THEOSOPHY

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A Modern Panarion

A Collection of Fugitive Fragments

From the Pen of

H P Blavatsky

First Published 1895

 

 

 

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The Secret Doctrine by H P Blavatsky

 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
The Eddy Manifestations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

Dr. Beard Criticized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

The Lack of Unity among Spiritualists . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

The Holmes Controversy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

The Holmes Controversy (continued) . . . . . . . . . . . .28

Notice to Mediums. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35

A Rebuke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36

Occultism or Magic. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Spiritualistic Tricksters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

The Search after Occultism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

The Science of Magic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55

An Unsolved Mystery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

Spiritualism in Russia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Spiritualism and Spiritualists. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72

What is Occultism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .78

A Warning to Mediums. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

(New) York against Lankester.- A new War of the Roses. . . . . . .84

Huxley and Shade. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .88

Can the Double Murder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

Fakirs and Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .103

A Protest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

The Fate of the Occultist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

Buddhism in America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

Russian Atrocities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

Washing the Disciples’ Feet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

Trickery or Magic ? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .121

The Jews in Russia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126

H. P. Blavatsky’s Masonic Patent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .128

Views of the Theosophists . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

A Society without a Dogma. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

Elementaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

Kabalistic Views of ‘‘Spirits” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152

The Knout. As Wielded by the Great Russian Theosophist. Mr. Coleman’s

First Appearance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

iv Contents
Page

Indian Metaphysics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

“H. M.’’ and the Todas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

The Todas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174

The Ahkoond of Swat. The Founder of Many Mystical Societies . . . . . 179

The Ærya Samàj . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .184

Parting Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .188

‘Not a Christian”! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

The Retort Courteous . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196

‘‘Scrutator Again’’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198

Magic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

A Republican Citizen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

The Theosophists and their Opponents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209

Echoes from India. What is Hindu Spiritualism?. . . . . . . . . . . .214

Missionaries Militant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

The History of a “Book” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229

A French View of Women’s Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

Occult Phenomena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242

Hindu Widow-Marriage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

“Oppressed Widowhood” in America. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

‘‘Esoteric Buddhism’’ and its Critic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .249

Mr. A. Lillie’s Delusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253

What is Theosophy? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253

What are the Theosophists? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270

Antiquity of the Vedas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278

Persian Zoroastrianism and Russian Vandalism. . . . . . . . . . . . . 283

Cross and Fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290

War in Olympus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295

A Land of Mystery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304

Which First—the Egg or the Bird?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333

The Pralaya of Modern Science. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

The Yoga Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338

A Year of Theosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .348

“A Word with Our Friends”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .353

Questions Answered about Yoga Vidyâ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .357

The Missing Link . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361

Hypnotism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365

The Leaven of Theosophy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367

Count St. Germain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

Lamas and Druses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .375

A Reply to Our Critics. Our Final Answer to Several Objections. . . . . . . . 387

‘‘The Claims of Occultism’’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392

A Note on Eliphas Levi. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .398

The Six-Pointed and Five-Pointed Stars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .401

The Grand Inquisitor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 410

The Bright Spot of Light . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 432

v contents

Page

“Is it Idle to Argue Further?”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 434

Fragments of Occult Truth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 438

Notes on some Aryan-Arhat Esoteric Tenets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475

The Thoughts of the Dead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481

Dreamland and Somnambulism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 482

Are Dreams but Idle Visions? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 485

Spiritualism and Occult Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .490

Reincarnation in Tibet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 497

PREFACE

THE title A Modern Panarion has been taken from the controversial Panarion of the Church Father Epiphanius in which he attacked the various sects and heresies of the first four centuries of the Christian era. The Panarion was so called as being a “basket” of scraps and fragments. We are told that this Panarion was “a kind of medicine chest, in which he had collected means of healing against the poisonous bite of the heretical serpent.”

A Modern Panarion is of a like nature with the intent of the Christian Father; only in the nineteenth century, heresy has in many instances become orthodoxy, and orthodoxy heresy, and the Panarion of H. P. Blavatsky is intended as a means of healing against the errors of ecclesiasticism, dogma and bigotry, and the blind negation of materialism and pseudo-science.
EDITORS.

THE H. P. B. MEMORIAL FUND

In 1891 the following resolutions were passed by all the Sections of the Theosophical Society :—

Resolved:

1. That the most fitting and permanent memorial of H. P. B.’s life and work would be the production and publication of such papers, books and translations as will tend to promote that intimate union between the life and thought of the Orient and the Occident to the bringing about of which her life was devoted.

2. That an “H. P. B. Memorial Fund” be instituted for this purpose, to which all those who feel gratitude or admiration towards H. P. B. for her work, both within and without the T. S., are earnestly invited to contribute as their means may allow.

3. That the President of the Theosophical Society, together with the General Secretaries of all Sections of the same, constitute the Committee of Management of this Fund.

4. That the Presidents of Lodges in each Section be a Committee to collect and forward to the General Secretary of their respective Sections the necessary funds for this purpose.

THE EDDY MANIFESTATIONS
—————

[ The following letter was addressed to a contemporary journal by Mine. Blavatsky, and was handed to us for publication in The Daily Graphic, as we have been taking the lead in the discussion of the curious subject of Spiritualism.—EDIT0R “DAILY GRAPHIC.”]

AWARE in the past of your love of justice and fair play, I most earnestly solicit the use of your columns to reply to an article by Dr. G. M. Beard in relation to the Eddy family in Vermont. He, in denouncing them and their spiritual manifestations in a most sweeping declaration, would aim a blow at the entire spiritual world of to-day. His letter appeared this morning (October 2 Dr. George M. Beard has for the last few weeks assumed the part of the “roaring lion” seeking for a medium “to devour.” It appears that to-day the learned gentleman is more hungry than ever. No wonder, after the failure he has experienced with Mr. Brown, the “mind-reader,” at New Haven.

I do not know Dr. Beard personally, nor do I care to know how far he is entitled to wear the laurels of his profession as an M.D., but what I do know is that he may never hope to equal, much less to surpass, such men and savants as Crookes, Wallace, or even Flammarion, the French astronomer, all of whom have devoted years to the investigation of Spiritualism. All of them came to the conclusion that, supposing even the well-known phenomenon of the materialization of spirits did not prove the identity of the persons whom they purported to represent, it was not, at all events, the work of mortal hands; still less was it a fraud.

Now to the Eddys. Dozens of visitors have remained there for weeks and even for months; not a single séance has taken place with out some of them realizing the personal presence of a friend, a relative, a mother, father, or dear departed child. But lo! here comes Dr. Beard, stops less than two days, applies his powerful electrical battery, under which the spirit does not even wink or flinch, closely examines the


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A MODERN PANARION.

cabinet (in which he finds nothing), and then turns his back and declares most emphatically “that he wishes it to be perfectly under-stood that if his scientific name ever appears in connection with the Eddy family, it must be only to expose them as the greatest frauds who cannot do even good trickery.” Consummatum est! Spiritualism is defunct. Requiescat in Pace! Dr. Beard has killed it with one word. Scatter ashes over your venerable but silly heads, 0 Crookes, Wallace and Varley! Henceforth you must be considered as demented, psychologized lunatics, and so must it be with the many thousands of Spiritualists who have seen and talked with their friends and relatives departed, recognizing them at Moravia, at the Eddys’, and elsewhere throughout the length and breadth of this continent. But is there no escape from the horns of this dilemma? Yea verily, Dr. Beard writes thus: “When your correspondent returns to New York I will teach him on any convenient evening how to do all that the Eddys' do.” Pray why should a Daily Graphic reporter be the only one selected by G. M. Beard, M.D. for initiation into the knowledge of so clever a “trick”? In such a case why not publicly denounce this universal trickery, and so benefit the whole world? But Dr. Beard seems to be as partial in his selections as he is clever in detecting the said tricks. Didn’t the learned doctor say to Colonel Olcott while at the Eddys’ that three dollars’ worth of second-hand drapery would be enough for him to show how to materialize all the spirits that visit the Eddy homestead?

To this I reply, backed as I am by the testimony of hundreds of reliable witnesses, that all the wardrobe of Niblo’s Theatre would not suffice to attire the numbers of “spirits” that emerge night after night from an empty little closet.

Let Dr. Beard rise and explain the following fact if he can: I remained fourteen days at the Eddys’. In that short period of time I saw and recognized fully, out of 119 apparitions, seven “spirits.” I admit that I was the only one to recognize them, the rest of the audience not having been with me in my numerous travels throughout the East, but their various dresses and costumes were plainly seen and closely examined by all.

The first was a Georgian boy, dressed in the historical Caucasian attire, the picture of whom will shortly appear in The Daily Graphic. I recognized and questioned him in Georgian upon circumstances known only to myself. I was understood and answered. Requested by me in


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his mother tongue (upon the whispered suggestion of Colonel Olcott) to play the Lezguinka, a Circassian dance, he did so immediately upon the guitar.

Second—A little old man appears. He is dressed as Persian merchants generally are. His dress is perfect as a national costume. Everything is in its right place, down to the “babouches” that are off his feet, he stepping out in his stockings. He speaks his name in a loud whisper. It is “Hassan Aga,” an old man whom I and my family have known for twenty years at Tiflis. He says, half in Georgian and half in Persian, that he has got a “big secret to tell me,” and comes at three different times, vainly seeking to finish his sentence.

Third—A man of gigantic stature comes forth, dressed in the picturesque attire of the warriors of Kurdistan. He does not speak, but bows in the oriental fashion, and lifts up his spear ornamented with bright-coloured feathers, shaking it in token of welcome. I recognize him immediately as Jaffar Ali Bek, a young chief of a tribe of Kurds, who used to accompany me in my trips around Ararat in Armenia on horseback, and who on one occasion saved my life. More, he bends to the ground as though picking up a handful of mould, and scattering it around, presses his hand to his bosom, a gesture familiar only to the tribes of the Kurdistan.

Fourth—A Circassian comes out. I can imagine myself at Tiflis, so perfect is his costume of “nouker” (a man who either runs before or behind one on horseback). This one speaks more, he corrects his name, which I pronounced wrongly on recognizing him, and when I repeat it he bows, smiling, and says in the purest guttural Tartar, which sounds so familiar to my ear, “Tchoch yachtchi” (all right), and goes away.

Fifth—Au old woman appears with Russian headgear. She comes out and addresses me in Russian, calling me by an endearing term that she used in my childhood. I recognize an old servant of my family, a nurse of my sister.

Sixth—A large powerful negro next appears on the platform. His head is ornamented with a wonderful coiffure something like horns wound about with white and gold. His looks are familiar to me, but I do not at first recollect where I have seen him. Very soon he begins to make some vivacious gestures, and his mimicry helps me to recognize him at a glance. It is a conjurer from Central Africa. He grins and disappears.


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A MODERN PANARION.

Seventh and last—A large, grey-haired gentleman comes out attired in the conventional suit of black. The Russian decoration of St. Ann hangs suspended by a large red moiré ribbon with two black stripes— a ribbon, as every Russian will know, belonging to the said decoration. This ribbon is worn around his neck. I feel faint, for I think I recognize my father. But the latter was a great deal taller. In my excitement I address him in English, and ask him: “Are you my father?” He shakes his head in the negative, and answers as plainly as any mortal man can speak, and in Russian, “No; I am your uncle.” The word “diadia” was heard and remembered by all the audience. It means “uncle.” But what of that? Dr. Beard knows it to be but a pitiful trick, and we must submit in silence. People that know me know that I am far from being credulous. Though an Occultist of many years’ standing, I am more sceptical in receiving evidence from paid mediums than many unbelievers. But when I receive such evidences as I received at the Eddys’, I feel bound on my honour, and under the penalty of confessing myself a moral coward, to defend the mediums, as well as the thousands of my brother and sister Spiritualists against the conceit and slander of one man who has nothing and no one to back him in his assertions. I now hereby finally and publicly challenge Dr. Beard to the amount of $500 to produce before a public audience and under the same conditions the manifestations herein attested, or failing this, to bear the ignominious consequences of his proposed exposé

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

I2 East Sixteenth Street, New York City,

October 27th, 1874

DR. BEARD CRITICIZED
—————

As Dr. Beard has scorned (in his scientific grandeur) to answer the challenge sent to him by your humble servant in the number of The Daily Graphic for the 13th* of October last, and has preferred instructing the public in general rather than one “credulous fool” in particular, let her come from Circassia or Africa, I fully trust you will permit me to use your paper once more in order that by pointing out some very spicy peculiarities of this amazingly scientific exposure, the public might better judge at whose door the aforesaid elegant epithet could be most appropriately laid.

For a week or so an immense excitement, a thrill of sacrilegious fear, if I may be allowed this expression, ran through the psychologized frames of the Spiritualists of New York. It was rumoured in ominous whispers that G. Beard, M.D., the Tyndall of America, was coming out with his peremptory exposure of the Eddys’ ghosts and—the Spiritualists trembled for their gods!

The dreaded day has come, the number of The Daily Graphic for November the 9th is before us. We have read it carefully, with respectful awe, for true science has always been an authority for us (weak- minded fool though we may be), and so we handled the dangerous exposure with a feeling somewhat akin to that of a fanatic Christian opening a volume of Büchner. We perused it to the last: we turned the page over and over again, vainly straining our eyes and brains to detect therein one word of scientific proof or a solitary atom of over whelming evidence that would thrust into our Spiritualistic bosom the venomous fangs of doubt. But no, not a particle of reasonable explanation or of scientific evidence that what we have all seen, heard and felt at the Eddys’ was but delusion. In our feminine modesty, still allowing the said article the benefit of the doubt, we disbelieved our
—————

* This appears to be a misprint, unless the challenge had been made on the 13th, and was Only repeated in the letter of Oct. 2 —Eds.



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own senses, and so devoted a whole day to the picking up of sundry bits of criticism from judges that we believe more competent than ourselves, and at last came collectively to the following conclusion:

The Daily Graphic has allowed Dr. Beard in its magnanimity nine columns of its precious pages to prove—what? Why, the following:

First, that he, Dr. Beard, according to his own modest assertions (see columns second and third) is more entitled to occupy the position of an actor intrusted with characters of simpletons (Molière’s “Tartuffe” might fit him perhaps as naturally) than to undertake the difficult part of a Prof. Faraday vis-à-vis the Chittenden D. D. Home.

Secondly, that although the learned doctor was “overwhelmed already with professional labours” (a nice and cheap reclame, by the way) and scientific researches, he gave the latter another direction, and so went to the Eddys. That, arrived there, he played with Horatio Eddy, for the glory of science and the benefit of humanity, the difficult character of a “dishevelled simpleton,” and was rewarded in his scientific research by finding on the said suspicious premises a professor of bumps “a poor harmless fool”! Galileo, of famous memory, when he detected the sun in its involuntary imposture chuckled certainly less over his triumph than does Dr. Beard over the discovery of this “poor fool” No. 1. Here we modestly suggest that perhaps the learned doctor had no need to go as far as Chittenden for that.

Further, the doctor, forgetting entirely the wise motto, Non bis in idem, discovers and asserts throughout the length of his article that all the past, present and future generations of pilgrims to the “Eddy homestead” are collectively fools, and that every solitary member of this numerous body of Spiritualistic pilgrims is likewise “a weak- minded, credulous fool”! Query—the proof of it, if you please, Dr. Beard? Answer—Dr. Beard has said so, and Echo responds, Fool!

Truly miraculous are thy doings, indeed, 0 Mother Nature! The cow is black and its milk is white! But then, you see, those ill-bred, ignorant Eddy brothers have allowed their credulous guests to eat up all the “trout” caught by Dr. Beard and paid for by him seventy-five cents per pound as a penalty; and that fact alone might have turned him a little—how shall we say—sour, prejudiced? No, erroneous in his statement, will answer better.

For erroneous he is, not to say more. When, assuming an air of scientific authority, he affirms that the séance-room is generally so dark


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that one cannot recognize at three feet distance his own mother, he says what is not true. When he tells us further that he saw through a hole in one of the shawls and the space between them all the manœuvres of Horatio’s arm, he risks finding himself contradicted by thousands who, weak-minded though they may be, are not blind for all that, neither are they confederates of the Eddys, but far more reliable wit nesses in their simple-minded honesty than Dr. Beard is in his would-be scientific and unscrupulous testimony. The same when he says that no one is allowed to approach the spirits nearer than twelve feet dis tance, still less to touch them, except the “two simple-minded ignorant idiots” who generally sit on both ends of the platform. To my knowledge many other persons have sat there besides those two.

Dr. Beard ought to know this better than anyone else, as he has sat there himself. A sad story is in circulation, by the way, at the Eddys’. The records of the spiritual séances at Chittenden have devoted a whole page to the account of a terrible danger that threatened for a moment to deprive America of one of her brightest scientific stars. Dr. Beard, admitting a portion of the story himself, perverts the rest of it, as he does everything else in his article. The doctor admits that he had been badly struck by the guitar, and, not being able to bear the pain, “jumped up,” and broke the circle. Now it clearly appears that the learned gentleman has neglected to add to the immense stock of his knowledge the first rudiments of “logic.” He boasts of having completely blinded Horatio and others as to the real object of his visit. What should then Horatio pummel his head for? The spirits were never known before to be as rude as that. But Dr. B. does not believe in their existence and so lays the whole thing at Horatio’s door. He forgets to state, though, that a whole shower of missiles were thrown at his head and that—”pale as a ghost,” so says the tale-telling record—the poor scientist surpassed for a moment the “fleet-footed Achilles” himself in the celerity with which he took to his heels. How strange if Horatio, not suspecting him still, left him standing at two feet distance from the shawl! How very logical!

It becomes evident that the said neglected logic was keeping company at the time with old mother Truth at the bottom of her well, neither of them being wanted by Dr. Beard. I myself have sat upon the upper step of the platform for fourteen nights by the side of Mrs. Cleveland. I got up every time “Honto” approached me to within an inch of my face in order to see her the better. I have touched her


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hands repeatedly as other spirits have been touched, and even embraced her nearly every night.

Therefore, when I read Dr. Beard’s preposterous and cool assertion that “a very low order of genius is required to obtain command of a few words in different languages and so to mutter them to credulous Spiritualists,” I feel every right in the world to say in my turn that such a scientific exposure as Dr. Beard has come out with in his article does not require any genius at all; per contra, it requires a ridiculous faith on the part of the writer in his own infallibility, as well as a positive confidence in finding in all his readers what he elegantly terms “weak- minded fools.” Every word of his statement, when it is not a most evident untruth, is a wicked and malicious insinuation built on the very equivocal authority of one witness against the evidence of thousands.

Says Dr Beard, “I have proved that the life of the Eddys is one long lie, the details need no further discussion.” The writer of the above lines forgets, by saying these imprudent words, that some people might think that “like attracts like.” He went to Chittenden with deceit in his heart and falsehood on his lips, and so judging his neighbour by the character he assumed himself, he takes everyone for a knave when he does not put him down as a fool. Declaring so positively that he has proved it, the doctor forgets one trifling circumstance, namely, that he has proved nothing whatever.

Where are his boasted proofs? When we contradict him by saying that the séance-room is far from being as dark as he pretends it to be, and that the spirits themselves have repeatedly called out through Mrs. Eaton’s voice for more light, we only say what we can prove before any jury. When Dr. Beard says that all the spirits are personated by W. Eddy, he advances what would prove to be a greater conundrum for solution than the apparition of spirits themselves. There he falls right away into the domain of Cagliostro: for if Dr. B. has seen five or six spirits in all, other persons, myself included, have seen one hundred and nineteen in less than a fortnight, nearly all of whom were differently dressed. Besides, the accusation of Dr. Beard implies the idea to the public that the artist of The Daily Graphic who made the sketches of so many of those apparitions, and who is not a “credulous Spiritualist” himself, is likewise a humbug, propagating to the world what he did not see, and so spreading at large the most preposterous and outrageous lie.

When the learned doctor will have explained to us how any man in


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his shirt-sleeves and a pair of tight pants for an attire can possibly conceal on his person (the cabinet having been previously found empty) a whole bundle of clothes, women’s robes, hats, caps, head-gears, and entire stilts of evening dress, white waistcoats and neckties included, then he will be entitled to more belief than he is at present. That would be a proof indeed, for, with all due respect to his scientific mind, Dr. Beard is not the first Œdipus that has thought of catching the Sphinx by its tail and so unriddling the mystery. We have known more than one “weak-minded fool,” ourselves included, that has lahoured under a similar delusion for more than one night, but all of us were finally obliged to repeat the words of the great Galileo, “E pur, se muove!” and give it up.

But Dr. Beard does not give it up. Preferring to keep a scornful silence as to any reasonable explanation, he hides the secret of the above mystery in the depths of his profoundly scientific mind. “His life is given to scientific researches,” you see; “his physiological knowledge and neuro-physiological learning are immense,” for he says so, and skilled as he is in combating fraud by still greater fraud (see column the eighth), spiritualistic humbug has no more mysteries for him. In five minutes the scientist had done more towards science than all the rest of the scientists put together have done in years of labour, and “would feel ashamed if he had not.” (See same column.) In the overpowering modesty of his learning he takes no credit to himself for having done so, though he has discovered the astounding, novel fact of the “cold benumbing sensation.” How Wallace, Crookes and Varley, the naturalist-anthropologist, the chemist and electrician, will blush with envy in their old country! America alone is able to produce on her fertile soil such quick and miraculous intellects. “Veni, Vidi, Vici!” was the motto of a great conqueror. Why should not Dr. Beard select for his crest the same? And then, not unlike the Alexanders and the Cæsars of antiquity (in the primitive simplicity of his manners), he abuses people so elegantly, calling them “fools” when he cannot find a better argument.

A far wiser mind than Dr. Beard (will he dispute the fact?) has suggested, centuries ago, that the tree was to be judged according to its fruits. Spiritualism, notwithstanding the desperate efforts of more scientific men than himself, has stood its ground without flinching for more than a quarter of a century. Where are the fruits of the tree of science that blossoms on the soil of Dr. Beard’s mind? If we are to


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judge of them by his article, then verily the said tree needs more than usual care. As for the fruits, it would appear that they are as yet in the realms of “sweet delusive hope.” But then, perhaps the doctor was afraid to crush his readers under the weight’ of his learning (true merit has been in all times modest and unassuming), and that accounts for the learned doctor withholding from us any scientific proof of the fraud that he pretends to be exposing, except the above-mentioned fact of the “cold benumbing sensation.” But how Horatio can keep his hand and arm ice cold under a warm shawl for half an hour at a time, in summer as well as in any other season, and that without having some ice concealed about his person, or how he can prevent it from thawing—all the above is a mystery that Dr. Beard doesn’t reveal for the sent. Maybe he will tell us something of it in his book that he advertises in the article. Well, we only hope that the former will be more satisfactory than the latter.

I will add but a few words before ending my debate with Dr. Beard for ever. All that he says about the lamp concealed in a bandbox, the strong confederates, etc., exists only in his imagination, for the mere sake of argument, we suppose. “False in one, false in all,” says Dr. Beard in column the sixth. These words are a just verdict on his own article.

Here I will briefly state what I reluctantly withheld up to the present moment from the knowledge of all such as Dr. Beard. The fact was too sacred in my eyes to allow it to be trifled with in newspaper gossiping. But now, in order to settle the question at once, I deem it my duty as a Spiritualist to surrender it to the opinion of the public.

On the last night that I spent with the Eddys I was presented by Georgo Dix and Mayflower with a silver decoration, the upper part of a medal with which I was but too familiar. I quote the precise words of the spirit: “We bring you this decoration, for we think you will value it more highly than anything else. You will recognize it, for it is the badge of honour that was presented to your father by his Government for the campaign of 1828, between Russia and Turkey. We got it through the influence of your uncle, who appeared to you here this evening. We brought it from your father’s grave at Stavropol. You will identify it by a certain sign known to yourself.”

These words were spoken in the presence of forty witnesses. Col. Olcott will describe the fact and give the design of the decoration.

I have the said decoration in my possession. I know it as having


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belonged to my father. More, I have identified it by a portion that, through carelessness, I broke myself many years ago, and, to settle all doubt in relation to it, I possess the photograph of my father (a picture that has never been at the Eddys’, and could never possibly have been seen by any of them) on which this medal is plainly visible.

Query for Dr. Beard: How could the Eddys know that my father was buried at Stavropol; that he was ever presented with such a medal, or that he had been present and in actual service at the time of the war of 1828?

Willing as we are to give every one his due, we feel compelled to say on behalf of Dr. Beard that he has not boasted of more than he can do, in advising the Eddys' to take a few private lessons of him in the trickery of mediumship. The learned doctor must be expert in such trickeries. We are likewise ready to admit that in saying as he did that “his article would only confirm the more the Spiritualists in their belief” (and he ought to have added, “convince no one else”), Dr. Beard has proved himself to be a greater “prophetic medium” than any other in this country!

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

23, Irving Place, New York City,

November 10th, 1874

THE LACK OF UNITY AMONG

SPIRITUALISTS
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[ From a letter received from Mme. Blavatsky last week we make the following extracts, want of space alone preventing us from publishing it entire. It was written in her usual lively and entertaining style, and her opinions expressed are worthy of careful study, many of them being fully consistent with the true state of affairs.—EDIT0R “SPIRITUAL SCIENTIST” (Dec. 3rd, 1874).]

As it is, I have only done my duty; first, towards Spiritualism, that I have defended as well as I could from the attacks of imposture under its too transparent mask of science; then towards two helpless slandered “mediums”—the last word becoming fast in our days the synonym of “martyr”; secondly, I have contributed my mite towards opening the eyes of an indifferent public to the real, intrinsic value of such a man as Dr. Beard. But I am obliged to confess that I really do not believe that I have done any good—at least, any practical good—to Spiritualism itself; and I never hope to perform such a feat as that were I to keep on for an eternity bombarding all the newspapers of America with my challenges and refutations of the lies told by the so-called “scientific exposers.”

It is with a profound sadness in my heart that I acknowledge this fact, for I begin to think there is no help for it. For over fifteen years have I fought my battle for the blessed truth; I have travelled and preached it—though I never was born for a lecturer—from the snow- covered tops of the Caucasian Mountains, as well as from the sandy valleys of the Nile. I have proved the truth of it practically and by persuasion. For the sake of Spiritualism I have left my home, an easy life amongst a civilized society, and have become a wanderer upon the face of this earth. I had already seen my hopes realized, beyond the most sanguine expectations, when, in my restless desire for more knowledge, my unlucky star brought me to America.

Knowing this country to be the cradle of modern Spiritualism, I


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came over here from France with feelings not unlike those of a Mohammedan approaching the birthplace of his prophet. I had for gotten that “no prophet is without honour save in his own country.” In the less than fourteen months that I am here, sad experience has but too well sustain the never-dying evidence of this immortal truth.

What little I have done towards defending phenomena I am ever ready to do over and over again, as long as I have a breath of life left in me. But what good will it ever do? We have a popular and wise Russian saying that “one Cossack on the battle-field is no warrior.” Such is my case, together with that of many other poor, struggling wretches, everyone of whom, like a solitary scout, sent far ahead in advance of the army, has to fight his own battle, and defend the post entrusted to him, unaided by anyone but himself. There is no union between Spiritualists, no entante cordiale, as the French say. Judge Edmonds said, some years ago, that they numbered in their ranks over eleven millions in this country alone; and I believe it to be true; in which case, it is but to be the more deplored. When one man—as Dr. Beard did and will do yet—dares to defy such a formidable body as that, there must be some cause for it. His insults, gross and vulgar as they are, are too fearless to leave one particle of doubt that if he does it, it is but because he knows too well that he can do so with impunity and perfect ease. Year after year the American Spiritualists have allowed themselves to be ridiculed and slighted by everyone who had a mind to do so, protesting so feebly as to give their opponents the most erroneous idea of their weakness. Am I wrong, then, in saying that our Spiritualists are more to be blamed than Dr. Beard himself in all this ridiculous polemic? Moral cowardice breeds more contempt than the “familiarity” of the old motto. How can we expect such a scientific sleight-of-hand as he is to respect a body that does not respect itself?

My humble opinion is, that the majority of our Spiritualists are too much afraid for their “respectability” when called upon to confess and acknowledge their “belief.” Will you agree with me, if I say that the dread of the social Areopagus is so deeply rooted in the hearts of your American people, that to endeavour to tear it out of them would be undertaking to shake the whole system of society from top to bottom? “Respectability” and “fashion” have brought more than one utter materialist to select (for mere show) the Episcopalian and other wealthy churches. But Spiritualism is not “fashionable,” as yet, and that’s

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where the trouble is. Notwithstanding its immense and daily increasing numbers, it has not won, till now, the right of citizenship. Its chief leaders are not clothed in gold and purple and fine raiment; for, not unlike Christianity in the beginning of its era, Spiritualism numbers in its ranks more of the humble and afflicted ones, than of the powerful and wealthy of this earth. Spiritualists belonging to the latter class will seldom dare to step out in the arena of publicity and boldly proclaim their belief in the face of the whole world; that hybrid monster, called “public opinion,” is too much for them; and what does a Dr. Beard care for the opinion of the poor and the humble ones? He knows but too well that his insulting terms of “fools” and “weak minded idiots,” as his accusations of credulousness, will never be applied to themselves by any of the proud castes of modern “Pharisees”; Spiritualists as they know themselves to be, and have perhaps been for years, if they deign to notice the insult at all, it will be but to answer him as the cowardly apostle did before them, “Man, I tell thee, I know him not!”

St. Peter was the only one of the remaining eleven that denied his Christ thrice before the Pharisees; that is just the reason why, of all the apostles, he is the most revered by the Catholics, and has been selected to rule over the most wealthy as the most proud, greedy and hypocritical of all the churches in Christendom. And so, half Christians and half believers in the new dispensation, the majority of those eleven millions of Spiritualists stand with one foot on the threshold of Spiritualism, pressing firmly with the other one the steps leading to the altars of their “fashionable” places of worship, ever ready to leap over under the protection of the latter in hours of danger. They know that under the cover of such immense “respectability” they are perfectly safe. Who would presume or dare to accuse of “credulous stupidity’’ a member belonging to certain ‘‘fashionable congregations’’? Under the powerful and holy shade of any of those “pillars of truth” every heinous crime is liable to become immediately transformed into but a slight and petty deviation from strict Christian virtue. Jupiter, for all his numberless “Don Juan” like frolics, was not the less on that account considered by his worshippers as the “Father of Gods”!



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A FEW weeks ago, in a letter, extracts from which have appeared in The Spiritual Scientist of December 3rd, I alluded to the deplorable lack of accord between American Spiritualists, and the consequences of the same. At that time I had just fought out my useless battle with a foe who, though beneath my own personal notice, had insulted all the Spiritualists of this country, as a body, in a caricature of a so-called scientific exposé. In dealing with him I dealt with but one of the numerous “bravos” enlisted in the army of the bitter opponents of belief; and my task was, comparatively speaking, an easy one, if we take it for granted that falsehood can hardly withstand truth, as the latter will ever speak for itself. Since that day the scales have turned; prompted now, as then, by the same love of justice and fair play, I feel compelled to throw down my glove once more in our defence, seeing that so few of the adherents to the cause are bold enough to accept that duty, and so many of them show the white feather of pusillanimity.

I indicated in my letter that such a state of things, such a complete lack of harmony, and such cowardice, I may add, among their ranks, subjected the Spiritualists and the cause to constant attacks from a compact, aggressive public opinion, based upon ignorance and wicked prejudice, intolerant, remorseless and thoroughly dishonest in the employment of its methods. As a vast army, amply equipped, may be cut to pieces by an inferior force well trained and handled, so Spiritualism, numbering its hosts by millions, and able to vanquish every reactionary theology by a little well-directed effort, is constantly harassed, weakened, impeded, by the convergent attacks of pulpit and press, and by the treachery and cowardice of its trusted leaders. It is one of these professed leaders that I propose to question to-day, as closely as my rights, not only as a widely known Kabalist but also as a resident of the United States, will allow me. When I see the numbers of believers in this country, the broad basis of their belief, the im-


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pregnability of their position, and the talent that is embraced within their ranks, I am disgusted at the spectacle that they manifest at this very moment, after the Katie King—how shall we say—fraud? By no means, since the last word of this sensational comedy is far from being spoken.

There is not a country on the face of our planet, with a jury attached to its courts of justice, but gives the benefit of the doubt to every criminal brought within the law, and affords him a chance to be heard and tell his story.

Is such the case between the pretended “spirit performer,” the alleged bogus Katie King, and the Holmes mediums? I answer most decidedly no, and mean to prove it, if no one else does.

I deny the right of any man or woman to wrench from our hands all possible means of finding out the truth. I deny the right of any editor of a daily newspaper to accuse and publish accusations, refusing at the same time to hear one word of justification from the defendants, and so, instead of helping people to clear up the matter, leaving them more than ever to grope their way in the dark.

The biography of “Katie King” has come out at last; a sworn certificate, if you please, endorsed (under oath?) by Dr. Child, who throughout the whole of this “burlesque” epilogue has ever appeared in it, like some inevitable deus-ex-machinâ. The whole of this made- up elegy (by whom? evidently not by Mrs. White) is redolent with the perfume of erring innocence, of Magdalene-like tales of woe and sorrow, tardy repentance and the like, giving us the abnormal idea of a pickpocket in the act of robbing our soul of its most precious, thrilling sensations. The carefully-prepared explanations on some points that appear now and then as so many stumbling-blocks in the way of a seemingly fair exposé do not preclude, nevertheless, through the whole of it, the possibility of doubt; for many awkward semblances of truth, partly taken from the confessions of that fallen angel, Mrs. White, and partly—most of them we should say—copied from the private note-book of her “amanuensis,” give you a fair idea of the veracity of this sworn certificate. For instance, according to her own statement and the evidence furnished by the habitue’s of the Holmeses, Mrs. White having never been present at any of the dark circles (her alleged acting as Katie King excluding all possibility, on her part, of such a public exhibition of flesh and bones), how comes she to know so well, in every particular, about the tricks of the mediums, the pro-


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gramme of their performances, etc.? Then, again, Mrs. White who remembers so well—by rote we may say—every word exchanged between Katie King and Mr. Owen, the spirit and Dr. Child, has evidently forgotten all that was ever said by her in her bogus personation to Dr. Felger; she does not even remember a very important secret communicated by her to the latter gentleman! What an extraordinary combination of, memory and absence of mind at the same time. May not a certain memorandum-book, with its carefully-noted contents, account for it, perhaps? The document is signed, under oath, with the name of a non-existing spirit, Katie King. . . . Very clever!

All protestations of innocence or explanations sent in by Mr. or Mrs. Holmes, written or verbal, are peremptorily refused publication by the press. No respectable paper dares takes upon itself the responsibility of such an unpopular cause.

