Chapter VI
That day the journey began early, and was very protracted. Twice during it they halted at little inns to rest the horses and to obtain what food they could. By the evening they had entered upon the most deserted region of the great forest which was one of the prides of the country. The King’s hunting seat, where he now was, stood in a part of this forest, but in quite another region, a long distance from this wild place where Hilary and his companions now were. Hilary had never been within the forest, as few from the city ever penetrated it except as part of the King’s retinue, and then they only saw such tracts of it as were preserved and in order. Of this wilder region practically little was known, and the spirit of adventure within Hilary made him rejoice to find that their journey led them through this unpopulated district. His curiosity as to their destination was not now very acute, for the experiences of the passing moments were all sufficient. It is true that he was conscious of the great gulf fixed between himself and Fleta. He knew her to be his superior in every respect. He knew not only that he must always be separated from her by their difference in station but that he was more vitally separated from her by their difference in thought—and that even now. But he was made happy by a look of love that plunged deep from her eyes into his own now and again, and he was thrilled to the heart when her hand touched his with a light and delicate pressure that he alone could understand. Ah! that secret understanding which separates lovers from all the rest of the world. How sweet it is! How strange it is, too, for they are overpowered by a mutual sense of sympathy which appears to be a supreme intelligence, giving each the power to look into the other’s heart. Dear moments are they when this is realised, when all life outside the sacred circle in which the two dwell is obscure and dim, while that within is rich, and strong, and sweet. Hilary lived supremely content only in the consciousness of being near this woman whom he loved; for now that he had actually asked her love, and been granted it, nothing else existed for him save that sweet fact. He was indifferent to the hardships, and, indeed, probable dangers, of the journey they were upon, which might have made a more intrepid spirit uneasy; for now he was content to suffer, or even to die, if all conditions were shared with Fleta. All her life could not be shared with him, but all his could be shared with her. When a man reaches this point, and is content to face such a state of things between himself and the woman he loves, he may be reckoned as being in love indeed.
Quite late at night it was when this day’s journey ended, and the splendid horses were really tired out. But a certain point evidently had to be reached, and the postilions pushed on. Fleta at last seemed to grow a little anxious, and several times rose in the carriage to look on ahead; once or twice she inquired of the postilions if they were certain of their way. They answered yes; though how that could be was to Hilary a mystery, for they had been for a long while travelling over mere grass tracts, of which there were many, to his eyes undistinguishable one from the other. But the postilions either had landmarks which he could not detect, or else knew their way very well. At last they stopped; and in the dim light Hilary saw that there was a gate at the side of the track, a gate wide enough to drive through, but of the very simplest construction. It might have defended merely a spot where young trees were planted, or some kind of preserving done; and it was set in a fence of the same character, almost entirely hidden by thick growth of wild shrubs. The Princess Fleta produced from her dress a whistle on which she sounded a clear ringing note, and then everybody sat still and waited. It seemed to Hilary that it was quite a long while that they waited; perhaps it was not really long, but the night was so still, the silence so profound, the feeling of expectancy so strong. He was, for the first time since they started, really very curious as to what would happen next. What did happen at last was this. There was a sound of laughter and footsteps, and presently two figures appeared at the gate; one that of a tall man, the other that of a young, slight girl. The gate was unlocked and thrown wide open, and a moment later the young girl was in the carriage, embracing Fleta with the greatest enthusiasm and delight. Hilary hardly knew how everything happened, but presently the whole party was standing together inside the gate, the carriage had driven in and was out of sight. Then the tall man shut and locked the gate, after which he turned back, and walked on ahead with the young girl at his side, while Hilary followed with Fleta. The moon had risen now, and Hilary could see her beautiful face plainly, wearing on it an unusually gay and happy expression; her lips seemed to smile at her own thoughts. The sweet gladness in her face made Hilary’s heart spring with joy. It could not be rejoining her friends that made her so glad, for they had gone on and left her alone with him.
“Fleta—my princess—no, my Fleta,” he said, “are you happy to be with me? I think you are!”
“Yes, I am happy to be with you—but I am not Fleta.”
“Not Fleta!” echoed Hilary, in utter incredulity.
He stopped, and catching his companion’s hand, looked into her face. She glanced up, and her eyes were full of shy coquetry and ready gaiety.
“I might be her twin sister, might I not, if I am not Fleta herself? Ah! no, Fleta’s fate is to live in a court—mine to live in a forest Live!—no, it is not life!”
What was it in that voice that made his heart grow hot with passion? Fiercely he exclaimed to himself that it was, it must, be Fleta’s voice. No other woman could speak in such tones—no other woman’s words give him such a sense of maddening joy.
“Oh! yes,” he said, “it is life—when one loves, one lives anywhere.”
“Yes, perhaps, when one loves!” was the answer.
“You told me this morning that you loved me, Fleta!” cried Hilary in despair.
“Ah! but I am not Fleta,” was the mocking answer. It sounded like mockery indeed as she spoke. And yet the voice was Fleta’s. There was no doubt of that. He looked, he listened, he watched. The voice, the face, the glorious eyes, were Fleta’s. It was Fleta who was beside him, say she what she might.
They had been following the others all this while, and had now reached a clearing in the wood, where was a garden full of sweet flowers, as Hilary could tell at once by the rich scents that came to him on the night air.
“I am glad we have reached the house,” said his companion, “for I am very tired and hungry. Are not you? I wonder what we shall have for supper. You know this is an enchanted place which we call the palace of surprises. We never know what will happen next. That is why one can enjoy a holiday here as one can enjoy it no where else. At home there is a frightful monotony about the eating and drinking Everything is perfect, of course, but it is always the same. Now here one is fed like a Russian one day, and a Hungarian the next. There is a perpetual novelty about the menus, and yet they are always good. Is not that extraordinary. And oh! the wines, great heavens! what a cellar our sainted father keeps. I can only bless, with all my heart, the long dead founders of his order, who instituted such a system.”
Hilary had regarded his companion with increasing amazement during this speech. Certainly it was unlike Fleta. Was she acting for his benefit? But at the words “sainted father” another idea thrust that one out of his head. What had become of Father Amyot? He had not seen him leave the carriage, or approach the house.
“Oh, your holy companion has gone to his brethren,” said the girl, with a laugh. “They have a place of their own where they torture themselves and mortify the flesh. But they entertain us well, and that is what I care for. We will have a dance to-night. Oh! Hilary, the music here! It is better than that of any band in the world!”
“If you are not, Fleta, how do you know my name?”
“Simple creature! What a question! Why, Fleta has told me all about you. Did you never hear that the princess had a foster-sister, and that none could ever tell which was which, so like were we—and are we! Did you never hear that Fleta’s mother was blonde, and dull, and plain, and that Fleta is like none of her own family? Oh, Hilary, you, fresh from the city, you know nothing!”
A sudden remembrance crossed Hilary’s mind.
“I have heard,” he said, “that no one could tell where Fleta had drawn her beauty from. But I believe you draw it from your own beautiful soul!”
“Ah, you still think me Fleta? I have had some happy hours in the city before now when Fleta has let me play at being a princess. Ah, but the men all thought the princess in a strange, charming, delightful humour on these days. And when next they saw her, that humour was gone, and they were afraid to speak to her. Come in. I am starving!”
They had entered a wide, low doorway, and stood now within the great hall. What a strange hall it was! The floor was covered with the skins of animals, many of them very handsome skins; and great jars held flowering plants, the scent from which made the air rich and heavy. A wood fire burned on the wide hearth, and before it, still in the dress she had travelled in, stood—Fleta.
Yes, Fleta.
The girl who stood at Hilary’s side laughed and clapped her hands as he uttered a cry of amazement, even of horror.
“This is some of your magic, Fleta!” he exclaimed involuntarily.
The Princess turned at his words. She was looking singularly grave and stern; her glance gave Hilary a sense of almost fear.
“No,” she answered in a low, quiet voice that had a tone, as Hilary fancied, of pain, “it is not magic. It is all very natural. This is Adine, my little sister; so like me that I do not know her from myself.”
She drew Adine to her with a gesture which had a protecting tenderness in it. This was the Princess who spoke, queen-like in her kindness. Hilary stood, unable to speak, unable to think, unable to understand. Before him stood two girls—each Fleta. Only by the difference of expression could he detect any difference between them. One threw him back the most coquettish and charming glance, as she went towards her grave sister. He could feel keenly how vitally different the two were. Yet they stood side by side, and though Fleta said “my little sister” there was no outward difference between them. Adine was as tall, as beautiful—and the same in everything!
“Do not be startled,” said Fleta quietly, “you will soon grow used to the likeness.”
“Though I doubt,” added Adine, with a wicked glance from her brilliant eyes, “whether you will ever tell us apart except when we are not together.”
“Come,” said Fleta, “let us go and wash the travel stains off. It is just supper time.”
Fleta talked of travel stains, but as Hilary looked at her queenly beauty, he thought she seemed as fresh as though she had but from this moment come from the hands of her maid. However, the two went away arm in arm, Adine turning at the door to have one last glance of amusement at Hilary’s utterly perplexed face. He was left alone, and he remained standing where he was, without power of thought or motion.
Presently some one came and touched him on the shoulder; this was necessary in order to attract his attention. It was the tall man who had come to the gate to meet them. He was very handsome, and with the most cheerful and good-natured expression; his blue eyes were full of laughter.
“Come,” he said, “come and see your room. I am master of the ceremonies here; apply to me for anything you want—even information! I may, or may not give it, according to the decision of the powers that be. Call me Mark. I have a much longer name, in fact, half-a-dozen much longer ones, and a few titles to boot; but they would not interest you, and in the midst of a forest where nobody has any dignity, a name of one syllable is by far the best.” While he talked on like this, apparently indifferent as to whether Hilary listened or no, he led the way out of the hall and down a wide, carpeted corridor. He opened the last door in this, and ushered Hilary in.
(To be continued.)
THE SCIENCE OF LIFE.
What is Life? Hundreds of the most philosophical minds, scores of learned well-skilled physicians, have asked themselves the question, but to little purpose. The veil thrown over primordial Kosmos and the mysterious beginnings of life upon it, has never been withdrawn to the satisfaction of earnest, honest science. The more the men of official learning try to penetrate through its dark folds, the more intense becomes that darkness, and the less they see, for they are like the treasure-hunter, who went across the wide seas to look for that which lay buried in his own garden.
What is then this Science? Is it biology, or the study of life in its general aspect? No. Is it physiology, or the science of organic function? Neither; for the former leaves the problem as much the riddle of the Sphinx as ever; and the latter is the science of death far more than that of life. Physiology is based upon the study of the different organic functions and the organs necessary to the manifestations of life, but that which science calls living matter, is, in sober truth, dead matter. Every molecule of the living organs contains the germ of death in itself, and begins dying as soon as born, in order that its successor-molecule should live only to die in its turn. An organ, a natural part of every living being, is but the medium for some special function in life, and is a combination of such molecules. The vital organ, the whole, puts the mask of life on, and thus conceals the constant decay and death of its parts. Thus, neither biology nor physiology are the science, nor even branches of the Science of Life, but only that of the appearances of life. While true philosophy stands Œdipus-like before the Sphinx of life, hardly daring to utter the paradox contained in the answer to the riddle propounded, materialistic science, as arrogant as ever, never doubting its own wisdom for one moment, biologises itself and many others into the belief that it has solved the awful problem of existence. In truth, however, has it even so much as approached its threshold? It is not, surely, by attempting to deceive itself and the unwary in saying that life is but the result of molecular complexity, that it can ever hope to promote the truth. Is vital force, indeed, only a “phantom,” as Du-Bois Reymond calls it? For his taunt that “life,” as something independent, is but the asylum ignorantiæ of those who seek refuge in abstractions, when direct explanation is impossible, applies with far more force and justice to those materialists who would blind people to the reality of facts, by substituting bombast and jaw-breaking words in their place. Have any of the five divisions of the functions of life, so pretentiously named—Archebiosis, Biocrosis, Biodiæresis, Biocænosis and Bioparodosis[49], ever helped a Huxley or a Hæckel to probe more fully the mystery of the generations of the humblest ant—let alone of man? Most certainly not. For life, and everything pertaining to it, belongs to the lawful domain of the metaphysician and psychologist, and physical science has no claim upon it. “That which hath been, is that which shall be; and that which hath been is named already—and it is known that it is MAN”—is the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx. But “man” here, does not refer to physical man—not in its esoteric meaning, at any rate. Scalpels and microscopes may solve the mystery of the material parts of the shell of man: they can never cut a window into his soul to open the smallest vista on any of the wider horizons of being.
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Footnote 49:
Or Life-origination, Life-fusion, Life-division, Life-renewal and Life-transmission.
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It is those thinkers alone, who, following the Delphic injunction, have cognized life in their inner selves, those who have studied it thoroughly in themselves, before attempting to trace and analyze its reflection in their outer shells, who are the only ones rewarded with some measure of success. Like the fire-philosophers of the Middle Ages, they have skipped over the appearances of light and fire in the world of effects, and centred their whole attention upon the producing arcane agencies. Thence, tracing these to the one abstract cause, they have attempted to fathom the MYSTERY, each as far as his intellectual capacities permitted him. Thus they have ascertained that (1) the seemingly living mechanism called physical man, is but the fuel, the material, upon which life feeds, in order to manifest itself; and (2) that thereby the inner man receives as his wage and reward the possibility of accumulating additional experiences of the terrestrial illusions called lives.
One of such philosophers is now undeniably the great Russian novelist and reformer, Count Lef N. Tolstoi. How near his views are to the esoteric and philosophical teachings of higher Theosophy, will be found on the perusal of a few fragments from a lecture delivered by him at Moscow before the local Psychological Society.
Discussing the problem of life, the Count asks his audience to admit, for the sake of argument, an impossibility. Says the lecturer:—
Let us grant for a moment that all that which modern science longs to learn of life, it has learnt, and now knows; that the problem has become as clear as day; that it is clear how organic matter has, by simple adaptation, come to be originated from inorganic material; that it is as clear how natural forces may be transformed into feelings, will, thought, and that finally, all this is known, not only to the city student, but to every village schoolboy, as well.
I am aware, then, that such and such thoughts and feelings originate from such and such motions. Well, and what then? Can I, or cannot I, produce and guide such motions, in order to excite within my brain corresponding thoughts? The question—what are the thoughts and feelings I ought to generate in myself and others, remains still, not only unsolved, but even untouched.
Yet it is precisely this question which is the one fundamental question of the central idea of life.
Science has chosen as its object a few manifestations that accompany life; and mistaking[50] the part for the whole, called these manifestations the integral total of life....”
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Footnote 50:
“Mistaking” is an erroneous term to use. The men of science know but too well that what they teach concerning life is a materialistic fiction contradicted at every step by logic and fact. In this particular question science is abused, and made to serve personal hobbies and a determined policy of crushing in humanity every spiritual aspiration and thought. “Pretending to mistake” would be more correct.—H. P. B.
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The question inseparable from the idea of life is not whence life, but how one should live that life: and it is only by first starting with this question that one can hope to approach some solution in the problem of existence.
The answer to the query “How are we to live?” appears so simple to man that he esteems it hardly worth his while to touch upon it.
... One must live the best way one can—that’s all. This seems at first sight very simple and well known to all, but it is by far neither as simple nor as well known as one may imagine....
The idea of life appears to man in the beginning as a most simple and self-evident business. First of all, it seems to him that life is in himself, in his own body. No sooner, however, does one commence his search after that life, in any one given spot of the said body, than one meets with difficulties. Life is not in the hair, nor in the nails; neither is it in the foot nor the arm, which may both be amputated; it is not in the blood, it is not in the heart, and it is not in the brain. It is everywhere and it is nowhere. It comes to this: life cannot be found in any of its dwelling-places. Then man begins to look for life in Time; and that, too, appears at first a very easy matter.... Yet again, no sooner has he started on his chase than he perceives that here also the business is more complicated than he had thought. Now, I have lived fifty-eight years, so says my baptismal church record. But I know that out of these fifty-eight years I slept over twenty. How then? have I lived all these years, or have I not? Deduct the months of my gestation, and those I passed in the arms of my nurse, and shall we call this life, also? Again, out of the remaining thirty-eight years, I know that a good half of that time I slept while moving about; and thus, I could no more say in this case, whether I lived during that time or not. I may have lived a little, and vegetated a little. Here again, one finds that in time, as in the body, life is everywhere, yet nowhere. And now the question naturally arises, whence, then, that life which I can trace to nowhere? Now—will I learn.... But it so happens that in this direction also, what seemed to me so easy at first, now seems impossible. I must have been searching for something else, not for my life, assuredly. Therefore, once we have to go in search of the whereabouts of life—if search we have to—then it should be neither in space nor in time, neither as cause nor effect, but as a something which I cognize within myself as quite independent from Space, time and causality.
That which remains to do now is to study self. But how do I cognize life in myself?
This is how I cognize it. I know, to begin with, that I live; and that I live wishing for myself everything that is good, wishing this since I can remember myself, to this day, and from morn till night. All that lives outside of myself is important in my eyes, but only in so far as it co-operates with the creation of that which is productive of my welfare. The Universe is important in my sight only because it can give me, pleasure.
