriant Trees” and vegetation of Mount Meru guarded by a Serpent. Juno giving to Jupiter, on her marriage with him, a Tree with golden fruit is another form of Eve offering Adam the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.

100.  The sentence in the Sepher Jezirah and elsewhere: “Achath-Ruach-Elohim-Chiim” denotes the Elohim as androgynous at best, the feminine element almost predominating, as it would read: “One is She the Spirit of the Elohim of Life.” As said above, Echath (or Achath) is feminine, and Echod (or Achod) masculine, both meaning One.

101.  This metaphysical tenet can hardly be better described than Mr. Subba Row’s in “Bhagavadgita” lectures: “Mulaprakriti (the veil of Parabrahmam) acts as the one energy through the Logos (or ‘Eswara’). Now Parabrahmam, is the one essence from which starts into existence a centre of energy, which I shall for the present call the Logos. . . . It is called the Verbum . . . by the Christians, and it is the divine Christos who is eternal in the bosom of his father. It is called Avalokiteshwara by the Buddhists. . . . In almost every doctrine, they have formulated the existence of a centre of spiritual energy which is unborn and eternal, and which exists in the bosom of Parabrahmam at the time of Pralaya, and starts as a centre of conscious energy at the time of Cosmic activity. . . .” For, as the lecturer premised by saying, Parabraham is not this or that, it is not even consciousness, as it cannot be related to matter or anything conditioned. It is not Ego nor is it Non-ego, not even Atma, but verily the one source of all manifestations and modes of existence.

102.  These voluntary re-incarnations are referred to in our Doctrine as Nirmanakayas (the surviving spiritual principles of men).

103.  Sukshma-sarira, “dream-like” illusive body, with which are clothed the inferior Dhyanis of the celestial Hierarchy.

104.  Compare this esoteric tenet with the Gnostic doctrine found in “Pistis-Sophia” (Knowledge = Wisdom), in which treatise Sophia Achamoth is shown lost in the waters of Chaos (matter), on her way to Supreme Light, and Christos delivering and helping her on the right Path. Note well, “Christos” with the Gnostics meant the impersonal principal, the Atman of the Universe, and the Atma within every man’s soul — not Jesus; though in the old Coptic MSS. in the British Museum “Christos” is almost constantly replaced by “Jesus.”

105.  The greatest philosopher of European birth, Imanuel Kant, assures us that such a communication is in no way improbable. “I confess I am much disposed to assert the existence of Immaterial natures in the world, and to place my own soul in the class of these beings. It will hereafter, I know not where, or when, yet be proved that the human soul stands even in this life in indissoluble connection with all immaterial natures in the spirit-world, that it reciprocally acts upon these and receives impressions from them.” (Traume eines Geistersehers, quoted by C. C. Massey, in his preface to Von Hartmann’s “Spiritismus.”)

106.  E.g., all that modern physiological research in connection with psychological problems has, and owing to the nature of things, could have shown, is, that every thought, sensation, and emotion is attended with a re-marshalling of the molecules of certain nerves. The inference drawn by scientists of the type of Buchner, Vogt, and others, that thought is molecular motion, necessitates a complete abstraction being made of the fact of our subjective consciousness.

107.  See “Le Livre des Morts,” by Paul Pierret; “Le Jour de ‘Viens a nous’ . . . c’est le jour ou Osiris a dit au Soleil: Viens! Je le vois rencontrant le Soleil dans l’Amenti.” (Chap. xvii., p. 61.) The Sun here stands for the Logos (or Christos, or Horus) as central Essence synthetically, and as a diffused essence of radiated Entities, different in substance, but not in essence. As expressed by the Bhagavadgita lecturer, “it must not be supposed that the Logos is but a single centre of energy manifested from Parabrahmam; there are innumerable other centres . . . and their number is almost infinite in the bosom of Parabrahmam.” Hence the expressions, “The Day of Come to us” and “The Day of Be with us,” etc. Just as the square is the Symbol of the Four sacred Forces or Powers — Tetraktis — so the Circle shows the boundary within the Infinity that no man can cross, even in spirit, nor Deva nor Dhyan Chohan. The Spirits of those who “descend and ascend” during the course of cyclic evolution shall cross the “iron-bound world” only on the day of their approach to the threshold of Paranirvana. If they reach it — they will rest in the bosom of Parabrahmam, or the “Unknown Darkness,” which shall then become for all of them Light — during the whole period of Mahapralaya, the “Great Night,” namely, 311,040,000,000,000 years of absorption in Brahm. The day of “Be-With-Us” is this period of rest or Paranirvana. See also for other data on this peculiar expression, the day of “Come-To-Us,” The Funerary Ritual of the Egyptians, by Viscount de Rouge. It corresponds to the Day of the Last Judgment of the Christians, which has been sorely materialised by their religion.

108.  This stanza is translated from the Chinese text, and the names, as the equivalents of the original terms, are preserved. The real esoteric nomenclature cannot be given, as it would only confuse the reader. The Brahmanical doctrine has no equivalent to these. Vach seems, in many an aspect, to approach the Chinese Kwan-yin, but there is no regular worship of Vach under this name in India, as there is of Kwan-Yin in China. No exoteric religious system has ever adopted a female Creator, and thus woman was regarded and treated, from the first dawn of popular religions, as inferior to man. It is only in China and Egypt that Kwan-Yin and Isis were placed on a par with the male gods. Esotericism ignores both sexes. Its highest Deity is sexless as it is formless, neither Father nor Mother; and its first manifested beings, celestial and terrestrial alike, become only gradually androgynous and finally separate into distinct sexes.

109.  The “Theosophist” of February, 1887, p. 305, first lecture on the Bhagavadgita.

110.  Says the lecturer on p. 306: “Evolution is commenced by the intellectual energy of the Logos, not merely on account of the potentialities locked up in Mulaprakriti. This light of the Logos is the link . . . between objective matter and the subjective thought of Eswara (or Logos). It is called in several Buddhist books Fohat. It is the one instrument with which the Logos works.”

111.  Madhya is said of something whose commencement and end are unknown, and Para means infinite. These expressions all relate to infinitude and to division of time.

112.  From the Sanskrit Laya, the point of matter where every differentiation has ceased.

113.  “Fohat” has several meanings. (See Stanza V., Commentary et infra). He is called the “Builder of the Builders,” the Force that he personifies having formed our Septenary chain.

114.  The shades of our pre-historical ancestors might return the compliment to modern physicists, now that new discoveries in chemistry have led Mr. Crookes, F.R.S., to admit that Science is yet a thousand leagues from the knowledge of the compound nature of the simplest molecule. From him we learn that such a thing as a really molecule entirely homogeneous is terra incognita in chemistry. “Where are we to draw the line?” he asks; “is there no way out of this perplexity? Must we either make the elementary examinations so stiff that only 60 or 70 candidates can pass, or must we open the examination doors so wide that the number of admissions is limited only by the number of applicants?” And then the learned gentleman gives striking instances. He says: “Take the case of yttrium. It has its definite atomic weight, it behaved in every respect as a simple body, an element, to which we might indeed add, but from which we could not take away. Yet this yttrium, this supposed homogeneous whole, on being submitted to a certain method of fractionation, is resolved into portions not absolutely identical among themselves, and exhibiting a gradation of properties. Or take the case of didymium. Here was a body betraying all the recognised characters of an element. It had been separated with much difficulty from other bodies which approximated closely to it in their properties, and during this crucial process it had undergone very severe treatment and very close scrutiny. But then came another chemist, who, treating this assumed homogeneous body by a peculiar process of fractionation, resolved it into the two bodies praseodymium and neodymium, between which certain distinctions are perceptible. Further, we even now have no certainty that neodymium and praseodymium are simple bodies. On the contrary, they likewise exhibit symptoms of splitting up. Now, if one supposed element on proper treatment is thus found to comprise dissimilar molecules, we are surely warranted in asking whether similar results might not be obtained in other elements, perhaps in all elements, if treated in the right way. We may even ask where the process of sorting-out is to stop — a process which of course pre-supposes variations between the individual molecules of each species. And in these successive separations we naturally find bodies approaching more and more closely to each other.” (Presidential address before the Royal Society of Chemists, March, 1888.)

115.  This is again corroborated by the same man of science in the same lecture, who quotes Clerk Maxwell, saying “that the elements are not absolutely homogeneous.” He writes: “It is difficult to conceive of selection and elimination of intermediate varieties, for where can these eliminated molecules have gone to, if, as we have reason to believe, the hydrogen, &c. of the fixed stars is composed of molecules identical in all respects with our own.” And he adds: “In the first place we may call in question this absolute molecular identity, since we have hitherto had no means for coming to a conclusion save the means furnished by the spectroscope, while it is admitted that, for accurately comparing and discriminating the spectra of two bodies, they should be examined under identical states of temperature, pressure, and all other physical conditions. We have certainly seen, in the spectrum of the sun, rays which we have not been able to identify.”

