Section V. The Masks of Science. Physics Or Metaphysics?

If there is anything like progress on earth, Science will some day have to give up, nolens volens, such monstrous ideas as her physical, self-guiding laws, void of Soul and Spirit, and will then have to turn to the Occult Teachings. It has already done so, however altered may be the title-pages and revised editions of the Scientific Catechism. It is now over half a century since, in comparing modern with ancient thought, it was found that, however different our Philosophy may appear from that of our ancestors, it is, nevertheless, composed only of additions and subtractions taken from the old Philosophy and transmitted drop by drop through the filter of antecedents.

This fact was well known to Faraday, and to other eminent men of Science. Atoms, Ether, Evolution itself—all come to Modern Science from ancient notions, all are based on the conceptions of the archaic nations. “Conceptions” for the profane, under the shape of allegories; plain truths taught during the Initiations to the Elect, which truths have been partially divulged through Greek writers and have descended to us. This does not mean that Occultism has ever had the same views on Matter, Atoms and Ether as may be found in the exotericism of the classical Greek writers. Yet, if we may believe Mr. Tyndall, even Faraday was an Aristotelean, and was more an Agnostic than a Materialist. In his Faraday, as a Discoverer,860 the author shows the great Physicist using “old reflections of Aristotle” which are “concisely found in some of his works.” Faraday, Boscovitch, and all others, however, who see, in the Atoms and molecules, “centres of force,” and in the corresponding element, Force, an Entity by itself, are far nearer the truth, perchance, than those, who, denouncing them, denounce at the same time the “old corpuscular Pythagorean theory”—one, [pg 553]by the way, which never passed to posterity as the great Philosopher really taught it—on the ground of its “delusion that the conceptual elements of matter can be grasped as separate and real entities.”

The chief and most fatal mistake and fallacy made by Science, in the view of the Occultists, lies in the idea of the possibility of such a thing existing in Nature as inorganic, or dead Matter. Is anything dead or inorganic which is capable of transformation or change?—Occultism asks. And is there anything under the sun which remains immutable or changeless?

For a thing to be dead implies that it had been at some time living. When, at what period of cosmogony? Occultism says that in all cases Matter is the most active, when it appears inert. A wooden or a stone block is motionless and impenetrable to all intents and purposes. Nevertheless, and de facto, its particles are in ceaseless eternal vibration which is so rapid that to the physical eye the body seems absolutely devoid of motion; and the spacial distance between those particles in their vibratory motion is—considered from another plane of being and perception—as great as that which separates snow flakes or drops of rain. But to Physical Science this will be an absurdity.

This fallacy is nowhere better illustrated than in the scientific work of a German savant, Professor Philip Spiller. In this cosmological treatise, the author attempts to prove that:

This statement, however, does not prevent Spiller from enunciating an Occult doctrine and principle. He asserts the independent substantiality of Force, and shows it as an “incorporeal stuff” (unkörperlicher Stoff) or Substance. Now Substance is not Matter in Metaphysics, and for argument’s sake it may be granted that it is a wrong expression to use. But this is due to the poverty of European languages, and especially to the paucity of scientific terms. Then this “stuff” is identified and connected by Spiller with the Æther. Expressed in Occult language it might be said with more correctness that this “Force-Substance” is the ever-active phenomenal positive Ether—Prakriti; while the omnipresent all-pervading Æther is the Noumenon of the former, the substratum of all, or Âkâsha. Nevertheless, Stallo falls foul of [pg 554]Spiller, as he does of the Materialists. He is accused of “utter disregard of the fundamental correlation of Force and Matter,” of neither of which Science knows anything certain. For this “hypostasized half-concept” is, in the view of all other Physicists, not only imponderable, but destitute of cohesive, chemical, thermal, electric, and magnetic forces, of all of which forces—according to Occultism—Æther is the Source and Cause.

Therefore Spiller, with all his mistakes, exhibits more intuition than does any other modern Scientist, with the exception, perhaps, of Dr. Richardson, the theorist on “Nerve-Force,” or Nervous Ether, also on “Sun-Force and Earth-Force.”862 For Æther, in Esotericism, is the very quintessence of all possible energy, and it is certainly to this Universal Agent (composed of many agents) that are due all the manifestations of energy in the material, psychic and spiritual worlds.

What, in fact, are electricity and light? How can Science know that one is a fluid and the other a “mode of motion”? Why is no reason given why a difference should be made between them, since both are considered as force-correlations? Electricity is a fluid, we are told, immaterial and lion-molecular—though Helmholtz thinks otherwise—and the proof of it is that we can bottle it up, accumulate it and store it away. Then, it must be simply Matter, and no peculiar “fluid.” Nor is it only “a mode of motion,” for motion could hardly be stored in a Leyden jar. As for light, it is a still more extraordinary “mode of motion”; since, “marvellous as it may appear, light [also] can actually be stored up for use,” as was demonstrated by Grove nearly half a century ago.

What is it that remains fixed, nailed, so to say, on the paper? It is a Force certainly that fixed the thing, but what is that thing, the residue of which remains on the paper?

Our learned men will get out of this by some scientific technicality; but what is it that is intercepted, so as to imprison a certain quantity of it on glass, paper, or wood? Is it “Motion” or is it “Force”? Or shall we be told that what remains behind is only the effect of the [pg 555]Force or Motion? Then what is this Force? Force or Energy is a quality; but every quality must belong to a something, or a somebody. In Physics, Force is defined as “that which changes or tends to change any physical relation between bodies, whether mechanical, thermal, chemical, electrical, magnetic, etc.” But it is not that Force or that Motion which remains behind on the paper, when the Force or Motion has ceased to act; and yet something, which our physical senses cannot perceive, has been left there, to become a cause in its turn and to produce effects. What is it? It is not Matter, as defined by Science—i.e., Matter in any of its known states. An Alchemist would say it was a spiritual secretion—and he would be laughed at. But yet, when the Physicist said that electricity, stored up, is a fluid, or that light fixed on paper is still sunlight—that was Science. The newest authorities have, indeed, rejected these explanations as “exploded theories,” and have now deified “Motion” as their sole idol. But, surely, they and their idol will one day share the fate of their predecessors! An experienced Occultist, one who has verified the whole series of Nidânas, of causes and effects, that finally project their last effect on to this our plane of manifestations, one who has traced Matter back to its Noumenon, holds the opinion that the explanation of the Physicist is like calling anger, or its effects—the exclamation provoked by it—a secretion or a fluid, and man, the cause of it, its material conductor. But, as Grove prophetically remarked, the day is fast approaching when it will be confessed that the Forces we know are but the phenomenal manifestations of Realities we know nothing about—but which were known to the Ancients, and by them worshipped.

He made one still more suggestive remark which ought to have become the motto of Science, but has not. Sir William Grove said that: “Science should have neither desires nor prejudices. Truth should be her sole aim.”

Meanwhile, in our days, Scientists are more self-opinionated and bigoted than even the Clergy. For they minister to, if they do not actually worship, “Force-Matter,” which is their Unknown God. And how unknown it is, may be inferred from the many confessions of the most eminent Physicists and Biologists, with Faraday at their head. Not only, he said, could he never presume to pronounce whether Force was a property or function of Matter, but he actually did not know what was meant by the word Matter.

There was a time, he added, when he believed he knew something of [pg 556]Matter. But the more he lived, and the more carefully he studied it, the more he became convinced of his utter ignorance of the nature of Matter.864

This ominous confession was made, we believe, at a Scientific Congress at Swansea. Faraday held a similar opinion, however, as stated by Tyndall:

The Occultists are often misunderstood because, for lack of better terms, they apply to the Essence of Force, under certain aspects, the descriptive epithet of Substance. Now the names for the varieties of Substance on different planes of perception and being are legion. Eastern Occultism has a special appellation for each kind; but Science—like England, in the recollection of a witty Frenchman, blessed with thirty-six religions and only one fish-sauce—has but one name for all, namely “Substance.” Moreover, neither the orthodox Physicists nor their critics seem to be very certain of their premisses, and are as apt to confuse the effects as they are the causes. It is incorrect, for instance, to say, as Stallo does, that “Matter can no more be realized or conceived as mere positive spatial presence than as a concretion of forces,” or that “Force is nothing without mass, and mass is nothing without force”—for one is the Noumenon and the other the phenomenon. Again; Schelling, when saying that

could never have applied the remark to the realm of transcendental Metaphysics. It is true that pure Force is nothing in the world of Physics; it is All in the domain of Spirit. Says Stallo:

This may be true in the phenomenal world, inasmuch as the illusive reflection of the One Reality of the supersensual world may appear true to the dwarfed conceptions of a Materialist. It is absolutely incorrect [pg 557]when the argument is applied to things in what the Kabalists call the supermundane spheres. Inertia, so-called, is Force, according to Newton,867 and for the student of Esoteric Sciences the greatest of the Occult Forces. A body can only conceptually, only on this plane of illusion, be considered divorced from its relations with other bodies—which, according to the physical and mechanical sciences, give rise to its attributes. In fact, it can never be so detached; death itself being unable to detach it from its relation with the Universal Forces, of which the One Force, or Life, is the synthesis: the inter-relation simply continues on another plane. But what, if Stallo is right, can Dr. James Croll mean when, in speaking “On the Transformation of Gravity,” he brings forward the views advocated by Faraday, Waterston, and others? For he says very plainly that gravity

No one will deny that a Force, whether gravity, electricity, or any other Force, which exists outside bodies and in open Space—be it Ether or a vacuum—must be something, and not a pure nothing, when conceived apart from a mass. Otherwise it could hardly exist in one place with a greater and in another with reduced “intensity.” G. A. Hirn declares the same in his Théorie Mécanique de l’Univers. He tries to demonstrate:

The above-cited views, expressed by two men of Science of great eminence in their respective countries, show that it is not in the least unscientific to speak of the substantiality of the so-called Forces. Subject to some future specific name, this Force is Substance of some kind, and can be nothing else; and perhaps one day Science will be the first to reädopt the derided name of phlogiston. Whatever may be the future name given to it, to maintain that Force does not reside in the Atoms, but only in the “space between them,” may be scientific enough; nevertheless it is not true. To the mind of an Occultist it is like saying that water does not reside in the drops of which the ocean is composed, but only in the space between those drops!

The objection that there are two distinct schools of Physicists, by one of which

is hardly likely to help the profane to any clearer understanding. It is, on the contrary, more calculated to throw the question into still greater confusion than ever. For Force is, then, neither this nor the other. By viewing it as “an independent substantial entity,” the theory extends the right hand of fellowship to Occultism, while the strange contradictory idea that it is not “related to Matter otherwise than by its power to act upon it,”870 leads Physical Science to the most absurd contradictory hypotheses. Whether “Force” or “Motion” (Occultism, seeing no difference between the two, never attempts to separate them), it cannot act for the adherents of the atomo-mechanical theory in one way, and for those of the rival school in another. Nor can the Atoms be, in one case, absolutely uniform in size and weight, and in another, vary in their weight (Avogadro’s law). For, in the words of the same able critic:

This shows that either modern Chemistry, or modern Physics, is entirely wrong in the respective fundamental principles. For if the assumption of Atoms of different specific gravities is deemed absurd, on the basis of the atomic theory in Physics; and if Chemistry, nevertheless, on this very assumption, meets with “unfailing experimental verification,” in the formation and transformation of chemical compounds; then it becomes apparent that it is the atomo-mechanical theory which [pg 559]is untenable. The explanation of the latter, that “the differences of weight are only differences of density, and differences of density are differences of distance between the particles contained in a given space,” is not really valid, because, before a Physicist can argue in his defence that “as in the atom there is no multiplicity of particles and no void space, hence differences of density or weight are impossible in the case of atoms,” he must first know what an Atom is, in reality, and that is just what he cannot know. He must bring it under the observation of at least one of his physical senses—and that he cannot do: for the simple reason that no one has ever seen, smelt, heard, touched or tasted an Atom. The Atom belongs wholly to the domain of Metaphysics. It is an entified abstraction—at any rate for Physical Science—and has nought to do with Physics, strictly speaking, as it can never be brought to the test of retort or balance. The mechanical conception, therefore, becomes a jumble of the most conflicting theories and dilemmas, in the minds of the many Scientists who disagree on this, as on other subjects; and its evolution is beheld with the greatest bewilderment by the Eastern Occultist, who follows this scientific strife.

To conclude, on the question of gravity. How can Science presume to know anything certain of it? How can it maintain its position and its hypotheses against those of the Occultists, who see in gravity only sympathy and antipathy, or attraction and repulsion, caused by physical polarity on our terrestrial plane, and by spiritual causes outside its influence? How can they disagree with the Occultists before they agree among themselves? Indeed one hears of the Conservation of Energy, and in the same breath of the perfect hardness and inelasticity of the Atoms; of the kinetic theory of gases being identical with “potential energy,” so called, and, at the same time, of the elementary units of mass being absolutely hard and inelastic! An Occultist opens a scientific work and reads as follows:

And further:

And a moment after he is told that:

Finally, to crown all, Sir W. Thomson is found declaring that:

But what do the men of true Science say to all this? By the “men of true Science” we mean those who care too much for truth and too little for personal vanity to dogmatize on anything, as do the majority. There are several among them—perhaps more than dare openly publish their secret conclusions, for fear of the cry “Stone him to death!”—men, whose intuitions have made them span the abyss that lies between the terrestrial aspect of Matter, and the, to us, on our plane of illusion, subjective, i.e., transcendentally objective Substance, and have led them to proclaim the existence of the latter. Matter, to the Occultist, it must be remembered, is that totality of existences in the Kosmos, which falls within any of the planes of possible perception. We are but too well aware that the orthodox theories of sound, heat and light, are against the Occult Doctrines. But, it is not enough for the men of Science, or their defenders, to say that they do not deny dynamic power to light and heat, and to urge, as a proof, the fact that Mr. Crookes’ radiometer has unsettled no views. If they would fathom the ultimate nature of these Forces, they have first to admit their substantial nature, however supersensuous that nature may be. Neither do the Occultists deny the correctness of the vibratory theory.877 Only they limit its functions to our Earth—declaring its inadequacy on other planes than ours, since Masters in the Occult Sciences perceive the Causes that produce ethereal vibrations. Were all these only the fictions of the Alchemists, or dreams of the Mystics, such men as Paracelsus, Philalethes, Van Helmont, and so many others, would have to be regarded as worse than visionaries; they would become impostors and deliberate mystificators.