Meanwhile, something else is bound up with this knowledge in me of my existence. Inseparable from the life I feel, is another cognition allied to it; namely, that besides myself, I am surrounded with a whole world of living creatures, possessed, as I am myself, of the same instinctive realization of their exclusive lives; that all these creatures live for their own objects, which objects are foreign to me; that those creatures do not know, nor do they care to know, anything of my pretensions to an exclusive life, and that all these creatures, in order to achieve success in their objects, are ready to annihilate me at any moment. But this is not all. While watching the destruction of creatures similar in all to myself, I also know that for me too, for that precious ME in whom alone life is represented, a very speedy and inevitable destruction is lying in wait.
It is as if there were two “I’s” in man; it is as if they could never live in peace together; it is as if they were eternally struggling, and ever trying to expel each other.
One “I” says, “I alone am living as one should live, all the rest only seems to live. Therefore, the whole raison d’être for the universe is in that I may be made comfortable.”
The other “I” replies, “The universe is not for thee at all, but for its own aims and purposes, and it cares little to know whether thou art happy or unhappy.”
Life becomes a dreadful thing after this!
One “I” says, “I only want the gratification of all my wants and desires, and that is why I need the universe.”
The other “I” replies, “All animal life lives only for the gratification of its wants and desires. It is the wants and desires of animals alone that are gratified at the expense and detriment of other animals; hence the ceaseless struggle between the animal species. Thou art an animal, and therefore thou hast to struggle. Yet, however successful in thy struggle, the rest of the struggling creatures must sooner or later crush thee.”
Still worse! life becomes still more dreadful....
But the most terrible of all, that which includes in itself the whole of the foregoing, is that:—
One “I” says, “I want to live, to live for ever.”
And that the other “I” replies, “Thou shalt surely, perhaps in a few minutes, die; as also shall die all those thou lovest, for thou and they are destroying with every motion your lives, and thus approaching ever nearer suffering, death, all that which thou so hatest, and which thou fearest above anything else.”
This is the worst of all....
To change this condition is impossible.... One can avoid moving, sleeping, eating, even breathing, but one cannot escape from thinking. One thinks, and that thought, my thought, is poisoning every step in my life, as a personality.
No sooner has man commenced a conscious life than that consciousness repeats to him incessantly without respite, over and over the same thing again. “To live such life as you feel and see in your past, the life lived by animals and many men too, lived in that way, which made you become what you are now—is no longer possible. Were you to attempt doing so, you could never escape thereby the struggle with all the world of creatures which live as you do—for their personal objects; and then those creatures will inevitably destroy you.”...
To change this situation is impossible. There remains but one thing to do, and that is always done by him who, beginning to live, transfers his objects in life outside of himself, and aims to reach them.... But, however far he places them outside his personality, as his mind gets clearer, none of these objects will satisfy him.
Bismarck, having united Germany, and now ruling Europe—if his reason has only thrown any light upon the results of his activity—must perceive, as much as his own cook does who prepares a dinner that will be devoured in an hour’s time, the same unsolved contradiction between the vanity and foolishness of all he has done, and the eternity and reasonableness of that which exists for ever. If they only think of it, each will see as clearly as the other; firstly, that the preservation of the integrity of Prince Bismarck’s dinner, as well as that of powerful Germany, is solely due: the preservation of the former—to the police, and the preservation of the latter—to the army; and that, so long only as both keep a good watch. Because there are famished people who would willingly eat the dinner, and nations which would fain be as powerful as Germany. Secondly, that neither Prince Bismarck’s dinner, nor the might of the German Empire, coincide with the aims and purposes of universal life, but that they are in flagrant contradiction with them. And thirdly, that as he who cooked the dinner, so also the might of Germany, will both very soon die, and that so shall perish, and as soon, both the dinner and Germany. That which shall survive alone is the Universe, which will never give one thought to either dinner or Germany, least of all to those who have cooked them.
As the intellectual condition of man increases, he comes to the idea that no happiness connected with his personality is an achievement, but only a necessity. Personality is only that incipient state from which begins life, and the ultimate limit of life....
Where, then, does life begin, and where does it end, I may be asked? Where ends the night, and where does day commence? Where, on the shore, ends the domain of the sea, and where does the domain of land begin?
There is day and there is night; there is land and there is sea; there is life and there is no life.
Our life, ever since we became conscious of it, is a pendulum-like motion between two limits.
One limit is, an absolute unconcern for the life of the infinite Universe an energy directed only toward the gratification of one’s own personality.
The other limit is a complete renunciation of that personality, the greatest concern with the life of the infinite Universe, in full accord with it, the transfer of all our desires and good will from one’s self, to that infinite Universe and all the creatures outside of us.[51]
The nearer to the first limit, the less life and bliss, the closer to the second, the more life and bliss. Therefore, man is ever moving from one end to the other; i.e. he lives. THIS MOTION IS LIFE ITSELF.
And when I speak of life, know that the idea of it is indissolubly connected in my conceptions with that of conscious life. No other life is known to me except conscious life, nor can it be known to anyone else.
We call life, the life of animals, organic life. But this is no life at all, only a certain state or condition of life manifesting to us.
But what is this consciousness or mind, the exigencies of which exclude personality and transfer the energy of man outside of him and into that state which is conceived by us as the blissful state of love?
What is conscious mind? Whatsoever we may be defining, we have to define it with our conscious mind. Therefore, with what shall we define mind?...
If we have to define all with our mind, it follows that conscious mind cannot be defined. Yet all of us, we not only know it, but it is the only thing which is given to us to know undeniably....
It is the same law as the law of life, of everything organic, animal or vegetable, with that one difference that we see the consummation of an intelligent law in the life of a plant. But the law of conscious mind, to which we are subjected as the tree, is subjected to its law, we see it not, but fulfil it....
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Footnote 51:
This is what the Theosophists call “living the life”—in a nut-shell.—H. P. B.
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We have settled that life is that which is not our life. It is herein that lies hidden the root of error. Instead of studying that life of which we are conscious within ourselves, absolutely and exclusively—since we can know of nothing else—in order to study it, we observe that which is devoid of the most important factor and faculty of our life, namely, intelligent consciousness. By so doing, we act as a man who attempts to study an object by its shadow or reflection does.
If we know that substantial particles are subjected during their transformations to the activity of the organism; we know it not because we have observed or studied it, but simply because we possess a certain familiar organism united to us, namely the organism of our animal, which is but too well known to us as the material of our life; i.e. that upon which we are called to work and to rule by subjecting it to the law of reason.... No sooner has man lost faith in life, no sooner has he transferred that life into that which is no life, than he becomes wretched, and sees death.... A man who conceives life such as he finds it in his consciousness, knows neither misery, nor death: for all the good in life for him is in the subjection of his animal to the law of reason, to do which is not only in his power, but takes place unavoidably in him. The death of particles in the animal being, we know. The death of animals and of man, as an animal, we know; but we know nought about the death of conscious mind, nor can we know anything of it, just because that conscious mind is the very life itself. And Life can never be Death....
The animal lives an existence of bliss, neither seeing nor knowing death, and dies without cognizing it. Why then should man have received the gift of seeing and knowing it, and why should death be so terrible to him that it actually tortures his soul, often forcing him to kill himself out of sheer fear of death? Why should it be so? Because the man who sees death is a sick man, one who has broken the law of his life, and lives no longer a conscious existence. He has become an animal himself, an animal which also has broken the law of life.
The life of man is an aspiration to bliss, and that which he aspires to is given to him. The light lit in the soul of man is bliss and life, and that light can never be darkness, as there exists—verily there exists for man—only this solitary light which burns within his soul.
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We have translated this rather lengthy fragment from the Report of Count Tolstoi’s superb lecture, because it reads like the echo of the finest teachings of the universal ethics of true theosophy. His definition of life in its abstract sense, and of the life every earnest theosophist ought to follow, each according to, and in the measure of, his natural capacities—is the summary and the Alpha and the Omega of practical psychic, if not spiritual life. There are sentences in the lecture which, to the average theosophist will seem too hazy, and perhaps incomplete. Not one will he find, however, which could be objected to by the most exacting, practical occultist. It may be called a treatise on the Alchemy of Soul. For that “solitary” light in man, which burns for ever, and can never be darkness in its intrinsic nature, though the “animal” outside us may remains blind to it—is that “Light” upon which the Neo Platonists of the Alexandrian school, and after them the Rosecroix and especially the Alchemists, have written volumes, though to the present day their true meaning is a dark mystery to most men.
True, Count Tolstoi is neither an Alexandrian nor a modern theosophist; still less is he a Rosecroix or an Alchemist. But that which the latter have concealed under the peculiar phraseology of the Fire-philosophers, purposely confusing cosmic transmutations with Spiritual Alchemy, all that is transferred by the great Russian thinker from the realm of the metaphysical unto the field of practical life. That which Schelling would define as a realisation of the identity of subject and object in the man’s inner Ego, that which unites and blends the latter with the universal Soul—which is but the identity of subject and object on a higher plane, or the unknown Deity—all that Count Tolstoi has blended together without quitting the terrestrial plane. He is one of those few elect who begin with intuition and end with quasi-omniscience. It is the transmutations of the baser metals—the animal mass—into gold and silver, or the philosopher’s stone, the development and manifestation of man’s higher, SELF which the Count has achieved. The alcahest of the inferior Alchemist is the All-geist, the all-pervading Divine Spirit of the higher Initiate; for Alchemy was, and is, as very few know to this day, as much a spiritual philosophy as it is a physical science. He who knows nought of one, will never know much of the other. Aristotle told it in so many words to his pupil, Alexander: “It is not a stone,” he said, of the philosopher’s stone. “It is in every man and in every place, and at all seasons, and is called the end of all philosophers,” as the Vedanta is the end of all philosophies.
To wind up this essay on the Science of Life, a few words may be said of the eternal riddle propounded to mortals by the Sphinx. To fail to solve the problem contained in it, was to be doomed to sure death, as the Sphinx of life devoured the unintuitional, who would live only in their “animal.” He who lives for Self, and only for Self, will surely die, as the higher “I” tells the lower “animal” in the Lecture. The riddle has seven keys to it, and the Count opens the mystery with one of the highest. For, as the author on “Hermetic Philosophy” beautifully expressed it: “The real mystery most familiar and, at the same time, most unfamiliar to every man, into which he must be initiated or perish as an atheist, is himself. For him is the elixir of life, to quaff which, before the discovery of the philosopher’s stone, is to drink the beverage of death, while it confers on the adept and the epopt, the true immortality. He may know truth as it really is—Aletheia, the breath of God, or Life, the conscious mind in man.”
This is “the Alcahest which dissolves all things,” and Count Tolstoi has well understood the riddle.
H. P. B.
SIN AGAINST LIFE.
A newspaper paragraph lately declared that a certain American lady of great wealth, residing in London, had conceived the strange desire to possess a cloak made of the soft warm down on the breasts of birds of Paradise. Five hundred breasts, it was said, were required for this purpose, and two skilful marksmen, the story went on to aver, had been sent to New Guinea to shoot the poor little victims whose wholesale slaughter must be accomplished to gratify this savage whim. We rejoice to observe that the whole statement has been flatly contradicted by the World, apparently on the best possible authority; but, however little the lady concerned may deserve the reproach which the authors of the calumny endeavoured to evoke against her, the feeling it may have excited is worth analysis in a world where, if bird of Paradise cloaks are rare, most women who dress luxuriously adorn themselves in one way or another at the expense of the feathered kingdom. The principle involved in a bonnet which is decorated with the plumage of a single bird, slaughtered for its sake, is the same as that which would be more grotesquely manifest in a garment that would require the slaughter of five hundred. Too many rich people in this greedy age forget that the grandest privilege of those who possess the means is that they have the power of alleviating suffering. Too many, again, forget that the sympathies of those who rule the animate world should extend beyond the limits of their own kind; and thus we have the painful spectacle of human “sport” associated in civilised countries still, with pursuits which should no longer afford pleasure to men who have emerged from the primitive life of hunters and fishers. But how is it possible, let us consider, to stoop lowest from the proud estate of humanity in search of ignoble gratification? It is bad to kill any sentient creature for the sake of the savage pleasures of the chase. It is bad, perhaps worse, to cause their destruction for the sake of coldly profiting by their slaughter, and it is bad to squander money in this hard world of want and wide-spread privation on costly personal indulgence. But the acme of all that is reprehensible in these various departments of ill-doing is surely reached when women—who should, by virtue of their sex, be helping to soften the ferocities of life—contrive to collect the cream of evil from each of these varieties, and to sin against a whole catalogue of human duties by cruel acquiescence in an unworthy fashion.
BROTHERHOOD.
The Theosophical Society has always placed in the forefront of its programme, as its first and most important object, the formation of the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood, without distinction of race, creed, caste or sex. It would doubtless be incorrect to say that this object of the Society has been entirely overlooked in the West, but it is to be feared that not a few members of the Society have accepted it as an amiable formula, to which no objection could be raised, and have turned their attention almost exclusively to the two remaining objects. And yet, without some attempt to understand the true meaning of this Universal Brotherhood, it is idle to expect that any great services can be rendered to the cause of Theosophy. It may be useful to see whether any explanation can be given of the reason for the neglect of this first object, and whether such light may be thrown on its meaning, as may render the idea a living reality to many who now but faintly grasp its significance.
In the first place it may be said, that in many enlightened Western minds, there was already a familiarity with the idea thus enunciated. Christianity has always taught the “theoretical” equality in the sight of God, of all true believers, and politically the dogma of “equal rights” is practically beyond the reach of attack. The abolition of slavery, the extension of representative government, the spread of education, and perhaps also, in some degree, the influence of the scientific as opposed to the religious theories of the origin and destiny of man, have all combined to render this idea by no means difficult of apprehension, at least intellectually. Further its acceptance in this sense has not necessarily entailed any different view of the duties and responsibilities of life. In the East it cannot be said that this is the case. In India, the stringency of caste regulations causes class distinctions to assume a very definite form, while religious hatreds, if not more bitter than with us, enter more directly into the life of the people, and interpose stronger barriers between man and man than in Europe or America. Hence an Indian theosophist must, before he can accept the first object, even in its outward form, modify to some extent his intellectual conception of the relations in which he stands to the rest of mankind, and he will in his life give practical proof of the change. In his case the acceptance of the outward form can only follow on the appreciation of the inner meaning; that which results is that his theosophy is firmly founded on the principle of the Universal Brotherhood.
On the other hand, in the West, a familiarity with the external side seems, in many cases, to have prevented any attempt to go below the surface, and to have caused men to be satisfied with vague philanthropic sentimentality, effecting nothing, and leading nowhere.
What then is this Universal Brotherhood, which is the main spring of Theosophy? and what are its results?
Socialism as preached in this 19th century it certainly is not. Indeed, there would be little difficulty in shewing that modern materialistic Socialism is directly at variance with all the teachings of theosophy. Socialism advocates a direct interference with the results of the law of Karma, and would attempt to alter the dénouement of the parable of the talents, by giving to the man who hid his talent in a napkin, a portion of the ten talents acquired by the labour of his more industrious fellow.
Neither is it true that in practical benevolence is the whole idea of universal brotherhood exemplified, though doubtless that unselfish and unceasing work for the good of mankind, which is true philanthropy must of necessity be one result of it. The philanthropist may be, and no doubt often is, a true theosophist in all but name, though there is still much of what may be called unintelligent benevolence, the result of a mere emotional impulse; and again there is much that is the result of very decided and very narrow sectarian views, to which it would be absolutely impossible to apply the epithet universal. The devotion and self-sacrifice shown in many individual instances by Christian missionaries of various denominations, may be taken as fairly exemplifying philanthropy both of the unintelligent and the narrow type. They are prepared to make any sacrifice for what they believe to be the ultimate good of humanity, and in that sense are practising what some others only preach, namely true unselfishness, but they are often hampered by an intellectual inability to view both sides of the question, and fail thereby to acquire that understanding of, and sympathy with the difficulties and the wants of those whom they are endeavouring to aid, which are necessary preliminaries to any work of lasting usefulness. In a word, they too often fail to realise that unity in mankind which truly underlies all individualism. But having said so much, it must be added that an understanding of the real meaning of “Brotherhood” must entail active benevolence, that is to say work for others in some form or other, upon every one who does not wilfully thrust aside the obligation.
Where then are we to look for the explanation, and how are we to understand the spirit which must animate all true theosophists, if they are to realise and follow out the first rule of the Society? Not surely on the physical plane. Not by an attempt to force on the intellect as a fact to be accepted, or more truly a pill to be swallowed, a belief in similarities, equalities or identities, which have no existence. Only a realisation of what truly constitutes man can help us to form a conception of what brotherhood means.
