Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching
Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching
Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching
OCCULT TEACHING
BY
A.P. SINNETT
1919
Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching by A. P. Sinnett.
©GlobalGrey 2018
globalgreyebooks.com
CONTENTS
Preface
This World's Place In The Universe
Future Life And Lives
Religion Under Repair
Religion Under Repair: A Reply To Professor Lindsay
The Occultism In Tennyson's Poetry
Creeds More Or Less Credible
Imprisoned In The Five Senses
Our Visits To This World
The Masters And Their Methods Of Instruction
Expanded Theosophical Knowledge
The Pyramids And Stonehenge
Theosophical Teachings Liable To Be Misunderstood
The Super-Physical Laws Of Nature
The Higher Occultism
The Objects Of The Theosophical Society
The Borderland Of Science
Archaeology: Relics Of Antiquity
Cataclysms And Earthquakes
Poetry And Theosophy
Note
1
PREFACE
Though crude and incomplete, this preliminary sketch of occult science and
of the agency through which, though unknown to the multitude, the
purpose of creation was being worked out on the physical plane, thrilled the
readers of the message all over the civilized world to an extent which gave
rise to an organization, the Theosophical Society, which now covers Great
Britain, Europe generally, and the United States of America with
innumerable branches . Fresh teaching and information relating to the great
subjects enumerated above has meanwhile been flowing into my hands, and
much has been embodied in my book, The Growth of the Soul; also, since
the publication of that book, in a large number of articles in reviews,
pamphlets, and "Transactions" of the London Lodge of the Theosophical
Society over which I preside. The present volume collects these scattered
contributions to our super-physical knowledge, still growing and expanding
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in its scope and value. At some later date the fundamental principles laid
down in the earlier books, the illuminating interpretation of these in the
essays now reproduced and further light on mysteries previously obscure,
may constitute something resembling a complete spiritual science. But
students need not wait for this result before assimilating the knowledge
already acquired. During this life we are each of us "imprisoned in the five
senses," and, though thought reaches out far beyond them, its range is
limited by the capacity of the physical brain. In time that capacity will
expand. Ideas easily grasped by the man of modern culture are beyond the
comprehension of the savage. The improved intellectual mechanism of
future generations will no doubt deal freely with conceptions which present
culture cannot appreciate. Spiritual science, however, is an infinitude, and
no attempt to interpret it in physical plane language will ever be more than
suggestive and alluring.
But it is equally true that human faculty on this plane of life will develop as
time goes on under the influence of effort to expand its range.
Unconsciously in most cases students of the spiritual science within our
reach will do more than profit by understanding it so far. They will have
established a claim on Nature for improved vehicles of consciousness in later
lives, and will have contributed to raise the level of human understanding. I
am sure the experience of many theosophists will show that within the
limits of the current life ideas can now be easily handled in thought, which
could not have been held in the mind during earlier periods of study. These
may still defeat the resources of physical plane speech, but they forecast
intellectual conditions that will ultimately outrun those resources. That state
of things should be a stimulus to theosophical study in whatever direction it
may tend, and few of the essays in this volume will be found destitute of
hints that will attract thought into some new channel of spiritual, or, at
least, of super-physical enlightenment.
Religious emotion was, till recently, at war with science especially indignant
with astronomy for disturbing primitive conceptions as to the way this
world was first opened for business. But a bold application of the principle
that biblical language need not be taken at the foot of the letter gradually
enlarged its interior meaning until the rotundity and annual revolution of the
earth were fitted in to the story told in Genesis. Evolution as accounting for
the human form then came within sight of a gloomy toleration if Modernists
insisted on it. That, however, which religious emotion has not yet quite
realized is the sublime truth that, the more we are enabled to penetrate the
deep mysteries of Nature, the more profoundly reverent we become in
contemplating the impenetrable infinitudes of that Divine Power which
operates alike in guiding the growth of protoplasm and the majestic
mechanism of the Solar System. Critics who preferred when Darwin first
shattered the paraphernalia of medieval theology, like a bull in a china shop
to remain on the side of the Angels, made the immense mistake of
supposing that the Angels (regarded as agents of Divinity) would be
disestablished if we began to approach an understanding of the way they
did their work. A view growing familiar with some students of Nature
involves the idea that even natural forces are the expression of conscious
will on some exalted levels of spiritual potency; that the so-called "laws" of
Nature are definite Divine enactments not merely blind attributes of matter.
And we can hardly begin to form a rational conception of the world's
development under Divine control without including this idea in our
thinking.
The reconciliation of religion and science has been advancing by leaps and
bounds of late, and "Seven Men of Science," all of the foremost rank,
recently published a collection of addresses frankly declaring their belief in
God, as a fundamental idea underlying scientific study. The record of the old
"Conflict" is now ancient history. But this result is not a conclusion. It is only
a beginning. The seven scientific leaders, quite in agreement as regards the
main proposition, may be groping in various directions in the search for a
5
definite mental picture of the God in whom they believe. Perhaps all would
admit that the reality does not lend itself to the formation of a mental
picture. Religion reconstructed on scientific principles must build up a
conception of Divinity by working from below upward. The earlier fashion
attempted to work from above downward. "In the beginning" certain things
happened, we were told by teachers who, quite reasonably in dealing with
young people, ignored the idea that Eternity has no beginning. But now that
embryology must be recognized as a method of creation when we talk
about the human form we feel the need of an embryology as applied to
planetary creation. And so we come to recognize the subtle, mysterious
laws of organic growth not as displacing the Divine creative Will,, but as the
agency by which it is fulfilled in physical manifestation.
So by degrees, with help available at the present day, for those especially
who realize that human consciousness can be reached by other channels of
perception besides the five senses, we reach the idea that Divine agency is
worked out through an enormously elaborate and magnificent hierarchy of
Spiritual Beings, beyond whom, in dazzling and (as yet) impenetrable
mystery, there exists an incomprehensibly sublime Power, of whom the Sun
may be thought of as the physical symbol.
In the mental search for God we may pause at this stage of the effort.
Human intelligence is more limited in its scope than early philosophers
imagined, but is quite limitless as regards its expectations. It presumes to
talk about the Divine power which accounts for the whole universe. Distant
stars, though to be counted by millions and mostly gigantic compared with
the star, or Sun, to which we belong, must come into the same creative
scheme as the sparrows in Kensington Gardens . The Sunday School teacher
can be content with nothing less than a God who is responsible for the Milky
Way as well as for the milky mothers of the field. And medieval painters
have even presented us with his portrait. In some foreign gallery I have seen
him included in a family group the Father with a long beard is in an armchair
with the Third Person of the Trinity as a pigeon perched on the back, and the
Son in a chair of somewhat lesser dignity beside him. Enlightened members
of the English Church would generally be shocked at this grossly
materialistic presentation of the Divine Mystery, forgetful of their own
6
declaration of belief that Christ ascended into Heaven and "sitteth on the
right hand of God, the Father Almighty." From The Fudge Family in Paris we
learn that a certain forcible expression, impossible in English, "doesn't
sound half so shocking in French," and on the same principle an idea merely
formulated in words that no one stops to invest with a meaning is not half
so shocking as the same idea depicted on canvas by means of oil colour.
In the days of the old "Conflict" those who dealt with it Draper and others
dwelt especially on the savage ferocity with which the early Church
endeavoured to stifle astronomical discovery. Faith, at that time, might have
been correctly described as "the faculty that enables, us to believe what we
know to be untrue." It was endangered by the astronomical emphasis of the
untruthfulness in question, but in the long run, as astronomy held the field,
faith fell into line with discovery, and in spite of ecclesiastical opposition
became ennobled in character. The God of a Semitic tribe might with an
effort of imagination be fitted into an armchair. The God of a Solar System,
including a central Sun many thousand times bigger than the Earth and the
orbit of Neptune thousands of million miles in diameter was in a different
order of magnitude. And if we attempt to strain imagination by looking
upward in thought at that inconceivable splendour, we may realize the
futility of the effort by attempting to gaze directly with open eyes on a fine
day at the physical Sun. Human sight will not tolerate the unveiled light.
Human understanding will not bring the God-idea, once cleared of
blundering theology, to a definite focus.
laws operative within that range hold good to infinitudes beyond. Almost all
the Heavenly bodies- -quite all if we merely except meteorites and some
comets— move in elliptical orbits more or less closely approximating to the
circular form. Plainly, it is much more probable that the Sun’s motion is in
conformity with this general principle, than that it is a blind rush in a straight
course, which would infallibly in the long run give rise to a cosmic
catastrophe. If the uniformities of Nature are maintained, the Sun must be
revolving in an orbit around some definite sidereal centre. Obviously such an
orbit must be so vast that any measurable arc will appear to be a straight
line.
our Sun cannot be the only one that revolves around Sirius. Directly that
idea is appreciated, we realize that Sirius must be the central sun of a vast
system, in which such suns as ours must be, to Sirius, what the planets are
to our Sun.
That this is so, can only be ascertained definitely by those in touch with
sources of information not yet within general reach, but at all events,
meanwhile, as a hypothesis, the statement is clearly in harmony with the
uniformities of Nature. To regard our Solar System and all the others
presumably represented by the millions of stars in the sky, as scattered at
random about space would be insulting to Supreme Wisdom and
Omnipotence. The conception could only be acceptable to thinkers at the
kindergarten stage. Certainly up to the middle of the last century grown and
grave men did discuss the question whether this was the only inhabited
world in the Universe, but increasing intelligence has rendered us at
once wiser and more modest than when a doubt on that subject was
possible. I need not go over the evidence that makes an important group of
astronomers certain that Mars (to confine our attention for a moment to
our own Solar System) is the abode of life not entirely unlike our own. The
other planets may not have climatic conditions like our own, but the
resources of Nature may easily provide vehicles of life appropriate to any
conditions of temperature; while those of us who know something more
about life, consciousness and spiritual growth than mere surgery would
suggest, regard with disdain the idea that any worlds —whether around our
sun or in the infinitudes of space—can be mere inanimate masses of matter
destitute of the loftier purposes that life implies.
Just for the present all information relating to the Sirian Cosmos must
remain hypothetical until the astronomy of the future overtakes the
forecast, but its value as illuminating reverent imagination reaching in the
direction of Divinity is very great. It helps us to realize that in all such upward
reaching we must blend with the idea of which we are in search, the idea of
infinity. In the search within the limits of our own Solar System we are
hopelessly dazzled long before we touch those limits. But the conception of
the Sirian Cosmos shows us that incomprehensible as the Solar Divinity may
be— “That” (our miserable word “he” is degrading in such use) can only be
9
Science, growing more and more intimately welded with spiritual aspiration
as human intelligence expands, grants us some mental illumination as we
seek to penetrate, so far as that may be possible, the mysteries of the Divine
Hierarchy. Certainly, if we turn our attention from the appalling magnitudes
of astronomy to the phenomena of the infinitely little, the measurements
we have to deal with are equally bewildering. Physicists tell us that a cubic
centimetre of water contains thirty trillions of molecules. That if a glass
globe four inches in diameter were absolutely empty and air molecules
admitted at the rate of a hundred millions a second 50,000 years would
elapse before the globe was full. Such figures are more amusing than
instructive, but they may help us, to some extent, in our attempt to
formulate a conception of the Divine Hierarchy. The attributes of the
physical molecules—the laws they obey, are obviously as much an
expression of Divine Will as the forces that regulate the march of solar
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systems in the Sirian Cosmos. Within our Solar System the Divine Hierarchy
extends downward, as definitely as, beyond it, it extends upward; and
though, as we attempt to understand it in its lower levels, we shall soon find
mental difficulties almost as insuperable as those attending efforts in the
other direction, we can, with help from certain sources of information,
arrive at some intelligible conclusions.
Astronomy may still help us to some extent. The conditions that must
attend life in the various planets of our system must obviously differ very
widely. Temperature may vary from below that of ice to above that of
steam. Vehicles of consciousness—bodies of whatever matter may be
suitable, must vary accordingly. We may safely assume that while some of
the fundamental laws of Nature may hold good throughout the system,
others, for example all appertaining to organic growth, may need local
modification. Each world must be controlled, even as regards its physical
manifestation, by appropriate Divine Agency. And very little progress
beyond primitive theology makes us sure that,—first of all as regards our
own world—there are teeming regions of life that lie beyond the cognition
of the physical senses. Talk therefore of our familiar planets should properly
relate to planetary schemes, embracing much more than the visible globes.
So we reach the conception that for each planetary scheme the Divine will
of the whole Solar System must transmit itself through an agency that is still
so Divine in its character as to dazzle our mental sight.
None the less a very important stage in our study of the Divine Hierarchy is
reached when we realize the principle of agency as working through it . The
mind leaps to the conclusion that this principle must be operative right
down to the subtle activities of Nature that we are in the habit of summing
up in the word “Evolution.” For the verification of this conjecture we must
obviously be dependent on information received from those sources of
superphysical knowledge above referred to, such information in turn being
only subject to the check imposed by our own critical faculties. Does it
appeal to our intelligence as essentially reasonable in its character ? Leaving
that question to be determined later, I will first endeavour to describe the
agency through which the purpose of the Divine Power presiding over the
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The first glimpses we get in this way, of the intricacy of the work carried out
by the hosts of Divine agents engaged in guiding the world’s growth,
prepare us to find that a distribution of function is carried out in that
wonderful realm of activity, so that while one great host is concerned with
the growth of consciousness, another is concentrated on the task of guiding
the growth of form—of carrying out the idea that, for want of a better
comprehension of the process, we call the principle of Evolution. And such
agency works again in its contact with matter through lower agency right
down to the manipulation of the molecule. The Divine Hierarchy is infinite
both ways; inconceivably exalted and inconceivably minute, but in the
direction of minutise still conscious and purposeful. Intelligence, with a
certain range of freedom within limits, guides not only the gradual
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improvement of the human form, pari passu with the progress of spiritual
growth, but the humbler development of form in the animal kingdom and
even variation in the colouring of plants and flowers. The agency concerned
with such work cannot be discerned by the physical senses, but finer senses
can already sometimes cognize its operation, though most of us are still too
young in evolution to have come into full possession of all the faculties
latent in human nature. ‘‘We are ancients of the earth and in the morning of
the times.”
So brief a sketch as this must be content in some directions with mere faint
hints. How do the Divine agents concerned, as declared above, with the
evolution of form translate their superphysical powers to the physical plane?
The answer has to do with what may be called the semi-intelligent
mechanism of Nature. The mere phrase is bewildering, but it deals with
certain aspects of Nature that science must concern itself with before
long. “Elemental Agency” cannot properly be regarded as belonging to the
Divine Hierarchy even in its lower levels, but it constitutes a vast subsidiary
evolution by itself; cosmic in its character: related to much more than the
interests of this world alone; beginning on levels commensurate with the
electron in magnitude and importance, rising to conditions in which definite
forms in certain fine orders of matter are identifiable by observers, with
adequately clairvoyant senses, as associated with specific functions in
Nature. Elemental constitute the link between will—human or Divine—and
physical manifestation. Obviously the subject is one of stupendous
magnitude. No fire could burn, no plant could grow, no human being could
live on the physical plane, and carry on all that business transacted within his
body of which he is wholly unconscious, without elemental agency. When
science comes to grapple with the intricacies of this so far hidden aspect of
Nature, it will look back to its present condition as one barely emerging
from the dark ages.
Thus vast and complicated is the agency by which Divine Will is fulfilled. But
we have to struggle as best we may with the idea of hierarchies within
hierarchies. The world is a theatre in which a stupendous drama is in process
of performance. The scenery and decorations are provided by Divine
agency, and the actors are responsible—if we push the metaphor to its
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extreme limits—for the parts they play. In other words, while Divine agency
invests them with their opportunity, their own free will is left to determine
the use they make of this. But they must not be allowed to wreck the whole
undertaking by too gross a misuse of that free will. .The drama is intended
to have a happy ending. So over and above or apart from the hierarchies
that provide the conditions Divine ordination provides for a governing
hierarchy that does not actually control the actors—put words into their
mouths, so to speak, or manage them like marionettes—but causes them to
feel disagreeable consequences from blundering; invests them with larger
consciousness as they willingly fall into line with the Divine idea. Of course
that governing hierarchy is merged in its loftier levels with the superior
agents of infinite Divinity, but on its less exalted levels is in close touch with
our own humanity. This thought leads up to what is perhaps the most
important idea of all that I have been endeavouring to suggest. Humanity
itself recruits the governing hierarchy. Its members on the first important
level above ordinary humanity have been, at some remote periods in the
past, human beings like (the best of) ourselves. We speak of them now,
those of us who have the privilege of more or less knowing them, as great
adepts, Masters of Wisdom, Brothers of the Great White Lodge, or by any
other phrases approximately appropriate. They are in normal periods equal
to the task—under Divine inspiration of which they, of course, are vividly
conscious—of carrying the government of the world in so far as it needs
adjustment or interference. They are our Allies in this ghastly abnormal
period in which humanity is confronted by an attack from such elevated
levels of spiritual potency that, great as their power undoubtedly is, they
can only for the moment resist the awful unseen foe inspiring our physical
plane enemies, whilst awaiting intervention, ultimately certain if it becomes
necessary, from lofty levels of Divine Power.
Will this view of the great current crisis seem, to some critics, at variance
with the main idea that this world, like all others, is governed by an infinite
Divine Hierarchy of quite limitless capacity and directing human evolution
from the realms of infinite Love ? The problem has been dealt with at some
14
length in articles for the Nineteenth Century, 1 and need only be referred to
now. Freewill, in one word, is the answer. The ultimate evolution of
individual humanity can only be accomplished by investing each unit with
the Divine attribute of freewill in a greater or less degree. Half-fledged
humanity of the kind around us in abundance is hardly conscious of the
extent to which it enjoys this attribute. It becomes more and more available
as spiritual evolution proceeds. By the hypothesis it may be exerted to fulfil
the purpose of Divine love, in so far as that may be discerned, or it may be
perverted to antagonize that purpose. Within the limits of our humanity the
perversion may not be carried to any extreme degree. But other humanities
have preceded our own and have reached exalted conditions in which free
will for good or evil was enormously expanded in its scope. In that way it has
come to pass that spiritual evil has assumed colossal proportions until at last
it has challenged Divine Power on very high levels. That is the challenge with
which we, on our humble level, are now contending. We feel sure of
ultimate success because the mighty spiritual powers of evil, at war with the
Divine idea of humanity (on this plane with ourselves, the Allied armies)
have had a definite origin that we can discern and have reached a definite
height of spiritual power. However exalted that power, it is finite. The Divine
Hierarchy is infinite. At whatever level Satanic power may confront it on
equal terms, Divine resources above that level are limitless. If exerted they
must subdue the finite power, and We have reason to feel sure that sooner
or later they will be exerted to avert the ruin of the world.
I have said that our Allies in this great struggle—the Masters of Wisdom, or
by whatever name we like to call them—the Chieftains of Humanity, of
whose existence, till recent years, humanity at large was wholly ignorant,
are recruited from amongst ourselves . although none the less constituting
the first great stage of advancement, counting from below upward, of the
Divine Hierarchy. But while, beyond them, conditions of existence begin to
transcend physical brain comprehension we can understand to some extent
the capacities and powers of the beings who have attained to them, and the
functions appertaining to their stage of evolution. Certainly that mighty
organization includes some who reached high spiritual dignity before this
1
"Our Unseen Enemies and Allies" and " When the Dark Hosts are Vanquished," Nineteenth Century and
After, October and November, 191 5.
15
world’s children had emerged from early races, in one sense their nursery.
But none the less it includes some who have been to outward appearance
within historic periods mere ordinary men. The world, indeed, has never
been without a great ruling Brotherhood, though at one time it was
indebted for this to a Senior humanity. The phrase needs amplification to be
fully intelligible, but a very little thought will give reason to the idea that the
history of this world and of our human races is not a “complete short story,"
in itself, but an episode in universal history.
As our humanity became sufficiently evolved to furnish recruits for the great
ruling Brotherhood its existence was allowed to filter out gradually into the
consciousness of the few candidates available. These were the few whose
ardour in the pursuit of lofty knowledge and whose moral development
were such that they could be trusted not to misuse enhanced knowledge.
The world at large was not generally ripe for the proper appreciation of the
fact that powers and knowledge beyond ordinary experience were
attainable by certain means. A premature dissemination of that idea might
have had unfortunate consequences. But for the chosen few it was
revealed, and so it has come to pass that at the present day the great
Brotherhood includes many members who have been men like (the best of)
ourselves within a comparatively recent period.
The view thus reached—that shows us the humanity to which we all belong
as designed to recruit the first, as we look upward, of the spiritual degrees
that in the aggregate constitute the Divine Hierarchy— is of supreme
significance. Properly understood it invests humanity with an entirely new
16
meaning, as compared with that which merely treats each item in that
humanity as destined to an infinitely continued individual existence, happy
or unhappy, as the case may be. The crude fancy thus presented to the mind
by commonplace religion may have served its purpose while the world was
young, as coaxing or warning an ignorant multitude not yet ripe for a more
profound conception, but philosophically it is beneath criticism. The sublime
idea, as directly affecting ourselves, to be derived from a conception, even if
only broad and incomplete, of the Divine Hierarchy is that which shows it to
be a coherent entirety stretching upward from this world as we know it, in
the direction of absolute infinity. It enables us, for the first time, to
comprehend this world’s place in the Universe. A misdirected modesty leads
some of us occasionally to talk of this world as a small planet amongst many
greater, attached to a tenth-rate sun in a Universe richly stocked with others
of enormously greater magnitude and brilliancy, The infinitesimal creatures
on its surface can only be regarded, in this way, as important in their own
estimation; no more so really than the grains of sand on the seashore. That
view is no less erroneous than depressing. The humanity for the sake of
evolving which this world exists, represents a definite stage in the evolution
of Divine consciousness, which, besides its limitless expansion towards
infinity, is susceptible of infinite accretion from below. There are no stages
in the Divine Hierarchy that have not been recruited, in some unfathomable
past, from humanities more or less resembling our own. Eternity stretches
both ways and the world—the solar systems of to-day, though figures
would fail to suggest their duration as measured in our time— are
manifestations of Divine power that have succeeded others and will be in
turn succeeded. We count the nebulas in the Heavens, and watch the
growth of future suns destined to bear their progeny of future worlds and
future candidates for Divine evolution.
But we need not torment imagination by following that thought too far. It is
enough to know that here and now we are candidates for Divine evolution ;
that there is no solution of continuity from this stage of existence up to
those that have been faintly suggested in these pages and are hopelessly
dazzling to mental vision as we dwell in thought on their attributes and
power. This humanity of ours, even as we contemplate its visible varieties
from the savage to the greatest philosopher, is obviously a vast procession
17
moving through the ages, each immortal spirit ever seeking new and new
incarnations till gathered experience and effort entitle it to those of the
loftiest order. The appreciation of this idea marks a huge advance beyond
the primitive conception of an eternal perpetuation of each grotesquely
incomplete being. But such an appreciation is merely a step in the direction
of the grander conception. The highest level of moral and intellectual
attainment the stage of this world’s potentialities is but a new beginning, a
point of departure for a progress beyond the precise comprehension of
physically incarnate intelligence, but happily not altogether veiled from our
view. No matter for the moment whether there be other worlds affording
still more favourable opportunities for embodied consciousness. That is no
concern of ours. We may be fully content to know that however the
preparatory processes leading up to the Divine Hierarchy may be provided
for in other worlds, this of ours has a place in the Universe in direct relation
with all the infinitudes that simple word represents—with all that the most
illuminated reverence can suggest when we presume to speak of God.
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Naturally enough the tragedies of the War have imparted thrilling interest to
some questions carelessly disregarded by the multitude during normal
periods. Is there an after life for all of us when we “die”? Can we find out
anything about it in advance ? Can we communicate with those who have
already passed on? Most current essays dealing with such perplexities have
a ludicrous aspect for millions of spiritualists in constant touch with
departed friends, for all occult students and for most psychic researchers. A
writer in these pages last month calmly asserts that communication with the
dead “ has never been definitely proved to be anything but delusion or
fraud.” If equally ignorant in other directions he might deal in the same way
with any scientific discovery, say, the retrograde motion of some planetary
satellites, or the transmutations of radium. The vast literature of spiritualism
is flooded with proof of the main idea. More recently the literature of occult
research is rich in detail concerning the conditions of the after life.2 To say
that knowledge thereof has made “no substantial progress whatever” is like
asserting that since Galvani's experiment with frogs’ legs our knowledge of
electricity has made no progress whatever. Raymond, attracting deserved
attention on account of its authorship, is only the latest contribution to
innumerable records of a similar kind, the cumulative significance of which is
overwhelming, while all who are patient and painstaking get personal
conviction for themselves.
Spiritualists for the most part are content with this. They know their
departed friends still live and get assurance of their welfare. They look
forward with confidence to their own future. Occult students find that,
besides evidence of that order, minute information relating to the
conditions of the after life can be obtained by people still in this life when
2
Simply to show that I am not talking at random I will mention a few books the perusal of which would
guard writers of a certain class from making themselves ridiculous: Spirit Identity, Psychography, The Higher
Aspects of Spiritualism, Spirit Teachings, A Wanderer in Spirit Lards, The Story of Ahrinziman, Colloquies with
an Unseen Friend, Out of the Vortex, After Death, Not Silent though Dead, In the Next World, Do Thoughts
Perish ? The Hidden Side of Things, The Inner Life, Esoteric Buddhism, The Growth of the Soul, The Occult
World, The Secrct Doctrine, A Study in Consciousness, The Ancient Wisdom. Some of the books named relate
to Spiritualism, some to Theosophy or occult science generally. They are a mere handful compared with
any complete bibliography of either subject.
19
But spiritualism, having broken down the deadly materialism into which
thought was drifting during the last century, paved the way for the
development of occult science. The later literature referred to above
illuminates its origin and progress. The new view of Evolution, of human
destiny, and the economy of Nature generally, which it has unfolded for us,
cannot be fully interpreted within the limits of a Review article, but may be
broadly suggested.
20
The stupendous conception of the future which shows that physical life has
spiritual progress for its purpose, that this world is the region in which that
progress has to be accomplished, that other realms of existence are the
regions in which the work done here bears fruit, and provides for
invigorating rest, leads us to the important conception that each physical
life is merely one of a series; that whatever experiences intervene between
each we shall all of us come back again and again to life of the kind we are
familiar with here, that Reincarnation is as certain a law of Nature as the
circulation of the blood.
" The Astral Plane '' is the term generally used by occultists to designate the
vast realm of unseen life immediately surrounding this globe. It is not a well-
chosen term, as the region in question has nothing to do with the stars, but
it has become rooted in occult phraseology, and we cannot now escape
from its use. It is really a vast concentric sphere of matter that does not
appeal to our physical senses; far greater in size than the physical globe it
embraces, including an enormous variety of conditions, some of them highly
disagreeable; but of these it is needless to speak for the moment, as the
vast majority of decently behaved people will have nothing to do with them
but will pass at once, when free of the body, to regions where they will find
themselves happier than they are likely to have ever been, even under
favourable circumstances, in the physical life. Naturally the character of such
22
happiness is determined by the use that has been made of the earth life and
the extent of spiritual development that the Soul (or Ego) has reached in its
long progress through the ages, its innumerable immersions in physical life,
its former incarnations. The distribution of the varied conditions is well
understood by those among us whose faculties are equal to the task of
cognizing astral conditions, but for people who are not merely without such
faculties, but have not been in touch with those who do enjoy them, some
explanation is needed in reference to matter and sense-perception.
The astral world is not merely a concentric sphere surrounding the physical
globe, it is—one within another—a series of concentric spheres, generally
spoken of by occult scientists as “sub-planes.” Counting from below
upwards, the first and second, actually immersed in the body of the earth,
are regions of suffering with which none but the very worst offenders
against Divine laws have anything to do. The third sub-plane, above the
earth's surface, is still a comfortless region in which people who have been
too deeply absorbed by the lower interests of physical life may have to
spend a period of purification before ascending to happier levels; but this
vast and highly varied range of experience may be ignored for the moment
as it need not disturb the apprehensions either of people who lead fairly
wholesome lives while incarnated, or of the large numbers of gallant victims
of the War who, on passing over, find the normal consequences of minor
shortcomings obliterated by the sacrifice they have made of their earth lives
in a noble cause. They, and the fairly well behaved majority, will slip through
the third sub-level without finding themselves entangled in it, and awake to
consciousness on the fourth level of the astral world, the circumstances of
which are almost infinitely varied but on which, however varied, happiness is
the underlying principle of all sensation and experience.
Obviously the conditions that make for happiness will be very different for
people who, however creditable in a humble way their earth lives may have
been, do not represent advanced intellectual development. The great man
of science, for example, and the simplest maid-servant may share one
characteristic. Both may regard some other human beings with genuine
love. Their happiness on the fourth level will involve reunion with such
persons if these have passed on first, ultimate reunion in either case; and if
they have to wait for this there will be partial reunion meanwhile, for the
Egos of people in physical life are, especially during sleep, in closer touch
with the astral plane than they realize in the normal waking state. But the
highly advanced Egos, the great men of science and others, have capacities
for the enjoyment of other astral opportunities over and above those
relating to personal affections. On higher levels of the astral, to which such
capacities would be automatically the passport, magnificent opportunities
for the expansion of knowledge, along the lines already laid down in
physical life, would open out. And for such Egos centuries of glorious
24
Those lofty levels share some characteristics with the fourth level but are
less earth-like in their superficial aspect. The conditions of the lower
fourth— for the sub-planes include much variety-—are curiously earth-like.
Life there is free from all the tiresome lower needs we are troubled with,
but people live there in houses, enjoy beautiful scenery and social
intercourse, although the delightful principles that prevail there sort them,
so to speak, into congenial groups, besides respecting the individual
attachments of a genuine character passed on from the love experiences of
the earth life. The progress upward towards sublime spiritual heights
ultimately attainable by all human beings, is a gradual progress just as the
acorn becomes the oak by degrees, not between to-day and to-morrow. If
anyone is discontented with this explanation because he thinks of a beloved
daughter (for instance) as turned into an angel of light, the day after her
death, and in touch with the throne of omniscience, he has failed to
appreciate the magnificence of the scale on which human perfection is
gradually developed. Some of us may already be exquisite in goodness, as
we measure character, some of us already splendid hi intellectual grandeur,
but infinitude is a long story. Eternity cannot be hustled. The achievement of
the modern occultist has to do with the illumination of the relatively
immediate future.