The Occultists are taken to task for calling the Cause of light, heat, sound, cohesion, magnetism, etc., etc., a Substance.878 Mr. Clerk Maxwell has stated that the pressure of strong sunlight on a square mile is about 3-¼ lbs. It is, they are told, “the energy of the myriad ether [pg 561]waves”; and when they call it a Substance impinging on that area, their explanation is proclaimed unscientific.

There is no justification for such an accusation. In no way—as already more than once stated—do the Occultists dispute the explanations of Science, as affording a solution of the immediate objective agencies at work. Science only errs in believing that, because it has detected in vibratory waves the proximate cause of these phenomena, it has, therefore, revealed all that lies beyond the threshold of Sense. It merely traces the sequence of phenomena on a plane of effects, illusory projections from the region that Occultism has long since penetrated. And the latter maintains that those etheric tremors are not set up, as asserted by Science, by the vibrations of the molecules of known bodies, the Matter of our terrestrial objective consciousness, but that we must seek for the ultimate Causes of light, heat, etc., in Matter existing in supersensuous states—states, however, as fully objective to the spiritual eye of man, as a horse or a tree is to the ordinary mortal. Light and heat are the ghost or shadow of Matter in motion. Such states can be perceived by the Seer or the Adept during the hours of trance, under the Sushumnâ Ray—the first of the Seven Mystic Rays of the Sun.879

Thus, we put forward the Occult teaching which maintains the reality of a supersubstantial and supersensible essence of that Âkâsha—not Ether, which is only an aspect of the latter—the nature of which cannot be inferred from its remoter manifestations, its merely phenomenal phalanx of effects, on this terrene plane. Science, on the contrary, informs us that heat can never be regarded as Matter in any conceivable state. To cite a most impartial critic, one whose authority no one can call in question, as a reminder to Western dogmatists, that the question cannot be in any way considered as settled:

Whether this is true or false we cannot tell, and many years, perhaps many generations, will have to elapse before we shall be able to tell.881 We are also told that the two great obstacles to the fluid (?) theory of heat undoubtedly are:

(1) The production of heat by friction—excitation of molecular motion.

(2) The conversion of heat into mechanical motion.

The answer given is: There are fluids of various kinds. Electricity is called a fluid, and so was heat quite recently, but it was on the supposition that heat was some imponderable substance. This was during the supreme and autocratic reign of Matter. When Matter was dethroned, and Motion was proclaimed the sole sovereign ruler of the Universe, heat became a “mode of motion.” We need not despair; it may become something else to-morrow. Like the Universe itself, Science is ever becoming, and can never say, “I am that I am.” On the other hand, Occult Science has its changeless traditions from prehistoric times. It may err in particulars; it can never become guilty of a mistake in questions of Universal Law, simply because that Science, justly referred to by Philosophy as the Divine, was born on higher planes, and was brought to Earth by Beings who were wiser than man will be, even in the Seventh Race of his Seventh Round. And that Science maintains that Forces are not what modern learning would have them; e.g., magnetism is not a “mode of motion”; and, in this particular case, at least, exact Modern Science is sure to come to grief some day. Nothing, at the first blush, can appear more ridiculous, more outrageously absurd than to say, for instance: The Hindû initiated Yogî knows really ten times more than the greatest European Physicist of the ultimate nature and constitution of light, both solar and lunar. Yet why is the Sushumnâ Ray believed to be that Ray which furnishes the Moon with its borrowed light? Why is it “the Ray cherished by the initiated Yogî”? Why is the Moon considered as the Deity of the Mind, by those Yogîs? We say, because light, or rather all its Occult properties, every combination and correlation of it with other forces, mental, psychic, and spiritual, was perfectly known to the old Adepts.

Therefore, although Occult Science may be less well-informed than modern Chemistry as to the behaviour of compound elements in various cases of physical correlation, yet it is immeasurably higher [pg 563]in its knowledge of the ultimate Occult states of Matter, and of the true nature of Matter, than all the Physicists and Chemists of our modern day put together.

Now, if we state the truth openly and in full sincerity, namely, that the ancient Initiates had a far wider knowledge of Physics, as a Science of Nature, than is possessed by our Academies of Science, all taken together, the statement will be characterized as an impertinence and an absurdity; for Physical Sciences are considered to have been carried in our age to the apex of perfection. Hence, the twitting query: Can the Occultists meet successfully the two points, namely (a) the production of heat by friction—excitation of molecular motion; and (b) the conversion of heat into mechanical force, if they hold to the old exploded theory of heat being a substance or a fluid?

To answer the question, it must first be observed that the Occult Sciences do not regard either electricity, or any of the Forces supposed to be generated by it, as Matter in any of the states known to Physical Science; to put it more clearly, none of these Forces, so-called, is a solid, gas, or fluid. If it did not look pedantic, an Occultist would even object to electricity being called a fluid—as it is an effect and not a cause. But its Noumenon, he would say, is a Conscious Cause. The same in the cases of “Force” and the “Atom.” Let us see what an eminent Academician, Butlerof, the Chemist, had to say about these two abstractions. This great man of Science argues:

We are assured that Modern Science is not Materialistic; and our own conviction tells us that it cannot be so, when its learning is real. There is good reason for this, well defined by some Physicists and Chemists themselves. Natural Sciences cannot go hand in hand with Materialism. To be at the height of their calling, men of Science have to reject the very possibility of Materialistic doctrines having aught to do with the Atomic Theory; and we find that Lange, Butlerof, Du Bois Reymond—the last probably unconsciously—and several others, have proved it. And this is, furthermore, demonstrated by the fact, that Kanâda in India, and Leucippus and Democritus in Greece, and after them Epicurus—the earliest Atomists in Europe—while propagating their doctrine of definite proportions, believed in Gods or supersensuous Entities, at the same time. Their ideas upon Matter thus differed from those now prevalent. We must be allowed to make our statement clearer by a short synopsis of the ancient and modern [pg 565]views of Philosophy upon Atoms, and thus prove that the Atomic Theory kills Materialism.

From the standpoint of Materialism, which reduces the beginnings of all to Matter, the Universe consists, in its fulness, of Atoms and vacuity. Even leaving aside the axiom taught by the Ancients, and now absolutely demonstrated by telescope and microscope, that Nature abhors a vacuum, what is an Atom? Professor Butlerof writes:

Büchner, for instance, like a true dogmatist in Materialism declares that:

The Atom is indivisible then, saith Materialism? Very well. Butlerof answers:

This is sufficient to show how absurd are the simultaneous admissions of the non-divisibility and of the elasticity of the Atom. The Atom is elastic, ergo, the Atom is divisible, and must consist of particles, or of sub-atoms. And these sub-atoms? They are either non-elastic, [pg 566]and in such case they represent no dynamic importance, or, they are elastic also; and in that case, they, too, are subject to divisibility. And thus ad infinitum. But infinite divisibility of Atoms resolves Matter into simple centres of Force, i.e., precludes the possibility of conceiving Matter as an objective substance.

This vicious circle is fatal to Materialism. It finds itself caught in its own nets, and no issue out of the dilemma is possible for it. If it says that the Atom is indivisible, then it will have Mechanics asking it the awkward question:

Accept the explanations and teachings of Occultism, and—the blind inertia of Physical Science being replaced by the intelligent active Powers behind the veil of Matter—motion and inertia become subservient to those Powers. It is on the doctrine of the illusive nature of Matter, and the infinite divisibility of the Atom, that the whole Science of Occultism is built. It opens limitless horizons to Substance, informed by the divine breath of its Soul in every possible state of tenuity, states still undreamed of by the most spiritually disposed Chemists and Physicists.

The above views were enunciated by an Academician, the greatest Chemist in Russia, and a recognized authority even in Europe, the late Professor Butlerof. True, he was defending the phenomena of the Spiritualists, the materializations, so-called, in which he believed, as Professors Zöllner and Hare did, as Mr. A. Russel Wallace, Mr. W. Crookes, and many another Fellow of the Royal Society, do still, whether openly or secretly. But his argument with regard to the nature of the Essence that acts behind the physical phenomena of light, heat, electricity, etc., is no less scientific and authoritative for all that, and applies admirably to the case in hand. Science has no right to deny to the Occultists their claim to a more profound knowledge of the so-called Forces, which, they say, are only the effects of causes generated by Powers, substantial, yet supersensuous, and beyond any kind of Matter with which Scientists have hitherto become acquainted. The most Science can do is to assume and to maintain the attitude of Agnosticism. Then it can say: Your case is no more proven than is ours; but we confess to knowing nothing in reality either about [pg 567]Force or Matter, or about that which lies at the bottom of the so-called correlation of Forces. Therefore, time alone can prove who is right and who is wrong. Let us wait patiently, and meanwhile show mutual courtesy, instead of scoffing at each other.

But to do this requires a boundless love of truth and the surrender of that prestige—however false—of infallibility, which the men of Science have acquired among the ignorant and flippant, though cultured, masses of the profane. The blending of the two Sciences, the Archaic and the Modern, requires first of all the abandonment of the actual Materialistic lines. It necessitates a kind of religious Mysticism and even the study of old Magic, which our Academicians will never take up. The necessity is easily explained. Just as in old Alchemical works the real meaning of the Substances and Elements mentioned is concealed under the most ridiculous metaphors, so are the physical, psychic, and spiritual natures of the Elements (say of Fire) concealed in the Vedas;, and especially in the Purânas, under allegories comprehensible only to the Initiates. Had they no meaning, then indeed all these long legends and allegories about the sacredness of the three types of Fire, and the Forty-Nine original Fires—personified by the Sons of Daksha’s Daughters and the Rishis, their Husbands, “who with the first Son of Brahmâ and his three descendants constitute the Forty-nine Fires”—would be idiotic verbiage and no more. But it is not so. Every Fire has a distinct function and meaning in the worlds of the physical and the spiritual. It has, moreover, in its essential nature a corresponding relation to one of the human psychic faculties, besides its well determined chemical and physical potencies when coming in contact with terrestrially differentiated Matter. Science has no speculations to offer upon Fire per se; Occultism and ancient religious Science have. This is shown even in the meagre and purposely veiled phraseology of the Purânas, where, as in the Vâyu Purâna, many of the qualities of the personified Fires are explained. Thus, Pâvaka is Electric Fire, or Vaidyuta; Pavamâna, the Fire produced by Friction, or Nirmathya: and Shuchi is Solar Fire, or Saura888—all these three being the sons of Abhimânin, the Agni (Fire), eldest son of Brahmâ and of Svâhâ. Pâvaka, moreover, is made parent to Kavyavâhana, the Fire of the Pitris: Shuchi to Havyaváhana, the Fire of the Gods; and Pavamâna to Saharaksha, the Fire of the Asuras. Now all this shows that the writers of the Purânas were perfectly conversant [pg 568]with the Forces of Science and their correlations, as well as with the various qualities of the latter in their bearing upon those psychic and physical phenomena which receive no credit and are now unknown to Physical Science. Very naturally, when an Orientalist, especially one with materialistic tendencies, reads that these are only appellations of Fire employed in the invocations and rituals, he calls this “Tântrika superstition and mystification”; and he becomes more careful to avoid errors in spelling than to give attention to the secret meaning attached to the personifications, or to seek their explanation in the physical correlations of Forces, so far as these are known. So little credit, indeed, is given to the ancient Âryans for knowledge, that even such glaring passages as that in Vishnu Purâna, are left without any notice. Nevertheless, what can this sentence mean?

This means, of course, that the writers were perfectly acquainted with correlation, and were well posted about the origin of Kosmos from the “Indiscrete Principle,” Avyaktânugrahena, as applied to Parabrahman and Mûlaprakriti conjointly, and not to “Avyakta, either First Cause, or Matter,” as Wilson gives it. The old Initiates knew of no “miraculous creation,” but taught the evolution of Atoms, on our physical plane, and their first differentiation from Laya into Protyle, as Mr. Crookes has suggestively named Matter, or primordial substance, beyond the zero-line—there where we place Mûlaprakriti, the Root-Principle of the World-Stuff and of all in the World.

This can be easily demonstrated. Take, for instance, the newly-published catechism of the Vishishthâdvaita Vedântins, an orthodox and exoteric system, yet fully enunciated and taught in the XIth century890 at a time when European “Science” still believed in the squareness and flatness of the Earth of Cosmas Indicopleustes of the VIth century. It teaches that before Evolution began, Prakriti, Nature, was in a condition of Laya, or of absolute homogeneity, as “Matter exists in two conditions, the Sûkshma, or latent and undifferentiated, and the Sthûla, or differentiated, condition.” Then it became Anu, [pg 569]atomic. It teaches of Suddasattva—“a substance not subject to the qualities of Matter, from which it is quite different,” and adds that out of that Substance the bodies of the Gods, the inhabitants of Vaikunthaloka, the Heaven of Vishnu, are formed. That every particle or atom of Prakriti contains Jîva (divine life), and is the Sharîra (body) of that Jîva which it contains, while every Jîva is in its turn the Sharîra of the Supreme Spirit, as “Parabrahman pervades every Jîva, as well as every particle of Matter.” Dualistic and anthropomorphic as may be the philosophy of the Vishishthâdvaita, when compared with that of the Advaita—the non-dualists—it is yet supremely higher in logic and philosophy than the Cosmogony accepted either by Christianity or by its great opponent, Modern Science. The followers of one of the greatest minds that ever appeared on Earth, the Advaita Vedântins are called Atheists, because they regard all save Parabrahman, the Secondless, or the Absolute Reality as an illusion. Yet the wisest Initiates came from their ranks, as also the greatest Yogîs. The Upanishads show that they most assuredly knew not only what is the causal substance in the effects of friction, and that their forefathers were acquainted with the conversion of heat into mechanical force, but that they were also acquainted with the Noumenon of every spiritual as well as of every cosmic phenomenon.