The public feel triumphant; the clergy, forgetting in the excitement of their victory the Brooklyn scandal, rub their hands and chuckle; a certain exposer of materialized spirits and mind-reading, like some monstrous anti-spiritual mitrailleuse shoots forth a volley of missiles, and sends a condoling letter to Mr. Owen; Spiritualists, crestfallen, ridiculed and defeated, feel crushed for ever under the pretended exposure and that overwhelming, pseudonymous evidence. . . . The day of Waterloo has come for us, and sweeping away the last remnants of the defeated army, it remains for us to ring our own death-knell.

Spirits, beware! henceforth, if you lack prudence, your materialized forms will have to stop at the cabinet doors, and in a perfect tremble melt away from sight, singing in chorus Edgar Poe’s “Never more.” One would really suppose that the whole belief of the Spiritualists hung at the girdles of the Holmeses, and that in case they should be unmasked as tricksters, we might as well vote our phenomena an old woman’s delusion.

Is the scraping off of a barnacle the destruction of a ship? But, moreover, we are not sufficiently furnished with any plausible proofs at all.

Colonel Olcott is here and has begun investigations. His first tests with Mrs. Holmes alone, for Mr. Holmes is lying sick at Vineland, have proved satisfactory enough, in his eyes, to induce Mr. Owen to return to the spot of his first love, namely, the Holmeses’ cabinet. He began by tying Mrs. Holmes up in a bag, the string drawn tightly round her neck, knotted and sealed in the presence of Mr. Owen, Col.


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Olcott and a third gentleman. After that the medium was placed in the empty cabinet, which was rolled away into the middle of the room, and it was made a perfect impossibility for her to use her hands. The door being closed, hands appeared in the aperture, then the outlines of a face came, which gradually formed into the classical head of John King, turban, beard and all. He kindly allowed the investigators to stroke his beard, touch his warm face, and patted their hands with his. After the séance was over, Mrs. Holmes, with many tears of gratitude in the presence of the three gentlemen, assured Mr. Owen most solemnly that she had spoken many a time to Dr. Child about “Katie” leaving her presents in the house and dropping them about the place, and that she—Mrs. Holmes—wanted Mr. Owen to know it; but that the doctor had given her most peremptory orders to the contrary, forbidding her to let the former know it, his precise words being, “Don’t do it, it’s useless; he must not know it I leave the question of Mrs. Holmes’ veracity as to this fact for Dr. Child to settle with her.

On the other hand, we have tile woman, Eliza White, exposer and accuser of the Holmeses, who remains up to the present day a riddle and an Egyptian mystery to every man and woman of this city, except to the clever and equally invisible party—a sort of protecting deity— who took the team in hand, and drove the whole concern of “Katie’s” materialization to destruction, in what he considered such a first-rate way. She is not to be met, or seen, or interviewed, or even spoken to by anyone, least of all by the ex-admirers of “Katie King” herself, so anxious to get a peep at the modest, blushing beauty who deemed her self worthy of personating the fair spirit. Maybe it’s rather dangerous to allow them the chance of comparing for themselves the features of both? But the most perplexing fact of this most perplexing imbroglio is that Mr. R. D. Owen, by his Own confession to me, has never, not even on the day of the exposure, seen Mrs. White, or talked to her, or had other wise the least chance to scan her features close enough for him to identify her. He caught a glimpse of her general outline but once, viz., at the mock séance of Dec. 5th referred to in her biography, when she appeared to half a dozen of witnesses (invited to testify and identify the fraud) emerging de nova from the cabinet, with her face closely covered with a double veil (!) after which the sweet vision vanished and appeared no more. Mr. Owen adds that he is not prepared to swear to the identity of Mrs. White and Katie King.

May I he allowed to enquire as to the necessity of such a profound

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mystery, after the promise of a public exposure of all the fraud? It seems to me that the said exposure would have been far more satisfactory if conducted otherwise. Why not give the fairest chance to R. D. Owen, the party who has suffered the most on account of this disgusting swindle—if swindle there is—to compare Mrs. White with his Katie? May I suggest again that it is perhaps because the spirit’s features are but too well impressed on his memory, poor, noble, confiding gentleman. Gauze dresses and moonshine, coronets and stars can possibly be counterfeited in a half-darkened room, while features, answering line for line to the “spirit Katie’s” face, are not so easily made up; the latter require very clever preparations. A lie may be easy enough for a smooth tongue, but no pug nose can lie itself into a classical one.

A very honourable gentleman of my acquaintance, a fervent admirer of the “spirit Katie’s” beauty, who has seen and addressed her at two feet distance about fifty times, tells me that on a certain evening, when Dr. Child begged the spirit to let him see her tongue (did the honour-able doctor want to compare it with Mrs. White’s tongue—the lady having been his patient?), she did so, and upon her opening her mouth, the gentleman in question assures me that he plainly saw, what in his admiring phraseology he terms “the most beautiful set of teeth—two rows of pearls.” He remarked most particularly those teeth. Now there are some wicked, slandering gossips, who happen to have cultivated most intimately Mrs. White’s acquaintance in the happy days of her innocence, before her fall and subsequent exposé and they tell us very bluntly (we beg the penitent angel’s pardon, we repeat but a hear say) that this lady can hardly number among her other natural charms the rare beauty of pearly teeth, or a perfect, most beautiful formed hand and arm. Why not show her teeth at once to the said admirer, and so shame the slanderers? Why shun “Katie’s” best friends? If we were so anxious as she seems to be to prove “who is who,” we would surely submit with pleasure to the operation of showing our teeth, yea, even in a court of justice. The above fact, trifling as it may seem at first sight, would be considered as a very important one by any intelligent juryman in a question of personal identification.

Mr. Owen's statement to us, corroborated by “Katie King” herself in her biography, a sworn document, remember, is in the following words:

“She consented to have an interview with some gentlemen who had seen her personating the spirit, on condition that she would be allowed to


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keep a veil over her face all the time she was conversing with them.” (Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 11th, 4 col., “K. K. Biography.”)

Now pray why should these “too credulous weak-minded gentle men,” as the immortal Dr. Beard would say, he subjected again to such an extra strain on their blind faith? We should say that that was just the proper time to come out and prove to them what was the nature of the mental aberration they were labouring under for so many months. Well, if they do swallow this new veiled proof they are welcome to it.

Vulgus vult decipi decipiatur! But I expect something more substantial before submitting in guilty silence to be laughed at. As it is, the case stands thus:

According to the same biography (same column) the mock séance was prepared and carried out to everyone’s heart’s content, through the endeavours of an amateur detective, who, by the way, if any one wants to know, is a Mr. W. 0. Leslie. a contractor or agent for the Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York Railroad, residing in this city. If the press and several of the most celebrated victims of the fraud are under bond of secrecy with him, I am. not, and mean to say what I know. And so the said séance took place on Dec. 5th last, which fact appearing in sworn evidence, implies that Mr. Leslie had wrested from Mrs. White the confession of her guilt at least several days previous to that date, though the precise day of the ‘‘amateur’s’’ triumph is very cleverly withheld in the sworn certificate. Now comes a new conundrum.

On the evenings of Dec. 2nd and 3rd at two séances held at the Holmeses’, I, myself, in the presence of Robert Dale Owen and Dr. Child (chief manager of those performances, from whom I got on the same morning an admission card), together with twenty more witnesses, saw the spirit of Katie step out of the cabinet twice, in full form and beauty, and I can swear in any court of justice that she did not bear the least resemblance to Mrs. White’s portrait.

As I am unwilling to base my argument upon any other testimony than my own, I will not dwell upon the alleged apparition of Katie King at the Holmeses’ on Dec. 5th to Mr. Roberts and fifteen others, among whom was Mr. W. H. Clarke, a reporter for The Daily Graphic, for I happened to be out of town, though, if this fact is demonstrated, it will go far against Mrs. White, for on that precise evening, and at the same hour, she was exhibiting herself as the bogus Katie at the mock séance. Something still more worthy of consideration is found in the


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most positive assertion of a gentleman, a Mr. Wescott, who on that evening of the 5th on his way home from the real séance, met in the car Mr. Owen, Dr. Child and his wife, all three returning from the mock séance. Now it so happened that this gentleman mentioned to them about having just seen the spirit Katie come out of the cabinet, adding ‘‘he thought she never looked better” ; upon hearing which Mr. Robert Dale Owen stared at him in amazement, and all the three looked greatly perplexed.

And so I have but insisted on the apparition of the spirit at the mediums’ house on the evenings Dec. 2nd and 3rd, when I witnessed the phenomenon, together with Robert Dale Owen and other parties.

It would be worse than useless to offer or accept the poor excuse that the confession of the woman White, her exposure of the fraud, the delivery to Mr. Leslie of all her dresses and presents received by her in the name of Katie King, the disclosure of the sad news by this devoted gentleman to Mr. Owen, and the preparation of the mock séance cabinet and other important matters, had all of them taken place on the 4th the more so, as we are furnished with most positive proofs that Dr. Child at least, if not Mr. Owen. knew all about Mr. Leslie’s success with Mrs. White several days beforehand. Knowing then of the fraud, how could Mr. Leslie allow it to be still carried on, as the fact of Katie’s apparition at the Holmeses’ on Dec. 2nd and 3rd prove to have been the case? Any gentleman, even with a very moderate degree of honour about him, would never allow the public to be fooled and defrauded any longer, unless he had time firm resolution of catching the bogus spirit on the spot and proving the imposition. But no such thing occurred. Quite the contrary; for Dr. Child, who had constituted himself from the first not only chief superintendent of the séances, cabinet and materialization business, but also cashier and ticket-holder (paying the mediums at first ten dollars per séance, as he did, and subsequently fifteen dollars, and pocketing the rest of the proceeds), on that same evening of the 3rd took the admission money from every visitor as quietly as he ever did. I will add, furthermore, that I, in propriâ personâ, handed him on that very night a five—dollar bill, and that he (Dr. Child) kept the whole of it, remarking that the balance could he made good to us by future séance.

Will Dr. Child presume to say that getting ready, as he then was, in company with Mr. Leslie, to produce the bogus Katie King on the 5th of December, he knew nothing, as yet, of the fraud on the 3rd?


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Further; in the same biography (chap. viii, column the 1st), it is stated that, immediately upon Mrs. White’s return from Blissfield, Mich., she called on Dr. Child, and offered to expose the whole humbug she had been engaged in, but that he would not listen to her. Upon that occasion she was not veiled, as indeed there was no necessity for her to be, since by Dr. Child’s own admission she had been a patient of his, and under his medical treatment. In a letter from Holmes to Dr. Child, dated Blissfield, Aug. 28th, 1874, the former writes:

Mrs. White says you and the friends were very rude, wanted to look into all our boxes and trunks and break open locks. What were you looking for, or expecting to find?

All these several circumstances show in the clearest possible manner that Dr. Child and Mrs. White were on terms much more intimate then than that of casual acquaintance, and it is the height of absurdity to assert that if Mrs. White and Katie King were identical, the fraud was not perfectly well known to the “Father Confessor” (see narrative of John and Katie King, p. 45). But a side light is thrown upon this comedy from the pretended biography of John King and his daughter Katie, written at their dictation in his own office by Dr. Child himself. This book was given out to the world as an authentic revelation from these two spirits. It tells us that they stepped in and stepped out of his office, day after day, as any mortal being might, and after holding brief conversations, followed by long narratives, they fully endorsed the genuineness of their own apparition in the Holmeses’ cabinet. Moreover, the spirits appearing at the public séances corroborated the statements which they made to their amanuensis in his office; the two dovetailing together and making a consistent story. Now, if the Holmeses’ Kings were Mrs. White, who were the spirits visiting the doctor’s office? and if the spirits visiting him were genuine, who were those that appeared at the public séances? In which particular has the “Father Confessor” defrauded the public? In selling a book containing false biographies or exposing bogus spirits at the Holmeses’? Which or both? Let the doctor choose.

If his conscience is so tender as to force him into print with his certificate and affidavits why does it not sink deep enough to reach his pocket, and compel him to refund to us the money obtained by him under false pretences? According to his own confession, the Holmeses received from him, up to the time they left town, about $1,2OO, for four months of daily séances. That he admitted every night as many visitors


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as he could possibly find room for—sometimes as many as thirty-five— is a fact that will be corroborated by every person who has seen the phenomena more than once. Furthermore, some six or seven reliable witnesses have told us that the modest fee of $1 was only for the habitués, too curious or over-anxious visitors having to pay sometimes as much as $5, and in one instance $10. This last fact I give under all reserve, not having had to pay so much as that myself.

Now let an impartial investigator of this Philadelphia imbroglio take a pencil and cast up the profit left after paying the mediums, in this nightly spirit speculation lasting many months. The result would be to show that the business of a spirit “Father Confessor” is, on the whole, a very lucrative one.

Ladies and gentlemen of the spiritual belief, methinks we are all of us between the horns of a very wonderful dilemma. If you happen to find your position comfortable, I do not, and so will try to extricate myself.

Let it be perfectly understood, though, that I do not intend in the least to undertake at present the defence of the Holmeses. They may be the greatest frauds for what I know or care. My only purpose is to know for a certainty to whom I am indebted for my share of ridicule— small as it may be, luckily for me. If we Spiritualists are to be laughed and scoffed at and ridiculed and sneered at, we ought to know at least the reason why. Either there was a fraud or there was none. If the fraud is a sad reality, and Dr. Child by some mysterious combination of his personal cruel fate has fallen the first victim to it, after having proved himself so anxious for the sake of his honour and character to stop at once the further progress of such a deceit on a public that had hitherto looked on him alone as the party responsible for the perfect integrity and genuineness of a phenomenon so fully endorsed by him in all particulars, why does not the doctor come out the first and help us to the clue of all this mystery? Well aware of the fact that the swindled and defrauded parties can at any day assert their rights to the restitution of moneys laid out by them solely on the ground of their entire faith in him they had trusted, why does he not sue the Holmeses and so prove his own innocence? He cannot but admit that in the eyes of some initiated parties, his cause looks far more ugly as it now stands than the accusation under which the Holmeses vainly struggle. Or, if there was no fraud, or if it is not fully proved, as it cannot well be on the shallow testimony of a nameless woman signing documents


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with pseudonyms, why then all this comedy on the part of the principal partner in the “Katie materialization” business? Was not Dr. Child the institutor, the promulgator, and we may say the creator of what proves to have been but a bogus phenomenon, after all? Was not lie the advertising agent of this incarnated humbug—the Barnum of this spiritual show? And now that he has helped to fool not only Spiritualists but the world at large, whether as a confederate himself or one of the weak-minded fools—no matter, so long as it is demonstrated that it was he that helped us to this scrape—he imagines that by helping to accuse the mediums, and expose the fraud, by fortifying with his endorsement all manner of bogus affidavits and illegal certificates from non-existing parties, he hopes to find himself henceforth perfectly clear of responsibility to the persons he has dragged after him into this infamous swamp!

We must demand a legal investigation. We have the right to insist upon it, for we Spiritualists have bought this right at a dear price:
with the life-long reputation of Mr. Owen as an able and reliable writer and trustworthy witness of the phenomena, who may henceforth be regarded as a doubted and ever-ridiculed visionary by sceptical wise-acres. We have bought this right with the prospect that all of us, whom Dr. Child has unwittingly or otherwise (time will prove it) fooled into belief in his Katie King, will become for a time the butts for end-less raillery, satires and jokes from the press and ignorant masses. We regret to feel obliged to contradict on this point such an authority in all matters as The Daily Graphic, but if orthodox laymen rather decline to see this fraud thoroughly investigated in a court of justice for fear of the Holmeses becoming entitled to the crown of martyrs, we have no such fear as that, and repeat with Mr. Hudson Tuttle that “better perish the cause with the impostors than live such a life of eternal ostracism, with no chance for justice or redress.”

Why in the name of all that is wonderful should Dr. Child have all the laurels of this unfought battle, in which the attacked army seems for ever doomed to be defeated without so much as a struggle? Why should he have all the material benefit of this materialized humbug, and R. D. Owen, an honest Spiritualist, whose name is universally respected, have all the kicks and thumps of the sceptical press? Is this fair and just? How long shall we Spiritualists be turned over like so many scapegoats to the unbelievers by cheating mediums and speculating prophets? Like some modern shepherd Paris, Mr. Owen fell a


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victim to the snares of this pernicious, newly materialized Helen; and on him falls heaviest the present reaction that threatens to produce a new Trojan war. But the Homer of the Philadelphia Iliad, the one who has appeared in the past as the elegiac poet and biographer of that same Helen, and who appears in the present kindling up the spark of doubt against the Holmeses, till, if not speedily quenched, it might become a roaring ocean of flames—he that plays at this present hour the unparalleled part of a chief justice presiding at his own trial and deciding in his own case-—Dr. Child, we say, turning back on the spirit daughter of his own creation, and backing the mortal, illegitimate off spring furnished by somebody, is left unmolested! Only fancy, while R. D. Owen is fairly crushed under the ridicule of the exposure, Dr. Child, who has endorsed false spirits, now turns state’s evidence and endorses as fervently spirit certificates, swearing to the same in a court of justice

If ever I may hope to get a chance of having my advice accepted by some one anxious to clear up all this sickening story, I would insist that the whole matter be forced into a real court of justice and unriddled before a jury. If Dr. Child is, after all, an honest man whose trusting nature was imposed upon, lie must be the first to offer us all the chances that he in his power of getting at the bottom of all these endless “whys” and “bows.” If he does not, in such a case we will try for ourselves to solve the following mysteries:

1st, Judge Allen, of Vineland, now in Philadelphia, testifies to the fact that when the cabinet, made up under the direct supervision and instructions of Dr. Child, was brought home to the Holmeses, the doctor worked at it himself, unaided, one whole day, and with his tools, Judge Allen being at the time at the mediums’, whom he was visiting. If there was a trap-door or “two cut boards” connected with it, who did the work? Who can doubt that such clever machinery, fitted in such a way as to baffle frequent and close examinations on the part of the sceptics, requires an experienced mechanic of more than ordinary ability? Further, unless well paid, he could hardly be bound to secrecy. Who paid him? Is it Holmes out of his ten-dollar nightly fee? We ought to ascertain it.

2nd, If it is true, as two persons are ready to swear, that the party, calling herself Eliza White, alias “Frank,” alias Katie King, and so forth, is no widow at all, having a well materialized husband, who is living, and who keeps a drinking saloon in a Connecticut town—then


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in such case the fair widow has perjured herself and Dr. Child has endorsed the perjury. We regret that he should endorse the statements of the former as rashly as he accepted the fact of her materialization.

3rd, Affidavits and witnesses (five in all) are ready to prove that on a certain night, when Mrs. White was visibly in her living body, refreshing her penitent stomach in company with impenitent associates in a lager beer saloon, having no claims to patrician “patronage,” Katie King, in her spirit form, was as visibly seen at the door of her cabinet.

4th On one occasion, when Dr. Child (in consequence of some prophetic vision, maybe) invited Mrs. White to his own house, where he locked her up with the inmates, who entertained her the whole of the evening, for the sole purpose of convincing (he always seems anxious to convince somebody of something) some doubting sceptics of the reality of the spirit-form, the latter appeared in the séance-room and talked with R. D. Owen in the presence of all the company. The Spiritualists were jubilant that night, and the doctor the most triumphant of them all. Many are the witnesses ready to testify to the fact, but Dr. Child, when questioned, seems to have entirely forgotten this important occurrence.

5th Who is the party whom she claims to have engaged to personate General Rawlings? Let him come out and swear to it, so that we will all see his great resemblance to the defunct warrior.

6th, Let her name the friends from whom she borrowed the costumes to personate “Sauntee” and “Richard.” They must prove it under oath. Let them produce the dresses. Can she tell us where she got the shining robes of the second and third spheres?

7th Only some portions of Holmes’ letters to “Frank” are published in the biography: some of them for the purpose of proving their co- partnership in the fraud at Blissfield. Can she name the house and parties with whom she lodged and boarded at Blissfield, Michigan?

When all the above questions are answered and demonstrated to our satisfaction, then, and only then, shall we believe that the Holmeses are the only guilty parties to a fraud, which, for its consummate rascality and brazenness, is unprecedented in the annals of Spiritualism.

I have read some of Mr. Holmes’ letters, whether original or forged, no matter, and blessed as I am with a good memory, I well remember certain sentences that have been, very luckily for the poetic creature,


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suppressed by the blushing editor as being too vile for publication. One of the most modest of the paragraphs runs thus:

Now, my advice to you, Frank, don’t crook your elbow too often; no use doubling up and squaring your fists again.

Oh, Katie King!

Remember, the above is addressed to the woman who pretends to have personated the spirit of whom R. D. Owen wrote thus:

I particularly noticed this evening the ease and harmony of her motions. In Naples, (luring five years, I frequented a circle famed for courtly demeanour; but never in the best-bred lady of rank accosting her visitors, have I seen Katie out-rivalled.

And further:

A well-known artist of Philadelphia, after examining Katie, said to me that he had seldom seen features exhibiting more classic beauty. “Her movements and, bearing,” he added, “are the very ideal of grace.”

Compare for one moment this admiring description with the quotation from Holmes’ letter. Fancy an ideal of classic beauty and grace crooking her elbow in a lager beer saloon, and—judge for yourselves !

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

1111, Girard Street, Philadelphia.





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(Continued.)

IN the last Religio-Philosophical Journal (for February 2 in the Philadelphia department, edited by Dr. Child, under the most poetical heading of “After the Storm comes the Sunshine,” we read the following:

I have been waiting patiently for the excitement in reference to the Holmes fraud to subside a little. I will now make some further statements and answer some questions.

Further:

The stories of my acquaintance with Mrs. White are all fabrications.

Further still:

I shall not notice the various reports put forth about my pecuniary relations farther than to say there is a balance due to me for money loaned to the Holmeses.

I claim the right to answer the above three quotations, the more so that the second one consigns me most unceremoniously to the ranks of the liars. Now if there is, in my humble judgment, anything more contemptible than a cheat, it is certainly a liar.

The rest of this letter, editorial, or whatever it may be, is unanswerable, for reasons that will be easily understood by whoever reads it. ‘When petulant Mr. Pancks (in Littie Dorrit) spanked the benevolent Christopher Casby, this venerable patriarch only mildly lifted up his blue eyes heavenward, and smiled more benignly than ever. Dr. Child, tossed about and as badly spanked by public opinion, smiles as sweetly as Mr. Casby, talks of “sunshine,” and quiets his urgent accusers by assuring them that ‘‘it is all fabrications.”

I don’t know whence Dr. Child takes his “sunshine,” unless he draws it from the very bottom of his innocent heart.

For my part, since I came to Philadelphia, I have seen little but slush and dirt; slush in the streets, and dirt in this exasperating Katie King mystery.


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I would strongly advise Dr. Child not to accuse me of “fabrication,” whatever else he may be inclined to ornament me with. What I say I can prove, and am ever willing to do so at any day. If he is innocent of all participation in this criminal fraud, let him “rise and explain.”

If he succeeds in clearing his record, I will be the first to rejoice, and promise to offer him publicly my most sincere apology for the “erroneous suspicions” I labour under respecting his part in the affair; but he must first prove that he is thoroughly innocent. Hard words prove nothing, and he cannot hope to achieve such a victory by simply accusing people of “fabrications.” If he does not abstain from applying epithets unsupported by substantial proofs, he risks, as in the game of shuttlecock and battledore, the chance of receiving the missile back, and maybe that it will hurt him worse than he expects.

In the article in question he says:

The stories of my acquaintance with Mrs. White are all fabrications. I did let her in two or three times, but the entry and hall were so dark that it was impossible to recognize her or any one. I have seen her several times, and knew that she looked more like Katie King than Mr. [?] or Mrs. Holmes.

Mirabile dietu! This beats our learned friend, Dr. Beard. The latter denies, point-blank, not only “materialization,” which is not yet actually proved to the world, but also every spiritual phenomenon. But Dr. Child denies being acquainted with a woman whom he confesses him self to have seen “several times,” received in his office, where she was seen repeatedly by others, and yet at the same time admits that he “knew she looked like Katie King,” etc. By the way, we have all laboured under the impression that Dr. Child admitted in The Inquirer that he saw Mrs. White for the first time and recognized her as Katie King only on that morning when she made her affidavit at the office of the justice of the peace. A “fabrication” most likely. In the R.-P. Journal for October 2 1874, Dr. Child wrote thus:

Your report does not for a moment shake my confidence in our Katie King, as she comes to me every day and talks to me. On several occasions Katie had come to me and requested Mr. Owen and myself to go there [ to the Holmeses’] and she would come and repeat what she had told me above.

Did Dr. Child ascertain where Mrs. White was at the time of the spirit’s visits to him?

As to Mrs. White, I know her well. I have on many occasions let her into the house. I saw her at the time the manifestations were going on in Blissfield. She has since gone to Massachusetts.


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And still the doctor assures us he was not acquainted with Mrs. White. What signification does he give to the word “acquaintance” in such a case? Did he not go, in the absence of the Holmeses, to their house, and talk with her and even quarrel with the woman? Another fabricated story, no doubt. I defy Dr. Child to print again, if he dare, such a word as fabrication in relation to myself, after he has read a certain statement that I reserve for the last.

In all this pitiful, humbugging romance of an “exposure” by a too material she-spirit, there has not been given us a single reasonable explanation of even so much as one solitary fact. It began with a bogus biography, and threatens to end in a bogus fight, since every single duel requires at least two participants, and Dr. Child prefers extracting sunshine from the cucumbers of his soul and letting the storm subside, to fighting like a man for his own fair name. He says that “he shall not notice” what people say about his little speculative transactions with the Holmeses. He assures us that they owe him money. Very likely, but it does not alter the alleged fact of his having paid $10 for every séance and pocketing the balance. Dare he say that he did not do it? The Holmeses' say otherwise, and the statements in writing of various witnesses corroborate them.

The Holmeses may be scamps in the eyes of certain persons, and the only ones in the eyes of the more prejudiced; but as long as their statements have not been proven false, their word is as good as the word of Dr. Child; aye, in a court of justice even, the “Mediums Holmes” would stand just on the same level as any spiritual prophet or clairvoyant who might have been visited by the same identical spirits that visited the former. So long as Dr. Child does not legally prove them to be cheats and himself innocent, why should not they be as well entitled to belief as himself?

From the first hour of the Katie King mystery, if people have accused them, no one so far as I know—not even Dr. Child himself—has proved, or even undertaken to prove, the innocence of their ex-cashier and recorder. The fact that every word of the ex-leader and president of the Philadelphian Spiritualists would be published by every spiritual paper (and here we must confess to our wonder that he does not hasten much to avail himself of this opportunity) while any statement coming from the Holmeses' would be pretty sure of rejection, would not necessarily imply the fact that they alone are guilty; it would only go towards showing that, notwithstanding the divine truth of our faith and the


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teachings of our invisible guardians, some Spiritualists have not profited by them to learn impartiality and justice.

These “mediums” are persecuted; so far it is but justice, since they themselves admitted their guilt about the photography fraud, and unless it can be shown that they were thereunto controlled by lying spirits their own mouths condemn them; but what is less just, is that they are slandered and abused on all points and made to bear alone all the weight of a crime, where confederacy peeps out from every page of the story. No one seems willing to befriend them—these two helpless uninfluential creatures, who, if they sinned at all, perhaps sinned through weakness and ignorance—to take their case in hand, and by doing justice to them, do justice at the same time to the cause of truth. If their guilt should be as evident as the daylight at noon, is it not ridiculous that their partner, Dr. Child, should show surprise at being so much as suspected! History records but one person—the legitimate spouse of the great Cæsar—whose name has to remain enforced by law as above suspicion. Methinks that if Dr. Child possesses some natural claims to his self-assumed title of Katie King’s “Father Confessor,” he can have none whatever to share the infallibility of Madame Cæsar's virtue. Being pretty sure as to this myself, and feeling, moreover, somewhat anxious to swell the list of pertinent questions, which are called by our disingenuous friend “fabrications,” with at least one fact, I will now proceed to furnish your readers with the following:

“Katie’s” picture has been, let us say, proved a fraud, an imposition on the credulous world, and is Mrs. White’s portrait. This counterfeit has been proved by the beauty of the “crooking elbow,” in her bogus autobiography (the proof sheets of which Dr. Child was seen correcting), by the written confession of the Holmeses', and, lastly, by Dr. Child himself.

Out of the several bogus portraits of the supposed spirit, the most spurious one has been declared—mostly on the testimony endorsed by Dr. Child and “over his signature”—to be the one where the pernicious and false Katie King is standing behind the medium.

The operation of this delicate piece of imposture proved so difficult as to oblige the Holmeses' to take into the secret of the conspiracy the photographer.

Now Dr. Child denies having had anything whatever to do with the sittings for those pictures. He denies it most emphatically, and goes so far as to say (we have many witnesses and proofs of this) that he


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was out of town, four hundred miles away, when the said pictures were taken. And so he was, bless his dear prophetic soul! Meditating and chatting with the nymphs and goblins of Niagara Falls, so that, when he pleads an alibi, it’s no “fabrication” but the truth for once.

Unfortunately for the veracious Dr. Child—”whose character and reputation for truthfulness and moral integrity no one doubts,” here we quote the words of “Honesty” and “Truth,” transparent pseudonyms of an “amateur” for detecting, exposing and writing under the cover of secrecy, who tried to give a friendly push to the doctor in two articles, but failed in both—unfortunately for H. T. Child, we say, he got inspired in some evil hour to write a certain article, and for getting the wise motto, Verba volant, scripta manent, to publish it in The Daily Graphic on Nov. 6th, together with the portraits of John and Katie King.

Now for tins bouquet of the endorsement of a fact by a truthful man, ‘‘whose moral integrity no one can doubt.’’

To The Editor of “The Daily Graphic.”

On the evening of July 20th, after a large and successful séance, in which Katie had walked out into the room in the presence of thirty persons and had disappeared and reappeared in full view, she remarked to Mr. Leslie and myself that if we, with four others whom she named, would remain after the séance, she would like to try for her photograph. We did so, and there were present six persons besides the photographer. I had procured two dozen magnesian spirals, and, when all was ready, she opened the door of the cabinet and stood in it, while Mr. Holmes on one side, and I upon the other, burned these, making a brilliant light. We tried two plates, but neither of them was satisfactory.

Another effort was made on July 23rd, which was successful. We asked her if she would try to have it taken by daylight. She said she would. We sat with shutters often at 4 pm. In a few moments Katie appeared at the aperture and said she was ready. She asked to have one of the windows closed, and that we should hold a shawl to screen her. As soon as the camera was ready she came out and walked behind the shawl to the middle of the room, a distance of six or eight feet, where she stood in front of the camera. She remained in that position until the first picture was taken, when she retired to the cabinet.

Mr. Holmes proposed that she should permit him to sit in front of the camera, and should come out and place her hand upon his shoulder. To this she assented, and desired all present to avoid looking into her eyes, as this disturbed the conditions very much.

The second picture was then taken in which she stands behind Mr. Holmes. When the camera was closed she showed great signs of weakness, and it was necessary to assist her back to the cabinet, and when she got to the door she appeared ready to sink to the floor and disappeared [?]. The cabinet door was opened, but she was not to be


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seen. In a few minutes she appeared again and remarked that she had not been sufficiently materialized, and said she would like to try again, if we could wait a little while. We waited about fifteen minutes, when she rapped on the cabinet, signifying that she was ready to come out. She did so, and we obtained the Third negative.

(Signed) DR. H. T. CHILD.

And so, Dr. Child, we have obtained this, we did that, and we did many other things. Did you? Now, besides Dr. Child’s truthful assertions about his being out of town, especially at the time this third negative was obtained, we have the testimony of the photographer, Dr. Selger, and other witnesses to corroborate the fact. At the same time, I suppose that Dr. Child will not risk a denial of his own article. I have it in my possession and keep it, together with many others as curious, printed like it, and written in black and white. Who fabricates stories? Can the doctor answer?

How will he creep out of this dilemma? What rays of his spiritual “sunshine” will be able to de-materialize such a contradictory fact as this one? Here we have an article taking up two spacious columns of The Daily Graphic, in which he asserts as plainly as possible, that he was present himself at the sittings of Katie King for her portrait, that the spirit come out boldly, in full daylight, that she disappeared on the threshold of the cabinet, and that he, Dr. Child, helping her back to it on account of her great weakness, saw that there was no one in the said cabinet, for the door remained opened. Who did he help? Whose fluttering heart beat against his paternal arm and waistcoat? Was it the bonny Eliza? Of course, backed by such reliable testimony of such a truly trustworthy witness, the pictures sold like wild-fire. Who got the proceeds? Who kept them? If Dr. Child was not in town when the pictures were taken, then this article is an “evident fabrication.” On the other hand, if what he says in it is truth, and he was present at all at the attempt of this bogus picture-taking, then he certainly must have known “who was who, in 1874,” as the photographer knew it, and as surely it did not require Argus-eyes to recognize in full daylight with only one shutter partially closed, a materialized, ethereal spirit, from a common, “elbow-crooking” mortal woman, whom, though not acquainted with her, the doctor still “knew well.”

If our self-constituted leaders, our prominent recorders of the phenomena, will humbug and delude the public with such reliable statements as this one, how can we Spiritualists wonder at the masses of incredulous scoffers that keep on politely taking us for “lunatics” when they do


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not very rudely call us “liars and charlatans” to our faces? It is not the occasionally cheating “mediums” that have or can impede the progress of our cause; it’s the exalted exaggerations of some fanatics on one hand, and the deliberate, unscrupulous statements of those who delight in dealing in “wholesale fabrications” and “pious frauds” that have arrested the unusually rapid spreading of Spiritualism in 1874 and brought it to a dead stop in 1875. For how many years to come yet, who can tell?

In his “After the Storm comes the Sunshine,” the Doctor makes the following melancholy reflection:

It has been suggested that going into an atmosphere of fraud, such as surrounds these mediums [ Holmeses] and being sensitive [ poor Yorick!] I was more liable to be deceived than others.

We shudder indeed at the thought of the exposure of so much sensitiveness to so much pollution. Alas! soiled dove! how very sensitive must a person be who picks up such evil influences that they actually force him into the grossest of fabrications and make him invent stories and endorse facts that he has not and could not have seen. If Dr. Child, victim to his too sensitive nature, is liable to fall so easily as that under the control of wicked “Diakka,” our friendly advice to him is to give up Spiritualism as soon as possible, and join a Young Men’s Christian Association; for then, under the protecting wing of the true orthodox Church, he can begin a regular fight, like a second St. Anthony, with the orthodox devil. Such Diakka as he fell in with at the Holmeses’ must beat Old Nick by long odds, and if he could not withstand them by the unaided strength of his own pure soul, he may with “bell, book and candle” and the use of holy water be more fortunate in a tug with Satan, crying as other “Father Confessors” have heretofore, “Exorciso vos in nomine Lucis!” and signify ing his triumph with a robust Laus Deo.