Man is a complex organism as he exists on our earth to-day. He is partly transitory, partly eternal; in one sense the creature of circumstances, in another the creator of his own environment. But the true man, the underlying individuality is a reflection of the Divine. We are able to discern physical beauty, even when clad in rags. Is it impossible that we should also recognise the beauty of the soul, though it be for a time veiled beneath a gross material body? The physical body is indeed nothing but the garment of the ego, the true man; that momentarily suited to his needs and his deserts, the livery of his servitude, which must be worn, in ever changing forms, till the moment of his final emancipation. It is then beyond the physical, beyond the intellectual man, that we must look for that fraternity, arising out of unity and equality, which cannot be found on the purely material plane of existence. The divine soul of man, in which is posited his true individuality, is the real man, the immortal ego, which, through the accumulated experience of many earth lives is marching onward through the ages to its goal, reunion with the Infinite. What matters then the outward semblance, which our senses know as man? Our æsthetic perception may shrink from the rags, the dirt, the ugliness which belong to the physical environment. Our moral nature may revolt at association with vice, with low selfish courses of life, but within and behind all this we must endeavour to realise the continual presence of the immortal ego, one with us, as with all humanity, as sharing the divine nature, and ever struggling, as we are struggling, on the upward path that leads to the realisation of the Absolute. As Carlyle says in Sartor Resartus. “Mystical, more than magical, is that communing of Soul with Soul, both looking heavenward; here properly Soul first speaks with Soul; for only in looking heavenward, take it in what sense you may, not in looking earthward does what we can call Union, Mutual Love, Society, begin to be possible.”
It may be objected that in some cases it is impossible to recognise even the glimmerings of those higher aspirations, which are the tokens of the presence of the soul, the immortal ego. Such cases, however, must be comparatively rare. Still there are beings—it is almost impossible to call them human—who have so persistently concentrated all their efforts on the gratification of their lower consciousness, as to sever the frail link which binds them to their higher selves. Then the true man is no longer present in the human form, and brotherhood becomes an impossibility. But we may in truth almost ignore the existence of this type of mankind, for even when an intellectual materialism seems to be the sole ruling principle, we dare not deny the presence of that capacity for higher things which must exist in all who can still truly be called men.
Surely then it is in this view of our relations to our fellow men, that we shall find that guiding influence which may enable us to rise above the sordid considerations of our ordinary earthly existence. It is no sectarian belief that is here advanced; it is the essence of the teaching of Jesus, as it was of Gautama; nor is it a mere formula, to be accepted as an article of faith, and then laid on the shelf. Once understood, it must influence all who have sufficient strength of purpose to fight their own lower selfish personalities, and must lead them to the practical realisation of their aspirations towards true unselfishness and active benevolence.
But there lurks a danger even in the use of the word unselfishness. It has been the text of sermons from every pulpit in Christendom for centuries, and with what small results? No doubt the duty nearest at hand must not be neglected, and it is the duty of every one to do what he can to render those about him happier. But many stop there and consider that all their work consists in the practice of self-abnegation in their own small circle. Does not the broader view of human life here set forth suggest a new sphere of usefulness, and therefore of duty? It is for every man to determine what he can do for the good of humanity; all are not equally gifted, but all can do something. Some theosophists appear to be satisfied with intellectual study, or the development of their own spiritual nature, and neither of these two courses is to be neglected; but something more must be done. “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” and the acquirement of knowledge brings with it the obligation of spreading it. This is work from which none need shrink, and all who truly desire to work for Theosophy, which is in the highest sense “the religion of humanity,” will find the work ready to their hand, and be able to assist in bringing the Light “to them that sit in darkness.”
T. B. H.
PYTHAGORIC SENTENCES OF DEMOPHILUS.
Esteem that to be eminently good, which, when communicated to another, will be increased to yourself.
Be persuaded that those things are not your riches which you do not possess in the penetralia of the reasoning power.
As many passions of the soul, so many fierce and savage despots.
No one is free who has not obtained the empire of himself.
BLOOD-COVENANTING.[52]
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Footnote 52:
“The Blood-Covenant, a Primitive Rite, and its bearings on Scripture.” By H. Clay Trumbull, D.D. London: Redway.
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Particular attention has been recently directed to this subject of Blood-Covenant by the experiences of explorers in Africa, who appear to have discovered in that Dark Land some of the primitive facts the gory ghost of which has long haunted our European mind in the Eschatological phase.
Stanley, an especial sufferer from the practice, denounces the blood-brotherhood as a beastly cannibalistic ceremony. “For the fiftieth time my poor arm was scarified and my blood shed for the cause of civilization.” As the writer of this book observes: “The blood of a fair proportion of all the first families of equatorial Africa now courses in Stanley’s veins; and if ever there was an American citizen who could pre-eminently appropriate to himself the national motto ‘E pluribus unum,’ Stanley is the man.”
In his book, Dr. Trumbull has collected a mass of data from a wide range of sources to illustrate what he terms the “Primitive rite of covenanting by the inter-transfusion of blood.”
Dr. Trumbull is anxious to make the efficacy of the rite depend upon the recognition of a vivifying virtue in the blood itself, as the essence of life. But such recognition appears to have been remote enough from the Primitive thought. The Aborigines were not Jews or Christians. They gave of their life without always thinking of the exact equivalent or superior value received. They gave it as the witness to the troth they plighted and the covenant which they intended to keep. His theory of interpretation is that there was a dominating and universal conviction that the “blood is the life; that blood-transfer is soul-transfer, and that blood-sharing, human or divine-human, secures an inter-union of natures; and that a union of the human nature with the divine is the highest ultimate attainment reached out after by the most primitive, as well as the most enlightened, mind of humanity.”
His collection of facts may serve a most useful purpose as eye-openers to other people (and for other facts to follow), just as they appear to have been to himself. The book is interesting, if not profound; and nothing that follows in this article is intended to decry it, or to prevent the readers of LUCIFER from looking into it if they do not feel too great a “scunner” at sight of the gilded-gory illustration on the cover. But the work is written by one who talks to us out of a window of Noah’s Ark, and who still seems to think the Hebrew Bible is the rim of the universe. We value and recommend the book solely for its facts, not for its theories, nor for its bibliolatry.
In all studies of this kind which make use of the word “Primitive,” it is the fundamental facts that we first need; and next a first-hand acquaintanceship with all the facts, so that we may do our own thinking for ourselves and strike our light within by which we can read the facts without, as the primary and essential procedure in the endeavour to attain the truth.
Also the facts may be genuine and honestly presented, yet the interpretation may be according to an inadequate or a “bogus” theory. The truth is that no bibliolator can be trusted to interpret the past of our race now being unveiled by evolution. He is born and begotten with the blinkers on. His mode of interpretation is to get behind us, to lay the hands upon our eyes in front, and ask us to listen whilst he gives us his views of the past! But the non-evolutionist cannot interpret the past from lack of a true standpoint with regard to the beginnings or rather the processes of becoming. He can begin anywhere and at any time short of the starting-point. There is nothing for it but to break away, and turn round to see for ourselves whether the traditionary vision of the Blinkerists be true or false. The facts alone are the final determinatives of the Truth. But we must have the whole of them and not a few, whether judiciously or Jesuitically selected to support a Christian theory. Whereas, the object and aim of this work, the bias of the writer, and the trend of his arguments, are all on the line of showing or suggesting that the blood-covenant was the result of some innate instinct or divine revelation which prefigured and foreshadowed, and may be taken to indicate and authorize, the Christian scheme of atonement, and the remission of sin by the shedding of innocent blood. The writer asserts that this primitive symbolism was “made a reality in Jesus Christ” in whom “God was to give of his blood in the blood of his Son for the revivifying of the sons of Abraham in the Blood of the Eternal Covenant.” But it can be demonstrated that the covenant by blood did not commence where Dr. Trumbull begins—with a religious yearning God-ward for the establishing of a brotherhood between the human nature and the Divine. The root-idea was not that of an “inter-union of the spiritual natures by the inter-commingling of blood for the sake of an inter-communion with deity.” That, at least, was by no means the “primitive rite,” which the blood-covenant is here called. The many forms of the blood-covenant can only be unified at the root, i.e., in the beginning, not at the end. They are not to be understood apart from the primitive language of signs, as in Tattoo, the very primitive biology of the early observers, and the most primitive sociology of the Totemic times.
Time was, and may be still, when the blood-covenant would often serve as the one protection against being killed and eaten. Even the cannibals will not partake of their own Totemic brothers. Also the covenant was extended to certain animals which were made of kin and held to be sacred as brothers of the blood.
The Blood-covenant takes many forms besides that of the blood-brotherhood, which are not to be explained by this writer’s theory of exchange.
When the blood of an African woman accidentally spurted into the eye of Dr. Livingstone, she claimed him for her blood relation, without there being any exchange of blood for blood.
Dr. Trumbull claims the Egyptians as witnesses to the truth of his interpretation. But so far from their highest conception of “a union with the Divine nature” being an inter-flowing and interfusion of blood, the soul of blood was the very lowest, that is the first, in a series of seven souls!
Their highest type of the soul was the sun that vivified for ever called Atmu, the Father Soul.[53] The bases of natural fact which lie at the foundation of the Blood-covenant, preceded any and all such ideas as those postulated by the writer as being extant from the first, such as “a longing for oneness of life with God;” an “out-reaching after inter-union and inter-communion with God.” There was no conception of a one God extant in the category of human consciousness when the rites of a blood-covenant were first founded. There could be no atonement where there was no sense of sin or a breaking of the law. All through, the writer is apt to confuse the past with the present, and eager to read the present into the past.[54]
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Footnote 53:
The Theosophists are reminded that the “seven souls” are what we call the “seven principles” in man. “Blood” is the principle of the Body, the lowest in our septenary, as the highest is “Atma,” which may well be symbolized by the Sun; Atma being the light and life in man, as the physical sun is the light and life of our solar system.—ED.
Footnote 54:
The arcane doctrine teaches that the “blood” rites are as old as the Third-Root race, being established in their final form by the Fourth Parent race in commemoration of the separation of androgynous mankind, their forefathers, into males and females. Mr. G. Massey is a strict scholar, who holds only to that which is made evident to him, and ignores the Occultistic division of mankind into Races, and the fact that we are in our Fifth-Root race, and would, of course, refuse to carry mankind back into pre-Tertiary times. Yet his researches and the fruit of his life-labour, corroborate, by their numberless new facts revealed by him, most wonderfully, the teachings of the “Secret Doctrines.” (ED.)
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The real roots of matters like these are to be found only in certain facts of nature which were self-revealing, and not in the sphere of concepts and causation! And it is only when we can reach the natural genesis of primitive customs and fetishtic beliefs, and trace their lines of descent, that we can understand and interpret their meaning in the latest symbolical and superstitious phase of religious rites. Nothing can be more fatally false than to interpret the physics of the past by means of modern metaphysic, with the view of proving that certain extant doctrines of delusion are the lineal descendants of an original Divine revelation, which has been bound up in two Testaments for the favoured few.
The blood-covenant is undoubtedly a primitive rite; but the author of this work does not penetrate to its most primitive or significant phases. These are not to be read by the light of Hebrew revelation, but by the light of nature if at all. Many primitive customs and rites survived amongst the Semites, but they themselves were not amongst the aboriginal races of the world. We have to get far beyond their stage to understand the meaning of the myths, legends, rites, and customs, that were preserved by them as sacred survivals from the remoter past. The symbolical and superstitious phases of custom cannot be directly explained on the spot where we may first meet with them in going back. In becoming symbolical they had already passed out of their primary phase, and only indirectly represent the natural genesis of the truly primitive rite. I have spent the best part of my life in tracking these rites and customs to their natural origin, and in expounding the typology and symbols by which the earliest meaning was expressed.
What then was the root-origin of a blood-covenant? The primary perceptions of primitive or archaic men included the observation that they came from the mother, and first found themselves at her breast.
Next they saw that the child was fleshed by the mother, and formed from her blood, the flow of which was arrested to be solidified, and take form in their own persons. Thus the red amulet which was worn by the Egyptian dead, was representative of the blood of Isis, who came from herself, and made her own child without the fatherhood, when men could only derive their blood and descent from the mother. This amulet was put on by her, says Plutarch, when she found herself enceinte with Horus, her child, who was derived from the mother alone, or was traced solely to the blood of Isis. Primitive men could perceive that the children of one mother were of the same blood. This, the first form of a blood-brotherhood, was the first to be recognised as the natural fact. Uterine brothers were blood-brothers. The next stage of the brotherhood was Totemic; and the mode of extending the brotherhood to the children of several mothers implies, as it necessitated, some form of symbolic rite which represented them as brothers, or as typically becoming of the one blood. Here we can track the very first step in sociology which was made when the typical blood-brotherhood of the Totem was formed in imitation of the natural brotherhood of the mother-blood. The modes and forms of the Covenant can be identified by the Totemic mysteries, some of which yet survive in the crudest condition. The brotherhood was entered at the time of puberty; that is, at the time of re-birth, when the boy was re-born as a man, and the child of the mother attained the soul of the fatherhood, and was permitted to join the ranks of the begetters. The mystery is one with that of Horus, child of the mother alone, who comes to receive the soul of the father in Tattu, the region of establishing the son as the father, which is still extant in the mysteries, and the symbolism of Tattoo.
This re-birth was enacted in various ways by typically re-entering the womb. One of these was by burial in the earth, the tomb or place of re-birth being the image of the maternal birth-place all the world over. Thus when the Norsemen or other races prepared a hole under the turf, and buried their cut and bleeding arms to let the blood flow, and commingle in one as the token of a covenant, they were returning typically to the condition of uterine twins, and the act of burial for the purpose of a re-birth was a symbolical mode of establishing the social brotherhood upon the original grounds of the natural brotherhood of blood. Thus the blood-covenant did not originate in the set transfusion or inter-fusion of blood. In the Totemic mysteries the pubescent lad was admitted by the shedding of his blood, with or without any interchange. The blood itself was the symbol of brotherhood, and the shedding of it was the seal of a covenant.
Nor was this merely because flesh was formed of blood, or the first men were made of the mystical red soil, as with the aarea of the Tahitians, or the red earth of the Adamic man. Most of these primitive rites, the Blood-Covenant included, had their starting-point from the period of puberty. It was at this time the lads who were not brothers uterine were made brothers of the Totem at what was termed the festival of young-man-making. The proper period for circumcision, or cutting and sealing, as still practised by the oldest aborigines, is the time of puberty, the natural coming of age. It is then they enter the Totemic Brotherhood. Now in Egyptian, the word khet or khut = cut, means to cut and to seal. Khetem is to enclose, bind, seal, and is applied to sealing. The same root passes into Assyrian and Hebrew as Khatan, Katam or Chatan, with the same meaning. In Arabic, Khatana is to circumcise. Cutting and sealing are identical as the mode of entering into a Blood-Covenant. Circumcision was one form of the sealing, but there were various kinds of cuts employed, and different parts of the body were scarified and tattooed. In the primary phase, then, the blood-brotherhood was established by the shedding of blood; the register was written in blood, and instead of the covenant being witnessed by the seal of red wax, it was stamped in blood.
The reason for phallic localization is to be sought in the fact that the young men not only entered the Brotherhood by the baptism of blood, they were also received into the higher ranks of the fathers, and sworn in to live an orderly, legal and cleanly life, henceforth, as the pro-creators and loyal preservers of the race.
But this was not the only clue directly derived from nature. There is another reason why blood should have become the sacred sign of a covenant. Amongst many primitive races blood, or the colour red, is the symbol of Tapu, the sign of sanctity. The bones of the dead were covered with red ochre as a means of protection by the most widely scattered races in the world. The stamp of a red hand on the building, or a crimson daub upon the gravestone will render them sacred. The Kaffirs will wash their bodies with blood as a protection against being wounded in battle. The colour of robin-redbreast still renders him tapu or sacred to English children.
Blood having become a sign of that which is true and sacred, on account of the Covenant, it is then made the symbol of all that is sacred. It can be used for the purpose of anointing the living or the dead, can be the seal of the marriage or other ceremonies and rites of covenanting. It is the primæval token of tapu.
As I have elsewhere shown, blood was sworn by as the type of that which was true, the primary one of the typical Two Truths of Egypt. It was so in all the mysteries, and is so to-day, including the mysteries of Masonry. I have suggested the derivation of the masonic name from the Egyptian Sen = son, for blood and brotherhood. The working Mason in Egyptian is the makh (makht) by name. Makh means to work, inlay by rule and measure. We see that makh modifies into mâ for measure, and for that which is just and true.
Mâ-sen = Mason, would denote the true brotherhood; and as sen is also blood, the true brotherhood as the blood-brotherhood would be the masons in the mystical or occult sense. Red is the colour of Mâ or Truth personified, and sen is blood. Blood is sworn by because it is the colour of truth, or the true colour. Now in old English the word seng means both “blood” and “true.” Here, then, we find the origin of the oath, which constitutes the supreme expression in the vocabulary of our English roughs, when they use the oath of the blood-covenant, and swear by the word “bloody!” When they wax emphatic, everything they say becomes “bloody true.” This is the exact equivalent of “seng it is” for “it is true.” According to the primitive mysteries, this mode of swearing, or establishing the covenant, was sacred whilst kept piously secret, and it becomes impious when made public or profane. Such mysteries were very simply natural at first, and it was this primitive simplicity and nearness to nature which demanded the veil to protect them from the gaze of the later consciousness. Time was when the English felon would carry a red handkerchief with him to the scaffold, and hold it in his hand as a signal that he had betrayed no secrets, but died “bloody true,” or true blood.