And some details of that fascinating period are already within the range of
our comprehension. Astral matter is plastic to the creative power of
thought. With a vivid imagination here we can mentally almost visualize
objects we might desire to possess. On the astral plane under similar
25
This outline sketch of the astral life could, indeed, be filled in with much
further detail and even be supplemented with some description of planes or
spheres higher and beyond the astral. But in attempting to explore these,
incarnate human intelligence is. up against conditions that defy the
resources of language. For every Ego, indeed, each experience of astral life
must come to an end sooner or later, though it may extend to many
centuries of our time, and must almost always culminate in some touch with
the lofty plane beyond; but for the humbler, less developed entities this
touch would hardly involve consciousness, would merely be the prelude to
an unconscious plunge back into incarnation. The better understanding of
that plunge by the great many people in the present day who recognize the
necessity of reincarnation as a principle, but dislike the idea for want of
comprehending its method, is supremely desirable.
The law applies to all, but is so elastic as to fit in with very different volumes
of circumstance. First we must remember that Egos ripe for reincarnation
represent very different stages of development. The humblest of these,
leaving out quite savage races that we need not think about for the
moment, is not a very expanded being when, after a long stay on the astral,
he has shed all memories of his last Iife and remains its spiritual nucleus. The
law, guided by Divine agency, puts that spiritual nucleus in touch with a new
birth, and there is not much consciousness left on higher planes to be
thought of as the Higher Self of the new personality. But in the case of the
26
If all goes well the first seven years of the new child’s life is spent in the
growth of certain invisible accessories of the body, which medical science
will sooner or later be concerned with investigating. And, again, the next
seven years are spent in further developments of the same order, but by the
time the boy or girl is fourteen a good deal of the real entity is beginning to
express itself. Not the whole by any means, nor even the whole of that part
designed for expression in the new life. But now the old astral is beginning
27
to be wanted no more. In the new life the Ego is forming for itself a new
astral. The Higher Self remaining in touch with lofty planes will, for any
expression it may need on the astral plane, make use of the new astral. Of
course all these changes fade one into another like dissolving views. Nature
is rarely addicted to abrupt metamorphoses.
Thus in thinking of future Life and lives we have to recognize the two-fold
character of the consequence ensuing from the manner in which each life is
spent. That definitely affects both the immediate future and the ultimate
future; more specifically it colours life the astral plane after the death of one
body, and determines the welfare or suffering of the next incarnation. For
people who have led fairly creditable lives the astral period is happy and
restful, often associated with opportunities of doing useful work. Even
when the previous life has been faulty in some respects, it may be that such
misdoing has been of a kind so exclusively identified with physical life that it
can only give rise to consequences on this plane again in the next earth life.
But when the misdirection of activity has been of a kind that deeply colours
the surviving consciousness of the Ego, it may entangle him, when first
29
passing on, in the third level of the astral world. That is a region of varied
discomfort in which people have to realize the nature of their misdoing and
shed the desires that have given rise to it. In bad cases that are not of
the supremely bad order, the purification may be rather a slow process, but
assuming that the character of the person going through it is tainted
merely—not predominantly evil—the ultimate passage to the happy levels
already (very imperfectly) described is assured, not merely in the long run,
but very likely in a short one.
In awfully serious cases the course of astral life is very different. There is one
variety of human wickedness that is altogether in a different category from
those that are mere vices. The sinful character of these—the mere vices—is
often exaggerated; but cruelty, that worst and horrible form of cruelty
which takes actual pleasure in the infliction of and sight of pain and
suffering m others, is an attribute that drives the authors of such hideous
misdoing down into that appalling submerged level of the astral world with
which most of those even in need of purification have nothing whatever to
do. Even that region must be thought of as purgatorial. Its fearful
experiences may at last cure or begin the cure of the most ghastly offenders
against the Divine law of love (of which cruelty is the exact reverse). But
imagination shrinks from the attempt to realize the details of the sufferings
incidental to existence on the terrible submerged level. Their duration, in
the worst cases, may be counted in centuries of our time. In others, a brief
experience of this character may give rise to the needful revulsion of feeling.
But though it would be unwise to attempt a survey of the astral world
without taking cognizance of its lower depths, it would be worse than
unwise to refer to them in any way that could excite fear on the part of
harmless, innocent people, too prone, as a consequence of clumsy religious
teaching, to imagine themselves “miserable sinners." Talk of that kind is for
the most part silly nonsense, culminating in something much worse when
associated with ghastly imaginings concerning eternal sufferings in hell. No
decorous language is equal to the emergency in dealing with the criminal
folly of those who terrify children and insult God by describing burning
tortures to be inflicted for ever on hapless victims of Providential atrocities.
Nature does provide a penitential reformatory for souls of diabolical
criminality, but even there reformation is the purpose in view. It need only
30
which he may accomplish results the dignity and grandeur of which cannot
easily be exaggerated. Something beyond mere personal happiness is then
seen to be the object of attainment. This world is the expression of Divine
Will: it is governed by Divine Law, but it is, so to speak, managed in detail by
the agents of Divine Will evolved from the scheme itself. To become a part
of, to be identified with that sublime agency, is the goal aimed at by those
who fully realize the true meaning of spiritual growth. That such a condition
involves a species of exalted beatitude which is something greater than and
beyond personal happiness is a thought that may fairly be associated with
true spiritual aspiration, but one that does not cover the whole idea, too
subtle perhaps for clear definition in language, though some trace of it
should always colour, for advanced thinkers, all reference to the changes
inaugurated by each physical death. When the grave swallows any particular
vehicle of consciousness that we have done with, it certainly marks an
important stage of our progress through the infinitudes of life, and
represents a very tiresome circumstance connected with this early period of
human evolution; but only while we are suffering from the sad
imperfections of conventional teaching is the grave surrounded with terror.
The purpose of this article has not been merely to dissipate that terror, but
to elucidate, for those who may long since have ceased to feel it, the
detailed circumstances of the passage to the life beyond; and above all, to
show how the all-important principle of reincarnation does not in any way
conflict with natural aspirations for spiritual existence after bodily death.
Reincarnation is no hurried process. There is plenty of time in Eternity. Does
anyone imagine that a thousand years of spiritual life after the fatigues of
this one will not be enough for him? If he continues hereafter to entertain
that view, then he will have more. Or if he has no such far-reaching
aspiration, and finds himself content with the simple enjoyment of the astral
life on its less exalted levels, he will fall asleep and drift back to physical life
in obedience to natural law at the appropriate time. And both in his case and
in that of his more advanced contemporaries, the return to physical life will
be accomplished as easily as the processes of sleep and waking during
physical life, with the inner mechanism of which, for that matter, most
people are no better acquainted than with the method of rebirth, the fullest
32
On the 14th of April, 1917, The Times published an article entitled “Sheep
without a Shepherd,” which, gently and without bitterness but in
unequivocal terms, described the conventional religion of the Churches and
all their creeds as hopelessly out of date. Thinking men and women were
represented as convinced that religion must be rediscovered from the
beginning. The clergyman and his religion “belong to a dead past.” Thinking
people “ turn away from the Churches more and more as their interest in
religion grows.” What they need is “ a conception of the Universe in which
they may take their place.” They believe in Christianity but they need an
expression of it that will satisfy intelligence. “The time of cleansing for the
Christian theology has been delayed so long that there is a danger lest the
mass of men should think it all litter and dust of the past.” The Churches
have fancied that the danger would be staved off “by the slow, reluctant
relinquishing of this or that belief as it became impossible.” The real need is
for discovery and growth. The Church “must not be content any longer to
talk pious nonsense in the hope that it will seem sense because it is pious.”
The true answer to that last question is in the affirmative, and those who
have been concerned during recent years with the assimilation of ideas
reflected in the Higher Occultism believe themselves, at all events, in
possession of definite knowledge which meets the intellectual craving
represented by The Times article. Many books convey this to all who care to
read, and describe the sources from which it is derived. For some of us who
are students of occult science and philosophy the authors of the teaching
given out are seen to have extraordinary claims on our trust. The nature of
these claims can better be appreciated after we have fairly considered the
general outline of the teaching they convey. It constitutes a complete
response to the demand set forth in The Times article. It does give us a
comprehensive view of the Cosmos to which we belong. It embodies a
revelation which is, for the world at large, a “discovery,” of previously
unsuspected truth concerning the fundamental facts of spiritual silence
underlying all forms of religion. It does much more than this because it gives
us a perfectly clear view of the course of human evolution, dissipating all the
darkness that surrounds death; lighting up the conditions of the new life
that immediately follows the change and pointing out the path to be
ultimately trodden, leading to infinitudes of progress. The view of Divinity,
Life and Nature thus afforded—conveniently to be described as the Higher
Occultism— makes its first claim on respectful consideration by its own
inherent reasonableness. It is vast in its scope, widely ramifying in all
directions, but perfectly coherent, scientifically harmonious; all parts of the
whole mutually supporting each other. In one way, that is a difficulty for the
beginner approaching the study of the Higher Occultism. The
comprehension of - not necessarily the whole because the whole is an
infinitude—but of a great volume of super-physical knowledge is essential
to an adequate appreciation of its parts separately. But eventually when
enough is grasped, conviction sets in as an intellectual necessity, and then,
among other conclusions, the honest student realizes that the Higher
Occultism has been a gift to the world from Teachers who are obviously
entitled to profound trust. But his perception of this is no longer needed as
a guarantee of the teaching.
35
Perhaps this can only be fully appreciated after a more exhaustive study of
super-physical science than can be provided for within the limits of a Review
article; but a mere outline sketch of the knowledge accumulating on our
hands will go far towards justifying the claim made above. Indeed, the most
elaborate attempt to deal with detail would still leave us gazing at remote
horizons beyond which human vision cannot penetrate, but that is by itself a
condition which tends to fortify belief in what can be seen. No theory which
invested Eternity with a beginning and an end could be otherwise than
absurd. But while the idea of God, Divinity, the Divine principle—whatever
phrase we prefer—expands into regions beyond the reach of
understanding, we do find that in so far as this world is concerned—in so
far, indeed, as the Solar System is concerned—Occultism presents us with
an intelligible conception of the Divine Hierarchy; also, as already affirmed,
clearly illuminating the mysteries of human origin and destiny, the course
and conditions of evolution, and the manner in which Divine justice can be
reconciled with the terrible irregularities of life in the physical world. It puts
us in a position of intimate familiarity with the life on super-physical worlds
surrounding our globe to which all pass after the change described as death.
It enlarges our view of human destiny, to that extent that we see life on
other planets linked with that of the Earth; and the whole Solar System
resolves itself into a definite Divine enterprise, with an origin and purpose
vaguely appreciable, though in touch with mysteries of infinitude and
eternity which we need not, at this stage of our progress, attempt to
fathom. Incidentally occult science forecasts the future progress in various
directions of physical science, and in some cases those forecasts, made ten
or fifteen years ago, have already been overtaken by practical research. The
proof of that last statement would involve a long digression, but is definitely
available, as many of the conclusions arising from the discovery of radium
were clearly set forth in a book entitled Occult Chemistry published many
years before Madame Curie's luminous contribution to plain physical
science. Indeed laboratory research has as yet only partly overtaken the
occult discoveries though confirming them as far as it has gone.
36
The claims for occult science just set forth may be examined one by one. It
does not shrink from the use of the word “God” except in so far as the word
has been degraded by ignoble creeds. But Supreme Divinity is necessarily
infinite and must have reference to manifestations in millions of worlds
besides our own. And yet we feel sure that Divine Consciousness permeates
this world. Occult teaching assures us that our own individual consciousness
is a Divine emanation, though limited in its scope and range of power by the
vehicle or sheath in which it is working—for the moment. The idea is
susceptible of expansion. All consciousness is a Divine emanation—that
working in animal forms—in vegetable forms even—also that working in
super-human forms on planes or realms of Nature loftier than the physical.
The idea at once leads to an appreciation of the sublime magnificence of the
Divine Hierarchy intervening between our humanity and the nearest
manifestation of the infinite Divinity. Reasonable occultists do not presume
to formulate a rigid conception of that nearest manifestation, but they
know that the Solar System is a definite enterprise within the manifested
Universe and therefore that in some way it can be identified with a vortex,
so to speak, in infinite Divinity, and that is generally referred to as the Logos
of the Solar System. Words are not well adapted to such thoughts, but we
must be content to use the best we have got. The simple Christian who
wants to discern a Father in God may be chilled by this awfully super-
physical idea, but he need not be so if he clings to his faith in Christ which
the occultist has no wish to disturb. Medieval creeds which the Churches
perpetuate have caricatured the Christ idea, amongst others, but the
occultist clearly understands Christ as belonging to the Divine Hierarchy, in
close touch with this world, and that understanding carries with it a
reverential feeling that no conventional Christian can possibly improve
upon. Of course the Hierarchy of Beings representing various stages of
spiritual evolution and a vast variety of functions in Nature include sublime
entities on all imaginable levels, but the fundamental all-important idea to
be held firmly in thinking of the hierarchy is that it constitutes the Agency
through which the Divine purpose is worked out in manifestation. This is one
way in which a scientific complexion is put upon occult religion. Agency runs
down to the minutest activities of Nature. There is no break in the
uniformity of the method. Archangelic Beings fulfil the Divine purpose on
37
A hierarchy that includes Beings of the Archangelic order (and also others of
still loftier spiritual rank) together with humbler agencies below the level of
humanity, concerned with the working of natural law, must obviously also
include beings but relatively little above the human level. And this thought
illuminated by definite information brings the occultist into touch with a
realm of knowledge bearing equally on the government of this world and
the possibilities of human evolution. There is a level of the great hierarchy
definitely recruited from humanity. Common conceptions of human
evolution have correctly hit off the idea that it is recruited itself from lower
forms of life. Prevailing belief, however, has not grasped the notion that it
expands into higher forms without any break of continuity. At an earlier
period in the world’s history this was more generally appreciated than it has
been in recent years. In ancient Egypt, for example—though the live or six
thousand years beyond which modern research does not extend were a
mere decadent remainder as compared with still earlier Egyptian
civilizations—the people generally knew that some few hierophants had
risen to a high condition of knowledge and power as compared with
ordinary humanity. Definite systems of initiation were known to lead
upward towards those heights. Though later generations have lost sight of
this deeply significant truth, it is still as true as ever. The (relatively) lower
levels of the Divine Hierarchy are still recruited in that way. For recent ages
the system has been veiled from common observation. The progress of
humanity is worked out in accordance with a definite Divine plan. For a time
it was necessary that intelligence should be trained in the study of physical
nature. The improvement of brain capacity was the task before the
incarnate vanguard of humanity. Super-physical knowledge, the fascination
of which would have attracted the pioneers of brain culture off the path
designed for them, was hidden away for a time. Those men of science who
resent the movements of thought bringing it to the light of day again are
survivals of the regime to which they have not yet ceased to belong —
38
The principle just hinted at—that human evolution does not stop short at
the stage reached by the most brilliant representatives of current
civilization— leads on to the appreciation of the idea that infinitude is
applicable to that evolution, as to the loftier conception of Divine nature.
The idea is best understood by tracing it back to some extent into the past.
Consciousness—which eludes research in the dissecting room—is, in a
certain sense, uniform in its nature; incomprehensible as regards its essence,
but vaguely acceptable as somehow of Divine origin. As above pointed out,
its scope and range are determined by the vehicle or sheath in which it is
involved. The full development of that idea puts a new face upon the whole
theory of evolution. In any animal form we like to think of, consciousness
has obviously a very limited scope compared with our own. The splendid
light Darwin threw on Nature showed us the growth of form, following
certain physical plane impulses. The occultist at first only found fault with
the theory as ignoring the simultaneous evolution of consciousness. A
clearer view has since been obtained. In the lower animal forms
consciousness has not been individualized. But an aggregate volume of
consciousness animating many lower forms gradually feels the need of
animating higher ones. Fully developed, the description of the process
would be very protracted. Eventually in the highest animal forms
consciousness is individualized and passes under well-understood conditions
into the human form, not at once into one of high development. By this
time, however, the individualized consciousness may be treated as an Ego
subject to the law of reincarnation. At first its progress may be thought of as
the growth of the Ego —its spiritual growth going on concurrently with the
improvement in the human form and the perfection of the brain. But how is
this view to be reconciled with the theory that consciousness is identical in
essence throughout Nature? Quite easily, for all who profit by what is known
concerning the laws governing reincarnation. Desire is one of them. Desire
for an improved form providing improved scope for consciousness would be
distinctly operative. But the man at a humble level does not know enough to
formulate such a desire explicitly. He does it automatically by making the
39
best use of the form— or vehicle—he has got. Natural law then gives him a
better one in his next life and so on ad infinitum.
But that does not mean that they have been simply human at any period in
the history of this planet. From the point of view of occult science no world
is a complete undertaking in itself. Life, the infusion of Divine consciousness
into matter, is a vast coherent phenomenon in Nature, limitless in all
directions. The idea may be approached by considering its bearing on the
Solar System, itself, as we are enabled now to realize, a coherent scheme of
manifestation, all its parts inter-related one with another, and as a whole
inter-related with a larger Cosmos.
than that generally reached so far by the foremost races, even, of the Earth
scheme. So the present conditions of Earth humanity do not yet afford them
appropriate incarnation. Nature deals with the difficulty in her usual
competent fashion, but to make the solution intelligible the conditions of
our own planetary scheme must be taken into account. In our case three
planets are linked together in one comprehensive evolution. Of course, the
reason of this is intelligible, but that would be a long story by itself and may
be left aside for the moment. Our human family is at present distributed
over three worlds— Mars, the Earth, and Mercury. Silly criticism based on
ignorance may fall foul of this statement on the ground that Mercury—so
near the Sun—must be too hot for human life. Too hot certainly for bodies
of our flesh and blood, but the chemistry of Nature can solve more intricate
problems than those merely of temperature. Mercury bodies are adapted to
temperatures in which our own could not exist.
Now the main body of our human family is here on the Earth, but an inferior
remnant at a very low and coarse stage of development—the dregs of our
humanity, so to speak—is still on Mars. A vanguard of peculiarly advanced
Egos is already on Mercury, leading a more beautiful life than any of which
the Earth’s main body has yet had experience. That advanced vanguard
supplies the Venus failures with suitable opportunities for incarnation, and
the bulk of the Mercury population at the present time had to begin with a
Venus origin. Of course, the numbers are not great compared with those of
the Earth— taking those to include Egos in and out of incarnation—in
physical bodies, that is to say, and on the higher spheres surrounding the
physical planet.
The importance of the explanation just given turns on the way it shows the
whole Solar System as a coherent organism, for obviously the system now
operative as between the senior evolution of Venus and the next in order—
our own—will go on providing for the evolution, at remote periods in the
future, of the outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Circumstances will no doubt vary in these far-off regions of the stupendous
Divine programme, but the leading idea establishes the unity within diversity
of the plan that the Solar System represents.
42
This light though comprehensive sketch of the Divine plan will enable the
reader incidentally to understand how the students of occult or Vital
Astronomy obtain their information, obviously of a kind that commonplace
physical faculties can possibly deal with. We see human evolutions
extending upward, without any break of continuity, to the nearest levels of
the Divine Hierarchy. We realize the unbroken continuity of consciousness
beyond those levels, so that knowledge of the kind that seems at the first
glance to belong to Divinity itself must filter down to the lower levels of the
Divine Hierarchy. Then we begin to understand how the Beings on those
levels—in touch in one direction with relatively Infinite Wisdom, in the other
with ordinary humanity—may see fit to pass on to some qualified pupils in
ordinary humanity some information illuminating the world and the Cosmos
to which that ordinary humanity belongs. Indeed, it is obvious that sooner
or later such information must be passed on, to provide for the fulfilment of
the Divine Plan. At earlier stages of growth humanity was not in need of all
this lofty teaching. It had to accomplish certain achievements—now, from
the higher point of view, essential preliminary undertakings. Humanity had
to learn simple broad principles of moral science, to grapple with the vague
idea that there was some Divine mystery pervading the world. The religions
of various periods met this need with more or less success. It did not much
matter at first that they were irrational in their design. In days of one early
papacy, for example, when priests disputed as to whether Christ was
the real son, or an adopted son, of God, religious intelligence was not ripe
for more suitable discussion concerning the Divine Hierarchy. The writer of
the article on “Sheep without a Shepherd” seems to think the Clergy of the
present day are not much more ready for it. However this may be, some of
them must be ready, and outside the Church a sufficient number have been
found ready, to justify the full flow of the teaching which this paper partly
embodies. Then, again, for the last thousand years or so, humanity has been
getting ready for higher teaching by perfecting its thinking capacity. The
study of physical science has polished human brains to a high degree of
delicacy. That had to be done before religion could be levelled up. Habits of
scientific thinking have certainly paved the way for appreciating the
credibility of occult teaching, better than the mental training of the
theologian plodding in the path of medieval creeds. A considerable number
43
of people thus prepared are ripe for superior enlightenment— more than
ripe: definitely craving for it. It has become incumbent on the custodians of
the superior knowledge to give out that knowledge far more freely than
was necessary or desirable in the past. Only as we become possessed of the
knowledge can we appreciate the obligation. The further growth of
humanity towards higher conditions of being can only be accomplished by a
humanity comprehending its purpose and potential destinies. That level of
the Divine Hierarchy nearest to and immediately above ordinary humanity
has to watch over, guide, and promote the spiritual growth of that ordinary
humanity. As those ready for new conditions become more and more
numerous, the work of those who link humanity with the hierarchy becomes
more and more important and exacting. The occult student generally refers
to those who are the links in question as the Masters of Wisdom. The title
will serve for the moment, though we may eventually adopt a better.
Whatever name we use, they are the immediate agents of Divinity in
carrying out the design in which this world and its inhabitants play a part,
and, as time goes on, and they have more and more to do in a world
ripening by degrees, their numbers must be recruited. That can only be done
as the more advanced claimants for spiritual enlightenment are mentally
and morally cultivated. The evolution of a humanity, in fact, is analogous to
that of a single entity. In childhood his growth, well-being and education
depend on others. Teaching gradually enables him to realize that his own
will and effort must be brought into play to accomplish growth beyond a
certain stage. His later development must depend upon himself. So with
humanity at large. The evolutionary law works under loftier guidance for a
time; but the race cannot improve beyond a certain stage without
understanding its place in Nature, without realizing the sublime truth that it
must for its later development guide its own evolution, govern itself.
of the knowledge which has been gradually pouring into our hands during
the last thirty-odd years, the ever-growing appreciation of which is no less
certain than the ultimate defeat of the Satanic power hitherto directed,
among other purposes, to stifle and impede its dissemination. That defeat
accomplished, the World’s progress along desirable paths will proceed with
a rapidity for which previous experience has prepared us, and the influence
of that comprehensive view of Nature and Divine truth that has hitherto
been “occult”— veiled or partially obscured—will permeate religious
thinking and soon lead to a reconstruction even of the orthodox clerical
presentation thereof, so that there will no longer be any inclination to
regard that as “ litter and dust of the past.” The unseen laws governing the
world and human evolution, the conscious agencies through which they are
administered, the higher realms of life intimately associated with the
physical life on the Earth's surface, will all come within the range of human
understanding in a near future and will bring about such a blend between
science and religion, that each will be regarded as the complement of the
other—the piety of the Church no longer nonsense in the sight of Science,
and the critical insight of Science no longer a terror for a Church which will
lean on it for support.
45
Foremost among these is the certainty that there are avenues to perception
over and above those provided by the physical senses. If anyone now denies
the possibility of clairvoyance, he does not express an opinion; he merely
shows himself unacquainted with certain developments of scientific
research. Again, while crowds of blatant assailants abuse the multitudes
who know that they have touch with conditions of human life following on
the change called death, disbelief in that matter where it exists is merely
due to ignorance of the work done in that department of research. Those
who challenge either of the statements just made are not entitled to attack
a writer who takes them for granted. The literature dealing with them is
abundant. No one addressing intelligent hearers concerning any fresh
development of superphysical research can be fairly called on to waste his
time in going afresh over the rudimentary discoveries of fifty years ago. A
46
modern chemist, writing about the atomic weight of thorium-lead, does not
include in his essay an elaborate argument to show that the measurement
of atomic weight is possible.
Pantheism! There is some resemblance between the true doctrine and the
speculation going by that name, just as there is some resemblance between
metempsychosis and reincarnation, but also all the difference that there is
between a lump of gold-bearing quartz and a finished gold coin. Spinoza’s
pantheism absorbed God in Nature and left no God behind. Occult
pantheism recognizes Nature as an emanation of God, but also recognizes
the infinite, supreme, Divine incomprehensible Being of omnipotent
consciousness which is God, as losing nothing by its infusion into matter.
Thus occult pantheism includes Deism while clearing that conception of its
limitations. It is true that almost all the finished mental products of modern
occult research have been crudely anticipated in a great many early
47
Reincarnation! Our Professor thinks it “has never found favour in the West.”
I think it is commanding the assent of all intelligent people— whenever it is
understood. Unhappily it is very widely misunderstood—as by our
Professor, obviously, when he describes it as a paralyzing doctrine of which
fatalism is the natural outcome. The natural outcome is exactly the reverse,
because it shows each life in turn the expression of causes set in motion by
the free-will of the Ego in former lives. Again, complete explanation of the
real doctrine would claim, very many of these pages. That doctrine is fairly
set forth in my own published writings, but I do not feel entitled to advertise
them here. If anyone thinks, along necessitarian lines, that acts in each life
are inevitable, and therefore, as causes, encouraging fatalism, the answer is,
firstly, a contradiction of the assumption arising from our knowledge of the
way Karma is adjusted by the Elemental agents of the Lipika! I use technical
phraseology for the moment, to hint that in dealing with the Higher
Occultism I am skirting the confines of an elaborate science. The words used
above will have a definite meaning for every Theosophical student, and will,
I venture to think, be quite destitute of meaning for the Professor. Secondly,
the reason why incarnation provides for intellectual moral and spiritual
growth and expansion is to be discerned in the fact, so ill-understood by the
48
materialistic science of the last century, that Thought is a force. Again, that
is a statement that people ignorant of all that has been done in psychic
research during the last quarter of the last century will not understand, and,
therefore, will foolishly deny. The influence of thought on future
incarnations has been elaborately traced in my own and other current
books. In truth it determines their course. And, when understood,
reincarnation becomes not only acceptable but the only thinkable method
of carrying on human evolution. Some people are frightened of it, because
they foolishly imagine that it means their own individuality and
consciousness immersed in a baby form, and miserable in such a condition.
Their consciousness during the baby period will be on a higher plane in
another vehicle. They will not enter their new bodies till these are mature far
beyond the stage of the nursery. How can I convey a glimmer of the truth in
a few words? The spiritual entity of an advanced representative of a highly
civilized race may be older than this world. His or her incarnate personality,
in any given case, may be only a partial incarnation. There is a Higher Self,
the part of the whole self, on a spiritual plane all the while. Clairvoyants,
adequately endowed, can see the law at work. Mesmeric practice will often
enable one to get touch through a personality with his or her Higher Self,
and thus not merely verify its existence but acquire voluminous information
concerning the conditions of the super-physical realms of consciousness
belonging to this world. These become so familiar to the qualified occult
investigator, that current discussions as to whether they do really exist or
not are more ludicrous in his sight than the outsider who never concerns
himself with such inquiries can easily imagine. And students of occultism will
be even more amused by the Professor’s criticism to the effect that their
studies throw “no light on the problems of life and consciousness." Their
literature is saturated with ethical teaching of an exalted order, which bears
on every imaginable problem of life and consciousness. Some Theosophical
writers, indeed, are so dominated by the thought that nothing matters
except the cultivation of the loftiest moral virtues, that they are less
interested in the knowledge concerning the previously hidden mysteries of
Nature which it has been my special business to unveil as far as possible. To
say that the Higher Occultism, which embraces or includes Theosophy, does
49
not concern itself with moral problems, would be like saying that the branch
of science called Physics does not concern itself with electrical phenomena.
Anyhow the result was that I came to know that Mme. Blavatsky exercised,
or was the agent through whom were exercised, super-normal powers. That
made me inclined to listen to her statement as to how such powers were
obtained. The statement was to the effect that they were a relatively feeble
reflection of mightier powers and wider knowledge possessed by certain
men whom she had personally known— members of a great Brotherhood
representing a higher stage of human evolution than had been attained by
the foremost even of those representing the progress of scientific
knowledge in the open world at large.
51
Satisfied myself (to go back to the beginning) that the exponents of the
higher knowledge must exist, I was eager to get into touch with them—and
succeeded. First a protracted correspondence began. How did letters pass
between myself and unknown correspondents, in Himalayan seclusion? By
that time I knew (see The Occult World) that occult power could transport
physical objects through space. I found that the “Master” could “take" my
letters by means unfamiliar to the post, could give me the answers in
strange and unexpected ways. But the “wonder" of this grew gradually
subordinate to the importance of the communications themselves.
Moreover, it was eclipsed by personal experiences of a super-normal
character that put me in closer touch with the Occult World than that
established by the correspondence. I am now merely sketching the course
of events. To describe them in detail would mean re-writing some of my
books, but the sketch will, at any rate, suggest the nature of those "sources
of information” which are within my reach, though “not generally
available.” And a moment’s reflection will show how reasonable it is to
believe that the “Masters” (to use the Western equivalent for the Indian
word Mahatma) are able, if willing, to give such information concerning the
other planets of the Solar System and its general design as that which I
52
made use of in my former article 3 for the Nineteenth Century, and in many
books. Common knowledge here amongst us relating to the capacities of
our own clairvoyants (though there are people claiming to be cultured who
remain absolutely ignorant of them) shows us the way in which senses finer
than the familiar five will reveal what is going on at great physical distances.
Developed by Masters of superphysical science is it surprising that they
should reach out to other worlds of our system?
There are indeed other ways of gathering in such teaching, and these have
been to some extent at my service since the far-away days of the beginning
that I have been describing, up to the present time. I am now in a position to
deal, much more definitely than then, with the functions of the Masters in
connection with the government of the world and of the stupendous Divine
Hierarchy to which they belong.
Vast numbers among us are ripe now to appreciate this revelation, though
other vast numbers are still intellectually cramped by conventional prejudice
from which they cannot escape, and it is to those thus ripe that I venture to
address what remains to be said, rather than to assailants impatient with
the disturbance of their cherished limitations.