Truly the young Brâhman who graduates in the Universities and Colleges of India with the highest honours; who starts in life as an M.A. and an LL.B., with a tail initialed from Alpha to Omega after his name, and a contempt for his national Gods proportioned to the honours received in his education in Physical Science; truly he has but to read in the light of the latter, and with an eye to the correlation of physical Forces, certain passages in his Purânas, if he would learn how much more his ancestors knew than he will ever know—unless he becomes an Occultist. Let him turn to the allegory of Purûravas and the celestial Gandharva,891 who furnished the former with a vessel full [pg 570]of heavenly fire. The primeval mode of obtaining fire by friction has its scientific explanation in the Vedas, and is pregnant with meaning for him who reads between the lines. The Tretâgni (sacred triad of fires) obtained by the attrition of sticks made of the wood of the Ashvattha tree, the Bo-tree of Wisdom and Knowledge, sticks “as many finger-breadths long as there are syllables in the Gâyatrî,” must have a secret meaning, or else the writers of the Vedas and Purânas were no sacred writers but mystificators. That it has such a meaning, the Hindu Occultists are a proof, and they alone are able to enlighten Science, as to why and how the Fire, that was primevally One, was made three-fold (tretâ) in our present Manvantara, by the Son of Ilâ (Vâch), the Primeval Woman after the Deluge, the wife and daughter of Vaivasvata Manu. The allegory is suggestive, in whatever Purâna it may be read and studied.

Section VI. An Attack on the Scientific Theory of Force by a Man of Science.

The wise words of several English men of Science have now to be quoted in our favour. Ostracized for “principle’s sake” by the few, they are tacitly approved of by the many. That one of them preaches almost Occult doctrines—in some things identical with, and often amounting to a public recognition of, our “Fohat and his seven Sons,” the Occult Gandharva of the Vedas—will be recognized by every Occultist, and even by some profane readers.

If such readers will open Volume V of the Popular Science Review,892 they will find in it an article on “Sun-Force and Earth-Force,” by Dr. E. W. Richardson, F.R.S., which reads as follows:

This, of course, is almost the Occult explanation of cohesion. Dr. Richardson continues:

Having thus quoted at length the heterodox views of the great “heretic”—views that to be correct, need only a little alteration of terms here and there—Dr. Richardson, undeniably an original and liberal thinker, proceeds to sum up these views, and continues:

Thus we find that Ether and elastic Atoms are, in the alleged mechanical conception of the Universe, the Spirit and Soul of Kosmos, and that the theory—put it in any way and under any disguise—always leaves a more widely opened issue for men of Science to speculate upon beyond the line of modern Materialism905 than the majority avails itself of. Atoms, Ether, or both, modern speculation cannot get out of the circle of ancient thought; and the latter was soaked through with archaic Occultism. Undulatory or corpuscular theory—it is all one. It is speculation from the aspects of phenomena, not from the knowledge of the essential nature of the cause and causes. When Modern Science has explained to its audience the late achievements of Bunsen and Kirchoff; when it has shown the seven colours, the primary of a ray which is decomposed in a fixed order on a screen; and has described the respective lengths of luminous waves, what has it proved? It has justified its reputation for exactness in mathematical achievement by measuring even the length of a luminous wave—“varying from about seven hundred and sixty millionths of a millimètre at the red end of the spectrum to about three hundred and ninety-three millionths of a millimètre at the violet end.” But when the exactness of the calculation with regard to the effect on the light-wave is thus vindicated, Science is forced to admit that the Force, which is the supposed cause, is believed to produce “inconceivably minute undulations” in some medium—“generally regarded as identical with the ethereal medium”906—and that medium itself is still only—a “hypothetical agent”!

Auguste Comte’s pessimism with respect to the possibility of knowing some day the chemical composition of the Sun, has not, as has been averred, been belied thirty years later by Kirchoff. The [pg 576]spectroscope has helped us to see that the elements, with which the modern Chemist is familiar, must in all probability be present in the Sun’s outward “robes”—not in the Sun itself; and, taking these “robes,” the solar cosmic veil, for the Sun itself, the Physicists have declared its luminosity to be due to combustion and flame, and mistaking the vital principle of that luminary for a purely material thing, have called it “chromosphere.”907 We have only hypotheses and theories so far, not law—by any means.

Section VII. Life, Force, or Gravity.

The imponderable fluids have had their day; mechanical Forces are less talked about; Science has put on a new face for this last quarter of a century; but gravitation has remained, owing its life to new combinations after the old ones had nearly killed it. It may answer scientific hypotheses very well, but the question is whether it answers as well to truth, and represents a fact in nature. Attraction by itself is not sufficient to explain even planetary motion; how can it then presume to explain the rotatory motion in the infinitudes of Space? Attraction alone will never fill all the gaps, unless a special impulse is admitted for every sidereal body, and the rotation of every planet with its satellites is shown to be due to some one cause combined with attraction. And even then, says an Astronomer,908 Science would have to name that cause.

Occultism has named it for ages, and so have all the ancient Philosophers; but then all such beliefs are now proclaimed exploded superstitions. The extra-cosmic God has killed every possibility of belief in intra-cosmic intelligent Forces; yet who, or what, is the original “pusher” in that motion? Says Francœur:909

And again:

If ever this theory of the Sun-Force being the primal cause of all life on earth, and of all motion in heaven, is accepted, and if that other far bolder theory of Herschell, about certain organisms in the Sun, is accepted even as a provisional hypothesis, then will our teachings be vindicated, and Esoteric allegory will be shown to have anticipated [pg 578]Modern Science by millions of years, probably, for such are the Archaic Teachings. Mârttânda, the Sun, watches and threatens his seven brothers, the planets, without abandoning the central position to which his Mother, Aditi, relegated him. The Commentary910 says:

It is the sun-fluids or emanations that impart all motion, and awaken all into life, in the Solar System. It is attraction and repulsion, but not as understood by modern Physics or according to the law of gravity, but in harmony with the laws of manvantaric motion designed from the early Sandhyâ, the Dawn of the rebuilding and higher reformation of the System. These laws are immutable; but the motion of all the bodies—which motion is diverse and alters with every minor Kalpa—is regulated by the Movers, the Intelligences within the Cosmic Soul. Are we so very wrong in believing all this? Well, here is a great and modern man of Science who, speaking of vital electricity, uses language far more akin to Occultism than to modern Materialistic thought. We refer the sceptical reader to an article on “The Source of Heat in the Sun,” by Robert Hunt, F.R.S.,911 who, speaking of the luminous envelope of the Sun and its “peculiar curdy appearance,” says:

Solar “flames” seen through telescopes are reflections, says Occultism. But the reader has already seen what Occultists have to say to this.

Occultism answers these queries in the affirmative; and Science will find this to be the case, one day.

Again, Mr. Hunt writes:

Thus, we have an important scientific corroboration for one of our fundamental dogmas—namely, that (a) the Sun is the store-house of Vital Force, which is the Noumenon of Electricity; and (b) that it is from its mysterious, never-to-be-fathomed depths, that issue those life-currents which thrill through Space, as through the organisms of every living thing on Earth. For see what another eminent Physician says, who calls this, our life-fluid, “Nervous Ether.” Change a few sentences in the article, extracts from which now follow, and you have another quasi-Occult treatise on Life-Force. It is again Dr. B. W. Richardson, F.R.S., who gives his views as follows on “Nervous Ether,” as he has on “Sun-Force” and “Earth-Force”:

And the whole Solar System falls into Pralaya—the author might have added. But let us read further:

A new flood of light is certainly thrown on the wisdom of ancient [pg 581]and mediæval Occultism and its votaries. For Paracelsus wrote the same thing more than three hundred years ago, in the sixteenth century, as follows:

Had Dr. Richardson studied all the secret works of Paracelsus, he would not have been obliged to confess so often, “we do not know,” “it is not known to us,” etc. Nor would he ever have written the following sentence, recanting the best portions of his independent rediscovery.

We fail to see this, and we know it is not so. Pantheism may be “physically rediscovered.” It was known, seen, and felt by the whole of antiquity. Pantheism manifests itself in the vast expanse of the starry heavens, in the breathing of the seas and oceans, and in the quiver of life of the smallest blade of grass. Philosophy rejects one finite and imperfect God in the universe, the anthropomorphic deity of the Monotheist as represented by his followers. It repudiates, in its name of Philo-theo-sophia, the grotesque idea that Infinite, Absolute Deity should, or rather could, have any direct or indirect relation to finite illusive evolutions of Matter, and therefore it cannot imagine a universe outside that Deity, or the absence of that Deity from the smallest speck of animate or inanimate Substance. This does not mean that every bush, tree or stone is God or a God; but only that every speck of the manifested material of Kosmos belongs to, and is the Substance of, God, however low it may have fallen in its cyclic [pg 582]gyration through the Eternities of the Ever-Becoming; and also that every such speck individually, and Kosmos collectively, is an aspect and a reminder of that universal One Soul—which Philosophy refuses to call God, thus limiting the eternal and ever-present Root and Essence.

Why either the Ether of Space or “Nervous Ether” should “destroy the individuality of every sense,” seems incomprehensible to one acquainted with the real nature of that “Nervous Ether” under its Sanskrit, or rather Esoteric and Kabalistic name. Dr. Richardson agrees that:

This is not so. The opinion that Pantheism “fails to be true because it would destroy the individuality of every individual sense” shows that all the conclusions of the learned doctor are based on the modern physical theories, though he would fain reform them. But he will find it impossible to do this unless he allows the existence of spiritual senses to replace the gradual atrophy of the physical. “We see and hear,” in accordance (of course, in Dr. Richardson’s mind) with the explanations of the phenomena of sight and hearing, afforded by that same Materialistic Science which postulates that we cannot see and hear otherwise. The Occultists and Mystics know better. The Vedic Âryans were as familiar with the mysteries of sound and colour on the physical plane as are our Physiologists, but they had also mastered the secrets of both on planes inaccessible to the Materialist. They knew of a double set of senses; spiritual and material. In a man who is deprived of one or more senses, the remaining senses become the more developed; for instance, the blind man will recover his sight through the senses of touch, of hearing, etc., and he who is deaf will be able to hear through sight, by seeing audibly the words uttered by the lips and mouth of the speaker. But these are cases that belong to the world of Matter still. The spiritual senses, those that act on a higher plane of consciousness, are rejected à priori by Physiology, because the latter is ignorant of the Sacred Science. It limits the action of Ether to vibrations, and, dividing it from air—though air is [pg 583]simply differentiated and compound Ether—makes it assume functions to fit in with the special theories of the Physiologist. But there is more real Science in the teachings of the Upanishads, when these are correctly understood, than the Orientalists, who do not understand them at all, are ready to admit. Mental as well as physical correlations of the seven senses—seven on the physical and seven on the mental planes—are clearly explained and defined in the Vedas, and especially in the Upanishad called Anugîtâ:

Thus speaks the Ascetic in the Anugîtâ, and also:

These seven notes of the scale are the principles of sound. The qualities of every Element, as of every sense, are septenary, and to judge and dogmatize on them from their manifestation on the material or objective plane—likewise sevenfold in itself—is quite arbitrary. For it is only by the Self emancipating itself from these seven causes of illusion, that we can acquire the knowledge (Secret Wisdom) of the qualities of objects of sense on their dual plane of manifestation, the visible and the invisible. Thus it is said:

The modern commentators, failing to comprehend the subtle meaning of the ancient Scholiasts, take the sentence, “causes of the agents,” to mean “that the powers of smelling, etc., when attributed to the Self, make him appear as an agent, as an active principle” (!), which is entirely fanciful. These “seven” are understood to be the causes of the agents, because “the objects are causes, as their enjoyment causes an impression.” It means esoterically that they, these seven senses, are caused by the agents, which are the “deities,” for otherwise what does, or can, the following sentence mean? “Thus,” it is said, “these seven [senses] are the causes of emancipation”—i.e., when these causes are made ineffectual. And, again, the sentence, “among the learned [the wise Initiates] who understand everything, the qualities which are in the position [in the nature, rather] of the deities, each in its place,” etc., means simply that the “learned” understand the nature of the Noumena of the various phenomena; and that “qualities,” in this instance, mean the qualities of the high Planetary or Elementary Gods or Intelligences, which rule the elements and their products, and not at all the “senses,” as the modern commentator thinks. For the learned do not suppose their senses to have aught to do with them, any more than with their Self.

Then we read in the Bhagavadgîtâ of Krishna, the Deity, saying:

Truly, then, one should study Occult Philosophy before one begins [pg 585]to seek for and verify the mysteries of Nature on its surface alone, as he alone “who knows the truth about the qualities of Nature, who understands the creation of all entities … is emancipated” from error. Says the Preceptor:

This is the Tree of Life, the Ashvattha tree, after the cutting of which only, Man, the slave of life and death, can be emancipated.

But the men of Science know nought, nor will they hear of the “Sword of Knowledge” used by the Adepts and Ascetics. Hence the one-sided remarks of even the most liberal among them, based on and flowing from undue importance given to the arbitrary divisions and classification of Physical Science. Occultism heeds them very little, and Nature heeds them still less. The whole range of physical phenomena proceeds from the Primary of Æther—Âkâsha, as dual-natured Âkâsha proceeds from undifferentiated Chaos, so-called, the latter being the primary aspect of Mûlaprakriti, the Root-Matter and the first abstract Idea one can form of Parabrahman. Modern Science may divide its hypothetically conceived Ether in as many ways as it likes; the real Æther of Space will remain as it is throughout. It has its seven “principles,” as all the rest of Nature has, and where there was no Æther there would be no “sound,” as it is the vibrating sounding-board in Nature in all its seven differentiations. This is the first mystery the Initiates of old have learned. Our present normal physical senses were, from our present point of view, abnormal in those days of slow and progressive downward evolution and fall into Matter. And there was a day when all that in our modern times is regarded as exceptional, so puzzling to the Physiologists now compelled to believe in them—such as thought-transference, clairvoyance, clairaudience, [pg 586]etc.; in short, all that is now called “wonderful and abnormal”—when all that and much more belonged to the senses and faculties common to all humanity. We are, however, cycling back and cycling forward; that is to say, that having lost in spirituality what we acquired in physical development until almost the end of the Fourth Race, we are now as gradually and imperceptibly losing in the physical all that we regain once more in the spiritual reëvolution. This process must go on, until the period which will bring the Sixth Root-Race on a line parallel with the spirituality of the Second Race, a long extinct mankind.