116.  “Each world has its Fohat, who is omnipresent in his own sphere of action. But there are as many Fohats as there are worlds, each varying in power and degree of manifestations. The individual Fohats make one Universal, Collective Fohat — the aspect-Entity of the one absolute Non-Entity, which is absolute Be-Ness, ‘SAT.’ “Millions and billions of worlds are produced at every Manvantara” — it is said. Therefore there must be many Fohats, whom we consider as conscious and intelligent Forces. This, no doubt, to the disgust of scientific minds. Nevertheless the Occultists, who have good reasons for it, consider all the forces of Nature as veritable, though supersensuous, states of Matter; and as possible objects of perception to Beings endowed with the requisite senses.

117.  Indeed, if such an imaginary Chemist happened to be intuitional, and would for a moment step out of the habitual groove of strictly “Exact Science,” as the Alchemists of old did, he might be repaid for his audacity.

118.  He who would allotropise sluggish oxygen into Ozone to a measure of alchemical activity, reducing it to its pure essence (for which there are means), would discover thereby a substitute for an “Elixir of Life” and prepare it for practical use.

119.  A period of 311,040,000,000,000 years, according to Brahminical calculations.

120.  See “Scientific Arena,” a monthly Journal devoted to current philosophical teaching and its bearing upon the religious thought of the Age. New York: A. Wilford Hall, Ph.D., LL.D., Editor. (1886, July, August, and September.)

121.  Such, we believe, is the name applied by Mr. Keely, of Philadelphia, the inventor of the famous “Motor” — destined, as his admirers have hoped, to revolutionise the motor power of the world — to what he again calls the “Etheric Centres.”

122.  The moon is dead only so far as regards her inner “principles” — i.e., psychically and spiritually, however absurd the statement may seem. Physically, she is only as a semi-paralysed body may be. She is aptly referred to in Occultism as the “insane mother,” the great sidereal lunatic.

123.  The instance of Uranus and Neptune, whose satellites, four and one respectively, revolved, it was thought, in their orbits from East to West, whereas all the other satellites rotate from West to East, is a very good one, as showing how unreliable are all a priori speculations even when based on the strictest mathematical analysis. The famous hypothesis of the formation of our Solar System out of the nebulous rings, put forward by Kant and Laplace, was chiefly based on the above fact that all the planets revolved in the same direction. It is on this fact, mathematically demonstrated during the time of Laplace, that this great astronomer, calculating on the theory of probabilities, offered to bet three milliards to one that the next planet discovered would have in its system the same peculiarity of motion Eastward. The immutable laws of scientific mathematics got “worsted by further experiments and observations,” it was said. This idea of Laplace’s mistake prevails generally to this day; but some astronomers have finally succeeded in demonstrating (?) that the mistake had been in accepting Laplace’s assertion for a mistake; and steps to correct it without attracting general attention to the bevue are now being taken. Many such unpleasant surprises are in store for hypotheses of even a purely physical character. What further disillusions, then, may there not be in questions of a transcendental, Occult Nature? At any rate, Occultism teaches that the so-called “reverse rotation” is a fact.

124.  The Occultists, having most perfect faith in their own exact records, astronomical and mathematical, calculate the age of Humanity, and assert that the latter (as separate sexes) has existed in this Round just 18,618,727 years, as the Brahmanical teachings and even some Hindu calendars declare.

125.  “Esoteric Buddhism” and “Man.”

126. See the note which follows the Commentary on the preceding page, and also the summary of the Stanzas in the Proem, page 22.

127. Many more planets are enumerated in the Secret Books than in modern astronomical works.

128. As we are proceeding here from Universals to Particulars, instead of using the inductive or Aristotelean method, the numbers are reversed. Spirit is enumerated the first instead of seventh, as is usually done, but, in truth, ought not to be done.

129. or as usually named after the manner of Esoteric Buddhism and others: 1, Atma; 2, Buddhi (or Spiritual Soul); 3, Manas (Human Soul); 4, Kama Rupa (Vehicle of Desires and Passions); 5, Linga Sarira; 6, Prana; 7, Sthula Sarira.

130. Says the author of “Modern Science and Modern Thought,” Mr. Samuel Laing: “The astronomical conclusions are theories based on data so uncertain, that while in some cases they give results incredibly short, like that of 15 millions of years for the whole past process of formation of the solar system, in others they give results almost incredibly long, as in that which supposes the moon to have been thrown off when the Earth was rotating in three hours, while the utmost actual retardation obtained from observation would require 600 millions of years to make it rotate in twenty-three hours instead of twenty-four” (p. 48). And if physicists persist, why should the chronology of the Hindus be laughed at as exaggerated?

131. She is the satellite, undeniably, but this does not invalidate the theory that she has given to the Earth all but her corpse. For Darwin’s theory to hold good, besides the hypothesis just upset (vide last footnote), other still more incongruous speculations had to be invented. The Moon, it is said, has cooled nearly six times as rapidly as the Earth (Winchell’s “World-Life”): “The Moon, if the earth is 14,000,000 years old since its incrustation, is only eleven and two thirds millions of years old since that stage . . .” etc. And if our Moon is but a splash from our Earth, why can no similar inference be established for the Moons of other planets? The Astronomers “do not know.” Why should Venus and Mercury have no satellites, and by what, when they exist, were they formed? Because, we say, science has only one key — the key of matter — to open the mysteries of nature withal, while occult philosophy has seven keys and explains that which science fails to see. Mercury and Venus have no satellites but they had “parents” just as the earth had. Both are far older than the Earth and, before the latter reaches her seventh Round, her mother Moon will have dissolved into thin air, as the “Moons” of the other planets have, or have not, as the case may be, since there are planets which have several moons — a mystery again which no OEdipus of astronomy has solved

132. Kosa (kosha) is “Sheath” literally, the sheath of every principle.

133. “Life.”

134. The astral body or Linga Sarira.

135. Sthula-Upadhi, or basis of the principle.

136. Buddhi.

137. We are not concerned with the other Globes in this work except incidentally.

138. With the exception of course of all the planets which come fourth in number, as our earth, the moon, etc., etc. Copies of all the letters ever received or sent, with the exception of a few private ones — “in which there was no teaching” the Master says — are with the writer. As it was her duty, in the beginning, to answer and explain certain points not touched upon, it is more than likely that notwithstanding the many annotations on these copies, the writer, in her ignorance of English and her fear of saying too much, may have bungled the information given. She takes the whole blame for it upon herself in any and every case. But it is impossible for her to allow students to remain any longer under erroneous impressions, or to believe that the fault lies with the esoteric system.

139. In this same letter the impossibility is distinctly stated: — . . . “Try to understand that you are putting me questions pertaining to the highest initiation; that I can give you (only) a general view, but that I dare not nor will I enter upon details . . .” wrote one of the Teachers to the author of “Esoteric Buddhism.”

140. “Lucifer,” May, 1888.

141. Occultism divides the periods of Rest (Pralaya) into several kinds; there is the individual pralaya of each Globe, as humanity and life pass on to the next; seven minor Pralayas in each Round; the planetary Pralaya, when seven Rounds are completed; the Solar Pralaya, when the whole system is at an end; and finally the Universal Maha — or Brahma — Pralaya at the close of the “Age of Brahma.” These are the three chief pralayas or “destruction periods.” There are many other minor ones, but with these we are not concerned at present.

142. We are forced to use here the misleading word “Men,” and this is a clear proof of how little any European language is adapted to express these subtle distinctions.

It stands to reason that these “Men” did not resemble the men of to-day, either in form or nature. Why then, it may be asked, call them “Men” at all? Because there is no other term in any Western language which approximately conveys the idea intended. The word “Men” at least indicates that these beings were “manus,” thinking entities, however they differed in form and intellection from ourselves. But in reality they were, in respect of spirituality and intellection, rather “gods” than “Men.”

The same difficulty of language is met with in describing the “stages” through which the Monad passes. Metaphysically speaking, it is of course an absurdity to talk of the “development” of a Monad, or to say that it becomes “Man.” But any attempt to preserve metaphysical accuracy of language in the use of such a tongue as the English would necessitate at least three extra volumes of this work, and would entail an amount of verbal repetition which would be wearisome in the extreme. It stands to reason that a Monad cannot either progress or develop, or even be affected by the changes of states it passes through. It is not of this world or plane, and may be compared only to an indestructible star of divine light and fire, thrown down on to our Earth as a plank of salvation for the personalities in which it indwells. It is for the latter to cling to it; and thus partaking of its divine nature, obtain immortality. Left to itself the Monad will cling to no one; but, like the “plank,” be drifted away to another incarnation by the unresting current of evolution.