3
See Nineteenth Century and After, September 191 7, pp. 536,537
53
When he is in a position to survey the whole process on which the human family is launched,
from its beginning in the remote past to its conclusion in the almost immeasurably distant future;
when all the natural laws and forces which play round it lie within his comprehension and grasp,
whether they are operative on the physical plane with its wonderful complexity of molecules and
forces, or on those other planes invisible to ordinary sight which interpenetrate it or surround it
and are more bewildering in their complexity still; when all the myriad enigmas of good and evil,
of sin and sorrow, and hope, are resolved into intelligible meaning, and neither the earth below,
nor the heavens above, nor life, nor death, hold any riddles from his understanding, the Adept is
qualified to attain the final rank in the vast concatenation of progress we have been surveying.
Concurrently with the advance in knowledge and power thus suggested, the
Master has been correctly described by another writer as necessarily
endowed with “perfect compassion, an absolutely selfless devotion to the
welfare of all sentient beings, and a boundless love and fellow-feeling for
them all.” It has been my privilege in recent years to pick up some bits of
information concerning former lives of some among the great Masters, and
these have illustrated what the writer just quoted meant by absolute
selflessness, in a way that has thrilled me with emotion, though on the
higher level self-sacrifice is taken as a matter of course. How, it may be
asked, can a being on the Master’s level be in a position to incur self-
sacrifice? If his body is menaced by injury or destruction, he can quit it at will
and assume a new incarnation if he chooses. Undoubtedly; but though he
may have been doing that at intervals (very protracted intervals) for a long
series of ages, he may sometimes as a definite duty, to fulfil some peculiar
purpose, take quite a humble or commonplace incarnation in the ordinary
world. He will never in such cases be known as a Master in the ordinary
world, but he may, for reasons connected with the welfare of other people,
choose to remain with them and die, even a painful death in the ordinary
way, though he might had he chosen have slipped out of the body without
incurring the least inconvenience, or, as Apollonius of Tyana is said to have
done when before Domitian, vanish from sight and remove himself from
danger by occult means. Nor indeed does the mere exchange of one body
for another mean any trouble for the Adept of Master rank. He can keep any
one going for periods measured in centuries that dazzle our imagination,
but in the course of ages may find it convenient to take new ones from time
to time. And this thought alone is one which will help to dissipate the
erroneous notion prevalent in the beginning of the Theosophical
movement, to the effect that there was something especially Eastern in the
54
The main idea in relation to the Masters that I want to enforce is this: they
belong to the Divine Hierarchy that presides over the evolution of mankind,
and as regards their work in guiding human progress, as definitely as they
are able, are absolutely at one, in thought and intention, with the still higher
agents in that sublime hierarchy. They may not always find it possible to
steer humanity exactly as they would wish. We, in this life, collectively
constitute a craft that often fails to answer to the helm. And,
as I endeavoured to explain in a former article entitled Our Unseen Enemies
and Allies, 4 we are terribly mixed up with inimical agencies bent upon
interfering with the Divine purpose at every available opportunity. If it were
not for the ceaseless, untieing efforts of our unknown protectors to shield
us from the consequences of such attacks, the civilization of the world, the
further evolution of the whole human race, indeed, would be utterly
wrecked.
For various reasons it is highly desirable that the world should understand
this. The services the Masters render us, in harmony with the influence of
the whole hierarchy to which they belong, would be rendered just as
zealously, however ignorant we might be of the benefits conferred upon us.
Divine agents do not work for reward. But if the matter is rightly understood
it will be seen that we are the people who would be richly rewarded, if we
became cognizant of the benefits conferred, and were, so to speak, grateful
accordingly. It is true, indeed, that if such gratitude were widely felt and
associated with clear comprehension of the way in which our Elder
Brethren, the Unseen Masters, are struggling on superphysical planes with
the Powers of Evil on our behalf, they would in a certain degree be
strengthened in the Struggle they are earning on. Success does not depend
on such reinforcement of strength; that is certain and assured, but the
duration of the struggle, on which the duration of the War depends, might
be to some extent affected in the way above described.
4
See Nineteenth Century and After, Octobcr, 1915
55
that some devotees of that study at the time thought dangerously frank.
The author answers the criticism by anticipation in words which I will leave,
in conclusion, as applicable also to such explanations as it has been my
privilege to put forward:
If we have been free in our expositions the spirit was not the more reckless, but because the
thresholds of ignorance are already overpast. . . . They are all now incredulous who were formerly
dreaded in their belief, and under that safe guardianship we leave them happily supine in the
conviction that our conduct will neither be attractive nor intelligible, much less practically useful,
to the profane multitude of mankind.
57
A few among the great host of his devotees who, besides appreciating the
varied beauties of Tennyson’s poetry, are in touch with modern
developments of the Higher Occultism, will be alive to the significance of
some hints scattered through his writings showing how he, in advance of
modern developments, intuitively divined some important principles now
emerging from obscurity into the light. Even highly cultured and
appreciative readers, unless also students of occultism, may pass them by
unnoticed. Sir Alfred Lyall, for example, in his generally admirable survey of
Tennyson’s work, contributed to the series of “English Men of Letters,”
overlooks some glaring hints of the kind in question, while actually dealing
with the mere literary charm of one poem mainly devoted to the
presentation of occult ideas.
unrivalled in dealing with rhyme. But after all, however highly we may
appreciate his art, that merely renders the surface worthy of the substance
of his poetry.
So much in advance to show that the interest some of us may take in the
flashes of occult inspiration to be discerned in Tennyson’s poems need not
separate us from the sympathy of worshippers who live in a more familiar
atmosphere. Nor from the point of view of occult students, who have
profited by the flood of light let in of late on mysteries previously obscure,
will the flashes in question show that Tennyson was completely in
possession of knowledge which humbler mortals at the present day are
inheriting without an effort. Indeed, innumerable allusions to death and the
hereafter in In Memoriam are hardly tinged with any philosophy deeper than
ordinary religious feeling, and in The Two Voices the second voice, which
sweeps away the comfortless reasoning of the first, offers merely
a mere “hidden hope.” And yet the same poem contains a passage that
might almost be reckoned among the flashes of inspiration, suggesting the
theory of life now reduced to a scientific shape, and gradually winning
consent in all directions—the doctrine of Reincarnation:
I need not expand the quotation. The poem from which it comes will be
familiar to all Tennysonian enthusiasts, and the passage to which I call
attention embodies a thought far more fully treated in later utterances; but
before dealing with them it is worth while to turn back to one of his very
earliest fragments entitled The Mystic, written when Tennyson could not
have been more than seventeen, and to be found, I think, in one edition of
the Poems by Two Brothers. It begins:
Skipping a great deal to the same general effect, we come to the final lines,
which are as follows:
As far as the form of this poem is concerned we need not trace any of the
lines, though some of them are dignified and worthy of the subject, to
anything in the nature of verbal inspiration. As the Memoir by his son shows
us, Tennyson wrote verse when he was only eight years old, and
the Memoir gives us some fairly long and harmonious examples of his
boyhood's work, never published during his life, written when he was
fourteen or fifteen. Everyone familiar with the principle of Reincarnation will
readily understand that so great a poet as Tennyson must have been a poet
already in former lives, and could not but bring over the capacity for poetic
expression, so that inspiration, merely conveying an idea, could rely on the
new personality to clothe it in appropriate language. Thus, although the
ideas underlying The Mystic can hardly be regarded as originating in the
mind of a boy of seventeen, the words conveying them may have been
entirely his own.
The description of The Mystic is not appropriate to any one on the ordinary
plane of life to whom that term might apply. Writers on the philosophical
system generally called "Mysticism” are “Mystics” in one sense, but may not
have any characteristics resembling those described in the poem. Those are
the characteristics which—with others—belong to the highly evolved “
Elder Brethren " of the human race —now generally spoken of as the
Masters of Wisdom, of whom—since they themselves have communicated
more freely than in former times with the ordinary plane of life—we have
come to know a good deal. That they inspire many modern writers with
ideas for them to work up in the progress of literature, art, and science is
now clearly realized by their pupils in occultism. Conventional thinking has
hitherto made at once too much and too little of inspiration. It has been
conceived as only of very rare occurrence in connection with writings of a
61
sacred character, its frequency being thus very limited, while its source is
thought of as altogether Divine. It is really of constant occurrence and
emanates from all levels of the Divine Hierarchy. The extent to which writers
and artists (those with some lofty purpose in their work) are “helped” by
invisible beings, on a higher plane of life than their own, can hardly be
exaggerated, so there is indeed little reason to be surprised at finding a
youthful poet of Tennyson's promise under inspiration from a very early
period.
But the world was not ripe in the year 1826 for the gift of any detailed
information concerning the actual constitution of the Divine Hierarchy, with
its varied levels of dignity and power and intricate agencies. In 1892, towards
the close of the great poet’s life, conditions had changed in a very
remarkable degree. And the flashes of inspiration to which Tennyson lent
himself then became wonderfully distinct. A few verses to be found in the
volume published in that year, and entitled By an Evolutionist, are deeply
suggestive. We read as follows:
And the Lord "Not yet : but make it as clean as you can,
In the Memoir of Alfred, Lord Tennyson by his son we are told that he left a
Note to Section xliii. of In Memoriam, which runs as follows :
If the immediate life after death be only sleep, and the spirit between this life and the next
should be folded like a flower in a night slumber, then the remembrance of the last night remains
as the smell and colour do in the sleeping flower, and in that case the memory of our love would
last as true and would live pure and whole within the spirit of my friend until after it was unfolded
at the breaking of the morn when the sleep was over.
Whenever genuine mutual affection unites people on this plane of life, they
are always found to have been in affectionate relationship in former lives
also. There may have been considerate differences in intellectual growth
even, but the love-tie is supreme, and the ingenuity of the natural law—or
of those who guide the natural law to the emergency in such cases, and to
much more complicated problems of “Karma”—the convenient term which
embraces, among other meanings, the necessity that moral causes
engendered in one life shall reap their appropriate consequences in lives of
later date.
Now let us turn to the last verse of the brief poem, of which the first has
been quoted above:
I have climb’d to the snows of Age, and I gaze at a field in the Past,
64
Where I sank with the body at times in the sloughs of a low desire,
But I hear no yelp of the boast, and the Man is quiet at last
The last few words of the last line—“a glimpse of a height that is higher”—
hint unmistakably at the sublime possibilities of Initiation. There is no finality
in the vast process of human evolution, but there are recognizable stages.
The perfect Man has reached one of these stages, from which he looks
forward to spiritual attainment transcending any condition that can be
limited by the term humanity.
I need not attempt to elaborate that idea; but we shall see reason to believe
that the poet knew more of the height that is higher than he found it
possible to put into words.
The law under which Divine consciousness in humanity seeks and secures
better and better vehicles operates also throughout the lower kingdoms. It
is not easily traced through animal and vegetable manifestations, but even
faintly understood it illuminates the whole doctrine of Evolution. Occult
students at one time were inclined to find fault with the Darwinian
presentation of the idea, as ignoring the evolution of consciousness going
on concurrently with the evolution of form. We see now that the evolution
of form defines the evolution of consciousness. Consciousness is very far
from being a mere attribute of the form, as some materialistic scientists of
the last century imagined, but the expression of its infinite capacities
depends on the form in which it is working. This view of the subject is
worthy of protracted treatment; but there are other poems that claim
examination.
Till the peoples all are one and all their voices blend in choric
We may now turn to the poem which is the fullest expression of occult
inspiration among all that suggest that origin—The Ancient Sage. This,
indeed, includes evidence showing that Tennyson in his own consciousness
had attained to definite knowledge relating to spiritual conditions far
transcending those familiar to the average humanity of our period The
Ancient Sage was published m the volume entitled “Tiresias and other
Poems,” just preceding the latest of all—‘‘Demeter and other Poems.” The
“Sage,” obviously a Master of Wisdom, criticises a “ scroll ” by a young
companion who has embodied sceptical, almost materialistic, views in very
graceful verse. The scroll recognizes that “the earth is fair in hue,”
The nameless Power, or Powers, that rule Were never heard or seen.
If thou wouldst hear the Nameless, and wilt dive Into the Temple-cave of
thine own self,
There, brooding by the central altar, thou Mayst haply learn the Nameless
hath a voice,
The Nameless never came Among us, never spake with man,
66
And the Sage answers with almost the best passage in the whole poem:
After a passage in the scroll relating to the darkness and miseries of life, the
Sage replies:
And this leads up to the most striking passage in the poem, in which the
Sage -in this case Tennyson himself—got “out of the body,” to use a phrase
familiar to occult students, by adopting a method with which they are quite
familiar. This consists of self-induced hypnotism brought on by repeating-—
alone and aloud —one’s own name. The repetitions may have to be very
numerous, running perhaps into hundreds, and even then the effort may be
futile unless the person making it has some psychic potentialities in his
nature. But granting that last condition, it is an effective process, and one
which Tennyson seems to have been almost in the habit of using. His
reference to it in the poem before us is as follows:
I cannot identify any other allusion in the whole range of Tennyson’s poetry
that directly relates to experiences of this nature, but in the Memoir his Son
tells us that
in some phases of thought and feeling his idealism tended more decidedly to mysticism. He
wrote: "A kind of waking trance I have frequently had quite up from boyhood when I have been
68
all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times
to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of
individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and
this not a confused state but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of
the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss
of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life! This might be said to be
the state which St. Paul describes, ‘Whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out of the body
I cannot tell!’” He continued: “I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is
utterly beyond words? But in a moment when I come back to my normal state of ‘ sanity ’ I am
ready to fight for meinliebes Ich and hold that it will last for aeons of aeons.” In the same way he
said that there might a more intimate communion than we could dream of between the living
and the dead, at all events for a time.
The injunctions which the Sage ultimately gives to his pupil, described in the
beginning as
sweep over the whole range of occult ethics. I pick out a few lines from a
passage too long to quote in exlenso :
Since the amusing period when Bishop Colenso discovered that the hare
does not chew the cud—as the author of the Pentateuch had supposed—
the “Allegory,” on the banks of the Nile and elsewhere, has been busy
chewing the primitive faith of good people previously content to accept
statements in the Bible as necessarily true, even when somewhat surprising.
Tempers were often lost during the discussions of the Colenso and Darwin
days, but Allegory has proved a more good-humoured beast than he was
thought to be at first, so that critics and the Church can give and take now
with a superficial pretence of being friends in reality. Beyond this, indeed,
the attitudes of mind on both sides are undergoing change. The ribald
scoffer is extinct. The D.D. who still attributes the sufferings of the world to
Eve's conversation with the Serpent hides quietly in cathedral towns.
Science and Theology are on the terms that Talleyrand described as
established between himself and the Host, when he raised his hat to a
Roman Catholic procession: “Nous nous saluons mais nous ne parlons pas.”
And happily these relations are still improving. Science, of the old
materialistic order, has had to endure many shocks of late. A police
magistrate some years ago refused to believe overwhelming testimony in
favour of a spiritualist medium on the ground that it was contrary to the
known laws of Nature. The members of the Royal Society are no longer so
sure of having completely catalogued those laws. And the doubt makes
them even respectful to the theory of miracles. After all, turning water into
wine is child’s play compared with the miracle accomplished whenever
artificial incubation turns an egg into a chicken. People who still disbelieve in
the phenomena of genuine spiritualism— as puzzling as any records in
Christian story—must guard their ignorance very carefully if they wish to
preserve their opinions. Science in all directions is negotiating with the
unseen, and the wise churchman realizes that some concessions on his part
may lead to a settled peace, promising protection for institutions and
substantial interests he sometimes felt to be in danger from the battering
ram. Already there is an entente more or less cordiale between the
72
But questions have arisen that are more embarrassing than the
reconciliation of Scripture with obvious physical facts. And these challenge
statements that cannot take sanctuary in any theory of Divine inspiration.
The language of the Creeds must at all events be ascribed to human
authorship. This is complicated and to some extent obscure, but in criticizing
the Creeds we are not in trouble with any theory of verbal inspiration from
Divine levels. The Revised Version of the Bible—humbly attempting to
correct a few gross errors of translation—has (according to a familiar
anecdote) been treated with faint praise by a sturdy exponent of the early
faith who preferred “God’s own words."
But the words adopted to define Christian belief at Nicaea in a.d. 325 were
simply those of certain bishops, who prevailed over other bishops desirous
of using different words, so we cannot well bring inspiration into the story.
Again, the Nicene Creed was preceded by an extensive “creed literature"—
to use the phrase of an orthodox writer, though it would be scarcely
possible now to identify any writing as the first attempt to put Christian
belief on paper. Nor does the importance of the subject at the present time
turn upon its historical aspect. The question arising is this: Do the Creeds, as
they are put into the mouths of people who attend church at the present
day, express beliefs they can possibly be expected to entertain? The
question may fairly be described as having arisen, because it has been
recently the subject of correspondence in The Times. Canon Glazebrook in a
book called The Faith 0f a Modern Churchman says that the clauses in the
Apostles’ Creed—“Born of the Virgin Mary’’ and “The third day He rose
again from the dead”—can legitimately be interpreted “symbolically.” The
Bishop of Ely, in a letter addressed to Canon Glazebrook and also published
in The Times, refuses to accept this view, and supports his refusal by quoting
a resolution adopted by “the bishops of the whole Anglican Communion
assembled at the Lambeth Conference in 1908,” which runs as follows: “The
Conference in view of tendencies widely shown in writings of the present
73
day hereby places on record its conviction that the historical facts stated in
the Creeds are an essential part of the faith of the Church.” Canon
Glazebrook, in a long letter published in The Times of May 21, does not argue
the question on its merits but quotes Episcopal sayings that deprecate
undue limitations on freedom of thought and inquiry, and attributes to the
Bishop of Oxford a view of the Ascension which he summarizes in this
way: "Our Lord could not, for astronomical reasons of which the disciples
were ignorant, physically ascend into Heaven. But in order give to them a
right conception of His change of state He rose to a moderate height in the
air, and then so veiled Himself behind a cloud that they believed Him to have
gone right up into the vault of the sky." If the Bishop is fairly represented by
this summary the suggestion needs expansion. What was the later course of
events? When our Lord, having deluded His disciples in the manner
described, wanted to come down again, how did He conceal His
reappearance? But while the Bishop’s hypothesis tempts further comment,
this might seem wanting in due reverence for the main idea concerned, so
no more on that subject need be said for the moment.
That idea applies very forcibly to the study of the Creeds. The writers who
reduced them to their present shape may have been using physical plane
language in a metaphorical sense, or they may simply have swallowed
without hesitation statements absurd on their face. But in either case we
have to recognize, in the light of modern occult knowledge, that
somewhere in the back history of the Creeds such knowledge must have
been in the possession of some person or persons who inspired the earliest
writers on the subject. And we reach, with the same confidence, the
conclusion that current versions of the Creeds have been the product of
painfully clumsy editing. Such work could only have been carried out
properly by editors saturated with knowledge of natural conditions unseen
by the multitude, while the actual editors were certainly not of that type. As
a mere first illustration of that idea we may take the few words in the
Apostles’ Creed about the Resurrection and the Ascension: “ The third day
He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven and sitteth on the
right hand of God the Father," etc. For people who can only think of a Being
still in touch with the Earth as of human flesh and bones, the statement
must either be rejected altogether as fabulous, or must lead to conceptions
which, followed out in detail, are deplorably degrading. But directly we
begin to understand how human personalities may function in full
consciousness, after escaping (for a time or for good) from imprisonment in
the physical body—functioning in another available vehicle, the astral
body—we see light shed on alleged phenomena otherwise inexplicable.
Many of us know now that natural law ever provides for the temporary
materialization of the astral form so that it may become apparent to
physical senses. The story of the Ascension thus comes within the range of
comprehensible occurrences, even if we make no attempt to interpret it by
more profound thinking ill another way altogether.
Perhaps to understand its origin properly we must pay attention first to the
ritual adopted in ancient Egypt in connection with initiation in the Mysteries,
ages before the Christian era. The candidate lay down on a great wooden
cross hollowed out so as to support the figure; was bound on it (quite
loosely so as to suggest the voluntary character of the sacrifice) and then
was put (mesmerically) into a deep trance which involved the emergence
from the body of his real consciousness in the astral form. The body was
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then deposited in a sarcophagus, to typify burial. In the astral body the real
entity was confronted with varied experiences educating him in the idea
that he—the real entity—was beyond the reach of injury from fire, water, or
even the subtler perils of the under-world. Then, on the third day the
physical body was brought up into the light of the sunrise, and its “
resurrection ”—the return to it of the real Ego—was accomplished.
Followed out more closely, the Egyptian ceremony included other super-
physical suggestions that may have been in the mind of those who sketched
the earliest draft of the Creed. Before being awakened the candidate had
touch, out of the body, with sublime levels of consciousness, as definitely an
ascent into heaven as the under-world experiences were a descent into hell.
The under-world in question is, of course, only a part, a low subdivision, of
the enormous astral world that surrounds the physical globe, and is growing
familiar in these days to many explorers. Its loftier realms are widely
expanded regions that provide for happy conditions of life, and for happy
conditions as varied as there are variations, amongst people still in life of
aspirations pointing to happiness.
How did it come to pass that allusions to the ritual of the Egyptian Mysteries
found their way into the Christian Creed ? To frame a conjecture we must
begin by realizing that the Egyptian ceremonial was itself an allegory based
on fundamental ideas connected with the science of human evolution—fully
understood by those who invented the ritual. We can see this hinting at the
ordeal of suffering incidental to the physical life, at the possibility of further
suffering in the under-world as the penalty of evil-doing here, at the restful
touch with happier conditions (the ascent into heaven), at the return to
Earth-life after This—the resurrection or more literally the reincarnation of
the Ego. Whoever infused into that early “ creed literature ” the first
suggestion for a formula of belief must have had the Egyptian allegory in his
mind, together with a perfect comprehension of its deep meaning, as also
embodied in the Christian story.
For many reasons besides those that have to do with the illumination of the
Creeds, it is deplorable that the clergy at large do not avail themselves of
growing knowledge concerning the unseen worlds, which might enable
them in turn to become more or less competent spiritual teachers. Some
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few are emerging from the stagnant majority, but for the rest to pose as
experts in dealing with the interests of humanity lying outside those of the
current life; while remaining ignorant of all that is now becoming known
concerning the life hereafter, is like claiming to practise as a doctor without
knowing more about the human body that was known to the barber-
surgeons of the Middle Ages. Even the humblest spiritualist has realized that
life hereafter is accessible to investigation. He may investigate very clumsily
His grasp even of the main idea may be very incomplete, but he knows that
he is in touch with another plane of existence; that death, for all decent
people is an introduction to life of a more promising kind than that which
the physical plane provides for as a rule. The average clergyman, meanwhile,
will not avail himself of the means by which he—with a more cultivated
mind—might not only realize this much, but expand his comprehension of
the ultimate spiritual possibilities awaiting humanity, to an enormous
extent. If it were not so profoundly distressing there would be something
supremely ludicrous in the spectacle of a vast organization, whose raison
d'etre is the general human thirst for guidance in spiritual thought,
resolutely keeping aloof from avenues of research proved by abundant
experience to be richly stored with spiritual wisdom for all who explore
them.
This view of the matter will become more and more impressive when
attention is turned to those passages in the Creeds which relate to the Virgin
Birth. For those who only can think in terms of physical plane matter, the
Virgin Birth seems to strain imagination less than an ascent to heaven by a
tangible flesh-and-blood Christ. Birth of any sort is a mystery. A virgin birth
would be only a little more mysterious than one of the ordinary kind. But the
first thought that suggests a pause for reflection arises from the undeniable
fact that other religions before Christianity claim virgin births for. their
founders. Is this merely due to a pious desire-In each case to dignify the
origin of the founder, or can it bear a more intricate explanation ? This is
certainly the case in reference to the adaptation of the familiar doctrine to
the Christian story. To get at the actual truth hinted at metaphorically by the
virgin birth idea, we must go rather deeply into modern developments of
super-physical science.
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Now when we attempt to see how this view of creation affects the
language of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, we have to keep touch with
another line of thought. The history of the Creeds points to a definite human
origin, but the hints their language embodies point (as already suggested)
to inspiration from a lofty source of wisdom; while it also betrays the
corruption of such hints as successive versions have been prepared. Lofty
wisdom has always lain hidden in the hands of the Elder Brethren of the
race, who well knew that primitive conditions of civilization would not allow
of its general diffusion.
applied in very ancient literature to mo,iter, as due to the action of the First
Logos, or the first creative wave. Only when— after intervening
development—it is touched with the Third Logos (or Holy Ghost) can it
engender the Christ principle. That idea gels twisted, by primitive ignorance
capable only of thought along the lines of the physical senses, into the idea
of a conception by a woman free of the conditions that generally give rise to
conception^ And then in the Nicene Creed we get the gross
misunderstanding developed into the unfortunate expression, “ the only-
begotten Son of God.”
How does this subtle interpretation of the familiar language fit in with the
Gospel story which the Creeds seem to follow ? The literal accuracy of that
story has been challenged by critics who object to miracles, and nothing
that can be called contemporary authentic history affords it any sanction;
but from the occult point of view—that is to say, from the point of view of
knowledge that relies on something much more trustworthy than written
history—the story is contemplated in a deeply reverential spirit, but is not
treated throughout as a mere record of occurrences. The occultist has
resources at his disposal when investigating the past that leave mere literary
research panting in the rear. The principle is intelligible to all who appreciate
the significance of clairvoyance, in some of its suggestive developments.
In the case of the Christ incarnation the Ego who took charge of the body in
the first instance was indeed of no ordinary type. And through later births
Jesus (if we cling to the use of the old name) has ascended to great altitudes
in the Divine Hierarchy. But the Christ, who made use of the body he
surrendered in Palestine, descended for that purpose from a loftier altitude
still.
Now in the light simply of the principle just defined as guiding successive
human evolutions in the Solar System, we see in a flash the underlying idea
caricatured by the language of the Athanasian Creed. Translate first the
phrase “ Whosoever will be saved ” from the blasphemous meaning—saved
from hell-fire—to that clearly intended by the original inspirer: “ Whosoever
would be safe from failure to attain the highest possibilities of his place in
Nature,” must “ believe ” or, in equivalent language, train himself to
understand, certain great subtleties of spiritual truth which frankly for the
physical brain at an early stage of its development are incomprehensible—
i.e., beyond its grasp. Physical, mental, and moral evolution proceed
concurrently. In a world at a far more advanced stage than our Earth has yet
reached, the majority of the Egos (Souls, spiritual entities, call them what
you will) are engendering bodies adapted to express Egos of similar
advancement. What is to be done, by the Powers that guide and control
incarnations, with the Egos that have been so neglectful of their past
opportunities that they are not fit to animate the bodies of the kind that are
being born ? The Powers in question—and for the occultist they are
conscious Beings on a very high level—can only do one thing with them—
pass them on to the scheme of human evolution next in order of
development. In other words, they have as a consequence of their own
neglect incurred the inevitable necessity of beginning again. They are not
destined to perish everlastingly, but they are thrown back in evolution for a
long period. All Oriental writings—and our “ sacred "scriptures including the
Creeds are saturated with the methods of Oriental writers—are prone to
use words like “ eternity ” and “ everlasting ” as indicating any long period
they are talking about, and not as we do—with a specific mathematical idea
behind them.
Vastly more than the difficulty of reconciling the triple aspect of Divinity
with the essential unity thereof is hinted at by the inspirer of the Athanasian
Creed, whose clumsy interpreters have been content to hammer at the one
problem of recognizing trinity in unity. But the elaboration of the teaching
the inspirer sought to convey would only have been possible for writers fully
illuminated with knowledge then “occult " in the strictest sense of the term.
Early theologians were certainly not among such illuminati, and those
responsible for the language of the Creed before us were so ill able to
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discriminate between credibility and absurdity, that they wove into their
work the most loathsomely ridiculous view of the Resurrection that any of
the Creeds suggest. Christ is described as sitting on the right hand of the Father
“ at whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies, and shall give
account of their own works," with life or damnation everlasting as the only
varieties of treatment available for their respective cases. And yet a little
progress in super-physical knowledge, available now for all who wall profit
by current revelation, invests the idea of the Resurrection with p6etical
charm. The astral body, which rises again m every case when a discarded
physical body melts away into its constituent elements, is susceptible of a
wonderfully beautifying change. Leave the evil-doers out of account for the
moment— the very bad cases have to be dealt with for a time in an
appropriate fashion—as regards the vast majority of decently behaved
people, even though life may have dragged on till the physical vehicle is
withered and destitute of all the graces of its youth, the astral body, in
which the Ego passes away from it, soon undergoes a change the exact
reverse of growing old on the physical plane. The old man or woman finds
him or her self restored in appearance to the aspect worn in whatever has
been the best period of the life concluded. All who are in touch with the
astral world—the first super-physical aspect of the Earth— will be familiar
with such changes; which, moreover, in the case of people who have, in the
course of a long life, far transcended the mental and spiritual condition of
what may have been physically their best period, will somehow show by
new expression in that recovered best period the mental and spiritual
attributes imperfectly developed during the Earth-life. It is sad to think that
multitudes of innocent people are allowed by ignorant teachers to grovel
with the foulest misconception of a beautiful natural truth, when they ought
to be instructed in the exquisite charm of the arrangements made by natural
law— in other words by Divine love—for their happiness and welfare
between successive lives (as they ought to be) of strenuous effort on the
physical plane.
And that same idea spreads over the whole area of conventional religious
teaching. Creeds incredible as they stand are matched by theological
doctrines that degrade the popular understanding, even when refined away
to some extent by cultivated thinking, and represent the Divine nature
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change set in which may be slow, like the movement of a glacier, but is as
certain of effect, in the long run, as the glacier flow, and will ultimately turn
the frozen ice into a dancing river, sparkling in the sunshine.
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The “Palace of Art” was replete with interest and charm for its mistress up
to a certain stage in her spiritual evolution; but a time came when she found
herself—though still in its luxurious magnificence—
An emotion loftier than the thirst for pleasure constrained her to break
away from its limitations, and to “ purge her guilt ” in a wider atmosphere of
sympathy with her kind.
By far the most important discoveries which reward the efforts of those
who escape from the imprisonment of the senses have to do with the
definite possibilities of spiritual progress associated with enlightenment that
may be attained through new channels of perception. But the laws and
phenomena of Nature are not really divided by the hard-and-fast frontiers
that sense-perceptions seem to define. Grant anyone amongst us certain
new senses, and he will not merely be enabled to perceive new regions of
existence with appropriate scenery and decorations, brimming over with life
of many kinds, but will find the familiar features of the life around us all—
those of the physical plane—much more full of meaning than they seemed
to be previously. I will illustrate this statement by describing a scientific
research carried on within the last few years by means of super-physical
senses, and happily involving something like a self-contained proof of its
conclusions.