H. P. BLAVATSKY

Philadelphia, March,1875


NOTICE TO MEDIUMS

IN compliance with the request of the Honourable Alexander Aksakoff, Counsellor of State in the Imperial Chancellery at St. Petersburg, the undersigned hereby give notice that they are prepared to receive applications from physical mediums who may he willing to go to Russia, for examination before the committee of the Imperial University.

To avoid disappointment, it may be well to state that the undersigned will recommend no mediums whose personal good character is not satisfactorily shown; nor any who will not submit themselves to a thorough scientific test of their mediumistic powers, in the city of New York, prior to sailing; nor any who cannot exhibit most of their phenomena in a lighted room, to be designated by the undersigned, and with such ordinary furniture as may be found therein.

Approved applications will be immediately forwarded to St. Petersburg, and upon receipt of orders thereon from the scientific commission or its representative, M. Aksakoff, proper certificates and instructions will be given to accepted applicants, and arrangements made for defraying expenses.

Address the undersigned, in care of E. Gerry Brown, Editor of The Spiritual Scientist, 18, Exchange Street, Boston, Mass., who is hereby authorized to receive personal applications from mediums in the New England States.

HENRY S. OLCOTT.

HELEN P. BLAVATSKY.

A REBUKE
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I AM truly sorry that a Spiritualist paper like The Religio-Philosophical Journal, which claims to instruct and enlighten its readers, should suffer such trash as Mr. Jesse Sheppard is contributing to its columns to appear without review. I will not dwell upon the previous letter of this very gifted personage, although everything he has said concerning Russia and life at St. Petersburg might be picked to pieces by anyone having merely a superficial acquaintance with the place and the people; nor will I stop to sniff at his nosegays of high-sounding names—his Princess Boulkoffs and Princes This and That, which are as preposterously fictitious as though, in speaking of Americans, some Russian singing-medium were to mention his friends Prince Jones or Duke Smith, or Earl Brown—for if he chooses to manufacture noble patrons from the oversloppings of his poetic imagination, and it amuses him or his readers, no great harm is done. But when it comes to his saying the things he does in the letter of July 3rd in that paper, it puts quite a different face upon the matter. Here he pretends to give historical facts—which never existed. He tells of things he saw clairvoyantly, and his story is such a tissue of ridiculous, gross anachronisms that they not only show his utter ignorance of Russian history, but are calculated to injure the cause of Spiritualism by throwing doubt upon all clairvoyant descriptions. Secondarily in importance they destroy his own reputation for veracity, stamp him as a trickster and a false writer, and bring the gravest suspicion upon his claim to possess any mediumship whatever.

What faith can anyone, acquainted with the rudiments of history, have in a medium who sees another (Catherine II) giving orders to strangle her son (Paul I), when we all know that the Emperor Paul ascended the throne upon the decease of the very mother whom the inventive genius of this musical prodigy makes guilty of infanticide?

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read in the history of her country, to refresh your memory. Spiritualism has been laughed at quite enough recently in consequence of such pious frauds as yours, and as Russian savants are about to investigate the subject, we may as well go to them with clean hands. The journal which gives you its hospitality goes to my country, and its interests will certainly suffer if you are allowed to go on with your embroidery and spangle-work without rebuke. Remember, young poetico-historian, that the Emperor Paul was the paternal grandfather of the present Czar, and everyone who has been at St. Petersburg knows that the “old palace,” which to your spiritual eye wears such “an appearance of dilapidation and decay, worthy of a castle of the Middle Ages,” and the one where your Paul was strangled, is an every-day, modern-looking, respectable building, the successor of one which was pulled down early in the reign of the late Emperor Nicholas, and known from the beginning until now as the Pawlowsky Military College for the “Cadets.” And the two assassins, begotten in your clairvoyant loins—Petreski and Kofski! Really now, Mr. Sheppard, gentlemanly assassins ought to be very much obliged to you for these pretty aliases!

It is fortunate for you, dear sir, that it did not occur to you to discuss these questions in St. Petersburg, and that you evolved your history from the depths of your own consciousness, for in our autocratical country one is not permitted to discuss the little unpleasantnesses of the imperial family history, and the rule would not be relaxed for a Spanish grandee, or even that more considerable personage, an American singing-medium. An attempt on your part to do so would assuredly have interfered with your grand concert, under imperial patronage, and might have led to your journeying to the borders of Russia under an armed escort befitting your exalted rank.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.


OCCULTISM OR MAGIC
—————

AMONG the numerous sciences pursued by the well-disciplined army of earnest students of the present century, none has had less honours or more scoffing than the oldest of them—the science of sciences, the venerable mother-parent of all our modern pigmies. Anxious in their petty vanity to throw the veil of oblivion over their undoubted origin, the self-styled positive scientists, ever on the alert, present to the courageous scholar who tries to deviate from the beaten highway traced out for him by his dogmatic predecessors, a formidable range of serious obstacles.

As a rule, Occultism is a dangerous, double-edged weapon for one to handle who is unprepared to devote his whole life to it. The theory of it, unaided by serious practice, will ever remain in the eyes of those prejudiced against such an unpopular cause an idle, crazy speculation, fit only to charm the ears of ignorant old women. When we cast a look behind us and see how for the last thirty years modern Spiritualism has been dealt with, notwithstanding the occurrence of daily, hourly proofs which speak to all our senses, stare us in the eyes, and utter their voices from “beyond the great gulf,” how can we hope, I say, that Occultism or Magic—which stands in relation to Spiritualism as the infinite to the finite, as the cause to the effect, or as unity to multifariousness—will easily gain ground where Spiritualism is scoffed at? One who rejects priori or even doubts the immortality of man’s soul can never believe in its Creator; and, blind to what is heterogeneous in his eyes, will remain still more blind to the proceeding of the latter from homogeneity. In relation to the Kabalah, or the compound mystic text-book of the great secrets of Nature, we do not know of anyone in the present century who could have commanded a sufficient dose of that moral courage which fires the heart of the true Adept with the sacred flame of propagandism, to force him into defying public opinion by displaying familiarity with that sublime work. Ridicule is the dead-


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liest weapon of the age, and while we read in the records of history of thousands of martyrs who joyfully braved flames and faggots in support of their mystic doctrines in the past centuries, we would scarcely be likely to find one individual in the present times who would be brave enough even to defy ridicule by seriously undertaking to prove the great truths embraced in the traditions of the Past.

As an instance of the above, I will mention the article on Rosicrucianism, signed “Hiraf.” This ably-written essay—notwithstanding some fundamental errors, which, though they are such, would be hardly noticed except by those who had devoted their lives to the study of Occultism in its various branches of practical teaching—indicates with certainty to the practical reader that, for theoretical knowledge, at least, the author need fear few rivals, still less superiors. His modesty, which I cannot too much appreciate in his case—though he is safe enough behind the mask of his fancy pseudonym—need not give him any apprehensions. There are few critics in this country of Positivism who would willingly risk themselves in an encounter with such a powerful disputant, on his own ground. The weapons he seems to hold in reserve, in the arsenal of his wonderful memory, his learning, and his readiness to give any further information that enquirers may wish for, will undoubtedly scare off every theorist, unless he is perfectly sure of himself, which few are. But book-learning—and here I refer only to the subject of Occultism—vast as it may be, will always
prove insufficient even to the analytical mind—the most accustomed to extract the quintessence of truth, disseminated throughout thousands of
contradictory statements—unless supported by personal experience and practice. Hence “Hiraf” can only expect an encounter with some one who may hope to find a chance to refute some of his bold assertions on the plea of having just such a slight practical experience. Still, it must not be understood that these present lines are intended to criticize our too modest essayist. Far from poor, ignorant me be such a presumptuous thought. My desire is simple: to help him in his scientific, but, as I said before, rather hypothetical researches, by telling a little of the little I picked up in my long travels throughout the length and breadth of the East—that cradle of Occultism—in the hope of correcting certain erroneous notions he seems to be labouring under, and which are calculated to confuse uninitiated sincere enquirers, who might desire to drink at his own source of knowledge.

In the first place, “Hiraf” doubts whether there are in existence, in


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England or elsewhere, what we term regular colleges for the neophytes of this Secret Science. I will say from personal knowledge that such places there are in the East—in India, Asia Minor, and other countries. As in the primitive days of Socrates and other sages of antiquity, so now, those who are willing to learn the Great Truth will ever find the chance if they only “try” to meet some one to lead them to the door of one “who knows when and how.” If “Hiraf” is right about the seventh rule of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, which says that “the Rose-crux becomes and is not made,” he may err as to the exceptions which have ever existed among other Brotherhoods devoted to the pursuit of the same secret knowledge. Then again, when he asserts, as he does, that Rosicrucianism is almost forgotten, we may answer him that we do not wonder at it, and add, by way of parenthesis, that, strictly speaking, the Rosicrucians do not now even exist, the last of that fraternity having departed in the person of Cagliostro.

“Hiraf” ought to add to the word Rosicrucianism “that particular sect” at least, for it was but a sect after all, one of many branches of the same tree.

By forgetting to specify that particular denomination and by including under the name of Rosicrucians all those who, devoting their lives to Occultism congregated together in Brotherhoods, “Hiraf” commits an error by which he may unwittingly lead people to believe that the Rosicrucians having disappeared, there are no more Kabalists practising Occultism on the face of the earth. He also becomes thereby guilty of an anachronism, attributing to the Rosicrucians the building of the pyramids and other majestic monuments, which indelibly exhibit in their architecture the symbols of the grand religions of the past. For it is not so. If the main object in view was, and still is, alike, with all the great family of the ancient and modern Kabalists, the dogmas and formulas of certain sects differ greatly. Springing one after the other from the great Oriental mother-root, they scattered broadcast all over the world, and each of them desiring to out-rival the other by plunging deeper and deeper into the secrets jealously guarded by Nature, some of them became guilty of the greatest heresies against the primitive Oriental Kabalah.

While the first followers of the secret sciences, taught to the Chaldæans by nations whose very name was never breathed in history, remained stationary in their studies, having arrived at the maximum, the Omega of the knowledge permitted to man, many of the subse-


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quent sects separated from them, and, in their uncontrollable thirst for more knowledge, trespassed beyond the boundaries of truth and fell into fictions. In consequence of Pythagoras—so says Jamblichus— having by sheer force of energy and daring penetrated into the mysteries of the Temple of Thebes, obtained therein his initiation and afterwards studied the sacred sciences in Egypt for twenty-two years, many foreigners were subsequently admitted to share the knowledge of the wise men of the East, who, as a consequence, had many of their secrets divulged. Later still, unable to preserve them in their purity, these mysteries were so mixed up with fictions and fables of the Grecian mythology that truth was wholly distorted.

As the primitive Christian religion divided, in course of time, into numerous sects, so the science of Occultism gave birth to a variety of doctrines and various brotherhoods. So the Egyptian Ophites became the Christian Gnostics, shooting forth the Basilideans of the second century, and the original Rosicrucians created subsequently the Paracelsists, or Fire Philosophers, the European Alchemists, and other physical branches of their sect. (See Hargrave Jennings’ Rosicrucians.) To call indifferently every Kabalist a Rosicrucian, is to commit the same error as if we were to call every Christian a Baptist on the ground that the latter are also Christians.

The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross was not founded until the middle of the thirteenth century. and notwithstanding the assertions of the learned Mosheim, it derives its name neither from the Latin word Ros (dew), nor from a cross, the symbol of Lux. The origin of the Brotherhood can he ascertained by any earnest, genuine student of Occultism, who happens to travel in Asia Minor, if he chooses to fall in with some of the Brotherhood, and if he is willing to devote himself to the head-tiring work of deciphering a Rosicrucian manuscript—the hardest thing in the world-—for it is carefully preserved in the archives of the very Lodge which was founded by the first Kabalist of that name, but which now goes by another name. The founder of it, a German Ritter, of the name of Rosencranz, was a man who, after acquiring a very suspicious reputation through the practice of the Black Art in his native place, reformed in consequence of a vision. Giving up his evil practices, he made a solemn vow, and went on foot to Palestine, in order to make his amende honorable at the Holy Sepulchre. Once there, the Christian God, the meek, but well-informed Nazarene—trained as he was in the high school of the Essenians, those


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virtuous descendants of the botanical as well as astrological and magical Chald to Rosencranz, a Christian would say, in a vision, but I would suggest, in the shape of a materialized spirit. The purport of this visitation, as well as the subject of their conversation, remained for ever a mystery to many of the Brethren; but immediately after that, the ex-sorcerer and Ritter disappeared, and was heard of no more till the mysterious sect of Rosicrucians was added to the family of Kabalists, and their powers aroused popular attention, even among the Eastern populations, indolent and accustomed as they are to live among wonders. The Rosicrucians strove to combine together the most various branches of Occultism, and they soon became renowned for the extreme purity of their lives and their extraordinary powers, as well as for their thorough knowledge of the secret of secrets.

As alchemists and conjurers they became proverbial. Later (I need not inform “Hiraf” precisely when, as we drink at two different sources of knowledge), they gave birth to the more modern Theosophists, at whose head was Paracelsus, and to the Alchemists, one of the most celebrated of whom was Thomas Vaughan (seventeenth century), who wrote the most practical things on Occultism under the name of Eugenius Philalethes. I know and can prove that Vaughan was, most positively, “made before he became.”

The Rosicrucian Kabalah is but an epitome of the Jewish and the Oriental ones, combined, the latter being the most secret of all. The Oriental Kabalah, the practical, full, and only existing copy, is carefully preserved at the headquarters of this Brotherhood in the East, and, I may safely vouch, will never come out of its possession. Its very existence has been doubted by many of the European Rosicrucians. One who wants “to become” has to hunt for his knowledge through thousands of scattered volumes, and pick up facts and lessons, bit by bit. Unless he takes the nearest way and consents “to be made,” he will never become a practical Kabalist, and with all his learning will remain at the threshold of the “mysterious gate.” The Kabalah may be used and its truths imparted on a smaller scale now than it was in antiquity, and the existence of the mysterious Lodge, on account of its secrecy, doubted, but it does exist and has lost none of the primitive secret powers of the ancient Chaldæans The lodges, few in number, are divided into sections and known but to the Adepts; no one would be likely to find them out, unless the Sages themselves found the neophyte worthy of initiation. Unlike the European Rosicrucians—who,


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in order “to become and not to be made,” have constantly put into practice the word of St. John, who says, “Heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force,” and who have struggled alone, violently robbing Nature of her secrets—the Oriental Rosicrucians (for such we will call them, being denied the right to pronounce their true name), in the serene beatitude of their divine knowledge, are ever ready to help the earnest student struggling “to become” with practical knowledge, which dissipates, like a heavenly breeze, the blackest clouds of sceptical doubt.

“Hiraf” is right again when he says that

Knowing that their mysteries, if divulged, in the present chaotic state of society, would produce mere confusion and death,

they shut up that knowledge within themselves. Heirs to the early heavenly wisdom of their first forefathers, they keep the keys which unlock the most guarded of Nature’s secrets, and impart them only gradually and with the greatest caution. But still they do impart sometimes.

Once all such a cercle vicieux, “Hiraf” sins likewise in a certain comparison he makes between Christ, Buddha, and Khoung-foo-tsee, or Confucius. A comparison can hardly be made between the two former wise and spiritual Illuminati, and the Chinese philosopher. The higher aspirations and views of the two Christs can have nothing to do with the cold, practical philosophy of the latter, brilliant anomaly as he was among a naturally dull and materialistic people, peaceful and devoted to agriculture from the earliest ages of their history. Confucius can never bear the slightest comparison with the two great Reformers. Whereas the principles and doctrines of Christ and Buddha were calculated to embrace the whole of humanity, Confucius confined his attention solely to his own country, trying to apply his profound wisdom and philosophy to the wants of his countrymen, and little troubling his head about the rest of mankind. Intensely Chinese in patriotism and views, his philosophical doctrines are as much devoid of the purely poetic element, which characterizes the teachings of Christ and Buddha, the two divine types, as the religious tendencies of his people lack in that spiritual exaltation which we find, for instance, in India. Khoung-foo-tsee has not even the depth of feeling and the slight spiritual striving of his contemporary, Lao-tsee. Says the learned Ennemoser:


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The spirits of Christ and Buddha have left indelible, eternal traces all over the face of the world. The doctrines of Confucius can he mentioned only as the most brilliant proceedings of cold human reasoning.

Harvey, in his Universal History, has depicted the Chinese nation perfectly, in a few words:

Their heavy, childish, cold, sensual nature explains the peculiarities of their history.

Hence any comparison between the first two Reformers and Confucius, in an essay on Rosicrucianism, in which “Hiraf” treats of the Science of Sciences and invites the thirsty for knowledge to drink at her inexhaustible source, seems inadmissible.

Further, when our learned author asserts so dogmatically that the Rosicrucian learns, though he never uses, the secret of immortality in earthly life, he asserts only what he himself, in his practical inexperience, thinks impossible. The words “never” and “impossible” ought to be erased from the dictionary of humanity, until the time at least when the great Kabalah shall all be solved, and so rejected or accepted. The Count St. Germain is, until this very time, a living mystery, and the Rosicrucian Thomas Vaughan another one. The countless authorities we have in literature, as well as in oral tradition (which sometimes is the more trustworthy), about this wonderful Count’s having been met and recognized in different centuries, is no myth. Anyone who admits one of the practical truths of the occult sciences taught by the Kabalah tacitly admits them all. It must be Hamlet’s “to be or not to be,” and if the Kabalah is true, then St. Germain need be no myth.

But I am digressing from my object, which is, firstly, to show the slight differences between the two Kabalahs, that of the Rosicrucians and time Oriental one; and, secondly, to say that the hope expressed by “Hiraf” to see the subject better appreciated at some future day than it has been till now, may perhaps become more than a hope. Time will show man things; till then, let us heartily thank “Hiraf” for this first well-aimed shot at those stubborn scientific runaways, who, once before the Truth, avoid looking her in the face, and dare not even throw a glance behind them, lest they should be forced to see that which would greatly lessen their self-sufficiency. As a practical follower of Eastern Spiritualism, I can confidently wait for the time, when, with the timely help of those ‘‘who know,’’ American Spiritualism, which even in its present shape has proved such a sore in the side of the materialists, will become a science and a thing of mathematical certi-


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tude, instead of being regarded only as the crazy delusion of epileptic monomaniacs.

The first Kabalah in which a mortal man ever dared to explain the greatest mysteries of the universe, and show the keys to

Those masked doors in the ramparts of Nature through which no mortal can ever pass without rousing dread sentries never seen upon this side her wall,

was compiled by a certain Simeon Ben Iochai, who lived at the time of the second Temple’s destruction. Only about thirty years after the death of this renowned Kabalist, his MSS. and written explanations, which had till then remained in his possession as a most precious secret, were used by his son Rabbi Elizzar and other learned men. Making a compilation of the whole, they so produced the famous work called Sohar (God’s splendour). This book proved an inexhaustible mine for all the subsequent Kabalists, their source of information and knowledge, and all more recent and genuine Kabalahs were more or less carefully copied from the former. Before that, all the mysterious doctrines had come down in an unbroken line of merely oral tradition as far back as man could trace himself on earth. They were scrupulously and jealously guarded by the wise men of Chald India, Persia and Egypt, and passed from one Initiate to another, in the same purity of form as when handed down to the first man by the angels, students of God’s great Theosophic Seminary. For the first time since the world’s creation, the secret doctrines, passing through Moses who was initiated in Egypt, underwent some slight alterations.

In consequence of the personal ambition of this great prophet medium, he succeeded in passing off his familiar spirit, the wrathful “Jehovah,” for the spirit of God himself, and so won undeserved laurels and honours. The same influence prompted him to alter some of the principles of the great oral Kabalah in order to make them the more secret. These principles were laid out in symbols by him in the first four books of the Pentateuch, but for some mysterious reasons he with held them from Deuteronomy. Having initiated his seventy Elders in his own way, the latter could give but what they had received them selves, and so was prepared the first opportunity for heresy, and the erroneous interpretation of the symbols. While the Oriental Kabalah remained in its pure primitive shape, the Mosaic or Jewish one was full of drawbacks, and the keys to many of the secrets—forbidden by the Mosaic law—purposely misinterpreted. The powers conferred by it on the Initiates were formidable still, and of all the most renowned


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Kabalists, King Solomon and his bigoted parent, David, not withstanding his penitential psalms, were the most powerful. But still the doctrine remained secret and purely oral, until, as I have said before, the days of the second Temple’s destruction. Philologically speaking, the very word Kabalah is formed from two Hebrew words, meaning to receive, as in former times the Initiate received it orally and directly from his Master, and the very book of the Sohar was written out on received information, which was handed down as an unvarying stereo typed tradition by the Orientals, and altered, through the ambition of Moses, by the Jews.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

SPIRITUALISTIC TRICKSTERS
—————

A MOST outrageous swindle was perpetrated upon the public last Sunday evening at the Boston Theatre. Some persons with no higher aspirations in the world than a lust for a few dollars to fill their pockets, depleted by unsuccessful cheap shows, advertised a “séance,” and engaged as “mediums” some of the most impudent impostors with which the world is cursed. They furthermore abused public confidence by causing it to be understood that these people were to appear before the scientific commission at St. Petersburg.

Is it not about time that some Society in Boston should be sufficiently strong financially, and have members who will have the requisite energy to act in an emergency like this? Common sense would dictate what might be done, and a determined will would overcome all obstacles. Spiritualism needs a Vigilance Committee. Public opinion will justify any measures that will tend to check this trifling. “Up, and at them!” should be the watchword until we have rid society of these pests and their supporters.

The press of Boston are disposed to be fair towards Spiritualists. But if Spiritualists do not care enough for Spiritualism to defend it from tricksters who have not sufficient skill to merit them the title of jugglers, how can they expect any different treatment than that it is receiving?

As a proof of the sincerity of the Boston press and also in support and further explanation of the above we might mention that the following card, sent to all the morning dailies, was accepted and printed in Tuesday’s edition.

Boston, July 19, 1875.
—————

SIR,—The undersigned desire to say that the persons who advertised a so-called spiritualistic exhibition at the Boston Theatre last evening were guilty of false representations to the public. We are alone empowered by the Academy of Sciences attached to the Imperial University of St. Petersburg, Russia, to select the mediums


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who shall be invited by that body to display their powers during the forthcoming scientific investigation of Spiritualism, and Mr. H. Gerry Brown, editor . Scientist, of this city, is our only authorized deputy.

Neither “F. Warren,” “Prof. J. T. Bates,” “Miss I “Mrs. S. Gould,” nor “Miss Lillie Darling” has been selected, or is at all likely to be selected for that honour.

As this swindle may be again attempted, we desire to say, once for all, that no medium accepted by us will be obliged to exhibit his powers to earn money to de fray his expenses, nor will any such exhibition be tolerated. The Imperial University of St. Petersburg makes its investigation in the interest of science—not to assist charlatans to give juggling performances in theatres, upon the strength of our certificates.
HENRY S. OLC0YT.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

THE SEARCH AFTER OCCULTISM
—————

[ The Spiritual Scientist.]

BEING daily in receipt of numerous letters, written with the view of obtaining advice as to the best method of receiving information respecting Occultism, and the direct relation it bears to modern Spiritualism, and not having sufficient time at my disposal to answer these requests, I now propose to facilitate the mutual labour of myself and correspondents by naming herein a few of the principal works treating upon Magism, and the mysteries of such modern Hermetists.

To this I feel bound to add, respecting what I have stated before, to wit: that would-be aspirants must not lure themselves with the idea of any possibility of their becoming practical Occultists by mere book-knowledge. The works of the Hermetic philosophers were never intended for the masses, as Mr. Charles Sotheran, a learned member of the Society Rosæ Crucis, in a late essay observes;

Gabriel Rossetti in his disquisitions on the anti-papal spirit which produced the Reformation shows that the art of speaking and writing in a language which bears a double interpretation is of very great antiquity, that it was in practice among the priests of Egypt, brought thence by the Manichees, whence it passed to the Ternplars and Albigenses, spread over Europe, and brought about the Reformation.

The ablest book that was ever written on Symbols and Mystic Orders, is most certainly Hargrave Jennings’ The Rosicrucians, and yet it has been repeatedly called “obscure trash” in my presence, and that too, by individuals who were most decidedly well-versed in the rites and mysteries of modern Freemasonry. Persons who lack even the latter knowledge, can easily infer from this what would be the amount of information they might derive from still more obscure and mystical works; for if we compare Hargrave Jennings’ book with some of the mediæval treatises and ancient works of the most noted Alchemists and Magi, we might find the latter as much more obscure than the former—as regards language—as a pupil in celestial philosophy would


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find the Book of the Heavens, if he should examine a far distant star with the naked eye, rather than with the help of a powerful telescope. Far from me, though, the idea of disparaging in anyone the laudable impulse to search ardently after Truth, however arid and ungrateful the task may appear at first sight; for my own principle has ever been to make the Light of Truth the beacon of my life. The words uttered by Christ eighteen centuries ago: “Believe and you will understand,” can be applied in the present case, and repeating them with but a slight modification, I may well say: “Study and you will believe.”

But to particularize one or another book on Occultism, to those who are anxious to begin their studies in the hidden mysteries of nature, is something the responsibility of which I am not prepared to assume. What may be clear to one who is intuitional, if read in the same book by another person might prove meaningless. Unless one is prepared to devote to it his whole life, the superficial knowledge of Occult Sciences will lead him surely to become the target for millions of ignorant scoffers to aim their blunderbusses loaded with ridicule and chaff against. Besides this, it is in more than one way dangerous to select this science as a mere pastime. One must bear for ever in mind the impressive fable of Œdipus, and beware of the same consequences. Œdipus unriddled but one-half of the enigma offered him by the Sphinx and caused its death; the other half of the mystery avenged the death of the symbolic monster, and forced the King of Thebes to prefer blindness and exile in his despair rather than face what he did not feel him self pure enough to encounter. He unriddled the man, the form, and had forgotten God, the idea.

If a man would follow in the steps of Hermetic philosophers he must prepare himself beforehand for martyrdom. He must give up personal pride and all selfish purposes, and be ready for everlasting encounters with friends and foes. He must part, once for all, with every remembrance of his earlier ideas, on all and on everything. Existing religions, knowledge, science, must rebecome a blank book for him, as in the days of his babyhood, for if he wants to succeed he must learn a new alphabet on the lap of Mother Nature, every letter of which will afford a new insight to him, every syllable and word an Unexpected revelation. The two hitherto irreconcilable foes, science and theology—the Montecchi and Capuletti of the nineteenth century—will ally themselves with the ignorant masses against the modern Occultist. If we have outgrown the age of stakes, we are in the heyday, per


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contra, of slander, the venom of the press, and all these mephitic venticelli of calumny so vividly expressed by the immortal Don Basilio. To science it will be the duty—arid and sterile as a matter of course—of the Kabbalist to prove that from the beginning of time there was but one positive science—Occultism; that it was the mysterious lever of all intellectual forces, the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil of the allegorical paradise, from whose gigantic trunk sprang in every direction boughs, branches and twigs, the former shooting forth straight enough at first, the latter deviating with every inch of growth, assuming more and more fantastical appearances, till at last one after the other lost its vital juice, got deformed, and, drying up, finally broke off, scattering the ground afar with heaps of rubbish. To theology the Occultist of the future will have to demonstrate that the Gods of the mythologies, the Elohims of Israel as well as the religious and theological mysteries of Christianity, to begin with the Trinity, sprang from the sanctuaries of Memphis and Thebes; that their mother Eve is but the spiritualized Psyche of old, both of them paying a like penalty for their curiosity, descending to Hades or hell, the latter to bring back to earth the famous Pandora’s box, the former to search out and crush the head of the serpent—symbol of time and evil, the crime of both expiated by the pagan Prometheus and the Christian Lucifer; the first delivered by Hercules, the second conquered by the Saviour.

Furthermore, the Occultist will have to prove to Christian theology, publicly, what many of its priesthood are well aware of in secret, namely, that their God on earth was a Kabbalist, the meek representative of a tremendous Power, which, if misapplied, might shake the world to its foundations; and that of all their evangelical symbols, there is not one but can be traced up to its parent fount. For instance, their incarnated Verbum or Logos was worshipped at his birth by the three Magi led on by the star, and received from them the gold, the frankincense and myrrh—the whole of which is simply an excerpt from the Kabalah our modern theologians despise, and the representation of another and still more mysterious “Ternary” embodying allegorically in its emblems the highest secrets of the Kabalah.

A clergy whose main object has ever been to make of their Divine Cross the gallows of Truth and Freedom, could not do otherwise than try and bury in oblivion the origin of that same cross, which, in the most primitive symbols of the Egyptians’ magic, represents the key to heaven. Their anathemas are powerless in our days—the multitude is


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wiser; but the greatest danger awaits us just in that latter direction, if we do not succeed in making the masses remain at least neutral—till they come to know better—in this forthcoming conflict between Truth, Superstition and Presumption, or to express it in other terms, Occult Spiritualism, Theology and Science. We have to fear neither the miniature thunderbolts of the clergy, nor the unwarranted negations of science. But Public Opinion, this invisible, intangible, omnipresent, despotic tyrant—this thousand-headed Hydra, the more dangerous for being composed of individual mediocrities—is not an enemy to be scorned by any would-be Occultist, courageous as he may be. Many of the far more innocent Spiritualists have left their sheepskins in the clutches of this ever-hungry, roaring lion, for he is the most dangerous of our three classes of enemies. What will be the fate in such a case of an unfortunate Occultist, if he once succeeds in demonstrating the close relationship existing between the two? The masses of people, though they do not generally appreciate the science of truth or have real knowledge, on the other hand are unerringly directed by mere instinct; they have intuitionally—if I may be allowed to so express myself—an idea of what is formidable in its genuine strength. People will never conspire except against real Power. In their blind ignorance, the Mysteries and the Unknown have been, and ever will be, objects of terror for them. Civilization may progress; human nature will remain the same throughout all ages. Occultists, beware!

Let it be understood then that I address myself but to the truly courageous and persevering. Besides the danger expressed above, the difficulties in becoming a practical Occultist in this country are next to insurmountable. Barrier upon barrier, obstacles in every form and shape, will present themselves to the student; for the keys of the Golden Gate leading to the Infinite Truth lie buried deep, and the gate itself is enclosed in a mist which clears up only before the ardent rays of implicit faith. Faith alone—one grain of which as large as a mustard-seed, according to the words of Christ, can lift a mountain—is able to find out how simple becomes the Kabalah to the Initiate once he has succeeded in conquering the first abstruse difficulties. The dogma of it is logical, easy and absolute. The necessary union of ideas and signs; the trinity of words, letters, numbers, and theorems; the religion of it can be compressed into a few words. “It is the Infinite condensed in the hand of an infant,” says Eliphas Lévi. Ten ciphers, twenty-two alphabetical letters, one triangle, a square and a circle. Such are


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the elements of the Kabalah from whose mysterious bosom sprang all the religions of the past and present; which endowed all the Free-masonic associations with their symbols and secrets, which alone can reconcile human reason with God and Faith, Power with Freedom, Science with Mystery, and which has alone the keys of present, past and future.

The first difficulty for the aspirant lies in the utter impossibility of his comprehending, as I said before, the meaning of the best books written by Hermetic philosophers. These, who mainly lived in the mediæval ages, prompted on the one hand by their duty towards their brethren, and by their desire to impart only to them and their successors the glorious truths, and on the other very naturally desirous to avoid the clutches of the bloodthirsty Christian Inquisition, enveloped themselves more than ever in mystery. They invented new signs and hieroglyphs, renovated the ancient symbolical language of the high priests of antiquity, who had used it as a sacred barrier between their holy rites and the ignorance of the profane, and created a veritable Kabalistic slang. This latter, which continually blinded the false neophyte, attracted towards the science only by his greediness for wealth and power which he would have surely misused were he to succeed, is a living, eloquent, clear language, but it is and can become such only to the true disciple of Hermes.

But were it even otherwise, and could books on Occultism, written in a plain and precise language be obtained in order to get initiated in the Kabalah, it would not be sufficient to understand and meditate on certain authors. Galatinus and Pic de la Mirandola, Paracelsus and Robertus de Fluctibus do not furnish one with the key to the practical mysteries. They simply state what can be done and why it is done; but they do not tell one how to do it. More than one philosopher who has by heart the whole of the Hermetic literature, and who has devoted to the study of it upwards of thirty or forty years of his life, fails when he believes he is about reaching the final great result. One must understand the Hebrew authors, such as Sepher Yelzirah, for instance, learn by heart the great book of the Zohar in its original tongue, master the Kabalah Denudata from the Collection of 1684 (Paris); follow up the Kabalistic pneumatics at first, and then throw oneself headlong into the turbid waters of that mysterious * . . . never tried to explain:

the Prophecy of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse, two Kabalistic treatises,
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* The cutting is here imperfect—some paragraph or so wanting.


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reserved without doubt for the commentaries of the Magi kings, books closed with the seven seals to the faithful Christian, but perfectly clear to the Infidel initiated in the Occult Sciences.

Thus the works on Occultism, were not, I repeat, written for the masses, but for those of the Brethren who make the solution of the mysteries of the Kabalah the principal object of their lives, and who are supposed to have conquered the first abstruse difficulties of the Alpha of Hermetic philosophy.

To fervent and persevering candidates for the above science, I have to offer but one word of advice, “try and become.” One single journey to the Orient, made in the proper spirit, and the possible emergencies arising from the meeting of what may seem no more than the chance acquaintances and adventures of any traveller, may quite as likely as not throw wide open to the zealous student the heretofore closed doors of the final mysteries. I will go farther and say that such a journey, performed with the omnipresent idea of the one object, and with the help of a fervent will, is sure to produce more rapid, better, and far more practical results, than the most diligent study of Occultism in books—even though one were to devote to it dozens of years.

In the name of Truth, yours,

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

THE SCIENCE OF MAGIC
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HAPPENING to be on a visit to Ithaca, where spiritual papers in general, and The Banner of Light in particular, are very little read, but where, luckily, The Scientist has found hospitality in several houses, I learned through your paper of the intensely interesting and very erudite attack in an editorial of The Banner, on “Magic,” or rather on those who had the absurdity to believe in Magic. As hints concerning myself—at least in the fragment I see—are very decently veiled, and, as it appears, Col. Olcott alone, just now, is offered by way of a pious holocaust on the altar erected to the angel-world by some Spiritualists, who seem to be terribly in earnest, I will—leaving the said gentleman to take care of himself, provided he thinks it worth his trouble—proceed to say a few words only, in reference to the alleged non-existence of Magic.

Were I to give anything on my own authority and base my defence of Magic only on what I have seen myself and know to he true in relation to that science, as a resident of many years’ standing in India and Africa, I might, perhaps, risk to be called by Mr. Colby—with that unprejudiced, spiritualized politeness, which so distinguishes the venerable editor of The Banner of Light—”an irresponsible woman”; and that would not be for the first time either. Therefore, to his astonishing assertion that no Magic whatever either exists or has existed in this world, I will try to find as good authorities as himself, and maybe better ones, and thus politely proceed to contradict him on that particular point.