143. The term “Man epoch” is here used because of the necessity of giving a name to that fourth kingdom which follows the animal. But in truth the “Man” on Globe A during the First Round is no Man, but only his prototype or dimensionless image from the astral regions.

144. “Physical” here means differentiated for cosmical purposes and work; that “physical side,” nevertheless, if objective to the apperception of beings from other planes, is yet quite subjective to us on our plane.

145. Vide Conclusion in Part II. of this Book.

146. Nature never repeats herself, therefore the anthropoids of our day have not existed at any time since the middle of the Miocene period; when, like all cross breeds, they began to show a tendency, more and more marked as time went on, to return to the type of their first parent, the black and yellow gigantic Lemuro-Atlantean. To search for the “Missing Link” is useless. To the scientists of the closing sixth Root-race, millions and millions of years hence, our modern races, or rather their fossils, will appear as those of small insignificant apes — an extinct species of the genus homo.

147. These “Elementals” will become human Monads, in their turn, only at the next great planetary Manvantara.

148. Such anthropoids form an exception because they were not intended by Nature, but are the direct product and creation of “senseless” man. The Hindus give a divine origin to the apes and monkeys because the men of the Third Race were gods from another plane who had become “senseless” mortals. This subject had already been touched upon in “Isis Unveiled” twelve years ago as plainly as was then possible. On pp. 278-279, the reader is referred “to the Brahmins, if he would know the reason of the regard they have for the monkeys. For then he (the reader) would perhaps learn — were the Brahman to judge him worthy of an explanation — that the Hindu sees in the ape but what Manu desired he should: the transformation of species most directly connected with that of the human family, a bastard branch engrafted on their own stock before the final perfection of the latter. He might learn, further, that in the eyes of the educated ‘heathen’ the spiritual or inner man is one thing, and his terrestrial physical casket another. That physical nature, the great combination of physical correlations of forces, ever creeping onward towards perfection, has to avail herself of the material at hand; she models and remodels as she proceeds, and finishing her crowning work in man, presents him alone as a fit tabernacle for the overshadowing of the divine Spirit.”

Moreover, a German scientific work is mentioned in a footnote on the same page. It says that a Hanoverian scientist had recently published a Book entitled “Ueber die Auflosung der Arten durch Naturliche Zucht-wahl,” in which he shows, with great ingenuity, that Darwin was wholly mistaken in tracing man back to the ape. On the contrary, he maintains that it is the ape which is evolved from man. He shows that, in the beginning, mankind were morally and physically the types and prototypes of our present Race, and of our human dignity, by their beauty of form, regularity of feature, cranial development, nobility of sentiments, heroic impulses, and grandeur of ideal conception. This is a purely Brahmanic, Buddhistic and Kabalistic philosophy. The Book is copiously illustrated with diagrams, tables, etc. It asserts that the gradual debasement and degradation of man, morally and physically, can be readily traced throughout the ethnological transformation down to our time. And, as one portion has already degenerated into apes, so the civilized man of the present day will at last, under the action of the inevitable law of necessity, be also succeeded by like descendants. If we may judge of the future by the actual Present, it certainly does seem possible that so unspiritual and materialistic a body should end as Simia rather than as Seraphs. But though the apes descend from man, it is certainly not the fact that the human Monad, which has once reached the level of humanity, ever incarnates again in the form of an animal.

149. The Natures of the seven hierarchies or classes of Pitris and Dhyan Chohans which compose our nature and Bodies are here meant.

150. And if this is found clashing with that other statement which shows the animal later than man, then the reader is asked to bear in mind that the placental mammal only is meant. In those days there were animals of which zoology does not even dream in our own; and the modes of reproduction were not identical with the notions which modern physiology has upon the subject. It is not altogether convenient to touch upon such questions in public, but there is no contradiction or impossibility in this whatever.

151. It was, as we shall see, at this period — during the highest point of civilization and knowledge, as also of human intellectuality, of the fourth, Atlantean Race — that, owing to the final crisis of physiologico-spiritual adjustment of the races, humanity branched off into its two diametrically opposite paths: the right- and the left-hand paths of knowledge or of Vidya. “Thus were the germs of the White and the Black Magic sown in those days. The seeds lay latent for some time, to sprout only during the early period of the Fifth (our Race).” (Commentary.)

152. Explaining Kabalistic views, the author of the “New Aspects of Life” says of the Fallen Angels that, “According to the symbolical teaching, Spirit, from being simply a functionary agent of God, became volitional in its developed and developing action; and, substituting its own will for the Divine desire in its regard, so fell. Hence the Kingdom and reign of Spirits and spiritual action, which flow from and are the product of Spirit-volition, are outside, and contrasted with, and in contradiction to the Kingdom of Souls and Divine action.” So far, so good; but what does the Author mean by saying, “When man was created, he was human in constitution, with human affections, human hopes and aspirations. From this state he fell — into the brute and savage”? This is diametrically opposite to our Eastern teaching, and even to the Kabalistic notion so far as we understand it, and to the Bible itself. This looks like Corporealism and Substantialism colouring positive philosophy, though it is rather hard to feel quite sure of the Author’s meaning (see p. 235). A fall, however, “from the natural into the supernatural and the animal” — supernatural meaning the purely spiritual in this case — means what we suggest.

153. On the authority of Irenaeus, of Justin Martyr and the “Codex” itself, Dunlap shows that the Nazarenes regarded “Spirit” as a female and Evil Power in its connection with our Earth. (Dunlap: “Sod,” the Son of the Man, p. 52).

154. Fetahil is identical with the host of the Pitris who “created Man” as only a “shell.” He was, with the Nazarenes, the king of light, and the creator; but in this instance he is the unlucky Prometheus, who fails to get hold of the Living Fire necessary for the formation of the divine Soul, as he is ignorant of the secret name, the ineffable or incommunicable name of the Kabalists.

155. The spirit of Matter and Concupiscence; “Kamarupa” minus “Manas,” Mind.

156. See Franck’s “Codex Nazaraeus,” and Dunlap’s “Sod, the Son of the Man.”

157. Codex Nazaraeus, ii., 233.

158. This Mano of the Nazarenes strangely resembles the Hindu Manu, the Heavenly Man of the “Rig Vedas.”

159. “I am the true Vine, and my father is the husbandman.” (John xv., 1.)

160. With the Gnostics, Christ, as well as Michael who is identical with him in some respects, was the “Chief of the AEons.”

161. Codex Nazaraeus, i., 135.

162. Ibid.

163. See the Cosmogony of Pherecydes.

164. They are found, however, in the Chaldean Book of Numbers.

165. The astral light stands in the same relation to Akasa and Anima Mundi, as Satan stands to the Deity. They are one and the same thing seen from two aspects: the spiritual and the psychic — the super-ethereal or connecting link between matter and pure spirit, and the physical. See for the difference between nous, the higher divine wisdom, and psyche, the lower and terrestrial (St. James iii. v. 15-17). Vide “Demon est Deus inversus,” Part II. of this volume.

166. Ilda-Baoth is a compound name made up of Ilda, , “a child,” and Baoth; both from the egg, and Baoth, “chaos,” emptiness, void, or desolation; or the child born in the egg of Chaos, like Brahma.

167. Jehovah’s connection with the moon in the Kabala is well known to students.

168. About the Nazarenes see Isis, Vol. II. p. 131 and 132; the true followers of the true Christos were all Nazarenes and Christians, and were the opponents of the later Christians.

169. Vide supra, the diagram of the lunar ring of seven worlds, where, as in our or any other chain, the upper worlds are spiritual, while the lowest, whether Moon, Earth, or any planet, is dark with matter.

170. The reader is reminded that Kosmos often means in our Stanzas only our own Solar System, not the Infinite Universe.

171. This is purely astronomical.

172. The Arupa or “formless,” there where form ceases to exist, on the objective plane.

173. The word “Archetypal” must not be taken here in the sense that the Platonists gave to it, i.e., the world as it existed in the Mind of the Deity; but in that of a world made as a first model, to be followed and improved upon by the worlds which succeed it physically — though deteriorating in purity.

174. These are the four lower planes of Cosmic Consciousness, the three higher planes being inaccessible to human intellect as developed at present. The seven states of human consciousness pertain to quite another question.