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through the series of the so-called chemical elements. Meanwhile the minor
atoms claimed attention. They were apparently the really ultimate form of
physical matter—atoms of ether, themselves below the limits of sense-
perception. Only when in combined masses—if the expression can be used
in reference to masses so minute as the atoms of the chemical elements —
do they come within those limits. Thus incidentally the research I am
describing brought out a new discovery. The etheric atoms do enter into
combination in numbers less than 18, but then they do not constitute any
known physical bodies. They are molecular varieties of ether, the atomic
ether being the kind that fills all space, the molecular ethers being definitely
aggregated around the planets.
So far the research was carried out in the year 1895, and happily the results,
including all that I have described above, were published at the time and are
available for reference. Six years later Mme. Curie discovered radium, and its
entrance on the scene revolutionized chemical science in more ways than
one. Study of the cathode ray had already introduced us all to the “ electron
” as an entity, but radium introduced us to the idea that physical matter
consisted of electrons, and that transmutation was a possibility in nature,
thus vindicating the alchemical theory of the Middle Ages which nineteenth-
century science had ridiculed. Inquiry of the ordinary kind was now directed
to the questions, what is an electron? and how many enter into the lightest
known atom —that of hydrogen ? The clairvoyant research above described
had answered both of these questions in advance, but was not thought
worthy of notice by scientists of the orthodox type. The electron came to be
treated as an atom of electricity by some scientific leaders, though to others
that view was unacceptable. Electricity is a force, not a form of matter. To
speak of an atom of electricity is like speaking of an atom of gravitation, and
that would be transparently ridiculous. Occult research had shown from the
beginning that the electron, though itself an atom of ether, carried a
definite unit charge of electricity. Orthodox opinions as to the number of
electrons in an atom of hydrogen vary within very wide limits. Some give us
figures from 1 to 5 ; some others guess by hundreds, and 700 is rather a
favourite estimate. The few of us who trusted the clairvoyant research felt
sure the real number was 18. Then in a few years came the proof of this, a
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The research of 1895 was only resumed several years later by my clairvoyant
friend, assisted then by another qualified observer. The task they undertook
was much more elaborate than the former. Its purpose was to ascertain by
actual counting the number of etheric atoms entering into the composition
of a large number of chemical elements, also to depict the grouping of the
etheric atoms. The complexity of the grouping was bewildering. Gold, for
instance, consists of three combined groups, an exact description of which,
unless illuminated by diagrams, would be hardly intelligible. The important
idea to realize is that the counting could only be effected by degrees, the
etheric atoms in each group reckoned up separately with the assistance of a
secretary who wrote down the figures as they were called out, and only
added them up after the protracted observations were complete. The total
was 3,546. Then came the interesting question—what figure would that
yield divided by 18 ? The answer is 197. The recognized atomic weight of gold
is 19574. The deeply interesting principle was vindicated and, as the
protracted research went on, over fifty of the recognized chemical elements
were examined, and in all cases the same principle was found to be
operative. I have a table before me as I write, showing the figures reached in
57 observations of elements commonplace and rare; and the result is
nothing less than a demonstration of the accuracy of the original
observation showing the atom of hydrogen to consist of 18 etheric atoms.
The notion that the counting can in any way have been made to fit the
theory is dissipated by the complication of the work. Neither the observer
nor the secretary could have foreseen how the figures given and recorded
by degrees would fit in with the theory when added up. Eight of the
observed elements have over 3,000 atoms each; eight more have over
2,000. And an interesting hint supporting the trustworthiness of the
research is due to the fact that the observers found in the atmosphere two
molecules that could not be identified with any known element. Their
electric atoms numbered respectively 54 and 402, yielding the atomic
weights 3 and 22^33. Now in the course of Sir J. J. Thomson’s research (by
ingenious electrical methods) into the vagaries of the electron, he found
reason to believe and to announce that there must be two unknown
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elements with atomic weights of (about) 3 and 22. He little realized that the
announcement vindicated a previous announcement to the same effect
giving similar results attained by clairvoyant research.
And yet, striking as it is, it is among the least important of the results
attained by human intelligence when once that breaks free from
imprisonment in the physical senses. The light shed on the gradual
development of the human race by clairvoyant research illuminates
evolution, and the magnitude of the design, to an extent that renders the
earliest Egyptian and Chaldean records modern history by comparison.
Besides being ultra-microscopic, clairvoyance of the highest order is
retrospective almost to infinity. There is no mystery in the matter as treated
from one point of view. The duly qualified clairvoyant can get into conscious
touch with the Memory of Nature, which is infinite in its range. That is a
great mystery, no doubt, only to be interpreted by very lofty wisdom; but
without reaching to such levels the clairvoyant who has but just broken out
of prison can share in the universal memory to a certain extent. One of the
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rays exist in Nature, and that those who may be described as Masters of
Wisdom and Knowledge exist also.
The limitations of sense, besides obscuring the past, veil the prospects of
the future. Once they are broken through, the Divine plan of human
evolution stretches out before us on a scale of startling magnificence.
Clairvoyance of the higher order introduces us, as already explained, to
those advanced leaders of our race described above as Masters of Wisdom
and Knowledge. We are enabled to recognize them as linking ordinary
humanity with the Divine Hierarchy. This extends upwards to infinity, but we
touch a sublime truth in realizing that on what may be called (though only
by comparison) its lower levels, it is recruited from ordinary humanity. The
prettiest among conventional conceptions of the after-life show us no more
than happy conditions of superphysical existence, dignified no doubt by the
actual recognition of Divinity. But such beatitude seems, regarded by
ordinary religious teaching, as a finality. Clearer vision shows the spiritual
future as infinitely progressive, and the sublime conditions attained by
Masters of Wisdom merely a stage of progress: a stage which the majority
of the human race ought to attain in the long run, though the length of that
run is all but beyond the reach of imagination. As some have attained it
already, many more may do so in the future, greatly in advance of its
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Emerging from the entirely primitive or childish view of the Sun and Moon
and starry heavens as designed merely to light up the earth, commonplace
modern speculation assigns inhabitants to some, at all events, of the
planets. And the stars are known to Astronomy as Suns, probably with
families of planets in each case. That knowledge can be reached by simple
intelligence working with the results of observation carried on within the
limits of normal sense-perception. The methods of observation available for
the advanced leaders of our race put them in touch with a new kind of
astronomy that may be called “ Vital," as distinguished from the mechanical
astronomy which deals only with magnitude and motion. Mechanical
astronomy is as different from the Vital as a mere geography book, just
defining the boundaries of the various countries, would differ from
exhaustive accounts of the people inhabiting each, their manners, customs,
arts and sciences, their political organizations and their sociology. Physical
observation has shown that Mars must be inhabited by intelligent and
competent beings, their huge artificial works proving this—in spite of
tenacious incredulity clinging in the case of a few astronomers to the idea
that the Lowell’s Canals are the offspring of chance. Vital Astronomy
enables us to understand that the inhabitants of Mars are linked in evolution
with ourselves, the inhabitants of this Earth, but at an earlier stage of
progress. The various planets of the Solar System are not disconnected from
one another in their design and destinies, as they seem disconnected in
space. On higher planes of manifestation—regions of which the imprisoning
senses give us no hint—the immortal units of humanity, the conscious Egos,
migrate at stupendous intervals of time from some globes to some others.
The plan in detail is much more elaborate than this rough sketch would
suggest, but it has the intellectual charm of showing the whole system to be
one coherent organism. The planet Mercury is also blended as regards its
vital purpose with the human life of the Earth, while already the human life
of the planet Venus has attained to far loftier conditions than we here have
reached as yet—is, in fact, a senior evolution as compared with our own,
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and one if, which humanity is set entirely free from the limitations of the
physical senses. If anyone mentally still imprisoned in these objects to this
statement on the ground that proximity to the Sun must make Venus and
Mercury very hot, the answer is that while Nature has adapted flesh and
blood to suit (with more or less success) the climatic conditions of the Earth,
it is quite equal to the task of providing vehicles of consciousness for
climates above our boiling-point, that can breathe comfortably in an
atmosphere at the temperature of super-heated steam. Chemistry has still
some discoveries to make, and the composition of liquids that provide
Mercury, for instance, with lakes and rivers defying evaporation at, say,
3003 F. would be very interesting if it could be ascertained. But less so after
all than the contemplation, possible for our prison-breakers, of the
delightful conditions of harmony and peace which are the keynotes of
existence on Mercury, and in a greater degree still on Venus.
This, moreover, will enable anyone who wishes to push the enquiry farther
to gather some information as to the way in which the five senses may be
reinforced by the development of new ones. In an imperfectly developed
condition there are two organs in the human brain which, when fully
matured, will respond to the higher vibrations of certain media in which we
are unconsciously immersed, and convey impressions to the brain as vivid as
those conveyed by the eye when dealing with objects normally visible.
These organs are the Pineal Gland and the Pituitary body. In some few cases
they are already active; in some others they might be cultivated into activity;
in the vast majority of cases they are hopelessly incapable of such
development during the current life of the Ego concerned. Their
development in the next physical life depends on the extent to which, in the
current life, the person in question devotes thought, study, and effort to
super-physical aspiration, for the laws governing the growth of form
recognize thought and effort as potent forces contributing to the result.
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Nor must it be imagined that the period spent in prison is wasted time.
Physical life is, indeed, subject to limitations trying to the patience of those
who know something about the infinite realities that lie beyond, but the law
of all progress defines the physical plane as the region of Beginnings. No
one word precisely fits the idea; nor does it apply to the beginnings of Form.
Divine Ideation, Creative Thought, takes its rise on much higher planes, but
culminates on the Physical. There, individualized consciousness, human
Egos—working in forms completed from one point of view, though very far
from perfection as contemplated from another—can start on an upward
journey. From that time on, their progress depends on themselves. They are
launched on the upward arc of evolution and all the limitations accumulated
during the downward arc fall away, or rather are shaken off as the onward
progress is accomplished. The work of shaking them off is difficult in the
beginning. Most people are imperfectly aware of the disabilities under
which they labour. The senses have given them a rich and apparently ever-
growing store of knowledge and power. They are—the foremost of them—
proud and content—within their Palace. The multitude have not yet even
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risen to the appreciation of its opulent resources. None the less, the
Beginning, for every single Ego of the countless millions, must be made from
the physical point of departure. And on the physical plane—the prison of,
my favourite metaphor—the countless millions will accumulate and remain
until they make it. In that fact lies the clue to the course that has been
pursued in recent years by agents of the Divine Hierarchy who have guided
the current outburst of information relating to the higher destinies available
for mankind, information which constitutes a feature of ever-increasing
importance in modern civilization. The steps taken were impossible at a
former time. Bigotry dominated the mental atmosphere. Ignorant power
stamped upon all manifestations of independent thought. It was only when
freedom had “ broadened slowly down from precedent to precedent ” that
a place was found among men for messengers from a loftier world. Now the
message has been poured forth through many channels. In varying forms of
expression it is the same in all cases. Look beyond the perishable interests of
transient life in the physical body. Comprehend the scheme of infinite
magnificence to which you belong. Get the clear view now attainable of the
whole Divine programme. Make the beginning that every human creature
must make soon or late, and the results are bound to transcend even the
most glowing anticipation.
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The materialist who regards human life as beginning in the cradle and
ending in the grave is at all events consistent, though he insults Divine
intelligence. But people who shrink from believing in final extinction, and
nevertheless regard each new life as a fresh beginning insult human
understanding. They ask us, in other words, to accept the idea of a stick with
only one end. We can think of a stick with no ends at all, or anyhow can talk
of it as we talk of Eternity, but to be on speaking terms with Infinitude we
must avoid the acquaintance of futurities that have no past. Some
phenomena—a bonfire, for instance—may begin and cease to be, but
human immortality is an idea that claims in the forward direction to share
the attributes of Duration, and cannot do without them in the other.
The word “ life ” needs to be handled with care. If people go on living after
their bodies are buried or burned, their presence on the physical plane is
merely an episode in their lives. If these continue they must, under other
conditions, have been going on before on other planes. Seventy or eighty
years of activity in the physical body constitute part of a life. Its continuance
has ceased to be a matter of guesswork for the millions concerned with the
simple variety of occult research described as Spiritualism, and the current
interest in that research is rapidly rendering the current contempt for it in
most newspapers an illustration of their patient efforts to represent the
greatest stupidity of the greatest number. A deeper research than that
content with merely proving that people are still alive after they are “ dead ”
introduces us to the logical conclusion that they were alive before they were
born, and thus, by stages, to the inevitable conclusion that consciousness
functioning sometimes on one plane of Nature, sometimes on another, is
never “ to one engine bound,” but always cycles round and round. In hard
scientific language this conclusion brings us up against the doctrine of
Reincarnation, which, sharing the fate of many others, is made to seem an
offence to lofty aspiration by getting itself profoundly misunderstood.
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the future life include a vague expectation that infinite spiritual progress is
possible after death down here. So it is, but the permanent Ego is not
spoon-fed with higher knowledge unless he has engendered a desire for it in
his working period on the physical plane. If he has not done this Nature
gives him such blissful rest on higher levels of consciousness as he may be
entitled to by the use he has made of his physical opportunities, and then
another set of opportunities in the shape of renewed physical life. Of
course, there are other purposes to be served by that renewed life to be
discussed later on, but for the moment, in reference to the first steps in our
comprehension of loftier destinies, Reincarnation may be thought of as the
system or method adopted by Nature for teaching the law of Reincarnation.
At earlier stages of human progress the young Ego has not begun to
concern itself with the study of natural law—is merely gathering, life after
life, preliminary experience of pleasure and pain, of right and wrong, of
emotion and desire and their consequences. Does the use of the word “
young ” in this sense seem to involve the fallacy of assigning a beginning to
that which has no end ? There is no real inconsistency in the language used.
The essence of the young Ego has emerged from infinite Divine life, but at
one period has crystallized as a centre of consciousness within the Divine
life, and in conformity with laws coming to be understood develops
expanded capacity by degrees. Gradually and slowly this result is
accomplished.
Man as yet is being made and ere the crowning Age of ages,
Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape ?
But his consciousness may be traced back through animal and vegetable
forms, through solar systems and nebulae to past infinitudes of
manifestation.
Perhaps a simpler answer than has been given above might more easily
meet the objection of spiritualists who say that their spirit friends do not
know anything of Reincarnation. Some of them do ! But the fact that some
of them deny it is quite intelligible when we comprehend their limitations,
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and unimportant. For most of us belief in the rotundity of the Earth is not
shaken by the denial of a few who still believe it to be flat.
When disbelief in the law of Reincarnation arises from dislike for the idea,
one may first of all suggest that people who deeply dislike the law which
brings trouble on those who pick other people’s pockets do not by such
dislike divert its course. But in truth, people only dislike the idea for want of
understanding it. They do not realize, for one thing, that the force which
gives rise to Reincarnation in each individual case is a desire on the part of
the Ego to reincarnate. If no such desire were generated, on the plane-of
the Ego, after the personal life of the entity in question has been fully
enjoyed or worked out in the Astral world, and then has merged itself in the
Ego on a higher plane, Reincarnation would not take place; but the
hypothesis for the occultist is unthinkable. The desire for fresh experience is
as inevitably engendered in the Ego when all so far gathered has been
absorbed, as the desire for fresh food is engendered during physical life in
the body, when previous supplies have been finally disposed of. This state of
things invests the familiar protest against having to come back to this vale
of tears with a very ludicrous aspect. Even after eating too much and being
for the moment disinclined for more food, people in general know that at
some future time they will be hungry again; but, if while suffering from
repletion they declared that for ever and ever they would detest food, the
declaration would be unconvincing. The advanced Ego knows that he must
come back to life on Earth in order eventually to get on. Certainly, by some,
a god-like stage is reached when an Ego may have risen above the laws
affecting ordinary humanity, but long before then his lives in connection
with the Earth will have included complete comprehension of all such laws.
People who criticize them the basis of profound ignorance of the way they
work have certainly not attained the condition which might enable them to
be a law unto themselves.
In view of what has just been said it is hardly necessary to deal seriously with
the self-sufficient foolishness of people who contend that, because they do
not remember any former life, no one has lived formerly. Many people do
remember, as one result of awakening faculties not yet common to all, and
the fact that the vast majority do not remember is easily accounted for. The
human race, as a whole, is not far enough advanced to work with the senses
that have been brought into activity by a few pioneers of progress. The
cultured minority of civilized countries, even, is little more than half-way on
along the course marked out for the millions of years of human activity,
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only one life, we could never get to the summit of our possible destiny.
Certainly there are aspects of progress at variance apparently with the
rigidity of the statement above about the necessity of providing for it by
work down here. At given stages of progress we must be in touch with
super-physical planes, but the aspiration to get into touch with them must
have begun here in the first instance. Thus the importance of the physical
life and its opportunities cannot be overrated, its frequent renewal is an
absolute necessity— deeply embedded, so to speak, in the Divine
programme of human evolution.
For a few (relatively), very far on, special arrangements come into play.
Dealing first with the enormous majority, including the savage and civilized
races, the course of rebirth is guided—not by blind laws inherent in matter,
but by the will of Beings on an immensely high level of Divine dignity,
thought of by occult students as the Lords of Karma. So far as we know
their collective jurisdiction extends over the whole Universe. As regards this
world we know of four such Beings, each, of course, presiding over an
immense hierarchy of agents. One is concerned merely — or especially —
with the savage races; another with the rank and file of civilization; another
with the cultured minority: these present Karmic problems of deeper
intricacy than are usual with the less evolved majority. The fourth is
concerned with the Karma of Nations, but that is a huge subject by itself
which need not claim attention for the moment.
the child, at fourteen, begin to be as regards its astral nature the personality
of the former life over again, and not until a third septenary period has
passed is it infused with the mentality of the former life. Then the Ego has
been reincarnated, except for what remains on higher spiritual levels as the
Higher Self. For, remember, we are now dealing with the case of an entity so
far advanced as necessarily to have developed through many former lives a
complicated account with Karma. There are good and evil forces awaiting
operation. Capacities of varied kinds need expression. It may not be possible
for the directing Powers to find an incarnation in which all these forces can
operate simultaneously. Successive lives, surrounded with very different
circumstances, may be required to work out the whole1 intricate problem.
Rut the great Powers of Nature are very patient, and have limitless time at
their disposal. A large draft upon those resources must be made when, in
addition to the intricate claims of an advanced Ego’s individual Karma, his
love ties and hostile relationships with other Egos have to be provided for.
But the manner in which Nature—the living mechanism of Divine Will—
exhibits a power of combining everything with everything else, is for a
thoughtful observer the most dazzling of her marvellous attributes.
The familiar phenomena of heredity illustrate that last remark. When a child
growing up exhibits characteristics resembling those of parents or
ancestors, he is sometimes regarded as supporting the idea that he is
mentally and morally, as well as physically, the product of his parentage—
new soul. In reality the Powers guiding his Incarnation have put him into a
family the physical heredity of which will provide him with a body capable of
giving expression to his individual characteristics. They have been able to
combine that provision with a life-destiny in which his Karma can be
properly worked out.
Master himself into his next incarnation. By the hypothesis in such a case
there has not necessarily been any exhaustion of the forces providing for
long terms of happy rest on the Astral and Manasic planes. The Disciple is
willing to forgo such spiritual enjoyments for the sake of getting on,
returning sooner than he is obliged to the working condition of physical
existence. The Master finds an appropriate opportunity for his rebirth in a
family the circumstances of which will fit him all round, provide him by its
physical heredity with a brain qualified to express his intellectual or artistic
developments, and at the same time involve him in conditions favourable to
his further spiritual progress. And the Disciple is definitely consulted in
regard to the choice. Probably two or three possible incarnations are taken
into consideration, and the Disciple, we may be sure, in such cases,
is not guided in his choice by what a mere worldly observer would regard as
the relatively attractive prospect offered by such alternatives. Luxury,
comfort even, in physical life is regarded from the point of view at which the
Disciple is standing, in consultation with his Master, as simply of no account.
The question is—which proposed life will be best calculated to promote real
spiritual progress ? Cases are known in which humble and arduous
incarnations have been chosen in preference to others of ease and far
superior social station.
The method of reincarnation in such cases will follow the ordinary routine in
one way. The permanent atoms will be guided to their destination in the
mother and the growing child, but the former personality is entirely
complete all the time, on the Astral plane, looking on and perhaps being
able to some extent to influence the parents in the treatment of the child,
who will most likely exhibit psychic characteristics of an unusual order—
though for various reasons this is not a matter of certainty. Eventually, by
the* time the "child has attained the age of fourteen or a little more, and
has grown a new astral body Identified in appearance with the new physical
body, the Astral of his former personality will be discarded and the new life
will fairly begin, though it will not till later on be infused with\the intellectual
attributes of the Ego.
The splendid development of the Theosophical Society all over the world
has naturally given rise to an eager desire on the part of earnest
Theosophists for detailed information concerning those “ Elder Brethren ”
of Humanity whom we commonly speak of as “ The Masters.” At first, in the
imagination of most of us, they were very mysterious entities. The Master “
K. H.,” of whom I was enabled to speak in the earliest books that gave the
world a glimpse of “ the White Lodge ” (to use a conveniently
comprehensive expression), remained for a long time the only one of Its
glorious Fraternity whose personality was in any way distinct in our
thoughts.
Then we came to know about the Master “ M,” whose name remained
partially disguised by the initial. But some of us have had touch, during the
thirty-odd years that have elapsed since the Theosophical Society took root
as a permanent organization, with many others of the White Lodge, and,
though some reserve on the subject still seems desirable, it is thought
equally desirable in another direction that earnest members of the T. S.
should be able to form a clearer mental conception of the Master
condition—and of the still higher levels of initiation beyond—than is
provided for in current theosophical literature. I feel sure, moreover, that
the Masters Themselves wish to be better understood in the Society they
originated than was generally possible at first. My present purpose,
therefore, is to deal with the subject more freely than has hitherto been
usual, and to show how intimately the activities of the White Lodge are
blended with the affairs of the world; how the Masters are much more
numerous than was at first supposed, and how They specialize in dealing
with the various departments of human life, while working together in
absolute harmony of purpose; how Their Divine aspect—as we regard Them
from our point of view—is blended with an intensely human aspect as They
deal with us individually, and how They, in turn, are guided in Their action by
the still loftier Will above.
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The Master level of initiation is a fairly definite stage on the path of spiritual
progress, but is in no sense a halting place. The next great stage (initiations
beyond common comprehension intervening) is that of the “ Fathers,” as
they are called (or by an equivalent term in another tongue). And I am
assured, though the idea is utterly beyond incarnate understanding, that the
interval, as representing power, knowledge, and cosmic experience,
between the condition of the Master and that of the Father is not less than
that between an ordinary cultured man of our race and the Master. Within
recent years there have been many ascents from the Master to the Father
level, but in no way does any such ascent cut off the new Father from the
disciple’s activities and personal attachments of Himself when in the Master
condition. From our point of view He is the Master still, so in thinking of
Those we may know we need not be curious concerning Their absolute rank
in the Mighty Hierarchy.
A simple fact not generally known throughout the Society is this: there is a
Master definitely identified with, or, in charge of, every great country or
nationality in the world. Thus I have had some touch with an English, a
Scotch, and an Irish Master; also with an American Master, indeed, with
more than one specializing in the Guardianship of the United States. I know
also of an Italian and a French Master, and in all such cases the Master in
question, though He may have held that rank for untold ages, and may have
used many physical bodies in the past, takes incarnation in a body belonging
to the nation or race over which He undertakes to preside. He generally
resides at the capital of that State, and this custom disposes of an absurd
notion, prevalent among Theosophists at one time when the Master
condition was very imperfectly understood, to the effect that no “ adept ”
could endure the evil magnetism of great cities. In some cases—and we
happened to hear of them first—certain Masters have found it convenient,
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Obviously, by the laws governing the occult world, national Masters cannot
let Themselves be known to ordinary people round Them for what They
really are. It is perfectly hopeless for anyone not of their own order to try
and identify Them.
During happier periods of the past there was a German Master, or more
than one, but since Satan has monopolized spiritual influence in Germany,
the White Lodge Masters have had to withdraw from that country. The
resulting condition of things could only be elucidated by a long collateral
story into which I have no time to diverge.
One Master, whose work lies chiefly in America, has been especially active in
helping to guard the transport ships carrying United States troops to France,
from torpedo attacks on the way. The black and white forces on the higher
planes are each, all the time, trying to bend physical forces to their own
ends, and the way in which, throughout this war, the powers of the whole
White Lodge have been strained in resisting the Satanic attack, is ill
understood as yet by the humanity that owes its escape from the fatal
disaster to that tireless protection. The Master to whom I have just been
referring has been identified with the American continent ever since it was
part of the still greater continent of Atlantis. He is linked, in a very curious
way, with the Atlantean period. And this leads me to speak on one condition
associated with Mastership that seems at first very bewildering. The physical
bodies of the Masters often attain to extraordinary ages, to be counted by
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During our youth we are all under the influence of a force science has not
yet catalogued, which makes for growth and improvement. When we are
grown up it continues in operation for a time, keeping the body in good
working order. Then, in the natural course of life at this stage of evolution,
that force ceases to affect us. Old age sets in, etc., etc. The
Masters understand that force, among Their own intellectual acquirements,
and can turn it on or off at will. As long as it is turned on Their bodies do not
show any sign of age. They may discard one body and take another
sometimes for reasons connected with Their work, but They are not under
any natural obligations to do so.
It is well for ordinary humanity that they do not know how to perpetuate
physical life. At this stage of our development our bodies are not worth
perpetuation, while, if we make the best good use of them for about the
usual time, the Karmic law will give us better ones for our next physical lives.
Masters not definitely linked with particular nations may range the world at
large, dealing with its needs as they fall within the scope of Their speciality-
Thus, one Master, who has been so freely spoken of that it would be
affectation to avoid using His name—the Count St. Germain—has been busy
in Russia ever since the revolution broke out, trying to mitigate its hideous
development—with poor success hitherto, I think He would be first to
admit. It is a mistake to suppose that He has only attained the Master level
in this life. I believe He has been on that level for ages gone by, but He has
been taking partial incarnation for the past few centuries. These have been
traced back through the latest—Francis Bacon —to various personalities
distinguished during the Middle Ages. The mystery is a little beyond
common comprehension, but that series of lives, though certainly a
continuous series, never absorbed more than a part of the great Spiritual
Master in the background. I am assured that there was about a third of Him
in Francis Bacon—a very magnificent incarnation all the same. Many Masters
work in this way. Indeed, on a level a little below that of a Master, the
arrangement is practicable. And a Master, if He sees fit, can run, so to speak,
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more than one body at the same time. This makes the identification of any
particular Master on the physical plane a matter of extreme difficulty.
This is not the only story of the kind I could quote, but it ought to be enough
to show the utter selflessness (“unselfish” is an inadequate word) that is
one of the sublime attributes of the Master condition. For me, I have always
regarded the arena incident as constituting the most wonderful lesson in
occult ethics I have ever received.
which Theosophy was planned to be the natural sequel. In view of this state
of things, the mutual antagonism on this plane of Spiritualism and
Theosophy is pitiably ludicrous. Spiritualists, refusing to believe in the
Masters and Their teachings, are fighting against their own illustrious Chief.
Theosophists, scoffing at Spiritualism, are insulting the wise policy of the
White Lodge they profess to revere !
Certain members of the Great White Lodge, on a very high level, are
concerned with the progress of the world in connection with science,
literature, and art. The scientific “ Master ” (a higher designation would be
more suitable) is the channel through Whom all new discovery and invention
(of dignified kind) naturally flows. He inspires discovery at the appropriate
times. In the whole Divine programme great blocks of natural knowledge
are marked out for dissemination on the physical plane at definite periods.
Discovery is never allowed to outrun these Divine limitations. It may
overtake them, for the Master A. (let us call Him) does not use men of
science as automata or telephones. He watches the drift of their researches,
may, indeed, prompt these, and then implants in some receptive mind a new
idea along that line of investigation. That does not in the least detract from
the merit of the incarnate discoverer. He could never have picked up the
inspiration unless he had developed his Ego capacity to the required degree
of perfection.
I know less about the way in which the artistic Masters work, and will not
attempt to describe it.
I have been in touch with Them, never more closely than now. But at the
best on this plane of consciousness we can only get a feeble grasp of some
of the features of the White Lodge life. In its higher aspects the mere
physical brain cannot deal with its conditions.
If the only purpose that the Masters had in view, when beginning to give
some of us “ instruction ” in certain occult mysteries, had been our
instruction, in the literal sense of the word, their method would undeniably
have been open to criticism. They set us no lessons to learn; they merely
indicated a willingness to answer questions if these did not seek information
of a ki.id They were forbidden to disclose. If we imagine that system
adopted in physical plane schools a boy desirous of learning arithmetic
would fare as follows : “ What do you want to know ?” the master would
ask. The boy, utterly ignorant of where to begin, might say, “ I have seen a
queer mark in arithmetic books. Looks like a V with a line at one end. What
does it mean ?” The master would say, “ That is the sign of a square root, and
it means the figure which multiplied by itself would give the figure you see.”
The boy might put away that piece of information for future use, but
ignorant, so far, of multiplication, would not all at once be much wiser.
Without being a gross caricature of the facts that is the way we—for in the
beginning I worked with a friend who afterwards dropped out of the
Theosophical movement—obtained the instruction that ultimately led to
the production of Esoteric Buddhism. On the face of things, looking back, it
really does seem absurd. We felt that we were in close touch with almost
infinite wisdom and knowledge, and we plunged into some of the most
enormous problems of human evolution. “ How did humanity originate ?”
(We got a clue to the existence of other worlds besides this.) “ What other
worlds ?” (We got a clue to the planetary chain.) We asked innumerable
questions about it. We wanted to know how to become a Master. Got very
little satisfaction along that line of inquiry. So on, and so on. Really, looking
back, I am surprised I did not make a worse hash of the teaching than my
earliest book is responsible for. Why was all this thus ?
It really did not matter at first whether people had correct or incorrect
notions about planetary chains, manvantaras, root races, and their periods;
of elemental nature, or the condition of the world in earlier rounds. It was
important that the}*- should get something like a clear idea of the way in
which the Divine Hierarchy—represented for us by our Elder Brethren,
whom we now call the Masters— brooded always over the world's welfare,
and held out Their hands to all worthy aspirants eager, or capable of
growing eager, to join that splendid fraternity.