Heterodox Spiritualists, like myself, must be cautious in our days and proceed with prudence, if they do not wish to be persecuted with all the untiring vengeance of that mighty army of” Indian controls” and miscellaneous “guides” of our bright Summer-Land.

When the writer of the editorial says that he—
Does not think it at all improbable that there are humbugging spirits who try to fool certain aspirants to occult knowledge with the notion that there is such a thing as magic, (?)


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then, on the other hand, I can answer him that I, for one, not only think it probable but I am perfectly sure and can take my oath to the certainty, that more than once spirits who were either very elementary or very unprogressed ones, calling themselves Theodore Parker, have been most decidedly fooling and disrespectfully humbugging our most esteemed editor of The Banner of Light into the notion that the Apennines were in Spain, for instance.

Furthermore, supported in my assertions by thousands of intelligent Spiritualists, generally known for their integrity and truthfulness I could furnish numberless proofs and instances where the Elementary Diakka, Esrito malims etfarfadeto and other such-like unreliable and ignorant denizens of the spirit-world, arraying themselves in pompous, world-known and famous names, suddenly gave the bewildered witnesses such deplorable, unheard-of, slipslop trash, and betirnes some thing worse, that more than one person who, previous to that, was an earnest believer in the spiritual philosophy, has either silently taken to his heels, or if he happened to have been formerly a Roman Catholic, has devoutly tried to recall to memory with which hand he used to cross himself, and then cleared out with the most fervent exclamation of “ Vade reyro, Satanas!” Such is the opinion of every educated Spiritualist.

If that indomitable Attila. the persecutor of modern Spiritualism and mediums, Dr. G. Beard, had offered such a remark against Magic, I would not wonder, as a too profound devotion to blue pill and black draught is generally considered the best antidote against mystic and spiritual speculations; but for a firm Spiritualist—a believer in invisible, mysterious worlds swarming with beings, the true nature of which is still an unriddled mystery to everyone—to step in and then sarcastically reject that which has been proved to exist and believed in for countless ages by millions of persons, wiser than himself, is too audacious! And that sceptic is the editor of a leading Spiritual paper!—a man whose first duty should be to help his readers to seek, untiringly and perseveringly, for the truth in whatever form it might present itself; but who takes the risk of dragging thousands of people into error, by pinning them to his personal rose-water faith and credulity. Every serious, earnest-minded Spiritualist must agree with me in saying, that if modern Spiritualism remains, for a few years only, in its present condition of chaotic anarchy, or still worse, if it is allowed to run its mad course, shooting forth on all sides idle hypotheses based on


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superstitious, groundless ideas, then will the Dr. Beards, Dr. Marvins and others, known as scientific (?) sceptics, triumph indeed.

Really, it seems to be a waste of time to answer such ridiculous, ignorant assertions as the one which forced me to take up my pen. Any well-read Spiritualist who finds the statement “that there ever was such a science as magic, has never been proved, nor ever will be,” will need no answer from myself, nor anyone else, to cause him to shrug his shoulders and smile, as he probably has smiled, at the wonderful attempt of Mr. Colby’s spirits to reorganize geography by placing the Apennines in Spain.

Why, man alive, did you never open a book in your life besides your own records of Tom, Dick and Harry descending from upper spheres to remind their Uncle Sam that he had torn his gaiters or broken his pipe in the far West?

Did you suppose that Magic is confined to witches riding astride broomsticks and then turning themselves into black cats? Even the latter superstitious trash, though it was never called Magic but Sorcery, does not appear so great an absurdity for one to accept who firmly believes in the transfiguration of Mrs. Compton into Katie Brinks. The laws of nature are unchangeable. The conditions under which a medium can be transformed, entirely absorbed in the process by the spirit, into the semblance of another person, will hold good whenever that spirit, or rather force, should have a fancy to take the form of a cat.

The exercise of magical power is the exercise of powers natural but superior to the ordinary functions of Nature. A miracle is not a violation of the laws of Nature, except for ignorant people. Magic is but a science, a profound knowledge of the Occult forces in Nature, and of the laws governing the visible or the invisible world. Spiritualism in the hands of an Adept becomes Magic, for he is learned in the art of blending together the laws of the universe, without breaking any of them and thereby violating Nature. In the hands of an experienced medium, Spiritualism becomes unconscious sorcery; for, by allowing himself to become the helpless tool of a variety of spirits, of whom he knows nothing save what the latter permit him to know, he opens, unknown to himself, a door of communication between the two worlds, through which emerge the blind forces of Nature lurking in the astral light, as well as good and bad spirits.

A powerful mesmerizer, profoundly learned in his science, such as


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Baron Dupotet, and Regazzoni Pietro d’Amicis of Bologna, are magicians, for they have become the Adepts, the initiated ones, into the great mystery of our Mother Nature. Such men as the above-mentioned— and such were Mesmer and Cagliostro—control the spirits instead of allowing their subjects or themselves to be controlled by them; and Spiritualism is safe in their hands. In the absence of experienced Adepts though, it is always safer for a naturally clairvoyant medium to trust to good luck and chance, and try to judge of the tree by its fruits. Bad spirits will seldom communicate through a pure, naturally good and virtuous person; and it is still more seldom that pure spirits will choose impure channels. Like attracts like.

But to return to Magic. Such men as Albertus Magnus, Raymond Lulli, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, Eugenius Philalethes, Kunrath, Roger Bacon and others of similar character, in our sceptical century, are generally taken for visionaries; but so, too, are modern Spiritualists and mediums—nay worse, for charlatans and poltroons; but never were the Hermetic philosophers taken by anyone for fools and idiots, as, unfortunately for ourselves and the cause, every unbeliever takes all of us believers in Spiritualism to be. Those Hermetics and philosophers may be disbelieved and doubted now, as everything else is doubted, but very few doubted their knowledge and power during their lifetime, for they could always prove what they claimed, having command over those forces which now command helpless mediums. They had their science and demonstrated philosophy to help them to throw down ridiculous negations, while we sentimental Spiritualists, rocking ourselves to sleep with our “Sweet Bye-and-Bye,” are now unable to recognize a spurious phenomenon from a genuine one, and are daily deceived by vile charlatans. Even though doubted then, as Spiritualism is in our day, still these philosophers were held in awe and reverence, even by those who did not implicitly believe in their Occult potency, for they were giants of intellect. Profound knowledge, as well as cultured intellectual powers, will always be respected and revered; but our mediums and their adherents are laughed at and scorned, and we are all made to suffer, because the phenomena are left to the whims and pranks of self-willed and other mischievous spirits, and we are utterly powerless in controlling them.

To doubt Magic is to reject History itself, as well as the testimony of ocular witnesses thereof, during a period embracing over 4,000 years. Beginning with Homer, Moses, Hermes, Herodotus, Cicero, Plutarch,


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Pythagoras, Apollonius of Tyana, Simon the Magician, Plato, Pausanias, Iamblichus, and following this endless string of great men— historians and philosophers, who all of them either believed in Magic or were magicians themselves—and ending with our modern authors, such as W. Howitt, Ennemoser, G. des Mousseaux, Marquis de Mirville and the late Eliphas Lévi who was a magician himself—among all of these great names and authors, we find but the solitary Mr. Colby, editor of The Banner of Light, who ignores that there ever was such a science as Magic. He innocently believes the whole of the sacred army of Bible prophets, commencing with Father Abraham, including Christ, to be merely mediums; in the eyes of Mr. Colby they were all of them acting under control! Fancy Christ, Moses, or an Apollonius of Tyana, controlled by an Indian guide! The venerable editor ignores, perhaps, that spiritual mediums were better known in those days to the ancients, than they are now to us, and he seems to be equally unaware of the fact that the inspired sibyls, pythonesses, and other mediums were entirely guided by their high priest and those who were initiated into the esoteric theurgy and mysteries of the temples. Theurgy was Magic; as in modern times, the sibyls and pythonesses were mediums; but their high priests were magicians. All the secrets of their theology, which included Magic, or the art of invoking ministering spirits, were in their hands. They possessed the science of discerning spirits; a science which Mr. Colby does not possess at all—to his great regret, no doubt. By this power they controlled the spirits at will, allowing but the good ones to absorb their mediums. Such is the explanation of Magic—the real, existing, While or Sacred Magic, which ought to be in the hands of science now, and would be, if science had profited by the lessons which Spiritualism has inductively taught for these last twenty-seven years.

That is the reason why no trash was allowed to be given by unprogressed spirits in the days of old. The oracles of the sibyls and inspired priestesses could never have affirmed Athens to be a town in India, or jumped Mount Ararat from its native place down to Egypt.

If the sceptical writer of the editorial had, moreover, devoted less time to little prattling Indian spirits and more to profitable lectures, he might have learned perhaps at the same time that the ancients had their illegal mediums—I mean those who belonged to no special temple—and thus the spirits controlling them, unchecked by the expert hand of the magician, were left to themselves, and had all the opportunity


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possible to perform their capers on their helpless tools. Such mediums were generally considered obsessed and possessed, which they were in fact, in other words, according to the Bible phraseology, “they had seven devils in them.” Furthermore, these mediums were ordered to be put to death, for the intolerant Moses the magician, who was learned in the wisdom of Egypt, had said, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Alone the Egyptians and Greeks, even more humane and just than Moses, took such into their temples, and, when found unfit for the sacred duties of prophecy cured them in the same way as Jesus Christ cured Mary of Magdala and many others, by “casting out the seven devils.” Either Mr. Colby and Co. must completely deny the miracles of Christ, the Apostles, Prophets, Thaumaturgists and Magicians, and so deny point-blank every bit of the sacred and profane histories, or he must confess that there is a Power in this world which can command spirits—at least the bad and unprogressed ones, the elementary and Diakka. The pure ones, the disembodied, will never descend to our sphere unless attracted by a current of powerful sympathy and love, or on some useful mission.

Far from me the thought of casting odium and ridicule on all mediums. I am myself a Spiritualist, if, as says Colonel Olcott, a firm belief in our spirit’s immortality and the knowledge of a constant possibility for us to communicate with the spirits of our departed and loved ones, either through honest, pure mediums, or by means of the Secret Science, constitutes a Spiritualist. And I am not of those fanatical Spiritualists, to be found in every country, who blindly accept the claims of every “spirit,” for I have seen too much of various phenomena, undreamed of in America; I know that Magic does exist, and 10,000 editors of spiritual papers cannot change my belief in what I know. There is a White and a Black Magic, and no one who has ever travelled in the East can doubt it, if he has taken the trouble to investigate. My faith being firm I am therefore ever ready to support and protect any honest medium—aye, and even occasionally one who appears dishonest, for I know but too well what helpless tools and victims such mediums are in the hands of unprogressed, invisible beings. I am furthermore aware of the malice and wickedness of the elementaries, and how far they can inspire not only a sensitive medium, but any other person as well. Though I may be an “irresponsible,” despite the harm some mediums do to earnest Spiritualists by their unfairness, one-sidedness, and spiritual sentimentalism, I feel safe to say that


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generally I am quick enough to detect whenever a medium is cheating under control, or cheating consciously.

Thus Magic exists, and has existed, ever since prehistoric ages. Beginning in history with the Samothracian Mysteries, it followed its course uninterruptedly, and ended for a time with the expiring theurgic rites and ceremonies of Christianized Greece; then reappeared for a time again with the Neo-Platonic, Alexandrian school, and, passing by initiation to sundry solitary students and philosophers, safely crossed the mediæval ages, and notwithstanding the furious persecutions of the Church, resumed its fame in the hands of such Adepts as Paracelsus and several others, and finally died out in Europe with the Count St. Germain and Cagliostro, to seek refuge from frozen-hearted scepticism in its native country of the East.

In India, Magic has never died out, and blossoms there as well as ever. Practised, as in ancient Egypt, only within the secret enclosure of the temples, it was, and still is, called the “Sacred Science.” For it is a science, based on the occult forces of Nature; and not merely a blind belief in the poll-parrot talking of crafty elementaries, ready to forcibly prevent real, disembodied spirits from communicating with their loved ones whenever they can do so.

Some time since a Mr. Mendenhall devoted several columns, in The Religio-Philosophical Journal, to questioning, cross-examining, and criticizing the mysterious Brotherhood of Luxor. He made a fruitless attempt at forcing the said Brotherhood to answer him, and thus unveil the sphinx.

I can satisfy Mr. Mendenhall. The Brotherhood of Luxor is one of the sections of the Grand Lodge of which I am a member. If this gentleman entertains any doubt as to my statement—which I have no doubt he will—he can, if he chooses, write to Lahore for information. If, perchance, the seven of the committee were so rude as not to answer him, and should refuse to give him the desired information, I can then offer him a little business transaction. Mr. Mendenhall, as far as I remember, has two wives in the spirit world. Both of these ladies materialize at M. Mott’s, and often hold very long conversations with their husband, as the latter told us several times and over his own signature; adding, moreover, that he had no doubt whatever of the identity of the said spirits. If so, let one of the departed ladies tell Mr. Mendenhall the name of that section of the Grand Lodge I belong to. For real, genuine, disembodied spirits, if both are what they claim


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to be, the matter is more than easy; they have but to enquire of other spirits, look into my thoughts, and so on; for a disembodied entity, an immortal spirit, it is the easiest thing in the world to do. Then, if the gentleman I challenge, though I am deprived of the pleasure of his acquaintance, tells me the true name of the section—which name three gentlemen in New York, who are accepted neophytes of our Lodge, know well—I pledge myself to give to Mr. Mendenhall the true statement concerning the Brotherhood, which is not composed of spirits, as he may think, but of living mortals, and I will, moreover, if he desires it, put him in direct communication with the Lodge as I have done for others. Methinks, Mr. Mendenhall will answer that no such name can be given correctly by the spirits, for no such Lodge or Section either, exists at all, and thus close the discussion.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

(From The Spiritual Scientist.)

AN UNSOLVED MYSTERY

THE circumstances attending the sudden death of M. Delessert, inspector of the Police de Surete seem to have made such an impression upon the Parisian authorities that they were recorded in unusual detail. Omitting all particulars except what are necessary to explain matters, we produce here the undoubtedly strange history.

In the fall of 1861 there came to Paris a man who called himself Vic de Lassa, and was so inscribed upon his passports. He came from Vienna, and said he was a Hungarian, who owned estates on the borders of the Banat, not far from Zenta. He was a small man, aged thirty-five, with pale and mysterious face, long blonde hair, a vague, wandering blue eye, and a mouth of singular firmness. He dressed carelessly and unaffectedly, and spoke and talked without much empressement. His companion, presumably his wife, on the other hand, ten years younger than himself, was a strikingly beautiful woman, of that dark, rich, velvety, luscious, pure Hungarian type which is so nigh akin to the gipsy blood. At the theatres, on the Bois, at the cafes, on the boulevards, and everywhere that idle Paris disports itself, Madame Aimee de Lassa attracted great attention and made a sensation.

They lodged in luxurious apartments on the Rue Richelieu, frequented the best places, received good company, entertained handsomely, and acted in every way as if possessed of considerable wealth. Lassa had always a good balance chez Schneider, Rater et Cie, the Austrian bankers in Rue Rivoli, and wore diamonds of conspicuous lustre.

How did it happen then, that the Prefect of Police saw fit to suspect Monsieur and Madame de Lassa, and detailed Paul Delessert, one of the most ruse inspectors of the force, to “pipe” him? The fact is, the insignificant man with the splendid wife was a very mysterious personage, and it is the habit of the police to imagine that mystery always hides either the conspirator, the adventurer, or the charlatan. The conclusion to which the Prefect had come in regard to M. de Lassa was


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that he was an adventurer and charlatan too. Certainly a successful one, then, for he was singularly unobtrusive and had in no way trumpeted the wonders which it was his mission to perform, yet in a few weeks after he had established himself in Paris the salon of M. de Lassa was the rage, and the number of persons who paid the fee of 100 francs for a single peep into his magic crystal, and a single message by his spiritual telegraph, was really astonishing. The secret of this was that M. de Lassa was a conjurer and deceiver, whose pretensions were omniscient and whose predictions always came true.

Delessert did not find it very difficult to get an introduction and admission to De Lassa’s salon. The receptions occurred every other day— two hours in the forenoon, three hours in the evening. It was evening when Inspector Delessert called in his assumed character of M. Flabry, virtuoso in jewels and a convert to Spiritualism. He found the handsome parlours brilliantly lighted, and a charming assemblage gathered of well-pleased guests, who did not at all seem to have come to learn their fortunes or fates, while contributing to the income of their host, but rather to be there out of complaisance to his virtues and gifts.

Mme. de Lassa performed upon the piano or conversed from group to group in a way that seemed to be delightful, while M. de Lassa walked about or sat in his insignificant, unconcerned way, saying a word now and then, but seeming to shun everything that was conspicuous. Servants handed about refreshments, ices, cordials, wines, etc. and Delessert could have fancied himself to have dropped in upon a quite modest evening entertainment, altogether en regle, but for one or two noticeable circumstances which his observant eyes quickly took in.

Except when their host or hostess was within hearing the guests conversed together in low tones, rather mysteriously, and with not quite so much laughter as is usual on such occasions. At intervals a very tall and dignified footman would come to a guest, and, with a profound bow, present him a card on a silver salver. The guest would then go out, preceded by the solemn servant, but when he or she returned to the salon—some did not return at all—they invariably wore a dazed or puzzled look, were confused, astonished, frightened, or amused. All this was so unmistakably genuine, and De Lassa and his wife seemed so unconcerned amidst it all, not to say distinct from it all, that Delessert could not avoid being forcibly struck and considerably puzzled.

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immediate observation, will suffice to make plain the character of the impressions made upon those present. A couple of gentlemen, both young, both of good social condition, and evidently very intimate friends, were conversing together and tutoying one another at a great rate, when the dignified footman summoned Alphonse. He laughed gaily, “Tarry a moment, cher Auguste,” said he, “and thou shalt know all the particulars of this wonderful fortune!” “En bien!” A minute had scarcely elapsed when Alphonse returned to the salon. His face was white and bore an appearance of concentrated rage that was frightful to witness. He came straight to Auguste, his eyes flashing, and bending his face toward his friend, who changed colour and recoiled, he hissed out: “Monsieur Lefèbure, vous êles Un láche ! ” Very well, Monsieur Meuner,” responded Auguste, in the same low tone, “tomorrow morning at six o’clock!” “It is settled, false friend, execrable traitor! A la mort!” rejoined Alphonse, walking off. “Cela va sans dire!” muttered Auguste, going towards the hat-room.

A diplomatist of distinction, representative at Paris of a neighbouring state, an elderly gentleman of superb aplomb and most commanding appearance, was summoned to the oracle by the bowing footman. After being absent about five minutes he returned, and immediately made his way through the press to M. de Lassa, who was standing not far from the fireplace, with his hands in his pockets and a look of utmost indifference upon his face. Delessert standing near, watched the interview with eager interest.

“I am exceedingly sorry,” said General Von , “to have to absent myself so soon from your interesting salon, M. de Lassa, but the result of my séance convinces me that my dispatches have been tampered with.” “I am sorry,” responded M. de Lassa, with an air of languid but courteous interest; “I hope you may be able to discover which of your servants has been unfaithful.” “I am going to do that now,” said the General, adding, in significant tones, “I shall see that both he and his accomplices do not escape severe punishment.” “That is the only course to pursue, Monsieur le Comte.” The ambassador stared, bowed, and took his leave with a bewilderment in his face that was beyond the power of his tact to control.

In the course of the evening M. de Lassa went carelessly to the piano, and, after some indifferent vague preluding, played a remarkably effective piece of music, in which the turbulent life and buoyancy of bacchanalian strains melted gently, almost imperceptibly away, into a


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sobbing wail of regret, and languor, and weariness, and despair. It was beautifully rendered, and made a great impression upon the guests, one of whom, a lady, cried, “How lovely, how sad! Did you compose that yourself, M. de Lassa?” He looked towards her absently for an instant, Then replied: “I? Oh, no! That is merely a reminiscence, madame.” “Do you know who did compose it, M. de Lassa?” enquired a virtuoso present. “I believe it was originally written by Ptolemy Auletes, the father of Cleopatra,” said M. de Lassa, in his indifferent musing way; “but not in its present form. It has been twice re-written to my knowledge; still, the air is substantially the same.” “From whom did you get it, M. de Lassa, if I may ask?” persisted the gentleman. “Certainly, certainly! The last time I heard it played was by Sebastian Bach; but that was Palestrina’s—the present—version. I think I prefer that of Guido of Arezzo—it is ruder, but has more force. I got the air from Guido himself.” “You—from— Guido!” cried the astonished gentleman. “Yes, monsieur,” answered De Lassa, rising from the piano with his usual indifferent air. “Mon Dieu!” cried the virtuoso, putting his hand to his head after the manner of Mr. Twemlow, “Mon Dieu! that was in Anno Domni 1022.” “A little later than that—July, 1031. if I remember rightly,” courteously corrected M. de Lassa.

At this moment the tall footman bowed before M. Delessert, and presented the salver containing the card. Delessert took it and read:

“On vous accorde trente-cinq secondes, M. Flabry, tout au plus I” Delessert followed; the footman opened the door of another room and bowed again, signifying that Delessert was to enter. “Ask no questions,” he said briefly; “Sidi is mute.” Delessert entered the room and the door closed behind him. It was a small room, with a strong smell of frankincense pervading it; the walls were covered completely with red hangings that concealed the windows, and the floor was felted with a thick carpet. Opposite the door, at the upper end of the room near the ceiling was the face of a large clock, under it, each lighted by tall wax candles, were two small tables, containing, the one an apparatus very like the common registering telegraph instrument, the other a crystal globe about twenty inches in diameter, set upon an exquisitely wrought tripod of gold and bronze intermingled. By the side of the door stood a man jet black in colour, wearing a white turban and burnous, and having a sort of wand of silver in one hand. With the other he took Delessert by the right arm above the elbow, and led him quickly up the


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room. He pointed to the clock, and it struck an alarum; he pointed to the crystal. Delessert bent over, looked into it, and saw—a facsimile of his own sleeping-room, everything photographed exactly. Sidi did not give him time to exclaim, but still holding him by the arm, took him to the other table. The telegraph-like instrument began to click click. Sidi opened the drawer, drew out a slip of paper, crammed it into Delessert’s hand, and pointed to the clock, which struck again. The thirty-five seconds were expired. Sidi, still retaining hold of Delessert’s arm, pointed to the door and led him towards it. The door opened, Sidi pushed him out, the door closed, the tall footman stood there bowing—the interview with the oracle is over. Delessert glanced at the piece of paper in his hand. It was a printed scrap, capital letters, and read simply: “To M. Paul Delessert: The policeman is always welcome, the spy is always in danger!”

Delessert was dumbfounded a moment to find his disguise detected, but the words of the tall footman, “This way if you please, M. Flabry,” brought him to his senses. Setting his lips, he returned to the salon, and without delay sought M. de Lassa. “Do you know the contents of this?” asked he, showing the message. “I know everything, M. Delessert,” answered De Lassa, in his careless way. “Then perhaps you are aware that I mean to expose a charlatan, and unmask a hypocrite, or perish in the attempt?” said Delessert. “Cela rn’est egal, monsieur,” replied De Lassa. “You accept my challenge then?” “Oh! it is a defiance, then?” replied De Lassa, letting his eye rest a moment upon Delessert, “mais oui, je l’accepte!” And thereupon Delessert departed.

Delessert now set to work, aided by all the forces the Prefect of Police could bring to bear, to detect and expose this consummate sorcerer, whom the ruder processes of our ancestors would easily have disposed of—by combustion. Persistent enquiry satisfied Delessert that the man was neither a Hungarian nor was named De Lassa; that no matter how far back his power of “reminiscence” might extend, in his present and immediate form he had been born in this unregenerate world in the toy-making city of Nuremburg; that he was noted in boyhood for his great turn for ingenious manufactures, but was very wild, and a mauvais sujet. In his sixteenth year he escaped to Geneva and apprenticed himself to a maker of watches and instruments. Here he had been seen by the celebrated Robert Houdin, the prestidigitateur. Houdin recognizing the lad’s talents, and being himself a maker of ingenious automata, had taken him off to Paris and employed him in


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his own workshops, as well as for an assistant in the public performances of his amusing and curious diablerie. After staying with Houdin some years, Pflock Haslich (which was De Lassa’s right name) had gone East in the suite of a Turkish Pasha, and after many years’ roving, in lands where he could not be traced under a cloud of pseudonyms, had finally turned up in Venice, and come thence to Paris.

Delessert next turned his attention to Mme. de Lassa. It was more difficult to get a clue by means of which to know her past life; but it was necessary in order to understand enough about Haslich. At last, through an accident, it became probable that Mme. Aimee was identical with a certain Mme. Schlaff, who had been rather conspicuous among the demi-monde of Buda. Delessert posted off to that ancient city, and thence went into the wilds of Transylvania to Mengyco. On his return as soon as he reached the telegraph and civilization, he telegraphed the Prefect from Kardszag: “Don't lose sight of my man, nor let him leave Paris. I will run him in for you two days after I get back.”

It happened that on the day of Delessert’s return to Paris the Prefect was absent, being with the Emperor at Cherbourg. He came back on the fourth day, just twenty-four hours after the announcement of Delessert’s death. That happened, as near as could be gathered, in this wise: The night after Delessert’s return he was present at De Lassa’s salon with a ticket of admittance to a séance. He was very completely disguised as a decrepit old man, and fancied that it was impossible for any one to detect him. Nevertheless, when he was taken into the room, and looked into the crystal, he was utterly horror stricken to see there a picture of himself, lying face down and senseless upon the side-walk of a street; and the message he received read thus:

“What you have seen will be, Delessert, in three days. Prepare!” The detective, unspeakably shocked, retired from the house at once and sought his own lodgings.

In the morning he came to the office in a state of extreme dejection. He was completely unnerved. In relating to a brother inspector what had occurred, he said: “That man can do what he promises, I am doomed!”

He said that he thought he could make a complete case out against Haslich alias De Lassa, but could not do so without seeing the Prefect and getting instructions. He would tell nothing in regard to his discoveries in Buda and in Transylvania—said he was not at liberty to do so—and repeatedly exclaimed: “Oh! if M. le Préfet were only here!”

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He was told to go to the Prefect at Cherbourg, but refused upon the ground that his presence was needed in Paris. He time and again averred his conviction that he was a doomed man, and showed himself both vacillating and irresolute in his conduct, and extremely nervous. He was told that he was perfectly safe, since De Lassa and all his household were under constant surveillance; to which he replied, “You do not know the man.” An inspector was detailed to accompany Delessert, never to lose sight of him night and day, and guard him carefully; and proper precautions were taken in regard to his food and drink, while the guards watching De Lassa were doubled.

On the morning of the third day, Delessert, who had been staying chiefly indoors, avowed his determination to go at once and telegraph to M. le Prefet to return immediately. With this intention he and his brother officer started out. Just as they got to the corner of the Rue de Lanery and the Boulevard, Delessert stopped suddenly and put his hand to his forehead.

“My God!” he cried, “the crystal! the picture!” and fell prone upon his face, insensible. He was taken at once to a hospital, but only lingered a few hours, never regaining his consciousness. Under express instruction from the authorities, a most careful, minute, and thorough autopsy was made of Delessert’s body by several distinguished surgeons, whose unanimous opinion was, that the cause of his death was apoplexy, due to fatigue and nervous excitement.

As soon as Delessert was sent to the hospital, his brother inspector hurried to the Central Office, and De Lassa, together with his wife and everyone connected with the establishment, were at once arrested. D Lassa smiled contemptuously as they took him away. “I knew you were coming; I prepared for it; you will be glad to release me again.”

It was quite true that De Lassa had prepared for them. When the house was searched it was found that every paper had been burned, the crystal globe was destroyed, and in the room of the seances was a great heap of delicate machinery broken into indistinguishable bits. “That cost me 200,000 francs,” said De Lassa, pointing to the pile, “but it has been a good investment.” The walls and floors were ripped out in several places, and the damage to the property was considerable. In prison neither De Lassa nor his associates made any revelations. The notion that they had something to do with Delessert’s death was quickly dispelled, in a legal point of view, and all the party but De Lassa were released. He was still detained in prison, upon one pretext


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or another, when one morning he was found hanging by a silk sash to the cornice of the room where he was confined—dead. The night before, it was afterwards discovered, Madame de Lassa had eloped with a tall footman, taking the Nubian Sidi with them. De Lassa’s secrets died with him.

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“It is an interesting story, that article of yours in to-day’s Scientist. But is it a record of facts, or a tissue of the imagination? If true, why not state the source of it, in other words, specify your authority for it.”

The above is not signed, but we would take the opportunity to say that the story, “An Unsolved Mystery,” was published because we considered the main points of the narrative—the prophecies, and the singular death of the officer—to be psychic phenomena, that have been, and can be, again produced. Why quote “authorities”? The Scriptures tell us of the death of Ananias, under the stern rebuke from Peter; here we have a phenomenon of a similar nature. Ananias is supposed to have suffered instant death from fear. Few can realize this power governed by spiritual laws, but those who have trod the boundary line and know some few of the things that can he done, will see no great mystery in this, nor in the story published last week. We are not speaking in mystical tones. Ask the powerful mesmerist if there is danger that the subject may pass out of his control?—if he could will the spirit out, never to return? It is capable of demonstration that the mesmerist can act on a subject at a distance of many miles; and it is no less certain that the majority of mesmerists know little or nothing of the laws that govern their powers.

It may be a pleasant dream to attempt to conceive of the beauties of the spirit-world; but the time can be spent more profitably in a study of the spirit itself, and it is not necessary that the subject for study should be in the spirit-world.

SPIRITUALISM IN RUSSIA
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To the Editor of “ The Spiritual Scientist.”

DEAR SIR,—In advices just received from St. Petersburg I am requested to translate and forward to The Scientist for publication the protest of the Hon. Alexander Aksakoff, Imperial Counsellor of State, against the course of the professors of the University respecting the Spiritualistic investigation. The document appears, in Russian, in the Vedomostji, the official journal of St. Petersburg.

This generous, high-minded, courageous gentleman has done the possible, and even the impossible, in order to open the spiritual eyes of those incurable moles who fear the daylight of truth as the burglar fears the policeman’s bull’s-eye.

The heartfelt thanks and gratitude of every Spiritualist ought to be forwarded to this noble defender of the cause, who regretted neither his time, trouble nor money to help the propagation of the truth.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

New York, April 19th, 1876.*
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* See Appendix, “A. Aksakoff’s Protest.”



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[From The Spiritual Scientist, Jan. 6th, 1876.]

DEAR SIR,—For the last three months one has hardly been able to open a number of The Banner or the other papers, without finding one or more proofs of the fecundity of the human imagination in the condition of hallucination. The Spiritualist camp is in an uproar, and the clans are gathering to fight imaginary foes. The tocsin is sounded; danger signals shoot, like flaming rockets, across the hitherto serene sky, and warning cries are uttered by vigilant sentries posted at the four corners of the “angel-girt world.” The reverberations of this din resound even in the daily press. One would think that the Day of Judgment had come for American Spiritualism.

Why all this disturbance? Simply because two humble individuals have spoken a few wholesome truths. If the grand beast of the Apocalypse with its seven heads and the word “Blasphemy” written upon each, had appeared in heaven, there would hardly have been seen so much commotion there, as this; and there seems to be a concerted effort to cast out Col. Olcott and myself (coupled like a pair of Hermetic Siamese twins) as ominous to the superstitious as a comet with a fiery tail, and the precursor of war, plagues and other calamities. They seem to think that if they do not crush us, we will destroy Spiritualism.

I have no time to waste, and what I now write is not intended for the benefit of such persons as these—whose soap-bubbles, however pretty, are sure to burst of themselves—but to set myself right with many most estimable Spiritualists for whom I feel a sincere regard.

If the spiritual press of America were conducted upon a principle of doing even justice to all, I would send your contemporaries copies of this letter, but their course in the past has made me—whether rightly or not—feel as if no redress could be had outside of your columns. I shall be only too glad if their treatment, in this case, gives me cause to change my opinion that they, and their slandering theorists, are inspired


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by the biblical devils who left Mary Magdalene and returned to the land of the “Sweet Bye-and-Bye.”

To begin, I wish to unhook my name from that of Col. Olcott, if you please, and declare that, as he is not responsible for my views or actions, neither am I for his. He is bold enough and strong enough to defend himself under all circumstances, and has never allowed his adversaries to strike without knocking out two teeth to their one. If our views on Spiritualism are in some degree identical, and our work in the Theosophical Society pursued in common, we are, notwithstanding, two very distinct entities and mean to remain such. I highly esteem Col. Olcott, as everyone does who knows him. He is a gentle man; but what is more in my eyes, he is an honest and true man, and an unselfish Spiritualist, in the proper sense of that word. If he now sees Spiritualism in another light than orthodox Spiritualists would prefer, they themselves are only to blame. He strikes at the rotten places of their philosophy, and they do all they can to cover up the ulcers instead of trying to cure them. He is one of the truest and most unselfish friends that the cause has to-day in America, and yet he is treated with an intolerance that could hardly be expected of any body above the level of the rabid Moodys and Sankeys. Surely, facts speak for themselves; and a faith so pure, angelic and unadulterated as American Spiritualism is claimed to be, can have nothing to fear from heresiarchs. A house built on the rock stands unshaken by any storm. If the New Lutheran Church can prove all its “controls, guides and visitors from behind the shining river” to be disembodied spirits, why all this row? That’s just where the trouble lies; they cannot prove it. They have tasted these fruits of Paradise, and while finding some of them sweet and refreshing because gathered and brought by real angel friends, so many others have proved sour and rotten at the core, that to escape an incurable dyspepsia, many of the best and most sincere Spiritualists have left the communion without asking for a letter of dismissal.

This is not Spiritualism; it is, as I say, a New Lutheran Church, and really, though the late oracle of The Banner of Light was evidently a pure and true woman—for the breath of calumny, this raging demon of America, has never been able to soil her reputation—and though certainly she was a wonderful medium, still I don’t see why a Spiritualist should be ostracized, only because after having given up St. Paul, he or she does not strictly adhere to the doctrines of St. Conant.


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The last number of The Banner contained a letter from a Mr. Saxon, criticizing some expressions in a recent letter of Col. Olcott to the New, York Sun, in defence of the Eddys. The only part which concerned me is this:

Surely some magician, with his or her Kabalistic “Presto! Change!” has worked sudden and singular revolutions in the mind of this disciple of Occultism, this gentleman who “is” and “is not” a Spiritualist.