175. To see and appreciate the difference — the immense gulf that separates terrestrial matter from the finer grades of supersensuous matter — every astronomer, every chemist and physicist ought to be a psychometer, to say the least; he ought to be able to sense for himself that difference in which he now refuses to believe. Mrs. Elizabeth Denton, one of the most learned, and also one of the most materialistic and sceptical women of her age — the wife of Professor Denton, the well-known American geologist and the author of “The Soul of Things” — was, nevertheless, one of the most wonderful psychometers some years ago. This is what she described in one of her experiments; with a particle of a meteorite placed on her forehead, in an envelope, the lady, not being aware of what it contained, said:

“What a difference between that which we recognise as matter here and that which seems like matter there! In the one, the elements are so coarse and so angular, I wonder that we can endure it all, much more that we can desire to continue our present relations to it; in the other, all the elements are so refined, they are so free from those great, rough angularities, which characterize the elements here, that I can but regard that as by so much the more than this, the real existence.” (Vol. III. p. 345-6.)

176. When carefully analysed and reflected upon, this will be found as scientific as Science could make it, even at our late period.

177. The seven fundamental transformations of the globes or heavenly spheres, or rather of their constituent particles of matter, is described as follows: (1) The homogeneous; (2) the aeriform and radiant (gaseous); (3) Curd-like (nebulous); (4) Atomic, Ethereal (beginning of motion, hence of differentiation); (5) Germinal, fiery, (differentiated, but composed of the germs only of the Elements, in their earliest states, they having seven states, when completely developed on our earth); (6) Four-fold, vapoury (the future Earth); (7) Cold and depending (on the Sun for life and light).

178. This cannot be so very unscientific, since Descartes thought also that “the planets rotate on their axes because they were once lucid stars, the centres of Vortices.”

179. Let those who doubt this statement explain the mystery of the extraordinary knowledge possessed by the ancients — alleged to have developed from lower and animal-like savages, the cave-men of the Palaeolithic age — on any other equally reasonable grounds. Let them turn to such works as those of Vitruvius Pollio of the Augustan age, on architecture, for instance, in which all the rules of proportion are those taught anciently at initiations, if he would acquaint himself with the truly divine art, and understand the deep esoteric significance hidden in every rule and law of proportion. No man descended from a Palaeolithic cave-dweller could ever evolve such a science unaided, even in millenniums of thought and intellectual evolution. It is the pupils of those incarnated Rishis and Devas of the third Root Race, who handed their knowledge from one generation to another, to Egypt and Greece with its now lost canon of proportion; as it is the Disciples of the Initiates of the 4th, the Atlanteans, who handed it over to their Cyclopes, the “Sons of Cycles” or of the “Infinite,” from whom the name passed to the still later generations of Gnostic priests. “It is owing to the divine perfection of those architectural proportions that the Ancients could build those wonders of all the subsequent ages, their Fanes, Pyramids, Cave-Temples, Cromlechs, Cairns, Altars, proving they had the powers of machinery and a knowledge of mechanics to which modern skill is like a child’s play, and which that skill refers to itself as the ‘works of hundred-handed giants.’ ” (See “Book of God,” Kenealy.) Modern architects may not altogether have neglected those rules, but they have superadded enough empirical innovations to destroy those just proportions. It is Vitruvius who gave to posterity the rules of construction of the Grecian temples erected to the immortal gods; and the ten books of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio on Architecture, of one, in short, who was an initiate, can only be studied esoterically. The Druidical circles, the Dolmen, the Temples of India, Egypt and Greece, the Towers and the 127 towns in Europe which were found “Cyclopean in origin” by the French Institute, are all the work of initiated Priest-Architects, the descendants of those primarily taught by the “Sons of God,” justly called “The Builders.” This is what appreciative posterity says of those descendants. “They used neither mortar nor cement, nor steel nor iron to cut the stones with; and yet they were so artfully wrought that in many places the joints are not seen, though many of the stones, as in Peru, are 18 ft. thick, and in the walls of the fortress of Cuzco there are stones of a still greater size.” (Acosta, vi., 14.) “Again, the walls of Syene, built 5,400 years ago, when that spot was exactly under the tropic, which it has now ceased to be, were so constructed that at noon, at the precise moment of the solar solstice, the entire disc of the Sun was seen reflected on their surface — a work which the united skill of all the astronomers of Europe would not now be able to effect.” — (Kenealy, “Book of God.”)

180. That which was natural in the sight of primitive man has become only now miracle to us; and that which was to him a miracle could never be expressed in our language.

181. There is no nation in the world in which the feeling of devotion or of religious mysticism is more developed and prominent than in the Hindu people. See what Max Muller says of this idiosyncracy and national feature in his works. This is direct inheritance from the primitive conscious men of the Third Race.

182. This relates to the Cosmic principles.

183. The seven creative Rishis now connected with the constellation of the Great Bear

184. Indeed, the Microprosopus — who is, philosophically speaking, quite distinct from the unmanifested eternal Logos “one with the Father,” — has been finally brought, by centuries of incessant efforts, of sophistry and paradoxes, to be considered as one with Jehovah, or the one living God (!), whereas Jehovah is no better than Binah, a female Sephiroth. This fact cannot be too frequently impressed upon the reader.

185. The Microprosopus is, as just said, the Logos manifested, and of such there are many.

186. Sephira is the Crown, kether, in the abstract principle only, as a mathematical x (the unknown quantity). On the plane of differentiated nature she is the female counterpart of Adam Kadmon — the first Androgyne. The Kabala teaches that the word “Fiat Lux” (Genesis ch. i.) referred to the formation and evolution of the Sephiroth, and not to light as opposed to darkness. Rabbi Simeon says: “Oh companions, companions, man as an emanation was both man and woman, Adam Kadmon verily, and this is the sense of the words ‘Let there be Light, and it was Light.’ And this is the two-fold man.” (Auszuge aus dem Zohar, pp. 13-15.)

187. See next footnote. These elements of Fire, Air, etc., are not our compound elements.

188. This “Consciousness” has no relation to our consciousness. The consciousness of the “One manifested,” if not absolute, is still unconditioned. Mahat (the Universal Mind) is the first production of the Brahma-Creator, but also of the Pradhana (undifferentiated matter).

189. It is worthy of notice that, while rejecting as a superstition of Occultism, and religion too, the theory of substantial and invisible Beings called Angels, Elementals, etc. — without, of course, having ever looked into the philosophy of these incorporeal Entities, or thought over them — modern chemistry, owing to observation and discovery, should have unconsciously been forced to adopt and recognize the same ratio of progression and order in the evolution of chemical atoms as Occultism does, both for its Dhyanis and Atoms — analogy being its first law. As seen above, the very first group of the Rupa Angels is quaternary, an element being added to each in descending order. So are the atoms, adopting the phraseology of chemistry, monatomic, diatomic, and tetratomic, progressing downwards. Let it be remembered that Fire, Water, and Air, or the “Elements of primary Creation” so-called, are not the compound Elements they are on Earth, but noumenal homogeneous Elements — the Spirits thereof. Then follow the septenary groups or hosts. Placed on parallel lines in a diagram with Atoms, the Natures of those Beings would be seen to correspond in their downward scale of progression to composite elements in a mathematically identical manner, as to analogy. This refers, of course, only to diagrams made by the Occultists; for were the scale of Angelic Beings to be placed on a parallel line with the scale of the chemical atoms of Science — from the hypothetical Helium down to Uranium — they would of course be found to differ. For these have, as correspondents on the Astral plane, only the four lowest orders — the higher three principles in the atom, or rather molecule or chemical element, being perceptible only to the initiated Dangma’s eye. But then, if Chemistry desired to find itself on the right path, it would have to correct its tabular arrangement by that of the Occultists — which it may refuse to do. In Esoteric Philosophy, every physical particle corresponds to and depends on its higher noumenon — the Being to whose essence it belongs; and above as below, the Spiritual evolves from the Divine, the psycho-mental from the Spiritual — tainted from its lower plane by the astral — the whole animate and (seemingly) inanimate Nature evolving on parallel lines, and drawing its attributes from above as well as from below.

190. The number seven does not imply only seven Entities, but seven groups or Hosts, as explained before. The highest group, the Asuras born in Brahma’s first body — which turned into “Night” — are septenary, i.e., divided like the Pitris into seven classes, three of which are arupa (bodiless) and four with bodies. (See Vishnu Purana, Book I.) They are in fact more truly our Pitris (ancestors) than the Pitris who projected the first physical men. (See Book II.)

191. One of the explanations of the real though hidden meaning of this Egyptian religious glyph is easy. The crocodile is the first to await and meet the devouring fires of the morning sun, and very soon came to personify the solar heat. When the sun arose, it was like the arrival on earth and among men “of the divine soul which informs the Gods.” Hence the strange symbolism. The mummy donned the head of a crocodile to show that it was a soul arriving from the earth.

192. A world when called “a higher world” is not higher by reason of its location, but because it is superior in quality or essence. Yet such a world is generally understood by the profane as “Heaven,” and located above our heads.

193. Paracelsus calls them the Flagae; the Christians, the “Guardian Angels;” the Occultist, the “Ancestors, the Pitris;” they are the sixfold Dhyan Chohans, having the six spiritual Elements in the composition of their bodies — in fact, men, minus the physical body.