These customs were symbolical, but there is a hint of the blood-covenant beyond them—a hint received direct from Nature herself—call it revelation if you please. In the first rude ethics we find that the time for the sexes to come together was recognised by the intimation of nature, made in her own sign-language at the period of feminine pubescence. Nature gave the hint, and a covenant was established. Henceforth, the child that could not enter that covenant would be protected from brutal assault, and was allowed, or rather compelled, to run about unclothed in token of her exemption. It is here in the swearing-in and covenanting of the sexes at the time of pubescence that we discover another real and most secret, i.e., sacred root of the rite.
The self-revelation made by nature to primitive man was very primitive in its kind. She not only demonstrated that the blood was the life, or that the life passed away with the letting out of the blood, but in another domain, which our author has not entered, she showed that blood was, and how it was, the future life. Blood was the primary witness to the future life which the child received from the mother. It was the token of the time when the female could become the bearer of that future life which took flesh and form in her blood.
The blood-covenanting of the primitive races is still a part of the most elaborate system of making presents, which are the express witnesses of proffered troth and intended fealty. The most precious or sacred things are parted from in proof. The best is given on either side. And in the offering of blood, they were giving their very life, that in which the best attains supremacy. But these primitive rites can never be truly read except by those who are deeply grounded in the fact, and well acquainted with the evidence, that sign-language was primordial, that gestures preceded verbal speech, and acting was an earlier mode of representing than talking. Primitive men could only do that which we can say. In Egyptian that which is said is done. And in these primitive customs and religious rites we see the early races of men performing in pantomime the early drama of dumb or inarticulate humanity. And it seems as if this primitive language could produce an impression and reach a reality that are unapproachable by means of words. The significance of the teaching went all the deeper when it was incised in the flesh and branded into the blood. For example, what a terrific glimpse of reality is revealed by the fact that the Malagasy make their sign of a blood-covenant by an incision in the skin that covers the bosom, and this opening with its utterance of blood is called ambavfo, the “mouth of the heart.” Thus the covenant is made in the blood, which is the very life, uttering itself with the mouth of the heart. In Egyptian the covenant, the oath, and the life, have the same name of Ankhu; and the greatest oath was to swear by the life or the blood of the Pharaoh. The primitive mode was to slash the flesh and let the hot blood spout and speak for itself with the “mouth of the heart,” the utterance of the living letter and red seal of the wound, as true witness.
No verbal covenant or written record of the modern races has ever had the full force and effect of these modes of covenanting amongst the primitive people of the past. The moderns do not keep their word with anything like the inviolable sanctity of the aborigines; when once they are sworn to fealty, the covenant is almost never broken. Few things in poetry are more pathetic than the story related of Tolo, a chief of the Shastika Indians on the Pacific Coast. In the year 1852 he entered into a tribal treaty with Colonel McKee and was desirous of making a covenant for life in some way that could not possibly be violated. Instead of exchanging blood he proposed a transfer of their own two personal names. Henceforth he was to be known as McKee, and the Colonel as Tolo. But the treaty was discarded, the covenant was not kept by the American Government. In reply, the Indian cast off the title of McKee and refused to resume his own tarnished and degraded name of Tolo! He considered that his very identity was lost by this mode of losing his good name! I doubt whether 1,800 years of Christianity have evolved in the later races of men a consciousness of truth, probity, and loyalty, so quick and profound as that!
The writer of this book remains stone-blind to its own teachings with regard to the doctrine of survivals, and of the past persisting as a pattern for the present.
To quote his own words, he rejoices in the “blessed benefits of the covenant of blood,” and is still a fervent supporter of the great delusion inculcated by the gospel of ruddy gore.
The doctrine is fundamentally the same whether the Greek murderer was cleansed from his guilt by the filthy purification of pig’s blood or the modern sinner is supposed to be washed white in the Blood of the Lamb.
As I had already written in my “Natural Genesis,” “the religious ritual of the moderns is crowded like a kitchen-midden with the refuse relics of customs that were natural once, and are now clung to as if they were supernatural in their efficacy because their origin has been unknown. Indeed, the current masquerade in these appurtenances of the past is as sorry a sight to the archaic student as are the straw crowns and faded finery of the kings and queens whose domain is limited to the lunatic asylum.” Dr. Trumbull endorses the doctrine that “Mortals gave the blood of their first-born sons in sacrifice to the Supreme Being, then the Supreme Being gave the blood of his first-born male in sacrifice” for men; and there you have the covenant of blood in its final form!
It is true that first-born children were offered in sacrifice just as the first take of fish was returned to the waters with a lively sense of future favours from the Typhonian power thus propitiated, but where is the sense of talking about the thought of an intercommunion with the divine nature through a blood-union with God as a concept in the mind of primitive man? It is true the recognized nature-powers, or devils of physical force, were invoked with blood, but what was the status of these powers when the beasts of blood were their representatives on earth, and the blood, which is the life, was given to the Serpent, for instance, as the likeness of life itself because it sloughed its own skin and manifested the enviable power of self-renewal? The profounder and more fundamental our researches, the more clearly does it become apparent that we have been victimised by the unsuspected survival of the past in the present, and that the veriest leavings of primitive man have been palmed off upon us by the ignorant as sacred mysteries and revelations guaranteed to be original and divine. Continually we find that our errors of belief are based upon very simple truths that have been misunderstood through a misinterpretation of primitive matters and modes of representation by means of modern ignorance. The blood-covenant of the aboriginal races has undoubtedly survived and culminated as Christian in the frightful formula, “Without blood there is no remission of sin.” Not merely the blood of beasts or human creatures this time, but the ruddy life and ichor of a supposed Divine Being, who was made flesh on purpose to pour out the blood for Almighty vengeance to lap in the person of a gory ghost of God. One of the seven primal powers in Egypt was represented by the hawk, because it drank blood. One of the Seven in Akkad was the vampire. And this type of blood-drinking has been divinised at last as the Christian God.
Pindar says: “It is impossible for me to call one of the blessed gods a cannibal.” But the Christian scheme makes the Only God a cannibal, who offers the flesh and blood of his own Son and Very Self as sacrificial food made sacred for his followers. Such a god is, in two senses, chimerical. How natural an accompaniment is the picture of the Crucified Christ to the Zuni saying, “My Father, this day shalt thou refresh thyself with blood!” Such a doctrine is but an awful shadow of the primitive past—the shadow, so to say, of our old earth in the very far-off past—that remains to eclipse the light of Heaven to-day, and darken the souls of men in the present through the survival of savage spiritualism in its final Christian phase, where the extant doctrines are little more than an ignorant perversion of the most primitive knowledge.
It is in this final and not in the primitive phase that we shall identify the irrationality, the impiety, the disgusting grossness of Mythology under the surface of theological varnish and veneer. The only senselessness is in the survival of Myths without their sense.
Lastly, it is observable that in the genuine rite the covenant-makers always bled directly and suffered each for themselves. Later on we find that other victims were substituted by purchase, by fraud, or by force; hence the blood-covenant by proxy. Now the Christian scheme is that which culminated in the blood-covenant and atonement by proxy. “His offspring for his life he gave,” is said of an Akkadian ruler who sacrificed his own son as an expiatory offering to save himself from the consequences of his own sin. And this doctrine of the despicable, this type of the fatherhood, is elevated to the status of divinity by Dr. Trumbull. To quote his own words, the inspired author of the narrative found in the Hebrew Genesis shows “Abel lovingly and trustfully reaching out toward God with substitute blood!”
And there began for the Historic Christians that vast perversion of a primitive custom which culminated at last in the Christian doctrine of vicarious sacrifice, based upon the mythology of the Old Testament being literalized in the New. Now we have the ludicrous spectacle of salvation by means of a rite which has lost all the manhood, all the morality, all the meaning, that was put into it by the despised races of uncivilized men.
The eucharistic rite is incredibly primitive when really understood. The bread and wine of the Christian sacrament still represent the male spirit and the female source of life. The “Blood of Jesus,” which was to be “drink indeed,” is identical with the “Blood of Bacchus,” which preceded historic Christianity, and has been substituted for the human or animal blood of the earlier mysteries. Imbibing the blood of the Christ did not originate in any historic or personal transaction. Also the blood of Christ, or Mithras, or Horus, employed in drinking the covenant, was preceded by the blood of Charis. In some of the Gnostic mysteries we have the proof that the first form of the saving blood was feminine, not masculine at all. Irenæus presents us with a picture of profound interest from the anthropological point of view.
He tells us how Marcus performed the eucharistic rite with the blood of Charis, instead of the blood of Christ. He handed cups to the women and bade them consecrate these in his presence. Then, by the use of magical incantation, “Charis was thought to drop her own blood into the cup” thus consecrated. (B. I. 13, 2.)
There is but one known fact in natural phenomena which will fitly account as Vera Causa for a monthly Sacrament, celebrated every twenty-eight days, or thirteen times to the year; which fact was commemorated by the Blood-Covenant of Charis ( Vide “Nat. Gen.” V. ii. section 12, for proofs). This kind of blood-covenant can be paralleled in the Yain or Yonian mysteries of India.
When rightly understood, the eucharist is a survival of the “beastly cannibalistic ceremony,” whether considered as the blood of Charis or the blood of Christ, or partaken of as the red Tent wine or the “bloody wafer” of Rome.
We welcome Dr. Trumbull’s contribution on the subject, although he has but “breathed a vein” of it, because these rites and customs have to be unveiled, and when they are at last exposed in all the simplicity of naked nature the erroneous ideas read into them, the delusive inferences drawn from them, the false illusions painted upon the veil that concealed the truth about them, will be doomed to pass away. To explain the true is the only effectual mode of exploding the false.
GERALD MASSEY.
=Correspondence.=
CORRESPONDENCE ADDRESSED TO THE AUTHOR OF “LIGHT ON THE PATH.”
I.
“What are the senses called astral, in reality? Are they not really spiritual, seizing on the inner essence of things and interpreting it. The ordinary psychic or clairvoyant surely does not use the astral senses? Yet he sees things which we do not see. It would be well to explain this.”
B. K.
A. The senses called astral in the comments on “Light on the Path” are the senses which perceive the inner essence, certainly; which are cognisant of the life underlying every form of matter. The ordinary psychic or clairvoyant only perceives other forms of matter than those we ordinarily see, and perceives them as a child perceives the forms in this world at first, without understanding their meaning. The astral senses carry beyond matter, and enlighten man with regard to any form of life which especially interests him. They show the poet painter, and composer the things they express to other men, who regard these great ones as beings of another order—beings with the gift of genius. So they are, and the vigour of that genius carries them on into the inner life where meaning, and harmony, and the indefinable all-desired are to be perceived. Wordsworth saw it in nature, he recognised the “spirit in the woods”—not the wood-nymphs but the divine spirit of peace which teaches a lesson in life. Richard Jeffries saw it in nature, too, as perhaps no other man ever has seen it; through the finite visible world he perceived the infinite invisible one, and before he died he had begun to know that the visible world does not exist. Turner, perhaps, is the only parallel. By the invisible world I must repeat again that I do not mean what the spiritualists call by that name—a new world of other forms. I mean the formless world. It is the farthest limit man’s consciousness can reach to; and only the pure and star-like soul can become even aware of its existence. It is not man’s divine nature, but the man who enters it with any reverence for the great miracle of life can only do so by the aid of his divine nature, whether as a poet, a painter, or an occultist. The soul which enters it without reverence is unable to endure its extreme rarity of atmosphere and turns to the psychic-astral in which to live; such men become madmen and suicides, more or less pronounced, as men do who refuse to dwell in any form of physical life but the grossest and simplest. There is some law of life which impels men onward—call it evolution or developement or what you will; and a man can no more go downwards without suffering than a tree can be placed with its branches in the ground, instead of its roots, without discomfort, and in the end, death.
I propose to use two phrases which have been suggested to me; the psychic-astral and the divine-astral. This seems the only way to make my meaning clear, for the word astral has two meanings, its own proper derivative one, from the Sanskrit stri to strew light, and that given it by the use of all occultists. Paracelsus appropriated the word for all things sidereal, subject to the moon and stars, part and parcel of this material universe, even though formed as Dryden says of “purest atoms of the air.” In this sense the spiritualists and psychics have the right of custom to use it as they do, to describe their world of finer forms. In this meaning an astral shape is the form of the human soul, still in possession of the passions which make it human; and the astral senses perceive not the subtle and supreme glory which Shelley seized on in Prometheus, but a region full of shapes and forms differing but little from those we now wear, and still distinctly material.
The “astral man” in the “Comments on Light on the Path” should have been written the divine-astral man, according to this evident difference of meaning between the present writer and all other writers on occultism.
II.
“Are not the astral senses used by every great poet or inventor though he does not see clairvoyantly at all? i.e. does not see elementals, astral pictures, forms, &c.”
FAUST.
The answer to the former question seems to contain the answer to this, which is clearly prompted by a conception of the word “astral” in its divine sense.
III.
1. “There is a law of nature which insists that a man shall read these mysteries for himself. Will all men seeking the occult path read these mysteries alike, or will each man find the interpretation peculiarly adapted to his own phrase of development. No two men read the mysteries contained in the Bhagavat Gita quite alike, each gains the glimpses of light which he is able to assimilate and no more.”
A. This seems to be rather a statement of a truth than a question which can be answered in any way other than putting it into different words, perhaps not so good.
2. “Is the outer world the reflection of the world within? like a shadowed reproduction in clumsy form, the inner being reality?”
A. This is what should be. But materialists have brought their sense of reality into the shadowed life.
3. “How is the intuition to be developed which enables one to grasp swift knowledge?”
A. To me no way is known but that of living the life of a disciple.
4. “Can the laws in super-nature only act on their own plane, or can their reflection be brought down intact in their own purity to govern physical life.”
A. Surely this must be so; yet rarely, for when it is accomplished the man would be divine, a Buddha!
5. “To be incapable of tears”—does not that mean that the physical emotions, being merged into the inner physical, that tears are impossible as being an outward phase of the physical nature—whereas the psychical emotions, to use a physical term are vibratory.
A. “The whole of ‘Light on the Path,’ is written in an astral cipher” is stated at the outset of the “comments;” the word “tears” does not refer to physical tears in any way.
It is the only word which will convey any idea whatever of the moisture of life, that which bursts from the human soul in its experience of sensation and emotion, and in the passion of its hunger for them.
6. “How is one to take the snake of self in a steady grasp and conquer it?”
W.
A. This is the great mystery which each man must solve for himself.
IV.
WALLASEY, Oct. 1st
Referring to the comments on “Light on the Path,” in the first number of LUCIFER, may I ask whether the full paradox “Before the eyes can see they must be incapable of tears, and yet no eyes incapable of tears can see,” i.e., see good or God, is not truer and stronger than its part?
“Therefore the soul of the occultist must become stronger than joy and greater than sorrow” I presume means that he must not seek joy or fear sorrow, not that he may not enjoy nor sorrow?
The phrase by itself may read “Before the eyes can see they must be incapable of tears,” tearless, dry, in fact dead! which is obviously not the author’s intention in “Light on the Path.”
Yours truly, A. E. I.
A. Once more I must refer to the preliminary statement in the comments that “Light on the Path,” is written in an astral cipher, and that tears do not mean the tears of the physical body, but the rain drops that come from the passion-life of the human soul. These being stayed for ever, the astral sight is no longer blinded or blurred. Divine love and charity then find room, when personal desire is gone. Joy and sorrow, for oneself, then drop naturally into another place than that which they filled before.
V.
(1.) I desire very strongly to obtain conquest over “self;” would my using the occult means for so doing, which apparently to me lie without the ordinary experience of Christians, necessitate my sacrificing any iota of my belief in the power of Christ?
(2.) If I submit myself to the occult conditions under which the four first rules in “Light on the Path” may be “engraved on my heart and life;” will these conditions permit me to pray throughout for the Divine help and strength of the Eternal Christ, who has passed the portal, opened the “way,” and whom I believe to be the “Master of Masters,” the “Lord of Angels”?
(3.) Do the words—“the disciple” ... “must then so shut the gates of his soul that no comforter can enter there nor any enemy”—mean, that we are wilfully to exclude ourselves from any desire for the sympathy, strength, and support of the spirit of One who said “No man cometh unto the Father but by Me,” and who drank the cup of agony to the very dregs for love of the Brotherhood?
L. H. FF.
A. (1.) Not any iota of your belief in the power of the Christ-spirit would or should be sacrificed; it would rather increase, for that spirit is the same Divine overshadowing which has inspired every Redeemer.
(2.) It matters very little by what name you call the Master of Masters, so that you do appeal to “Its” power throughout.
(3.) Man can find no comforter save in the Divine Spirit within himself. Does not the tale of the life of Jesus illustrate this, looking at it from one point of view? In what dread isolation he lived and died; His disciples, even those who were most beloved by Him, could not reach His spirit in its sublime moments, or in the hours of its keenest suffering. So with every one who raises himself by effort above the common life of man, in however small a degree. Solitude becomes a familiar state, for nothing personal, not even a personal God, can comfort or cheer any longer.
VI.
“Is there any chance of self-deception? May one enter the path so gradually as to be conscious of no radical change, representing a change of life or stage of progression? How is it with one who has never experienced a great and lasting sorrow, or an all-absorbing joy, but who in the midst of both joy and sorrow strives to remember others, and to feel that he hardly deserves the joy, and that his sorrow is meagre in the presence of the great all-pain? How is such a one to enter through the gates? By what sign shall he know them?”