As I am the only Kabalist in America, I cannot be mistaken as to the author’s meaning; so I cheerfully pick up the glove. While I am not responsible for the changes in the barometer of Col. Olcott’s spirituality (which I notice usually presage a storm), I am for the following facts: Since I left Chittenden, I have constantly and fearlessly maintained against everyone, beginning with Dr. Beard, that their apparitions are genuine and powerful. Whether they are “spirits of hell or goblins damned” is a question quite separate from that of their mediumship. Col. Olcott will not deny that when we met at Chittenden for the first time, and afterwards—and that more than once—when he expressed suspicions about the genuineness of Mayflower and George Dix, the spirits of Horatio’s dark séances, I insisted that, so far as I could judge, they were genuine phenomena. He will also no doubt admit, since he is an eminently truthful man, that when the ungrateful behaviour of the Eddys—toward whom every visitor at the homestead will testify that he was kinder than a brother—had made him ready to express his indignation, I interfered on their behalf, and begged that he would never confound mediums with other people as to their responsibility. Mediums have tried to shake my opinions of the Eddy boys, offering in two cases that I can recall to go to Chittenden with me and expose the fraud. I acted the same with them that I did with the Colonel. Mediums have tried likewise to convince me that Mr. Crookes’ Katie King was but Miss F. Cooke walking about, while a wax bust, fabricated in her likeness and covered with her clothes, lay in the cabinet representing her as entranced. Other mediums, regarding me as a fanatical Spiritualist, who would even be ready to connive at fraud rather than see the cause hurt by an exposure, have let, or pretended to let, me into the secrets of the mediumship of their fellow mediums, and sometimes incautiously into their own.

My experience shows that the worst enemies of mediums are mediums. Not content with slandering each other, they assail and. traduce their warmest and most unselfish friends.


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Whatever objection anyone may have to me on account of country, religion, occult study, rudeness of speech, cigarette-smoking, or any other peculiarity, my record in connection with Spiritualism for long years does not show me as making money by it, or gaining any other advantage, direct or indirect. On the contrary, those who have met me in all parts of the world (which I have circumnavigated three times), will testify that I have given thousands of dollars, imperilled my life, defied the Catholic Church—where it required more courage to do so than the Spiritualists seem to show about encountering elementaries—and in camp and court, on the sea, in the desert, in civilized and savage countries, I have been from first to last the friend and champion of mediums. I have done more. I have often taken the last dollar out of my pocket, and even necessary clothes off my back, to relieve their necessities.

And how do you think I have been rewarded? By honours, emoluments, and social position? Have I charged a fee for imparting to the public or individuals what little knowledge I have gathered in my travels and studies? Let those who have patronized our principal mediums answer.

I have been slandered in the most shameful way, and the most unblushing lies circulated about my character and antecedents by the very mediums whom I have been defending at the risk of being taken for their confederate, when their tricks have been detected. What has happened in American cities is no worse nor different from what has befallen me in Europe, Asia and Africa. I have been injured temporarily in the eyes of good and pure men and women by the libels of mediums whom I never saw, and who never were in the same city with me at the same time; of mediums who made me the heroine of shameful histories whose action was alleged to have occurred when I was in another part of the world, far away from the face of a white man. Ingratitude and injustice have been my portion since I had first to do with spiritual mediums. I have met here with a few exceptions, but very, very few.

Now, what do you suppose has sustained me throughout? Do you imagine that I could not see the disgusting frauds mixed up with the most divine genuine manifestations? Could I, having nothing to gain in money, power or any other consideration, have been content to pass through all these dangers, suffer all this abuse, and receive all these injurious insults, if I saw nothing in Spiritualism but what these critics


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of Col. Olcott and myself can see? Would the prospect of an eternity, passed in the angel-girt world, in company with unwashed Indian guides and military controls, with Aunt Sallies and Prof. Websters, have been inducement enough? No; I would prefer annihilation to such a prospect. It was because I knew that through the same golden gates which swung open to admit the elementary and those unprogressed human spirits who are worse, if anything, than they, have often passed the real and purified forms of the departed and blessed ones. Because, knowing the nature of these spirits and the laws of mediumistic control, I have never been willing to hold my calumniators responsible for the great evil they did, when they were often simply the unfortunate victims of obsession by unprogressed spirits. Who can blame me for not wishing to associate with or receive instruction from spirits who, if not far worse, were no better nor wiser than I? Is a man entitled to respect and veneration simply because his body is rotting under ground, like that of a dog? To me the grand object of my life was attained and the immortality of our spirit demonstrated. Why should I turn necromancer and evoke the dead, who could neither teach me nor make me better than I was? It is a more dangerous thing to play with the mysteries of life and death than most Spiritualists imagine.

Let them thank God for the great proof of immortality afforded them in this century of unbelief and materialism; and, if divine Providence has put them on the right path, let them pursue it by all means, but not stop to pass their time in dangerous talk indiscriminately with every one from the other side. The land of spirits, the Summer Land, as they call it here, is a terra incognita; no believer will deny it; it is vastly more unknown to every Spiritualist, as regards its various inhabitants, than a trackless virgin forest of Central Africa. And who can blame the pioneer settler if he hesitates to open his door to a knock, before assuring himself whether the visitor be man or beast?

Thus, just because of all that I have said above I proclaim myself a true Spiritualist, because my belief is built upon a firm ground, and that no exposure of mediums, no social scandal affecting them or others, no materialistic deductions of exact science, or sneers and denunciations of scientists, can shake it. The truth is coming slowly to light and I shall do my best to hasten its advent. I will breast the current of popular prejudice and ignorance. I am prepared to endure


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slander, foul insinuations and insult in the future as I have in the past. Already one spiritual editor, to most effectually demonstrate his spirituality, has called me a witch. I have survived, and hope to do so if two or two-score more should do the same; but whether I ride the air to attend my Sabbath or not, one thing is certain: I will not ruin myself to buy broomsticks upon which to chase after every lie set afloat by editors or mediums.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.



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[From The Spiritual Scientist.]

I BELIEVE Occultism to be essentially a reincarnation of ancient paganism, a revivification of the Pythagorean philosophy; not the senseless ceremonies and spiritless forms of those ancient religions, but the Spirit of the Truth which animated those grand old systems which held the world spell-bound in awe and reverence long after the spirit had departed, and nothing was left but the dead, decaying body.

Occultism asserts the eternal individuality of the soul, the imperishable force which is the cause and sustaining power of all organization, that death is only the casting off of a worn-out garment in order to procure a new and better one.

So death, so-called, can but the form deface,
The immortal soul flies out in empty space,
To seek her fortune in another place.

Occultism, in its efforts to penetrate the arcana of dynamic forces and primordial power, sees in all things a unity, an unbroken chain extending from the lowest organic form to the highest, and concludes that this unity is based upon a uniformly ascending scale of organic forms of being, the Jacob’s ladder of spiritual organic experience, up which every soul must travel before it can again sing praises before the face of its Father. It perceives a duality in all things, a physical and spiritual nature, closely interwoven in each other’s embrace, interdependent upon each other, and yet independent of each other. And as there is in spirit-life a central individuality, the soul, so there is in the physical, the atom, each eternal, unchangeable and self-existent. These centres, physical and spiritual, are surrounded by their own respective atmospheres, the intersphering of which results in aggregation and organization. This idea is not limited to terrestrial life, but is extended to worlds and systems of worlds.

Physical existence is subservient to the spiritual, and all physical


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improvement and progress are only the auxiliaries of spiritual progress, without which there could be no physical progress. Physical organic progress is effected through hereditary transmission; spiritual organic progress by transmigration.

Occultism has divided spiritual progress into three divisions—the elementary, which corresponds with the lower organizations; the astral, which relates to the human; and the celestial, which is divine. “Elementary spirits,” whether they belong to “earth, water, air or fire,” are spirits not yet human, but attracted to the human by certain congenialities. As many physical diseases are due to the presence of parasites, attracted or produced by uncleanness and other causes, so parasitic spirits are attracted by immorality or spiritual uncleanness, thereby inducing spiritual diseases and consequent physical ailments. They who live on the animal plane must attract spirits of that plane, who seek for borrowed embodiments where the most congeniality exists in the highest form.

Thus the ancient doctrine of obsession challenges recognition, and the exorcism of devils is as legitimate as the expelling of a tape-worm, or the curing of the itch. It was also believed that these spiritual beings sustained their spiritual existence by certain emanations from physical bodies, especially when newly slain; thus in sacrificial offerings the priests received the physical part, and the Gods the spiritual, they being content with a “sweet-smelling savour.” It was further thought that wars were instigated by these demons, so that they might feast on the slain.

But vegetable food also held a place in spiritual estimation, for incense and fumigations were powerful instruments in the hands of the expert magician.

Above the elementary spheres were the seven planetary spheres, and as the elementary spheres were the means of progress for the lower animals, so were the planetary spheres the means of progress for spirits advanced from the elementary—for human spirits. The human spirit at death went to its associative star, till ready for a new incarnation, and its birth partook of the nature of the planet whence it came, and whose rays illumined the ascendant—the central idea of astrology. When the lessons of a planetary sphere were fully mastered, the spirit rose to the next sphere to proceed as before. The character of these spheres corresponded to the “seven ages of man.” But not always did the spirit return to the astral spheres. Suicides; those from whom life had been


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suddenly taken before fully ripe; those whose affections were inordinately attached to earthly things, etc., were held to the earth till certain conditions were fulfilled, and some whose lives had fitted them for such disposal were remanded to the elementary spheres, to be incarnated as lower animals, corresponding to the nature of their lives. Such were the perturbed spirits who sometimes disturbed the peace of sensitive mortals in the days gone by—perhaps now.

Transcending the planetary spheres were the three divine spheres where the process of apotheosis took place, where the spirit progressed till it reached the fulness of the Godhead bodily. From these spheres were appointed the Guardians of the inferior spheres, the Messengers of God, ministering spirits, sent to minister to them who shall receive the inheritance of salvation.

Such is a brief outline of spiritual Occult philosophy; it may seem to be inconsistent with the ideas of modern Spiritualism, yet even Spiritualism has not altogether lost sight of the seven spheres and other peculiarities of the ancient astro-spiritual faith; and as knowledge is acquired and experience gained, a better understanding of both ancient and modern mysticism will bring them nearer together and show a consistency and mutual agreement which has never been disturbed—only obscured—by human ignorance and presumption.

But Occultism has a physical aspect which I cannot afford to pass by. Man is a fourfold being.

Four things of man there are: spirit, soul, ghost, flesh;
Four places these four keep and do possess.
The earth covers flesh, the ghost hovers o’er the grave,
Orcus hath the soul, the stars the spirit crave.

When the spirit leaves the body, and is properly prepared for the stellar spheres, these are retained in the mortal remains; and the shade, which is no part of the spirit or the true man or woman, may still counterfeit them, make revelations of the past, in fact reveal more of its sensual history, and prove sensual identity better than the spirit itself could do, seeing it knows only spiritual things. The sciomancy of the past bears the same relation to modern psychometry that ancient Magic does to modern Spiritualism. Thus in haunted houses, in graveyards and places where deeds of violence have occurred, sensitives see the drama reacted which transpired long ago, the spirit being no accessory thereto.

The spirit cannot even communicate unless through the interblend-


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ing of physical and spiritual auræ and only by coming en rapport with physical things can it know anything of them; and thus mediums are as necessary on the other side as on this; through which mediums, Guardian Spirits, we may gain a nearer apprehension of spiritual truths, if we live for them.

BUDDHA 0F CALIFORNIA.*
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* We cannot say positively that this is H. P. B. ‘s, but it is either written by her, or under her inspiration.

A WARNING TO MEDIUMS
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[From The Banner of Light, May 13th1876.]

DEAR SIR,—I take the earliest opportunity to warn mediums generally—but particularly American mediums—that a plot against the cause has been hatched in St. Petersburg. The particulars have just been received by tile from one of my foreign correspondents, and may be relied upon as authentic.

It is now commonly known that Prof. Wagner, the geologist, has boldly come out as a champion for mediumistic phenomena. Since he witnessed the wonderful manifestations of Bredif, the French medium, he has issued several pamphlets, reviewed at great length in Col. Olcott’s People from the Other World, and excited and defied the anger of all the scientific pyschophobists of the Imperial University. Fancy a herd of mad bulls rushing at the red flag of a picador, and you will have some idea of the effect of Wagner’s Olcott-pamphlet upon his colleagues.

Chief among them is the chairman of the scientific Commission which has just exploded with a report of what they did not see at séances never held! Goaded to fury by the defence of Spiritualism, which they had intended to quietly butcher, this individual suddenly took the determination to come to America, and is now probably on his way. Like a Samson of science, he expects to tie our foxes of mediums together by the tails, set fire to them, and turn them into the corn of those Philistines, Wagner and Butlerow.

Let me give mediums a bit of friendly caution. If this Russian Professor should turn up at a séance, keep a sharp eye upon him, and let everyone do the same; give him no private séances at which there is not present at least one truthful and impartial Spiritualist. Some scientists are not to be trusted. My correspondent writes that the Professor—
Goes to
America to create a great scandal, burst up Spiritualism, and turn the laugh on P. Wagner, Aksakoff and Butlerow.


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The plot is very ingeniously contrived: he is coming here under the pretext of the Centennial, and will attract as little attention as possible among the mediums.

But, Mr. Editor, what if he should meet the fate of Hare and become a Spiritualist! What wailing would there not be in the Society of Physical Sciences! I shudder at the mortification which would await my poor countrymen.

But another distinguished Russian scientist is also coming, for whom I bespeak a very different reception. Prof. Kittara, the greatest technologist of Russia and a member of the Emperor’s Privy Council, is really sent by the government to the Centennial. He is deeply interested in Spiritualism, very anxious to investigate it, and will bring the proper credentials from Mr. Aksakoff. The latter gentleman writes me that every civility and attention should be shown Prof. Kittara, as his report, if favourable, will have a tremendous influence upon public opinion.

The unfairness of the University Commission has, it seems, produced a reaction. I translate the following from a paper which Mr. Aksakoff has sent me, the St. Petersburg Berjeveya viedomostji (Exchange Reports):

We hear that the Commission for the investigation of mediumism, which was formed by the Society of Physical Sciences attached to the University, is preparing to issue a report of its labours [? !]. It will appear as an appendix to the monthly periodical of the Chemical and Physical Societies. Meanwhile another Commission is being formed, but this time its members will not be supplied from the Physical Science Society, but from the Medical Society. Nevertheless, several members of the former will be invited to join, as well as the friends of mediumism, and others who would be able to offer important suggestions pro or con. We hear that the formation of this new Commission is warmly advocated, its necessity having been shown in the breach of faith by the Physical Science Society, its failure to hold the promised forty seances, its premature adoption of unfair conclusions, and the strong prejudices of the members.

Let us hope that this new organization may prove more honourable than its predecessor (peace to its ashes!).

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

(NEW) YORK AGAINST LANKESTER

A NEW WAR OF THE ROSES.

[From The Banner of Light, Oct. 24th, 1876]

DESPITE the constant recurrence of new discoveries by modern men of science, an exaggerated respect for authority and an established routine among the educated class retard the progress of true knowledge. Facts which, if observed, tested, classified and appreciated, would be of inestimable importance to science, are summarily cast into the despised limbo of supernaturalism. To these conservatives the experience of the past serves neither as an example nor a warning. The overturning of a thousand cherished theories finds our modern philosopher as unprepared for each new scientific revelation as though his predecessor had been infallible from time immemorial.

The protoplasmist should, at least, in modesty remember that his past is one vast cemetery of dead theories; a desolate potter’s field wherein exploded hypotheses lie, in ignoble oblivion, like so many executed malefactors, whose names cannot be pronounced by the next of kin without a blush.

The nineteenth century is essentially the age of demolition. True, science takes just pride in many revolutionary discoveries and claims to have immortalized the epoch by forcing from Dame Nature some of her most important secrets. But for every inch she illumines of the narrow and circular path within whose limits she has hitherto trodden, what unexplored boundless stretches have been left behind? The worst is that science has not simply withheld her light from these regions that seem dark (but are not), but her votaries try their best to quench the lights of other people under the pretext that they are not authorities, and their friendly beacons are but “will-o’-the-wisps.” Prejudice and preconceived ideas have entered the public brain, and, cancer-like, are eating it to the core. Spiritualism—or, if some for whom the word has become so unpopular prefer it, the universe of


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spirit—is left to fight out its battle with the world of matter, and the crisis is at hand.

Half-thinkers, and aping, would-be philosophers—in short, that class which is unable to penetrate events any deeper than their crust, and which measures every clay’s occurrences by its present aspect, unmindful of the past and careless of the future—heartily rejoice over the latest rebuff given to phenomenalism in the Lankester-Donkin offensive and defensive alliance, and the pretended exposure of Slade. In this hour of would—be Lancastrian triumph, a change should be made in English heraldic crests. The Lancasters were always given to creating dissensions and provoking strife among peaceable folk. From ancient York the War of the Roses is now transferred to Middle sex, and Lankester (whose name is a corruption), instead of uniting himself with the hereditary foe, has joined his idols with those of Donkin (whose name is evidently also a corruption). As the hero of the hour is not a knight, but a zoologist deeply versed in the science to which lie devotes Ins talents, why not compliment his ally by quartering the red rose of Lancaster with the downy thistle so delicately appreciated by a certain prophetic quadruped, who seeks for it by the wayside? Really, Mr. Editor, when Mr. Lankester tells us that all those who believe in Dr. Slade’s phenomena ‘are lost to reason,” we must accord to biblical animals a decided precedence over modern ones. The ass of Balaam had at least the faculty of perceiving spirits, while some of those who bray in our academies and hospitals show no evidence of its possession. Sad degeneration of species!

Such persons as these bound all spiritual phenomena in Nature by the fortunes and mishaps of mediums; each new favourite, they think, must of necessity pull down in his fall an unscientific hypothetical “Unseen Universe,” as the tumbling red dragon of the Apocalypse drew with his tail the third part of the stars of heaven. Poor blind moles! They perceive not that by inveighing against the “craze” of such phenomenalists as Wallace, Crookes, Wagner and Thury, they only help the spread of true Spiritualism. We millions of lunatics really ought to address a vote of thanks to the “dishevelled” Beards who make supererogatory efforts to appear as stupid clodpoles to deceive the Eddys, and to Lankesters simulating “astonishment and intense interest,” the better to cheat Dr. Shade. More than any advocates of phenomenalism, they bring its marvels into public notice by their pyrotechnic exposures.


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As one entrusted by the Russian Committee with the delicate task of selecting a medium for the coming St. Petersburg experiments, and as an officer of the Theosophical Society, which put Dr. Slade’s powers to the test in a long series of seances, I pronounce him not only a genuine medium, but one of the best and least fraudulent mediums ever developed. From personal experience I can not only testify to the genuineness of his slate-writing, but also to that of the materializations which occur in his presence. A shawl thrown over a chair (which I was invited to place wherever I chose) is all the cabinet he exacts, and his apparitions immediately appear, and that in gas—light.

No one will charge me with a superfluous confidence in the personality of material apparitions, or a superabundance of love for them ; but honour and truth compel me to affirm that those who appeared to me in Slade’s presence were real phantoms, and not “made up” confederates or dolls. They were evanescent and filmy, and the only ones I have seen in America which have reminded me of those that the Adepts of India evoke. Like the latter, they formed and dissolved before my eyes, their substance rising mist-like from the floor, and gradually condensing. Their eyes moved and their lips smiled ; but as they stood near me their forms were so transparent that through them I could see the objects in the room. These I call genuine spiritual substances, whereas the opaque ones that I have seen else where were nothing but animated forms of matter—whatever they be—with sweating hands and a peculiar odour, which I am not called upon to define at this time.

Everyone knows that Dr. Slade is not acquainted with foreign languages, and yet at our first séance, three years ago, on the day after my arrival in New York, where no one knew me, I received upon his slate a long communication in Russian. I had purposely avoided giving either to Dr. Slade or his partner, Mr. Simmons, any clue to my nationality, and while, from my accent, they would of course have detected that I was not an American, they could not possibly have known from what country I came. I fancy that if Dr. Lankester had allowed Slade to write on both knees and both elbows successively or simultaneously, the poor man would not have been able to turn out Russian messages by trick and device.

In reading the accounts in the London papers, it has struck me as very remarkable that this “vagrant” medium, after baffling such a host of savants, would have fallen so easy a victim to the zoölogico-osteological


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brace of scientific detectives. Fraud, that neither the “psychic” Sergeant Cox, nor the “unconsciously cerebrating” Carpenter, nor the wise Wallace, nor the experienced M.A. (Oxon.), nor the cautious Lord Rayleigh—who, mistrusting his own acuteness, employed a professional juggler to attend the séance with him—nor Dr. Carter Blake, nor a host of other competent observers could detect, was seen by the eagle eyes of the Lankester-Donkin Gemini at a single glance. There has been nothing like it since Beard, of electro-hay fever and Eddy fame, denounced the faculty of Yale for a set of asses, because they would not accept his divinely-inspired revelation of the secret of mind-reading, and pitied the imbecility of that “amiable idiot,” Col. Olcott, for trusting his own two—months’ observation of the Eddy phenomena in preference to the electric doctor’s single séance of an hour.

I am an American citizen in embryo, Mr. Editor, and I cannot hope that the English magistrates of Bow Street will listen to a voice that comes from a city proverbially held in small esteem by British scientists. When Prof. Tyndall asks Prof. Youmans if the New York carpenters could make him a screen ten feet long for his Cooper Institute lectures, and whether it would be necessary to send to Boston for a cake of ice that he wished to use in the experiments; and when Huxley evinces grateful surprise that a “foreigner” could express him self in your (our) language in such a way as to be so readily intelligible, “to all appearance,” by a New York audience, and that those clever chaps—the New York reporters—could report him despite his accent, neither New York “spooks,” nor I, can hope for a standing in a London court, when the defendant is prosecuted by English scientists. But, fortunately for Dr. Slade, British tribunals are not inspired by the Jesuits, and so Slade may escape the fate of Leymarie. He certainly will, if he is allowed to summon to the witness-stand his Owasso and other devoted “controls,” to write their testimony inside a double state, furnished and held by the magistrate himself. This is Dr. Slade’s golden hour; he will never have so good a chance to demonstrate the reality of phenomenal manifestations, and make Spiritualism triumph over scepticism; and we, who know the doctor’s wonderful powers, are confident that he can do it, if he is assisted by those who in the past have accomplished so much through his instrumentality.

H. P. BLAVATSKY,

Corresponding Secretary of the Theosophical Society. New York, Oct. 8th, 1876.

HUXLEY AND SLADE

[ From The banner of Light, Oct. 28th, 1876.]

As I see the issue that has been raised by Dr. Hallock with Mr. Huxley, it suggests to me the comparison of two men looking at the same distant object through a telescope. The Doctor, having taken the usual precautions, brings the object within close range where it can he studied at one’s leisure; but the naturalist, having forgotten to remove the cap, sees only the reflection of his own image.

Though the materialists may find it hard to answer even the brief criticisms of the Doctor, yet it appears that Mr. Huxley’s New York lectures—as they present themselves to me in their naked desolation— suggest one paramount idea which Dr. Hallock has not touched upon. I need scarcely say to you, who must have read the report of these would-be iconoclastic lectures, that this idea is one of the “false pretences” of Modern Science. After all the flourish which attended his coming, all the expectations that had been aroused, all the secret apprehensions of the church and the anticipated triumph of the materialists, what did he teach us that was really new or so extremely suggestive? Nothing, positively nothing. Exclude a sight of his personality, the sound of his well-trained voice, the reflection of his scientific glory, and the result may be summed up thus: “Cr., Thomas H. Huxley, L1,000.”

Of him it may be said, as it has been of other teachers before, that what he said that was new was not true; and that which was true was not new.

Without going into details, for the moment, it suffices to say that the materialistic theory of evolution is far from being demonstrated, while the thought that Mr. Huxley does not grasp—i.e., the double evolution of spirit and matter—is imparted under the form of various legends in the oldest parts of the Rig Veda (the Aitareya Brâhmana). Only these benighted Hindus, it seems, made the trifling improvement over Modern

89 ————————————————————HUXLEY AND SLADE.

Science, of hooking a First Cause on to the further end of the chain of evolution.

In the Chaturhotri Mantra (Book V of the Aitareya Brâhmana) the Goddess Eath (lyam), who is termed the Queen of the Serpents (Sârpa), for she is the mother of everything that moves (Sârpat), was in the beginning of time completely bald. She was nothing but one round head, which was soft to the touch, i.e., “a gelatinous mass.” Being disstressed at her baldness, she called for help to the great Vâyu, the Lord of the airy regions; she prayed him to teach her the Mantra (invocation or sacrificial prayer—a certain part of the Veda), which would confer on her the magical power of creating things (generation). He complied, and then as soon as the Mantra was pronounced by her “in the proper metre” she found herself covered with hair (vegetation). She was now hard to the touch, for the Lord of the air had breathed upon her—the globe had cooled. She had become of a variegated or motley appearance, and suddenly acquired the power to produce out of herself every animate and inanimate form, and to chance one form to another.

Therefore in like manner [ the sacred book] the man who has such a knowledge [ the Mantras] obtains the faculty of assuming any shape or form he likes.

It will scarcely be said that this allegory is capable of more than one interpretation, viz., that the ancient Hindus, many centuries before the Christian era, taught the doctrine of evolution. Martin Haug, the Sanskrit scholar, asserts that the Vedas were already in existence from 2,000 to 2,200 B.C.

Thus, while the theory of evolution is nothing new, and may be considered a proven fact, the new ideas forced upon the public by Mr. Huxley are only undemonstrated hypotheses, and as such liable to be exploded the first fine day upon the discovery of some new fact. We find no admission of his, however, in Mr. Huxley’s communications to the public; but the unproved theories are enunciated with as much boldness as though the were established scientific facts, corroborated by unerring laws of Nature. Notwithstanding this the world is asked to revere the great evolutionist, only because he stands under the shadow of a great name.

What is this but one of the many false pretences of the sciolists? And yet Huxley and his admirers charge the believers in the evolution of spirit with the same crime of false pretences, because, forsooth, our theories are as yet undemonstrated. Those who believe in Slade’s


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spirits-are “lost.to reason,” while those who can see embryonic man in Huxley’s “gelatinous mass” are accepted as the progressive minds of the age. Slade is arraigned before the magistrate for taking $5 from Lankester, while Huxley triumphantly walks away with $5,0OO of American gold in his pockets, which was paid him for imparting to us the mirific fact that man evolved from the hind toe of a pedactyl horse!

Now, arguing from the standpoint of strict justice, in what respect is a materialistic theorist any better than a spiritualistic one? And in what degree is the evolution of man—independent of divine and spiritual interference—better proven by the toe-bone of an extinct horse, than the evolution and survival of the human spirit by the writing upon a screwed-up slate by some unseen power or powers? And yet again, the soulless Huxley sails away laden with flowers like a fashionable corpse, conquering and to conquer in fresh fields of glory, while the poor medium is hauled before a police magistrate as a “vagrant and a swindler,” without proof enough to sustain the charge before an unprejudiced tribunal.

There is good authority for the statement that psychological science is a debatable land upon which the modern physiologist hardly dares to venture. I deeply sympathize with the embarrassed student of the physical side of Nature. We all can readily understand how disagreeable it must be to a learned theorist, ever aspiring for the elevation of his hobby to the dignity of an accepted scientific truth, constantly to receive the lie direct from his remorseless and untiring antagonist— psychology. To see his cherished materialistic theories become every day more untenable, until they are reduced to the condition of mummies swathed in shrouds, self-woven and inscribed with a farrago of pet sophistries, is indeed hard. And in their self-satisfying logic, these sons of matter reject every testimony but their own: the divine entity of the Socratic daimonion, the ghost of Cæsar, and Cicero’s Divinum Quidam, they explain by epilepsy; and the prophetic oracles of the Jewish Bath-Kol are set down as hereditary hysteria!

And now, supposing the great protoplasmist to have proved to the general satisfaction that the present horse is an effect of a gradual development from the Orophippus, or four-toed horse of the Eocene formation, which, passing further through Miocene and Pliocene periods, has become the modern honest Equus, does Huxley thereby prove that man has also developed from a one-toed human being? For nothing short of that could demonstrate his theory. To be consistent he must


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show that while the horse was losing at each successive period a toe, man has in reversed order acquired an additional one at each new formation; and unless we are shown the fossilized remains of man in a series of one-, two-, three- and four-toed anthropoid ape-like beings antecedent to the present perfected Homo, what does Huxley’s theory amount to? Nobody doubts that everything has evolved out of some thing prior to itself. But, as it is, he leaves us hopelessly in doubt whether it is man who is a hipparionic or equine evolution, or the antediluvian Equus that evolved from the primitive genus Homo!

Thus to apply the argument to Slade’s case we may say that, whether the messages on his slate indicate an authorship among the returning spirits of antediluvian monkeys, or the bravos and Lankestrian ancestors of our day, he is no more guilty of false pretences than the $5,000 evolutionist. Hypothesis, whether of scientist or medium, is no false pretence; but unsupported assertion is, when people are charged money for it.

If, satisfied with the osseous fragments of a Hellenized or Latinized skeleton, we admit that there is a physical evolution, by what logic can we refuse to credit the possibility of an evolution of spirit? That there are two sides to the question, no one but an utter psychophobist will deny. It may be argued that even if the Spiritualists have demonstrated their bare facts, their philosophy is not complete, since it has missing links. But no more have the evolutionists. They have fossil remains which prove that once upon a time the ancestors of the modern horse were blessed with three and even four toes and fingers, the fourth ‘‘answering to the little finger of the human hand,” and that the Protohippus rejoiced in ‘‘a fore-arm’’ ; Spiritualists in their turn exhibit entire hands, arms, and even bodies in support of their theory that the dead still live and revisit us. For my part I cannot see that the osteologists have the better of them. Both follow the inductive or purely scientific method, proceeding from particulars to universals; thus Cuvier, upon finding a small bone, traced around it imaginary lines until he had built up from his prolific fancy a whole mammoth. The data of scientists are no more certain than those of Spiritualists; and while the former have but their modern discoveries upon which to build their theories, Spiritualists may cite the evidence of a succession of ages, which began long prior to the advent of Modern Science.

An inductive hypothesis, we are told, is demonstrated when the facts are shown to be in entire accordance with it. Thus, if Huxley possesses


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conclusive evidence of the evolution of man in the genealogy of the horse, Spiritualists can equally claim that proof of the evolution of spirit out of the body is furnished in the materialized, more or less substantial, limbs that float in the dark shadows of the cabinet, and often in full light—a phenomenon which has been recognized and attested by numberless generations of wise men of every country. As to the pretended superiority of modern over ancient science, we have only the word of the former for it. This is also an hypothesis; better evidence is required to prove the fact. We have but to turn to Wendell Phillips’s lecture on the Lost Arts to have a certain right to doubt the assurance of Modern Science.

Speaking of evidence, it is strange what different and arbitrary values may be placed upon the testimony of different men equally trustworthy and well-meaning. Says the parent of protoplasm:

It is impossible that one’s practical life should not be more or less influenced by the views which he may hold as to what has been the past history of things. One of them is human testimony in its various shapes—all testimony of eye-witnesses, traditional testimony from the lips of those who have been eye-witnesses, and the testimony of those who have put their impressions into writing or into print.

On just such testimony, amply furnished in the Bible (evidence which Mr. Huxley rejects), and in many other less problematical authors than Moses, among whom may be reckoned generations of great philosophers, theurgists, and laymen, Spiritualists have a right to base their fundamental doctrines. Speaking further of the broad distinction to be drawn between the different kinds of evidence, some being less valuable than others, because given upon grounds not clear, upon grounds illogically stated and upon such as do not bear thorough and careful inspection, the same gelatinist remarks:

For example, if I read in your history of Tennessee [Ramsays] that one hundred years ago this country was peopled by wandering savages, my belief in this statement rests upon the conviction that Mr. Ramsay was actuated by the same sort of motives that men are now,... that he himself was, like ourselves, not inclined to make false statements. . . . If you read Cæsar’s Commentaries, wherever he gives an account of his battles with the Gauls, you place a certain amount of confidence in his statements. You take his testimony upon this, you feel that Cæsar would not have made these statements unless he had believed them to be true.

Profound philosophy! precious thoughts! gems of condensed, gelatinous truth! long may it stick to the American mind! Mr. Huxley ought to devote the rest of his days to writing primers for the feeble minded adults of the United States. But why select Cæsar as the type


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of the trustworthy witness of ancient times? And if we must implicitly credit his reports of battles, why not his profession of faith in augurs, diviners and apparitions?—for in common with his wife, Calpurnia, he believed in them as firmly as any modern Spiritualist in his mediums and phenomena. We also feel that no more than Cæsar would such men as Cicero and Herodotus and Livy and a host of others “have made these false statements,” or reported such things “unless they believed them to be true.”

It has already been shown that the doctrine of evolution, as a whole, was taught in the Rig Veda, and I may also add that it can be found in the most ancient of the books of Hermes. This is bad enough for the claim to originality set up by our modern scientists, but what shall be said when we recall the fact that the very pedactyl horse, the finding of whose footprints has so overjoyed Mr. Huxley, was mentioned by ancient writers (Herodotus anti Pliny, if I mistake not), and was once outrageously laughed at by the French Academicians? Let those who wish to verify the fact read Salverti’s Philosophy of Occult Science, translated by Todd Thompson.

Some day proofs as conclusive will be discovered of the reliability of the ancient writers as to their evidence on psychological matters. What Niebuhr, the German materialist, did with Livy’s History, from which he eliminated every one of the multitude of facts of phenomenal “Super naturalism,’’ scientists now seem to have tacitly agreed to do with all the ancient, medæval and modern authors. What they narrate, that can be used to bolster up the physical part of science, scientists accept and sometimes coolly appropriate without credit; what supports the Spiritualistic philosophy they incontinently reject as mythical and contrary to the order of Nature. In such cases “evidence” and the “testimony of eye-witnesses” count for nothing. They adopt the contrary course to Lord Verulam, who, arguing on the properties of amulets and charms, remarks that:

We should not reject all this kind, because it is not known how far those contributing to superstition depend on natural causes.

There can be no real enfranchisement of human thought nor expansion of scientific discovery until the existence of spirit is recognized, and the double evolution accepted as a fact. Until then, false theories will always find favour with those who, having forsaken “the God of their fathers,” vainly strive to find substitutes in nucleated masses of matter. And of all the sad things to be seen in this era of “shams,”


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none is more deplorable—though its futility is often ludicrous—than the conspiracy of certain scientists to stamp out spirit by their one-sided theory of evolution, and destroy Spiritualism by arraigning its mediums upon the charge of “false pretences.”

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

CAN THE DOUBLE MURDER?
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To the Editor of” The Sun.”