But this will hardly be understood at present. We must return to Dr. Richardson’s hopeful, though somewhat incorrect hypothesis about “Nervous Ether.” Under the misleading translation of the word as “Space,” Âkâsha has just been shown in the ancient Hindû system as the “first born” of the One, having but one quality, “Sound,” which is septenary. In Esoteric language this One is the Father-Deity, and Sound is synonymous with the Logos, Verbum, or Son. Whether consciously or otherwise, it must be the latter; and Dr. Richardson, while preaching an Occult doctrine, chooses the lowest form of the septenary nature of that Sound, and speculates upon it, adding:

Herein lies the nucleus of error leading to all the resultant mistaken views. This “Nervous Ether” is the lowest principle of the Primordial Essence which is Life. It is Animal Vitality diffused in all Nature, and acting according to the conditions it finds for its activity. It is not an “animal product,” but the living animal, the living flower and plant, are its products. The animal tissues only absorb it according to their more or less morbid or healthy state—as do physical materials and structures (in their primogenial state, nota bene)—and, from the moment of the birth of the Entity, are regulated, strengthened, and fed by it. It descends in a larger supply to vegetation in the Sushumnâ Sun-Ray which lights and feeds the Moon, and it is through her beams that it pours its light upon, and penetrates man and animal, more during their sleep and rest, than when they are in full activity. Therefore Dr. Richardson errs again in stating that:

Just so; this is quite correct and comprehensible. Therefore:

Modern Science denies the existence of a “vital principle.” This extract is a clear proof of its grand mistake. But this “physical something,” that we call life-fluid—the Liquor Vitæ of Paracelsus—has not deserted the body, as Dr. Richardson thinks. It has only changed its state from activity to passivity, and has become latent, owing to the too morbid state of the tissues, on which it has hold no longer. Once the rigor mortis is absolute, the Liquor Vitæ will reäwaken into action, and will begin its work on the atoms chemically. Brahmâ-Vishnu, the Creator and the Preserver of Life, will have transformed himself into Shiva the Destroyer.

Lastly Dr. Richardson writes:

And the learned gentleman might have added on the same Occult principle: That the “Nervous Ether” of one person can be poisoned by the “Nervous Ether” of another person or by his “auric emanations.” But see what Paracelsus said of this “Nervous Ether”:

That the two, “Archæus” and “Nervous Ether,” are identical, is shown by the English Scientist, who says that generally the tension of it may be too high or too low; that it may be so:

This is called nervous excitation, but no one, except the Occultist, knows the reason of such nervous perturbation, or explains the primary causes of it. The principle of Life may kill when too exuberant, as much as when there is too little of it. But this “principle” on the manifested plane, that is to say, our plane, is but the effect and the result of the intelligent action of the “Host,” or collective Principle, the manifesting Life and Light. It is itself subordinate to, and emanates from, the ever-invisible, eternal and Absolute One Life, in a descending and reäscending scale of hierarchic degrees, a true septenary ladder, with Sound, the Logos, at the upper end, and the Vidyâdharas936, the inferior Pitris, at the lower.

Of course, the Occultists are fully aware of the fact that the vitalist “fallacy,” so derided by Vogt and Huxley, is, nevertheless, still countenanced [pg 589]in very high scientific quarters, and, therefore, they are happy to feel that they do not stand alone. Thus, Professor de Quatrefages writes:

Section VIII. The Solar Theory.

In his reply to Dr. Gull’s attack on the theory of Vitality, which is inseparably connected with the Elements of the Ancients in the Occult Philosophy, Professor Beale, the great Physiologist, has a few words as suggestive as they are beautiful:

This “mystery,” or the origin of the Life Essence, Occultism locates in the same Centre as the nucleus of prima materia of our Solar System, for they are one.

As says the Commentary:

The Sun is the heart of the Solar World [System] and its brain is hidden behind the [visible] Sun. Thence, sensation is radiated into every nerve-centre of the great body, and the waves of the life-essence flow into each artery and vein…. The planets are its limbs and pulses.

It has been stated elsewhere938 that Occult philosophy denies that the Sun is a globe in combustion, but defines it simply as a world, a glowing [pg 591]sphere, the real Sun being hidden behind, and the visible Sun being only its reflection, its shell. The Nasmyth willow leaves, mistaken by Sir John Herschell for “solar inhabitants,” are the reservoirs of solar vital energy; “the vital electricity that feeds the whole system; the sun in abscondito being thus the storehouse of our little Cosmos, self-generating its vital fluid, and ever receiving as much as it gives out,” and the visible Sun only a window cut into the real solar palace and presence, which, however, shews without distortion the interior work.

Thus, during the manvantaric solar period, or life, there is a regular circulation of the vital fluid throughout our System, of which the Sun is the heart—like the circulation of the blood in the human body; the Sun contracting as rhythmically as the human heart does at every return of it. Only, instead of performing the round in a second or so, it takes the solar blood ten of its years to circulate, and a whole year to pass through its auricle and ventricle before it washes the lungs, and passes thence back to the great arteries and veins of the System.

This, Science will not deny, since Astronomy knows of the fixed cycle of eleven years when the number of solar spots increases,939 the increase being due to the contraction of the Solar Heart. The Universe, our World in this case, breathes, just as man and every living creature, plant, and even mineral does upon the Earth; and as our Globe itself breathes every twenty-four hours. The dark region is not due to the “absorption exerted by the vapours issuing from the bosom of the sun, and interposed between the observer and the photosphere,” as Father Secchi would have it,940 nor are the spots formed “by the matter [heated gaseous matter] itself which the irruption projects upon the solar disk.” The phenomenon is similar to the regular and healthy pulsation of the heart, as the life fluid passes through its hollow muscles. Could the human heart be made luminous, and the living and throbbing organ made visible, so as to have it reflected upon a screen, such as is used by lecturers on Astronomy to show the moon, for instance, then every one would see the sun-spot phenomena repeated every [pg 592]second, and that they were due to contraction and the rushing of the blood.

We read in a work on Geology that it is the dream of Science that:

Occult Philosophy has taught this since the existence of human speech and language, adding, however, on the principle of the immutable law of analogy, “as it is above, so it is below,” another of its axioms, that there is neither Spirit nor Matter, in reality, but only numberless aspects of the One ever-hidden Is, or Sat. The homogeneous primordial Element is simple and single, only on the terrestrial plane of consciousness and sensation, since Matter, after all, is nothing more than the sequence of our own states of consciousness, and Spirit an idea of psychic intuition. Even on the next higher plane, that single element which is defined on our Earth by current Science, as the ultimate undecomposable constituent of some kind of Matter, would be pronounced in the world of a higher spiritual perception to be something very complex indeed. Our purest water would be found to yield, instead of its two declared simple elements of oxygen and hydrogen, many other constituents, undreamed of by our modern terrestrial Chemistry. As in the realm of Matter, so in the realm of Spirit, the shadow of that which is cognized on the plane of objectivity exists on that of pure subjectivity. The speck of the perfectly homogeneous Substance, the sarcode of the Hæckelian Moneron, is now viewed as the archebiosis of terrestrial existence (Mr. Huxley’s protoplasm)942; and Bathybius Hæckelii has to be traced to its pre-terrestrial archebiosis. This is first perceived by the Astronomers at its third stage of evolution, and in the “secondary creation,” so-called. But the students of Esoteric Philosophy understand well the secret meaning of the Stanza:

Anu is one of the names of Brahmâ, as distinct from Brahman, [pg 593]and it means “atom”; anîyâmsam anîyasâm, “the most atomic of the atomic,” the “immutable and imperishable (achyuta) Purushottama.”

Surely, then, the elements now known to us—be their number whatever it may—as they are understood and defined at present, are not, nor can they be, the primordial Elements. Those were formed from “the curds of the cold radiant Mother” and “the fire-seed of the hot Father,” who “are one,” or, to express it in the plainer language of Modern Science, those Elements had their genesis in the depths of the primordial Fire-mist, the masses of incandescent vapour of the irresolvable nebulæ; for, as Professor Newcomb shows,944 resolvable nebulæ do not constitute a class of proper nebulæ. More than half of those, he thinks, which were at first mistaken for nebulæ, are what he calls “starry clusters.”

The elements now known have arrived at their state of permanency in this Fourth Round and Fifth Race. They have a short period of rest before they are propelled once more on their upward spiritual evolution, when the “living fire of Orcus” will dissociate the most irresolvable, and scatter them again into the primordial One.

Meanwhile the Occultist goes further, as has been shown in the Commentaries on the Seven Stanzas. Hence he can hardly hope for any help or recognition from Science, which will reject both his “anîyâmsam anîyasâm,” the absolutely spiritual Atom, and his Mânasaputras or Mind-born Men. In resolving the “single material element” into one absolute irresolvable Element, Spirit, or Root-Matter, thus placing it at once outside the reach and province of Physical Philosophy—he has, of course but little in common with the orthodox men of Science. He maintains that Spirit and Matter are two Facets of the unknowable Unity, their apparently contrasted aspects depending, (a) on the various degrees of differentiation of Matter, and (b) on the grades of consciousness attained by man himself. This is, however, Metaphysics, and has little to do with Physics—however great in its own terrestrial limitation that physical Philosophy may now be.

Nevertheless, once that Science admits, if not the actual existence, at any rate, the possibility of the existence, of a Universe with its numberless forms, conditions, and aspects built out of a “single [pg 594]Substance,”945 it has to go further. Unless it also admits the possibility of One Element, or the One Life of the Occultists, it will have to hang up that “single Substance,” especially if limited to only the solar nebulæ, in mid air, like the coffin of Mahomet, though minus the attractive magnet that sustained that coffin. Fortunately for the speculative Physicists, if we are unable to state with any degree of precision what the nebular theory does imply, we have, thanks to Professor Winchell, and several dissident Astronomers, been able to learn what it does not imply.

Unfortunately, this is far from clearing even the most simple of the problems that have vexed, and do still vex, the men of learning in their search after truth. We have to proceed with our enquiries, starting with the earliest hypotheses of Modern Science, if we would discover where and why it sins. Perchance it may be found that Stallo is right, after all, and that the blunders, contradictions and fallacies made by the most eminent men of learning are simply due to their abnormal attitude. They are, and want to remain Materialistic quand même, and yet “the general principles of the atomo-mechanical theory—the basis of modern Physics—are substantially identical with the cardinal doctrines of ontological Metaphysics.” Thus, “the fundamental errors of ontology become apparent in proportion to the advance of physical science.”946 Science is honeycombed with metaphysical conceptions, but the Scientists will not admit the charge, and fight desperately to put atomo-mechanical masks on purely incorporeal and spiritual laws in Nature, on our plane—refusing to admit their [pg 595]substantiality even on other planes, the bare existence of which they reject à priori.

It is easy to show, however, how Scientists, wedded to their materialistic views, have, ever since the days of Newton, endeavoured to put false masks on fact and truth. But their task is becoming every year more difficult; and every year also, Chemistry, beyond all the other sciences, approaches nearer and nearer the realm of the Occult in Nature. It is assimilating the very truths taught by the Occult Sciences for ages, but hitherto bitterly derided. “Matter is eternal,” says the Esoteric Doctrine. But the Matter the Occultists conceive of in its laya, or zero state, is not the matter of Modern Science, not even in its most rarefied gaseous state. Mr. Crookes’ “radiant matter” would appear Matter of the grossest kind in the realm of the beginnings, as it becomes pure Spirit before it returns back even to its first point of differentiation. Therefore, when the Adept or Alchemist adds that, though Matter is eternal, for it is Pradhâna, yet Atoms are born at every new Manvantara, or reconstruction of the universe, it is no such contradiction as a Materialist, who believes in nothing beyond the Atom, might think. There is a difference between manifested and unmanifested Matter, between Pradhâna, the beginningless and endless cause, and Prakriti, or the manifested effect. Says the Shloka:

That which in modern phraseology is referred to as Spirit and Matter, is one in eternity as the Perpetual Cause, and it is neither Spirit nor Matter, but it—rendered in Sanskrit by Tad, “that”—all that is, was, or will be, all that the imagination of man is capable of conceiving. Even the exoteric Pantheism of Hindûism renders it as no monotheistic Philosophy ever did, for in superb phraseology its Cosmogony begins with the well-known words:

It is that which is dissolved, or the illusionary dual aspect of That, the essence of which is eternally One, that we call Eternal Matter, or Substance, formless, sexless, inconceivable, even to our sixth sense or mind,948 in which, therefore, we refuse to see that which Monotheists call a personal, anthropomorphic God.