Y. H.
A. It is difficult for such a one to know anything of what lies beneath the surface of his nature until it has been probed by the fiercer experiences of life. But, of course, the theory of re-incarnation makes it possible that such experiences are left behind in the past. The entrance to the gates is marked by one immutable sign; the sense that personal joy or sorrow no longer exist. The disciple lives for humanity, not for himself; works for all creatures that suffer instead of knowing that he himself has pain.
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“ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.”
“As the Editors of LUCIFER kindly invite questions concerning Theosophy and kindred subjects, an honest enquirer into these matters would welcome an answer to the following difficulty:
“In his book on ‘Esoteric Buddhism,’ Mr. Sinnett states that souls or spirits pass the long interval between the one incarnation and another in a sort of quiescent, and at least half-unconscious, state, losing enough of their identity to preclude their carrying any recollection of one incarnation on to the next. In his novel, “Karma,” Mr. Sinnett represents one character, Mrs. Lakesby, gifted with more than usual powers, as being very fond, when she has the chance, of allowing her spirit to escape from the trammels of the body and meeting the spirits of departed—that is, dead friends—“and others” on the Astral plane where she holds agreeable converse with them.
“How are these two statements reconcilable?
“October 22nd, 1887.
N. D.”
Mr. Sinnett would probably reply that the answer could only be given fully by reprinting all that he has written in various published works, on the conditions of existence in Kama-Loca, and Devachan, and on the higher and lower aspects of Self. The normal course of events will conduct a human being who quits the material body through Kama-Loca to the Devachanic state, in which Mrs. Lakesby would not be able to interview him. But while in Kama-Loca she might at least imagine she did this, and, perhaps not too wisely, indulge in the practice of so doing. If we remember rightly the Baron, in “Karma,” who is represented as knowing a good deal more than Mrs. Lakesby, gifted as she is, throws some discredit upon her view concerning the Astral plane and its inhabitants. At the best when a clairvoyant can gain touch with a soul in Kama-Loca, it is the lower self remaining there, though it has left the body, that she deals with. And though that lower self may be very recognisable for people who have known it in the earthly manifestation, it will be lower than the lower self of earth and not higher because ethereal. That is to say on earth the living man is more or less under the guidance of his higher self. But the higher has no longer any business to transact with the lower self of Kama-Loca, and does not manifest there at all.
Finally it must always be remembered that a romance, even though written by an Occultist, is a romance still, designed to suggest broad conceptions rather than to expound scientific and doctrinal details.
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“Being courteously invited to address any questions bearing on the matter contained in LUCIFER to the Editors, Madame la Marechale Canrobert would gladly know:—First, What is the distinction made (page 11) between the soul and the starry spirit? Is it that soul which is again alluded to (page 91) as the animal soul, in opposition to the Divine soul? Second, What are the external forms of the individualised being spoken of also on page 91?”
A. The human soul, that which is subject to human passions, but which can also yearn towards the nobility of the Divine soul, is that which is spoken of on page 11. The starry spirit is the Divine-astral. The animal soul is that which animates the mere physical life, the unintelligent existence of the body. The “external forms” referred to on page 91 are the successive human shapes which the starry spirit inspires during its long pilgrimage.
M. C.
=Reviews.=
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THE REAL HISTORY OF THE ROSICRUCIANS.[55]
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Footnote 55:
A. E. Waite. Published by G. Redway.
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Mr. Waite’s new book will be welcomed by that large class of readers who regard occultism, alchemy, and all like studies with antagonism and suspicion. Secret societies supposed to deal with such subjects are, from their point of view, better exposed and ridiculed than treated with respect or taken seriously. The author of the present volume does not, however, cast disrespect on occult science, nor does he discuss the Rosicrucians in a spirit of levity or disdain. He recognises that there may be, and probably is, a grand spiritual and moral philosophy in the higher aspects of true alchemy, but in these pages he treats the subject of the society from the historical, and not at all from the mystical side, and confines himself to tracing its recorded history, its rise, fall, and raison d’etre. The conscientious study of these records relating to the Brotherhood has brought Mr. Waite to the conclusion that they do not support the traditions which up to the present have surrounded the society with a veil of unknown antiquity and have endowed its members with a halo of marvellous wisdom. It is these conclusions that will charm the incredulous, and may probably blind them to the indications of an undercurrent of belief in the reality of occult science, per se, which the author has evidently not desired to suppress. To investigate and disentangle the network of facts, theories, and traditions which must necessarily envelope a society that up to the commencement of the seventeenth century had not been heard of by the general public is no easy task, and Mr. Waite may be congratulated upon the calm and judicial spirit with which he has treated his subject, as well as upon the moderation with which he advances his own views. To be able to gather from these open records how far the members of such a society may have held in their keeping some of the inner secrets of Nature is of course impossible to ordinary humanity. The real character and aims of such an association can be known only to passed Initiates. In his preface Mr. Waite says: “I claim to have performed my task in a sympathetic but impartial manner, purged from the bias of any theory, and above all uncontaminated by the pretension to superior knowledge, which claimants have never been able to substantiate.” This statement is fully justified in the pages of the book under review. Its value does not lie so much in any new presentation of the facts or theories pertaining to the Rosicrucians, and which are so frequently distorted by ignorant commentators, as in the compact and systematic arrangement of some of the principal writings available. He has brought together not only the leading works of the various writers known, or supposed to be Rosicrucians, but he has also collected the criticisms and conjectures on these current at the time of their appearance in Germany, together with others of a much more recent date. Consequently the reader has before him almost all the information of this description he could require, and which he could not obtain for himself except by the expenditure of time and trouble that very few are either able or willing to give.
It is not surprising that Mr. Waite should have satisfied himself that the Rosicrucians have no sort of claim to the reverence and admiration in which scholars and mystics have held them up to the present time. But these conclusions will form only one more of other proofs to students of esotericism, that the task of writing a true and real history of a secret occult society from its records, where such exist, is an impossibility. For even when such societies left reliable information of their pursuits, aspirations, and beliefs, the language employed has always been of such a character as to baffle entirely the ordinary exoteric reader, whether he were historian, literateur, or scientist. Such literature can be interesting only to the student on the track of esoteric knowledge, or to one who has in a great measure acquired the meaning conveyed, for himself in other ways. This method of giving to the world, as it were, the proceeds, of life-long research in the realms of unseen Nature, has been adopted by alchemists, magicians, priests, and hierophants from all ages. None but those who were sufficiently steadfast in the cause of truth could read and understand what was thus written. The numerous and minute directions for the working of spells and cures, etc., left by Paracelsus, and which are apparently as straight forward and practicable as the receipts in a modern cookery book, would turn out probably much less successful in the hands of an amateur, no matter how highly educated on the physical plane, than the more delicate dishes taken from such receipts manipulated by an entirely inexperienced servant. For these elaborate instructions are given in terms that appeal simply to the material senses of those who are in search of power rather than of wisdom, whereas the real effort to produce the result has to take place on the Astral plane of nature. The spiritual or soul side of man, must be awakened and utilised, before the Philosopher’s stone, or the elixir of life, can be discovered.
The comprehension of the potentialities of the human body, their nurture and eventual utilisation for purely unselfish ends and spiritual, i.e., real wisdom, is, or ought to be, the work of all secret occult societies. But to return to Mr. Waite’s book. The popular notion that this Brotherhood is of great, almost incredible antiquity, is utterly condemned by him. He fails to find any documentary evidence to show that it existed before the early part of the seventeenth century, and argues that the well-known antiquity of the Rose and Cross in symbolism is no proof of the antiquity of a society using them “at a period subsequent to the Renaissance.” Granting that the device of the Rose and Cross, as emblems of a particular order or brotherhood, does not guarantee its equal antiquity with them, still it must be admitted that these symbols bearing as they do a profoundly esoteric interpretation, and being adopted by a society of a distinctly occult character, is an argument in support of the theory that the founder or originator of this order had some reason other than fancy for thus labelling his fraternity. Elsewhere he says, “I have shown indisputably that there was no novelty in the Rosicrucian pretensions, and no originality in their views. They appear before us as Lutheran disciples of Paracelsus.”
The author here seems to be not entirely logical in his deductions. When he states that he has not met in his search with either letters, records, or papers that mention or suggest the existence of such a society before the seventeenth century, he is of course, as a historian, safely ensconced from attack. In this capacity as an impartial seeker after facts, it is outside the area of his work in the absence of data to theorise on probabilities. When, however, in dealing with the manifestoes of the seventeenth century, he finds therein evidence that shows him the Brotherhood had no back history or ancestry, his conclusions are open to criticism. The very fact of the want of originality and novelty in the views, aims and aspirations set forth in the “Fama,” and “Confessio” surely gives strength to the theory that holds to the antiquity of the society, rather than to its being the outcome of a spontaneous effort. All true students of mysticism have good reason to believe, even when they do not absolutely know, that the various schools of occultism considered from their highest or most spiritual and abstract teaching, lead to the same goal. They may be called by different names, and their methods in minor details may not be the same, but the wisdom au fond is identical. Therefore when Mr. Waite casts discredit upon the Rosicrucians for not advertising novelties in their manifesto, in the mystical line of thought, he reminds us of a man who in making up his mind on the value of a violin, decides that it cannot be of great age, because it emits only the same set of sounds that such musical instruments have been accustomed to give forth from time immemorial.
As far as can be ascertained by studying the state of thought and society at the period when the Rosicrucians were first heard of in Europe, this particular order manifested itself as an antidote to the general tendency towards the material side of alchemy, which honey-combed the educated classes of Germany. Wonder-seekers then, as now, did not apprehend that ethics, both social and spiritual, are the fundamental basis of real wisdom, consequently the great cry was for power, no matter of what description, for the accumulation of wealth. The craving for arcane knowledge, so widely diffused, and which alchemists were truly known to possess, had gradually degenerated into a purely selfish desire for the secret of transmuting metals. To supply this eager demand charlatans of every description rushed to the front professing to teach all who joined their standards, i.e., who could pay the necessary fee, how to turn common metal into pure gold. The craze for this power was so universal, the motive of it so unspiritual, that in order to stem the tide of the folly, and to checkmate the impostors who were bringing discredit on the Sacred Art, the “Fama” was issued by a body of people who took as their symbols the Rose and Cross. From this point of view the Rosicrucians historically come before the world in the light of a group of Reformers.
Different people interpret in different ways the two manifestoes—the “Fama” and “Confessio.” Mr. Waite appears to place great importance on the adherence to Christian dogmas observable in the wording of these papers. But in taking the documents literally, he seems to overlook the necessity that all writers were under, in those troubled times, of pandering to the narrow and prejudiced minds of the leaders of the so called Christian Church, by apparently adhering to the Ritual. Naturally, the author of the “Fama” worded it in such a manner as to avoid persecution or suspicion of heresy. Those to whom it was really addressed would not be misled by its tone of orthodoxy, and the general public and the church would pass it by as harmless. Moreover, as Mr. Waite remarks further on, “the philosophical and scientific opinions and pretentions of the Rosicrucian Society have more claim on our notice” than their theology. Speaking again of the school of thought current at the time this organization was floated, and which he tells us the Rosicrucians followed, he says.... “Mystics in an age of scientific and religious materialism, they were connected by an unbroken chain with the theurgists of the first Christian centuries, they were alchemists in the spiritual sense, and the professors of a Divine Magic. Their disciples, the Rosicrucians, followed closely in their footsteps, and the claims of the “Fama” and “Confessio” must be reviewed in the light of the great elder claims of alchemy and magic.” In spite of this, Mr. Waite judges the Society, it would appear, by what he admits to be the minor and less important side of its object, for he speaks of it eventually, as a body of “pre-eminently learned men and a Christian Sect.” We will not stop to consider the probability or possibility of a body of “pre-eminently learned men,” being at the same time a “Christian Sect.”
Having thus deprived the Rosicrucians of the dignity, reverence and romance, that cling round great antiquity; having saddled them with the tenets and dogmas of conventional mediæval christianity, Mr. Waite next proceeds to demolish their emblems, or at all events, to deny that they attached any esoteric interpretation to them. He says ... “The whole question of the Crucified Rose, in its connection with the Society is one of pure conjecture, that no Rosicrucian manifestoes, and no acknowledged Brother have ever given any explanation concerning it, and that no presumption is afforded by the fact of its adoption, for the antiquity of the Society, or for its connection with Universal Symbolism.” Allowing for the necessity in writing a history of a mystical society of taking the documents as they stand, Mr. Waite rather ignores the fact that the evidence for the statement above is of a negative character. That in their manifestoes and records there appears no explanation of their emblems, hardly justifies the conclusion that they were incapable of giving any. It would indeed have been a new departure in the annals of Secret Societies if the founders of this particular order had left behind the explanation of their signs and symbols. The study and interpretation of symbology forms a most important element in the education of occult disciples, and therefore to assume that the projectors of this organisation should be unaware of the mystic reading of the Rose and Cross, is a hypothesis that no student of mysticism could accept.
It is, on the whole, generally assumed by those who have taken any pains to investigate the evidence, that Johann Valentin Andreas was the author of the “Fama,” the Confessio Fraternitatis, and also of the “Chymical Marriage” of Christian Rosencreutz, and to that extent he must be looked upon exoterically as the founder of the Rosicrucian Society, as first known to history. He was deeply versed in mystic studies and alchemy, and had besides a widespread reputation as a scholar and learned man. His “Chymical Marriage,” to anyone with even a slight acquaintance with alchemical literature, reveals him as one who had penetrated deeply into some of the mysteries of nature. Consequently, he must have been well aware that the Rose and Cross bore a profoundly occult signification. Considering the man himself, the character of his studies, and his well known devotion to alchemy and mysticism, it is certainly more reasonable to suppose that he took those emblems (presuming he had any choice in the matter) for his society, not as some suggest, because they happened to form a part of his own armorial bearings, or that the Rose and Cross on a Heart was used by Martin Luther, but because he recognised their full value and importance as symbols of cosmic evolution.
Mr. Waite seems, on the whole, to agree with the idea that Andreas was the author of the “Fama” and “Confessio,” and regards the “Chymical Marriage” as undoubtedly his production. He also allows that the latter pamphlet can only have been the work of a man deeply embued with alchemical speculations, a mystic and follower of Paracelsus. How then can he ask us to believe that the Society formed under such auspices was au fond, nothing but a Christian sect based on the teachings of Martin Luther! To the public at large these theories may perhaps appear sufficiently plausible in face of the wording of those parts of the manifestoes that touch on theology. To students of esotericism, however, such conclusions will be absolutely unacceptable, and we can not allow to pass without comment Mr. Waite’s hypothesis that the Rosicrucian Society, as it first came before the world, was simply a society for the propagation of the deteriorated Christianity of the middle ages. No mystic, whether calling himself Rosicrucian, Cabbalist, Theosophist, Christian, or Buddhist, would either, intellectually or spiritually, accept the narrow dogmas and intolerant views of the Christian church, even when to some extent cleansed of many of its grosser abuses by the energy of Martin Luther’s Reform.
The two lines of thought are essentially different. In the case of the Christian, no matter of what denomination, his thoughts are bound down and paralysed within the rigid circle drawn by the materialistic reading of Christ’s birth, life, and death. The true occultist takes those episodes spiritually or allegorically, finding their correspondences within himself as well as in the universe. To say that a human being can at one and the same time be an occultist, and a sectarian Christian, is as impossible as to speak of a Christian Jew. A true Christian, i.e., one who understood and followed absolutely the teachings of Jesus, would be also a true Rosicrucian. Membership of particular churches or societies does not unfortunately endow the individual immediately with the virtue, knowledge or power, that is the theoretical goal of his initial action. Such membership is, or may be a step in the direction of Divine Wisdom, but one step does not carry him to the summit of the path. Men do not become either Rosicrucians, Christians, or Theosophists merely by joining the Societies working under those particular names. But certain tendencies in their temperaments urge them into the special Society where the mode of thought seems best fitted to help them, to realise the magnitude and glory of the possibilities inherent in their own souls.
Between the humanity of to-day, and the development of a sixth sense, which will enable it to perceive what now is imperceptible, there is but a thin veil of obstructing matter, metaphorically speaking. This veil is even now being continually pierced by psychics, first in one direction then in another, letting in through these tiny openings glimpses of the invisible world around. In a little while the veil will be worn away entirely, and the humanity of that future time will doubtless wonder how the humanity of this age, which we find so enlightened, could have been so unintuitive and blind to the most important side of their natures. Until the race however has by soul evolution attained to this sixth sense, real histories of Mystical Societies can hardly be hoped for. Members of such Societies, who by study and training have attained some degree of knowledge may not disclose the secrets, non-members cannot get at them. The reading-classes of to-day may, after reading Mr. Waite’s book, think they have learnt something of the body of people called Rosicrucians, and until now supposed to have some claim to arcane knowledge. The students of occultism will know that the vital part of the subject is and must remain ever impregnable, excepting from its esoteric side.
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“NINETEENTH CENTURY SENSE.”