SIR,—One morning in 1867 Eastern Europe was startled by news of the most horrifying description. Michael Obrenovitch, reigning Prince of Serbia, his aunt, the Princess Catherine, or Katinka, and her daughter had been murdered in broad daylight, near Belgrade, in their own garden, assassin or assassins remaining unknown. The Prince had received several bullet-shots and stabs, and his body was actually butchered; the Princess was killed on the spot, her head smashed, and her young daughter, though still alive, was not expected to survive. The circumstances are too recent to have been forgotten, but in that part of the world, at the time, the case created a delirium of excitement.

In the Austrian dominions and in those tinder the doubtful protectorate of Turkey, from Bucharest down to Trieste, no high family felt secure. In those half-Oriental countries every Montecchi has its Capuletti, and it was rumoured that the bloody deed was perpetrated by the Prince Kara-Gueorguevitch, or “Tzerno-Gueorgey,” as he is usually called in those parts. Several persons innocent of the act were, as is usual in such cases, imprisoned, and the real murderers escaped justice. A young relative of the victim, greatly beloved by his people, a mere child, taken for the purpose from a school in Paris, was brought over in ceremony to Belgrade and proclaimed Hospodar of Serbia. In the turmoil of political excitement the tragedy of Belgrade was for gotten by all but an old Serbian matron who had been attached to the Obrenovitch family, and who, like Rachel, would not be comforted for the death of her children. After the proclamation of the young Obrenovitch, nephew of the murdered man, she had sold out her property and disappeared; but not before taking a solemn vow on the tombs of the victims to avenge their deaths.

The writer of this truthful narrative had passed a few days at Belgrade, about three months before the horrid deed was perpetrated,


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and knew the Princess Katinka. She was a kind, gentle, and lazy creature at home; abroad she seemed a Parisienne in manners and education. As nearly all the personages who will figure in this true story are still living, it is but decent that I should withhold their names, and give only initials.

The old Serbian lady seldom left her house, going but to see the Princess occasionally. Crouched on a pile of pillows and carpeting, clad in the picturesque national dress, she looked like the Cumæan sibyl in her days of calm repose. Strange stories were whispered about her Occult knowledge, and thrilling accounts circulated some times among the guests assembled round the fireside of the modest inn. Our fat landlord’s maiden aunt’s cousin had been troubled for some time past by a wandering vampire, and had been bled nearly to death by the nocturnal visitor, and while the efforts and exorcisms of the parish pope had been of no avail, the victim was luckily delivered by Gospoja P—, who had put to flight the disturbing ghost by merely shaking her fist at him, and shaming him in his own language. It was in Belgrade that I learned for the first time this highly-interesting fact in philology, namely, that spooks have a language of their own. The old lady, whom I will call Gospoja P was generally attended by another personage destined to be the principal actress in our tale of horror. It was a young gipsy girl from some part of Roumania, about fourteen years of age. Where she was born, and who she was, she seemed to know as little as anyone else. I was told she had been brought one day by a party of strolling gipsies, and left in the yard of the old lady, from which moment she became an inmate of the house. She was nicknamed “the sleeping girl,” as she was said to be gifted with the faculty of apparently dropping asleep wherever she stood, and speaking her dreams aloud. The girl’s heathen name was Frosya.

About eighteen months after the news of the murder had reached Italy, where I was at the tune, I travelled over the Banat in a small waggon of my own, hiring a horse whenever I needed one. I met on my way an old Frenchman, a scientist, travelling alone after my own fashion, but with the difference that while he was a pedestrian, I dominated the road from the eminence of a throne of dry hay in a jolting waggon. I discovered him one fine morning slumbering in a wilderness of shrubs and flowers, and had nearly passed over him, absorbed as I was in the contemplation of the surrounding glorious scenery. The acquaintance was soon made, no great ceremony of


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mutual introduction being needed. I had heard his name mentioned in circles interested in mesmerism, and knew him to be a powerful adept of the school of Dupotet.

“I have found,” he remarked, in the course of the conversation after I had made him share my seat of hay, “one of the most wonderful subjects in this lovely Thebaide. I have an appointment to-night with the family. They are seeking to unravel the mystery of a murder by means of the clairvoyance of the girl . . . she is wonderful!”

“Who is she?” I asked.

“A Roumanian gipsy. She was brought up, it appears, in the family of the Serbian reigning Prince, who reigns no more, for he was very mysteriously mur— Halloo, take care! Diable, you will upset us over the precipice!” he hurriedly exclaimed, unceremoniously snatching from me the reins, and giving the horse a violent pull.

“You do not mean Prince Obrenovitch?” I asked aghast.

“Yes, I do; and him precisely. To-night I have to be there, hoping to close a series of seances by finally developing a most marvellous manifestation of the hidden power of the human spirit; and you may come with me. I will introduce you; and besides, you can help me as an interpreter, for they do not speak French.”

As I was pretty sure that if the somnambule was Frosya, the rest of the family must be Gospoja P—, I readily accepted. At sunset we were at the foot of the mountain, leading to the old castle, as the Frenchman called the place. It fully deserved the poetical name given it. There was a rough bench in the depths of one of the shadowy retreats, and as we stopped at the entrance of this poetical place, and the Frenchman was gallantly busying himself with my horse on the suspicious-looking bridge which led across the water to the entrance gate, I saw a tall figure slowly rise from the bench and come towards us.

It was my old friend Gospoja P—, looking more pale and more mysterious than ever. She exhibited no surprise at seeing me, but simply greeting me after the Serbian fashion, with a triple kiss on both cheeks, she took hold of my hand and led me straight to the nest of ivy. Half reclining on a small carpet spread on the tall grass, with her back leaning against the wall, I recognized our Frosya.

She was dressed in the national costume of the Wallachian women, a sort of gauze turban intermingled with various gilt medals and bands on her head, white shirt with opened sleeves, and petticoats of varie-


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gated colours. Her face looked deadly pale, her eyes were closed, and her countenance presented that stony, sphinx-like look which characterizes in such a peculiar way the entranced clairvoyant somnambule. If it were not for the heaving motion of her chest and bosom, ornamented by rows of medals and head necklaces which feebly tinkled at ever breath, one might have thought her dead, so lifeless and corpse-like was her face. The Frenchman informed me that he had sent her to sleep just as we were approaching the house, and that she now was as he had left her the previous night; he then began busying himself with the sujet, as he called Frosva. Paying no further attention to us, he shook her by the hand, and then making a few rapid passes stretched out her arm and stiffened it. The arm, as rigid as iron, remained in that position. He then closed all her fingers but one—the middle finger—which he caused to point at the evening star, which twinkled in the deep blue sky. Then he turned round and went over from right to left, throwing on some of his fluids here, again discharging them at another place; busying himself with his invisible but potent fluids, like a painter with his brush when giving the last touches to a picture.

The old lady, who had silently watched him, with her chin in her hand the while, put her thin, skeleton—looking hands on his arm and arrested it, as he was preparing himself to begin the regular mesmeric passes.

‘‘Wait,” she whispered, ‘‘till the star is set and the ninth hour completed. The Vourdalaki are hovering round; they may spoil the influence.’’

“What does she say?” enquired time mesmerizer, annoyed at her interference.

I explained to him that the old lady feared the pernicious influences of the Vourdalaki.

“Vourdalaki! What’s that—the Vourdalaki?” exclaimed the French man. “Let us be satisfied with Christian spirits, if the honour us to-night with a visit, and lose no time for the Vourdalaki.”

I glanced at the Gospoja. She had become deathly pale and her brow was sternly knitted over her flashing black eyes.

“Tell him not to jest at this hour of the night!” she cried. “He does not know the country. Even this holy church may fail to protect us once the Vourdalaki are roused. What’s this ?“ pushing with her foot a bundle of herbs the botanizing mesmerizer had laid near on the


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grass. She bent over the collection and anxiously examined the contents of the bundle, after which she flung the whole into the water.

‘‘It must not be left here,’’ she firmly added; ‘‘these are the St. John’s plants, and they might attract the wandering ones.’’

Meanwhile the night had come, and the moon illuminated the land scape with a pale, ghostly light. The nights in the Banat are nearly as beautiful as in the East, and the Frenchman had to go on with his experiments in the open air, as the priest of the church had prohibited such in the tower, which was used as the parsonage, for fear of filling the holy precincts with the heretical devils of the mesmerizer, which, the priest remarked, he would be unable to exorcise on account of their being foreigners.

The old gentleman had thrown off his travelling blouse, rolled tip his shirt sleeves, and now, striking a theatrical attitude, began a regular process of mesmerization.

Under his quivering fingers the odile fluid actually seemed to flash in the twilight. Frosya was placed with her figure facing the moon, and every motion of the entranced girl was discernible as in daylight. In a few minutes large drops of perspiration appeared on her brow, and slowly rolled down her pale face, glittering in the moonbeams. Then she moved uneasily about and began chanting a low melody, to the words of which the Gospoja, anxiously bent over the unconscious girl, was listening with avidity and trying to catch every syllable. With her thin finger on her lips, her eyes nearly starting from their sockets, her frame motionless, the old lady seemed herself transfixed into a statue of attention. The group was a remarkable one, and I regretted that I was not a painter. What followed was a scene worthy to figure in Macbeth. At one side she, the slender girl, pale and corpse- like, writhing tinder the invisible fluid of him who for the hour was her omnipotent master; at the other the old matron, who, burning with her unquenched fire of revenge, stood waiting for the long-expected name of the Prince’s murderer to be at last pronounced. The Frenchman himself seemed transfigured, his grey hair standing on end; his bulky clumsy form seemed to have grown in a few minutes. All theatrical pretence was now gone; there remained but the mesmerizer, aware of his responsibility, unconscious himself of the possible results, studying and anxiously expecting. Suddenly Frosya, as if lifted by some super natural force, rose from her reclining posture and stood erect before us,


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again motionless and still, waiting for the magnetic fluid to direct her. The Frenchman, silently taking the old lady’s hand, placed it in that of the somnambulist, and ordered her to put herself en rapport with the Gospoja.

“What seest thou, my daughter?” softly murmured the Serbian lady. “Can your spirit seek out the murderers?”

“Search and behold!” sternly commanded the mesmerizer, fixing his gaze upon the face of the subject.

“I am on my way—I go,” faintly whispered Frosya, her voice seeming not to come from herself, but from the surrounding atmosphere.

At this moment something so strange took place that I doubt my ability to describe it. A luminous vapour appeared, closely surround ing the girl’s body. At first about an inch in thickness, it gradually expanded, and, gathering itself, suddenly seemed to break off from the body altogether and condense itself into a kind of semi-solid vapour, which very soon assumed the likeness of the somnambule herself. Flickering about the surface of the earth the form vacillated for two or three seconds, then glided noiselessly toward the river. It disappeared like a mist, dissolved in the moonbeams, which seemed to absorb it altogether.

I had followed the scene with an intense attention. The mysterious operation, known in the East as the evocation of the scin-lecca, was taking place before my own eyes. To doubt was impossible, and Dupotet was right in saying that mesmerism is the conscious Magic of the ancients, and Spiritualism the unconscious effect of the same Magic upon certain organisms.

As soon as the vaporous double had smoked itself through the pores of the girl, Gospoja had, by a rapid motion of the hand which was left free, drawn from under her pelisse something which looked to us suspiciously like a small stiletto, and placed it as rapidly in the girl’s bosom. The action was so quick that the mesmerizer, absorbed in his work, had not remarked it, as he afterwards told me. A few minutes elapsed in a dead silence. We seemed a group of petrified persons. Suddenly a thrilling and transpiercing cry burst from the entranced girl’s lips, she bent forward, and snatching the stiletto from her bosom, plunged it furiously round her, in the air, as if pursuing imaginary foes. Her mouth foamed, and incoherent, wild exclamations broke from her lips, among which discordant sounds I discerned several times two familiar Christian names of men. The mesmerizer was so terrified


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that he lost all control over himself, and instead of withdrawing the fluid he loaded the girl with it still more.

“Take care,” exclaimed I. “Stop! You will kill her, or she will kill you!”

But the Frenchman had unwittingly raised subtle potencies of Nature over which he had no control. Furiously turning round, the girl struck at him a blow which would have killed him had he not avoided it by jumping aside, receiving but a severe scratch on the right arm. The poor man was panic-stricken; climbing with an extraordinary agility, for a man of his bulky form, on the wall over her, he fixed himself on it astride, and gathering the remnants of his will power, sent in her direction a series of passes. At the second, the girl dropped the weapon and remained motionless.

“What are you about?” hoarsely shouted the mesmerizer in French, seated like some monstrous night-goblin on the wall. “Answer me, I command you!’’

“I did ... but what she...whom you ordered me to obey commanded me to do,” answered the girl in French, to my amazement.

“What did the old witch command you?” irreverently asked he.

‘‘To find them how murdered .. kill them. . . I did so . . . and they are no more . . . Avenged! . . . Avenged! They are An exclamation of triumph, a loud shout of infernal joy, rang loud in the air, and awakening the dogs of the neighbouring villages a responsive howl of barking began from that moment, like a ceaseless echo of the Gospoja’s cry:

“I am avenged! I feel it; I know it. My warning heart tells me that the fiends are no more.” She fell panting on the ground, dragging down, in her fall, the girl, who allowed herself to be pulled down as if she were a bag of wool.

‘‘I hope my subject did no further mischief to—night. She is a dangerous as well as a very wonderful subject,” said the Frenchman.

We parted. Three days after that I was at T—, and as I was sitting in the dining-room of a restaurant, waiting for my lunch, I happened to pick up a newspaper, and the first lines I read ran thus:

VIENNA, 186—. TWO MYSTERIOUS DEATHS.

Last evening, at 9.45, as was about to retire, two of the gentlemen-in-wait ing suddenly exhibited great terror, as though they had seen a dreadful apparition.


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They screamed, staggered, and ran about the room, holding up their hands as if toward off the blows of an unseen weapon. They paid no attention to the eager questions of the prince and suite, but presently fell writhing upon the floor, and expired in great agony. Their bodies exhibited no appearance of apoplexy, nor any external marks of wounds, hot, wonderful to relate, there were numerous dark spots and long marks upon the skin, as though they were stabs and slashes made without puncturing the cuticle. The autopsy revealed the fact that beneath each of these mysterious discolourations there was a deposit of coagulated blood. The greatest excitement prevails, and the faculty are unable to solve the mystery.

HADJI MORA.

(H. P. BLAVATSKY.)

FAKIRS AND TABLES
—————

[ From the New York Sun, April 1st,1877.]

HOWEVER ignorant I may be of the laws of the solar system, I am at all events so firm a believer in heliocentric journalism that I sub scribe some remarks for The Sun upon my “iconoclasm.”

No doubt it is a great honour for an unpretending foreigner to be thus crucified between the two greatest celebrities of your chivalrous country—the truly good Deacon Richard Smith, of the blue gauze trousers, and the nightingale of the willow and the cypress, G. Washington Childs, A.M. But I am not a Hindu Fakir, and therefore can not say that I enjoy crucifixion, especially when unmerited. I do not even fancy being swung round the “tall tower” with the steel hooks of your satire metaphorically thrust through my back. I have not invited the reporters to a show. I have not sought notoriety. I have only taken up a quiet corner in your free country, and, as a woman who has travelled much, shall try to tell a Western public the strange things I have seen among Eastern peoples. If I could have enjoyed this privilege at home I should not be here. Being here, I shall, as your old English proverb expresses it, “Tell the truth and shame the devil.’’

The World reporter who visited me wrote an article which mingled his souvenirs of my stuffed apes and my canaries, my tiger-heads and palms, with aerial music and the flitting doppelgangers of Adepts. It was a very interesting article and was certainly intended to be very impartial. If I appear in it to deny the immutability of natural law, and inferentially to affirm the possibility of miracle, it is either due to my faulty English or to the carelessness of the reader.

There are no such uncompromising believers in the immutability and universality of the laws of Nature as students of Occultism. Let us then, with your permission, leave the shade of the great Newton to rest in peace. It is not the principle of the law of gravitation, or the neces-


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sity of a central force acting toward the sun, that is denied, but the assumption that, behind the law which draws bodies toward the earth’s centre, and which is our most familiar example of gravitation, there is no other law, equally immutable, that under certain conditions appears to counteract the former.

If but once in a hundred years a table or a Fakir is seen to rise in the air, without a visible mechanical cause, then that rising is a manifestation of a natural law of which our scientists are as yet ignorant. Christians believe in miracles; Occultists credit them even less than pious scientists, Sir David Brewster, for instance. Show an Occultist an Unfamiliar phenomenon, and he will never affirm a priori that it is either a trick or a miracle. he will search for the cause in the reason of causes.

There was an anecdote about Babinet, the astronomer, current in Paris in 1854, when the great war was raging between the Academy and the “waltzing tables.” This sceptical man of science had proclaimed in the Revue des Deux Mondes (January, 1854, p. 414) that the levitation of furniture without contact “was simply as impossible as perpetual motion.” A few days later, during an experimental seance, a table was levitated without contact in his presence. The result was that Babinet went straight to a dentist to have a molar tooth extracted, which the iconoclastic table in its aerial flight had seriously damaged. But it was too late to recall his article.

I suppose nine men out of ten, including editors, would maintain that the undulatory theory of light is one of the most firmly establislied. And yet if you will turn to page 22 of The New Chemistry, by Prof. Josiah P. Cooke, Jr., of Harvard University (New York, 1876), you will find him saying:

I cannot agree with those who regard the wave-theory of light as an established principle of science. . . . It requires a combination of qualities in the ether of space which I find it difficult to believe are actually realized.

What is this that iconoclasm?

Let us bear in mind that Newton himself accepted the corpuscular theory of Pythagoras and his predecessors, from whom he learned it, and that it was only en desespoir de cause that later scientists accepted the wave theory of Descartes and Huyghens. Kepler maintained the magnetic nature of the sun. Leibnitz ascribed the planetary motions to agitations of an ether. Borelli anticipated Newton in his discovery, although he failed to demonstrate it as triumphantly. Huyghens and


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Boyle, Horrocks and Hooke, Halley and Wren, all had ideas of a central force acting toward the sun, and of the true principle of diminution of action of the force in the ratio of the inverse square of the distance. The last word has not yet been spoken with respect to gravitation; its limitations can never be known until the nature of the sun is better understood.

They are just beginning to recognize—see Prof. Balfour Stewart’s lecture at Manchester, entitled, The Sun and the Earth, and Prof. A. M. Mayer’s lecture, The Earth a Great Magnet—the intimate connection between the sun’s spots and the position of the heavenly bodies. The interplanetary magnetic attractions are but just being demonstrated. Until gravitation is understood to be simply magnetic attraction and repulsion, and the part played by magnetism itself in the endless correlations of forces in the ether of space—that “hypothetical medium,” as Webster terms it—is better grasped, I maintain that it is neither fair nor wise to deny the levitation of either Fakir or table. Bodies oppositely electrified attract each other; similarly electrified they repulse each other. Admit, therefore, that any body having weight, whether man or inanimate object, can by any cause whatever, external or internal, be given the same polarity as the spot on which it stands, and what is to prevent its rising?

Before charging me with falsehood when I affirm that I have seen both men and objects levitated, you must first dispose of the abundant testimony of persons far better known than my humble self. Mr. Crookes, Prof. Thury of Geneva, Louis Jacolliot, your own Dr. Gray and Dr. Warner, and hundreds of others, have, first and last, certified the fact of levitation.

I am surprised to find how little even the editors of your erudite contemporary, The World, are acquainted with Oriental metaphysics in general, and the trousers of the Hindu Fakirs in particular. It was bad enough to make those holy mendicants of the religion of Brahmâ graduate from the Buddhist Lamaseries of Tibet; but it is unpardonable to make them wear baggy breeches in the exercise of their religious functions.

This is as bad as if a Hindu journalist had represented the Rev. Mr. Beecher entering his pulpit in the scant costume of the Fakir—the dhoti, a cloth about the loins, “only that and nothing more.” To account, therefore, for the oft-witnessed, open-air levitations of tile Swamis and Gurus upon the theory of an iron frame concealed beneath


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the clothing, is as reasonable as Monsieur Babinet’s explanation of the table-tipping and tapping as unconscious ventriloquism.

You may object to the act of disembowelling, which I am compelled to affirm I have seen performed. It is as you say, “remarkable,” but still not miraculous. Your suggestion that Dr. Hammond should go and see it is a good one. Science would be the gainer, and your humble correspondent be justified. Are you, however, in a position to guarantee that he would furnish the world of sceptics with an example of “veracious reporting,” if his observation should tend to overthrow the pet theories of what we loosely call science?

Yours very respectfully,

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

New York, March 28th, 1877.

A PROTEST

[From the New York World April 6th, 1877.]

THERE was a time when the geocentric theory was universally accepted by Christian nations, and if you and I had then been carrying on our little philological and psychological controversy, I should have bowed in humility to the dictum of an authority so particularly at home in “the Mysticism of the Orient” But despite all modifications of our astronomical system, I am no heliolater, though I do subscribe for The Sun as well as The World. I feel no more bound to “cajole” or conciliate the one than to suffer my feeble taper to be extinguished by the draught made by the other in its diurnal rush through journalistic space.

As near as I can judge from your writing there is this difference between us, that I write from personal experience, and you upon information and belief My authorities are my eyes and ears; yours, obsolete works of reference and the pernicious advice of a spontaneously generated Lampsakano who learned his Mysticism from the detached head of one Dummkopf. (See The Sun of March 25th My assertions may be corroborated by any traveller, as they have been by the first authorities. Elphinstone’s Kingdom of Kabul was published sixty-two years ago (1815), his History of India thirty-six years ago. If the latter is the “standard text-book” for British civil servants, it certainly is not so for native Hindus, who perhaps know as much of their Philosophy and Religion as he. In fact, a pretty wide reading of European “authorities” has given me a very poor opinion of them, since no two agree. Sir William Jones himself, whose shoe-strings few Orientalists are worthy to untie, made very grave mistakes, which are now being corrected by Max Muller and others. He knew nothing of the Vedas (see Max Muller’s Chips, vol. i. p. 183), and even expressed his belief that Buddha was the same as the Teutonic deity Woden or Odin, and Shâkya—another name of Buddha—the same as Shishak, a king of


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Egypt! Why, therefore, could not Elphinstone make a mess of such subtle religious distinctions as the innumerable sects of Hindu Mystics existing at present?

I am charged with such ignorance that I imagine the Fakirs to be holy mendicants of the religion of Brahma,” while you say they are not of the religion of Brahma at all, but Mohammedans.

Does this precious piece of information also come from Elphinstone? Then I give you a Roland for your Oliver. I refer you to James Mill’s History of British India, vol. . i-283 (London: 1858). You say:

Those seeking ready-made information can find our statements corroborated in any encyclopædia.

Perhaps you refer to Appleton’s? Very well. In the article on James Mill (vol. ii. p. 501), you will find it saying that his India

Was the first complete work on the subject. It was without a rival as a source of information, and the justice of its views appeared in the subsequent measures for the government of that country.

Now, Mill says that the

Fakirs are a sect of Brâhmanism; and that their penances are prescribed by the Laws of Manu.

Will your Lamp-sickener, or whatever the English of that Greek may be, say that Manu was a Mohammedan? And yet this would be no worse than your clothing the Fakirs, who belong, as a rule, to the Brâhman pagodas, in yellow—the colour exclusively worn by Buddhist lamas—and breeches—which form part of the costume of the Mohammedan dervishes. Perhaps it is a natural mistake for your Lampsakanoi, who rely upon Elphinstone for their facts and have not visited India, to confound the Persian dervishes with the Hindu Fakirs. But “while the lamp holds out to burn” read Louis Jacolliot’s Bible in India, just out, and learn from a man who has passed twenty years in India, that your correspondent is neither a fool nor a liar.

You charge me with saying that a Fakir is a “worshipper of God.” I say I did not, as the expression I used, “Fakir is a loose word,” well proves. It was a natural mistake of the reporter, who did not employ stenography at our interview. I said, “A Svamis one who devotes himself entirely to the service of God.”

All Svamis of the Nir-Narrain sects are Fakirs, but all Fakirs are not necessarily Svamis. I refer you to Coleman’s Mythology of the Hindus (p. 244.), and to The Asiatic Journal. Coleman says precisely what Louis Jacolliot says, and both corroborate me. You very oblig-


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ingly give me a lesson in Hindustâni and Devanâgari, and teach me the etymology of “Guru,” “Fakir,” “Gossain,” etc. For answer I refer you to John Shakespear’s large Hindustani-English Dictionary. I may know less English than your Lampsakanoi, but I do know of Hindustâni and Sanskrit more than can be learned on Park Row.

As I have said in another communication, I did not invite the visits of reporters, nor seek the notoriety which has suddenly been thrust upon me. If I reply to your criticisms—rhetorically brilliant, but wholly unwarranted by the facts—it is because I value your good opinion (without caring to cajole you), and at the same time cannot sit quiet and be made to appear alike devoid of experience, knowledge and truthfulness.

Respectfully, but still rebelliously, yours,

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

Monday, April 2nd, 1877.

THE FATE OF THE OCCULTIST

[From the New York World, May 6th, 1877.]

FROM the first month of my arrival in America I began, for reasons mysterious, but perhaps intelligible, to provoke hatred among those who pretended to be on good terms with Me, if not the best of friends. Slanderous reports, vile insinuations and innuendoes have rained about me. For more than two years I have kept silent, although the least of the offences attributed to me were calculated to excite the loathing of a person of My disposition. I have rid myself of a number of these retailers of slander, but finding that I was actually suffering in the estimation of friends whose good opinion I valued, I adopted a policy of seclusion. For two years my world has been in my apartments, and for an average of at least seventeen hours a day I have sat at my desk, with my books and manuscripts as my companions. During this time many highly-valued acquaintanceships have been formed with ladies and gentlemen who have sought me out, without expecting me to return their visits.

I am an old woman, and I feel the need of fresh air as much as any one, but my disgust for the lying, slanderous world that one finds out side of “heathen” uncivilized countries has been such that in seven months I believe I have been out but three times. But no retreat is secure against the anonymous slanderer, who uses the United States mail. Letters have been received by my trusted friends containing the foulest aspersions upon myself. At various times I have been charged with: (1) drunkenness; (2) forgery; (3) being a Russian spy; (4) with being an anti-Russian spy; (5) with being no Russian at all, but a French adventuress; (6) with having been in jail for theft; (7) with being the mistress of a Polish count in Union Square; (8) with murdering seven husbands; (9) with bigamy; (10) with being tile mistress of Col. Olcott, (11) also of an acrobat. Other things might be mentioned, but decency forbids.


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Since the arrival of Wong Chin Foo the game has recomrnenced with double activity. We have received anonymous letters and others, and newspaper slips, telling infamous stories about him. On his part, he has received communications about us, one of which I beg you to insert.

May 4th..

Does the disciple of Buddha know the character of the people with whom he is at present residing? The surroundings of a teacher of morality and religion should be moral. Are his so? On the contrary, they are people of very doubtful reputation, as he can ascertain by applying at the nearest police-station.

A FRIEND.

Of Wong Chin Foo’s merits or shortcomings I know nothing, except that since his arrival his conversation and behaviour have impressed me very favourably. He appears to be a very earnest and enthusiastic student. However, he is a man, and is able to take care of himself, although, like me, a foreigner. But I wish to say for myself just this:
that I defy any person in
America to come forward and prove a single charge against my honour. I invite everyone possessed of such proof as will vindicate them in a court of justice to publish it over their own signatures in the newspapers. I will furnish to anyone a list of my several residences, and contribute towards paying detectives to trace my every step. But I hereby give notice that if any more unverifiable slanders can be traced to responsible sources, I will invoke the protection of the law, which, it is the theory of your national Constitution, was made for heathen as well as Christian denizens.

Respectfully,

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

New York, May 5th 1877

BUDDHISM IN AMERICA.

[From the New York Sun, May 13th, 1877.]

As, in your leading article of May 6th, I am at one moment given credit for knowing something about the religion of the Brâhmans and Buddhists, and, anon, of being a pretender of the class of Jacolliot, and even his plagiarist, you will not wonder at my again knocking at your doors for hospitality. This time I write over my own signature, and am responsible, as I am not under other circumstances.

No wonder that the “learned friend” at your elbow was reminded “of the utterances of one Louis Jacolliot.”

The paragraphs in the very able account of your representative’s interview, which relate to “Adhima and Heva” and “Jezeus Christna,” were translated bodily, in his presence, from the French edition of the Bible in India. They were read, moreover, from the chapter entitled, “Bagaveda”—instead of “Bhagavat,” as you put it, kindly correcting me. In so doing, in my humble opinion, he is right, and the others are wrong, were it but for the reason that the Hindus themselves so pronounce it—at least those of southern India, who speak either the Tamil language or other dialects. Since we seek in vain among Sanskrit philologists for any two who agree as to the spelling or meaning of important Hindu words, and scarcely two as to the orthography of this very title, I respectfully submit that neither “the French fraud” nor I are chargeable with any grave offence in the premises.

For instance, Prof. Whitney, your greatest American Orientalist, and one of the most eminent living, spells it Bagavata; while his equally great opponent, Max Muller, prefers Bagavadgitâ, and half a dozen others spell it in as many different ways. Naturally each scholar, in rendering the Indian words into his own vernacular, follows the national rule of pronunciation; and so, you will see, that Prof. Muller in writing the syllable ad with an a does precisely what Jacolliot does in spelling it ed, the French e having the same sound as the


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AMERICA.

English a before a consonant. The same holds good with the name of the Hindu Saviour, which by different authorities is spelt Krishna, Crisna, Khristna and Krisna; everything, in short, but the right way, Christna, Perhaps you may say that this is there hypothesis. But since every Indianist follows his own fancy in his phonetic transcriptions, I do not know why I may not exercise my best judgment, especially as I can give good reasons to support it.

You affirm that there “never was a Hindu reformer named Jezeus Christna”; and, although I confined my affirmation of his existence to the authority of Jacolliot at the interview in question, I now assert on my own responsibility that there was, and is, a personage of that name recognized and worshipped in India, and that he is not Jesus Christ. Christna is a Brâhmanical deity, and, besides by the Brâhmans, is recognized by several sects of the Jains. When Jacolliot says “Jezeus Christna,” he only shows a little clumsiness in phonetic rendering, and is nearer right than many of his critics. I have been at the festivals of Janmotsar, in commemoration of the birth of Christna (which is their Christmas) and have heard thousands of voices shouting: “Jas-i Christna! Jasas-wi-Christna!” Translated they are: Jas-i, renowned, famous, and Jasas-wi, celebrated, or divinely-renowned, powerful; and Christna, sacred. To avoid being again contradicted, I refer the reader to any Hindustâni dictionary. All the Brâhmans with whom I have talked on the subject spoke of Christna either as Jas-i-Christna, or Jadar Christna, or again used the term, Yadur-pati, Lord of Yâdavas, descendant of Yadu, one of the many titles of Christna in India. You see, therefore, that it is but a question of spelling.

That Christna is preferable to Krishna can be clearly shown under the rules laid down by Burnouf and others upon the authority of the pandits. True, the initial of the name in the Sanskrit is generally written k; but the Sanskrit k is strongly aspirated; it is a guttural expiration, whose only representation is the Greek chi. In English, therefore, the k instead of having the sound of k as in king would be even more aspirated than the h in heaven. As in English the Greek word is written Christos in preference to H’ristos, which would be nearer the mark, so with the Hindu deity; his name under the same rule should be written Christna, notwithstanding the possible unwelcomeness of the resemblance.

M. Taxtor de Ravisi, a French Catholic Orientalist, and for ten years Governor of Karikal (India), Jacolliot’s bitterest opponent in religious

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conclusions, fully appreciates the situation. He would have the name spelt Krishna, because (1) most of the statues of this God are black, and Krishna means black; and (2) because the real name of Christna “was Kaneya, or Caneya.” Very well; but black is Krishna. And if not only Jacolliot, but the Brâhnians themselves are not to be allowed to know as much as their European critics, we will call in the aid of Volney and other Orientalists, who show that the Hinds deity’s name is formed from the radical Chris, meaning sacred, as Jacolliot shows it. Moreover, for the Brâhmans to call their God the “black one would be unnatural and absurd; while to style him the sacred, or pure essence, would be perfectly appropriate to their notions. As to the name being Caneya, M. Taxtor de Ravisi, in suggesting it, completes his own discomfiture. In escaping Scylla he falls into Charybdis. I suppose no one will deny that the Sanskrit Kanyâ means Virgin, for even in modern Hindustâni the Zodiacal sign of Virgo is called Kaniya. Christna is styled Kâneya, as having been born of a Virgin. Begging pardon, then, of the “learned friend” at your elbow, I reaffirm that if there “never was a Hindu reformer named Jezeus Christna,” there was a Hindu Saviour, who is worshipped unto this day as Jasi Christna, or, if it better accords with his pious preferences, Jas-i-Kristna.

When the 84,000 volumes of the Dharma Khanda, or sacred books of the Buddhists, and the thousands upon thousands of ollæ of Vaidic and Brâhmanical literature, now known by their titles only to European scholars, or even a tithe of those actually in their possession are translated, and comprehended, and agreed upon, I will be happy to measure swords again with the solar pandit who has prompted your severe reflections upon your humble subscriber

Though, in common with various authorities, you stigmatize Jacolliot as a “French fraud,” I must really do him the justice to say that his Catholic opponent, De Ravisi, said of his Bible in India, in a report made at the request of the Sociéte Académique de St. Quentin, that it is written

With good faith, of absorbing interest, a learned work on known facts and with familiar arguments.

Ten years’ residence and studies in India were surely enough to fit him to give an opinion. Unfortunately, however, in America it is but too easy to gain the reputation of “a fraud” in much less time.

Respectfully,

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

RUSSIAN ATROCITIES

[From the New York World, Aug. 13th, 1877.]

THE Sublime Porte has had the sublime effrontery to ask the American people to execrate Russian barbarity. It appeals for sympathy on behalf of helpless Turkish subjects at the seat of war. With the memories of Bulgaria and Servia still fresh, this seems the climax of daring hypocrisy. Barely a few months ago the reports of Mr. Schuyler and other impartial observers of the atrocities of Bashi Bazouks sent a thrill of horror through the world. Perpetrated under official sanction, they aroused the indignation of all who had hearts to feel. In to-day’s paper I read another account of pretended Russian cruelties, and your able and just editorial comments upon the same. Permit one who is, perhaps, in a better position than any other private person here to know what is taking place at the front, to inform you of certain facts derived from authentic sources. Besides receiving daily papers from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Tiflis and Odessa, I have an uncle, a cousin and a nephew on active service, and every steamer brings me accounts of military improvements from eye-witnesses. My cousin and nephew have taken part in all bloody engagements in Turkish Armenia up to the present time, and were at the siege and capture of Ardahan. Newspapers may suppress, colour or exaggerate facts; the private letters of brave soldiers to their families rarely do.