How are these two propositions—that “Matter is eternal,” and that “the Atom is periodical, and not eternal”—viewed by exact Modern Science? The materialistic Physicist will criticize and laugh them to scorn. The liberal and progressive man of Science, however, the true and earnest scientific searcher after truth, such as the eminent Chemist, Mr. Crookes, will corroborate the probability of the two statements. For hardly had the echo of his lecture on the “Genesis of the Elements” died away—the lecture which, delivered by him before the Chemical Section of the British Association, at the Birmingham meeting in 1887, so startled every evolutionist who heard or read it—than there came another in March, 1888. Once more the President of the Chemical Society brought before the world of Science and the public the fruits of some new discoveries in the realm of Atoms, and these discoveries justified the Occult Teachings in every way. They are more startling even than the statements made by him in the first lecture, and well deserve the attention of every Occultist, Theosophist, and Metaphysician. This is what he says in his “Elements and Meta-Elements,” thus justifying Stallo’s charges and prevision, with the fearlessness of a scientific mind which loves Science for truth’s sake, regardless of any consequences to his own glory and reputation. We quote his own words:

Here the great Chemist gives several cases of the very extraordinary behaviour of molecules and earths, apparently the same, but which yet, when examined very closely, were found to exhibit differences which, however minute, still show that none of them are simple bodies, and that the 60 or 70 elements accepted in chemistry can no longer cover the ground. Their name, apparently, is legion, but as the so-called “periodic theory” stands in the way of an unlimited multiplication of elements, Mr. Crookes is obliged to find some means of reconciling the new discovery with the old theory. “That theory,” he says:

Thus fact and truth have once more forced the hand of “exact” Science, and compelled it to enlarge its views and change its terms, which, masking the multitude, reduced them to one body—like the Septenary Elohim and their hosts transformed by the materialistic religionists into one Jehovah. Replace the chemical terms “molecule,” “atom,” “particle,” etc., by the words “Hosts,” “Monads,” “Devas,” etc., and one might think the genesis of Gods, the primeval evolution of manvantaric intelligent Forces, was being described. But the learned lecturer adds to his descriptive remarks something still more suggestive; whether consciously or unconsciously, who knoweth? For he says:

The italics in the above passage are ours. Well may a man of Science ask himself: What power is it that directs each Atom? and what is the meaning of its character being selective? Theists would solve the question by answering “God”; and would thereby solve nothing philosophically. Occultism answers on its own Pantheistic grounds, and teaches the student about Gods, Monads, and Atoms. The learned lecturer sees in it that which is his chief concern: the finger-posts and the traces of a path which may lead to the discovery, and the full and complete demonstration, of an homogeneous element in Nature. He remarks:

Occultism, which knows of the existence and presence in Nature of the One Eternal Element, at the first differentiation of which the roots of the Tree of Life are periodically struck, needs no scientific proofs. It [pg 600]says: Ancient Wisdom has solved the problem ages ago. Aye; earnest, as well as mocking reader, Science is slowly but surely approaching our domains of the Occult. It is forced by its own discoveries to adopt nolens volens our phraseology and symbols. Chemical Science is now compelled, by the very force of things, to accept even our illustration of the evolution of the Gods and Atoms, so suggestively and undeniably figured in the Caduceus of Mercury, the God of Wisdom, and in the allegorical language of the Archaic Sages. Says a Commentary in the Esoteric Doctrine:

The trunk of the Asvattha (the tree of Life and Being, the rod of the Caduceus) grows from and descends at every Beginning (every new Manvantara) from the two dark wings of the Swan (Hansa) of Life. The two Serpents, the ever-living and its illusion (Spirit and matter) whose two heads grow from the one head between the wings, descend along the trunks interlaced in close embrace. The two tails join on earth (the manifested Universe) into one, and this is the great illusion, O Lanoo!

Every one knows what the Caduceus is, modified considerably by the Greeks. The original symbol—with the triple head of the serpent—became altered into a rod with a knob, and the two lower heads were separated, thus disfiguring somewhat the original meaning. Yet it is as good an illustration as can be for our purpose, this laya rod, entwined by two serpents. Verily the wonderful powers of the magic Caduceus were sung by all the ancient poets, with a very good reason for those who understood the secret meaning.

Now what says the learned President of the Chemical Society of Great Britain, in that same lecture, which has any reference to, or bearing upon, our above-mentioned doctrine? Very little; only this—and nothing more:

A lemniscate for the evolution downward, from Spirit into Matter; another form of a spiral, perhaps, in its reinvolutionary path onward, from Matter into Spirit; and the necessary gradual and final reabsorption into the laya state, that which Science calls, in her own way, “the point neutral as to electricity,” or the zero point. Such are the Occult facts and statement. They may be left with the greatest security and confidence to Science, to be justified some day. Let us hear some more, however, about this primordial genetic type of the symbolical Caduceus.

And, as if to prove the postulate of Occult Science and Hindû philosophy, that, at the hour of the Pralaya, the two aspects of the Unknowable Deity, “the Swan in darkness,” Prakriti and Purusha, Nature or Matter in all its forms and Spirit, no longer subsist but are absolutely dissolved, we learn the conclusive scientific opinion of the great English Chemist, who caps his proofs by saying:

Occultism says amen to this, as the scientific “possibility” and “probability” are for it facts, demonstrated beyond the necessity for further proof, or for any extraneous physical evidence. Nevertheless, it repeats with as much assurance as ever: “matter is eternal, becoming atomic (its aspect) only periodically.” This is as sure as that the other proposition, which is almost unanimously accepted by Astronomers and Physicists—namely, that the wear and tear of the body of the Universe is steadily going on, and that it will finally lead to the extinction of the Solar Fires and the destruction of the Universe—is quite erroneous on the lines traced by men of Science. There will be, as there ever were in time and eternity, periodical dissolutions of [pg 603]the manifested Universe, such as a partial Pralaya after every Day of Brahmâ; and a Universal Pralaya—the Mahâ-Pralaya—only after the lapse of every Age of Brahmâ. But the scientific causes for such dissolution, as brought forward by exact Science, have nothing to do with the true causes. However that may be, Occultism is once more justified by Science, for Mr. Crookes said:

By a strange and curious coincidence even our Septenary doctrine seems to force the hand of Science. If we understand rightly, Chemistry speaks of fourteen groupings of primitive atoms—lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, sodium, magnesium, aluminium, silicon, phosphorus, sulphur and chlorine; and Mr. Crookes, speaking of the “dominant atomicities,” enumerates seven groups of these, for he says:

It might be interesting to compare these seven, and the eighth family of “incurables,” with the allegories concerning the seven primitive sons of “Mother, Infinite Space,” or Aditi, and the eighth son rejected by her. Many a strange coincidence may thus be found between “those intermediate links … named meta-elements” or elementoids, and those whom Occult Science names their Noumenoi, the intelligent Minds and Rulers of those groupings of Monads and Atoms. But this would lead us too far. Let us be content with finding the confession of the fact that:

Thus finally Science, in the person of its highest representatives, in order to make itself clearer to the profane, adopts the phraseology of such old Adepts as Roger Bacon, and returns to the “protyle.” All this is hopeful and suggestive of the “signs of the times.”

Indeed these “signs” are many and multiply daily; but none are more important than those just quoted. For now the chasm between the Occult “superstitious and unscientific” teachings and those of “exact” Science is completely bridged, and one, at least, of the few eminent Chemists of the day is in the realm of the infinite possibilities of Occultism. Every new step he will take will bring him nearer and nearer to that mysterious Centre, from which radiate the innumerable paths that lead down Spirit into Matter, and which transform the Gods and the living Monads into man and sentient Nature.

But we have something more to say on this subject in the following Section.

Section IX. The Coming Force. Its Possibilities And Impossibilities.

Shall we say that Force is “moving Matter,” or “Matter in motion,” and a manifestation of Energy; or that Matter and Force are the phenomenal differentiated aspects of the one primary, undifferentiated Cosmic Substance?

This query is made with regard to that Stanza which treats of Fohat and his “Seven brothers or Sons,” in other words, of the cause and the effects of Cosmic Electricity, the Brothers or Sons of Occult parlance being the seven primary forces of Electricity, whose purely phenomenal, and hence grossest, effects are alone cognizable by Physicists on the cosmic and especially on the terrestrial plane. These include, among other things, Sound, Light, Colour, etc. Now what does Physical Science tell us of these “Forces”? Sound, it says, is a sensation produced by the impact of atmospheric molecules on the tympanum, which, by setting up delicate tremors in the auditory apparatus, thus communicate their vibrations to the brain. Light is the sensation caused by the impact of inconceivably minute vibrations of ether on the retina of the eye.

So, too, say we. But these are simply the effects produced in our atmosphere and its immediate surroundings, all, in fact, which falls within the range of our terrestrial consciousness. Jupiter Pluvius sent his symbol in drops of rain, of water composed, as is believed, of two “elements,” which Chemistry dissociates and recombines. The compound molecules are in its power, but their atoms still elude its grasp. Occultism sees in all these Forces and manifestations a ladder, the lower rungs of which belong to exoteric Physics, and the higher are traced to a living, intelligent, invisible Power, which is, as a rule, the unconcerned, but, exceptionally, the conscious, Cause of the sense-born phenomena designated as this or that natural law.

We say and maintain that Sound, for one thing, is a tremendous Occult power; that it is a stupendous force, of which the electricity generated by a million of Niagaras could never counteract the smallest potentiality when directed with Occult Knowledge. Sound may be produced of such a nature that the pyramid of Cheops would be raised in the air, or that a dying man, nay, one at his last breath, would be revived and filled with new energy and vigour.

For Sound generates, or rather attracts together, the elements that produce an ozone the fabrication of which is beyond Chemistry, but is within the limits of Alchemy. It may even resurrect a man or an animal whose astral “vital body” has not been irreparably separated from the physical body by the severance of the magnetic or odic chord. As one saved thrice from death by that power, the writer ought to be credited with personally knowing something about it.

And if all this appears too unscientific to be even noticed, let Science explain to what mechanical and physical laws, known to it, are due the recently produced phenomena of the so-called Keely motor. What is it that acts as the formidable generator of invisible but tremendous force, of that power which is not only capable of driving an engine of 25 horse-power, but has even been employed to bodily lift the machinery? Yet this is done simply by drawing a fiddle-bow across a tuning fork, as has been repeatedly proven. For the Etheric Force, discovered by John Worrell Keely, of Philadelphia, well-known in America and Europe, is no hallucination. Notwithstanding his failure to utilize it—a failure prognosticated and maintained by some Occultists from the first—the phenomena exhibited by the discoverer during the last few years have been wonderful, almost miraculous, not in the sense of the supernatural949 but of the superhuman. Had Keely been permitted to succeed, he might have reduced a whole army to atoms in the space of a few seconds, as easily as he reduced a dead ox to that condition.

The reader is now asked to give serious attention to that newly-discovered [pg 607]potency, which the discoverer has named Inter-Etheric Force, and Forces.

In the humble opinion of the Occultists, as of his immediate friends, Mr. Keely was, and still is, at the threshold of some of the greatest secrets of the Universe; of that chiefly on which is built the whole mystery of physical Forces, and the Esoteric significance of the “Mundane Egg” symbolism. Occult Philosophy, viewing the manifested and the unmanifested Kosmos as a unity, symbolizes the ideal conception of the former by that “Golden Egg” with two poles in it. It is the positive pole that acts in the manifested World of Matter, while the negative loses itself in the unknowable Absoluteness of sat—Be-ness.950 Whether this agrees with the philosophy of Mr. Keely, we cannot tell, nor does it really much matter. Nevertheless, his ideas about the ethero-material construction of the Universe look strangely like our own, being in this respect nearly identical. This is what we find him saying in an able pamphlet compiled by Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore, an American lady of wealth and position, whose incessant efforts in the pursuit of truth can never be too highly appreciated:

This is, as may easily be seen, precisely the Eastern Doctrine. Mr. Keely’s inter-etheric point is the laya-point of the Occultists; this, however, does not require “an infinite mind to understand it,” but only a specific intuition and ability to trace its hiding-place in this World of Matter. Of course, the laya centre cannot be produced, but an inter-etheric vacuum can be—as is proved by the production of bell-sounds in space. Mr. Keely speaks as an unconscious Occultist, nevertheless, when he remarks, in his theory of planetary suspension:

Mr. Keely illustrates his idea of “a neutral centre” in this way:

And this is what Occultists understand by a laya centre.

The above is pronounced to be “unscientific” by many. But so is everything that is not sanctioned and kept on the strictly orthodox lines of Physical Science. Unless the explanation given by the inventor [pg 609]himself is accepted—and his explanations, being quite orthodox from the Spiritual and the Occult standpoints, if not from that of materialistic speculative Science, called exact, are therefore ours in this particular—what can Science answer to facts already seen, which it is no longer possible for anyone to deny? Occult Philosophy divulges few of its most important vital mysteries. It drops them like precious pearls, one by one, far and wide apart, and even this only when forced to do so by the evolutionary tidal wave that carries on Humanity slowly, silently, but steadily, toward the dawn of the Sixth Race mankind. For once out of the safe custody of their legitimate heirs and keepers, those mysteries cease to be Occult: they fall into the public domain, and have to run the risk of becoming curses more often than blessings in the hands of the selfish—of the Cains of the human race. Nevertheless, whenever such individuals as the discoverer of Etheric Force are born, men with peculiar psychic and mental capacities,953 they are generally and more frequently helped, than allowed to go unassisted, groping on their way; if left to their own resources, they very soon fall victims to martyrdom or become the prey of unscrupulous speculators. But they are helped only on the condition that they should not become, whether consciously or unconsciously, an additional peril to their age: a danger to the poor, now offered in daily holocaust by the less wealthy to the very wealthy.954 This necessitates a short digression and an explanation.

Some twelve years back, during the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, the writer, in answering the earnest queries of a Theosophist, one of the earliest admirers of Mr. Keely, repeated to him what she had heard in quarters, information from which she could never doubt.