Sense! What is ”sense”? A word meaning either little or much; simple and clear to the understanding, or various and carrying with it many connotations. It is one or other according as we measure the depth, the thoroughness, or the reality of the knowledge acquired. From a purely physical “sensation” we may trace the word through endless shades of signification; through “good” sense, “sound” sense, through the artistic and finer sensibilities, the “moral” sense, till it loses itself in the vague hint of a dim, unformed consciousness, pointing the way to the new world of the “inner senses.”
All these meanings and more are connoted by the phrase “Nineteenth Century Sense;” [56] for, by a daring metaphor, the tools which modern science places at our disposal are considered as “senses,” and even the faculty and power of analysis is sometimes included under the word.
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Footnote 56:
NINETEENTH CENTURY SENSE: The Paradox of Spiritualism. By John Darby. J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, and 10, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London.
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Beginning with the simplest, the reader is led on to the most astounding phenomena of modern spiritualism in the first thirty-seven pages of this strange work. The author depicts in vivid language his own experiences, and the triumphs of phenomena produced by one of his personal friends, in a style which is often quaint and striking, though at times the writer’s disregard of many of the accepted rules of composition becomes—to say the least—irritating. But the matter of his book earns forgiveness for the manner in which it is formulated.
After carrying his reader to a pitch of interest and expectation as to the phenomena he describes, Mr. Darby suddenly plunges him into the frozen sea of scepticism by stating that all the phenomena produced under what seemed the strictest test conditions, were produced by conjuring and legerdemain, and by explaining the physical causes of some of the visions he has so graphically described. It will suffice to cite a single instance in illustration. “The President of the American Branch of the Indian Society of Theosophists (Professor Coues) ... spent an evening with me some time back in conversation on the subject of psychical phenomena. We parted at midnight. At seven o’clock the next morning I suddenly awoke, beholding the astral of the professor standing at my bed-side.”
This vision Mr. Darby explains by reference to the fact of the persistence of retinal images and the super-excitability of the nerves and brain. “Astral projections,” he concludes, “are of precisely similar significance.” We would feel obliged to the eminent American professor of physiology referred to if he would give his written opinion on the question thus raised. For Theosophists have heard of persons whose brains were in complete repose and fully occupied otherwise who have also seen the astral form of Professor Coues. How’s this?
He concludes, nevertheless, that materialistic agnosticism is the only “creed”? Far from it. This portion of the book is purely introductory; it forms the five door-steps leading to the Spiritus Sanctus—the laboratory of the Divine Spirit.
From this black depth of doubt and confusion, the reader is lifted suddenly into the clear ether, and his feet are placed on the “Rosicrucian Way.”
Whether called “Rosicrucian,” or by whatever other name, the “Way” is the “Way of Life,” the path which leads to freedom, to wisdom, to true living. Whole pages might well be quoted; a few aphorisms must suffice.
“A thing is to the sense that uses it what to the sense It seems to be; it is never anything else.”
Many passages recall “Light on the Path,” though Mr. Darby probably never saw that book; but life is one, and true occultism is one.
Speaking of mankind as divided into two classes, men in whom is the Holy Ghost, the Divine Spirit or the Logos, he says:
“With people self-wise or over-sufficient, with the proud and the uncharitable, with all who are without understanding as to the common good being the only good, with him who fails to see that gifts are in men as almoners only—with all these the Holy Ghost is absent, otherwise so lacking in measure as to be incapable of making itself felt.”
The italicised passages give the key-note of the true science and art of living. To quote again:
“Settled into tranquillity by entirely satisfactory recognition of noumenon through phenomenon an end is reached where instrument is prepared and ready for use. Analysis has shown the Rosicrucian what he is; more than this—what he can become as to his Ego. If out of his understanding, he puts office [the service of others.—ED.] before self, he learns directly of the God, as the God comes to live in and to make use of him.”
“Proving to one’s self that one’s self is God”; and again, “God ... the One is in all; the All is in one.”
The next chapter contrasts strangely with the one just quoted from—strangely, that is, to the outer sense. The one full of deep philosophy, of questionings of God, the Self, the World, clothed in the profound and significant paradoxes in which wisdom finds expression; the other an idyll, a sketch of nature, deeply coloured by the influence of Walt Whitman, whose style, perhaps, has had too great an influence on Mr. Darby, who has caught its jerky and unpleasant strings of detached sentences.
This is Chapter V.; Chapter VI. deals with Matter in its relation to the Ego, the spirit of the treatment being indicated by the following conclusion:
“That there shows itself, out of a process of exclusion, conducted even only so far as the analysis of matter, a something which is not matter. The analysis demonstrates the something to be of individual signification; further, that it is to it what a flute or other instrument is to harmony.”
The final words express a purely occult doctrine, which is worked out at length in the succeeding chapter on the Ego.
This is the fundamental thought of the book, the last fifty pages of which describe the author’s individual experiences in nascent psychic development.
They are not of a very striking character, but exhibit with sufficient clearness the early forms of this new growth. Unfortunately, the author seems to have lacked the desire to pursue the road thus opened to him, and the final pages of his work are but a lame and halting conclusion to a remarkable production.
The book is well adapted for those who stand halting on the verge of mysticism, while for the student who has advanced further, its pages may serve as a means for helping others.
The Editors of LUCIFER beg to acknowledge the following books, which will be noticed in future numbers:—
From Messrs. Ward and Downey: “A Modern Magician,” by Fitzgerald Molloy. “Twin Souls.”
From Messrs. David Nutt & Co.: “The Gnostics and their Remains,” by C. H. King.
From the Authors: “Natural Genesis,” by Gerald Massey. “Sepher Yezirah,” by Dr. Wynn Westcott. “Palingenesia,” by “Theosopho and Ellora.” “Mohammed Benani,” by Ion Perdicaris. “Lays of Romance,” by W. Stewart Ross.
From George Redway: “Posthumous Humanity,” translated by Col. H. S. Olcott.
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⁂ The Editors regret that the pressure on their space prevents their noticing in detail the various Theosophical Magazines:—THE THEOSOPHIST, THE PATH, LE LOTUS, and L’AURORE. A full summary of their contents for November and December will appear next month. The same remark applies to a letter on “Karma,” received from Mr. Beatty, which will be published and fully answered next month.
=FROM THE NOTE BOOK OF AN UNPOPULAR PHILOSOPHER=
I am Sternly Rebuked for some remarks made in the last number. My reflections with regard to the respective value of Mussulman and Christian pledges exchanged, as also on the doubtful propriety of zoological symbolism in the Churches—are pronounced wantonly wicked and calculated to hurt the tender feelings of Christian readers—if any. Protestant England—it is solemnly urged—is full of truly good men and women, of sincere church-goers, who “walk in the ways of the Lord.” No doubt there are such, and no doubt they do, or try to, which is a step in advance of those who do not. But then none of the “righteous” need recognize their faces in the mirror presented by the “Unpopular Philosopher” only to the unrighteous. And again—-
“THE WAYS OF THE LORD....” The ways of which Lord? Is the jealous Lord of Moses meant, the God who thundered amidst the lightnings of Sinai, or the meek “Lord” of the Mount of Olives and Calvary? Is it the stern God that saith “vengeance is mine,” and who must be “worshipped in fear,” or the “man-God” who commanded to love one’s neighbours as oneself, to forgive one’s enemies and bless those who revile us? For the ways of the two Lords are wide apart, and can never meet.
No one who has studied the Bible can deny for one single moment that a large proportion (if happily not all) of modern Christians walk indeed “in the ways of the Lord”—Number I. This one is the “Lord” who had respect unto Abel, because the meat of his sacrifice smelt sweet in his nostrils; the “Lord” who commanded the Israelites to spoil the Egyptians of their jewels of silver and gold;[57] also to “kill every male among the little ones,” as “every woman ... but all the women children (virgins) to keep alive for themselves” (Numb. XXXI., 17, et seq.); and to commit other actions too coarse to be repeated in any respectable publication.
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Footnote 57:
And no doubt also the Anglo-Indians to spoil the King of Burmah of his?
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Hence the modern warriors who achieve such feats (with the modern improvement occasionally, of shooting their enemies out of the mouths of big guns) walk, most undeniably, “in the ways” of the Lord of the Jews, but never in the ways of Christ. So does the modern trader who keeps the Sabbath most rigorously, attending Divine Service thrice on that day, after treating during the whole week his hired clerks as the brood of Ham “who shall be their (Shem and Japhet’s) servants.”
So does, likewise, he who helps himself, David-like, to a Bath-Sheba, the wife of Uriah, without the least concern whether he simply robs or kills the Hittite husband. For he has every right to take for his sampler “a friend of God”—the God of the old covenant.
But will either of these pretend they walk in the ways of their Lord of the new Dispensation? Yet, he who raises his voice in a protest against the “ways” of the Mosaic God, therefore, in favour of those preached by the very antithesis of Jehovah—the meek and gentle “Man of Sorrow”—he is forthwith set up on the pillory and denounced to public opprobrium as an anti-Christian and an Atheist! This, in the face of the words: “Not every one that saith unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in Heaven.... And every one that heareth these words of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand.... and great was the fall thereof!”
THE “WILL OF MY FATHER?” Is this “Father” identical with the God of Mount Sinai and of the Commandments? Then what is the meaning of the whole Chapter V. of Matthew, of the Sermon on the Mount, in which every one of these Commandments is virtually criticised and destroyed by the new amendments?
“Ye have heard that it hath been said ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’; but I say unto you that you resist not evil,” etc.
Glance at the big centres of our Christian civilisations. Look at the jails, the court and the prison-houses, the tribunals, and the police; see the distress, with starvation and prostitution as its results. Look at the host of the men of law and of judges; and then see how far the words of Christ, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, Judge not that ye be not judged,” apply to the whole structure of our modern civilised life, and how far we may be called Christians.
How well the commandment—“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone”—is now obeyed, may be seen by following day after day, the law reports for slander, calumny and defamation. Obedience to the injunction, and warning against the sin of offending children, “these little ones,” of whom is the Kingdom of Heaven, is found in the brutal treatment of fatherless children on the streets by the Christian police, of other children by their parents, and finally, in the merciless flogging of wee bits of culprits driven to crime by their own parents and starvation. And is it those who denounce such an anti-Christian spirit in legislation, the Pharisaical church and society, who shall be branded for speaking the truth? The magistrate, who has sworn on the Bible—contrary to Christ’s express injunction—to administer justice; the pious defaulter, who swears falsely on it, but cannot be convicted; the sanctimonious millionaire who fattens on the blood and sweat of the poor; and the aristocratic “Jezebel” who casts mud from her carriage wheels on her “fallen” sister, on the street, a victim perchance, of one of the men of her own high caste—all these call themselves Christians. The anti-Christians are those who dare to look behind that veil of respectability.
The best answer to such paradoxical denunciation may be found in one of “Saladin’s” admirable editorials. The reader must turn to The Secular Review for October 22nd, 1887, and read some pertinent reflections on “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,” and the “Child-thieves” flogging. Well may a “heathen Chinee” or a “mild Hindu” shudder in horror at the picture in it of that “drawing of blood” out of the baby-bodies of infant thieves. The process is executed by a Christian policeman acting under the orders and in the presence of a righteous Christian magistrate. Has either of the two ever given a thought during the “child-torture” to the words of their Christ: “Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were cast into the sea”?
Yes, they are walking “in the ways of the God of Israel”! For, as “it repented the Lord that he had made man” so wicked and so imperfect, that “Lord” drowned and destroyed him “from the face of the Earth,” without more ado. Verily so, “both man and beast, and the creeping thing and the fowls,” though the latter had neither sinned, nor were they “wicked.” And why shouldn’t the righteous men on Earth do likewise? It repents the Christian citizens of pious LUGDUNUM perchance also, that they create the starving little wretches, the foundlings abandoned to vice from the day of their birth? And the truly good Christian men, who would believe themselves damned to hell-fire were they to miss their Sabbath Service, forbidden by law to drown their creatures, resort to the next best thing they can; they “draw blood” from those little ones whom their “Saviour” and Master took under his special protection.
May the shadow of “Saladin” never grow less, for the fearless honest words of truth he writes:—
“And whose blood was in the veins of these two boys? Whose blood reddened the twigs of the birch? Peradventure that of the magistrate himself, or of the chaplain of the prison. For mystical are the grinding of the wheels of the mill of misery. And God looks on and tolerates. And I am accounted a heretic, and my anti-Christian writings are produced against me in a Court of Justice to prevent my getting justice, because I fail to see in all this how Christianity “elevates” woman and casts a “halo of sacred innocence round the tender years of the child.” So be it. I have flung down my gage of battle, and the force of bigotry may break me to death; but it shall never bend me to submission. Unsalaried and ill-supported, I fight as stubbornly as if the world flung at my feet its gold and laurels and huzzas; for the weak need a champion and the wronged an avenger. It is necessary that Sham find an opponent and Hypocrisy a foe: these they will find in me, be the consequences what they may.
“SALADIN.”
This is the epitomized history of the “Unpopular Philosopher”; aye, the story of all those who, in the words of “Lara,” know that “Christianity will never save humanity, but humanity may save Christianity,” i.e., the ideal spirit of the Christos-Buddha—of THEOSOPHY.
LUCIFER
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VOL. I. LONDON, DECEMBER 15TH, 1887. NO. 4.
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“LUCIFER” TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY, GREETING!
MY LORD PRIMATE OF ALL ENGLAND,—
We make use of an open letter to your Grace as a vehicle to convey to you, and through you, to the clergy, to their flocks, and to Christians generally—who regard us as the enemies of Christ—a brief statement of the position which Theosophy occupies in regard to Christianity, as we believe that the time for making that statement has arrived.
Your Grace is no doubt aware that Theosophy is not a religion, but a philosophy at once religious and scientific; and that the chief work, so far, of the Theosophical Society has been to revive in each religion its own animating spirit, by encouraging and helping enquiry into the true significance of its doctrines and observances. Theosophists know that the deeper one penetrates into the meaning of the dogmas and ceremonies of all religions, the greater becomes their apparent underlying similarity, until finally a perception of their fundamental unity is reached. This common ground is no other than Theosophy—the Secret Doctrine of the ages; which, diluted and disguised to suit the capacity of the multitude, and the requirements of the time, has formed the living kernel of all religions. The Theosophical Society has branches respectively composed of Buddhists, Hindoos, Mahomedans, Parsees, Christians, and Freethinkers, who work together as brethren on the common ground of Theosophy; and it is precisely because Theosophy is not a religion, nor can for the multitude supply the place of a religion, that the success of the Society has been so great, not merely as regards its growing membership and extending influence, but also in respect to the performance of the work it has undertaken—the revival of spirituality in religion, and the cultivation of the sentiment of BROTHERHOOD among men.
We Theosophists believe that a religion is a natural incident in the life of man in his present stage of development; and that although, in rare cases, individuals may be born without the religious sentiment, a community must have a religion, that is to say, a uniting bond—under penalty of social decay and material annihilation. We believe that no religious doctrine can be more than an attempt to picture to our present limited understandings, in the terms of our terrestrial experiences, great cosmical and spiritual truths, which in our normal state of consciousness we vaguely sense, rather than actually perceive and comprehend; and a revelation, if it is to reveal anything, must necessarily conform to the same earth-bound requirements of the human intellect. In our estimation, therefore, no religion can be absolutely true, and none can be absolutely false. A religion is true in proportion as it supplies the spiritual, moral and intellectual needs of the time, and helps the development of mankind in these respects. It is false in proportion as it hinders that development, and offends the spiritual, moral and intellectual portion of man’s nature. And the transcendentally spiritual ideas of the ruling powers of the Universe entertained by an Oriental sage would be as false a religion for the African savage as the grovelling fetishism of the latter would be for the sage, although both views must necessarily be true in degree, for both represent the highest ideas attainable by the respective individuals of the same cosmico-spiritual facts, which can never be known in their reality by man while he remains but man.
Theosophists, therefore, are respecters of all the religions, and for the religious ethics of Jesus they have profound admiration. It could not be otherwise, for these teachings which have come down to us are the same as those of Theosophy. So far, therefore, as modern Christianity makes good its claim to be the practical religion taught by Jesus, Theosophists are with it heart and hand. So far as it goes contrary to those ethics, pure and simple, Theosophists are its opponents. Any Christian can, if he will, compare the Sermon on the Mount with the dogmas of his church, and the spirit that breathes in it, with the principles that animate this Christian civilisation and govern his own life; and then he will be able to judge for himself how far the religion of Jesus enters into his Christianity, and how far, therefore, he and Theosophists are agreed. But professing Christians, especially the clergy, shrink from making this comparison. Like merchants who fear to find themselves bankrupt, they seem to dread the discovery of a discrepancy in their accounts which could not be made good by placing material assets as a set-off to spiritual liabilities. The comparison between the teachings of Jesus and the doctrines of the churches has, however, frequently been made—and often with great learning and critical acumen—both by those who would abolish Christianity and those who would reform it; and the aggregate result of these comparisons, as your Grace must be well aware, goes to prove that in almost every point the doctrines of the churches and the practices of Christians are in direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus.