Why did that first book, Esoteric Buddhism, start the Theosophical
movement in the Western world as, in effect, it did ? Because it made people
think of the Masters, and gave Them an opportunity of thinking back, thus
pouring an extremely important influence into the world. A deep occult
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truth underlies that idea. No one gets direct personal notice or guidance
from the Masters unless he looks up to Them consciously in search of it, in
the first instance. He cannot do this unless he knows something about them
to guide his thoughts. The earliest book gave multitudes a hint of Their
existence; made the readers think of the Masters, however vaguely. This
gave them Their opportunity. They shed back influences upon those who
thought of Them. Few of us have, even now, more than a very imperfect
conception of thought as a power. The thoughts that flew back and forward
among readers of the earlier books gave rise to the Theosophical Society. A
long time elapsed before the Higher Powers felt sure that it would last.
Many people imagine that it was founded in 1875. Look back to the first
volume of Isis Unveiled (p. 12 of the Introduction), and reconsider that
impression. It was not until nearly ten years later that the Society began to
excite real interest in the Western world, and nearly another ten years
elapsed before it was so firmly rooted that the Masters could regard it as an
accomplished fact. In the interval between the early eighties and the early
nineties it went through vicissitudes that almost killed it outright, but it
survived them, and its life became assured.
A great deal of important teaching came through during the latter end of
the critical period before the restrictions above referred to were altogether
swept away. The years from 1885 to about 1902 were remarkable years in
connection with instruction from the Masters. The early London Lodge
included during those years a good many earnest and qualified students,
among them Mr. Leadbeater and Mrs. Besant. And I had the advantage of
touch with my own Master through an appropriate channel. The long series
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This light sketch of the history of our theosophical education will, perhaps,
help to make some embarrassments intelligible. Few students can be in
constant touch with every fragment of theosophical information that finds
its way into print, and though some of us are keenly interested in Occult
Science— knowledge, that is to say, of super-physical Nature and its
marvellous machinery of law—that interest is by no means felt with the
same intensity by all. The Masters, in my opinion, would be the last people
to wish that it should be the main object of pursuit for members of the
Society in general.
And yet that cannot be attained without some appreciation of the great
Divine scheme of which we are a part.
It is desirable that all should absorb as much as they conveniently can of the
magnificent Occult Science that explains our place in Nature and the
possibilities of our future growth. Broad, vague impressions on these
subjects are, however, enough to give colour and meaning, so to speak, to
efforts we may all make toward living up to the ethical teachings from the
Master level, the comprehension of which puts no strain on even the most
humble estimate we can form of our intellectual capacity.
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First I propose to deal with the great mystery of Consciousness, one which
at the first glance seems the most unfathomable of any we have to study;
then to set forth, in fuller detail than has hitherto been found possible, the
actual present condition of human life on the planetary chain to which we
belong, and thirdly, to show how our comprehension of the realm
immediately in touch with the physical life, though just beyond its
boundaries, the Astral world, has been developed to an extent that we
never attempted to reach when Theosophical study thirty-five years ago
was mainly directed towards still wider horizons.
When Darwin first started the evolutionary theory, some of us were inclined
to regard him as having made the mistake of concerning himself with
vehicles alone, ignoring the concurrent evolution of intellectual and spiritual
capacity. Without, perhaps, fully realizing the magnitude of his own
achievement, he was embracing in his view of nature both the physical and
super-physical processes of evolution. Although by profound study the
process can be comprehended even at the level of its obscure beginnings,
the principle is better grasped if we confine our attention to the
development of consciousness in the human being. By what law is the
gradual improvement of the vehicle as time goes on provided for ? Putting
the answer in a brief phrase, susceptible of further development in detail,
the law is that when consciousness within any given vehicle exerts itself to
the utmost, or in other words, makes the best use of the vehicle in which it
finds itself at any given time, the law—really a part of the great aggregation
of Karmic laws—proceeds to invest that volume of consciousness, that Ego,
with a better vehicle for its next physical manifestation.
I must here quote a line or two from Tennyson, whose poetry, as we grow
to appreciate it, is saturated with occult knowledge. He writes in one
fragment to be found in almost the last published volume of his works:—
In these compact lines we have the whole idea I want to convey suggested,
if not elaborate^ expressed. “ Make it as clean as you can " means, of
course, make the best use of it, and establish a Karmic claim on an improved
house or vehicle. We see the system working as we study the principles of
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I will venture on a subtle illustration of this idea. Thinkers who rather resent
than aspire to clearly defined knowledge concerning the spiritual aspect of
their own nature, are often fond of treating Christ as a state of
consciousness. “ The awakening of the Christ within us,” or some such
vague interpretation of the idea, is held preferable to any specific
knowledge concerning the levels in the Divine Hierarchy at which we find
definitely in manifestation a Being from whom the Christ Principle actually
emanates. Attached as many thinkers are to the cloudiness of mysticism, the
recognition of such a specific Being seems to them to degrade the idea, and
yet with the knowledge concerning the Divine Hierarchy that has been in
Theosophical possession almost since the beginning, we know that there is
a specific Being at a certain level within the Divine Hierarchy of the Solar
System, to whom we may definitely look up as the conscious source of all
spiritual influence. This clear knowledge, far from degrading the aspiration
in each individual Ego to comprehend spirituality, is just as superior to the
state of mind with which the mystic is content, as the landscape illuminated
by sunshine is superior to the dim suggestion of partial obscurity.
"Undoubtedly in all research or teaching connected with spiritual truth
mysteries still lie beyond any that are being by degrees cleared up—
stretching beyond these to all Infinity; but the more our knowledge is
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The first idea we had about the progress of life on planetary chains was,
looking back upon it, all we could be expected to understand at the first
blush* It was a huge expansion of the elementary idea that this world was
the beginning of all things, and that its gradual creation could be traced in
the familiar language of scripture.
The very notion of planetary chains was an entirely new one which had to be
assimilated by degrees, and has needed in later years very elaborate
explanation. The planetary chain that we belong to consists, as the early
teaching showed, of seven globes, the first and last on the Manasic level,
two others below these on the Astral level, three on the physical plane. We
jumped to the conclusion in the beginning that all planetary chains were
alike, consisting of seven globes, and the idea has unhappily permeated
Theosophical literature to that extent that it has misled many thinkers. It is
really only the middle chain of a manvantaric series that consists of seven
planets; in the previous Manvantara a chain had only five; in the one before
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it, only three; and in the one before that, only one. I will not stop to work
out this idea in all its scientific beauty. A mere hint will be enough to show
how the whole series of Manvantaras is a harmonious conception beginning
with the Divine Thought—the first Manasic globe— culminating in some
supreme results that are beyond our present comprehension in that far-
away future when the whole series will be complete. But keeping our
attention fixed for the moment on our present planetary chain of seven
globes, the first idea we have to realize is that, when we were told in the
beginning about the great life wave sweeping on from world to world, and
for the present occupying this earth, we were put in possession of a broad
idea which is perfectly true, but which requires elaboration. The main part of
the human family to which we belong does occupy this earth at the present
time, but during the various rounds of progress which have been going on
for an almost incalculable past, the family has to a certain extent straggled
over the whole series of worlds constituting the Chain. At present we shall
find it impossible to understand the conditions of life on the super-physical
planets, and we may leave them out of account for the moment; but on the
three physical, including Mars behind us and Mercury in advance of us, the
human family is now distributed —part of it already established on Mercury,
part left behind on Mars. The explanation is simple. While the great majority
swept forward to this earth, the laggard remnant not yet qualified for
incarnation here remains on the planet Mars, a superior vanguard already
getting forward to the planet in advance. The retarded condition of the
Martian remnant— counted, of course, by a fairly large number of
millions—consists of those who have (reverting to my former explanation
about consciousness) failed to make the exertions required for the
acquisition of superior vehicles. There is no vehicle of human consciousness
on this earth amongst even the lowest savages that is not definitely superior
in some important ways to the vehicles of consciousness now inhabiting
Mars./'Strange to say, as often happens on the downward arc, some
capacities are still active amongst them, which enable them to do things
that we ourselves, in spite of our superior development, are unable to
accomplish. The Martian people can handle matter by arts that we, to a
certain extent, have lost, though the use of such arts does not represent
superior intelligence any more than a spider’s capacity to make a web that
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Even amongst the Martians the evolutionary law which presses gradually on
the multitude is slowly working. Some Egos—for already the Martians must
be thought of as human—gradually establish claims on a better vehicle of
consciousness than those around them, and then they become qualified for
incarnation on this earth, and are brought over under the guidance of
appropriate emissaries from the White Lodge in batches sometimes of fairly
considerable number. I have heard of a recent case in which within the last
year or two, a batch of about a hundred thousand Martian Egos were
imported into this world, finding incarnation, some of them, in the
aborigines, as they are called, of Australia, some in the lowest types of
Central Africa, the best of them amongst the populations of Central Asia.
The conditions on the other hand involving the premature migration of Egos
from this earth to Mercury are curious and interesting when understood,
but at this step of the explanation it will be more convenient to stop and
take a new departure having to do with the relations of the various
planetary systems or chains of our Solar System with one another.
Even in the first sketches of occult teaching, as soon as the notion of the
planetary chain had been established in the mind, it became clear that Egos
evolving around any given planetary chain, granting free will to each, must
work out different destinies. Some Egos would advance more rapidly than
others, so that at a fairly advanced stage the whole process there would be
immense intervals of conditions between those in the vanguard and those in
the rear. Then it was explained that at a certain stage in the development of
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any given planetary chain some would have fallen so far back, as compared
with their more persevering companions, that physical progress for the best
would have advanced to a condition in which the worst would not be
qualified to make use of the forms then in process of development. In other
words, and in the rougher language of our first explanations, a period is
inevitable in each planetary scheme when those who cannot advance
farther drop off from the main current of evolution, only those who have
made better use of their opportunities reaching onwards towards the final
possibilities of their existence. This period used to be spoken of as the
critical period of the fifth Round, and for a long time information reached us
as to what would be the final destiny, in the case of our own planetary
scheme, of those who would fall off from evolution at that remote period
far ahead of us, the middle of the Round destined to succeed that with
which we are at present concerned.
Later information filled up this gap in our knowledge, and in so doing threw
a flood of light upon the constitution of the Solar System as a whole.
Obviously the senior planetary scheme, of which Venus is the physical world,
has long since passed that critical period, although for us it lies so far still in
the future. Already the course of events must have decided the fate of the
failures of Venus at the critical period, and the answer given me, when I was
eventually enabled to put the question, at once showed how various
planetary chains of the Solar System are not to be regarded as entirely
independent undertakings. They are linked together in an extremely
intelligible fashion by the fact that the Egos who become the failures of one
planetary scheme pass into the evolution of the planetary scheme next in
order of development; so the simple answer to the question, “ Where are
the failures of the Venus scheme ? ” is embodied in the one word, “ Here !”
Certainly, in my own experience, no one word ever before threw such light
on vast regions of speculation. One saw the whole seven (or rather ten)
planetary schemes, all forming part of one coherent design; one saw the
reason why they were not all at this moment in similar stages of progress;
one could look forward to the time when, for example, the planet Jupiter,
now an incandescent mass of mineral matter, will become an inhabited
home of future races, when those which inhabit our earth will no longer
number among them any beings of a less exalted spiritual rank than those
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we now think of as the Masters, and when the future Jupiter evolution will
afford opportunities for a new beginning to those who may have dropped
out of the evolutionary course designed in connection with later
developments of this world.
Now we come back to the further details of the process. The Venus failures
are here; more precisely, what does that mean? In truth, although failures
from the present standpoint of Venus attainment, they failed at a period in
the evolution of their own race already far in advance of that reached by the
great bulk of our own people. None of them could be content with such
incarnations as are offered to humanity at present, even by the most
civilized races inhabiting this world, or, at all events, no such offers can be
provided in anything resembling adequate abundance. The problem as thus
stated almost hints at its own solution. I have already said that the planet
Mercury, belonging to our chain, is actually the home of Egos constituting
the vanguard of our humanity. For the moment I am leaving out of account
those who, along the Path, attain sublime spiritual conditions which, for that
matter, make them free of all the planets of our chain. But Mercury,
inhabited by the very best, so to speak, of the human family, became a
region in which the Venus failures could freely incarnate, and at the present
moment “ Mercury ” is the more precise form of the word “ here,” which
impressed me so much when I first heard it used in this connection.
And now let us realize more in detail the nature of the life of which Mercury
is the home. In many ways it is so far superior to the conditions we are
familiar with here, that only by degrees can we form any conception of it. In
some respects we are helped to do this by a book which, at the first glance,
has nothing whatever to do with scientific occultism— Bulwer Lytton’s
delightful story, The Coming Race. We do not go far in occult study before
coming into touch with the frequent occurrence of literary inspiration.
Masters taking an interest in that work, and finding sensitive authorship, will
constantly inspire poetry and fiction, while others, indeed, are inspiring
scientific thought; but that need not be dealt with at this moment. The
Master who inspired Bulwer Lytton with the ideas so prettily set forth in The
Coming Race did not, so to speak, give Himself the trouble to invent an
imaginary world of dignity and beauty; He simply drew on His personal
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In its later evolution, possibly in obedience to a law which may govern other
worlds, the people of Venus became very much more advanced students of
beauty—among other things—than we on this world can claim to be as yet.
That drift of development was already operative with the whole race before
the critical period. So, as a matter of fact, Venus failures now on Mercury are
enormously in advance of the earthly population, as a whole, as regards the
appreciation of beauty on a level only represented amongst us, if at all, by
the greatest artists of our period. Parenthetically I may here just mention a
bit of information that reached me a long time ago, and seemed puzzling at
the moment, concerning the peculiar Karma which, in some cases, makes it
possible for Earthly Egos to be prematurely transferred to incarnations on
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Mercury (I am not talking about the inner round, which is a subject apart). It
is just possible for people appropriately qualified by their Karma to be thus
transferred. I must not stop to go into the numerous details of the subject,
but one characteristic required by people unconsciously becoming qualified
for the transfer, is the artistic temperament. They must have some
qualification for appropriately enjoying the heredity of Mercurial parents.
As above suggested, not quite all the Venus failures are already established
on Mercury. Some, if not actually amongst us yet, are awaiting earthly
incarnation, due, no doubt, to their exact place on the scale of evolution,
and are meanwhile, from higher levels either on the Astral or Manasic
worlds, influencing artistic thought, inspiring artistic achievement actually in
progress amongst us at the present time, and this has been going on over
what we are in the habit of thinking of as long periods; short, of course, as
measured on the scale of natural evolution. The whole outburst of artistic
capacity in Greece during that period the other day which we call “ ancient ”
was due to the way in which Venus failures in our higher worlds discerned in
that race great capacities for the reception of their influence. Roughly
speaking, all Greek art in sculpture may be regarded as having been a gift to
us from the Venus immigrants, whom, from the Venus point of view, we
must still speak of as failures.
there is uncouth and repulsive as compared with the animal life of this
world. Doubtless there are exceptions that will leap into consciousness for
everyone who thinks on the subject, but very broadly the law of nature
appears to link the moral improvement of conscious beings with
corresponding improvement in the beauty of form. When we understand
the intricacies of Karma better than we do at present, it may be possible to
find out why men and women amongst us are sometimes conspicuous at
the same time for beauty of form and atrociously defective character. But
exceptions without, according to the stupid proverb, “ proving the rule,”
are at all events compatible with its operation on a large scale.
And one more suggestion in connection with this line of thought arises from
definite information about the people on Mercury. Without going into
indecorous detail, it is enough to say that the birth of children is absolutely
unattended with distress or inconvenience for the mother. The whole
business of race propagation is in point of fact so unlike our own, so
infinitely more charming and attractive to the imagination, that incidentally
it must mean differences in the physical conformation of men and women
which may, at the first glance, seem to conflict with our present conceptions
of perfect female beauty. And yet I am assured by one, at all events, in a
position to form an opinion, that, without for a moment denying the beauty
of a perfect female form of our kind at present, the perfect Mercury woman,
though very different, is the more beautiful of the two. The perception of
beauty is a faculty that grows and changes in its growth, and this thought
reaches in both directions, so that when I have sometimes sought to
ascertain why Nature’s early experiments in form have generally been
uncouth and ugly, I have been told they were neither from the point of view
of the lowly developed consciousness they were designed to express.
Any reference to the real conditions of astral life must bring us first of all
into touch with a situation —as lamentable as it is ludicrous—that has
established an almost impassable chasm between the vast body of super-
physical inquirers engaged with the methods of spiritualism, and those who
have appreciated what with all respect to the other I cannot but describe as
the infinitely more important line of study identified with the Theosophical
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movement. One might laboriously trace the way mistakes were made in the
beginning, but as regards authentic teaching from the Masters, on the
strength of which the Theosophical movement was launched, the subject of
astral life immediately following the death of the physical body was simply
neglected. Somehow we were drifted in the beginning into concerning
ourselves with the gigantic principles governing human evolution on a large
scale, and disregarded opportunities of understanding our immediate future
better than before, in a way which painfully reminds one of the old story
about the star-gazer who fell into the ditch. The pity of it, looking back, is
intense. The Theosophical movement ought to have been recruited
wholesale from the ranks of the spiritualists. As things have turned out, it is
only a few who can be drawn across the gulf dividing most of them from
loftier work.
But now, forgetting all this, let us turn to the accurate information which in
later years some of us have been able to obtain from lofty sources of
information concerning that astral world which thirty or forty years ago the
spiritualists understood better than the first writers on Theosophy, but
which now we are able to examine and interpret to an extent which puts
the knowledge acquired by the ordinary methods of spiritualism in the
background altogether.
To survey the astral world in its entirety and to comprehend its manifold
varieties of condition, the survey must be on an altogether higher level of
consciousness than that of the normal inhabitants. This idea, which is
obvious as soon as stated, is ignored, altogether by spiritualists of the
simpler type, who imagine that because their friend has passed to a new
state of existence he must know, not merely all about it, but all that relates
to human destinies beyond his own condition. And many spiritualists will
even accept negative testimony; a spirit who quite truly says that he cannot
perceive any reincarnations in progress is held by. his friend on this plane to
have proved that no reincarnations take place; but in thus indicating the
necessary imperfection of the spiritualistic method as a means of acquiring
knowledge, let me, before passing 011 to deal with the knowledge acquired
in other ways, bear testimony to the magnificent work that has been done
in the world by spiritualism in its relations with religious thinking. The
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Coming to detail, we find the number seven playing an important part in the
astral economy, as in many other ways with which we are familiar. It is a
great mistake to imagine that seven as a key number is one of any deep
significance in the universe at large. It has a deep significance as regards our
world, of which, after all, the astral plane is merely a part—a part as
definitely objective as so much granite rock to appropriate senses of
perception. To those the granite rock would hardly make an appeal. We
must think of the astral world to begin with as consisting of a vast series of
concentric shells entirely surrounding this Earth, the aggregate diameter of
which is enormously greater than that of the physical globe. It is difficult to
get measurements in miles when dealing with the region of nature in which,
for some purposes, distance is almost negligible, and yet, in truth, there are
definite magnitudes in connection with the various subdivisions of the astral
world which may actually be expressed in terms of our measurement.
Enough for the moment to realize that the height above the earth’s surface
to which the loftier subdivisions of the astral world extend is to be thought
of at least in tens of thousands of miles. Then, if we begin to attempt a
survey of the varied subdivisions, we have to recognize that the astral plane
interpenetrates the physical body of the earth to a fairly considerable
extent, and that the regions thus submerged below the earth’s surface are
horrible in their characteristics, though definitely fulfilling a purpose in the
Divine plan of human evolution. There are two distinct concentric shells of
astral matter sunk within the body of the earth. The lowest of all is one with
which humanity has scarcely anything to do, or ought not to have anything
to do, though in the ghastly unprecedented conditions of Satanic
disturbance that we are going through, influences from that lowest astral
region have been brought to the surface for our profound discomfort. Sub-
plane No. 1 ought to be concerned merely with the gradual disintegration of
elemental forms that played a part appropriately enough in the very earliest
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history of this planet, but the need for which has long since expired. Level
No. 2, immediately below the earth’s surface, is the real Hell of actual
Nature, a condition of suffering for those who drift thither that can hardly
be exaggerated in imagination. That' such suffering, however, is destined to
be curative in its character is a fundamental idea to which, investigating that
region, we should always cling. It deals only with the most hideously
degraded and atrociously criminal representatives of our humanity.
fourth we find life carried on with such close resemblance to the conditions
of physical life on this globe, that when we hear of houses, theatres, and
amusements there, landscapes and lakes, and actual furniture in the houses,
some of us start up indignantly with the idea of associating such phenomena
with a spiritual condition. /The spiritual life and fleshly life are, however,
closely intermingled, not merely in the living human body, but in the
superphysical worlds, appropriate to human existence. There are people on
the astral world free of all painful embarrassments, but who have not
climbed beyond the conception of happiness associated with physical
enjoyment. To find these still available to the astral life their aspirations in
that direction must, indeed, be a good deal refined, and we have always to
remember that the affections which play so important a part in our life even
here are still more supreme in their importance on all the happy levels of the
astral world. Karma entangles incarnate life with all kinds of associations,
and though it may permit us to enjoy some really congenial companionship
it often forces upon us a good deal of the other kind. In the astral life, even
on the fourth level, not to speak for the moment of loftier conditions,
people are never thrown into companionship which is otherwise than
congenial. This is one of the foremost assurances we gather from people
speaking to us from the next world. Sometimes they are still with friends
they have known and cared for on the Earth-life, but in any case with people
towards whom they feel entirely sympathetic.
region in which intellectual activity can most easily expand; the sixth is more
devotional in its character, while the seventh is a region in which those Egos
that have played an important public part in the Earth-life find themselves in
congenial companionship, and within reach of opportunities for developing
their own qualifications as leaders of men in preparation for future
incarnations along that line of activity.
The idea just hinted at interprets the enormously significant fact that in
various departments of human distinction great Egos remain by preference
on the higher levels of the astral world instead of passing on, as they
conceivably might, to the still more elevated conditions of the Manasic
plane. Let us consider, for example, the choice to be made by the great men
of science as they pass on from physical life. Assume, first, that they have no
bad Karma to keep them for a while on No. 3. They wake up on the highest
levels of the fourth in company with congenial friends in their own line of
development. They quickly learn that on the fifth, to which they can pass on
at will, splendid opportunities for carrying on the scientific researches to
which they may have been devoted lie within their reach. They see that to
take a forward leap to the Manasic plane would break the continuity of their
work—land them on levels of perception out of tune with the science they
have been used to. It would carry them on to another line of development
altogether. By keeping on the astral they acquire new knowledge in tune
with that of their lives just spent. That will invest their Egos with expanded
capacity. In the next life on Earth they will be able to carry on their work
from the. point at which they left it off last, and they see the plain path of
duty before them.
The same principle certainly applies to the case of the great poets of the
past who are gathered together on the sixth sub-plane, though in other
departments of artistic greatness complications may arise. But how about
people who are not especially distinguished? Have they any choice as
regards astral and Manasic destinies ? Serious confusion of thought arose
among Theosophical students in the beginning by reason of the way in
which we happened to pick up some quite correct information about the
Devachanic state. That is a condition of blissful illusion on the lower levels of
the Manasic plane, appropriate to people innocent of wrong-doing, of
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Obviously the study of astral details is an endless task, and can only be
carried out thoroughly when we are in personal touch with them; but one
idea not yet dealt with in this hurried survey can be understood now, and
claims attention. Besides that which may be broadly thought of as the
stratification concentrically of the astral world, it has vast divisions that may
be thought of as corresponding to the geographical divisions of this Earth.
Over the great geographical areas of the Earth lie the astral regions
appropriate to the people of the region below. Thus the astral regions over
India and other parts of Asia are quite different in many ways from the astral
regions over European countries. This does not interfere with the fact that
movement from one part of the astral world to any other with the velocity
of light is open to any one belonging to that world who knows, to start
with, that he has the power of getting about in that way. In truth, that
knowledge only appertains to people who have been making some progress
during physical life in occult study. The vast majority of perfectly
commonplace people on the comfortable lower levels of the fourth sub-
plane never want to investigate, for example, the corresponding conditions
of the Indian astral world. In a still more emphatic extent the Indian on the
astral never thinks of its Western aspect, unless he belongs to the few who
have travelled West in life.
For those who realize the importance, as well as the possibilities of getting
definite and vivid mental conceptions of super-physical Nature, this
geography of the astral world is extremely significant. It all helps to make
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the whole complicated realm harmonious and restful for the great
multitudes. For all of us there may in future be a time when nationality
becomes merged in some higher attribute of exalted consciousness, but all
progress is gradual. That is the foremost principle to be discerned in
studying astral life. Spiritualists all recognize it, as well as those who derive
super-physical knowledge in other ways. For a time people passing on are
on the other side just what they were here. Especially, therefore, they are of
the same nationality as here. If all the nations of the world were jumbled up
together on the astral, that world would not, as it does, show us the laws
and designs of Nature in perfect harmony and accord —in that symmetrical
aspect which appeals so powerfully to the intelligent observer. That is the
peculiar charm of the later Theosophical teaching. It enables all who truly
understand the Theosophical movement to feel that they are engaged not
merely in stimulating spiritual aspiration, but in the magnificent task of
creating a true spiritual science.
would know to be that of his future home. He would not neglect his current
work, because he would know that his efficiency therein would have much
to do with his welfare in the new life; but he would look on the current work
with an eye to the future, attending to it all the more zealously so far as it
trained his capacity, but with a sense of detachment that would make him
relatively indifferent to its immediate results.
Will the little parable fit the case of those who are—and who are not ?—
destined to migrate at no very distant future to the astral plane ? Most
people, it is true, have made no attempt to get information in advance in
reference to the conditions prevailing there, because they have not believed
any information on the subject to be trustworthy. The misty suggestions of
religious doctrine left all details obscure. Spiritualism incurred discredit in
various ways, and the importance of its main revelation was imperfectly
understood by the critical world at large; but now we have to deal with a
fuller revelation conveyed to us by Theosophy. The history of the movement
since 1880 embodies its credentials. The vision of the future is clearing up in
many directions. That department which includes life on the astral plane is
illuminated by a great wealth of knowledge. For all who appreciate this, that
knowledge sheds light on the path they are actually treading through the
current physical life, and with an expanded power of gazing into futurity, we
are already beginning to concern ourselves with problems of infinite futurity
extending far beyond the range of astral experience and physical
reincarnation. .
The feeling with which we do this is very unlike that which governs the
investigation of astral conditions. The ultimate conditions of our humanity
when the history of this world is complete are interesting only to thinkers
who can deal in imagination with states of consciousness, so far
transcending that of any one personal life, that they are content to lose
touch with the limitations which actually engender the feeling of
individuality. And if, as we may, we look beyond the limitations of the one
world we seem to lose sight of ourselves. Thus the contemplation of infinite
futurity is not at the first glance at all events compatible with an interest in
ourselves. But none the less does it dignify all thinking, even of the kind
which does relate to ourselves. We know that the continuity of our
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bathed in the colours of the sunset. Even natural beauty and grandeur of
that order is uplifting in its effect on the emotions. So with the mental
influence of attempts to gaze in thought at the infinitudes of spiritual
development. By comparison our Humanity seems so small—if, indeed, we
can think of it at all as the stupendous magnificence of the Cosmos is partly
revealed to us. In one sense, if we can forget it, so much the better. Truth
lies in some paradoxical phrases about sublime results attained by the loss
of what seems everything for the moment, but paradoxes may be
misleading as well as suggestive. If only by our capacity to admire, we are
identified with the glories of infinitude—the realm to which, attached to it
by ties that can never be broken, we eternally belong.
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Comparing these two views, mere reasoning on the basis of evidence that
everyone is equally qualified to appreciate will go far to support a belief in
pre- historic civilizations. In Egypt, the testimony of the monuments and of
papyrus records, already translated, carries us back to a period about 5,000
years B.C. But at that time we find ourselves just as much in presence of
Egyptian civilization as at that relatively modern epoch of Egyptian
grandeur, the Eighteenth Dynasty. According to the admirable German
Egyptologist, Brugsch Bey, Menes, the first king of the first dynasty
mentioned by Manetho, altered the course of the Nile by constructing an
enormous dyke, in order to facilitate the foundation of Memphis. He was a
law-giver, moreover, and is said to have greatly augmented the pomp and
extravagance of the monarchy, thus showing himself at the same time not
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merely a civilized ruler, but one who had already contracted some of the
vices of civilization, a sure indication that he belonged to a declining rather
than to a rising era of his country's progress. But, in truth, people have got
into the way of thinking of him as if he were a primeval personage, merely
because he begins Manetho's list of the kings in so far as that list has been
preserved for us by the accident of its quotation by some classical writers.
The original work of Manetho vanished probably in the smoke of the
Alexandrian library. It is known through other writers that Manetho spoke
of Egyptian epochs long previous to that of the thirty dynasties; and even if
he had not done so, the situation faintly portrayed as prevailing in the time
of Menes is enough to show that it must have been the growth of a social
progress extending into the past for almost immeasurable ages previously.
Fifteen and not five millenniums B.C. must be taken into account—
according to some of the modern Egyptologists now engaged in translating
the papyri—if we wish to frame a picture in our own minds of the rise of
Egyptian civilization.
ancient Mexican inscriptions are written, and has even translated a very old
manuscript saved from the vandalism of Cortez and his attendant monks.
This turns out to include a straightforward record of the final catastrophe
which swallowed up the last remnant of Atlantis ten or twelve thousand
years ago.
The question of Atlantis is immensely important, and I am, for the present,
merely referring to the chain of reasoning by which its actual existence in
former days is supported. A thorough examination of the merely exoteric
evidence on the subject would be a large undertaking in itself, and I have
another task before me for the moment. But all theosophical students, and
even cursory readers of theosophical books, will be aware that the teaching
concerning the origins of the human race that have been given to the world
in connection with the inauguration of the theosophical movement, gear in
with that belief in the former existence of the Atlantean continent which, as
I have shown, is making its way even in the outside world, which has nothing
to do with theosophy. Humanity, according to all theosophical authorities, is
evolved through a series of great root races, of which the Atlantean race
was the predecessor of our own. I do not put forward the statement as in
itself conclusive, because the whole character of theosophic teaching—as
far as its really qualified exponents are concerned—is opposed to the
principle of ex cathedra assertion. The regular method of instruction
adopted by the Masters of occult science is to show the student how his
own interior dormant faculties may be awakened and brought to bear the
discovery of truth, whether it has to do with the planes of Nature and
consciousness superior to our own, or with periods of the world's history
long anterior to our own. Until the pupil is sufficiently advanced to have the
power of applying his own direct perceptions to the questions he may wish
to investigate, he is almost discouraged from taking the statements of
others, more advanced than himself, on trust. But, at the same time, we
must steer a middle course between the attitude of mental servility and the
attitude of narrow-minded incredulity. For the reasonable theosophic
student who has found substantial ground for relying on the knowledge
and bona fides of the occult Masters, from whom our current theosophic
teaching has been received, the statements they make in reference to such
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matters as the character and place in Nature of the Atlantean race will
necessarily have very great weight.