It had been stated that the inventor of the “Self-Motor” was what is called, in the jargon of the Kabalists, a “natural-born magician.” That he was and would remain unconscious of the full range of his powers, and would work out merely those which he had found out and ascertained in his own nature—firstly, because, attributing them to a [pg 610]wrong source, he could never give them full sway; and secondly, because it was beyond his power to pass to others that which was a capacity inherent in his own special nature. Hence, the whole secret could not be made over permanently to anyone, for practical purposes or use.955

Individuals born with such a capacity are not very rare. That they are not heard of more frequently is due to the fact that they live and die, in almost every case, in utter ignorance that they are possessed of abnormal powers. Mr. Keely possesses powers which are called abnormal, just because they happen to be as little known, in our day, as was the circulation of the blood before Harvey’s time. Blood existed, and it behaved as it does at present in the first man born from woman; and so exists and has existed in man that principle which can control and guide etheric vibratory Force. At any rate, it exists in all those mortals whose Inner Selves are primordially connected, by reason of their direct descent, with that group of Dhyân-Chohans who are called “the first-born of Æther.” Mankind, psychically considered, is divided into various groups, each group being connected with one of the Dhyânic Groups that first formed psychic man (see paragraphs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in the Commentary to Stanza VII.). Mr. Keely—being greatly favoured in this respect, and besides his psychic temperament, being, moreover, intellectually a genius in mechanics—may achieve most wonderful results. He has achieved some already—more than any mortal man, not initiated into the final Mysteries, has achieved in this age up to the present day. What he has done is—as his friends justly say of him—certainly quite sufficient “to demolish with the hammer of Science the idols of Science”—the idols of matter with the feet of clay. Nor would the writer for a moment think of contradicting Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore, when, in her paper on “Psychic Force and Etheric Force,” she states that Mr. Keely, as a Philosopher:

And again she writes:

The same lady, in her pamphlet, Keely’s Secrets,956 brings forward the following passage from an article, written in the Theosophist a few years ago, by the writer of the present volume:

It is just because Keely’s discovery would lead to a knowledge of one of the most Occult secrets, a secret which can never be allowed to fall into the hands of the masses, that his failure to push his discoveries to their logical end seems certain to Occultists. But of this more presently. Even in its limitations this discovery may prove of the greatest benefit. For:

The Occultists are ready to admit all this with the eloquent writer. Molecular vibration is, undeniably, “Keely’s legitimate field of research,” and the discoveries made by him will prove wonderful—yet only in his hands and through himself. The world so far will get but that with which it can be safely entrusted. The truth of this assertion has, perhaps, not yet quite dawned upon the discoverer himself, since he writes that he is absolutely certain that he will accomplish all that he has promised, and that he will then give it out to the world; but it must dawn upon him, and at no very far distant date. And what he says in reference to his work is a good proof of it:

The passages underlined by us, are those which bear directly on the Occult side of the application of the vibratory Force, that which Mr. Keely calls “sympathetic vibration.” The “wire” is already a step below, or downward from the pure Etheric plane into the Terrestrial. The discoverer has produced marvels—the word “miracle” is not too [pg 613]strong—when acting through the inter-etheric Force alone, the fifth and sixth principles of Âkâsha. From a generator six feet long, he has come down to one “no larger than an old-fashioned silver watch”; and this by itself is a miracle of mechanical, but not of spiritual, genius. As was well said by his great patroness and defender, Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore:

One was generated and acted upon by and through himself. No one, who should have repeated the thing done by himself, could have produced the same results. It was truly Keely’s Ether that acted, while Smith’s or Brown’s Ether would have remained for ever barren of results. For Keely’s difficulty has hitherto been to produce a machine which would develop and regulate the Force without the intervention of any “will power” or personal influence of the operator, whether conscious or unconscious. In this he has failed, so far as others were concerned, for no one but himself could operate on his “machines.” Occultly this was a far more advanced achievement than the “success” which he anticipates from his wire, but the results obtained from the fifth and sixth planes of the Etheric, or Astral, Force, will never be permitted to serve for purposes of commerce and traffic. That Keely’s organism is directly connected with the production of his marvellous results is proven by the following statement, emanating from one who knows the great discoverer intimately.

This fact, if true, settles the question.

We are told that Mr. Keely defines electricity “as a certain form of atomic vibration.” In this he is quite right; but this is Electricity on the terrestrial plane, and through terrestrial correlations. He estimates—

This proves our point. There are no vibrations that could be counted or even estimated at an approximate rate beyond “the realm of the fourth Son of Fohat,” to use an Occult phrase, or that motion which corresponds to the formation of Mr. Crookes’ radiant matter, lightly called some years ago the “fourth state of matter”—on this our plane.

If the question is asked why Mr. Keely was not allowed to pass a certain limit, the answer is easy; it was because that, which he has unconsciously discovered, is the terrible sidereal Force, known to, and named by the Atlanteans Mash-mak, and by the Âryan Rishis in their Astra Vidyâ by a name that we do not like to give. It is the Vril of Bulwer Lytton’s Coming Race, and of the coming Races of our mankind. The name Vril may be a fiction; the Force itself is a fact, as little doubted in India as is the existence of the Rishis, since it is mentioned in all the secret books.

It is this vibratory Force, which, when aimed at an army from an Agni-ratha, fixed on a flying vessel, a balloon, according to the instructions found in Astra Vidyâ, would reduce to ashes 100,000 men and elephants, as easily as it would a dead rat. It is allegorized in the Vishnu Purâna, in the Râmâyana and other works, in the fable about the sage Kapila whose “glance made a mountain of ashes of King Sagara’s 60,000 sons,” and which is explained in the Esoteric Works, and referred to as the Kapilâksha—Kapila’s Eye.

And is it this Satanic Force that our generations are to be allowed to add to their stock of Anarchist’s baby-toys, known as melenite, dynamite clock-work, explosive oranges, “flower baskets,” and such other innocent names? Is it this destructive agency, which, once in the hands of some modern Attila, a bloodthirsty Anarchist, for instance, would in a few days reduce Europe to its primitive chaotic state, with no man left alive to tell the tale—is it this Force which is to become the common property of all men alike?

What Mr. Keely has already done is grand and wonderful in the extreme; there is enough work before him in the demonstration of his new system to “humble the pride of those scientists who are materialistic, [pg 615]by revealing those mysteries which lie behind the world of matter,” without, nolens volens, revealing it to all. For surely Psychics and Spiritualists, of whom there are a good number in European armies, would be the first to personally experience the fruits of the revelation of such mysteries. Thousands of them would speedily find themselves in blue Ether, perhaps with the populations of whole countries to keep them company, were such a Force to be even entirely discovered, let alone made publicly known. The discovery in its completeness is by several thousand—or shall we say hundred thousand—years too premature. It will be in its appointed place and time only when the great roaring flood of starvation, misery, and underpaid labour ebbs back again—as it will when the just demands of the many are at last happily attended to; when the proletariat exists but in name, and the pitiful cry for bread, that rings unheeded throughout the world, has died away. This may be hastened by the spread of learning, and by new openings for work and emigration, with better prospects than now exist, and on some new continent that may appear. Then only will Keely’s Motor and Force, as originally contemplated by himself and his friends, be in demand, because it will then be more needed by the poor than by the wealthy.

Meanwhile the Force he has discovered will work through wires, and, if he succeeds, this will be quite sufficient to make of him the greatest discoverer of the age in the present generation.

What Mr. Keely says of Sound and Colour is also correct from the Occult standpoint. Hear him talk as though he were the nursling of the “Gods-Revealers,” and as if he had gazed all his life into the depths of Father-Mother Æther.

In comparing the tenuity of the atmosphere with that of the etheric flows, obtained by his invention for breaking up the molecules of air by vibration, Keely says:

It may be remarked that, save for a few small divergencies, no Adept nor Alchemist could have better explained these theories, in the light of Modern Science, however much the latter may protest against these novel views. In all its fundamental principles, if not in its details, this is Occultism pure and simple; and moreover, it is modern Natural Philosophy as well.

This new Force, or whatever Science may call it, the effects of which are undeniable—as is admitted by more than one Naturalist and Physicist who has visited Mr. Keely’s laboratory and personally witnessed its tremendous effects—what is it? Is it a “mode of motion,” also, in vacuo, since there is no Matter to generate it except Sound—another “mode of motion,” no doubt, a sensation caused, like Colour, by vibrations? Fully as we believe in these vibrations as the proximate, the immediate, cause of such sensations, we as absolutely reject the one-sided scientific theory that there is no factor to be considered as external to us, other than etheric or atmospheric vibrations.

In this case the American Substantialists are not wrong, though they are too anthropomorphic and material in their views for these to be accepted by Occultists, when they argue through Mrs. M. S. Organ, M.D., that:

There is a transcendental set of causes put in motion, so to speak, in the occurrence of these phenomena, which, not being in relation to our narrow range of cognition, can only be understood and traced to their source and their nature, by the spiritual faculties of the Adept. They are, as Asclepios puts it to the King, “incorporeal corporealities,” such as “appear in the mirror,” and “abstract forms” that we see, hear, and smell, in our dreams and visions. What have the “modes of motion,” light, and ether to do with these? Yet we see, hear, smell and touch them, ergo they are as much realities to us in our dreams, as any other thing on this plane of Mâyâ.

Section X. On the Elements and Atoms.

When the Occultist speaks of Elements, and of human Beings who lived during those geological ages, the duration of which it is found as impossible to determine—according to the opinion of one of the best English Geologists960—as the nature of Matter, it is because he knows what he is talking about. When he says Man and Elements, he means neither man in his present physiological and anthropological form, nor the elemental Atoms, those hypothetical conceptions, existing at present in scientific minds, the entitative abstractions of Matter in its highly attenuated state; nor, again, does he mean the compound Elements of Antiquity. In Occultism the word Element in every case means Rudiment. When we say “Elementary Man,” we mean either the proëmial, incipient sketch of man, in its unfinished and undeveloped condition, hence in that form which now lies latent in physical man during his life-time, and takes shape only occasionally and under certain conditions; or, that form which for a time survives the material body, and which is better known as an Elementary.961 With regard to Element, when the term is used metaphysically, it means, in distinction to the mortal, the incipient Divine Man; and, in its physical usage, it means inchoate Matter in its first undifferentiated condition, or in the Laya state, the eternal and normal condition of Substance, which differentiates only periodically; during that differentiation, Substance is really in an abnormal state—in other words, it is but a transitory illusion of the senses.

As to the Elemental Atoms, so-called, the Occultists refer to them by that name with a meaning analogous to that which is given by [pg 620]the Hindû to Brahmâ, when he calls him Anu, the Atom. Every Elemental Atom, in search of which more than one Chemist has followed the path indicated by the Alchemists, is, in their firm belief, when not knowledge, a Soul; not necessarily a disembodied Soul, but a Jîva, as the Hindûs call it, a centre of Potential Vitality, with latent intelligence in it, and, in the case of compound Souls, an intelligent active Existence, from the highest to the lowest order, a form composed of more or less differentiations. It requires a Metaphysician—and an Eastern Metaphysician—to understand our meaning. All those Atom-Souls are differentiations from the One, and are in the same relation to it as is the Divine Soul, Buddhi, to its informing and inseparable Spirit, Âtmâ.

Modern Physics, in borrowing from the Ancients their Atomic Theory, forgot one point, the most important point of the doctrine; hence they have got only the husks and will never be able to get the kernel. In adopting physical Atoms, they omitted the suggestive fact that, from Anaxagoras to Epicurus, to the Roman Lucretius, and finally even to Galileo, all these Philosophers believed more or less in animated Atoms, not in invisible specks of so-called “brute” matter. According to them, rotatory motion was generated by larger (read, more divine and pure) Atoms forcing other Atoms downwards; the lighter ones being simultaneously thrust upward. The Esoteric meaning of this is the ever cyclic curve of differentiated Elements downward and upward through intercyclic phases of existence, until each again reaches its starting-point or birthplace. The idea was metaphysical as well as physical; the hidden interpretation embracing Gods or Souls, in the shape of Atoms, as the causes of all the effects produced on Earth by the secretions from the divine bodies.962 No Ancient Philosopher, not even the Jewish Kabalists, ever dissociated Spirit from Matter, or Matter from Spirit. Everything originated in the One, and, proceeding from the One, must finally return to the One.

Atoms and Souls were synonymous in the language of the Initiates. The doctrine of “whirling Souls,” Gilgoolem, in which so many learned Jews have believed,964 had no other meaning esoterically. The [pg 621]learned Jewish Initiates never meant Palestine alone by the Promised Land, but they meant the same Nirvâna as do the learned Buddhist and Brahman—the bosom of the Eternal One, symbolized by that of Abraham, and by Palestine as its substitute on Earth.

Surely no educated Jew ever believed this allegory in its literal sense, that the bodies of Jews contain within them a principle of Soul which cannot rest, if the bodies are deposited in a foreign land, until, by a process called the “whirling of the Soul” the immortal particle reaches once more the sacred soil of the “Promised Land.”965 The meaning of this is evident to an Occultist. The process was supposed to be accomplished by a kind of metempsychosis, the psychic spark being conveyed through bird, beast, fish, and the most minute insect.966 The allegory relates to the Atoms of the body, each of which has to pass through every form, before all reach the final state, which is the first starting-point of the departure of every Atom—its primitive Laya state. But the primitive meaning of Gilgoolem, or the “Revolution of Souls,” was the idea of the reïncarnating Souls or Egos. “All the Souls go into the Gilgoolah,” into a cyclic or revolving process; i.e., they all proceed on the cyclic path of re-births. Some Kabalists interpret this doctrine to mean only a kind of purgatory for the souls of the wicked. But this is not so.

The passage of the Soul-Atom “through the seven Planetary Chambers” had the same metaphysical and physical meaning. It had the latter when it was said to dissolve into Ether. Even Epicurus, the model Atheist and Materialist, knew so much and believed so much in the ancient Wisdom, that he taught that the Soul—entirely distinct from immortal Spirit, when the former is enshrined latent in it, as it is in every atomic speck—was composed of a fine, tender essence, formed from the smoothest, roundest, and finest atoms.967

And this shows that the ancient Initiates, who were followed more or less closely by all profane Antiquity, meant by the term Atom, a Soul, a Genius or Angel, the first-born of the ever-concealed Cause of all causes; and in this sense their teachings become comprehensible. They asserted, as do their successors, the existence of Gods and Genii, Angels or Demons, not outside, nor independent of, the Universal Plenum, but within it. Only this Plenum, during the life-cycles, is infinite. They admitted and taught a good deal of that which modern Science now teaches—namely, the existence of a primordial World-Stuff [pg 622]or Cosmic Substance, eternally homogeneous, except during its periodic existence; then, universally diffused throughout infinite Space, it differentiates, and gradually forms sidereal bodies from itself. They taught the revolution of the Heavens, the Earth’s rotation, the Heliocentric System, and the Atomic Vortices—Atoms being in reality Souls and Intelligences. These “Atomists” were spiritual, most transcendental, and philosophical Pantheists. It is not they who would have ever conceived or dreamed that monstrous contrasted progeny, the nightmare of our modern civilized race: inanimate material and self-guiding Atoms, on the one hand, and an extra-cosmic God on the other.

It may be useful to show what the Monad was, and what its origin, in the teachings of the old Initiates.