Let me say, then, that during this campaign the Turkish troops have been guilty of such fiendish acts as to make me pray that my relatives may be killed rather than fall into their hands. In a letter from the Danube, corroborated by several correspondents of German and Austrian papers, the writer says:

On June 20th we entered Kozlovetz, a Bulgarian town of about two hundred houses, which lies three or four hours distant from Sistova. The sight which met our eyes made the blood of every Russian soldier run cold, hardened though he is to such scenes. On the principal street of the deserted town were placed in rows 140 beheaded bodies of men, women, and children. The heads of these unfortu-


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nates were tastefully piled in a pyramid in the middle of the street. Among the smoking ruins of every house we found half-burned corpses, fearfully mutilated. We caught a Turkish soldier, and to our questions he reluctantly confessed that their chiefs had given orders not to leave a Christian place, however small, before burning it and putting to death every man, woman, and child.

On the first day that the Danube was crossed some foreign correspondents, among them that of the Cologne Gazette, saw several bodies of Russian soldiers whose noses, ears, hands, etc., had been cut off, while the genital organs had been stuffed into the mouths of the corpses. Later, three bodies of Christian women were found—a mother and two daughters—whose condition makes one almost drop the pen in horror at the thought. Entirely nude, split open from below to the navel, their heads cut off; the wrists of each corpse were tied together with strips of skin and flesh flayed from the shoulder down; and the corpses of the three martyrs were similarly bound to each other by long ribbons of flesh dissected from their thighs.

A correspondent writes from Sistova:

The Emperor continues his daily visits to the hospitals and passes whole hours with the wounded. A few (lays ago His Majesty, accompanied by Colonel Wellesley, the British military attache, visited two unfortunate Bulgarians who died on the night following. The skull of one of them was split open both laterally and vertically, by two sword-cuts, an eye was torn out, and he was otherwise mutilated. He explained, as well as he could, that several Turks seeing him, demanded his money. As he had none, four of the party held him fast while the fifth, brandishing his sword, and repeating all the time, “There, you Christian dog, there’s your cross for you!” first split his skull from the forehead to the back of the head, and then crosswise from ear to ear. While the Emperor was listening to these details the greatest agony was depicted upon his face. Taking Colonel Wellesley by the arm, and pointing to the Bulgarian, he said to him in French: “See the work of your prolégés’” The British officer blushed and was much confused.

The special correspondent of the London Standard, describing his audience with the Grand Duke Nicholas, Commander-in-Chief, on July 7th, says that the Grand Duke communicated to him the most horrifying details about the cruelties committed at Dobroudga. A Christian whose hands were tied with strips of his own skin cut from the length of both his arms, and his tongue cut down from the root, was laid at the feet of the Emperor and died there before the eyes of the Czar and the British agent, the same Colonel Wellesley, who was in attendance. Turning to the latter, His Majesty, with a stern expression, asked him to inform his Government of what he had just seen for himself. Says the correspondent:


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From the beginning of the war I have heard of quite a number of such cases, but never witnessed one myself: After the personal assurances given to me by the Grand Duke, it is no longer possible to doubt that the Turkish officers are unable to control their irregular troops.

The correspondent of The Northern Messenger had gone the rounds of the hospitals to question the wounded soldiers. Four of them, belonging to the Second Battalion of Minsk Rifles, testified with the most solemn asseverations that they had seen the Turks approach the wounded, rob them, mutilate their bodies in the most cruel way, finish them with the bayonet. They themselves had avoided this fate only by feigning death. It is a common thing for wounded Turks to allure Russian soldiers and members of the sanitary corps to their assistance, and, as they bend over them, to kill with a revolver or dagger those who would relieve them. A case like this occurred under the eye of one of my correspondents in Turkish Armenia, and was in all the Russian papers. A sergeant’s assistant (a sanitar) was despatched under such circumstances; thereupon a soldier standing by killed the assassin.

My cousin, Major Alexander U. White—of the Sixteenth Nijegorodsk Dragoons, one of the most gallant soldiers in the army of Loris Melikof and who has just been decorated by the Grand Duke, under the authority of the Emperor, with a golden sword inscribed, “For Bravery”—says that it is becoming positively dangerous to relieve a wounded Turk. The people who robbed and killed the wounded in the hospital at Ardahan upon the entry of the Russian troops were the Karapapahs, Mussulmans and the supposed allies of the Turks. During the siege they prudently awaited the issue from a safe distance. As soon as the Russians conquered, the Karapapahs flew like so many tigers into the town, slaying the wounded Turks, robbing the dead, pillaging houses, bringing the horses and mules of the fleeing enemy into the Russian camp, and swearing allegiance to the Commander-in-Chief. The Cossacks had all the trouble in the world to prevent their new allies from continuing the greatest excesses. To charge, therefore, upon the Russians the atrocities of these cowardly jackals (a nomadic tribe of brigands) is an impudent lie of Mukhtar Pasha, whose falsifications have become so notorious that some Parisian papers have nicknamed him “Blaguer Pasha.” His despatches are only matched in mendacity by those of the Spanish commanders in Cuba.


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The stupidity of charging such excesses upon the Russian army becomes apparent when we remember that the policy of the Government from the first has been to pay liberally for supplies, and win the goodwill of the people of the invaded provinces by kindness. So marked and successful has this policy proved in General Loris Melikof’s field of operations, that the anti-Russian papers of England, Austria and other countries have denounced it as Russian “craft.” With the Danubian forces is the Emperor in person, liberator of millions of serfs, and the mildest and justest sovereign who has ever occupied the throne of any country. As he won the love of his whole people and the adoration of his army by his sense of justice and benevolent regard, I ask you if he is likely to countenance any cruel excesses? While the cowardly Abdul-Hamid hides in the alcoves of his harem, and of the imperial princes none have taken the field, the Czar follows his army, step by step, submits to comparatively severe and unaccustomed hardships, and exposes his health and life against all the rernonstrances and prayers of Prince Gortschakof. His four sons are all in active service, and the son of the Grand Duke Nicholas was decorated at the crossing of the Danube for personal courage, having exposed his life for hours under a shower of bullets.

I only ask the American people to do justice to their long-tried and unfaltering friends, the Russians. However politicians may have planned, the Russian people have entered this war as a holy crusade to rescue millions of helpless Slavonians—their brothers—of the Danube from Turkish cruelty. The people have dragged the Government to the field. Russia is surrounded by false neutrals, who but watch the opportunity to fly at her throat, and, shameful fact, the blessing of the Pope rests upon the Moslem standards, and his curse against his fellow Christians has been read in all the Catholic churches. For my part, I care a great deal less even than my countrymen for his blessings or curses, for besides other reasons I regard this war not as one of Christian against Moslem, but as one of humanity and civilization against barbarism. This is the view of the Catholic Czecks of Bohemia. So great was their indignation at what they rightly considered the dishonour of the Roman Catholic Church that on July 4th—anniversary of the martyrdom of John Huss—notwithstanding the efforts of the police, they repaired in multitudes to the heights of Smichovo, Beraun and other hills around Prague, and burnt at the stake the portraits and wax effigies of the Pope and the Prince Archbishop


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Schwartzenberg, and the papal discourse against the Russian Emperor and army, singing the while Slavonian national songs, and shouting, “Down with the Pope! Death to the Ultramontanes! Hurrah for the Czar-Liberator! “—all of which shows that there are good Catholics among the Slavonians, at least, who rightly hold in higher estimation the principles of national solidarity than foolish dogmas of the Vatican, even though backed by pretended infallibility.

Respectfully,

August 9th H. P. BLAVATSKY.

WASHING THE DISCIPLES’ FEET

[From the New York Sun, August 16th, 1877.]

AT the ceremony of “feet-washing” which occurred at Limwood Camp-ground, August 8th, and is described in The Sun of to-day, Elder Jones, of Mechanicsburg, Pa., professed to give the history of this ancient custom. The report says:

He claimed that its origin did not date anterior to the coming of Christ; neither was the matter of cleanliness to be thought of in this connection. Its observance was due exclusively to the fact that it was a scriptural injunction; it originated in Christ’s example, and it devolved upon his hearers to follow this example. Numerous scriptural passages were quoted in support of this argument.

The reverend gentleman is in error. The ceremony was first performed by the Hindu Christna (or Krishna) who washed the feet of his Brâhmans as an example of humility, many thousand years anterior to the Christian era. Chapter and verse will be given, if required, from the Brâhmanical books. Meanwhile, the reader is referred to the Rev. John P. Lundy’s Monumental christianity, p. 154.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

TRICKERY OR MAGIC?
—————

[From The Religio-Philosophical Journal, Dec. 22nd, 1877.]

A wise saying is that which affirms that he who seeks to prove too much, in the end proves nothing. Prof. W. B. Carpenter, F.R.S. (and otherwise alphabetically adorned), furnishes a conspicuous example in his strife with men better than himself. His assaults accumulate bitterness with every new periodical he makes his organ, and in proportion with the increase of his abuse his arguments lose force and cogency. And, forsooth, he nevertheless lectures his antagonists for their lack of “calm discussion,” as though he were not the very type of controversial nitro-glycerine! Rushing at them with his proofs, which are “incontrovertible” only in his own estimation, he commits himself more than once. By one of such committals I mean to profit to-day, by citing some-curious experiences of my own.

My object in writing the present is far from that of taking any part in this onslaught upon reputations. Messrs. Wallace and Crookes are well able to take care of themselves. Each has contributed in his own specialty towards real progress in useful knowledge more than Dr. Carpenter in his. Both have been honoured for valuable original researches and discoveries, while their accuser has been often charged with being no better than a very clever compiler of other men’s ideas. After reading the able rejoinders of the “defendants” and the scathing review of the mace-swinging Prof. Buchanan, every one, except his friends, the psychophobists, can see that Dr. Carpenter is completely floored. He is as dead as the traditional door nail.

In the December supplement of The Popular Science Monthly, I find, (p.116) the interesting admission that a poor Hindu juggler can perform a feat that quite takes the great Professor’ breath away! In comparison, the mediumistic phenomena of Miss Nichol (Mrs. Guppy) are of no account. Says Dr. Carpenter:

The celebrated “tree-trick,” which most people who have been long in India have seen, as described by several of our most distinguished civilians and scientific


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officers, is simply the greatest marvel I ever heard of. That a mango-tree should first shoot up to a height of six inches, from a grass-plot to which the conjurers had no previous access, beneath an inverted cylindrical basket, whose emptiness has been previously demonstrated, and that this tree should appear to grow in the course of half an hour from six inches to six feet, under a succession of taller and yet taller baskets, beats Miss Nichol.

Well, I should think it did. At any rate, it beats anything that any F.R.S. can show by daylight or dark, in the Royal Institution or else where. Would not one think that such a phenomenon so attested, and occurring under circumstances that preclude trickery, would provoke scientific investigation? If not, what would? But observe the knot hole through which an F.R.S. can creep out. “Does Mr. Wallace,” ironically asks the Professor,

Attribute this to a spiritual agency? or, like the world in general [of course meaning the world that science created and Carpenter energizes] and the performers of the tree-trick in particular, does he regard it as a piece of clever jugglery?

Leaving Mr. Wallace, if he survives this Jovian thunder-bolt, to answer for himself, I have to say for the “performers” that they would respond with an emphatic “No” to both interrogatories. The Hindu jugglers neither claim for their performance a “spiritual agency,” nor admit it to be a “trick of clever jugglery.” The ground they take is that the tricks are produced by certain powers inherent in man him self, which may he used for a good or bad purpose. And the ground that I, humbly following after those whose opinion is based on really exact psychological experiments and knowledge, take, is, that neither Dr. Carpenter nor his body-guard of scientists, though their titles stream after their names like the tail after a kite, have as yet the slightest conception of these powers. To acquire even a superficial knowledge of them, they must change their scientific and philosophical methods. Following after Wallace and Crookes, they must begin with the A B C of Spiritualism, which—meaning to be very scornful—Dr. Carpenter terms “the centre of enlightenment and progress.” They must take their lessons not alone from the true but as well from spurious phenomena, from what his (Carpenter’s) chief authority, the “arch-priest of the new religion,” properly classifies as “Delusions, Absurdities and Trickeries.” After wading through all this, as every intelligent investigator has had to do, he may get some glimpses of truth. It is as useful to learn what the phenomena are not, as to find out what they are.


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Dr. Carpenter has two patent keys warranted to unlock every secret door of the mediumistic cabinet. They are labelled “expectancy” and “prepossession.” Most scientists have some pick-lock like this. But to the “tree-trick” they scarcely apply; for neither his “distinguished civilians” nor “scientific officers” could have expected to see a stark- naked Hindu on a strange glass-plot, in full daylight, make a mango-tree grow six feet from the seed in half an hour, their “prepossessions” would be all against it. It cannot be a “spiritual agency”; it must be “jugglery.” Now Maskelyne and Cooke, two clever English jugglers, have been keeping the mouths and eyes of all London wide open with their exposures of Spiritualism. They are admired by all the scientists, and at Slade’s trial figured as expert witnesses for the prosecution. They are at Dr. Carpenter’s elbow. Why does he not call them to explain this clever jugglery, and make Messrs. Wallace and Crookes blush with shame at their own idiocy? All the tricks of the trade are familiar to them; where can science find better allies? But we must insist upon identical conditions. The “Tree-Trick” must not be per formed by gas-light on the platform of any Egyptian Hall, nor with the performers in full evening dress. It must be in broad daylight, on a strange grass-plot to which the conjurers had no previous access. There must he no machinery, no confederates, white cravats and swallow-tail coats must be laid aside, and the English champions appear in the primitive apparel of Adam and Eve—a tight-fitting “coat of skin,” and with the single addition of a dhoti, or a breech cloth seven inches wide. The Hindus do all this, and we only ask fair play. If they raise a mango-sapling under these circumstances, Dr. Carpenter will he at perfect liberty to beat therewith the last remnant of brains out of the head of any “crazy Spiritualist” he may encounter. But until then, the less he says about Hindus jugglery the better for his scientific reputation.

It is not to be denied that in India, China and elsewhere in the East there are veritable jugglers who exhibit tricks. Equally true is it that some of these performances surpass any with which Western people are acquainted. But these are neither Fakirs nor the performers of the “mango-tree” marvel, as described by Dr. Carpenter. Even this is sometimes imitated both by Indian and European adepts in sleight of-hand, but under totally different conditions. Modestly following in the rear of the “distinguished civilians” and “scientific officers,” I will now narrate something which I have seen with my own eyes.


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While at Cawnpur, en route to Benares, the holy city, a lady, my travelling companion, was robbed of the entire contents of a small trunk. Jewelry, dresses, and even her note-book, containing a diary which she had been carefully compiling for over three months, had mysteriously disappeared, without the lock of the valise having been disturbed. Several hours, perhaps a night and a day had passed since the robbery, as we had started at daybreak to explore some neighbouring ruins, still freshly allied with the Nana Sahib’s reprisals on the English. My companion’s first thought was to call upon the local police; mine for the help of some native gossain (a holy man supposed to be informed of everything) or at least a jadugar, or conjurer. But the ideas of civilization prevailed, and a whole week was wasted in fruitless visits to the chabutara (police-house), and interviews with the kotwal, its chief. In despair, my expedient was at last resorted to, and a gossain procured. We occupied a small bungalow at the extreme end of one of the suburbs, on the right bank of the Ganges, and from the verandah a full view of the river was had, which at that place was very narrow.

Our experiment was made on that verandah in the presence of the family of the landlord—a half-caste Portuguese from the south—my friend and myself and two freshly-imported Frenchmen, who laughed outrageously at our superstition. Time, three o’clock in the afternoon. The heat was suffocating, but notwithstanding, the holy man—a coffee coloured, living skeleton—demanded that the motion of the pankah (hanging fan worked by a cord) should be stopped. He gave no reason, but it was because the agitation of the air interferes with all delicate magnetic experiments. We had all heard of the “rolling pot” as an agency for the detection of theft in India—a common iron pot being made, under the influence of a Hindu conjurer, to roll of its own impulse, without any hands touching it, to the very spot where the stolen goods are concealed. The gossain proceeded otherwise. He first of all demanded some article that had been latest in contact with the contents of the valise; a pair of gloves was handed him. He pressed them between his thin palms, and, rolling them over and over again, then dropped them on the floor and proceeded to turn himself slowly around, with arms outstretched and fingers expanded, as though he were seeking the direction in which the property lay. Suddenly he stopped with a jerk, sank gradually to the floor and remained motionless, sitting cross-legged and with his arms still outstretched in the


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same direction, as though plunged in a cataleptic trance. This lasted for over an hour, which in that suffocating atmosphere was to us one long torture. Suddenly the landlord sprang from his seat to the balustrade, and began intently looking towards the river, in which direction our eyes also turned. Coming from whence, or how, we could not tell, but out there, over the water, and near its surface, was a dark object approaching. What it was we could not make out; but the mass seemed impelled by some interior force to revolve, at first slowly, but then faster and faster as it drew near. It was as though supported on an invisible pavement, and its course was in a direct line as the bee flies. It reached the bank, disappeared again among the high vegetation, and anon, rebounding with force as it leaped over the low garden wall, flew rather than rolled on to the verandah and dropped with a heavy thud under the extended palms of the gossain. A violent, convulsive tremor shook the frame of the old man, as with a deep sigh he opened his half-closed eyes. All were astonished, but the French men stared at the bundle with an expression of idiotic terror in their eyes. Rising from the ground the holy man opened the tarred canvas envelope, and within were found all the stolen articles down to the least thing. Without a word or waiting for thanks, he salaamed low to the company and disappeared through the doorway, before we recovered from our surprise. We had to run after him a long way before we could press upon him a dozen rupees, which blessings he received in his wooden bowl.

This may appear a very surprising and incredible story to Europeans and Americans who have never been in India. But we have Dr. Carpenter’s authority for it, that even his “distinguished civilian” friends and “scientific officers,” who are as little likely to sniff out anything mystical there with their aristocratic noses as Dr. Carpenter to see it with his telescopic, microscopic, double-magnifying scientific eyes in England, have witnessed the mango “tree-trick,” which is still more wonderful. If the latter is “clever jugglery” the other must be, too. Will the white-cravated and swallow-tailed gentlemen of the Egyptian Hall, please show the Royal Society how either is done?

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

THE JEWS IN RUSSIA

[From the New York World, Sept. 25th, 1877.]

IT is to be regretted that your incandescent contemporary, The Sun, should have no better sources of information. It stated on Saturday last that

In Russia the persecution of the Israelites is continued, with nearly all its ancient cruelty. They are not permitted to reside in many of the greatest cities. Kief and Novgorod as well as Moscow are forbidden to them, and even in the rural districts they are burdened with multiform exactions.

This is the reverse of correct, as is also the further statement that

They have been robbed and oppressed in Bulgaria by the Russians.

The murdering and plundering at the seat of war, it is now pretty well settled, has been done by the Turks exclusively, and, notwithstanding that the English and other Turkophile organs have diligently cast the blame upon the Russians, the plot f the Ottoman Government, thanks to the honest old German Emperor, is now discovered. The Turks are convicted of systematic lying, and nearly every country, including England herself, has sent a protest to the Sublime Porte against atrocities. As to the condition of Israelites in Russia, it has immensely improved since the ascension of Alexander II to the throne of his father. For more than ten years they have been placed on jury duty, admitted to the bar, and otherwise accorded civil rights and privileges. If social disabilities still linger, we are scarcely the ones to chide, in view of our Saratoga and Long Branch customs, and the recent little unpleasantness between Mr. Hilton and the descendants of the “chosen people.”

If your neighbour would take the trouble to ask any traveller or Russian Israelite now in America, it would learn that Kief, as well as other “greatest cities” are full of Jews; that in fact there are more Jews than Gentiles in the first-named of these cities. Pretty much all trade is in their hands, and they furnish even all the olive-oil that is perma-


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RUSSIA.

nently burnt at the rakka (shrines) of the 700 orthodox saints whose beatified mummies fill up the catacombs of Kief, and the wax for the candles on all the altars. It is again the Jews who keep the dram-shops, or Kabak, where the faithful congregate after service to give a last fillip to their devotional ardour. It is barely four months since the chief Rabbi of Moscow published in the official Viedomosty an earnest address to his co-religionists throughout the empire to remind them that they were Russians by nativity, and called upon them to display their patriotism in subscriptions for the wounded, prayers in the synagogues for the success of the Russian arms, and in all other practical ways. In 1870, during the emeut in Odessa, which was caused by some Jewish children throwing dirt into the church on Easter night, and which lasted more than a week, the Russian soldiers shot and bayoneted twelve Christian Russians and not a single Jew; while—and I speak as an eye-witness—over two hundred rioters were publicly whipped by order of the Governor-General, Kotzebue, of whom none were Israelites. That there is a hatred between them and the more fanatical Christians is true, but the Russian Government can be no more blamed for this than the British and American Governments because Orangemen and Catholics mutually hate, beat, and occasionally kill each other.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

New York, Sept. 24th 1877.

H. P. BLAVATSKY’S MASONIC

PATENT

[From The Franklin Register, Feb. 8th, 1878.]

[ EDITORIAL.— are gratified to be able to present to the readers of The Register this week, the following highly-characteristic letter, prepared expressly for our paper by Madame Helen P. Blavatsky, the authoress of Isis Unveiled. In this letter the lady defends the validity of her diploma as a Mason, reference to which was had in our issue of January 8th. The immediate cause of the letter from Madame B. was the multiplication of attacks upon her claim to that distinguished honour both before and since the publication mentioned.

The field is open for a rejoinder; and we trust that a champion will appear, to defend that which she so vigorously and bravely assails.

That the subject-matter in controversy may be seen at a glance by those who may not be regular readers of our paper, we again print the text of her diploma.

To the Glory of the Sublime Architect of the Universe.

Ancient and Primitive Rite of Masonry, derived through the Charter of the

Sovereign Sanctuary of America, from the Grand Council of the

Grand Lodge of France.

Salutation on all points of the Triangle.

Respect to the Order.

Peace, Tolerance, Truth.

To all Illustrious and Enlightened Masons throughout the world—union, prosperity,

friendship, fraternity.

We, the The Sovereign Grand Master General, and we, the Sovereign Grand Conservators, thirty-third and last degree of the Sovereign Sanctuary for England, Wales, etc., decorated with the Grand Star of Sirius, etc., Grand Commanders of the Three Legions of the Knights of Masonry, by virtue of the high authority with which we are invested, have declared and proclaimed, and by these presents do declare and proclaim our illustrious and enlightened Brother, H. P. Blavatsky, to be an Apprentice, Companion, Perfect Mistress, Sublime Elect


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Scotch Lady, Grand Elect, Chevaliere de Rose Croix, Adonaite Mistress, Perfect Venerable Mistress, and a crowned Princess of Rite of Adoption.

Given under our hands and the seals of the Sovereign Sanctuary for England and Wales, sitting in the Valley of London, this 24th day of November, 1877, year of true light ooo,ooo,ooo.

JOHN YARKER, thirty-third degree, Sovereign Grand Master.

M. CASPARI, thirty-third degree, Grand chancellor.

A. D. LOEWENSRARK, thirty-third degree, Grand Secretary.]
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To the Editor of “ The Frankin Register.”

I am obliged to correct Certain errors in your highly complimentary editorial in The Register of January 18th. You say that I have taken “the regular degrees in Masonic Lodges” and attained high dignity in the order, and further add:

Upon Madame B. has recently been conferred the diploma of the thirty-third Masonic Degree, from the oldest Masonic body in the world.

If you will kindly refer to my Isis Unveiled (vol. ii. p. 394), YOU will find me saying:

We are neither under promise, obligation, nor oath, and therefore violate no confidence,—reference being made to Western Masonry, to the criticism of which the chapter is devoted; and full assurance is given that I have never taken “the regular degrees” in any Western Masonic Lodge. Of course, therefore, having taken no such degrees, I am not a thirty-third degree Mason. In a private note, also in your most recent editorial, you state that you find yourself taken to task by various Masons, among them one who has taken thirty-three degrees—which include the “Ineffable”—for what you said about me. My Masonic experience—if you will so term membership in several Eastern Masonic Fraternities and Esoteric Brotherhoods—is confined to the Orient. But, nevertheless, this neither prevents my knowing, in common with all Eastern “Masons,” everything connected with Western Masonry (including the numberless humbugs that have been imposed upon the Craft during the last half century) nor, since the receipt of the diploma from the “Sovereign Grand Master,” of which you publish the text, my being entitled to call myself a Mason. Claiming nothing, therefore, in Western Masonry but what is expressed in the above diploma, you will perceive that your Masonic mentors must transfer their quarrel to John Yarker, jun., P.M., P.Mk., M.Pz., P.G.C., and M.W.S.K.T. and R.C., K.T., P.K.H., and K.A.R.S., P.M.W., P.S.G.C. and P.S.,

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Dai AD., A. and P. Rite, to the man, in short, who is recognized in England and Wales and the whole world, as a member of the Masonic Archæological Institute; as Honorary Fellow of the London Literary Union; of Lodge No. 227, Dublin; of the Bristol College of Rosicrucians; who is Past Grand Mareschal of the Temple; member of the Royal Grand Council of the Antient Rites time immemorial; keeper of the Ancient Royal Secrets, Grand Commander of Mizraim, Ark Mariners, Red Cross Constantine, Babylon and Palestine, R. Grand Superintendent for Lancashire, Sovereign Grand Conservator of the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Masonry, thirty-third and last degree, etc., from whom the Patent issued.

Your “Ineffable” friend must have cultivated his spiritual perceptions to small purpose in the investigation and contemplation of the “Ineffable Name,” from the fourth to the fourteenth degrees of that gilded humbug, the A. and A. Rite, if he could say that there is,

No authority for a derivation through the charter of the Sovereign Sanctuary of America, to issue this patent.

He lives in a veritable Crystal Palace of Masonic glass, and must look out for falling stones. Brother Yarker says, in his Notes on the

Modern Rosicrucianism and the various Rites and Degrees (p. 149), that the Grand Orient, derived from the Craft Grand Lodge of England, in 1725, works and recognizes the following Rites, appointing representatives with chapters in America and elsewhere: 1. French Rite; 2. Rite of Heredom; 3. A. and A. Rite; 4. Rite of Kilwinning; 5. Philosophical Rite; 6. Rite du Régime rectif; 7. Rite of Memphis; 8. Rite of Mizraim. All under a grand college of Rites.

The A. and P. Rite was originally chartered in America, November 9th 1856, with David McChellan as G. M. [ Kenneth Mackenzie’s Royal Masonic Cyclopædia p. 43], and in 1862 submitted entirely to the Grand Orient of France. In 1862, the Grand Orient vised and sealed the American Patent of Seymour as G. M., and mutual representatives were appointed, down to 1866, when the relations of the G. 0. with America were ruptured, and the American Sovereign Sanctuary took up its position, “in the bosom” of the Ancient Cernear Council, of the “Scottish Rite” of thirty-three degrees, as John Yarker says, in the above quoted work. In 1872 a Sovereign Sanctuary of the Rite was established in England, by the American Grand Body, with John Yarker as Grand Master. Down to the present time the legality of Seymour’s Sanctuary has never been disputed by the Grand Orient of France, and reference to it is found in Marconis de Nègre’s books.


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It sounds very grand, no doubt, to be a thirty-second degreeist, and an “Ineffable” one into the bargain; but read what Robert B. Folger, M.D., Past Master thirty-third, says himself in his Ancient’ and Accepted Scottish Rite in Thirty-three Degrees:

With reference to the other degrees, . . . (with the exception of the thirty third, which was manufactured in Charleston) they were all in the possession of the G. 0. before, but were termed ... obsolete.

And further: he asks:

Who were the persons that formed this Supreme Council of the thirty-third degree? And where did they get that degree, or the power to confer it?

Their patents have never been produced, nor has any evidence ever yet been given that they came in possession of the thirty-third degree in a regular and lawful manner (pp. 92, 95, 96).

That an American Rite, thus spuriously organized, declines to acknowledge the Patent of an English Sovereign Sanctuary, duly recognized by the Grand Orient of France, does not at all invalidate my claim to Masonic honours. As well might Protestants refuse to call the Dominicans Christians, because they—the Protestants—broke away from the Catholic Church and set up for themselves, as for A. and A. Masons of America to deny the validity of a Patent from an English A. and P. Rite body. Though I have nothing to do with American modern Masonry, and do not expect to have, yet, feeling highly honoured by the distinction conferred upon me by Brother Yarker, I mean to stand for my chartered rights, and to recognize no other authority than that of the high Masons of England, who have been pleased to send me this unsolicited and unexpected testimonial of their approval of my humble labours.

Of a piece with the above is the ignorant rudeness of certain critics who pronounce Cagliostro an “impostor” and his desire of engrafting Eastern Philosophy upon Western Masonry “charlatanism.” Without such a union Western Masonry is a corpse without a soul. As Yarker observes, in his Notes on the Mysteries of Antiquity:

As the Masonic fraternity is now governed, the Craft is becoming a storehouse of paltry Masonic emperors and other charlatans, who swindle their brothers, and feather their nests out of the aristocratic pretensions which they have tacked on to our institutions—ad captanduin vulgus.

Respectfully,

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

VIEWS OF THE THEOSOPHISTS

[From the London Spiritualist.]

PERMIT a humble Theosophist to appear for the first time in your columns, to say a few words in defence of our beliefs. I see in your issue of December 21St ultimo, one of your correspondents, Mr. J. Croucher, makes the following very bold assertions:

Had the Theosophists thoroughly comprehended the nature of the soul and spirit, and its relation to the body, they would have known that if the soul once leaves, it leaves for ever.

This is so ambiguous that, unless he uses the term “soul” to designate only the vital principle, I can only suppose that he falls into the common error of calling the astral body, spirit, and the immortal essence, “soul.” We Theosophists, as Col. Olcott has told you, do vice versa.

Besides the unwarranted imputation on us of ignorance, Mr. Croucher has an idea (peculiar to himself) that the problem which has heretofore taxed the powers of the metaphysicians in all ages has been solved in our own. It is hardly to be supposed that Theosophists or any others “thoroughly” comprehend the nature of the soul and spirit, and their relation to the body. Such an achievement is for Omniscience, and we Theosophists treading the path worn by the footsteps of the old Sages in the moving sands of exoteric philosophy, can only hope to approximate to the absolute truth. It is really more than doubtful whether Mr. Croucher can do better, even though an “inspirational medium,’’ and experienced ‘‘through constant sittings with one of the best trance mediums” in your country. I may well leave to time and Spiritual Philosophy to entirely vindicate us in the far here after. When any Œdipus of this or the next century shall have solved this eternal enigma of the Sphinx—man, every modern dogma, not excepting some pets of the Spiritualists, will be swept away, as the Theban monster, according to the legend, leaped from his promontory into the sea, and was seen no more.


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As early as February 8th, 1876, your learned correspondent, “M.A. Oxon.,” took occasion, in an article entitled “Soul and Spirit,” to point out the frequent confusion of the terms by other writers. As things are no better now, I will take the opportunity to show how surely Mr. Croucher, and many other Spiritualists of whom he may be taken as the spokesman, misapprehend Col. Olcott’s meaning and the views of the New York Theosophists. Col. Olcott neither affirmed nor dreamed of implying that the immortal spirit leaves the body to produce the medial displays. And yet Mr. Croucher evidently thinks he did, for the word “spirit” to him means the inner, astral man, or double. Here is what Col. Olcott did say, double commas and all:

That mediumistic physical phenomena are not produced by pure spirits, but by “souls” embodied or disembodied, and usually with the help of Elementals.

Any intelligent reader must perceive that, in placing the word “souls” in quotation marks, the writer indicated that he was using it in a sense not his own. As a Theosophist, he would more properly and philosophically have said for himself “astral spirits” or “astral men,” or doubles. Hence, the criticism is wholly without even a foundation of plausibility. I wonder that a man could be found who, on so frail a basis, would have attempted so sweeping a denunciation. As it is, our President only propounded the trine of man, like the ancient and Oriental Philosophers and their worthy imitator Paul, who held that the physical corporeity, the flesh and blood, was permeated and so kept alive by the Psuche, the soul or astral body. This doctrine, that man is trine—spirit or Nous, soul and body—was taught by the Apostle of the Gentiles more broadly and clearly than it has been by any of his Christian successors (see i Thess., V. 23). But having evidently forgotten or neglected to “thoroughly” study the transcendental opinions of the ancient Philosophers and the Christian Apostle upon the subject, Mr. Croucher views the soul (Psuche) as spirit (Nous) and vice versa.

The Buddhists, who separate the three entities in man (though viewing them as one when on the path to Nirvana), yet divide the soul into several parts, and have names for each of these and their functions. Thus confusion is unknown among them. The old Greeks did likewise, holding that Psuche was bios, or physical life, and it was thumos, or passional nature, the animals being accorded but the lower faculty of the soul instinct. The soul or Psuche is itself a combination, consensus or unity of the bios, or physical vitality, the epithumia or concupiscible nature, and the phrén, mens or mind. Perhaps the animus


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ought to be included. It is constituted of ethereal substance, which pervades the whole universe, and is derived wholly from the soul of the world—Anima Mundi or the Buddhist Svabhâvat—which is not spirit; though intangible and impalpable, it is yet, by comparison with spirit or pure abstraction, objective matter. By its complex nature, the soul may descend and ally itself so closely to the corporeal nature as to exclude a higher life from exerting any moral influence upon it. On the other hand, it can so closely attach itself to the Nous or spirit, as to share its potency, in which case its vehicle, physical man, will appear as a God even during his terrestrial life. Unless such union of soul and spirit does occur, either during this life or after physical death, the individual man is not immortal as an entity. The Psuche is sooner or later disintegrated. Though the man may have gained “the whole world,” he has lost his “soul.” Paul, when teaching the anastasis, or continuation of individual spiritual life after death, set forth that there was a physical body which was raised in incorruptible substance.

The spiritual body is most assuredly not one of the bodies, or visible or tangible larvre, which form in circle-rooms, and are so improperly termed “materialized spirits.” When once the metanoia,, the full developing of spiritual life, has lifted the spiritual body out of the psychical (the disembodied, corruptible, astral man, what Col. Olcott calls “soul”), it becomes, in strict ratio with its progress, more and more an abstraction for the corporeal senses. It can influence, inspire, and even communicate with men subjectively; it can make itself felt, and even, in those rare instances when the clairvoyant is perfectly pure and perfectly lucid, be seen by the inner eye (which is the eye of the purified Psuche—soul). But how can it ever manifest objectively?

It will be seen, then, that to apply the term “spirit” to the materialized eldola of your “form-manifestations” is grossly improper, and something ought to be done to change the practice, since scholars have begun to discuss the subject. At best, when not what the Greeks termed phantasma, they are but phasma or apparitions.