194. The materialists and the evolutionists of the Darwinian school would be ill-advised to accept the newly worked-out theories of Professor Weissmann, the author of Beitrage zur Descendenzlehre, with regard to one of the two mysteries of Embryology, as above specified, which he seems to have solved — as he thinks. For, when it is solved, Science will have stepped over into the domain of the truly occult, and stepped for ever out of the realm of transformation, as taught by Darwin. The two are irreconcileable, from the standpoint of materialism. Regarded from that of the Occultists, it solves all these mysteries. Those who are not acquainted with the new discovery of Professor Weissman — at one time a fervent Darwinist — ought to hasten to repair the deficiency. The German Embryologist-philosopher shows — thus stepping over the heads of the Greek Hippocrates and Aristotle, right back into the teachings of the old Aryans — one infinitesimal cell, out of millions of others at work in the formation of an organism, determining alone and unaided, by means of constant segmentation and multiplication, the correct image of the future man (or animal) in its physical, mental, and psychic characteristics. It is that cell which impresses on the face and form of the new individual the features of the parents or of some distant ancestor; it is that cell again which transmits to him the intellectual and mental idiosyncracies of his sires, and so on. This Plasm is the immortal portion of our bodies — simply through the process of successive assimilations. Darwin’s theory, viewing the embryological cell as an essence or the extract from all other cells, is set aside; it is incapable of accounting for hereditary transmission. There are but two ways of explaining the mystery of heredity; either the substance of the germinal cell is endowed with the faculty of crossing the whole cycle of transformations that lead to the construction of a separate organism and then to the reproduction of identical germinal cells; or, those germinal cells do not have their genesis at all in the body of the individual, but proceed directly from the ancestral germinal cell passed from father to son through long generations. It is the latter hypothesis that Weissmann accepted and has worked upon; and it is to this cell that he traces the immortal portion of man. So far, so good; and when this almost correct theory is accepted, how will Biologists explain the first appearance of this everlasting cell? Unless man “grew” like the “immortal Topsy,” and was not born at all, but fell from the clouds, how was that embryological cell born in him?

195. Science, dimly perceiving the truth, may find Bacteria and other infinitesimals in the human body, and see in them but occasional and abnormal visitors to which diseases are attributed. Occultism — which discerns a life in every atom and molecule, whether in a mineral or human body, in air, fire or water — affirms that our whole body is built of such lives, the smallest bacteria under the microscope being to them in comparative size like an elephant to the tiniest infusoria.

196. The learned and very philosophical author of “New Aspects of Life” would impress upon his reader that the Nephesh chaiah (living soul), according to the Hebrews, “proceeded from, or was produced by, the infusion of the Spirit or Breath of Life into the quickening body of man, and was to supersede and take the place of that spirit in the thus constituted self, so that the spirit passed into, was lost sight of, and disappeared in the living Soul.” The human body, he thinks, ought to be viewed as a matrix in which, and from which, the Soul (which he seems to place higher than the spirit) is developed — considered functionally and from the standpoint of activity, the Soul stands undeniably higher in this finite and conditioned world of Maya — the Soul, he says, “is ultimately produced from the animated body of man.” Thus the author identifies “Spirit” (Atma) simply with “the breath of life.” The Eastern Occultists will demur to this statement, for it is based on the erroneous conception that Prana and Atma or Jivatma are one and the same thing. The author supports the argument by showing that with the ancient Hebrews, Greeks and even Latins, Ruach, Pneuma and Spiritus — with the Jews undeniably, and with the Greeks and Romans very probably — meant Wind; the Greek word Anemos (wind) and the Latin Anima “Soul” having a suspicious relation.

This is very far fetched. A legitimate battle-field for deciding this question is hardly to be found, since Mr. Pratt seems to be a practical, matter-of-fact metaphysician, a kind of Kabalist-Positivist, and the Eastern metaphysicians, especially the Vedantins, are all Idealists. The Occultists are also of the extreme esoteric Vedantin school, and they call the One Life (Parabrahm), the Great Breath and the Whirlwind; but they disconnect the seventh principle entirely from matter or any relation to, or connection with it.

197. Vide in Part II., Book II., “The Seven Souls of Man,” the divisions made respectively by Messrs. Gerald Massey and Franz Lambert.

198. Another suggestive analogy between the Aryan or Brahmanical and the Egyptian esotericism. The former call the Pitris “the lunar ancestors” of men; and the Egyptians made of the Moon-God, Taht-Esmun, the first human ancestor. This “moon-god” “expressed the Seven nature-powers that were prior to himself, and were summed up in him as his seven souls, of which he was the manifestor as the eighth one (hence the eighth sphere). The seven rays of the Chaldean Heptakis or Iao, on the Gnostic stones indicate the same septenary of souls.” . . . “The first form of the mystical seven was seen to be figured in heaven, by the seven large stars of the Great Bear, the constellation assigned by the Egyptians to the Mother of Time, and of the seven elemental powers.” (See The Seven Souls, etc.) As well known to every Hindu, this same constellation represents in India the Seven Rishis, and as such is called Riksha, and Chitra-Sikhandinas.

199. In the oldest systems we find the Moon always male. Thus Soma is, with the Hindus, a kind of sidereal Don Juan, a “King,” and the father, albeit illegitimate, of Buddha — Wisdom, which relates to Occult Knowledge, a wisdom gathered through a thorough acquaintance with lunar mysteries including those of sexual generation. (See “Holy of Holies.”)

200. If instead of being taught in Sunday Schools useless lessons from the Bible, the armies of the ragged and the poor were taught Astrology — so far, at any rate, as the occult properties of the Moon and its hidden influences on generation are concerned, then there would be little need to fear increase of the population nor to resort to the questionable literature of the Malthusians for its arrest. For it is the Moon and her conjunctions that regulate conceptions, and every astrologer in India knows it. During the previous and the present races, at least at the beginning of this one, those who indulged in marital relations during certain lunar phases that made those relations sterile were regarded as sorcerers and sinners. But even now those sins of old, based on the Occult knowledge and the abuse of it, would appear preferable to the crimes of to-day, which are perpetrated because of the complete ignorance of, and disbelief in all such occult influences.

201. Several inimical critics are anxious to prove that no seven principles of man nor septenary constitution of our chain were taught in our earlier volume, “Isis Unveiled.” Though in that work the doctrine could only be hinted at, there are many passages, nevertheless, in which the septenary constitution of both man and chain is openly mentioned. Speaking of the Elohim in Vol. II., page 420, it is said: “They remain over the seventh heaven (or spiritual world), for it is they who, according to the Kabalists, formed in succession the six material worlds, or rather, attempts at worlds that preceded our own, which, they say, is the seventh.” Our globe is, of course, upon the diagram representing the “chain,” the seventh and the lowest; though, as the evolution on these globes is cyclic, it is the fourth in descending the arc of matter. And again, on page 367, Vol. II., it is written: “In the Egyptian notions, as in those of all other faiths founded on philosophy, man was not merely . . . an union of soul and body; he was a trinity when spirit was added to it; and besides that doctrine made him consist of body, astral form, or shadow, the animal soul, the higher soul, and terrestrial intelligence and a sixth principle, etc., etc. — the seventh — Spirit.” So clearly are these principles mentioned, that even in the Index, one finds on page 683: — “Six principles of man” — the seventh being the synthesis of the six, and not a principle but a ray of the Absolute All — in strict truth.

202. Creation is an incorrect word to use, as no religion, not even the sect of the Visishta Adwaitees in India — one which anthropomorphises even Parabrahmam — believes in creation out of nihil as Christians and Jews do, but in evolution out of preexisting materials.

203. The so-called “Spirits” that may occasionally possess themselves of the bodies of mediums are not the Monads or Higher Principles of disembodied personalities. Such a “Spirit” can only be either an Elementary, or — a Nirmanakaya.

204. On p. 340-351 (Genesis of the Soul) in the “New Aspects of Life,” the Author states the Kabalistic teaching: “They held that, functionally, Spirit and Matter of corresponding opacity and density tended to coalesce; and that the resultant created Spirits, in the disembodied state, were constituted on a scale in which the differing opacities and transparencies of Elemental or uncreated Spirit were reproduced. And that these Spirits in the disembodied state attracted, appropriated, digested and assimilated Elemental Spirit and Elemental Matter whose condition was conformed to their own.” “They therefore taught that there was a wide difference in the condition of created Spirits; and that in the intimate association between the Spirit-world and the world of Matter, the more opaque Spirits in the disembodied state were drawn towards the more dense parts of the material world, and therefore tended towards the centre of the Earth, where they found the conditions most suited to their state; while the more transparent Spirits passed into the surrounding aura of the planet, the most rarified finding their home in its satellite.”