Clairvoyance has many varieties and ramifications, but that with which I am
concerned for the moment has been called—rather clumsily, perhaps, by
modern writers dealing with it—psychometry. In its simplest manifestation
it is not very uncommon. I have met many people, besides those who have
had a regular occult training, who are able, by fingering a letter, without
looking at it or reading it—or perhaps by putting it to their foreheads—to
get impressions concerning the person who has written it, extending
sometimes to an accurate delineation of his outward appearance and
character. Now, this accomplishment depends upon facts of Nature that are
enormously important in their wider manifestations. Psychometrising letters
bears to the law under which it becomes possible much the same relation
that the experiment of rubbing sealing-wax so as to make it attract little bits
of paper bears to the whole science of electricity. There is a medium in
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Nature in which pictures, so to speak, of all that has ever taken place on
earth are indestructibly preserved for ever. This medium is spoken of in the
occult literature of the East as the Akasa. European medieval occultists
mean the same thing when they speak of the astral light. This astral light
includes a record for those who can perceive and interpret it, that dwarfs to
insignificance the value, for historical purposes, of all the written documents
the world contains.
exists between his own astral self and bygone scenes of his own life that he
has witnessed. Take the case of recollections any of us may entertain of
some distant place he may formerly have visited. Desirous of remembering
it, he turns back his thoughts upon that page of his memory, and in a certain
interior way may be said to see again the scene of which he thinks. The
occultist in the same way lays his hand upon the stones of a building— or it
may be enough for him merely to come near them—and he can follow the
magnetic thread of connection which leads back his consciousness to the
early events with which they were associated.
This is the way in which, for the occultist, the pyramids of Egypt may be
made to tell their own story very much more fully than it is possible to trace
this with the help of fragmentary inscriptions or documents accidentally
surviving the destroying influence of time. The extent to which the
psychometric faculty is trustworthy in the case of people below the level of
adeptship is a question that can only be considered in reference to each
case in turn; but, at all events, I have had the advantage of being assisted—
in such attempts as I have made to penetrate rather more deeply than usual
the mystery of Egyptian antiquities—by psychometric power of a very high
order, and I have been enabled to check the information I have thus
received through the fuller knowledge possessed by those from whom the
teaching put forward in various theosophic books from my hand has been
derived. In this way I have been enabled to build up a conception of the
early beginnings of Egyptian civilization which constitutes a coherent and
intelligible sketch of the whole process, and synthesises in a very interesting
manner a great deal of disjointed speculation concerning the evolution of
the human race towards which archaeological research of the ordinary kind
has been groping its way.
I will now put forward the story for the benefit of all who may be sufficiently
in touch with occult methods of investigation to appreciate its prima
facie claim to attention.
the earth, except the Atlantean race- - inhabiting many regions, as the earth
was then configurated, besides those which formed part of the continent of
Atlantis—just as at the present day, to draw an illustration from one of the
minor ethnological divisions of our own great race, the Caucasians inhabit
many other regions of the earth besides the Caucasus. But different
ramifications of the same root race may differ very widely from each other:
and at a time when this main body of the Atlantean race on the continent of
Atlantis had attained a very high degree, of civilization and power, Egypt,
amongst other countries, was in the occupation of a relatively prim live
people, whom we need not think of as savage or barbarous in the worst
sense of those words, but for whom the arts and customs of civilization
were as yet a closed book.
As far back as 800,000 years ago the Atlantean continent, having all but'
fulfilled its destinies in the education of the human race, began to melt
away. The process was inaugurated at the period just mentioned by a
geological catastrophe, on a very stupendous scale; but that merely began,
it did not accomplish, what is known to occult history as the submergence
of Atlantis. The continent held out against the destructive forces of Nature
till about 80,000 years ago, when some considerable portions surviving till
then finally disappeared, leaving only one big island—the Atlantis of classical
tradition— which perished in a great natural convulsion about 11,500 years
ago, a date originally derived from occult teaching, -and approximately
confirmed by Le Plongeon’s discoveries, to which reference has already
been made.
advantage. They had to discover a younger and more vigorous human stock,
on which to graft the spiritual impulse of which they were the custodians.
For a very long time the adept immigrants who settled in what is now Egypt
did not attempt the education of the people in the arts of civilization. They
simply resided in the country, and there, no doubt, brought forward
individual pupils, and upheld the higher spiritual knowledge, which, however
ill qualified to assimilate it the bulk of mankind at any time may be, can
never be allowed to die out altogether, even if its guardians, as they
sometimes may in the crises of human evolution, diminish to a few in
number. What may have been the nature of the unseen spiritual influence
they were bringing to bear all the while on the people amongst whom they
lived, is a question that I need not attempt to deal with here. The race
around them was gradually ripened for the teachings of a lofty civilization,
and no doubt was largely augmented and elevated ethnologically by the
infusion of the immigrant blood, for, as I have said, large numbers of
Atlantean people, besides those who represented the adeptship of the
period, accompanied their spiritual leaders in their migrations, and mingled
their descendants with the original inhabitants of their new home.
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Thus, at last, a time came when the seed sown amongst them germinated
effectually. The adepts began to teach and rule as well as to reside in
Egypt. The vague traditions as to long lines of Divine Kings, who preceded
those dynasties chronicled by Manetho, are no mere fables of an infant
humanity, as the narrow-minded ignorance of materialistic critics in the
nineteenth century too often supposes them. The Divine Kings of Egypt
were the early adept rulers, and the golden age of Egyptian greatness was
that over which they presided, in millenniums far back in a past so remote
that one almost hesitates to handle the real figures, amongst people of
whom only a few as yet can have become completely emancipated from the
mental fetters, as regards the duration of the world’s history, forged for
modern Europeans by the imbecile interpretation put by the theology of the
Middle Ages on chronological statements of the Bible. In following back the
history of the earliest monuments of Egyptian civilization, by the help of
those imperishable records still to be found, as vivid as ever, in the Memory
of Nature by those who know how to gain access to its boundless picture-
gallery, we do not have to add at a venture a few extra millenniums to the
conventional dates of modern Egyptologists, but to measure their ages on
the scale of Atlantean history. It was at a midway period between the- first
immigration of Atlantean adepts in Egypt, and the stage of the world’s
progress we have ,now reached, that the pyramids were really built, or, in
other words, a little more than two hundred thousand years ago. Closely
connected as they were in their origin and purpose with occult mysteries, it
is impossible to obtain from initiated informants in the present day any very
precise statement concerning the design which they subserved in the
beginning. I have gathered a hint to the effect that, although no doubt from
the beginning used as and designed to be temples or chambers of initiation
—the great pyramid, for one, certainly containing other chambers besides
the three that have been discovered —one purpose of the great pyramid
was the protection of some tangible objects of great importance having to
do with the occult mysteries. These were buried in the rock, it is said, and
the pyramid was reared over them, its form and magnitude being adopted
to render it safe from the hazards of earthquake, and even from the
consequences of submergence beneath the sea during the great secular
undulations of the earth’s surface.
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This brings me to one of the most remarkable facts about the pyramids,
among those which modern research has never suspected. Within the
enormous period of their existence there has been time for more than one
of those great changes in the configuration of the earth brought about by
what some geologists, at all events, recognize as a necessity of its
constitution. The alternative elevations and depressions of continents and
ocean beds are due to a slow pulsation of the body of the earth, that may be
likened, as regards the surface, to the undulations of a sea that has settled
down in a condition of almost perfect calm, but is still gently heaving under
the influence of an all but imperceptible swell. Probably there are cross
currents in such undulations that may occasionally intensify, and
occasionally minimize them; but, at any rate, they cannot be excluded from
any reasonable scientific hypothesis concerning the progress of geological
growth, however far beyond the reach of our very brief historic records
their last manifestations may be withdrawn.
Occult information on the subject brings some of them into view, and since
the erection of the earliest pyramids one such undulation—connected with
that which had to do with the final submergence of the last bit of the old
Atlantean Continent—depressed the region which is now the Lower Nile
valley below the level of the sea which spread over the northern part of
Africa—except for the high lands near the Mediterranean coast. The west
coast was also dry land at the period in question, but the present desert of
Sahara was a sea, and that sea spread over the whole country now fertilized
by the Lower Nile, as the huge undulation depressed its level.
The country of the Upper Nile was not submerged, and thither no doubt the
population of Egypt, to a large extent, withdrew, although the
submergence, I understand, was cataclysmic enough in its character to
involve some destruction of life among those who clung longest to the
menaced region. At all events, I am told that there was a considerable
migration of the people to the east and west, as well as to the south, and for
a time—I do not know exactly for how long, but for a short time compared
with the general course of the undulations of the great ruck-sheet of the
earth—the pyramids and the country round remained under water.
Incidentally this will suggest that the present course of the River Nile was
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not that which it followed before the natural convulsion in question. The
course to-day differs, I am told, as a matter of fact, from that which it
followed in the age of the great pyramid’s construction as high up as
Thebes. The temple of Karnac is an Egyptian monument of enormous
antiquity, though not so old as the great pyramid, and it never shared the
submergence of the pyramid; but as far as the course of the river was
concerned, that was different from what it is now’, even as high up as
Thebes, at the time of the erection of the temple of Karnac.
The sea again receded from lower Egypt after an interval, the exact duration
of which has not been given to me, and the pyramids were again left dry.
Rapidly as compared with the geological changes in progress, it was
doubtless repeopled, and again taken in charge by the adept kings. I am
inclined to regard the period which now came on as the really golden age of
Egyptian civilization. The decline did not set in till much later. But Fate held
another shock in reserve for the ancient State. When the last island remnant
of Atlantis was submerged with cataclysmic violence about 11,500 years ago,
an undulation of the oceans led to some enormous inundations, and without
again becoming the bed of a sea as on the former occasion, the land of
Egypt was overwhelmed with an immense flood, which again dispersed its
people. I do not understand that this was on such a scale as again to
submerge the pyramids, but, at any rate, the population was drowned or
driven out of the surrounding country—for a time. When, in turn, this flood
passed away and population spread again over the land, there began that
downward movement of spirituality and culture which, from the occultist's
point of view, is the final brief period of the decadence of Egyptian
civilization, though, for the modern Egyptologist, it includes the whole
range of Egyptian history, behind which some inquirers begin to look out for
the evidences of primitive man.
Probably when the decadent period began, or was somewhat advanced, the
tangible objects, whatever they were, which the great pyramid was
designed to cover, were removed to some other country chosen as the
headquarters of the world’s adeptship. And though, as long as the ancient
wisdom religion survived in Egypt to any considerable extent, the pyramids
continued to fulfil their purpose as temples of initiation, by degrees, no
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doubt, the full knowledge concerning their uses in this respect faded out
from among the people. On the face of things, it would only be by initiated
adepts that chambers dedicated to secret ceremonies could be put to such
uses, and with the fading out of the adept element in the population, due to
its own moral deterioration, the old traditions would naturally be lost- This
consideration will, amongst others, abundantly account for the
multiplication of pyramids in comparatively recent ages, when, certainly,
there was no thought on the part of the builders of using them in
connection with the introduction of neophytes to the mysteries of occult
science. As late as within the last few thousand years some of the pyramids
along the Nile valley have been erected. While, therefore, occult teaching
entirely discountenances the conventional theory that the pyramids in all
cases were put up to serve as the tombs of monarchs, it opens the door to
conjectures along that road as regards some of the latest among them.
From an antiquity with which the decadent dynasties had probably lost
touch, the example of the earlier pyramids as a fashion in architecture had
obviously been handed down.
Certainly the coffer of the great pyramid was neither a sarcophagus nor, as
Piazzi Smyth conjectures, a standard measure of capacity, but a font in
which certain baptismal ceremonies connected with initiations were carried
out. It is possible, however, that in the later and degenerate period of
Egyptian history - to which all the Manetho dynasties belong—some of the
kings, losing touch with the ideas associated with the more ancient
pyramids in the beginning, may have followed the fashion of their
architecture without knowing why it was originally designed, and may have
put up pyramids to be their tombs. I understand definitely that this was the
case, but the fact in no way militates against the explanations just given.
The great pyramid has been assigned by most Egyptologists to a king of the
fourth dynasty, generally known as Cheops, or more correctly, to students
of hieroglyphics, as Khufu. That monarch is supposed to have built it, and to
have gone on adding to its size as long as he lived. As his reign was a long
one, the enormous magnitude of the building—standing on a base the size
of Lincoln’s Inn Fields—is thus accounted for, My own information is to the
effect that Khufu simply restored some portions of the pyramid that had
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suffered injury, also, for reasons that I have not heard stated, closing up
some of the chambers that were previously accessible. It is admitted by
modern Egyptologists that the evidence which points to Khufu as the
builder of the pyramid is meagre, although the original guess has been
quoted so often now that most writers assume it to be somehow known as
a fact.
People who contend, with Mr. Fergusson, that the rude stone monuments
must have been put up in the third and fourth centuries, because we know
they have not been built since, while they could not have been erected by
primeval savages, are simply— without setting out on that argument
consciously— making smooth the path that conducts us back, in search of
an explanation, to a civilization anterior to our own, the traces of which
have all but evaporated from the records from which, till lately, we have
been constructing the history of the ancient world. Atlantis is the only
rational clue to the comprehension of Stonehenge, just as it affords the only
satisfactory solution of ancient Egypt.
corrupt luxury of the perishing civilization they had left behind. In Atlantis
itself the human family had touched the nadir point of materiality. Great
developments of scientific- knowledge had been turned entirely to the
service of the physical life, and spiritual aspiration was entirely stifled in the
pursuit of material welfare. Personal luxury, cultivated by those who were
strong enough to secure it for themselves, was the goal to which ail the
energies of the race were bent. Many-secrets of Nature, which the science
of this fifth race has not yet recovered, were degraded to the exclusive
service of physical enjoyment by the dominant classes—for an inferior,
servile race also inhabited the country—and the spiritual adepts of the
period turned with disgust from a community which it was not in their
power to redeem. They set themselves the task of, implanting amongst a
simpler and relatively barbarous population abroad, whose descendants
were destined, in progress of time, to melt into the next great race, the
spiritual enthusiasm that might, in their case, lead on to an ennobled future.
So the external ceremonies of the religion they taught were carried on
under their guidance with stern simplicity. They built their great temple, of
unhewn rooks. They sought no architectural effects that would divert
attention from Nature. They invested their great cathedral with no other
claims to admiration but those depending on the massive grandeur of its
proportions.
But how did they overcome the difficulty of manipulating the huge masses
of stone, the mere superposition of which, one upon the other, seems to
have demanded mechanical resources which we can hardly associate in
imagination with any period but our own ? For that matter, in Atlantis itself it
may be found, when fuller light is ultimately cast upon its history, that
mechanical resources of a very advanced order were available for any work
that needed them; but the builders of that age were not exclusively
dependent on appliances of the kind we now make use of in handling large
masses of material. In the maturity of Atlantean civilization some forces of
Nature, now only under the control of adepts in occult science, were in
general use. The adepts of the time were under no obligation to keep the
secret of their existence jealously guarded; and among them was that
power, so rarely exercised now that its very existence is scornfully derided
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But that which happens only now and then, no matter how rarely, must be
traceable, if only we knew enough, to the operation of some law as natural
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as that under which steam expands. Nor is there anything in the essence of
the matter more mysterious in the fact that solid objects are sometimes
repelled from the earth—or levitated—than in the other fact that more
usually they are attracted./'’ No modern physicist has as yet any glimmering
conception as to why or how gravity works. We are no better informed at
this moment than Newton as to why the apple falls. We can, to a certain
extent, measure the force which controls it; we do not know what that
force is. So with magnetism. There we have an agency we can observe in
action both ways— as an attractive and as a repulsive force. Stimulate an
electro-magnet in one way and it will attract iron; stimulate it in another way
and it will repel copper, so that a mass of that metal may be visibly levitated
and kept floating on nothing, apparently, at some height above the
apparatus repelling it. Electricians observe and can reproduce the fact; they
do not understand it. The levitation of tables and human beings at spiritual
stances can only be observed occasionally and cannot be reproduced at
will—not by ordinary observers, at all events—but the fact has to be faced
by reasonable men, and brought into relation with our general thinking. It is
stupid to attempt an escape from the difficulty of not understanding it by
declaring, in spite of the evidence, that the fact is not a fact.
effective weight of heavy bodies at will. That is the whole explanation of the
marvels of megalithic architecture. Working under the guidance and with
the help of the adepts from Atlantis, the builders of Stonehenge, and of the
ancient “ dolmen ” altars found the enormous masses of stone they used
light enough to be handled with facility. Clairvoyant observers of
Stonehenge have seen the process of its construction going on. The pictures
of its progress are all Indelibly imprinted on the Memory of Nature: they are
visible now, as plainly as the actual transactions were visible for those who
were present. And the vision shows us the enormous masses of the
trilithons being raised to their places with the help of scaffoldings, no more
substantial in their character than would be used to day in the erection of a
brick cottage.
I have said that it was at a much later period than that at which the
Atlantean adepts, who first left the perishing continent, took up their
residence in Egypt, that those who settled in Western Europe set on foot
the grand and simple spiritual worship which Stonehenge in the first
instance was employed to subserve. It was at a much later period even than
that at which the pyramids were erected. I do not know whether there was
any long residence by Atlantean adepts in Western Europe prior to the
introduction of their teaching among the people. Probably there was, but, at
all events, it was near the final culmination of the great Atlantean
continent's submergence, about 100,000 years ago from the present time,
that the grey stones still standing on Salisbury Plain were first established in
their places. Among the facts concerning them, which supporters of
Fergusson’s grotesque theory have to pass over very lightly, is one which
relates to the geological character of the stones used. The outer circle and
the stones of the great trilithons are of a composition that suggest their
derivation from quarries in the neighbourhood. But the inner circle and the
altar stone are of a totally different formation, of a kind which cannot be
identified with any rockbeds in that part of England Such stone is to be
found in Cornwall, in Wales, and in Ireland, but nowhere nearer. So from one
of these regions the materials of the inner circle must certainly have been
brought. Reasoning of the kind that is never shocked by an absurdity, but is
only offended by the suggestion that modern knowledge does not embrace
all the capacities of Nature, is content complacently to suppose that the
Stonehenge builders brought the massive materials in question across many
hundred miles of primeval forest-covered country, or, by sea—all for the
sake of a battle memorial on Salisbury Plain—when abundant stone, just as
good and durable, was to be had in the neighbourhood. The nature of the
Stonehenge materials would be alone enough to make the Arthurian theory
ridiculous, even if it would bear consideration along other lines of attack. For
the purposes of a mystic temple, however, everyone who has a glimmering
of occult knowledge will apprehend that there may have been
considerations connected with those subtle attributes of different kinds of
stone, which occultists generally call their magnetism, that would' prescribe
the employment of more than one kind.
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The worship of the early Druids, to give that name to the occult teachers
who made Stonehenge their headquarters, was grandiose and simple. There
were processions and chants and symbolical ceremonies associated with
astronomical events, especially with the rising of the sun on Midsummer
Day, when great crowds of people assembled to witness the sun’s rays, at
the moment of his rising, shoot through an opening opposite to the altar,
and illuminate the sacred stone. There were no unholy sacrifices offered on
the altar in those days, and the only external ceremony of a sacrificial nature
that took place had to do with a libation of milk that was poured over the
stone. In accordance with the elaborate symbolism of early occult rites, a
great deal of importance was attached to the serpent as an emblem of
multifarious significance, and as the adept Druids could easily control these
creatures, an actual living serpent was made to glide up into the altar stone
at the sunrise ceremony, and lap the milk. There is some truth, but much
more misconception, in prevailing notions concerning what is called the “
Serpent Worship ” of olden times. The failure of modern, students of
religion, to discriminate between worship and the use of symbols has had to
do with graver misconceptions even than those which have entangled the
commonplace interpretations of serpent worship.
The chief Druid of the Stonehenge ceremonies in the days of the pure
worship in the beginning used to march in some of the processions with a
live serpent round his neck. Later on, when the adept influence was no
longer present—many millenniums later—the degraded chiefs of the Druid
decadence used to keep up the old tradition in so far as it lay in them to do
so, but for prudential reasons wore a dead serpent—a more fitting emblem
than they supposed of the state of the faith they represented. Lower and
lower its practices became debased, until the once sacred altar stone was
deluged no longer with milk, but with the blood of human victims, and this
was the only sort of Druid worship of which, through Roman historians, we
have any written records. How did it happen that so terrible a change came
on ? The age apparently, as far as ancient Britain was concerned, was not
sufficiently advanced to provide the earlier adepts with a continuous line of
successors. Eventually, it is to be presumed, one by one, no doubt, the
earlier adepts ceased to incarnate among the people they could not lead on
to the path of true spiritual progress. In Egypt the graft they planted took a
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firm hold of the stock to which it was attached. In Britain it did not, and
thus, while Egypt remained to a comparatively recent period a land of high
civilization, and one of the principal centres of fifth-race adeptship, Britain
relapsed back into barbarism. Up to only a few thousand years before the
Roman conquest it remained still faintly tinged with the remote traditions of
its vanishing civilization, then it sank to its lowest condition of decay before
the commencement of its modern cycle of progress within the historic
period.
This sweeping survey of a past that will be more fully recalled, no doubt, in
progress of time, as the world learns better to appreciate the inner faculties
of man, slight and sketchy though it be, has only been rendered possible by
much patient gleaning on my part, opportunities being made use of as they
arose. It is possible at a later date that I may be able to fill up some details,
but I hope the imperfect suggestions of this essay may meanwhile be
accepted as contributing in some measure to show how imperatively
necessary it is to bring the Atlantean origin of all civilizations belonging to
our age into the scheme of our thinking, if we are to hope for anything
resembling a correct interpretation of the ancient world.
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has the idea been appreciated. It is even surprising, considering how much
there is in the idea to excite repugnance on the part of people who do not
understand it properly, that it has made way to the extent that we have
seen, gradually conquering acceptance more widely than theosophical
teaching does this generally. It has frequently been defended in pulpits as
not incompatible with ordinary religious teaching; it has been accepted by
people quite outside the range of theosophical influence, as the only
possible explanation of what seems the terrible injustice reigning in the
world—the mysterious inequalities of condition that we see around us, the
differences not merely of welfare, but of moral and intellectual
development, of environment, and so forth, which render human life so
painfully variegated. But theoretical acceptance of the idea has not always
rendered it welcome to people who want to realize precisely how the law
will work when they come to be reincarnated, who are troubled with
anxieties in that way that render the whole conception exceedingly
repulsive. They persist in thinking of themselves as plunged afresh into
babyhood, as coming back with the consciousness they are now invested
with, to be again subject to the appalling limitations of the infant condition.
They think of themselves as fretting against the limitations of the baby
state, wearily enduring their slow progress towards maturity. We have to
get rid of all such ideas absolutely and entirely before we understand what
reincarnation means, and the first difficulty in the way of getting rid of
them, has to do with the distinction between the personality of any given
life and the Ego of which that personality is a temporary expression.
resembling what they are now were absorbed into Divinity, as a drop of
water is absorbed in the ocean, that would be equivalent to annihilation,
and mergence in the Ego when the personality is passing on from this life to
another seems, again, a species of annihilation, for most people unable to
escape, in imagination, from the conditions of the current personality.
Now what we have to remember, first of all, in order to get rid of that
misconception, is that protracted and vivid conditions of life intervene
between the disappearance from this plane of any given personality and the
next presentation of the Ego on the physical plane in accordance with the
law of rebirth. A very long interval elapses before the personality with which
we are associated in any given life has accomplished its mergence in the
Ego. I have dealt to some extent with that subject on former occasions, but
it requires continued attention. Remember that, first of all, we have a
considerably protracted experience, which may extend to enormous length
sometimes—of life in which the personality is maintained in full
completeness on the higher levels of the astral plane. In a large number of
cases people whose personalities have been highly evolved, and who
represented great intellectual development in this life, elect to remain on
the higher levels of the astral plane for long after the time when they might
have passed on to Manasic conditions, had they so chosen, because under
those conditions it is possible for them to gather fresh knowledge along the
line of their previous work, and prepare themselves in their next incarnation
for much more extended activities of a similar order. In a minor degree the
same explanation applies to people of less advanced evolution, though we
have to remember, in trying to think out the conditions of future life, that
they vary to an almost illimitable extent. It is difficult in attempting to
interpret any of these mysteries to make adequate allowance for that.
Whereas highly intellectual people will elect to remain for a long time on the
higher level, people of lesser advancement also, assuming that their lives
have not been very bad indeed, will long remain on levels where life is
exceedingly enjoyable, though not necessarily in such cases very conducive
to further progress. But in all cases there comes a time when, in fulfilment of
the necessities of further evolution, all the inhabitants of the astral world
must pass on to the Manasic condition. We must not think of this passage as
in the nature of a second death. It is quite free from all the anxieties and
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distrust that, too often, embitter the approach of physical dissolution, and it
is hardly necessary to say utterly free from the suffering so often attending
departure from this plane. During astral life a good many of the attributes
that contributed to make up the personality have faded away. Its higher
emotions, its love energies, its intellectual capacities remain unimpaired, but
it has already shed most of the minor attachments arising from its earthly
life. It is getting ready for that union with the Ego which must not be
thought of as accomplished at once on leaving this plane of life. Whatever
desires may have been engendered for the continuance of personal
existence, those desires will operate to retain vivid consciousness of
personality on appropriate levels of nature for as long as their force can
persist. But, as I say, the Ego, the real permanent self, is a more permanent
thing than any one personality, and, however important any given
personality may be compared with those that have preceded it in the long
career of the Ego through nature, its importance has to be expressed in a
new environment, to clear the way for which the minor details of the last
incarnation have been allowed to fade away, or evaporate. But the Ego and
the personality must not be thought of as two separate entities. The
personality is, at all events, a partial expression of the Ego and, sooner or
later, the Earth-plane consciousness is withdrawn into the Ego, sometimes
rapidly, sometimes after a long interval, but eventually in all cases that has
to be accomplished. And the blending means the absorption into the Ego of
all that was important in the personality that has lately been spent.
I come now to consider various possibilities which have to do with the re-
attachment of the Ego to a bodily manifestation. In the case of Egos
sufficiently advanced along the path of that progress to which knowledge is
so conducive, it may be possible for the higher self, if I may use that
expression, or the Ego—I am using the two terms as almost synonymous —
to exercise a definite choice in regard to the new incarnation on which it will
enter. People already at some stage “ on the path,” especially if they are
called upon to return rather sooner than the ordinary law would provide for,
would probably have a considerable range of choice in regard to the
incarnation they would accept. I have been privileged to obtain some
information bearing upon cases that have actually occurred, and a curious
discovery emerges. In all such cases of which I have heard, where several
opportunities have lain before an Ego coming into incarnation—some
apparently very much less attractive than others—it seems almost invariably
the case that the Ego chooses the least desirable incarnation, as its
desirability would be measured from our point of view. Incarnations in
humble life involving a great deal of what, from our point of view, we should
consider hardship and undesirable conditions have continually, within my
knowledge, been chosen by people of sufficient advancement to exercise a
choice, in preference to those representing more agreeable conditions of
life on this plane. From the Ego point of view nothing is of really any
importance compared with spiritual growth and progress, and it may not
infrequently happen that the humbler incarnation is, first of all, calculated to
get rid of Karma that lies in the background, while it also not infrequently
happens that the humbler incarnation is distinctly more conducive to
devotion to spiritual thought and effort than those where pleasures and
distractions of all kinds keep people’s thoughts centred on the life that they
are actually leading. And again it may happen—though I am now about to
speak of a case that is probably unique —that some definite work that a
highly evolved Ego has undertaken can be better carried out in a humble
than in an exalted station of life. Most students of philosophical literature
will be more or less familiar with the writings of that wonderful German
philosopher Jacob Boehme. Now Jacob Boehme's writings show him to
have been on the threshold, at all events, of high Adeptship, and yet in that
life he was a humble cobbler, just a subordinate worker at that humble
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trade. Why did he choose such an incarnation as that ?—for it is certain that
a Being on his level must have chosen his incarnation. The answer I
understand to be that at the period in which he lived it was not desirable
that the teachings he had to put forward—real theosophic teachings,
though not illustrated with the amplitude of detail we have since been
privileged to obtain—should descend upon the world from any altitude of
authority. Only a few were ripe for them. It was held to be necessary that
they should be suggested, so to speak, from a humble level of mundane
authorship. I am not presuming to endorse or criticize that idea. I merely
state it as given to me in explanation of the Jacob Boehme incarnation. “
But why,” I asked, “ such a very ignoble position as that of a working
cobbler V” The answer, I believe derived from himself, was— “No position
can be ignoble in which you are fulfilling the purpose of the Logos.” That
seems to me to have been an extremely beautiful answer, radiant with
meaning that can be applied to many of the phenomena of life. True, there
are not .many working cobblers who are Jacob Boehmes in disguise, and we
must not be hurried into conclusions to the effect that it is only on such
levels of life that great spiritual natures are to be sought for. Indeed, the
normal rule is rather the other way about. There is a tendency in Nature to a
gradual upward drift in social station in the long progress of incarnations.
This ensues from the way in which desire, in ordinary life, is one of the
factors making up the next Karmic programme. The desire must be clear and
definite to be operative in this way, and it would not amount to much if a
costermonger desired to be a king. He would not know enough about the
king’s life to desire that with precision, nor even if his desire pointed to a
less exalted station could it be definite enough to have a Karmic value. But
he may fully realize the conditions of life a little better than those he might
be used to, and then the desire assumes creative force, always supposing
the man does not engender, in other directions, bad Karma that conflicts
with his desire. But all these last remarks obviously apply to levels of life
below those inspired by genuine spiritual aspiration. When this is sufficiently
developed for the Ego to feel it as his predominant motive, it sweeps away
all minor ambitions.