We are accustomed to say to the Buddhist, the Mahomedan, the Hindoo, or the Parsee: “The road to Theosophy lies, for you, through your own religion.” We say this because those creeds possess a deeply philosophical and esoteric meaning, explanatory of the allegories under which they are presented to the people; but we cannot say the same thing to Christians. The successors of the Apostles never recorded the secret doctrine of Jesus—the “mysteries of the kingdom of Heaven”—which it was given to them (his apostles) alone to know.[58] These have been suppressed, made away with, destroyed. What have come down upon the stream of time are the maxims, the parables, the allegories and the fables which Jesus expressly intended for the spiritually deaf and blind to be revealed later to the world, and which modern Christianity either takes all literally, or interprets according to the fancies of the Fathers of the secular church. In both cases they are like cut flowers: they are severed from the plant on which they grew, and from the root whence that plant drew its life. Were we, therefore, to encourage Christians, as we do the votaries of other creeds, to study their own religion for themselves, the consequence would be, not a knowledge of the meaning of its mysteries, but either the revival of mediæval superstition and intolerance, accompanied by a formidable outbreak of mere lip-prayer and preaching—such as resulted in the formation of the 239 Protestant sects of England alone—or else a great increase of scepticism, for Christianity has no esoteric foundation known to those who profess it. For even you, my Lord Primate of England, must be painfully aware that you know absolutely no more of those “mysteries of the kingdom of Heaven” which Jesus taught his disciples, than does the humblest and most illiterate member of your church.
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Footnote 58:
S. Mark, iv. 11; Matthew, xiii. 11; Luke, viii. 10.
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It is easily understood, therefore, that Theosophists have nothing to say against the policy of the Roman Catholic Church in forbidding, or of the Protestant churches in discouraging, any such private enquiry into the meaning of the “Christian” dogmas as would correspond to the esoteric study of other religions. With their present ideas and knowledge, professing Christians are not prepared to undertake a critical examination of their faith, with a promise of good results. Its inevitable effect would be to paralyze rather than stimulate their dormant religious sentiments; for biblical criticism and comparative mythology have proved conclusively—to those, at least, who have no vested interests, spiritual or temporal, in the maintenance of orthodoxy—that the Christian religion, as it now exists, is composed of the husks of Judaism, the shreds of paganism, and the ill-digested remains of gnosticism and neo-platonism. This curious conglomerate which gradually formed itself round the recorded sayings (λογια) of Jesus, has, after the lapse of ages, now begun to disintegrate, and to crumble away from the pure and precious gems of Theosophic truth which it has so long overlain and hidden, but could neither disfigure nor destroy. Theosophy not only rescues these precious gems from the fate that threatens the rubbish in which they have been so long embedded, but saves that rubbish itself from utter condemnation; for it shows that the result of biblical criticism is far from being the ultimate analysis of Christianity, as each of the pieces which compose the curious mosaics of the Churches once belonged to a religion which had an esoteric meaning. It is only when these pieces are restored to the places they originally occupied that their hidden significance can be perceived, and the real meaning of the dogmas of Christianity understood. To do all this, however, requires a knowledge of the Secret Doctrine as it exists in the esoteric foundation of other religions; and this knowledge is not in the hands of the Clergy, for the Church has hidden, and since lost, the keys.
Your Grace will now understand why it is that the Theosophical Society has taken for one of its three “objects” the study of those Eastern religions and philosophies, which shed such a flood of light upon the inner meaning of Christianity; and you will, we hope, also perceive that in so doing, we are acting not as the enemies, but as the friends of the religion taught by Jesus—of true Christianity, in fact. For it is only through the study of those religions and philosophies that Christians can ever arrive at an understanding of their own beliefs, or see the hidden meaning of the parables and allegories which the Nazarene told to the spiritual cripples of Judea, and by taking which, either as matters of fact or as matters of fancy, the Churches have brought the teachings themselves into ridicule and contempt, and Christianity into serious danger of complete collapse, undermined as it is by historical criticism and mythological research, besides being broken by the sledge-hammer of modern science.
Ought Theosophists themselves, then, to be regarded by Christians as their enemies, because they believe that orthodox Christianity is, on the whole, opposed to the religion of Jesus; and because they have the courage to tell the Churches that they are traitors to the MASTER they profess to revere and serve? Far from it, indeed. Theosophists know that the same spirit that animated the words of Jesus lies latent in the hearts of Christians, as it does naturally in all men’s hearts. Their fundamental tenet is the Brotherhood of Man, the ultimate realisation of which is alone made possible by that which was known long before the days of Jesus as “the Christ spirit.” This spirit is even now potentially present in all men, and it will be developed into activity when human beings are no longer prevented from understanding, appreciating and sympathising with one another by the barriers of strife and hatred erected by priests and princes. We know that Christians in their lives frequently rise above the level of their Christianity. All Churches contain many noble, self-sacrificing, and virtuous men and women, eager to do good in their generation according to their lights and opportunities, and full of aspirations to higher things than those of earth—followers of Jesus in spite of their Christianity. For such as these, Theosophists feel the deepest sympathy; for only a Theosophist, or else a person of your Grace’s delicate sensibility and great theological learning, can justly appreciate the tremendous difficulties with which the tender plant of natural piety has to contend, as it forces its root into the uncongenial soil of our Christian civilization, and tries to blossom in the cold and arid atmosphere of theology. How hard, for instance, must it not be to “love” such a God as that depicted in a well-known passage by Herbert Spencer:
“The cruelty of a Fijian God, who, represented as devouring the souls of the dead, may be supposed to inflict torture during the process, is small, compared to the cruelty of a God who condemns men to tortures which are eternal.... The visiting on Adam’s descendants through hundreds of generations, of dreadful penalties for a small transgression which they did not commit, the damning of all men who do not avail themselves of an alleged mode of obtaining forgiveness, which most men have never heard of, and the effecting of reconciliation by sacrificing a son who was perfectly innocent, to satisfy the assumed necessity for a propitiatory victim, are modes of action which, ascribed to a human ruler, would call forth expressions of abhorrence.”
(“Religion: a Retrospect and a Prospect.”)
Your Grace will say, no doubt, that Jesus never taught the worship of such a god as that. Even so say we Theosophists. Yet that is the very god whose worship is officially conducted in Canterbury Cathedral, by you, my Lord Primate of England; and your Grace will surely agree with us that there must indeed be a divine spark of religious intuition in the hearts of men, that enables them to resist so well as they do, the deadly action of such poisonous theology.
If your Grace, from your high pinnacle, will cast your eyes around, you will behold a Christian civilisation in which a frantic and merciless battle of man against man is not only the distinguishing feature, but the acknowledged principle. It is an accepted scientific and economic axiom to-day, that all progress is achieved through the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest; and the fittest to survive in this Christian civilization are not those who are possessed of the qualities that are recognised by the morality of every age to be the best—not the generous, the pious, the noble-hearted, the forgiving, the humble, the truthful, the honest, and the kind—but those who are strongest in selfishness, in craft, in hypocrisy, in brute force, in false pretence, in unscrupulousness, in cruelty, and in avarice. The spiritual and the altruistic are “the weak,” whom the “laws” that govern the universe give as food to the egoistic and material—“the strong.” That “might is right” is the only legitimate conclusion, the last word of the 19th century ethics, for, as the world has become one huge battlefield, on which “the fittest” descend like vultures to tear out the eyes and the hearts of those who have fallen in the fight. Does religion put a stop to the battle? Do the churches drive away the vultures, or comfort the wounded and the dying? Religion does not weigh a feather in the world at large to-day, when worldly advantage and selfish pleasures are put in the other scale; and the churches are powerless to revivify the religious sentiment among men, because their ideas, their knowledge, their methods, and their arguments are those of the Dark Ages. My Lord Primate, your Christianity is five hundred years behind the times.
So long as men disputed whether this god or that god was the true one, or whether the soul went to this place or that one after death, you, the clergy, understood the question, and had arguments at hand to influence opinion—by syllogism or torture, as the case might require; but now it is the existence of any such being as God, at all, or of any kind of immortal spirit, that is questioned or denied. Science invents new theories of the Universe which contemptuously ignore the existence of any god; moralists establish theories of ethics and social life in which the non-existence of a future life is taken for granted; in physics, in psychology, in law, in medicine, the one thing needful in order to entitle any teacher to a hearing is that no reference whatever should be contained in his ideas either to a Providence, or to a soul. The world is being rapidly brought to the conviction that god is a mythical conception, which has no foundation in fact, or place in Nature; and that the immortal part of man is the silly dream of ignorant savages, perpetuated by the lies and tricks of priests, who reap a harvest by cultivating the fears of men that their mythical God will torture their imaginary souls to all eternity, in a fabulous Hell. In the face of all these things the clergy stand in this age dumb and powerless. The only answer which the Church knew how to make to such “objections” as these, were the rack and the faggot; and she cannot use that system of logic now.
It is plain that if the God and the soul taught by the churches be imaginary entities, then the Christian salvation and damnation are mere delusions of the mind, produced by the hypnotic process of assertion and suggestion on a magnificent scale, acting cumulatively on generations of mild “hysteriacs.” What answer have you to such a theory of the Christian religion, except a repetition of assertions and suggestions? What ways have you of bringing men back to their old beliefs but by reviving their old habits? “Build more churches, say more prayers, establish more missions, and your faith in damnation and salvation will be revived, and a renewed belief in God and the soul will be the necessary result.” That is the policy of the churches, and their only answer to agnosticism and materialism. But your Grace must know that to meet the attacks of modern science and criticism with such weapons as assertion and habit, is like going forth against magazine guns, armed with boomerangs and leather shields. While, however, the progress of ideas and the increase of knowledge are undermining the popular theology, every discovery of science, every new conception of European advanced thought, brings the 19th century mind nearer to the ideas of the Divine and the Spiritual, known to all esoteric religions and to Theosophy.
The Church claims that Christianity is the only true religion, and this claim involves two distinct propositions, namely, that Christianity is true religion, and that there is no true religion except Christianity. It never seems to strike Christians that God and Spirit could possibly exist in any other form than that under which they are presented in the doctrines of their church. The savage calls the missionary an Atheist, because he does not carry an idol in his trunk; and the missionary, in his turn, calls everyone an Atheist who does not carry about a fetish in his mind; and neither savage nor Christian ever seem to suspect that there may be a higher idea than their own of the great hidden power that governs the Universe, to which the name of “God” is much more applicable. It is doubtful whether the churches take more pains to prove Christianity “true,” or to prove that any other kind of religion is necessarily “false;” and the evil consequences of this, their teaching, are terrible. When people discard dogma they fancy that they have discarded the religious sentiment also, and they conclude that religion is a superfluity in human life—a rendering to the clouds of things that belong to earth, a waste of energy which could be more profitably expended in the struggle for existence. The materialism of this age is, therefore, the direct consequence of the Christian doctrine that there is no ruling power in the Universe, and no immortal Spirit in man except those made known in Christian dogmas. The Atheist, my Lord Primate, is the bastard son of the Church.
But this is not all. The churches have never taught men any other or higher reason why they should be just and kind and true than the hope of reward and the fear of punishment, and when they let go their belief in Divine caprice and Divine injustice the foundations of their morality are sapped. They have not even natural morality to consciously fall back upon, for Christianity has taught them to regard it as worthless on account of the natural depravity of man. Therefore self-interest becomes the only motive for conduct, and the fear of being found out, the only deterrent from vice. And so, with regard to morality as well as to God and the soul, Christianity pushes men off the path that leads to knowledge, and precipitates them into the abyss of incredulity, pessimism and vice. The last place where men would now look for help from the evils and miseries of life is the Church, because they know that the building of churches and the repeating of litanies influence neither the powers of Nature nor the councils of nations; because they instinctively feel that when the churches accepted the principle of expediency they lost their power to move the hearts of men, and can now only act on the external plane, as the supporters of the policeman and the politician.
The function of religion is to comfort and encourage humanity in its life-long struggle with sin and sorrow. This it can do only by presenting mankind with noble ideals of a happier existence after death, and of a worthier life on earth, to be won in both cases by conscious effort. What the world now wants is a Church that will tell it of Deity, or the immortal principle in man, which will be at least on a level with the ideas and knowledge of the times. Dogmatic Christianity is not suited for a world that reasons and thinks, and only those who can throw themselves into a mediæval state of mind, can appreciate a Church whose religious (as distinguished from its social and political) function is to keep God in good humour while the laity are doing what they believe he does not approve; to pray for changes of weather; and occasionally, to thank the Almighty for helping to slaughter the enemy. It is not “medicine men,” but spiritual guides that the world looks for to-day—a “clergy” that will give it ideals as suited to the intellect of this century, as the Christian Heaven and Hell, God and the Devil, were to the ages of dark ignorance and superstition. Do, or can, the Christian clergy fulfil this requirement? The misery, the crime, the vice, the selfishness, the brutality, the lack of self-respect and self-control, that mark our modern civilization, unite their voices in one tremendous cry, and answer—NO!
What is the meaning of the reaction against materialism, the signs of which fill the air to-day? It means that the world has become mortally sick of the dogmatism, the arrogance, the self-sufficiency, and the spiritual blindness of modern science—of that same Modern Science which men but yesterday hailed as their deliverer from religious bigotry and Christian superstition, but which, like the Devil of the monkish legends, requires, as the price of its services, the sacrifice of man’s immortal soul. And meanwhile, what are the Churches doing? The Churches are sleeping the sweet sleep of endowments, of social and political influence, while the world, the flesh, and the devil, are appropriating their watchwords, their miracles, their arguments, and their blind faith. The Spiritualists—oh! Churches of Christ—have stolen the fire from your altars to illumine their séance rooms; the Salvationists have taken your sacramental wine, and make themselves spiritually drunk in the streets; the Infidel has stolen the weapons with which you vanquished him once, and triumphantly tells you that “What you advance, has been frequently said before.” Had ever clergy so splendid an opportunity? The grapes in the vineyard are ripe, needing only the right labourers to gather them. Were you to give to the world some proof, on the level of the present intellectual standard of probability, that Deity—the immortal Spirit in man—have a real existence as facts in Nature, would not men hail you as their saviour from pessimism and despair, from the maddening and brutalizing thought that there is no other destiny for man but an eternal blank, after a few short years of bitter toil and sorrow?—aye; as their saviours from the panic-stricken fight for material enjoyment and worldly advancement, which is the direct consequence of believing this mortal life to be the be-all and end-all of existence?
But the Churches have neither the knowledge nor the faith needed to save the world, and perhaps your Church, my Lord Primate, least of all, with the mill-stone of £8,000,000 a year hung round its neck. In vain you try to lighten the ship by casting overboard the ballast of doctrines which your forefathers deemed vital to Christianity. What more can your Church do now, than run before the gale with bare poles, while the clergy feebly endeavour to putty up the gaping leaks with the “revised version,” and by their social and political deadweight try to prevent the ship from capsizing, and its cargo of dogmas and endowments from going to the bottom?
Who built Canterbury Cathedral, my Lord Primate? Who invented and gave life to the great ecclesiastical organisation which makes an Archbishop of Canterbury possible? Who laid the foundation of the vast system of religious taxation which gives you £15,000 a year and a palace? Who instituted the forms and ceremonies, the prayers and litanies, which, slightly altered and stripped of art and ornament, make the liturgy of the Church of England? Who wrested from the people the proud titles of “reverend divine” and “Man of God” which the clergy of your Church so confidently assume? Who, indeed, but the Church of Rome! We speak in no spirit of enmity. Theosophy has seen the rise and fall of many faiths, and will be present at the birth and death of many more. We know that the lives of religions are subject to law. Whether you inherited legitimately from the Church of Rome, or obtained by violence, we leave you to settle with your enemies and with your conscience; for our mental attitude towards your Church is determined by its intrinsic worthiness. We know that if it be unable to fulfil the true spiritual function of a religion, it will surely be swept away, even though the fault lie rather in its hereditary tendencies, or in its environments, than in itself.
The Church of England, to use a homely simile, is like a train running by the momentum it acquired before steam was shut off. When it left the main track, it got upon a siding that leads nowhere. The train has nearly come to a standstill, and many of the passengers have left it for other conveyances. Those that remain are for the most part aware that they have been depending all along upon what little steam was left in the boiler when the fires of Rome were withdrawn from under it. They suspect that they may be only playing at train now; but the engineer keeps blowing his whistle and the guard goes round to examine the tickets, and the breaksmen rattle their breaks, and it is not such bad fun after all. For the carriages are warm and comfortable and the day is cold, and so long as they are tipped all the company’s servants are very obliging. But those who know where they want to go, are not so contented.
For several centuries the Church of England has performed the difficult feat of blowing hot and cold in two directions at once—saying to the Roman Catholics “Reason!” and to the Sceptics “Believe!” It was by adjusting the force of its two-faced blowing, that it has managed to keep itself so long from falling off the fence. But now the fence itself is giving way. Disendowment and disestablishment are in the air. And what does your Church urge in its own behalf? Its usefulness. It is useful to have a number of educated, moral, unworldly men, scattered all over the country, who prevent the world from utterly forgetting the name of religion, and who act as centres of benevolent work. But the question now is no longer one of repeating prayers, and giving alms to the poor, as it was five hundred years ago. The people have come of age, and have taken their thinking and the direction of their social, private and even spiritual affairs into their own hands, for they have found out that their clergy know no more about “things of Heaven” than they do themselves.