This relates exclusively to our Elementary Spirits, and has naught to do with either the Planetary, Sidereal, Cosmic or Inter-Etheric Intelligent Forces or “Angels” as they are termed by the Roman Church. The Jewish Kabalists, especially the practical Occultists who dealt with ceremonial magic, busied themselves solely with the spirits of the Planets and the “Elementals” so-called. Therefore this covers only a portion of the Esoteric Teaching.

205. The possibility of the “Soul” (i.e., the eternal Spiritual Ego) dwelling in the unseen worlds, while its body goes on living on Earth, is a pre-eminently occult doctrine, especially in Chinese and Buddhist philosophy. See “Isis Unveiled,” vol. i., p. 602, for an illustration. Many are the Soulless men among us, for the occurrence is found to take place in wicked materialists as well as in persons “who advance in holiness and never turn back.” (See ibid and also “Isis,” vol. ii., p. 369.)

206. This identity between the Spirit and its material “double” (in man it is the reverse) explains still better the confusion, alluded to already in this work, made in the names and individualities, as well as the numbers, of the Rishis and the Prajapatis; especially between those of the Satyayuga and the Mahabharatan period. It also throws additional light on what the Secret Doctrine teaches with regard to the Root and the Seed Manus (see Book ii. “On the primitive Manus of humanity”). Not only those progenitors of our mankind, but every human being, we are taught, has its prototype in the Spiritual Spheres; which prototype is the highest essence of his seventh principle. Thus the seven Manus become 14, the Root Manu being the Prime Cause, and the “Seed-Manu” its effect; and when the latter reach from Satyayuga (the first stage) to the heroic period, these Manus or Rishis become 21 in number.

207. The Egyptian allegory in the “Book of the Dead” already mentioned, the hymn that relates to the reward “of the Soul,” is as suggestive of our Septenary Doctrine as it is poetical. The deceased is allotted a piece of land in the field of Aanroo, wherein the Manes, the deified shades of the dead, glean, as the harvest they have sown by their actions in life, the corn seven cubits high, which grows in a territory divided into 14 and 7 portions. This corn is the food on which they live and prosper, or that will kill them, in Amenti, the realm of which the Aanroo field is a domain. For, as said in the hymn, (see chap. xxxii. 9) the deceased is either destroyed therein, or becomes pure spirit for the Eternity, in consequence of the “Seven times seventy-seven lives” passed or to be passed on Earth. The idea of the corn reaped as the “fruit of our actions” is very graphic.

208. The three-tongued flame of the four wicks corresponds to the four unities and the three Binaries of the Sephirothal tree (see Commentary on Stanza VI.).

209. Useless to repeat again that the terms given here are Sanskrit translations; for the original terms, unknown and unheard of in Europe, would only puzzle the reader more, and serve no useful purpose.

210. The formation of the “living Soul” or man, would render the idea more clearly. “A Living Soul” is a synonym of man in the Bible. These are our seven “Principles.”

211. Nephesch is the “breath of (animal) life” breathed into Adam, the man of dust; it is consequently the Vital Spark, the informing element. Without Manas, or what is miscalled in Levi’s diagram Nephesch instead of Manas, “the reasoning Soul,” or mind, Atma-Buddhi are irrational on this plane and cannot act. It is Buddhi which is the plastic mediator, not Manas, “the intelligent medium between the upper Triad and the lower Quaternary.” But there are many such strange and curious transformations to be found in the Kabalistic works — a convincing proof that its literature has become a sad jumble. We do not accept the classification except in this one particular, in order to show the points of agreement.

212. Eliphas Levi has, whether purposely or otherwise, confused the numbers: with us his No. 2 is No. 1. (Spirit); and by making of Nephesch both the plastic mediator and Life, he thus makes in reality only six principles, because he repeats the first two.

213. Esotericism teaches the same. But Manas is not Nephesch; nor is the latter the astral, but the 4th principle, if also the 2nd prana, for Nephesch is the “breath of life” in man, as in beast or insect, of physical, material life, which has no spirituality in it.

214. The introductory chapters of Genesis were never meant to represent even a remote allegory of the creation of our Earth. They embrace a metaphysical conception of some indefinite period in the eternity, when successive attempts were being made by the law of evolution at the formation of universes. The idea is plainly stated in the Zohar: “There were old worlds, which perished as soon as they came into existence, were formless, and were called Sparks. Thus, the smith, when hammering the iron, lets the sparks fly in all directions. The sparks are the primordial worlds, which could not continue because the Sacred Aged (Sephira) had not as yet assumed its form (of androgyne, or opposite sexes) of King and Queen (Sephira and Kadmon), and the Master was not yet at his work.” See Zohar, “Idra Suta,” Book iii., p. 292, b. The Supreme consulting with the Architect of the world — his Logos — about creation. (“Isis Unveiled,” vol. ii., p. 421.)

215. Read in Isis, vol. ii., pp. 297-303, the doctrine of the Codex Nazaraeus — every tenet of our teaching is found there under a different form and allegory.

216. The word “Sin” is curious, but has a particular Occult relation to the Moon, besides being its Chaldean equivalent.

217. Is Pasteur unconsciously taking the first step toward Occult Science in declaring that, if he dared express his full idea upon this subject, he would say that the Organic cells are endowed with a vital potency that does not cease its activity with the cessation of a current of Oxygen towards them, and does not, on that account, break off its relations with life itself, which is supported by the influence of that gas? “I would add,” goes on Pasteur, “that the evolution of the germ is accomplished by means of complicated phenomena, among which we must class processes of fermentation”; and life, according to Claude Bernard and Pasteur, is nothing else than a process of fermentation. That there exist in Nature Beings or Lives that can live and thrive without air, even on our globe, was demonstrated by the same men of science. Pasteur found that many of the lower lives, such as Vibriones, and some microbes and bacteria, could exist without air, which, on the contrary, killed them. They derived the oxygen necessary for their multiplication from the various substances that surround them. He calls them AErobes, living on the tissues of our matter when the latter has ceased to form a part of an integral and living whole (then called very unscientifically by science “dead matter”), and Anaerobes. The one kind binds oxygen, and contributes vastly to the destruction of animal life and vegetable tissues, furnishing to the atmosphere materials which enter later on into the constitution of other organisms; the other destroys, or rather annihilates finally, the so-called organic substance; ultimate decay being impossible without their participation. Certain germ-cells, such as those of yeast, develop and multiply in air, but when deprived of it, they will adapt themselves to life without air and become ferments, absorbing oxygen from substances coming in contact with them, and thereby ruining the latter. The cells in fruit, when lacking free oxygen, act as ferments and stimulate fermentation. “Therefore the vegetable cell manifests in this case its life as an anaerobic being. Why, then, should an organic cell form in this case an exception”? asks Professor Bogolubof. Pasteur shows that in the substance of our tissues and organs, the cell, not finding sufficient oxygen for itself, stimulates fermentation in the same way as the fruit-cell, and Claude Bernard thought that Pasteur’s idea of the formation of ferments found its application and corroboration in the fact that Urea increases in the blood during strangulation: Life therefore is everywhere in the Universe, and, Occultism teaches us, it is also in the atom. Also see infra, at the close of this Section.

218. It is a Vedic teaching that “there are three Earths corresponding to three Heavens, and our Earth (the fourth) is called Bhumi.” This is the explanation given by our exoteric Western Orientalists. But the esoteric meaning and allusion to it in the Vedas is that it refers to our planetary chain, three “Earths” on the descending arc, and three “heavens” which are the three Earths or globes also, only far more ethereal, on the ascending or spiritual arc: by the first three we descend into matter, by the other three we ascend into Spirit; the lower one, Bhumi, our Earth, forming the turning point, so to say, and containing potentially as much of Spirit as it does of Matter. We shall treat of this hereafter.

219. Professor Zollner’s theory has been more than welcomed by several Scientists — who are Spiritualists — Professors Butlerof and Wagner, of St. Petersburg, for instance.

220. “The giving reality to abstractions is the error of Realism. Space and Time are frequently viewed as separated from all the concrete experiences of the mind, instead of being generalizations of these in certain aspects.” (Bain, Logic, Part II., p. 389.)

221. The order in which these Elements are placed above is the correct one for esoteric purposes and in the Secret Teachings. Milton was right when he spoke of the “Powers of Fire, Air, Water, Earth”; the Earth, such as we know it now, had no existence before the 4th Round, hundreds of million years ago, the commencement of our geological Earth. The globe was “fiery, cool and radiant as its ethereal men and animals during the first Round,” says the Commentary, uttering a contradiction or paradox in the opinion of our present Science; “luminous and more dense and heavy during the second Round; watery during the Third!” Thus are the elements reversed.