Modern exact Science, as soon as it began to grow out of its teens, perceived the great, and to it hitherto esoteric, axiom, that nothing, whether in the spiritual, psychic, or physical realm of Being, could come into existence out of nothing. There is no cause in the manifested Universe without its adequate effects, whether in Space or Time; nor can there be an effect without its primal cause, which itself owes its existence to a still higher one—the final and absolute Cause having to remain to man for ever an incomprehensible Causeless Cause. But even this is no solution, and must be viewed, if at all, from the highest philosophical and metaphysical standpoints, otherwise the problem had better be left unapproached. It is an abstraction, on the verge of which human reason—however trained in metaphysical subtleties—trembles, threatening to collapse. This may be demonstrated to any European, who would undertake to solve the problem of existence, by the articles of faith of the true Vedântin for instance. Let him read and study the sublime teachings of Shankarâchârya, on the subject of Soul and Spirit, and the reader will realize what is now said.968

While the Christian is taught that the human Soul is a breath of God, being created by him for sempiternal existence, having a beginning, but no end—and therefore never to be called eternal—the Occult Teaching says: Nothing is created, it is only transformed. Nothing can manifest itself in this Universe—from a globe down to a vague, rapid thought—that was not in the Universe already; everything on the subjective plane is an eternal is; as everything on the objective plane is an ever-becoming—because all is transitory.

The Monad—a truly “indivisible thing,” as defined by Good, who did not give it the sense we now do—is here rendered as the Âtmâ, in conjunction with Buddhi and the higher Manas. This trinity is one and eternal, the latter being absorbed in the former at the termination of all conditioned and illusive life. The Monad, then, can be traced through the course of its pilgrimage and in its changes of transitory vehicles, only from the incipient stage of the manifested Universe. In Pralaya, the intermediate period between two Manvantaras, it loses its name, as it loses it when the real One Self of man merges into Brahman, in cases of high Samâdhi (the Turîya state), or final Nirvâna; in the words of Shankara:

For Buddhi, the Anandamaya Sheath, is but a mirror which reflects absolute bliss; and, moreover, that reflection itself is yet not free from ignorance, and is not the Supreme Spirit, since it is subject to conditions, is a spiritual modification of Prakriti, and is an effect; Âtmâ alone is the one real and eternal substratum of all, the Essence and Absolute Knowledge, the Kshetrajña. Now that the Revised Version of the Gospels has been published and the most glaring mistranslations of the old versions are corrected, one can understand better the words in 1 John v. 6: “It is the Spirit that beareth witness because the Spirit is truth.” The words that follow in the mistranslated version about the “three witnesses,” hitherto supposed to stand for “the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost,” show the real meaning of the writer very clearly, thus still more forcibly identifying his teaching in this respect with that of Shankarâchârya. For what can the sentence mean, “there are three that bear witness … the Spirit and the Water and the Blood”—if it bears no relation to, nor connection with, the more philosophical statement of the great Vedântin teacher, who, speaking of the Sheaths—the principles in man—Jîva, Vijñânamaya, etc., which are, in their physical manifestation, “Water and Blood” or Life, adds that Âtmâ, Spirit, alone is what remains after the subtraction of the Sheaths and that it is the Only Witness, or synthesized unity. The less spiritual and philosophical school, solely with an eye to a Trinity, made three witnesses out of “one,” thus connecting it more with Earth than with Heaven. It is called in Esoteric Philosophy the “One [pg 624]Witness,” and, while it rests in Devachan, is referred to as the “Three Witnesses to Karma.”

Âtmâ, our seventh principle, being identical with the Universal Spirit, and man being one with it in his essence, what is then the Monad proper? It is that homogeneous spark which radiates in millions of rays from the primeval Seven;—of which Seven something will be said further on. It is the emanating Spark from the uncreated Ray—a mystery. In the esoteric, and even exoteric Buddhism of the North, Âdi-Buddha (Chogi Dangpoi Sangye), the One Unknown, without beginning or end, identical with Parabrahman and Ain Suph, emits a bright Ray from its Darkness.

This is the Logos, the First, or Vajradhara, the Supreme Buddha, also called Dorjechang. As the Lord of all Mysteries he cannot manifest, but sends into the world of manifestation his Heart—the “Diamond Heart,” Vajrasattva or Dorjesempa. This is the Second Logos of Creation, from whom emanate the seven—in the exoteric blind the five—Dhyâni-Buddhas, called the Anupâdaka, the “Parentless.” These Buddhas are the primeval Monads from the World of Incorporeal Being, the Arûpa World, wherein the Intelligences (on that plane only) have neither shape nor name, in the exoteric system, but have their distinct seven names in the Esoteric Philosophy. These Dhyâni-Buddhas emanate, or create from themselves, by virtue of Dhyâna, celestial Selves—the super-human Bodhisattvas. These, incarnating at the beginning of every human cycle on Earth as mortal men, become occasionally, owing to their personal merit, Bodhisattvas among the Sons of Humanity, after which they may reäppear as Mânushi, or Human, Buddhas. The Anupâdaka, or Dhyâni-Buddhas, are thus identical with the Brâhmanical Mânasaputra, Mind-born Sons—whether of Brahmâ, or of either of the other two Trimûrtian Hypostases; they are identical also with the Rishis and Prajâpatis. Thus, a passage is found in Anugîtâ, which, read esoterically, shows plainly, though under another imagery, the same idea and system. It says:

Evidently then, these Brâhmanas are identical with the terrestrial Bodhisattvas of the heavenly Dhyâni-Buddhas. Both, as primordial, intelligent “Elements,” become the Creators or the Emanators of the Monads destined to become human in that cycle; after which they evolve themselves, or, so to say, expand into their own Selves as Bodhisattvas or Brâhmanas, in heaven and earth, to become at last simple men. “The creators of the world are born here, on earth again and again”—truly. In the Northern Buddhist system, or the popular exoteric religion, it is taught that every Buddha, while preaching the Good Law on Earth, manifests himself simultaneously in three Worlds: in the Formless World as a Dhyâni-Buddha, in the World of Forms as a Bodhisattva, and in the World of Desire, the lowest or our World, as a man. Esoterically the teaching differs. The divine, purely Âdi-Buddhic Monad manifests as the universal Buddhi, the Mahâ-Buddhi or Mahat, in Hindû philosophies, the spiritual, omniscient and omnipotent Root of divine Intelligence, the highest Anima Mundi or the Logos. This descends “like a flame spreading from the eternal Fire, immoveable, without increase or decrease, ever the same to the end” of the cycle of existence, and becomes Universal Life on the Mundane Plane. From this Plane of conscious Life shoot out, like seven fiery tongues, the Sons of Light, the Logoi of Life; then the Dhyâni-Buddhas of contemplation, the concrete forms of their formless Fathers, the Seven Sons of Light, still themselves, to whom maybe applied the Brâhmanical mystic phrase: “Thou art That”—Brahman. It is from these Dhyâni-Buddhas that emanate their Chhâyâs or Shadows, the Bodhisattvas of the celestial realms, the prototypes of the super-terrestrial Bodhisattvas, and of the terrestrial Buddhas, and finally of men. The Seven Sons of Light are also called Stars.

The star under which a human Entity is born, says the Occult Teaching, will remain for ever its star, throughout the whole cycle of its incarnations in one Manvantara. But this is not his astrological star. The latter is concerned and connected with the Personality; the former with the Individuality. The Angel of that Star, or the Dhyâni-Buddha connected with it, will be either the guiding, or simply the presiding, Angel, so to say, in every new rebirth of the Monad, which is part of his own essence, though his vehicle, man, may remain for ever ignorant of this fact. The Adepts have each their Dhyâni-Buddha, their elder “Twin-Soul,” and they know it, calling it “Father-Soul,” and “Father-Fire.” It is only at the last and supreme Initiation, however, when placed face to face with the bright “Image” that they learn to recognize it. How much did Bulwer Lytton know of this mystic fact, when describing, in one of his highest inspirational moods, Zanoni face to face with his Augoeides?

The Logos, or both the unmanifested and the manifested Word, is called by the Hindûs, Îshvara, the Lord, though the Occultists give it another name. Îshvara, say the Vedântins, is the highest consciousness in Nature. “This highest consciousness,” answer the Occultists, “is only a synthetic unit in the World of the manifested Logos—or on the plane of illusion; for it is the sum total of Dhyân Chohanic consciousness.” “O wise man, remove the conception that Not-Spirit is Spirit”—says Shankarâchârya. Âtmâ is Not-Spirit in its final Parabrahmic state; Îshvara, or Logos, is Spirit; or, as Occultism explains, it is a compound unity of manifested living Spirits, the parent-source and nursery of all the mundane and terrestrial Monads, plus their divine Reflection, which emanate from, and return into, the Logos, each in the culmination of its time. There are seven chief Groups of such Dhyân Chohans, which groups will be found and recognized in every religion, for they are the primeval Seven Rays. Humanity, Occultism teaches us, is divided into seven distinct Groups, with their sub-divisions, mental, spiritual, and physical. Hence there are seven chief planets, the spheres of the indwelling seven Spirits, under each of which is born one of the human Groups which is guided and influenced thereby. There are only seven planets specially connected with Earth, and twelve houses, but the possible combinations of their aspects are countless. As each planet can stand to each of the others in twelve different aspects, their combinations must be almost infinite; as infinite, in fact, as the spiritual, psychic, mental, and physical [pg 627]capacities in the numberless varieties of the genus homo, each of which varieties is born under one of the seven planets and one of the said countless planetary combinations.971

The Monad, then, viewed as One, is above the seventh principle in Kosmos and man; and as a Triad, it is the direct radiant progeny of the said compound Unit, not the Breath of “God,” as that Unit is called, nor creating out of nihil; for such an idea is quite unphilosophical, and degrades Deity, dragging It down to a finite, attributive condition. As well expressed by the translator of the Crest-Jewel of Wisdom—though Îshvara is “God.”

The “Triads” born under the same Parent-Planet, or rather the Radiations of one and the same Planetary Spirit or Dhyâni-Buddha are, in all their after lives and rebirths, sister, or “twin” souls, on this Earth. The idea is the same as that of the Christian Trinity, the “Three in One,” only it is still more metaphysical: the Universal “Over-Spirit,” manifesting on the two higher planes, those of Buddhi and Mahat. These are the three Hypostases, metaphysical, but never personal.

This was known to every high Initiate in every age and in every country: “I and my Father are one,” said Jesus.973 When he is made to say, elsewhere: “I ascend to my Father and your Father,”974 it meant that which has just been stated. The identity, and at the same time the illusive differentiation of the Angel-Monad and the Human-Monad is shown in the sentences: “My Father is greater than I”;975 “Glorify your Father which is in Heaven”;976 “Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (not our Father).977 So [pg 628]again Paul asks: “Know ye not ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?”978 All this was simply meant to show that the group of disciples and followers attracted to him belonged to the same Dhyâni-Buddha, Star, or Father, and that this again belonged to the same planetary realm and division as he did. It is the knowledge of this Occult Doctrine that found expression in the review of The Idyll of the White Lotus, when T. Subba Row wrote:

It is then the Seven Sons of Light,—called after their planets and often identified with them by the rabble, namely, Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Venus, and presumably the Sun and Moon, for the modern critic, who goes no deeper than the surface of old religions980—which are, according to the Occult Teachings, our heavenly Parents, or synthetically our “Father.” Hence, as already remarked, Polytheism is really more philosophical and correct, as to fact and Nature, than is anthropomorphic Monotheism. Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus, the four exoteric planets, and the three others, which must remain unnamed, were the heavenly bodies in direct astral and psychic communication, morally and physically, with the Earth, its Guides, and Watchers; the visible orbs furnishing our Humanity with its outward and inward characteristics, and their Regents or Rectors with our [pg 629]Monads and spiritual faculties. In order to avoid creating new misconceptions, let it be stated that among the three Secret Orbs, or Star-Angels, neither Uranus nor Neptune were included; not only because they were unknown under these names to the ancient Sages, but because they, like all other planets, however many there may be, are the Gods and Guardians of other septenary Chains of Globes within our System.

Nor do the two great planets last discovered depend entirely on the Sun, as do the rest of the planets. Otherwise, how can we explain the fact that Uranus receives 1/390th part of the light received by our Earth, while Neptune receives only 1/900th part; and that their satellites show a peculiarity of inverse rotation found in no other planets of the Solar System? At any rate, what we say applies to Uranus, though the fact has again been disputed recently.

This subject will, of course, be considered as a mere vagary, by all those who confuse the universal order of Being with their own systems of classification. Here, however, simple facts from Occult Teachings are stated, to be either accepted or rejected, as the case may be. There are details which, on account of their great metaphysical abstraction, cannot be entered upon. Hence, we merely state that only seven of our planets are as intimately related to our Globe, as the Sun is to all the bodies subject to him in his System. Of these bodies the poor little number of primary and secondary planets known to Astronomy, looks wretched enough, in truth.981 Therefore, it stands to reason that there are a great number of planets, small and large, that have not been discovered yet, but of the existence of which ancient Astronomers—all of them initiated Adepts—must certainly have been aware. But, as the relation of these to the Gods was sacred, it had to remain arcane, as did also the names of various other planets and stars.

Besides this, even the Roman Catholic Theology speaks of “seventy planets that preside over the destinies of the nations of this globe;” and, save the erroneous application, there is more truth in this tradition than in exact modern Astronomy. The seventy planets are connected [pg 630]with the seventy elders of the people of Israel,982 and the Regents of these planets are meant, not the orbs themselves; the word seventy is a play and a blind upon the 7 × 7 of the subdivisions. Each people and nation, as we have already said, has its direct Watcher, Guardian and Father in Heaven—a Planetary Spirit. We are willing to leave their own national God, Jehovah, to the descendants of Israel, the worshippers of Sabaoth or Saturn; for, indeed, the Monads of the people chosen by him are his own, and the Bible has never made any secret of it. Only the text of the Protestant English Bible is, as usual, in disagreement with those of the Septuagint and the Vulgate. Thus, while in the former we read:

In the Septuagint the text reads “according to the number of the Angels,” Planet-Angels, a version more concordant with truth and fact. Moreover, all the texts agree that “the Lord’s [Jehovah’s] portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance”;984 and this settles the question. The “Lord” Jehovah took Israel for his portion; what have other nations to do with that particular national Deity? Let then, the “Angel Gabriel” watch over Iran and “Mikael-Jehovah” over the Hebrews. These are not the Gods of other nations, and it is difficult to see why Christians should have selected a God against whose commandments Jesus was the first to rise in rebellion.