So, as I say, on the higher levels choice enters into this matter. When it does
not enter—which is the case with the vast majority of our fellow-
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new lives—it is not until another stage of distinct progress has been
accomplished that the etheric and astral elements in the new child’s
composition become identified with the Ego in the background. I am not
going to attempt a very minute explanation of the successive stages
through which Nature works in bringing an Ego into a new incarnation, but
the two septenary periods that I have mentioned are by no means all that
are recognizable as stages in the process. The real truth I believe to be that
it is not until full maturity is reached, not till such an age as twenty-eight, or
even a later period than that, that the highest elements in the Ego are
capable of functioning in the new organism. I believe, even as far as the
period of thirty-five, it may sometimes be said that the new incarnation is
not absolutely in its completely perfected condition. So that no conception
of this subject can be more wide of the truth than that which embarrasses
the idea of reincarnation with the belief that, in the earlier stages, the
experience is distressing to the entity coming back.
A good deal was said in the beginning of our studies in reference to the
periods which usually elapse between incarnations. In my own first book on
the subject, those who have read it may remember that I spoke—under
guidance of course—of the intervening period which applied to the average
of mankind, as running from 1,500 to 2,000 years, during which, of course,
life was divided between astral conditions and Devachanic or Manasic
conditions. Only after this very ample scope had been given for the
exhaustion of all the forces of the previous life did the entity come back into
incarnation. There was nothing untrue in that statement at the time,- but a
very remarkable condition of things has arisen since that statement was put
forward. We live in a very remarkable period, remarkable not merely for its
extraordinary development of theosophical knowledge amongst us in the
world at large, but in other ways as well, and amongst other features that
are remarkable in this period is the extraordinary acceleration of all
processes which have to do with human evolution. I think we have many of
us noticed this acceleration as applied to the phenomena of life around us,
even in reference to the changes that have been going on on the physical
plane. Looking back over the past fifty years we see that immense progress
has been made in science, in discovery, in moral development, in religious
thought all over the world; and that acceleration has been going on with
even greater rapidity and energy on the higher planes of nature. It has to do,
of course, with the difference between the downward and the upward arcs
of evolution. On the downward arc of evolution—the great preparatory
process of nature— progress is slow; on the upper arc of the cycle it is
quick, and we are beginning now, having turned the corner as regards this
world period, to feel the accelerating influence of the upward arc of
evolution; and the accelerating influence, I am told, has definitely operated
within the last thirty years, to accelerate the return to incarnation of such
people as we are talking about when we speak of civilized communities. I
leave out of account those who are on the Path; a condition that probably
applies to a good many of my readers, whether they are fully aware of it or
not, most likely to a majority of those who take a real, deep and serious
interest in theosophical teaching. They come under the operation of a new
law altogether, and their incarnation may be accelerated far beyond any
such periods as we have been talking about. But dealing with the general
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concerned for the moment with the Star of Empire—but westward the
great forces of spiritual energy and development are distinctly moving. And
we have to be worthy, as it were, of that condition of things; we have to rise
to meet it.
If we properly appreciate our functions, they are much more dignified than
at the first glance people believe. The Theosophical Society is charged with
the great task of leading spiritual progress in the Western world. The Society
is a nucleus which in future generations, at no very distant period, will be
enormously expanded beyond its present conditions, expanded let us trust
by virtue of the fact that those who are now concerned with it will
appreciate the duties incumbent on them, and act in a manner which may
pave the way for that further development which undoubtedly is
contemplated by Higher Powers as the programme of the future. That can
be carried out if we can respond adequately to the influence that they are
radiating.
That is the most important thought that I have to deal with just now, but
there are one or two other minor matters having to do with misconceptions
or misunderstandings of theosophical teaching, which seem trivial and
almost trumpery compared with those which I have been talking about, but
which none the less claim notice. I am referring to Views which are
sometimes put forward, connecting aspirations for spiritual growth and
progress with questions relating to what we eat and drink or refrain from
eating and drinking. Now this is a very delicate subject which has been a
good deal discussed by theosophical writers lately, and in reference to
which I am very anxious not to be misunderstood myself by theosophical
friends. No one can entertain a more definitely appreciative admiration for
what may roughly be called superior or cleaner modes of life, as compared
with those of the multitude, than I myself; but I do venture to say—and I say
it on authority that I respect—that however beautiful in its conception purer
diet may be, that " perfect way in diet" that Mrs. Kingsford so admirably
wrote about many years ago has nothing to do with spiritual progress. That
is all that I am driving at. Do not let people who, whether for reasons of
health, convenience, family environment, or for any other reasons worthy of
consideration, find it difficult to adopt the rules of the perfect way in diet—
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do not let them suppose that in any way they are prejudicing their spiritual
growth by disregarding them. That is all I am emphasizing. The all-important
consideration in regard to physical life—I am not speaking now of the moral
attributes that should guide our conduct in life—our all-important duty in
regard to the physical instrument with which we have to work when we are
trying to do the right thing in this life, is that we should keep it in health. And
at the present time, when most of our bodies—not our Egos, but most of
our bodies—may have come down through a line of heredity familiarized
with the old-fashioned diet, it does not always happen that the present
representatives of that line can be healthy on an entirely new regime. That is
the important point to remember. Your duty, so to speak, to the body is to
keep it in health, and you must determine for yourself what particular
course of life in regard to this matter of eating and drinking is best
calculated to have that effect. I have made efforts to get information on this
subject from exalted teachers. I think I have succeeded, and of course what I
have been saying to you is the outcome of such success.
Going more into detail, it may be recognized that in a certain very limited
sense it is true that what, for want of a better term, we call “ magnetism ”
of a bad order does attach to meat as a food. It has a very slight influence,
and I am told that those who look on from a higher plane at the efforts of
some vegetarian thinkers to follow the perfect way in diet, are rather
amused to see that they ignore this question of magnetism as between
various kinds of vegetable food. If there is any point in the idea that certain
foods have a bad magnetism, then certain kinds of vegetable foods have a
bad magnetism to just the same extent as meat, and in neither case does
that matter seriously. The same thing applies to alcohol with slightly greater
emphasis. And again the question is whether physical heredity is of such an
order as to render any particular body incapable of maintaining health and
efficiency for whatever work it has to do, without some little of that
otherwise undesirable beverage.
One other theory claims notice in this connection— that which relates to
the habit of smoking. Let nobody be under the impression—if they are
inclined to attach any importance to the information I have been privileged
to obtain—that there is any harm in that practice in regard to the conditions
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To speak of the change which has come over the public mind, or that
portion of the public mind which represents the advanced culture of the
period, as a movement of thought, is, in truth, to use an inadequate
expression, for that movement is largely due to an inflow of new knowledge
and information concerning the super-physical mysteries of nature, which
were not at the disposal of those who, in the middle of the last century,
represented the incredulity which then prevailed in reference to all matters
having to do with mystic research. Those of us whose memories stretch
back to the middle of the last century will remember how determined and
contemptuous that incredulity generally was. To attain any knowledge
concerning super-physical states of human consciousness was held to be
eternally impossible. Sporadic phenomena, reported from time to time as
indicating that it might be possible to obtain communication with the
surviving consciousness of people who had departed this life, were treated
as though of necessity they represented imposture and fraud. Stories of
clairvoyance, and records of curious results obtained by mesmerism,
fortune-telling, in all its curious varieties, whether concerned with cards,
palmistry, or astrology, and all the confused traditions of medieval magic,
were lumped up together as representing ignorant superstition. The Science
of the period, dealing exclusively with the phenomena of matter—with
theories that could be substantiated by physical experiment—was
enthroned in public esteem, not merely, as it deserved, by reason of
representing a magnificent development of human intelligence, but as
expressive of finality in regard to human knowledge; not finality along the
lines of its own activity, but finality as regards the character of such
knowledge, held to be necessarily limited by the resources of physical sense.
Philosophy even, vaguely conscious of something beyond the characteristics
of matter, did not hesitate to describe whatever lay beyond the reach of
physical research as “ unknowable," and those who ventured to attempt the
exploration of the unseen or intangible mysteries of Nature, did so at the
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But without stopping to trace the steps by which the great change has been
brought about, what is the actual state of things which we have now to
recognize as distinguishing the thought of our own period ? To begin with,
those who feel themselves in possession of certain knowledge to the effect
that it is possible to communicate with those who have passed on to other
states of existence, are to be counted by millions both in Europe and
America. Their conviction does not imply that it is always possible to
command such communication in individual cases. The laws relating to all
such methods are, as yet, but imperfectly understood; but the broad
certainty that, under some circumstances, such communication is possible,
is enough to establish the main principle that human consciousness survives
the change called death, and it is impossible to overrate the value of the
widespread conviction to that effect permeating our civilization, in which
the progress of physical science was tending in the opposite direction, while
the influence of religious teaching was insufficient to counteract that
tendency. Concurrently with the growth of confidence in the main idea
represented by spiritualism, the various manifestations of Nature’s finer
forces operative amongst those still in physical life have been steadily
securing attention. Psychic research became, by degrees, not merely
emancipated from the intolerance it formerly encountered, but has been
gradually established amongst us as almost a fashionable pursuit.
Mesmerism, so fiercely flouted in the beginning, became recognized, in
some of its aspects, at all events, as a curative agent in some conditions of
disease, and though ill-understood as yet by those who only know it under
the modern and misleading designation “ hypnotism,” is actually recognized
as a system of treatment by many orthodox practitioners. And, sharing in
the growing changes of opinion, the fascination of fortune-telling in all its
varieties has proved only too attractive to many enthusiasts of our
generation. Finally we have to recognize that in the scientific world itself, a
few, at all events, of those most distinguished in research, and many indeed
beside those who have had the courage to acknowledge their conviction,
are conscious already that they are standing on the threshold of a new
scientific dispensation, in which super-physical laws and super-physical
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That is the change that has taken place within the last five and twenty or
thirty years. Beyond the influence of spiritualism, to which I have already
referred, what are the other influences which have brought it about?
for our benefit, the whole scheme of human evolution, the laws governing
spiritual progress, the possibilities awaiting mankind in a remote future, the
continuity of life in successive manifestations on this physical plane of
existence, and the growth of the soul, under the influence of the experience
which those successive manifestations afford. No hurried phrases of this
nature can adequately convey to minds, as yet unfamiliar with the literature
of Theosophy, a complete comprehension of its sublime significance. But in
truth the teaching itself, when properly understood, enables us to realize
that everyone who aspires sooner or later to realize the potentialities of
human progress, must absorb that teaching into his consciousness as a
necessary preparation for the efforts he will be called upon to make, in
connection with his ulterior development.
The phrase I have employed as the title of this essay may not at once be
intelligible, but if I had not shrunk from expanding it to inconvenient length,
I should have rendered it more unintelligible still by employing the words
used with a double signification, proposing to deal, not merely with the
super-physical aspect of natural forces, but also with the natural aspect of
super-physical forces. The inversion of the phrase may not at once convey a
specific meaning, but I venture to think that before I have done its
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significance will be clearly appreciated, and in order that what I have to say
may be at once intelligible in its bearing on the main idea, let me explain
very concisely at the oustet the conclusions I shall endeavour to reach.
I want to show, first of all, that the forces with which we are all familiar, in
their relationship with matter, the laws of Nature as they are commonly
called, can only be correctly understood if we think of them as the
expression of Divine Will consciously operating to produce the effects we
observe, and, secondly, that while the effects we observe, in connection
with the consequences of action—with all that has to do with our
appreciation of right and wrong, good and evil, and moral principle—can
readily enough be associated with the idea of Divine Will, embodying
sanction or disapproval, they are none the less to be recognized as a vast
department of natural law, which, though dealing with resources of a super-
physical nature beyond the reach of experimental research, constitute none
the less a department of natural law as uniform and definite as those which
have to do with the behaviour of matter.
can be distinctly observed as obedient to the law which governs the motion
of our own planets in their orbits. And beyond this the resources of
spectroscopic observation enable us to identify, in distant Suns, some of the
varieties under which matter manifests itself to us in our laboratories, and to
speculate, not unreasonably, on the probability that the so-called chemical
elements with which we are acquainted here are also the materials of which
distant Solar Systems are constructed, and which, most probably, are
obedient in such systems to the same laws of chemical affinity that we are
enabled to investigate in handling those elements on earth. The value of this
observation has to do, of course, with the manner in which it tends to
suggest an otherwise unrecognizable unity in the whole cosmos, even if it is
hardly profitable for us to pursue that idea much farther. But whether we
think of the natural laws affecting matter in their cosmic or in their more
limited aspect, we cannot but be equally driven to the conclusion that the
Divine Power, which builds up definite worlds and systems, impresses on the
complex organisms thus created the characteristics they exhibit when the
creation is accomplished.
on through the will of the Divine Beings to whom the existence of each
Solar System is due. And apart from the general force of reasonable
speculation along these lines, I have been incidentally assured that
clairvoyant observation of a high order will confirm this conclusion in a
curious and interesting way.
But so far I have been dealing only with half the idea I want to convey; that
which is, in a certain sense, the least important half, because it involves
ideas which, independently of occult research, will probably be found
floating in the thought of the period, though perhaps, in most cases, more
vaguely than when clarified by a broad and comprehensive appreciation of
the world’s evolution, as a whole. The expansion of the idea into the region
of intangible cause and effect, is certainly not yet familiar to ordinary
psychological speculation. But, to begin with, all of us who have been
appreciative of Theosophical teaching on the comprehensive scale, will be
familiar with the idea that what is known as the law of Karma, is a law
operative on the moral plane, as definitely as the law of gravitation controls
the region of physical manifestation. But that law is generally thought of as
a vague expression of Divine Will; and even with such opportunity as may be
furnished by familiarity, in some cases, with the evolution of specific Egos
through a long series of lives, though it is exceeding difficult to recognize it
as working with the regularity so plainly observable when we are dealing
with the laws of physical Nature, nevertheless, we do broadly recognize the
idea that conduct in life of a specific order is productive of definite
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The conception with which we are thus inevitably faced by a profound study
of the whole subject, is that the whole scheme of morals, in the broadest
acceptation of that term, is governed by a body of law as comprehensive as
the law of gravitation, as detailed as those which are studied in chemical
laboratories, where the will of God, in reference to matter, is investigated by
experiment and even guided, by the free will of man, towards purposes we
may desire to subserve. And just as the physical law is operative, not merely
with great masses of matter, but with microscopic morsels, or even with
ultra-microscopic particles, so the moral law can penetrate the smallest
crevices of our moral nature, dealing as appropriately with the pettiest
shortcomings, with the feeblest aspirations upward, as with the grandest
achievements of philanthropy or the foulest varieties of crime.
It must be allowed that we cannot easily escape from old habits of thought,
nor give up the trick of thinking of any peculiar faculty we may possess as a
gift of Nature, of any suffering we may be called upon ’ to endure as a
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Nor when the almost infinite resources of free will within the domain of law
are recognized, will the recognition of an all-pervading system of moral law
be, in any way, confusion to the mind. At the present stage of average
human development, that element of free will within human nature is hardly
illuminated with sufficient knowledge to render it capable, so to speak, of
steering a chosen path through the complexities of the law. But the law,
itself, provides compensation for the embarrassments of ignorance while
ignorance prevails, at the same time that it provides opportunity for the
exercise of free will, when at a later stage more enlightened knowledge
shall guide its exercise. Nor even need we cast aside the early
anthropomorphic conception of Divinity which appealed to the saintship of
a more primitive age, and responded to the spiritual thirst of humanity for a
Divine object of worship, sufficiently like ourselves to excite adoration and
love. We who are, at present, concerned with the attempt to comprehend
the meaning of the Higher Occultism, may be embarrassed, for a time, by
finding it impossible to retain anthropomorphic conceptions of Divinity
while, as yet, our knowledge is insufficient to picture in imagination the
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The instruction given in ancient Greece to those who took part in the
meetings at Eleusis—celebrated in history as the Eleusinian Mysteries—
related, as we have abundant reason to believe, to super-physical
knowledge concerning the higher planes of Nature, of the kind that has
been freely promulgated amongst us in recent years. Such knowledge is that
with which we are engaged in our study of the Higher Occultism. The eager
pursuit of super-physical knowledge has been a leading characteristic of
civilized intelligence for the last fifty years, within which time multitudes
have come to know that communication between this plane of life and that
to which humanity passes after the death of the body is possible. But the
great movement—having a wider scope than that which, important as its
influence has been, is narrowed to the consideration of experiences
immediately following the physical life—the study of the Higher Occultism
with which we are now concerned, originated with the Theosophical
Society, the branches of which spread now over the whole world. This
Society was, at all events as regards this country, the channel through which
recent enlightenment has been poured, and thus it becomes necessary to
glance back over the history of the current movement in order to appreciate
the importance of the work it has been privileged to accomplish, as also in
order to appreciate the dignity of the task which lies before it. And to do this
effectually it is necessary to look back even farther than to those earlier
beginnings of modern civilization when the knowledge that we have been
enabled to handle so freely was already in the possession of a few, but
guarded for these few, in accordance with what was then held to be an
imperative necessity, by secrecy of the most rigid order.
later, every human being must possess as a condition providing for his
progress along the path of evolution marked out for him by the great
design. To appreciate the true importance of that Higher Occultism with the
study of which we are now concerned, it is necessary that the full
significance of the idea I have just endeavoured to express should be
grasped by everyone who takes part in such work as that we have now in
hand. Earlier impressions with reference to the teaching conferred on
students of Occultism in former ages, are generally to the effect that such
teaching must have been intensely interesting, that it invested the
possessor with powers of a kind unfamiliar to ordinary life, that it was
something so desirable in itself that no personal sacrifices were allowed to
stand in the way of those who aspired to it, that no perils daunted them,
that no temptations of a worldly nature could turn them aside from its
pursuit. All such conceptions were perfectly sound as far as they went, but
they failed entirely to interpret the great primary motive that inspired those
who pursued occult knowledge with a correct appreciation of all that its
acquisition signified. It is true that the Adept and, in a lesser degree, those
who are advancing along the path leading to adeptship, acquire knowledge
of transcendent interest, and powers the dignity of which cannot easily be
exaggerated. But these rewards are not those which the enlightened
aspirant for adeptship is seeking in his long and laborious efforts to make
progress in that direction. That which he soon learns to realize, if morally
capable of continuous advance along the path he has chosen, is suggested
by the simple truth that the path leading to adeptship is the condensed
epitome of the whole design which Divine Wisdom has sketched out on an
enormous scale for the ultimate progress of all humanity. The supreme
achievements of adeptship establish those who attain it on the moral,
intellectual, and spiritual level which .represents the culmination of all that is
possible for the human race as such. Occult Science is so concatenated
altogether in its vast entirety, that these great truths can only be fully
grasped by those who have completely assimilated the teaching now
available for all of us who care to profit by it, concerning the whole design in
which the human race is involved. But all who have profited effectually by
the literature of modern Occultism will be in a position to appreciate the
force of what I have just said, and even those who as yet are merely
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On the contrary, there was a stage, during the progress of humanity along
the downward arc, when selfishness was the law of progress—of such
progress as was then desired in accordance with the Divine purpose. But
from the midway stage of human evolution onwards, new conceptions of
right and wrong became possible. Of course the midway stage was not
reached by the whole human race simultaneously, but a considerable
number of millions may have been standing fairly in the front, by the time
the Atlantean race had lived through half the period of the life assigned to it.
And from that period onward, it became theoretically possible for those
members of the human family who had most completely fulfilled the
programme of Nature up to that time to appreciate the loftier purposes of
the further evolution awaiting them during the second half of the great
evolutionary process—during the upward arc leading towards Divine
perfection.
found its expression in the foundation of all the great religions of the world
which have emanated, as we see now without the possibility of mistake,
from the wisdom of early adeptship. That suggestion need not be held at
variance with the belief which assigns a Divine origin to some religions of
the kind referred to. Divine purposes are worked out in all cases through
subordinate agencies, and the comprehension of this, in many ways, is one
of the illuminating discoveries that we are enabled to reach through the
study of Occultism. But at all events, those who appreciate the spiritual and
educational blessings conferred on humanity by religion, may readily erect
on that primary belief the further conception that at a certain stage of
human progress specific knowledge of spiritual science may, without
offending against the dignity of religion, be super-added to it. And what we
know now is that for some centuries, adept observers of human growth in
this fifth race of ours—the first beyond the Atlantean on the upward arc of
evolution —have been on the watch for indications which may show that an
adequate number of those left hitherto to the simpler influence and
guidance of religious thought, might become qualified for the reception in
its entirety, or at all events, in considerable measure, of that spiritual science
from which religion, in the first instance, had its rise.
We can see now, looking back 100, 200, or even 300 years, that some
experiments were made by the adept experts of this science, to ascertain
whether amongst ordinary humanity people were ripe for higher teaching in
a sufficient degree to justify its public dissemination. To trace the details of
these experiments would be a considerable task by itself, which indeed
some of us have attempted to carry out by studying the life histories of
distinguished occultists throughout the Middle Ages. But passing over that,
for the moment, we have to recognize that until our own time such
experiments were held to be unsuccessful, and so we come at last—along
the train of thought I have been following—to an intelligent comprehension
of the circumstances that prompted the recent outburst of teaching from
adept sources. That teaching embodied in the earliest Theosophical books
was itself experimental in its inception, but unlike previous attempts of a
similar character, was crowned with success. Sufficient numbers of people
in the modern world—or leaving out of account whatever has been done in
the East, I may fairly say in this modern European world of ours— have
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I.—Theosophical “Brotherhood”
The word “ Brotherhood ” does not creep into its records till some years
later. It was first used by Mr. C. C. Massey and his friends in London when
they formed a British branch of the New York Society. They described its
purpose as being “ to discover the nature and powers of the human soul,”
and they went on to declare that they believed in “ a great intelligent First
Cause and in the Divine sonship of the spirit of Man, and hence in the
immortality of that spirit and in the universal Brotherhood of the human
race.” Colonel Olcott took this hint and developed the idea in a new
statement of subjects as follows: “ (1) The study of Occult Science; (2) the
formation of a nucleus of universal brotherhood; (3) the revival of Oriental
literature.” The word " brotherhood ” was afterwards shifted into the first
place, but it was always accompanied by the qualifying term “ Nucleus.” It
was not used, and should never be used, by Theosophists with the
significance attached to it by those concerned with mundane politics or
social reconstruction on the physical plane. The word in its theosophical
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Thus, to let the formula in which the objects of the Theosophical Society are
generally expressed distort the purpose of the movement to suit the
purpose of any mundane theory of social reform is a very grievous blunder.
From the beginning all qualified exponents of the Theosophical Movement
have warned us to keep clear of all political contamination. The Society may
include persons of very varied political opinions, but within the Society their
only duty is to study and promote the study of the super-physical spiritual
science gradually unfolded for our benefit and through us for the benefit of
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all mankind. The fulfilment of that duty should be compatible with perfect
harmony of feeling within the Society, where it is needless and undesirable
to discuss varied beliefs as to how the physical welfare of the community
may be best promoted. We should not]'furnish unsympathetic critics of our
real work with an excuse for pretending to regard us as a body of people
entangled with questionable schemes for subversive changes on the
physical plane.
By those who concern themselves with it, this second “ object ” is liable to
be misunderstood. By a large!1 number it is disregarded. It has a very definite
purpose really. Briefly stated, that is, to bring out by such study the fact that
at the basis of all religions worth talking of there are certain fundamental
ideas, more or less vaguely hinted at, which are clearly set forth in
Theosophical teaching. Theosophical writers have sometimes too
emphatically emphasized the idea that Theosophy is not a religion. Of
course it is not, in the sense that it has no hard and fast creed of the kind
that most religions adopt. But no one who really understands Theosophical
teaching is in need of any other religion. A real comprehension of the Divine
Hierarchy, and of the laws governing human evolution, covers the whole
area of thought and emotion which any religion at its best can cover
(besides covering a good deal more). Not on that account will any true
Theosophist repudiate any religion with which by race or nationality he may
be traditionally connected. Here we have a very pretty subtlety to consider.
If any Theosophist identified by race, residence, and habits of thought with
this country is asked the question, “Are you a Christian ?” what should he
answer ? To say “ No ” (because in his inner consciousness he felt that occult
wisdom superseded all religions having a definite name) would be
misleading and in bad taste. My answer in such a case would be, “ Certainly;
of course I am.” I might go on to explain that I had 110 sympathy with the
caricature of Christianity provided for us by most of the European Churches,
but that would only be possible if the conversation were protracted.
The idea to enforce is, that any one who takes up any particular religion and
makes a close study of that, embellishing its crudities as far as he can by the
results of his own thinking, is not doing anything which resembles the
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This could not have been done at a much earlier period. Clumsy religions,
brutal bigotry, atheism (the result of disgust developed among the most
intelligent by the stupidity of priests and clergy), all stood in the way. But
the experiment was made in these latter years, and has been justified by
partial success. Multitudes all over the world do appreciate the gift of occult
knowledge. Of course, besides these, many rush in without understanding
the real purpose of the movement, caught by some phrase associated with
it, into which they read their own prepossessions. They may impede the
progress of the great work for a time, but there are forces behind this that
must prevail in the end. Far beyond the limits of the Society the fascination
of occult teaching is spreading through the cultured classes. To that growth
we must look forward with confident hope, even if we, or some of us, get a
little out of patience with mistaken ideas permeating the Society at this
early stage of its existence. The Theosophical Movement is much bigger
than the Theosophical Society, which must undergo great purification if it is,
in future years, destined to lead the Theosophical Movement. The
movement itself is pressing towards a period when advanced thinkers will
not be comparing medieval religions, but will be comparing whichever of
these appeals best to their sympathies, with the grand spiritual truths
conveyed to them by the theosophical revelation—recasting their favourite
religion, if they cling to it at all, in harmony with these truths. At the end
there will be many who find in the teaching which we still call “ occult ” all
the religion they need. Others will prefer to decorate it with some of the
phraseology of their earlier faith. Thus ceremonial religions will survive by
their various names, and in the midst of all there will be a central block of
thinkers, more or less indifferent to ceremonial, who will be content to call
themselves “ Theosophists,” pure and simple. But the same ideas will
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permeate all groups, and great progress will then have been made in the
development of that “ brotherhood ” the “ nucleus ” of which we, who
understand our task, are called upon to “ form ” at this commencement of
the stupendous religious construction, the beautiful results of which those
adequately gifted with foresight can discern beyond the horizon.
The third object of the Society is less liable to be misunderstood than either
the first or second, but is perhaps the most important, and, like any other
idea expressed in concise language, is open to various interpretations. It is
formally stated in these terms: “ To investigate the unexplained laws of
Nature and the powers latent in Man.” These words properly understood
may be held to inaugurate the study of an entirely new science. The mistake
sometimes made is to suppose that they merely prescribe an attempt to
cultivate hitherto undeveloped faculties theoretically latent in each of us.
That, in most cases, would prove an extremely unsatisfying or disappointing
pursuit. Most people of this age and race have come into the present life
without the potentiality of such development in themselves. As with every
other attribute we possess the potentiality of psychic perception can only
exist as the product of some effort made in a former life. Many
Theosophists accept en bloc the theory of Karma, and at once proceed to
ignore it when they think of themselves. They are too often encouraged to
do this by people endowed with psychic faculties who find these so natural
and easily used that they cannot help thinking that anyone might acquire
them by working for that end with sufficient earnestness of purpose.
Volumes (reckoning such writing in the aggregate) have been written to
assure candidates for psychic development that if they will only “ lead the
life ”—be ascetics in the matter of food, drink, etc., etc.—they will be able
to verify Theosophical teaching for themselves. One might just as well tell a
weak, undersized boy that by searing underdone beefsteaks and using the
dumbbells he would make himself able to go into the ring and beat a
prizefighter. The boy’s Karma has not endowed him with an athletic body,
and he must be content to use it for pursuits it is adapted to deal with.
Of course it is true that there are cases in which partially endowed persons
may greatly stimulate their latent faculties. It is only a question of their
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Karmic condition. There are all degrees of this condition to consider. At one
end of the scale we have people who are naturally psychic from childhood
onwards, and who, if they take pains, develop into great clairvoyants and
seers in mature life. At the other end of the scale we have those who,
however gifted intellectually, morally, and physically, have no glimmering of
psychic faculty and could not develop that even if they made the struggle to
do so the passion of a ' lifetime and ruined their health by asceticism, f
Between those two extremes there are all varieties of condition, and in
some of these appropriate effort may give rise to results. I will only add, as a
personal conviction, that in no cases will the results ensue from fanatical
rules about eating and drinking. The finest clairvoyants and psychics I have
known- and I have been privileged to know a good many—are people who
laugh at all such rules and eat whatever they find by experience keeps them
in the best health I am assured on high authority that that is the only sound
rule to work with. Our bodies are the instruments we have to make use of in
this life, and whatever work we have to do, we can do it best by keeping the
instrument in good order. It should go without saying that no one worth
talking about makes pleasure the test of what is best for him to eat or drink.
Amplifying the above generalities, the first thing the true Theosophist has
got to do is to understand the goal to be aimed at—in other words, the
place in Nature, the condition and powers and functions of those whom we
speak of now as “ Masters of the White Lodge.” I do not much like the
phrase, but it will serve for the moment. In the early days of the movement
we were all led to say to people thinking of joining the Society: “ It does not
matter whether you believe in the Adept Brotherhood or not.” And it did
not matter then. We felt that membership in the Society would surely lead
them sooner or later to acquire this essential belief. If it does not, they
might really employ their energies elsewhere to better advantage. Do my
readers realize, I wonder, how it came to pass that “ Esoteric Buddhism ”
sent a thrill through the world on its first appearance? That was not merely
or chiefly because the sketch it gave of occult science met an intellectual
need, but because it made people think of the Great Adepts, and that gave
them a chance of driving home a return current of thought. They cannot
begin such intercourse. The first appeal must come from the aspiring human
Ego. But once that aspiration is kindled, any results may ensue.
Now, of course, those who profit by later theosophical literature may learn
much more about the Masters than they could gather from the first book.
That, like every other theosophical book I have ever looked at, is replete
with imperfection, for we who endeavour to interpret the rudiments of
occult science are working on the threshold of infinity. But there is much
known now that was quite unknown to the early leaders of the movement,
about the White Lodge and the methods of approach to it, and those are
the subjects and ideas people should concern themselves with if they desire,
in an intelligent way, to carry out our third object—to "investigate ” the laws
of Nature governing the development of the faculties and powers latent in
Man.