222. If we had to frame our conclusions according to the data furnished to us by the geologists, then we would say that there was no real water — even during the Carboniferous period. We are told that gigantic masses of carbon, which existed formerly spread in the atmosphere as Carbonic Acid, were absorbed by plants, while a large proportion of that gas was mixed in the water. Now, if this be so, and we have to believe that all the Carbonic Acid which went to compose those plants that formed bituminous coal, lignite, etc., and went towards the formation of limestone, and so on, that all this was at that period in the atmosphere in gaseous form, then, there must have been seas and oceans of liquid carbonic acid? But how then could the carboniferous period be preceded by the Devonian and Silurian ages — those of Fishes and Molluscs — on that assumption? Barometric pressure, moreover, must have exceeded several hundred times the pressure of our present atmosphere. How could organisms, even so simple as those of certain fishes and molluscs, stand that? There is a curious work by Blanchard, on the Origin of Life, wherein he shows some strange contradictions and confusions in the theories of his colleagues, and which we recommend to the reader’s attention.

223. Eliphas Levi shows it very truly “a force in Nature,” by means of which “a single man who can master it . . . might throw the world into confusion and transform its face”; for it is the “great Arcanum of transcendent Magic.” Quoting the words of the great Western Kabalist in their translated form (see The Mysteries of Magic, by A. E. Waite), we may explain them perhaps the better by the occasional addition of a word or two to show the difference between Western and Eastern explanations of the same subject. The Author says of the great Magic Agent — “This ambient and all-penetrating fluid, this ray detached from the (Central or ‘Spiritual’) Sun’s splendour . . . fixed by the weight of the atmosphere (?!) and the power of central attraction . . . the Astral Light, this electromagnetic ether, this vital and luminous caloric, is represented on ancient monuments by the girdle of Isis which twines round two poles . . . and in ancient theogonies by the serpent devouring its own tail, emblem of prudence and of Saturn” — emblem of infinity, immortality, and Kronos — “Time” — not the god Saturn or the planet. “It is the winged dragon of Medea, the double serpent of the caduceus, and the tempter of Genesis; but it is also the brazen snake of Moses encircling the Tau . . . lastly, it is the devil of exoteric dogmatism, and is really the blind force (it is not blind, and Levi knew it), which souls must conquer in order to detach themselves from the chains of Earth; ‘for if they should not,’ they will be absorbed by the same power which first produced them and will return to the central and eternal fire.” This great archaeus is now discovered by, and only for one man — Mr. J. W. Keeley, of Philadelphia. For others, however, it is discovered, yet must remain almost useless. “So far shalt thou go. . . .”

All the above is as practical as it is correct, save one error, which we will explain in the text further on. Eliphas Levi commits a great blunder in always identifying the Astral Light with what we call Akasa. What it really is will be given in Part II. of Vol. II.

224. The student has to note, moreover, that the Purana is a dualistic system, not evolutionary, and that, in this respect, far more will be found, from an esoteric standpoint, in Sankhya, and even in the Manava-dharma-Sastra, however much the latter differs from the former.

225. In the Sankhya philosophy, the seven Prakritis or “productive productions” are Mahat, Ahamkara, and the five tanmatras. See “Sankhya-karika,” III., and the Commentary thereon.

226. No use to say so to the Hindus, who know their Puranas by heart, but very useful to remind our Orientalists and those Westerns who regard Wilson’s translations as authoritative, that in his English translation of the Vishnu Purana he is guilty of the most ludicrous contradictions and errors. So on this identical subject of the seven Prakritis or the seven zones of Brahma’s egg, the two accounts differ totally. In Vol. 1, page 40, the egg is said to be externally invested by seven envelopes — Wilson comments: “by Water, Air, Fire, Ether, and Ahamkara” (which last word does not exist in the Sanskrit texts); and in vol. v., p. 198, of the same Vishnu Purana it is written, “in this manner were the seven forms of nature (Prakriti) reckoned from Mahat to Earth” (?). Between Mahat or Maha-Buddhi and “Water, etc.,” the difference is very considerable.

227. According to the great metaphysician Hegel also. For him Nature was a perpetual becoming. A purely esoteric conception. Creation or Origin, in the Christian sense of the term, is absolutely unthinkable. As the above-quoted thinker said: “God (the Universal Spirit) objectivises himself as Nature, and again rises out of it.”

228. Speaking of it in his Preface to the “History of Magic” Eliphas Levi says: “It is through this Force that all the nervous centres secretly communicate with each other; from it — that sympathy and antipathy are born; from it — that we have our dreams; and that the phenomena of second sight and extra-natural visions take place. . . . . Astral Light, acting under the impulsion of powerful wills, destroys, coagulates, separates, breaks, gathers in all things. . . . God created it on that day when he said: Fiat Lux, and it is directed by the Egregores, i.e., the chiefs of the souls who are the spirits of energy and action.” Eliphas Levi ought to have added that the astral light, or primordial substance, if matter at all, is that which, called Light, Lux, esoterically explained, is the body of those Spirits themselves, and their very essence. Our physical light is the manifestation on our plane and the reflected radiance of the Divine Light emanating from the collective body of those who are called the “Lights” and the “Flames.” But no other Kabalist has ever had the talent of heaping up one contradiction on the other, of making one paradox chase another in the same sentence and in such flowing language, as Eliphas Levi. He leads his reader through the most lovely, gorgeously blooming valleys, to strand him after all on a desert and barren rocky island.

229. The French savants Arnaud, Gautier, and Villiers, have found in the saliva of living men the same venomous alkaloid as in that of the toad, the salamander, the cobra, and the trigonocephalus of Portugal. It is proven that venom of the deadliest kind, whether called ptomaine, or leucomaine, or alkaloid, is generated by living men, animals, and plants. The same savant, Gautier, discovered an alkaloid in the fresh meat of an ox and in its brains, and a venom which he calls Xanthocreatinine similar to the substance extracted from the poisonous saliva of reptiles. It is the muscular tissues, as being the most active organ in the animal economy, that are suspected of being the generators or factors of venoms, having the same importance as carbonic acid and urea in the functions of life, which venoms are the ultimate products of inner combustion. And though it is not yet fully determined whether poisons can be generated by the animal system of living beings without the participation and interference of microbes, it is ascertained that the animal does produce venomous substances in its physiological or living state.

230. It might be supposed that these “fiery lives” and the microbes of science are identical. This is not true. The “fiery lives” are the seventh and highest subdivision of the plane of matter, and correspond in the individual with the One Life of the Universe, though only on that plane. The microbes of science are the first and lowest sub-division on the second plane — that of material prana (or life). The physical body of man undergoes a complete change of structure every seven years, and its destruction and preservation are due to the alternate function of the fiery lives as “destroyers” and “builders.” They are “builders” by sacrificing themselves in the form of vitality to restrain the destructive influence of the microbes, and, by supplying the microbes with what is necessary, they compel them under that restraint to build up the material body and its cells. They are “destroyers” also when that restraint is removed and the microbes, unsupplied with vital constructive energy, are left to run riot as destructive agents. Thus, during the first half of a man’s life (the first five periods of seven years each) the “fiery lives” are indirectly engaged in the process of building up man’s material body; life is on the ascending scale, and the force is used in construction and increase. After this period is passed the age of retrogression commences, and, the work of the “fiery lives” exhausting their strength, the work of destruction and decrease also commences.

An analogy between cosmic events in the descent of spirit into matter for the first half of a manvantara (planetary as human) and its ascent at the expense of matter in the second half, may here be traced. These considerations have to do solely with the plane of matter, but the restraining influence of the “fiery lives” on the lowest sub-division of the second plane — the microbes — is confirmed by the fact mentioned in the foot-note on Pasteur (vide supra) that the cells of the organs, when they do not find sufficient oxygen for themselves, adapt themselves to that condition and form ferments, which, by absorbing oxygen from substances coming in contact with them, ruin the latter. Thus the process is commenced by one cell robbing its neighbour of the source of its vitality when the supply is insufficient; and the ruin so commenced steadily progresses.

231. Phallic worship has developed only with the loss of the keys to the true meaning of the symbols. It was the last and most fatal turning point from the highway of truth and divine knowledge into the side path of fiction, raised into dogma through human falsification and hierarchic ambition.

232. See the “Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 years ago,” by Auguste le Plongeon, who shows the identity between the Egyptian rites and beliefs and those of the people he describes. The ancient hieratic alphabets of the Maya and the Egyptians are almost identical.

233. Which are in truth seven as shown later, on the authority of the oldest Upanishads.

234.  . . . “The Vedas have a distinct dual meaning — one expressed by the literal sense of the words, the other indicated by the metre and the swara — intonation — which are as the life of the Vedas. . . . Learned pundits and philologists of course deny that swara has anything to do with philosophy or ancient esoteric doctrines; but the mysterious connection between swara and light is one of its most profound secrets.” (T. Subba Row, Five Years of Theosophy, p. 154.)