The planetary origin of the Monad, or Soul, and of its faculties was taught by the Gnostics. On its way to the Earth, as on its way back from the Earth, each soul born in, and from, the “Boundless Light,”985 had to pass through the seven planetary regions either way. The pure Dhyâni and Devas of the oldest religions had become, in course of time, with the Zoroastrians, the Seven Devs, the ministers of Ahriman, “each chained to his planet”;986 with the Brâhmans, the Asuras and some of the Rishis—good, bad and indifferent; among the Egyptian Gnostics it was Thoth, or Hermes, who was the chief of the Seven [pg 631]whose names are given by Origen as Adonai, genius of the Sun; Tao, of the Moon; Eloi, of Jupiter; Sabaoth, of Mars; Orai, of Venus; Astaphai, of Mercury; and Ildabaoth (Jehovah), of Saturn. Finally, the Pistis-Sophia, which the greatest modern authority on exoteric Gnostic beliefs, the late Mr. C. W. King, refers to as “that precious monument of Gnosticism”—this old document echoes the archaic belief of the ages, while distorting it to suit sectarian purposes. The Astral Rulers of the Spheres, the planets, create the Monads, or Souls, from their own substance out of “the tears of their eyes, and the sweat of their torments,” endowing the Monads with a spark of their substance which is the Divine Light. It will be shown in Volume II why these “Lords of the Zodiac and Spheres” have been transformed by sectarian Theology into the Rebellious Angels of the Christians, who took them from the Seven Devs of the Magi, without understanding the significance of the allegory.987

As usual, that which is, and was from its beginning, divine, pure, and spiritual in its earliest unity, became—by reason of its differentiation through the distorted prism of man’s conceptions—human and impure, as reflecting man’s own sinful nature. Thus, in time, the planet Saturn became reviled by the worshippers of other Gods. The nations born under Saturn—the Jewish, for instance, with whom he became Jehovah, after being considered as a son of Saturn, or Ilda-Baoth, by the Ophites, and in the Book of Jasher—were eternally fighting with those born under Jupiter, Mercury, or any other planet, except Saturn-Jehovah; genealogies and prophecies notwithstanding, Jesus the Initiate (or Jehoshua)—the type from whom the “historical” Jesus was copied—was not of pure Jewish blood, and thus recognized no Jehovah; nor did he worship any planetary God beside his own “Father,” whom he knew, and with whom he communed, as every high Initiate does, “Spirit to Spirit and Soul to Soul.” This can hardly be taken exception to, unless the critic explains to every one’s satisfaction the strange sentences put into the mouth of Jesus during his disputes with the Pharisees by the author of the Fourth Gospel:

This “Father” of the Pharisees was Jehovah, for he was identical with Cain, Saturn, Vulcan, etc.—the planet under which they were born, and the God whom they worshipped. Evidently there must be an Occult meaning sought in these words and admonitions, however mistranslated, since they are pronounced by one who threatened with hell-fire anyone who says to his brother simply Raca, fool.990 And evidently, again, the planets are not merely spheres, twinkling in Space, and made to shine for no purpose, but they are the domains of various Beings with whom the uninitiated are so far unacquainted, but who have, nevertheless, a mysterious, unbroken, and powerful connection with men and globes. Every heavenly body is the temple of a God, and these Gods themselves are the temples of God, the Unknown “Not Spirit.” There is nothing profane in the Universe. All Nature is a consecrated place, as Young says:

Thus can all exoteric religions be shown to be the falsified copies of the Esoteric Teaching. It is the priesthood which has to be held responsible for the reaction of our day in favour of Materialism. It is by worshipping and enforcing on the masses the worship of the shells of pagan ideals—personified for purposes of allegory—that the latest exoteric religion has made of Western lands a Pandemonium, in which the higher classes worship the golden calf, and the lower and ignorant masses are made to worship an idol with feet of clay.

Section XI. Ancient Thought in Modern Dress.

Modern Science is Ancient Thought distorted, and no more. We have seen, however, what intuitional Scientists think, and are busy about; and now the reader shall be given a few more proofs of the fact that more than one F.R.S. is unconsciously approaching the derided Secret Sciences.

With regard to Cosmogony and primeval matter, modern speculations are undeniably ancient thought, “improved” by contradictory theories of recent origin. The whole foundation belongs to Grecian and Indian Archaic Astronomy and Physics, in those days called always Philosophy. In all the Âryan and Greek speculations, we meet with the conception of an all-pervading, unorganized, and homogeneous Matter, or Chaos, re-named by modern Scientists “nebular condition of the world-stuff.” What Anaxagoras called Chaos in his Homoiomeria is now called “primitive fluid” by Sir William Thomson. The Hindû and Greek Atomists—Kanâda, Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, etc.—are now reflected, as in a clear mirror, in the supporters of the Atomic Theory of our modern days, beginning with Leibnitz’s Monads, and ending with the Vortical Atoms of Sir William Thomson.991 True, the corpuscular theory of old is rejected, and the undulatory theory has taken its place. But the question is, whether the latter is so firmly established as not to be liable to be dethroned like its predecessor? Light, from its metaphysical aspect, has been fully treated in Isis Unveiled:

This is the Ether, as just explained in the views of Metcalfe, repeated by Dr. Richardson, save for the submission of the former to some details of the modern undulatory theory. We do not say that we deny the theory; we assert only that it needs completion and reärrangement. But the Occultists are by no means the only heretics in this respect; for Mr. Robert Hunt, F.R.S. finds that:

To this remark of Sir David Brewster—“forced to reason as if light was material”—there is a good deal to reply. Light, in one sense, is [pg 635]certainly as material as is electricity itself. And if electricity is not material, if it is only a “mode of motion,” how is it that it can be stored up in Faure’s accumulators? Helmholtz says that electricity must be as atomic as matter; and Mr. W. Crookes, F.R.S., supported the view in his address at Birmingham, in 1886, to the Chemical Section of the British Association, of which he was President. This is what Helmholtz says:

Here we have to repeat that which was already said in Section VIII, that there is but one science that can henceforth direct modern research into the one path which will lead to the discovery of the whole, hitherto Occult, truth, and it is the youngest of all—Chemistry, as it now stands reformed. There is no other, not excluding Astronomy, that can so unerringly guide scientific intuition, as can Chemistry. Two proofs of this are to be found in the world of Science—two great Chemists, each among the greatest in his own country, namely, Mr. Crookes and the late Professor Butlerof: the one is a thorough believer in abnormal phenomena; the other was as fervid a Spiritualist, as he was great in the natural sciences. It becomes evident that, while pondering over the ultimate divisibility of Matter, and in the hitherto fruitless chase after the element of negative atomic weight, the scientifically trained mind of the Chemist must feel irresistibly drawn towards those ever-shrouded worlds, to that mysterious Beyond, whose measureless depths seem to close against the approach of the too materialistic hand that would fain draw aside its veil. “It is the unknown and the ever-unknowable,” warns the Monist-Agnostic. “Not so,” answers the persevering Chemist. “We are on the track and we are not daunted, and fain would we enter the mysterious region which ignorance tickets unknown.”

In his Presidential Address at Birmingham Mr. Crookes said:

Two or three sentences, at the very close of his lecture on the Genesis of the Elements, showed the eminent Scientist to be on the royal road [pg 636]to the greatest discoveries. He has been for some time overshadowing “the original protyle,” and he has come to the conclusion that “he who grasps the Key will be permitted to unlock some of the deepest mysteries of creation.” Protyle, as the great Chemist explains:

The knowledge of Roger Bacon did not come to this wonderful old magician999 by inspiration, but because he studied ancient works on Magic and Alchemy, and had a key to the real meaning of their language. But see what Mr. Crookes says of Protyle, next neighbour to the unconscious Mûlaprakriti of the Occultists:

With every respect due to the great knowledge of the lecturer, the Occultist would put it otherwise. He would say that no Atom is ever “created,” for the Atoms are eternal within the bosom of the One Atom—“the Atom of Atoms”—viewed during Manvantara as the Jagad-Yoni, the material causative womb of the World. Pradhâna, unmodified Matter—that which is the first form of Prakriti, or material, visible, [pg 637]as well as invisible Nature—and Purusha, Spirit, are eternally one; and they are Nirupâdhi, without adventitious qualities or attributes, only during Pralaya, and when beyond any of the planes of consciousness of existence. The Atom, as known to modern science, is inseparable from Purusha, which is Spirit, but is now called “energy” in Science. The Protyle Atom has not been comminuted or subtilized: it has simply passed into that plane, which is no plane, but the eternal state of everything beyond the planes of illusion. Both Purusha and Pradhâna are immutable and unconsumable, or Aparinâmin and Avyaya, in eternity; and both may be referred to during the Mâyâvic periods as Vyaya and Parinâmin, or that which can expand, pass away and disappear, and which is “modifiable.” In this sense Purusha, must, of course, be held distinct in our conceptions from Parabrahman. Nevertheless that, which is called “energy” or “force” in Science, and which has been explained as a dual force by Metcalfe, is never, in fact, and cannot be, energy alone; for it is the Substance of the World, its Soul, the All-permeant, Sarvaga, in conjunction with Kâla, Time. The three are the trinity in one, during Manvantara, the all-potential Unity, which acts as three distinct things on Mâyâ, the plane of illusion. In the Orphic philosophy of ancient Greece they were called Phanes, Chaos, and Chronos—the triad of the Occult Philosophers of that period.

But see how closely Mr. Crookes brushes the “Unknowable,” and what potentialities there are for the acceptance of Occult truths in his discoveries. He continues, speaking of the evolution of Atoms:

This justifies several assertions in the Occult works.

Firstly, that neither the stars nor the Sun can be said to be constituted of those terrestrial elements with which the Chemist is familiar, though they are all present in the Sun’s outward robes—as well as a host more of elements so far unknown to Science.

Secondly, that our globe has its own special laboratory on the far-away outskirts of its atmosphere, crossing which, every Atom and molecule changes and differentiates from its primordial nature.

And thirdly, that though no element present on our Earth could ever possibly be found wanting in the Sun, there are many others there which have either not reached, or not as yet been discovered on our globe.

Mr. Crookes speaks of helium, an element of still lower atomic weight than hydrogen, an element purely hypothetical as far as our earth is concerned, though existing in abundance in the chromosphere of the Sun. Occult Science adds that not one of the elements regarded as such by Chemistry really deserves the name.

Again we find Mr. Crookes speaking with approbation of

Hitherto, Alchemy alone, within the historical period, and in the so-called civilized countries, has succeeded in obtaining a real element, or a particle of homogeneous Matter, the Mysterium Magnum of Paracelsus. But then that was before Lord Bacon’s day.1004

This is, in strictly scientific, but beautiful language, the description of the evolution of the differentiated Universe in the Secret Teachings. The learned gentleman closes his address in words, every sentence of which is like a flash of light from beyond the dark veil of materiality, hitherto thrown upon the exact sciences, and is a step forward towards the Sanctum Sanctorum of the Occult. Thus he says:

Thus inductive Science, in its branches of Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry, while advancing timidly towards the conquest of Nature’s secrets in her final effects on our terrestrial plane, recedes to the days of Anaxagoras and the Chaldees in its discoveries of (a) the origin of our phenomenal world, and (b) the modes of formation of the bodies that compose the Universe. And having, for their cosmogonical hypotheses to turn back to the beliefs of the earliest philosophers, and the systems of the latter—systems that were all based on the teachings of a universal Secret Doctrine with regard to primeval Matter, with its properties, functions, and laws—have we not the right to hope that the day is not far off when Science will show a better appreciation of the Wisdom of the Ancients than it has hitherto done?

No doubt Occult Philosophy could learn a good deal from exact Modern Science; but the latter, on the other hand, might profit by ancient learning in more than one way, and chiefly in Cosmogony. It might learn, for instance, the mystical signification, alchemical and transcendental, of the many imponderable substances that fill interplanetary space, and which, interpenetrating each, are the direct cause, at the lower end, of the production of natural phenomena manifesting through so-called vibration. The knowledge of the real, not the hypothetical, nature of Ether, or rather of the Âkâsha, and other mysteries, in short, can alone lead to the knowledge of Forces. It is that Substance against which the Materialistic school of the Physicists rebels with such fury, especially in France,1011 and which exact Science has to advocate notwithstanding. They cannot make away with it without incurring the risk of pulling down the pillars of the Temple of Science, like a modern Samson, and of getting buried under its roof.

The theories built upon the rejection of Force, outside and independent of Matter pure and simple, have all been shown to be fallacious. They do not, and cannot, cover the ground, and many of the scientific data are thus proved to be unscientific. “Ether produced Sound” is said in the Purânas, and the statement is laughed at. Sound is the result of the vibrations of the air, we are corrected. And what is air? Could it exist if there were no etheric medium in Space to buoy up its molecules? The case stands simply thus. Materialism cannot admit [pg 642]the existence of anything outside Matter, because with the acceptance of an imponderable Force—the source and head of all the physical Forces—other intelligent Forces would have to be virtually admitted, and that would lead Science very far. For it would have to accept as a sequel the presence in Man of a still more spiritual power—entirely independent, for once, of any kind of Matter about which Physicists know anything. Hence, apart from a hypothetical Ether of Space and gross physical bodies, the whole sidereal and unseen Space is, in the sight of Materialists, one boundless void in Nature—blind, unintelligent, useless.

And now the next question is: What is that Cosmic Substance, and how far can one go in suspecting its nature or in wrenching from it its secrets, thus feeling justified in giving it a name? How far, especially, has Modern Science gone in the direction of those secrets, and what is it doing to solve them? The latest hobby of Science, the Nebular Theory, may afford us some answer to this question. Let us then examine the credentials of this Nebular Theory.