But the Church of England, it is said, has become so liberal that all ought to support it. Truly, one can go to an excellent imitation of the mass, or sit under a virtual Unitarian, and still be within its fold. This beautiful tolerance, however, only means that the Church has found it necessary to make itself an open common, where every one can put up his own booth, and give his special performance if he will only join in the defence of the endowments. Tolerance and liberality are contrary to the laws of the existence of any church that believes in divine damnation, and their appearance in the Church of England is not a sign of renewed life, but of approaching disintegration. No less deceptive is the energy evinced by the Church in the building of churches. If this were a measure of religion what a pious age this would be! Never was dogma so well housed before, though human beings may have to sleep by thousands in the streets, and to literally starve in the shadow of our majestic cathedrals, built in the name of Him who had not where to lay His head. But did Jesus tell you, your Grace, that religion lay not in the hearts of men, but in temples made with hands? You cannot convert your piety into stone and use it in your lives; and history shows that petrifaction of the religious sentiment is as deadly a disease as ossification of the heart. Were churches, however, multiplied a hundred fold, and were every clergyman to become a centre of philanthropy, it would only be substituting the work that the poor require from their fellow men but not from their spiritual teachers, for that which they ask and cannot obtain. It would but bring into greater relief the spiritual barrenness of the doctrines of the Church.
The time is approaching when the clergy will be called upon to render an account of their stewardship. Are you prepared, my Lord Primate, to explain to YOUR MASTER why you have given His children stones, when they cried to you for bread? You smile in your fancied security. The servants have kept high carnival so long in the inner chambers of the Lord’s house, that they think He will surely never return. But He told you He would come as a thief in the night; and lo! He is coming already in the hearts of men. He is coming to take possession of His Father’s kingdom there, where alone His kingdom is. But you know Him not! Were the Churches themselves not carried away in the flood of negation and materialism which has engulfed Society, they would recognise the quickly growing germ of the Christ-spirit in the hearts of thousands, whom they now brand as infidels and madmen. They would recognise there the same spirit of love, of self-sacrifice, of immense pity for the ignorance, the folly, and the sufferings of the world, which appeared in its purity in the heart of Jesus, as it had appeared in the hearts of other Holy Reformers in other ages; and which is the light of all true religion, and the lamp by which the Theosophists of all times have endeavoured to guide their steps along the narrow path that leads to salvation—the path which is trodden by every incarnation of CHRISTOS or the SPIRIT OF TRUTH.
And now, my Lord Primate, we have very respectfully laid before you the principal points of difference and disagreement between Theosophy and the Christian Churches, and told you of the oneness of Theosophy and the teachings of Jesus. You have heard our profession of faith, and learned the grievances and plaints which we lay at the door of dogmatic Christianity. We, a handful of humble individuals, possessed of neither riches nor worldly influence, but strong in our knowledge, have united in the hope of doing the work which you say that your MASTER has allotted to you, but which is so sadly neglected by that wealthy and domineering colossus—the Christian Church. Will you call this presumption, we wonder? Will you, in this land of free opinion, free speech, and free effort, venture to accord us no other recognition than the usual anathema, which the Church keeps in store for the reformer? Or may we hope that the bitter lessons of experience, which that policy has afforded the Churches in the past, will have altered the hearts and cleared the understandings of her rulers; and that the coming year, 1888, will witness the stretching out to us of the hand of Christians in fellowship and goodwill? This would only be a just recognition that the comparatively small body called the Theosophical Society is no pioneer of the Anti-Christ, no brood of the Evil one, but the practical helper, perchance the saviour, of Christianity, and that it is only endeavouring to do the work that Jesus, like Buddha, and the other “sons of God” who preceded him, has commanded all his followers to undertake, but which the Churches, having become dogmatic, are entirely unable to accomplish.
And now, if your Grace can prove that we do injustice to the Church of which you are the Head, or to popular Theology, we promise to acknowledge our error publicly. But—“SILENCE GIVES CONSENT.”
“EMERSON AND OCCULTISM.”
“’Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply, And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by.”
—Erd. Geist, FAUST.
The sunset, to the boor a mere mass of evening vapours, presaging rain for his fields or heat for his harvest, expands for the poet, standing beside him and beholding the self-same firmament, into a splendid picture, rich in crimson and purple, in golden light and gleaming colour, mingled in harmonious purity.
Whence so great a difference?
The poet has finer eyes; and within the mere material forms perceives a subtle essence, which flows everywhere through nature, adding to all it touches a new wealth of joy and power. The poet’s eyes have opened to a new reality; he no longer values things for themselves; but in proportion as they contain this quality, they become dear to him.
But beyond the poet, there is yet a third rank. The poet, it is true, rejoices in nature, and perceives its beauty and symbolic character. But he rests in the beauty of the symbol, and does not pass to the reality symbolised. Rapt in adoration of the beauty of the garment, he does not pierce through to Him who wears the garment. This remains for the philosopher—the sage. Yet the boor has his place in Nature. He has tilled and subdued the soil, has brought its latent powers into action; in command of nature, he is far in advance of the mere nomad savage, for whom nature is a maze of uncertain and unconquered forces.
The savage, the boor, the poet; these types have their parallels in mental life.
When the crude conceptions of nature, which mark dawning civilisation, give place to those fair and truer, because more harmonious, views which bear the name of Science; when the principle of Continuity, the reign of Universal Law, have displaced the first notions of Chance and Discord, the work of the physical scientist is done; he must stand aside, and make way for the philosopher, the transcendentalist. Modern Science has replaced the crudities of mediæval theology by the idea of an orderly universe permeated by Law, binding alike the galaxy and the atom, as the tillage of the farmer has replaced the nomadism of the savage.
But within the world of the boor nestles the poet’s world, and within the world of the physical scientist lies an ethereal, spiritual universe, with its own powers, its own prophets. The great trilogy of friends at the beginning of this century, who rose like three mountain peaks above their contemporaries, Goethe, Carlyle, and Emerson, were chosen by Destiny as prophets of this nature within nature.
Their gleanings have been rich enough to tempt many to enter the same field, though they have no more exhausted its wealth than Homer and Shakespeare have exhausted poetry.
The new world they have explored, is the land of hope of the future, for which we must leave the impoverished soil of theology, and the arid deserts of materialism.
What these three masters taught, Occultism teaches; and we propose to show them as great natural masters in the mystic knowledge.
To do this with any completeness in the space at our disposal is necessarily impossible; for the present, we must content ourselves with shewing from the writings of one of the masters, Emerson, that he recognised some of the chief laws announced by Occultism.
The first truth to be insisted on, concerning this nature within nature, the spiritual universe, is that it exists for its own ends, and not as an adjunct to the material world; in other words, the end of morals is to make archangels rather than good citizens.
Spirit is the reality; matter, the secondary; or, as Goethe says, the Garment of God.
No occultist could insist on the subordinate character of matter more vehemently than Emerson—he writes:
“Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same. Through the bruteness and toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God into the unconscious.”
The Occultist sees in this world of spirit the home of that true joy of which all earthly happiness is the shadow, and whispered intimation. There all ideals find their realization, all highest hopes their fulfilment; there flow abundant fountains of celestial bliss, whose least presence makes earthly things radiant.
Of spirit, Emerson writes:
“But when following the invisible steps of thought, we come to enquire, Whence is matter? and where to? Many truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread universal essence which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power; but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature spirit is present. As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power.”
But to obtain a footing in this world of essential being, is to be emancipated from the domination of Time and Space, to enter a universe where they do not exist; for Space and Time are no realities, but, as Carlyle says, the “deepest of all illusory appearances.” Emancipation from Space and Time; how much more this implies than is at first sight apparent. The first fruit of this freedom is a feeling of eternalness, the real basis of the doctrine of immortality. It is an attainable reality, this sense of eternalness; let the sceptic and materialist say what they will.
Of this truth, also, we may bring Emerson as witness. He writes:
“To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the soul, the idea of immutableness is essentially associated. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, there is no question of continuance.”
Once recognise the truth that we can gain a footing in a world free from the tyranny of time, that the soul exists in such a world, and a new philosophy is at once required. Freedom from Time implies the eternity of the soul, and the facts of life and death take a new position and significance. If the soul be eternal, death must be an illusion, a garment in which Nature wraps some hidden law.
In the following words of Emerson, on this subject:
“It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight, and afterwards return again. Whatever does not concern us, is concealed from us. As soon as a person is no longer related to our present well-being, he is concealed or dies, as we say. When the man has exhausted for the time the nourishment to be drawn from any one person or thing, that object is withdrawn from his observation, and though still in his immediate neighbourhood, he does not suspect its presence. Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new disguise. Jesus is not dead; he is very well alive; nor John, nor Paul, nor Mahomet, nor Aristotle.”
we have an accurate exposition of the occult doctrine of Reincarnation—the progressive discipline of the soul through many lives—which has been parodied in the popular fable of metemphsychosis.
The true occult doctrine does not picture a series of bodies in each of which the soul makes a temporary sojourn. In this, as in all else, it begins with spirit and then descends to matter. It depicts that vital energy which we call a soul, alternately exuding from itself and re-absorbing into its own nature an environment or physical encasement, whose character varies with the increasing stature of the soul. According to the teaching of occultism, the successive formations of this objective shell—whose purpose is to provide for the development of the animal nature—alternate with periods of subjective life, which give expansion to the powers of the soul.
As corollary to this doctrine, occultism postulates a second—that the incidents of each objective environment or physical life—are not fortuitous and isolated, but that they are bound to all that precede and follow them, and moreover that “the future is not arbitrarily formed by any separate acts of the present, but that the whole future is in unbroken continuity with the present, as the present is with the past.”
To the various developments of this law, eastern philosophy has given the name of Karma; the west has as yet no name for it. But though unnamed, its leading ideas have not been unperceived by those western minds which have penetrated into the world of supernature.
Thus we find Emerson writing:
“Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. Crime and punishment grow on one stem; punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of pleasure which concealed it. You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. The thief steals from himself; the swindler swindles himself. Everything in nature, even motes and feathers, goes by law and not by luck. What a man sows, he reaps.”
The picture of an orderly universe, where matter is the garment of spirit—spirit visualised—where souls march onward in orderly procession to boundless perfection; where the life of each permeates and flows through the life of all; where the wrong of each is turned to the benefit of all by the firm hand of an invisible and ever active law, incessantly disciplining and correcting, till the last dross of self and sin is purged away, and instead of man there remains God only, working through the powers that were man’s; such is the conception Occultism holds.
“I know not,” says Emerson—
“I know not whether there be, as is alleged, in the upper region of our atmosphere a permanent westerly current, which carries with it all atoms which rise to that height, but I see that when souls reach a certain clearness of perfection, they accept a knowledge and motive above selfishness. A breath of Will blows eternally through the universe of souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary. It is the air which all intellects inhale and exhale, and it is the wind which blows the world into order and orbit.
“Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity which rudely or softly educates men to the perception that there are no contingencies, that Law rules through existence, a Law which is not intelligent but intelligence, not personal nor impersonal—it disdains words, and passes understanding; it dissolves persons; it vivifies nature, yet solicits the pure in heart to draw on its all, its omnipotence.”
Discipline always and everywhere throughout the universe; to discipline, development, all other facts are subordinate; for their sake, all laws are enunciated, all spiritual facts are insisted on; all truths which tend not to the melioration of human life—if any such there be—are worthless. Discipline, development. What development does Occultism predict for man? Man’s future destiny, in the view of Occultism, is so stupendous, that we prefer merely to erect a finger-post pointing out the direction of the path, using the words of Emerson:
“The youth puts off the illusions of the child, the man puts off the ignorance and tumultuous passions of the youth; proceeding thence, puts off the egotism of manhood, and becomes at last a public and universal soul. He is rising to greater height, but also to realities; the outer relations and circumstances dying out, he is entering deeper into God, God into him, until the last garment of egotism falls, and he is with God, shares the will and the immensity of the First Cause.”
From first to last, Occultism has preached no doctrine more emphatically than the necessity of dependence on the intuitions, and the reality of interior illumination. “Seek out the way by making the profound obeisance of the soul to the dim star that burns within; within you is the light of the world,” writes the Occultist.
And this doctrine is repeated again and again in the writings of the philosopher we have been quoting from. He writes:
“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but that the light is all. The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees. There is for each a Best Counsel, which enjoins the fit word and the fit act for every moment. There is no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away, we lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. The simplest person who, in his integrity, worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable.”
The life of one is the life of all. The good of one re-acts on all. The walls by which selfishness conceives itself enclosed and isolated, are unreal, have no existence. Spirit is fluid and all-pervading; its beneficent power flows unchecked from soul to soul, energising, harmonising, purifying. To resist all discordant tendencies which check this salutary flow, this all-permeating love, is to come under the reign of Universal Brotherhood; and to the honour of Occultism be it said, that Universal Brotherhood is blazoned highest on its standard.
“Thus,” writes Emerson—
—“Are we put in training for a love which knows not sex nor person, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere. One day all men will be lovers, and every calamity will be dissolved in universal sunshine. An acceptance of the sentiment of love throughout Christendom for a season would bring the felon and the outcast to our side in tears, with the devotion of his faculties to our service.”
But to the axiom “Kill out the sense of separateness” Occultism adds another, “Yet stand alone.” Before the lesson of life can be learnt, the soul must in some sort detach itself from its environment, and view all things impersonally, in solitude and stillness. There is an oracle in the lonely recess of the soul to which all things must be brought for trial. Here all laws are tested, all appearances weighed.
About this truth always hangs a certain solemnity, and Emerson has given it a fitting expression in the following words:
“The soul gives itself alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it. Then it is glad, young, and nimble. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars, and feel them to be the fair accidents and effects which change and pass. More and more the surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I become public and human in my regards and actions. So I come to live in thoughts, and act with energies, which are immortal.”
The last words of this sentence lead us to the occult idea of Mahatma-hood, which conceives a perfected soul as “living in thoughts, and acting with energies which are immortal.”
The Mahatma is a soul of higher rank in the realms of life, conceived to drink in the wealth of spiritual power closer to the fountain-head, and to distil its essence into the interior of receptive souls.
In harmony with this idea, Emerson writes:
“Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs. All individual natures stand in a scale, according to the purity of this element in them. The will of the pure runs down from them into other natures, as water runs down from a higher into a lower vessel; this natural force is no more to be withstood than any other natural force. A healthy soul stands united with the Just and the True, as the magnet arranges itself with the pole, so that he stands to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt them and the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun, journeys towards that person.”
Occultism conceives the outer world and all its accidents to be so many veils, shrouding the splendour of essential nature, and tempering the fiery purity of spirit to the imperfect powers of the understanding soul. This illusory power Occultism considers to be the “active will of God,” a means to the ends of eternal spirit.
In the view of Occultism, life is a drama of thinly veiled souls; as Shakespeare writes:
“We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep!”
We shall conclude with two passages from Emerson’s essays, on the subject of illusions:
“Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate; and meantime it is only puss and her tail. How long before our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter, and shouting, and we shall find it was a solitary performance?”
We must supplement this rather playful passage with one in a higher strain:
“There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament; there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On an instant, and incessantly, fall snowstorms and illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment new changes and new showers of deceptions to baffle and distract him. And when, by-and-bye, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones—they alone with him alone.”
CHARLES JOHNSTON, F.T.S.
=THE BLOSSOM AND THE FRUIT=:
THE TRUE STORY OF A MAGICIAN.
(Continued.)
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BY MABEL COLLINS,
Scribe of “THE IDYLL OF THE WHITE LOTUS,” and “THROUGH THE GATES OF GOLD.”
[Some of the readers of LUCIFER have taken great exception to the love passages between Fleta and Hilary, saying that they are not up to the standard of Theosophic thought, and are out of place in the magazine. The author can only beg that time may be given for the story to develope. None of us that is born dies without experiencing human passion; it is the base on which an edifice must rise at last, after many incarnations have purified it; “it is the blossom which has in it the fruit.” Hilary is still only a man, he has not yet learned to the full the lesson of human life and human passion. Fleta promises him all that he can take and that plainly is only what she can give—the deep love of the disciple. But she cannot instantly free his eyes from the illusions caused by his own passionate heart; till he has suffered and conquered, he cannot recognise her for what she is, the pledged servant of a great master, of necessity more white-souled than any nun need be.
Another strange criticism is made, condemning portions of the story as though expressive of the author’s feelings and sentiments; whereas they are simply descriptive of the states through which Hilary is passing. They no more express the author’s feelings than do those later parts which refer to the ordeals of Fleta, the accepted disciple, express the author’s feelings. The two characters of the struggling aspirant and the advanced disciple, are studies from life. The stumbling-block of human passion which stands in Hilary’s way, is the same which lost Zanoni his high estate; in the coming chapters of “The Blossom and the Fruit,” we shall see Fleta flung back from the high estate she aims at, by this same stumbling-block, in an idealised and subtle form. She has not yet learned the bitter truth that the Occultist must stand absolutely alone, without even companionship of thought, or sympathy of feeling, at the times of the Initiations and the trials which precede them.—M. C.]
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