235. Also called “the Sons of Wisdom,” and of the “Fire-Mist” and the “Brothers of the Sun” in the Chinese records. Si-dzang (Tibet) is mentioned in the MSS. of the sacred library of the province of Fo-Kien, as the great seat of Occult learning from time immemorial, ages before Buddha. The Emperor Yu, the “great” (2,207 years B.C.), a pious mystic and great adept, is said to have obtained his knowledge from the “great teachers of the Snowy Range” in Si-dzang.

236. Nature taken in its abstract sense, cannot be “unconscious,” as it is the emanation from, and thus an aspect (on the manifested plane) of the absolute consciousness. Where is that daring man who would presume to deny to vegetation and even to minerals a consciousness of their own. All he can say is, that this consciousness is beyond his comprehension.

237. “When thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are . . . but enter into thine inner chamber and having shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret.” Matt. vi.). Our Father is within us “in Secret,” our 7th principle, in the “inner chamber” of our Soul perception. “The Kingdom of Heaven” and of God “is within us” says Jesus, not outside. Why are Christians so absolutely blind to the self-evident meaning of the words of wisdom they delight in mechanically repeating?

238. To this the late Mrs. (Dr.) Kingsford, the able translator and compiler of the Hermetic Fragments (see “The Virgin of the World”) remarks in a foot-note; “Dr. Menard observes that in Greek the same word signifies to be born and to become. The idea here is that the material of the world is in its essence eternal, but that before creation or ‘becoming’ it is in a passive and motionless condition. Thus it ‘was’ before being put into operation; now it ‘becomes,’ that is, it is mobile and progressive.” And she adds the purely Vedantic doctrine of the Hermetic philosophy that “Creation is thus the period of activity (Manvantara) of God, who, according to Hermetic thought (or which, according to the Vedantin) has two modes — Activity or Existence, God evolved (Deus explicitus); and Passivity of Being (Pralaya) God involved (Deus implicitus). Both modes are perfect and complete, as are the waking and sleeping states of man. Fichte, the German philosopher, distinguished Being (Seyn) as One, which we know only through existence (Daseyn) as the Manifold. This view is thoroughly Hermetic. The ‘Ideal Forms’ are the archetypal or formative ideas of the Neo-Platonists; the eternal and subjective concepts of things subsisting in the divine mind prior to ‘becoming’ ” (p. 134).

239. The centripetal and the centrifugal forces, which are male and female, positive and negative, physical and spiritual, the two being the one Primordial Force.

240. Occultism teaches that no form can be given to anything, either by nature or by man, whose ideal type does not already exist on the subjective plane. More than this; that no such form or shape can possibly enter man’s consciousness, or evolve in his imagination, which does not exist in prototype, at least as an approximation.

241. This word is explained by Dr. Hartmann from the original texts of Paracelsus before him, as follows. According to this great Rosicrucian: “Mysterium is everything out of which something may be developed, which is only germinally contained in it. A seed is the ‘Mysterium’ of a plant, an egg that of a living bird, etc.”

242. It is only the mediaeval Kabalists who, following the Jewish and one or two Neo-Platonists, applied the term Microcosm to man. Ancient philosophy called the Earth the Microcosm of the Macrocosm, and man the outcome of the two.

243. The Eastern Occultist says — “are guided and informed by the Spiritual Beings” — the Workmen in the invisible worlds and behind the veil of Occult nature, or nature in Abscondito.

244. A frequent expression in the said Fragments, to which we take exception. The Universal Mind is not a Being or “God.”

245.  The Hermetic philosophers called Theoi, gods, Genii and Daimones (in the original texts), those Entities whom we call Devas (gods), Dhyan Chohans, Chitkala (Kwan-yin, the Buddhists call them), and by other names. The Daimones are — in the Socratic sense, and even in the Oriental and Latin theological sense — the guardian spirits of the human race; “those who dwell in the neighbourhood of the immortals, and thence watch over human affairs,” as Hermes has it. In Esoteric parlance, they are called Chitkala, some of which are those who have furnished man with his fourth and fifth Principles from their own essence; and others the Pitris so-called. This will be explained when we come to the production of the complete man. The root of the name is Chiti, “that by which the effects and consequences of actions and kinds of knowledge are selected for the use of the soul,” or conscience the inner Voice in man. With the Yogis, the Chiti is a synonym of Mahat, the first and divine intellect; but in Esoteric philosophy Mahat is the root of Chiti, its germ; and Chiti is a quality of Manas in conjunction with Buddhi, a quality that attracts to itself by spiritual affinity a Chitkala when it develops sufficiently in man. This is why it is said that Chiti is a voice acquiring mystic life and becoming Kwan-Yin.

246. This (teaching) does not refer to Prakriti-Purusha beyond the boundaries of our small universe.

247. The ultimate quiescent state: the Nirvana condition of the seventh Principle.

248. The teaching is all given from our plane of consciousness.

249. Or the “dream of Science,” the primeval really homogeneous matter, which no mortal can make objective in this Race or Round either.

250. “Vishnu in the form of the Solar active energy, neither ever rises nor sets, and is at once, the sevenfold Sun and distinct from it,” says Vishnu Purana (Book II., Chap. 11).

251. “In the same manner as a man approaches a mirror placed upon a stand, beholds in it his own image, so the energy or reflection of Vishnu (the Sun) is never disjoined but remains in the Sun as in a mirror that is there stationed” (“Vishnu Purana”).

252. In “Vishnu” and other Puranas.

253. See the Hermetic “Nature,” “Going down cyclically into matter when she meets ‘heavenly man.’ ”

254. The writers of the above knew perfectly well the physical cause of the tides, of the waves, etc. It is the informing Spirit of the whole Cosmic solar body that is meant here, and which is referred to whenever such expressions are used from the mystic point of view.

255. See Stanzas III. and IV. and the Commentaries thereupon, especially the Comments on Stanza IV. “the Lipika and the four Maharajas,” the agents of Karma.

256. And “Gods” or Dhyanis, too, not only the genii or “guided Forces.”

257. The meaning of this is that as man is composed of all the Great Elements: Fire, Air, Water, Earth and Ether — the elementals which belong respectively to these Elements feel attracted to man by reason of their co-essence. That element which predominates in a certain constitution will be the ruling element throughout life. For instance, if man has a preponderance of the Earthly, gnomic element, the gnomes will lead him towards assimilating metals — money and wealth, and so on. “Animal man is the son of the animal elements out of which his Soul (life) was born, and animals are the mirrors of man,” says Paracelsus (De Fundamento Sapientiae). Paracelsus was cautious, and wanted the Bible to agree with what he said, and therefore did not say all.

258. Cyclic progress in development.

259. The God in man and often the incarnation of a God, a highly Spiritual Dhyan Chohan in him, besides the presence of his own seventh Principle.

260. Now, what “god” is meant here? Not God “the Father,” the anthropomorphic fiction; for that god is the Elohim collectively, and has no being apart from the Host. Besides, such a god is finite and imperfect. It is the high Initiates and Adepts who are meant here by those men “few in number.” And it is precisely those men who believe in “gods” and know no “God,” but one Universal unrelated and unconditioned Deity.

261. The astral light of the Kabalists is very incorrectly translated by some “AEther;” the latter is confused with the hypothetical Ether of Science, and both are referred to by some theosophists as synonymous with Akasa. This is a great mistake.

“A characteristic of Akasa will serve to show how inadequately it is represented by Ether,” writes the author of Rational Refutations, thus unconsciously helping Occultism. “In dimension it is infinite; it is not made up of parts; and colour, taste, smell, and tangibility do not appertain to it. So far forth it corresponds exactly to time, space, Isvara, (“The Lord,” but rather creative potency and soul — anima mundi). Its speciality, as compared therewith, consists in its being the material cause of sound. Except for its being so, one might take it to be one with vacuity” (p. 120.)

It is vacuity, no doubt, especially for Rationalists. At any rate Akasa is sure to produce vacuity in the brain of a materialist. Nevertheless, though Akasa is not that Ether of Science, not even the Ether of the Occultist, who defines the latter as one of the principles of Akasa only, it is as certainly, together with its primary, the cause of sound, only a physical and spiritual, not a material cause by any means. The relations of Ether to Akasa may be defined by applying to both Akasa and Ether the words said of the god in the Vedas, “So himself was indeed (his own) son,” one being the progeny of the other and yet itself. This may be a difficult riddle to the profane, but very easy to understand for any Hindu — though not even a mystic.

262. National Reformer, January 9th, 1887. Article “Phreno-Kosmo-Biology,” by Dr. Lewins.

263. This is Cyclic law, but this law itself is often defied by human stubbornness.

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