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I . Nebula
This whole department of astronomy has only been evolved since the
development of the telescope. One may almost say, since the Huggins
discovery that some nebulas give a purely gaseous spectrum, making it
certain that they were not star clusters. Since then we have got on rapidly. It
was found, indeed, that some nebula?, certainly not resolvable into clusters,
gave continuous spectra. Some consisted of glowing gas and some of solid
particles. Then it became apparent that most probably all nebulas were
spiral in their shape, and we approached the conception that central suns
were formed before the planets. Then (again with the help of Sir William
Huggins) we got at a means of ascertaining the motion of nebulae in the line
of sight. It is an old story now, but fascinating as ever. The dark lines in the
spectra of stars are sometimes displaced a little as compared with those of
similar bodies in the laboratory. If they are displaced towards the red end of
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the spectrum, that means that the star is receding from us. If they are
displaced towards the violet end, that means that the star is approaching us.
The light waves are, in fact, in the one case crushed together, in the other
drawn out. Recent work with this method at the Lowell observatory has
shown that the great Andromeda nebula is approaching us at the rate of
300 kilometres per second, and other nebulae show still higher velocities.
But they are so far off, hopelessly beyond the reach of parallax, almost too
far for guesswork, that some astronomers incline to think them outside our
Universe altogether, an unacceptable guess in my humble judgment. The
great nebula in Orion is, of course, the biggest. It covers a region of space
not less than one which light would only cross in forty years. But we cannot
suggest a maximum limit of its magnitude, because we have no notion how
far off it is. When we call it the nebula in Orion, we merely mean that we can
see it if we look in the direction of Orion. How far it may be behind the stars
of that group is wholly uncertain.
suppose that such collisions are among Nature's methods in starting a new
nebula, but it is just as easy to assign planetesmal knots to the aggregation
of matter within the spirals of a nebula after it has been started in business
by some other device—the condensation of etheric matter from infinite
space, for example.
One word more while on this subject concerning a theory that some
astronomers have favoured to the effect that nebulse, in some cases at all
events, may be so remote that they constitute Universes outside our own
altogether. “ Our " Universe, on that h3rpothesis, is the whole stellar system
embraced by the Milky Way, and shaped, in the aggregate, like a millstone,
the diameter greatly exceeding its thickness. Nebulae are more frequent in
the direction of the thickness than in that of the diameter, and from that
condition of things the hypothesis referred to has arisen. It has always
seemed to me to rest on quite insufficient data, and I am glad to see that an
American astronomer, Professor Barnard, dismisses it with confidence in its
mistaken character “We used to think,” he says, “of these nebulae as being
at such vast distances from us, much beyond the limits of our universe of
stars. Photography has shown in many ways that though their distances
must be great indeed they are often well this side of more distant stars, and
that many of them, perhaps most of them, are within our stellar system, and
are no farther away than some of the brighter stars.”
Now the line of thought that seems to me more definitely adverse to the
theory has to do with infinitudes of various unthinkable orders, taken in
conjunction with ideas suggested by the visible facts of our own Universe.
By that last phrase I mean all the millions of visible stars embraced by the
Milky Way. The actual diameter of the space included by that wonderful
girdle is a matter of conjecture, but roughly the Milky Way is often spoken of
as probably about 50,000 light years away from us in either direction,
assuming that we are somewhere near the centre of the whole system,
there or thereabouts. Now planetary distribution within the Solar System
shows us outer planets set at ever increasing distances from the central Sun.
We have not yet worked out any map showing the distribution of Solar
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Systems in the Universe, but the old Hermetic philosophers had a favourite
saying, “ As below, so above." It is applicable to many observed facts of
Nature, and if we start with the assumption that in the infinities of space
there may or must be other universes, the probability would be that they are
dispersed in space on principles resembling the dispersal of planets within
the Solar System. The nearest planet to the Sun is many times as distant as
the Sun's diameter. The nearest external universe to us ought on the same
principle to be many times the distance of our Universe's diameter, and that,
as I have said above, is guessed at about 100,000 light years, so the nearest
external universe ought to be much more than that distance away. It sounds
ridiculous to talk of 100,000 light years as an incredible measurement by
reason of being too little, but in talking about universes we must think in
terms of infinitude.
All this, I grant, is in the region of the most unpractical thinking in which we
can indulge, but that is one of the fascinating attributes of astronomy— it
takes us outside the area of low-down practicalities.
Like other sciences astronomy was paralyzed by the war, and very little new
work was accomplished during its progress. But some observations were
directed to the question whether the satellites of Jupiter revolve on their
axes or keep only one face to their august primary. To be more rigidly
accurate: do they rotate on their axes only once in the period of a revolution
round the primary, or more often ? The question is full of interest, because it
is always cropping up in reference to the interior planets, Venus and
Mercury, and has a very important bearing on all speculation as to life in
other worlds. The one celestial body that undoubtedly turns only one face
to its primary is our own moon; but by common consent the moon is to be
regarded as a dead planet, whether we accept (what seems to me) the
foolish theory that it is a fragment of the earth torn off at an early stage of
our planetary life, or the other theory that it is really the remains of an older
world than ours, the outer casings of which were melted off when the
nebular condensation that gave rise to our world was in progress. Now we
cannot frame any corresponding hypothesis that would account for the
satellites of Jupiter. Let me remind the reader of what we know about them.
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Leaving out of account the later discovered exterior satellites outside the
familiar four—and these may be merely masses of meteoric matter caught
by the attraction of Jupiter—the well-known four are bodies of considerable
magnitude. The two innermost, Io and Europa, to give them the names that
have been assigned to them, are somewhat smaller than our moon, the two
outer ones, Ganymede and Callisto, are somewhat larger. These have been
the subject of study by Mr. Waterfield of the British Astronomical
Association, and he thinks he has discerned markings which show that
Callisto always turns the same face to Jupiter, while Ganymede, the
outermost of the four, does not seem quite to do this, but has a period of
rotation fifty-nine minutes less than the period of its revolution round the
primary. It seems presumptuous to criticize the conclusions of an
astronomer using powerful instruments, but this theory about tidal action—
the assumed cause of the single rotation idea—is so much in fashion just
now that one can well believe observers falling in with it, prone to discover
evidence in its favour. My main objection to it turns on very broad principles
which seem to underlie all reasonable theories of the Universe. So far as
observation enables us to check the conception, the purpose of
manifestation on the physical plane is to provide for the activities of life. All
intelligent thinkers have long since got beyond the primitive notion that the
Earth is the only inhabited world; that the Sun and stars exist merely for our
sake. We need not jump to the conception that all other worlds are
inhabited by beings just like ourselves, but the more closely we study the
Earth the more we find it teeming with life of one kind or another in every
corner, life in forms adapted to the most varied conditions of heat and cold.
Directly faith lifts us above blank materialism it becomes impossible to rest
content with the idea that any of the other planets of the Solar System are
mere purposeless masses of dead matter. They must be theatres of life of
one kind or another.
Now the theory about turning one face to the primary has even been
applied to the interior planets of our system. Venus and Mercury are
supposed by some astronomers to turn only one face to the Sun. But this
arrangement would make them unfit to be the theatres of life of any kind.
One part would be burnt to a cinder, and the other frozen to an
unimaginable degree. The theory as applied to Venus and Mercury is an
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insult to the harmonies of Nature, and if observers think they have detected
markings the motions of which seem to imply the single rotation
arrangement—I do not say tant pis pour les faits,but tant pis pvur the
current interpretation of the facts. As regards the satellites of Jupiter it is
true, even though they should really turn one face to the primary, they
would in their revolution round him turn all faces in succession to the Sun,
so such light and warmth as they get from him would be evenly diffused. On
the other hand, as against Mr. Waterfield’s contention, we have to take first
the all but universality of the habit celestial bodies have of turning on their
axes. Secondly, the Jupiter satellites, whatever their origin may have been,
are certainly not what our satellite is, remains of a world older than the
primary. They are four independent bodies of considerable magnitude, and
we must await the development of our knowledge to a far higher level than
we have yet reached before expecting to comprehend their beginnings. “
We are ancients of the Earth,” etc., and the expansion of our faculties since
the days of King Alfred have bridged the spaces of this world in a way that
would have indeed seemed unthinkable for the earlier ancients of that time.
Another advance of corresponding importance may enable us, or our
successors, to cross in consciousness the spaces of the Solar System.
META-SCIENCE
Now it is quite true that the war has made the whole subject, and many
others that cling to it, much more insistent in their demand on attention
than they used to be in the ancient days of peace. And the wave of interest
in super-physical research and speculation that is spreading through the
intellectual world has a force that seems likely ere long to bear down the
affectation that the newspapers, as a rule, still maintain—the pretence of
assuming that all attempts to penetrate the unseen mysteries of Nature
represent the foolishness of weak minds to be laughed out of court by the
sane man in the street. People who have lost dear relations in the war are
not easily warned off inquiries that may throw light on their fate. And when
they make inquiry they find that belief in the possibility of getting definite
news from those who have “ passed on ” is not confined, as they had been
told, to weak-minded women and fraudulent fortune-tellers, but is held as a
solid conviction by a large number of the most eminent men of the time.
Then they are duly impressed. Such books as Sir A. Conan Doyle’s New
Revelation, Sir William Barrett's Threshold of the Unseen, and Sir Oliver
Lodge’s Raymond, and scores of earlier volumes of equal value and dignified
authorship, make the old-fashioned attitude of supercilious contempt for
Spiritualism too ridiculous to be kept up much longer even in Fleet Street. So
we may be approaching a time when metaphysics of the old-fashioned
order—vague speculation about the nature of Thought, and the intangible
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the activities required to materialize the idea. But when it merely controls
the bricklayer (through the intermediation of wages), and materializes itself
by slow degrees, people lose sight of the fact that Will has been the origin of
the result. Future science has got to ascertain whether there may not be
some more direct way of bringing Will to bear on matter.
I have referred from time to time to the theory that the electron is an atom
of electricity supported (in the beginning at all events) by Sir J. J. Thomson
and Sir Oliver Lodge. I have ventured to repudiate that theory in favour of its
rival—the theory that the electron is an atom of ether carrying a definite
charge of electricity. Of course, I am very far from being alone in dissenting
from the views of the dignified authorities just mentioned, but the atomic
theory of electricity must be regarded so far as the more orthodox view of
the two, and a recent number of Nature actually heads an article with the
words: “ The Atom of Electricity.” Now, of course, one difficulty in the way
of general acceptance for the etheric theory of the electron arises from the
view that has been widely entertained concerning the constitution of the
ether itself. According to that conception the attributes of the ether
embody a mass of paradox. It has been described as non-molecular, denser
than the densest metals and yet utterly intangible to our senses, perfectly
frictionless, interpenetrating all matter, which is at the same time passing
through it with planetary velocity. Then this mysterious medium, at once
denser than the densest solid, and less so than the finest gases, is
undulating all the time at rates which paralyze imagination, and giving rise
to all the sensations of light and colour.
But are we incapable of framing any theory that will fit the facts better than
the ultra-dense non-molecular theory ? The great Russian chemist,
Mendelef, answered that question some years ago in a book that attracted
at the time less attention than it deserved, while now, in the midst of the
electron controversy, it really clamours for attention. It is called A Chemical
Conception of the Ether. I will endeavour to explain the argument, content to
say, first, that there can be no one in the scientific hierarchy great enough to
treat any views of Mendelef’s with disdain. He was the originator of the
universally accepted periodic table of the elements, an arrangement which
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Within recent years, however, the discovery of the inert gases of the
atmosphere—argon, helium, krypton and the rest—presented chemists
with a new puzzle. There was no place for them in the periodic table.
Mendeleeff, in the book I have named above, finds the difficulty merely the
introduction to a new and brilliant hypothesis. All these inert gases form a
new group or column by themselves, and their atomic weights fit in with this
arrangement. But there are gaps in the new column I To make the
arrangement symmetrical there should be two bodies lighter than helium.
And this condition of things harmonizes with a belief Mendeleeff tells us he
has long entertained that there ought to be two “ elements,” as yet
unknown to science, lighter than hydrogen. He boldly fills up these two gaps
with bodies x and y, and x, the lighter of the two, he suggests, is the Ether !
explain the fact that the ether pervades all space, disregarding the
attraction of planets. The velocity of its atomic vibrations would enable it to
overcome gravitation. And the dimensions of the etheric atoms would be of
such a minute order that they obviously may provide a material basis for the
unit charge of electricity described as the electron, while this view of the
whole subject gets rid of what has always seemed to me the monstrous
absurdity of treating force as atomic. One might as well talk of an atom of
gravitation.
Science has so long been commandeered for the service of the war, that in
reference to some of its pre-war achievements it has failed to make further
progress. Especially is this the case in connection with the study of the
electron, so that a view I have long held be a delusion, and have often
ventured to describe as such, still commands general acquiescence. I rejoice,
therefore, to observe in America the dawn of a clear understanding as to the
real place in Nature of that elusive particle. Sir J. J. Thomson and others still
persist in regarding it as an atom of electricity. A long and, as it seems to me,
an extremely intelligent article appears in The Scientific American, under the
heading, “ The Relations of Matter and Ether.” That all atoms of physical
matter, even the finest, those of hydrogen, are built up each of many
electrons, is a practically established fact, though opinions still differ widely
as to the number of electrons in each. Anyhow, these are supposed, quite
correctly in all probability, to move about freely within the space included by
the atom, just as the planets of a solar system move about within the space
embraced by each solar system. The article before me recognizes the
electron as thus the unit of physical matter, while agreeing that it is also—or
represents also—the unit volume of electric force. It has a dual aspect. I
must here quote a few lines from the article to show how the writer glides
into the view I have always maintained. “ A question of moment here arises.
Can the corpuscles of the ether, its unit particle, be smaller than this vastly
minute particle of matter ? Are we not warranted in suggesting that these
may be in the same category so far as size is concerned ? Yet if this is
admitted as probable we cannot stop here. If these excessively minute
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particles, the electron and the ether corpuscles, are similar in size, may they
not be similar in other directions ? In short, may they not be identical ?”
On the basis of this more than reasonable hypothesis, the writer goes on to
draw various inferences. We start with the conception of the ether as
atomic in its constitution and filling all space—the raw material from which
all physical matter is built up. May it not be susceptible of existence in
different states as physical matter exists in the three states, solid, liquid, and
gaseous ? Then the atomic condition in which it fills all space and transmits
the vibrations of light and heat would be its gaseous condition. In its liquid
condition it might roll up into drops analogous to those of water, and
become atoms of physical matter ! I do not find that idea at all helpful. A
much simpler and more natural view treats the aggregation of etheric atoms
into physical molecules as a process accomplished by stages. Atomic ether
does not appeal to our physical senses. Evidently there must be some
minimum number of etheric atoms in a molecule to render it so qualified.
Aggregations of lesser number would still remain imperceptible to our
senses. But it would be extravagant to assume that Nature has no activities
outside those limits. The minor aggregations of etheric atoms that do not
come within the range of our senses must constitute so many varieties of
molecular ether !
I have long been convinced that there are such varieties of molecular ether,
and when this comes to be recognized it will open the door to a flood of
new speculation concerning the phenomena of light, heat and colour. More
than this, it will put a new and greatly more nature-like complexion on
theories concerning the radiations from the Sun. We are all familiar with the
calculation showing that the heat radiations of the Sun are wasted to the
extent of some ridiculous percentage, because so little of them can actually
impinge upon the planets. Suppose no heat is really wasted !—that what we
call heat is an effect developed by the molecular ether .surrounding each
planet; that the vibrations of the atomic ether of interstellar space are not
heat at all ! I am not daring to assert this. Future discovery may follow some
quite different line, but the discovery of molecular ether—at present merely
a profoundly plausible hypothesis—arising from the discovery of the
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Certainly we shall have to improve our present senses, or get some more,
before we can expect to be directly cognizant of molecular ether, but we
already deal with many natural phenomena beyond the range of the senses.
Invisible light and inaudible sound are favourite subjects for scientific
lectures. The ultra-violet rays can be detected by the photographic plate; the
note of a whistle, too shrill to be heard, can be observed by the sensitive
flame. Over and above the debt that optics in the future may owe to the
discovery of molecular ether, it may go a long way towards breaking down
the habit of nineteenth-century science, which used to make it so scornful of
everything it could neither see, hear, nor feel. For many men of science, and
for multitudes whose beliefs are based on personal experience, the new
senses required to enable us to penetrate the mysteries of Nature farther
than this has been done by merely physical researches, are recognized as
beginning to flicker about here and there, and are loosely grouped under
the title “ clairvoyance.” They are already available for scientific purposes. I
hesitate no longer to include the subject in the range of scientific
developments, partly because—as Sir Oliver Lodge has put it—those who
disbelieve in the existence of clairvoyance do not express an opinion, but
merely show ignorance, and partly because my own experience has very
fully confirmed that view. Vaguely most people imagine that clairvoyance
has to do with fortune-telling and ghost stories. In reality it is sometimes
directed to genuine scientific research, and, for example, to the study of the
atom. Along this line of inquiry it has been ascertained (if we treat the
method as reliable) that the number of etheric atoms (or electrons) in an
atom (or molecule) of hydrogen is 18. Current scientific guesses on the
subject vary so widely that some writers put the figure down as two or
three, or even one, while others soar in imagination to the level of many
thousands. The theory is supported along the line of research that gave rise
to it, by the observation of other atoms besides those of hydrogen. Many
have been examined, and the result shows that in all such cases the larger
numbers identified with heavier atoms, when divided by 18, give the
recognized atomic weights of the substances in question. The discovery is
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I freely grant that as yet the new senses required for scientific clairvoyance
are so rarely found in adequate perfection, that they cannot be checked by
use in different laboratories. But if a gradual prima facie belief in their
occasional existence gains ground, efforts will assuredly be made to
cultivate the faculty where it exists in embryo, and by degrees true scientific
research will certainly be pushed beyond that Threshold of the Unseen that
Sir William Barrett writes about with remarkable effect.
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From Central America, south of Mexico, as the county narrows towards the
Isthmus of Panama, the peninsula of Yucatan stretches out eastward. It is
not a region that tempts civilized immigrants. The climate is not specially
unhealthy, but too hot to be pleasant. Its half-million or so of primitive
inhabitants have no mineral wealth. Nature endows them with mahogany-
trees and tolerates tobacco, cotton, and the sugar-cane; but the only
product which Yucatan sells to the outer world is henequin, a kind of hemp
used in the manufacture of coarse sackcloth and hammocks. Yet from one
point of view, that of the archaeologist, Yucatan is one of the most
interesting regions in the world. It links us with a past that lies tar behind the
few thousand years that engage the attention of the Egyptologist, and puts
us in touch with a period of the Earth’s history which used to be regarded as
entirely mythical, but has emerged from that comfortless moral atmosphere
and is now accorded a grudging recognition by orthodox geology. The
fundamental fact that the Atlantic basin must once have been, for the most
part, continental land, would no longer offend any modern geologist. The
idea used to be ridiculed, but is now treated as a matter of course. Plato,
however, is so far only partially vindicated. Geology tolerates the theory that
there must once have been an Atlantean land, but declines to have anything
to do with the theory that it was inhabited. This is the stage in the
development of prehistoric knowledge at which Yucatan comes in. And I am
tempted to deal with the subject because one number of the Scientific
American has an article about the antiquities of Yucatan that may help to get
attention focused on their enormous significance.
Yucatan, says the writer, can well be called the American Egypt. The ruins of
172 cities, big and little, have been discovered, and not a quarter of the
territory has been explored. Tropical vegetation makes the work difficult. “
You might pass within a hundred feet of a wonderful old temple or pyramid
a hundred times, and not discover it, so effectively does the jungle screen
these crumbling monuments of the distant past.” The article goes on to tell
us that some of these ruins must once have been large cities, with not less
223
than half a million inhabitants in each one. The writer, who seems to have
had personal experience, has found one pyramid the most interesting
among all these relics of the past. The steps on one side are fairly well
preserved, and at the top is a platform, which was the sacrificial altar. There
the priests “ cut out the hearts of living victims.” In a great quadrangle at
the foot of the pyramid the inhabitants of the city used to gather to watch “
these festal doings.” Around were the “ palaces ” of nuns, “ for whose
special delectation these sacrifices were made. The nuns were the
aristocrats of ancient Maya society.”
The writer does not tell us from what authorities he derives his information,
but anyone who wants to study the subject further will find all he needs in
the books of Dr. Le Plongeon (an American archaeologist, though with a
French name), who devoted his life to the study of Mexican, and especially
Yucatan, antiquities, and did much more than merely describe remains.
These, like the antiquities of Egypt, are covered to a large extent with
inscriptions in hieroglyphic character. The hieroglyphics seem the same as
those used in Egypt, but the Egyptologists could make nothing of them.
Egyptian hieroglyphics became intelligible when the Rosetta stone showed
what language they spelled. But they certainly did not spell Coptic in
Yucatan. The discovery of the language they did spell is the splendid gift Le
Plongeon bestowed on the archaeological world, and because the results
offended the prejudices of the period (still clinging to the idea that Atlantis
was a fable), they were never properly appreciated. But the scientific mind
at the present day is more accessible to new views, which sometimes
involve the restoration of very old views, and the stone inscriptions of
Yucatan are already establishing some broad conclusions respecting the
people of the old Atlantic continent, compared to whom the earliest
Egyptian and Chaldean civilizations were recent stages of human history. In
several places Le Plongeon came upon inscriptions plainly describing the
final catastrophe that submerged the last great surviving fragment of the
old Atlantean continent. The date of the catastrophe is even given with
precision. It took place 8060 years before the period at which the event was
recorded. Plausible guesses as to the date of the inscriptions add about
3500 years to the 8000 odd, so it was about 9000 odd b.c. when the
stupendous cataclysm took place. And that only affected the last then
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Everything, says a familiar proverb, comes to those who wait, even the
vindication, at the hands of exoteric science, of information acquired from
the great teachers of occultism, however widely this may seem, at first
sight, at variance with conventional views. Within the last few years,
something fresh has come out about earthquakes which has an important
bearing on the physical history of this world, as interpreted by esoteric
teaching and investigation. Almost everything that stands written in
encyclopaedias and popular textbooks concerning earthquakes is now out
of date, and under the highest scientific auspices we are introduced to a
view of this subject that begins to be in harmony with Nature’s records in
reference to the great geographical catastrophes that from time to time
have altered the face of the globe.
The modern world is indebted to Japan for having done most up to the
present time in the direction of elucidating the mystery of earthquakes.
Certainly Japan has been better qualified than any other country to take a
leading part in this investigation. It is favoured, if that phrase be admissible,
with opportunities for studying earthquakes which no other country enjoys.
On an average Japan endures three a day, not always on the scale of that
which, in 1891, destroyed 10,000 lives, and involved the Government in an
expenditure of 30 million dollars on repairs, but at all events of one kind or
another. Perhaps for scientific purposes the little earthquakes are most
useful. When towns are shivering in ruins, and railway viaducts being tied up
into knots, the most zealous seismologist may get confused in his
observations. But anyhow, taking all sorts together, Japan has plenty of
seismological material to work with. The examination of this has become an
intellectual fashion in Japan, and a seismograph is as common an article of
luxury in a Japanese household as a mantelpiece clock with us. The
Government has liberally subsidized the investigation, and a distinguished
English engineer for some time past occupied what may be called the Chair
of Earthquakes at the Tokio University.
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Professor Milne, the engineer in question, has thus become the leading
authority on earthquakes, and as such he lectured at the Royal Institution
one Friday evening, a few years ago. In the hour he had at his disposal he did
not survey the various hypotheses that have been put forward from time to
time to account for earthquakes, but it may be worth while to glance at
these here, for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with the subject.
The volcanic theory has perhaps been most in favour. Earthquakes, it has
been assumed, have been underground disturbances that have not been
near enough to the surface to break out as eruptions, but have nevertheless
shaken and dislocated the upper strata. Another notion has been that they
were due to the influx of sea-water into internal cavities in the crust of the
Earth. Steam, at a high temperature, it was supposed, would be engendered
in this way, and an earthquake would ensue on the principle of an explosion
in a steam-boiler. Yet another theory suggested the reaction of certain
chemical ingredients coming into contact in the interior cavities of the
Earth’s crusts. Gases at a high pressure were thus supposed to be
developed, and hence the explosive energy displayed. All these conjectures
are equally dispelled by the results of the Japanese investigations. Professor
Milne did not think it worth while even to notice the steam and chemical
theories, but he paid the volcanic theory the compliment of a specific
repudiation. We have arrived at the conclusion, he declared, that
earthquakes have nothing whatever to do with volcanoes. They are not local
phenomena at all, not due to causes engendered in the neighbourhood
where they occur, but to great waves or pulsations to which the crust of the
earth is constantly subject, the effect of which is not perceived unless some
rupture ensues. The huge, slow waves or undulations are described in the
new terminology of earthquake science as “ bradyseismic ” disturbances,
and they are going on just as freely and steadily in quiet regions, where
earthquakes in the ordinary sense of the word are unknown, as in regions
like Japan, or the west coast of South America, where they are frequent. But
now and then it happens that as the bradyseismic wave encounters some
irregular resistance or weakness in the strata it disturbs, something gives
way, something cracks, and then a shiver goes through the region where
that occurs. Such a shiver may in a few moments destroy property worth
millions, and lives by the thousand.
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earthquake of 1783 destroyed 40,000 lives. But, after all, disasters of this
magnitude are not commensurable with the least of the great Atlantean
catastrophes. According to the Troano manuscript, translated by Dr. Le
Plongeon, sixty million people perished in the final Poseidonis convulsion,
which changed an inhabited territory, measuring over two thousand miles
one way by about one thousand two hundred the other, into so much ocean
bed. For people to whom the six or seven thousand years of the historic
period seem to afford a good basis for generalization, it naturally appears
unlikely that if our Lisbon earthquake is the champion convulsion for that
period, anything so out of proportion with it should have taken place six or
seven thousand years earlier.
The bradyseismic wave system, taken in nonjunction with the secular flow of
rocks, puts a new complexion on all such speculation. Everything we know
about vibrations tends to show that in Nature these movements are
superimposed one upon another. In electrical phenomena this is certainly
the case, and in fact the whole principle of multiplex telegraphy is built upon
that idea. Occult investigation into the nature of the ultimate atom points to
the same kind of complexity there. In the motion of the planetary bodies we
have to recognize similar movements within movements. The diurnal
rotation of the Earth is superimposed upon the much slower precessional,
or second rotation. Whatever the great pulsations of the Earth's surface
may be due to, it is more than imaginable that a larger and slower pulsation
passes through it at longer intervals. Earthquakes of the secondary order,
like those which afflicted Lisbon in the last century, are due apparently to a
rupture of some rock body giving way to the pressure of one of the
relatively minor undulations of the strata below. A pulsation of greater
magnitude may easily be supposed to create a superficial disturbance on a
different scale altogether, one for which, perhaps, a long-continued
operation of the secular rock flow has prepared the way.
A recent article in the Theosophist deals with a subject that has often
engaged my thoughts. Much poetry is deplorably unspiritual by reason of
treating death as a dismal finality, instead of being the gateway to new
life—“ Mors janua vitae.” As Mr. Cousins puts it, a “ revolution in Western
literary arts would be brought about if the idea, say of reincarnation, could
be given as full a place in thought as the current idea of a single life.” I quite
agree, but meanwhile a grand result would be achieved if poetry could help
the world to realize that before attaining reincarnation, there is a period of
happiness in the more immediate future awaiting all decent people on the
astral plane. In our earlier teaching this was a good deal slurred over, as still
wider aspects of truth claimed interpretation first. But in a recent book, In
the Next World, I have endeavoured to show how vivid, delightful, and fairly
protracted may be that astral experience preceding not merely the return to
physical life, but preceding any experiences on higher planes that may await
any given Ego. Therefore, the first great poetical reform I should like to see
would be one that should encourage thought to range beyond the grave,
instead of burrowing incessantly in that unimportant region.
Consider, for instance, one of the most beautiful passages in all poetry,
Moore’s “ Farewell to Araby’s Daughter ” at the end of The Fire-
worshippers. Its beauty resides entirely in the form, not in the substance. It
is altogether a lament. Its exquisite language is concerned entirely with the
dear girl’s body lying at the bottom of the sea. The Peris who speak the
dirge are solely engaged with their efforts to beautify its bed.
For pure mellifluous beauty of expression those verses will rank with
anything in literature, but what a ghastly blunder it was for Moore to spend
his genius on thoughts about the dead girl’s body, instead of thinking about
the girl I have endeavoured to suggest a paraphrase of his superb effusion—
what he might have given us instead if he had come within the range of
Theosophical teaching. To guard against misunderstanding, let me explain
that I am not supposing that any rhymes of mine can rival Moore’s in form.
Moore—imperfectly appreciated in these days—was, among all poets that
have ever lived, the supreme master of versification. Tennyson, a far
grander poet as regards thought, has here and there touched Moore’s
perfection of form, but, as a composer of music in words, Moore is facile
princeps. My effort is a concrete expression of wonder as to what might
have been the character of his “ Farewell ” had he known what (I think) I
know about life immediately after death. Here are the verses. They are not a
“ Farewell,” but a “ Greeting.”
The World left behind you will weep o’er your story,
The dawn of new life with the pure and the brave
They bid you farewell, those who mourn your wild daring,
The grief that once marred it this glow will soon banish,
No graven stone tells where the form that once bound you
There are many other well-known poems dealing with death that might be
recast along similar lines: “ The Burial of Sir John Moore/' for example,
though those rather ponderous verses do riot attract one to the task.
Poetry, indeed, is dotted all over with blemishes due to ignorance of astral
conditions, and perhaps it may be admitted that even Theosophical
literature, apart from poetry altogether, has sometimes tended to chill
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imagination by leaving too much out of account the gradual character of the
transition from this life towards the illimitable future of human evolution.
Natural law is very patient with the pardonable cravings of personality, and
lofty teaching is sometimes made to seem repellent by neglecting this
profound truth, as was illustrated by a remark I once heard of, made by a
lady who said she was much attracted to Theosophy but could not be a
Theosophist because she loved her husband and her children I One can easily
understand the peculiar variety of foolishness on the part of some ill-
qualified exponent of Theosophy who gave her that impression. The charms
of the higher astral life ought to find more frequent description in
Theosophical literature, as well as in the poetry of the future.
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NOTE
The substance of some of the various essays in this book has appeared
in The Nineteenth Century, The Messenger (California), The Vahan, The
Pioneer (Allahabad), Lucifer, and The Theosophist. “ Expanded Theosophical
Knowledge ” was originally published as a pamphlet by the Theosophical
Book Shop, 42, George Street, Edinburgh. “ Theosophical Teachings Liable
to be Misunderstood ” and “ The Pyramids and Stonehenge ” appear among
the Transactions of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society. The
substance of the “ Super-Physical Laws of Nature ” and “ The Higher
Occultism ” was delivered in addresses to the Eleusinian Society, since
merged in the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society.