In scholars, speculators, and especially in our modern savants, the psychical principle is more or less pervaded by the corporeal, and “the things of the spirit are foolishness and impossible to be known” (i Cor., ii. 14). Plato was then right, in his way, in despising land measuring, geometry and arithmetic, for all these overlooked all high ideas. Plutarch taught that at death Proserpine separated the body


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and the soul entirely, after which the latter became a free and independent demon (daimon). Afterward the good underwent a second dissolution: Demeter divided the Psuche from the Nous or Pneuma. The former was dissolved after a time into ethereal particles—hence the inevitable dissolution and subsequent annihilation of the man who at death is purely psychical; the latter, the Nous, ascended to its higher divine power and became gradually a pure, divine spirit. Kapila, in common with all Eastern Philosophers, despised the purely psychical nature. It is this agglomeration of the grosser particles of the soul, the mesmeric exhalations of human nature imbued with all its terrestrial desires and propensities, its vices, imperfections and weakness, forming the astral body, which can become objective under certain circumstances, which the Buddhists call the Skandhas (the groups), and Col. Olcott has for convenience termed the “soul.” The Buddhists and Brâhmans teach that the man’s individuality is not secured until he has passed through and become disembarrassed of the last of these groups, the final vestige of earthly taint. Hence their doctrine of metempsychosis, so ridiculed and so utterly misunderstood by our greatest Orientalists.

Even the physicists teach us that the particles composing physical man are, by evolution, reworked by nature into every variety of inferior physical form. Why, then, are the Buddhists unphilosophical or even unscientific, in affirming that the semi-material Skandhas of the astral man (his very ego, up to the point of final purification) are appropriated to the evolution of minor astral forms (which, of course, enter into the purely physical bodies of animals) as fast as he throws them off in his progress toward Nirvana? Therefore, we may correctly say, that so long as the disembodied man is throwing off a single particle of these Skandhas, a portion of him is being reincarnated in the bodies of plants and animals. And if he, the disembodied astral man, be so material that “Demeter” cannot find even one spark of the Pneuma to carry up to the “divine power,” then the individual, so to speak, is dissolved, piece by piece, into the crucible of evolution, or, as the Hindus allegorically illustrate it, he passes thousands of years in the bodies of impure animals. Here we see how completely the ancient Greek and Hindu Philosophers, the modern Oriental schools, and the Theosophists, are ranged on one side, in perfect accord, and the bright array of “inspirational mediums” and “spirit guides” stand in perfect discord on the other. Though no two of the latter, unfortunately,


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agree as to what is and what is not truth, yet they do agree with unanimitv to antagonize whatever of the teachings of the Philosophers we may repeat.

Let it not be inferred, though, from this, that I, or any other real Theosophist, undervalue true spiritual phenomena or philosophy, or that we do not believe in the communication between mortals and pure Spirits, any less than we do in communication between bad men and bad Spirits, or even of good men with bad Spirits under bad conditions. Occultism is the essence of Spiritualism, while modern or popular Spiritualism I cannot better characterize than as adulterated unconscious Magic. We go so far as to say that all the great and noble characters, all the grand geniuses, the poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, all who have worked at any time for the realization of their highest ideal, irrespective of selfish ends—have been spiritually inspired; not mediums, as many Spiritualists call them—passive tools in the hands of controlling guides—but incarnate, illuminated souls, working consciously in collaboration with the pure disembodied human and new-embodied high Planetary Spirits, for the elevation and spiri-tualization of mankind. We believe that everything in material life is most intimately associated with spiritual agencies. As regards physical phenomena and mediumship, we believe that it is only when the passive medium has given place, or rather grown into, the conscious mediator, that he discerns between Spirits good and bad. And we do believe, and know also, that while the incarnate man (though the highest Adept) cannot vie in potency with the pure disembodied Spirits, who, freed of all their Skandhas, have become subjective to the physical senses, yet he can perfectly equal, and can far surpass in the way of phenomena, mental or physical, the average “Spirit” of modern mediumship. Believing this, you will perceive that we are better Spiritualists, in the true acceptation of the word, than so-called Spiritualists, who, instead of showing the reverence we do to true Spirits—Gods—debase the name of Spirit by applying it to the impure, or at best, imperfect beings who produce the majority of the phenomena.

The two objections urged by Mr. Croucher against the claim of the Theosophists, that a child is but a duality at birth, “and perhaps until the sixth or seventh year,” and that some depraved persons are annihilated at some time after death, are (1) the mediums have described to him his three children “who passed away at the respective ages of two,


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four, and six years”; and (2) that he has known persons who were “very depraved” on earth come back. He says:

These statements have been afterwards confirmed by glorious beings who came after, and who have proved by their mastery of the laws which are governing the universe, that they are worthy of being believed.

I am really happy to hear that Mr. Croucher is competent to sit in judgment upon these “glorious beings,” and give them the palm over Kapila, Manu, Plato, and even Paul. It is worth something, after all, to be an “inspirational medium.” We have no such “glorious beings” in the Theosophical Society to learn from; but it is evident that while Mr. Croucher sees and judges things through his emotional nature, the Philosophers whom we study took nothing from any “glorious being” that did not perfectly accord with the universal harmony, justice, and equilibrium of the manifested plan of the Universe. The Hermetic axiom, “as below, so above,” is the only rule of evidence accepted by the Theosophists. Believing in a spiritual and invisible Universe, we cannot conceive of it in any other way than as completely dovetailing and corresponding with the material, objective Universe; for logic and observation alike teach us that the latter is the outcome and visible manifestation of the former, and that the laws governing both are immutable.

In this letter of Dec. 7th Colonel Olcott very appropriately illustrates his subject of potential immortality by citing the admitted physical law of the survival of the fittest. The rule applies to the greatest as to the smallest things, to the planet equally with the plant. It applies to man. And the imperfectly developed man-child can no more exist under the conditions prepared for the perfected types of its species, than can an imperfect plant or animal. In infantile life the higher faculties are not developed, but, as everyone knows, are only in the germ, or rudimentary. The babe is an animal, however “angelic” he may, and naturally enough ought to, appear to his parents. Be it ever so beautifully modelled, the infant body is but the jewel-casket preparing for the jewel. It is bestial, selfish, and, as a babe, nothing more. Little of even the soul, Psuche, can be perceived except so far as vitality is concerned; hunger, terror, pain and pleasure appear to be the principal of its conceptions. A kitten is its superior in everything but possibilities. The grey neurine of the brain is equally unformed. After a time mental qualities begin to appear, but they relate chiefly to external matters. The cultivation of the mind of the child by teachers


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can only affect this part of the nature—what Paul calls natural or physical, and James and Jude sensual or psychical. Hence the words of Jude, “psychical, having not the spirit,” and of Paul:

The psychical man receiveth not the things of the spirit, for to him they are foolishness; the spiritual man discerneth.

It is only the man of full age, with his faculties disciplined to discern good and evil, whom we can denominate spiritual, noetic, intuitive. Children developed in such respects would be precocious, abnormal abortions.

Why, then, should a child who has never lived other than an animal life; who never discerned right from wrong; who never cared whether he lived or died—since he could not understand either of life or death—become individually immortal? Man’s cycle is not complete until he has passed through the earth-life. No one stage of probation and experience can be skipped over. He must he a man before he can become a Spirit. A dead child is a failure of nature—he must live again; and the same Psuche reenters the physical plane through another birth. Such cases, together with those of congenital idiots, are, as stated in Isis Unveiled, the only instances of human reincarnation. If every child-duality were to be immortal, why deny a like individual immortality to the duality of the animal? Those who believe in the trinity of man know the babe to be but a duality—body and soul—and the individuality which resides only in the psychical is, as we have seen proved by the Philosophers, perishable. The completed trinity only survives. Trinity, I say, for at death the astral form becomes the outward body, and inside a still finer one evolves, which takes the place of the Psuche on earth, and the whole is more or less overshadowed by the Nous. Space prevented Col. Olcott from developing the doctrine more fully, or he would have added that not even all of the Elementaries (human) are annihilated. There is still a chance for some. By a supreme struggle these may retain their third and higher principle, and so, though slowly and painfully, yet ascend sphere after sphere, casting off at each transition the previous heavier garment, and clothing themselves in more radiant spiritual envelopes, until, rid of every finite particle, the trinity merges into the final Nirvana, and becomes a unity—a God.

A volume would scarce suffice to enumerate all the varieties of Ele-
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* [Note that ‘reincarnation” is here used as a term applying only to the Psuche. This does not reincarnate, it has always been taught, except in the instances given.—Ens.]


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mentaries and Elementals; the former being so called by some Kabalists (Henry Kunrath, for instance) to indicate their entanglement in the terrestrial elements which hold them captive, and the latter designated by that name to avoid confusion, and equally applying to those which go to form the astral body of the infant and to the stationary Nature Spirits proper. Eliphas Levi, however, indifferently calls them all “Elementary” and “souls.” I repeat again, it is but the wholly psychical disembodied astral man which ultimately disappears as an individual entity. As to the component parts of his Psuche, they are as indestructible as the atoms of any other body composed of matter.

The man must indeed be a true animal who has not, after death, a spark of the divine Ruach or Nous left in him to allow him a chance of self-salvation. Yet there are such lamentable exceptions, not alone among the depraved, but also among those who, during life, by stifling every idea of an after existence, have killed in themselves the last desire to achieve immortality. It is the will of man, his all-potent will, that weaves his destiny, and if a man is determined in the notion that death means annihilation, he will find it so. It is among our commonest experiences that the determination of physical life or death depends upon the will. Some people snatch themselves by force of determination from the very jaws of death, while others succumb to insignificant maladies. What man does with his body he can do with his disembodied Psuche.

Nothing in this militates against the images of Mr. Croucher’s children being seen in the Astral Light by the medium, either as actually left by the children themselves, or as imagined by the father to look when grown. The impression in the latter case would be but a phasma, while in the former it is a phantasma, or the apparition of the indestructible impress of what once really was.

In days of old the “mediators” of humanity were men like Christna, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Apollonius of Tyana, Plotinus, Porphyry, and the like of them. They were Adepts, Philosophers—men who, by struggling their whole lives in purity, study, and self-sacrifice, through trials, privations and self-discipline, attained divine illumination and seemingly superhuman powers. They could not only produce all the phenomena seen in our times, but regarded it as a sacred duty to cast out “evil spirits,” or demons, from the unfortunates who were obsessed—in other words, to rid the medium of their days of the “Elementaries.”


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But in our time of improved psychology every hysterical sensitive looms into a seer, and behold! there are mediums by the thousand! Without any previous study, self-denial, or the least limitation of their physical nature, they assume, in the capacity of mouthpieces of unidentified and unidentifiable intelligences, to outrival Socrates in wisdom, Paul in eloquence, and Tertullian himself in fiery and authoritative dogmatism. The Theosophists are the last to assume infallibility for themselves, or recognize it in others; as they judge others, so they are willing to be judged.

In the name, then, of logic and common sense, before bandying epithets, let us submit our difference to the arbitrament of reason. Let us compare all things, and, putting aside emotionalism and prejudice as unworthy of the logician and the experimentalist, hold fast only to that which passes the ordeal of ultimate analysis.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

New York, Jan. 14th 1878.

A SOCIETY WITHOUT A DOGMA
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[From the London Spiritualist Feb. 8th, 1878.]

TIMES have greatly changed since the winter of 1875-6, when the establishment of the Theosophical Society caused the grand army of American Spiritualists to wave banners, clang steel, and set up a great shouting. How well we all remember the putting forth of “Danger Signals,” the oracular warnings and denunciations of numberless mediums! How fresh in memory the threats of “angel-friends” to Dr. Gardiner, of Boston that they would kill Colonel Olcott if he dared call them “Elementaries” in the lectures he was about delivering! The worst of the storm has passed. The hail of imprecations no longer batters around our devoted heads; it is raining now, and we can almost see the rainbow of promised peace spanning the sky.

Beyond doubt, much of this subsidence of the disturbed elements is due to our armed neutrality. But still I judge that the gradual spread of a desire to learn something more as to the cause of the phenomena must be taken into account. And yet the time has not quite come when the lion (Spiritualism) and the lamb (Theosophy) are ready to lie down together—unless the lamb is willing to lie inside the lion. While we held our tongues we were asked to speak, and when we spoke—or rather our President spoke—the hue and cry was raised once more. Though the pop-gun fusillade and the dropping shots of musketry have mostly ceased, the defiles of your spiritual Balkans are defended by your heaviest Krupp guns. If the fire were directed only against Colonel Olcott there would be no occasion for me to bring up the reserves. But fragments from both of the bombs which your able gunner, and our mutual friend, ‘‘M.A. Oxon.’’ has exploded, in his two letters ‘of January 4th and 11th have given me contusions. Under the velvet paw of his rhetoric I have felt the scratch of challenge.

At the very beginning of what must be a long struggle, it is imperatively demanded that the Theosophical position shall be unequivo-

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cally defined. In the last of the above two communications, it is stated that Colonel Olcott transmits “the teaching of the learned author of Isis Unveiled”—the “master key to all problems.” (?)

Who has ever claimed that the book was that, or anything like it? Not the author, certainly. The title? A misnomer for which the publisher is unpremeditatedly responsible, and, if I am not mistaken, “MA. Oxon.” knows it. My title was The Veil of Isis, and that head line runs through the entire first volume. Not until that volume was stereotyped did anyone recollect that a book of the same name was before the public. Then, as a derniere ressource, the publisher selected the present title.

“If he [Olcott] be not the rose, at any rate he has lived near it,” says your learned correspondent. Had I seen this sentence apart from the context, I would never have imagined that the unattractive old party, superficially known as H. P. Blavatsky, was designated under this poetical Persian simile. If he had compared me to a bramble- bush, I might have complimented him upon his artistic realism. He says:

Colonel Olcott of himself would command attention; he commands it still more on account of the store of knowledge to which he has had access.

True, he has had such access, but by no means is it confined to my humble self. Though I may have taught him a few of the things that I had learned in other countries (and corroborated the theory in every case by practical illustration), yet a far abler teacher than I could not in three brief years have given him more than the alphabet of what there is to learn, before a man can become wise in spiritual and psycho physiological things. The very limitations of modern languages prevent any rapid communication of ideas about Eastern Philosophy. I defy the great Max Muller himself to translate Kapila’s Sutras so as to give their real meaning. We have seen what the best European authorities can do with the Hindu metaphysics; and what a mess they have made of it, to be sure! The Colonel corresponds directly with Hindu scholars, and has from them a good deal more than he can get from so clumsy a preceptor as myself.

Our friend, “M.A. Oxon.,” says that Colonel Olcott “comes forward to enlighten us’’—than which scarce anything could be more inaccurate. He neither comes forward, nor pretends to enlighten anyone. The public wanted to know the views of the Theosophists, and our President attempted to give, as succinctly as possible in the limits of a

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single article, some little glimpse of so much of the truth as he had learned. That the result would not be wholly satisfactory was inevitable. Volumes would not suffice to answer all the questions naturally presenting themselves to an enquiring mind; a library of quartos would barely obliterate the prejudices of those who ride at the anchor of centuries of metaphysical and theological misconceptions—perhaps even errors. But, though our President is not guilty of the conceit of “pretending to enlighten” Spiritualists, I think he has certainly thrown out some hints worthy of the thoughtful consideration of the unprejudiced.

I am sorry that “M.A. Oxon.” is not content with mere suggestions. Nothing but the whole naked truth will satisfy him. We must “square” our theories with his facts, we must lay our theory down “on exact lines of demonstration.” We are asked:

Where are the seers? What are their records? And, far more important, how do they verify them to Us?

I answer: Seers are where “Schools of the Prophets” are still extant, and they have their records with them. Though Spiritualists are not able to go in search of them, yet the Philosophy they teach commends itself to logic, and, its principles are mathematically demonstrable. If this be not so, let it be shown.

But, in their turn, Theosophists may ask, and do ask.: Where are the proofs that the medial phenomena are exclusively attributable to the agency of departed “Spirits”? Who are the “Seers” among mediums blessed with an infallible lucidity? What “tests” are given that admit of no alternative explanation? Though Swedenborg was one of the greatest of Seers, and churches are erected in his name, yet except to his adherents what proof is there that the “Spirits” objective to his vision—including Paul—promenading in hats, were anything but the creatures of his imagination? Are the spiritual potentialities of the living man so well comprehended that mediums can tell when their own agency ceases, and that of outside influence begins? No; but for all answer to our suggestions that the subject is open to debate, “M.A. Oxon.” shudderingly charges us with attempting to upset what he designates as “a cardinal dogma of our faith,” i.e., the faith of the Spiritualists. Dogma? Faith? These are the right and left pillars of every soul crushing Theology. Theosophists have no dogmas, exact no blind faith. Theosophists are ever ready to abandon every idea that is


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proved erroneous upon strictly logical deductions; let Spiritualists do the same. Dogmas are the toys that amuse, and can satisfy but, unreasoning children. They are the offspring of human speculation and prejudiced fancy. In the eye of true Philosophy it seems an insult to common sense, that we should break loose from the idols and dogmas of either Christian or heathen exoteric faith to catch up those of a church of Spiritualism. Spiritualism must either be a true Philosophy, amenable to the test of the recognized criterion of logic, or be set up in its niche beside the broken idols of hundreds of antecedent Christian sects.

Realizing, as they do, the boundlessness of the absolute truth, Theosophists repudiate all claim to infallibility. The most cherished preconceptions, the most “pious hope,” the strongest “ master passion,” they sweep aside like dust from their path, when their error is pointed out. Their highest hope is to approximate to the truth; that they have succeeded in going a few steps beyond the Spiritualists, they think proved in their conviction that they know nothing in comparison with what is to be learned; in their sacrifice of every pet theory and prompting of emotionalism at the shrine of fact; and in their absolute and unqualified repudiation of everything that smacks of “dogma.”

With great rhetorical elaboration “M.A. Oxon.” paints the result of the supersedure of spiritualistic by Theosophic ideas. In brief, he shows Spiritualism a lifeless corpse:

A body from which the soul has been wrenched, and for which most men will care nothing.

We submit that the reverse is true. Spiritualists wrench the soul from true Spiritualism by their degradation of Spirit. Of the in they make the finite; of the divine subjective they make the human and limited objective. Are Theosophists Materialists? Do not their hearts warm with the same “pure and holy love” for their “loved ones” as those of Spiritualists? Have not many of us sought long years “through the gate of mediumship to have access to the world of Spirit”—and vainly sought? The comfort and assurance modern Spiritualism could not give us we found in Theosophy. As a result we believe far more firmly than many Spiritualists—for our belief is based on knowledge—in the communion of our beloved ones with us; but not as materialized Spirits with beating hearts and sweating brows.

Holding such views as we do as to logic and fact, you perceive that when a Spiritualist pronounces to us the words dogma and fact, debate


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is impossible, for there is no common ground upon which we can meet. We decline to break our heads against shadows. If fact and logic were given the consideration they should have, there would be no more temples in this world for exoteric worship, whether Christian or heathen, and the method of the Theosophists would be welcomed as the only one insuring action and progress—a progress that cannot be arrested, since each advance shows yet greater advances to be made.

As to our producing our “Seers” and “their records”—one word. In The Spiritulist of Jan. 11th, I find Dr. Peebles saying that in due time he

Will publish such facts about the Dravida Brâhmans as I am [he is] permitted. I say permitted, because some of these occurred under the promise and seal of secrecy.

If even the casual wayfarer is put under an obligation of secrecy before he is shown some of the less important psycho-physiological phenomena, is it not barely possible that the Brotherhood to which some Theosophists belong has also doctrines, records, and phenomena, that cannot be revealed to the profane and the indifferent, without any imputation lying against their reality and authoritativeness? This, at least, I believe, “M.A. Oxon.” knows. As we do not offensively obtrude ourselves upon an unwilling public, but only answer under compulsion, we can hardly be denounced as contumacious if we produce to a promiscuous public neither our “Seers” nor “their records.” When Mohammed is ready to go to the mountain, it will be found standing in its place.

And that no one that makes this search may suppose that we Theosophists send him to a place where there are no pitfalls for the unwary, I quote from the famous commentary on the Bhagavad Gita of our brother Hurrychund Chintamon, the unqualified admission that,

In Hindustau, as in England, there are doctrines for the learned, and dogmas for the unlearned; strong meat for men, and milk for babes; facts for the few, and fictions for the many; realities for the wise, and romances for the simple; esoteric truth for the philosopher, and exoteric fable for the fool.

Like the Philosophy taught by this author in the work in question, the object of the Theosophical Society “is the cleansing of spiritual truth.”

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

New York, Jan. 20th, 1877.

ELEMENTARIES
—————

[From The Religio-Philosophical Journal, Nov. 17th, 1877.]

I PERCEIVE that of late the ostracized subject of the Kabalistic “Elementaries” is beginning to appear in the orthodox spiritualistic papers pretty often. No wonder; Spiritualism and its Philosophy are progressing, and they will progress despite the opposition of some very learned ignoramuses, who imagine the Cosmos rotates within the academic brain. But if a new term is once admitted for discussion, the least we can do is to first clearly ascertain what that term means. We students of the Oriental Philosophy count it a clear gain that spiritualistic journals on both sides of the Atlantic are beginning to discuss the subject of sub-human and earth-bound beings, even though they ridicule the idea. But do those who ridicule know what they are talking about, having never studied the Kabalistic writers? It is evident to me that they are confounding the “Elementaries”—disembodied, vicious, and earth-bound, yet human Spirits—with the “Elementals,” or Nature Spirits.

With your permission, then, I will answer an article by Dr. Woldrich which appeared in your Journal of the 2th inst., and to which the author gives the title of “Elementaries.” I freely admit that, owing to my imperfect knowledge of English at the time I first wrote upon the Elementaries, I may have myself contributed to the present confusion, and thus brought upon my doomed head the wrath of Spiritualists, mediums, and their “guides” into the bargain. But now I will attempt to make my meaning clear. Eliphas Levi applies the term “Elementary” equally to earth-bound human Spirits and to the creatures of the elements. This carelessness on his part is due to the fact that as the human Elementaries are considered by the Kabalists as having irretrievably lost every chance of immortality, they therefore, after a certain period of time, become no better than the “Elementals,” who never had any souls at all. To disentangle the subject, I have, in my


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Isis Unveiled, shown that the former should, alone, be called “Elementaries” and the latter “Elementals” (vol. i. p. xxx. “Before the Veil”).

Dr. Woldrich, in imitation of Herbert Spencer, attempts to explain the existence of a popular belief in Nature Spirits, demons and mythological deities, as the effect of an imagination untutored by Science, and wrought upon by misunderstood natural phenomena. He attributes the legendary Sylphs, Undines, Salamanders and Gnomes—four great families, which include numberless sub-divisions—to mere fancy; going however to the extreme of affirming that by long practice one can acquire

That power which disembodied spirits have of materializing apparitions by the will.

Granted that “disembodied Spirits” have sometimes that power; but if disembodied why not embodied Spirits also, i.e., a yet living person who has become an Adept in Occultism through study? According to Dr. Woldrich’s theory, an embodied Spirit or Magician can create only subjectively, or to quote his words:

He is in the habit of summoning, that is, bringing up to his imagination, his familiar spirits, which, having responded to his will, he considers as real existences.

I will not stop to enquire for the proofs of this assertion, for it would only lead to an endless discussion. If many thousands of Spiritualists in Europe and America have seen materialized objective forms which assure them they were the Spirits of once living persons, millions of Eastern people throughout the past ages have seen the Hierophants of the Temples, and even now see them in India, without being in the least mediums, also evoking objective and tangible forms, which display no pretensions to being the souls of disembodied men. But I will only remark that, though subjective and invisible to others, as Dr. Woldrich tells us, these forms are palpable, hence objective to the clairvoyant; no scientist has yet mastered the mysteries of even the physical sciences sufficiently to enable him to contradict, with anything like plausible or incontrovertible proofs, the assumption that because the clairvoyant sees a form remaining subjective to others, this form is nevertheless neither a “hallucination” nor a fiction of the imagination. Were the persons present endowed with the same clairvoyant faculty, they would every one of them see this creature of “hallucination” as well; hence there would be sufficient proof that it had an objective existence. And this is how the experiments are conducted in certain psychological training schools, as I call such establishments in the East. One clair-


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voyant is never trusted. The person may be honest, truthful, and have the greatest desire to learn only that which is real, and yet mix the truth unconsciously and accept an Elemental for a disembodied Spirit, and vice versa. For instance, what guarantee can Dr. Woldrich give us that “Hoki” and “Thalla,” the guides of Miss May Shaw, were not simply creatures produced by the power of the imagination? This gentleman may have the word of his clairvoyant for this; he may implicitly and very deservedly trust her honesty when in her normal state; but the fact alone that a medium is a passive and docile instrument in the hands of some invisible and mysterious powers, ought to make her irresponsible in the eves of every serious investigator. It is the Spirit, or these invisible powers, he has to test, not the clairvoyant; and what proof has he of their trustworthiness that he should think himself warranted in coming out as the opponent of a Philosophy based on thousands of years of practical experience, the iconoclast of experiments performed by whole generations of learned Egyptians, Hierophants, Gurus, Brâhmans, Adepts of the Sanctuaries, and a whole host of more or less learned Kabalists, who were all trained Seers? Such an accusation, moreover, is dangerous ground for the Spiritualists them selves. Admit once that a Magician creates his forms only in fancy, and as a result of hallucination, and what becomes of all the guides, spirit friends and the tutti quanti from the sweet “Summer Land,” crowding around the trance mediums and Seers? Why these would-be disembodied entities are to be considered more identified with humanity than the Elementals, or as Dr. Woldrich terms them, “Elementaries,” of the Magician, is something which would scarcely bear investigation.

From the standpoint of certain Buddhist Schools, your correspondent may be right. Their Philosophy teaches that even our visible Universe assumed an objective form as a result of the fancy followed by the volition or the will of the Unknown and Supreme Adept, differing, however, from Christian theology, inasmuch as they teach that instead of calling out our Universe from nothingness, He had to exercise His will upon preexisting Matter, eternal and indestructible as to invisible Substance, though temporary and ever-changing as to forms. Some higher and still more subtle metaphysical Schools of Nepaul even go so far as to affirm—on very reasonable grounds, too—that this preexisting and self-existent Substance or Matter (Svabhâvat) is itself without any other creator or ruler; when in the state of activity it is Pravritti, a universal creating principle; when latent and passive they


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call this force Nirvritti. As for something eternal and infinite, for that which had neither beginning nor end there can be neither past nor future, but everything that was and will be, Is; therefore there never was an action or even thought, however simple, that is not impressed in imperishable records on this Substance, called by the Buddhists Svabhâvat, by the Kabalists Astral Light. As in a faithful mirror, this Light reflects every image, and no human imagination could see any thing outside that which exists impressed somewhere on the eternal Substance. To imagine that a human brain can conceive of anything that was never conceived of before by the “universal brain,” is a fallacy and a conceited presumption. At best, the former can catch now and then stray glimpses of the “Eternal Thought” after this has assumed some objective form, either in the world of the invisible, or visible, Universe. Hence the unanimous testimony of trained Seers goes to prove that there are such creatures as the Elementals; and that though the Elementaries have been at some time human Spirits, they, having lost every connection with the purer immortal world, must be recognized by some special term which would draw a distinct line of demarcation between them and the true and genuine disembodied souls, winch have henceforth to remain immortal. To the Kabalists and the Adepts, especially in India, the difference between the two is all-important, and their tutored minds will never allow them to mistake the one for the other; to the untutored medium they are all one.

Spiritualists have never accepted the suggestion and sound advice of certain of their seers and mediums. They have regarded Dr. Peebles’ “Gadarenes” with indifference; they have shrugged their shoulders at the “Rosicrucian” fantasies of P. B. Randolph, and his Ravalette has made none of them the wiser; they have frowned and grumbled at A. Jackson Davis’ “Diakka”; and finally, lifting high the banner, have declared a murderous war of extermination against the Theosophists and Kabalists. What are now the results?

A series of exposures of fraudulent mediums that have brought mortification to their endorsers and dishonour upon the cause; identification by genuine seers and mediums of pretended Spirit-forms that were afterwards found to be mere personations by lying cheats, go to prove that in such instances at least, outside of clear cases of confederacy, the identifications were due to illusion on the part of the said seers; spirit-babes discovered to be battered masks and bundles of rags; obsessed mediums driven by their guides to drunkenness and immor-


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ality of conduct; the practices of free-love endorsed and even prompted by alleged immortal Spirits; sensitive believers forced to the commission of murder, suicide, forgery, embezzlement and other crimes; the over-credulous led to waste their substance in foolish investments and the search after hidden treasures; mediums fostering ruinous speculations in stocks; free-loveites parted from their wives in search of other female affinities; two continents flooded with the vilest slanders, spoken and sometimes printed by mediums against other mediums; incubi and succubi entertained as returning angel-husbands or wives; mountebanks and jugglers protected by scientists and the clergy, and gathering large audiences to witness imitations of the phenomena of cabinets, the reality of which genuine mediums themselves and Spirits are powerless to vindicate by giving the necessary test conditions; seances still held in Stygian darkness, where even genuine phenomena can readily be mistaken for the false, and false for the real; mediums left helpless by their angel guides, tried, convicted, and sent to prison, and no attempt made to save them from their fate by those who, if they are Spirits having the power of controlling mortal affairs, ought to have enlisted the sympathy of the heavenly hosts on behalf of their mediums in the face of such crying injustice; other faithful spiritualistic lecturers and mediums broken down in health and left unsupported by those calling themselves their patrons and protectors—such are some of the features of the present situation; the black spots of what ought to become the grandest and noblest of all religious Philosophies freely thrown by the unbelievers and Materialists into the teeth of every Spiritualist. No intelligent person of the latter class need go outside of his own personal experience to find examples like the above. Spiritualism has not progressed and is not progressing and will not progress, until its facts are viewed in the light of the Oriental Philosophy.

Thus, Mr. Editor, your esteemed correspondent, Dr. Woldrich, may be found guilty of an erroneous proposition. In the concluding sentence of his article he says:

I know not whether I have succeeded in proving the Elementary a myth, but at least I hope that I have thrown some more light upon the subject to some of the readers of the journal.

To this I would answer: (1) He has not proved at all the “Elementary a myth,” since the Elementaries are, with a few exceptions, the earth-bound guides and Spirits in which he believes, together with every other Spiritualist. (2) Instead of throwing light upon the subject,


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the Doctor has but darkened it the more. (3) Such explanations and careless exposures do the greatest harm to the future of Spiritualism, and greatly serve to retard its progress by teaching its adherents that they have nothing more to learn.

Sincerely hoping that I have not trespassed too much on the columns of your esteemed journal, allow me to sign myself, dear sir,

Yours respectfully,

H. P. BLAVATSKY,

Corresponding Secretary of the Theosophical Society.
New York.

KABALISTIC VIEWS OF “SPIRITS”

[From The Religio-Philosophical Journal, Jan. 26th, 1578.]

I MUST beg you to again allow me a little space for the further elucidation of a very important question—that of the “Elementals” and the “Elementaries.” It is a misfortune that our European languages do not contain a nomenclature expressive of the various grades and conditions of spiritual beings. But surely I cannot be blamed for either the above linguistic deficiency, or because some people do not choose, or are unable, to understand my meaning! I cannot too often repeat that in this matter I claim no originality. My teachings are but the substance of what many Kabalists have said before me, which to-day I mean to prove, with your kind permission.

I am accused (1) of “turning somersaults” and jumping from one idea to another. The defendant pleads—not guilty. (2) Of coining not only words but Philosophies out of the depths of my consciousness. Defendant enters the same plea. (3) Of having repeatedly asserted that “intelligent Spirits other than those who have passed through an earth experience in a human body were concerned in the manifestations known as the phenomena of Spiritualism.” True, and defendant repeats the assertion. (4) Of having advanced, in my bold and unwarranted theories, “beyond the great Eliphas Levi himself.” Indeed? Were I to go even as far as he (see his Science des Esprits), I would deny that a single so-called spiritual manifestation is more than hallucination, produced by soulless Elementals, whom he calls “Elementaries” (see Ritual de la Haute Magic).

I am asked: “What proof is there of the existence of the Elementals?” In my turn I will enquire: “‘What proof is there of ‘diakkas,’ ‘guides,’ ‘bands’ and ‘controls’ ?“ And yet these terms are all current among Spiritualists. The unanimous testimony of innumerable observers and competent experimenters furnishes the proof. If Spiritualists cannot, or will not, go to those countries where they are living


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and these proofs are accessible, they, at least, have no right to give the lie direct to those who have seen both the Adepts and the proofs. My witnesses are living men teaching and exemplifying the Philosophy of hoary ages; theirs, these very “guides” and “controls,” who up to the present time are at best hypothetical, and whose assertions have been repeatedly found, by Spiritualists themselves, contradictory and false.

If my present critics insist that since the discussion of this matter began, a disembodied soul has never been described as an “Elementary,” I merely point to the number of the London Spiritualist for Feb. 8th, 1876, published nearly two years ago, in which a correspondent, who has certainly studied the Occult Sciences, says :

Is it not probable that some of the elementary spirits of an evil type are those spirit-bodies, which, only recently disembodied, are on the eve of an eternal dissolution, and which continue their temporary existence only by vampirizing those still in the flesh? They had existence; they never attained to being.

Note two things: that human Elementaries are recognized as existing, apart from the Gnomes, Sylphs, Undines and Salamanders beings purely elemental; and that annihilation of the soul is regarded as potential.

Says Paracelsns, in his Philosophia Sagax:

The current of Astral Light with its peculiar inhabitants, Gnomes, Svlphs, etc., is transformed into human light at the moment of the conception. and it becomes the first envelope of the soul—its grosser portion; combined with the most subtle fluids, it forms the sidereal [astral, or ethereal] phantom—the inner man.

And Eliphas Levi :

The Astral Light is saturated with elementary souls which it discharges in the incessant generation of beings ...At the birth of a child they influence the four temperaments of the latter: the element of the Gnomes predominates in melanchol persons; of the Salamanders in the sanguine; of the Undines in the phlegmatic; of the Sylphs in the giddy and bilious.... These are the spirits which we designate under the tern of occult elements (Rituel de la Haute Magic, vol. ii. chapter on the ‘‘Conjnration of the Four Classes of Elementary”).

‘‘Yes, yes,’’ he remarks (op. cit., vol. i. p. 164):

These spirits of the elements do exist. Same wandering in their spheres, others trying to incarnate themselves, others, again, already incarnated, and living on earth. These are vicious and imperfect men.

Note that we have here described to us more or less “intelligent Spirits, other than those who have passed through an earth experience in a human body.’’ If not intelligent, they would not know how to make the attempt to incarnate themselves. Vicious Elementals, or


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Elementaries, are attracted to vicious parents; they bask in their atmosphere, and are thus afforded the chance, by the vices of the parents, to perpetuate in the child the paternal wickedness. The unintellectual “Elementals” are drawn in unconsciously to themselves, and, in the order of Nature, as component parts of the grosser astral body or soul, determine the temperament. They can as little resist as the animalcules can avoid entering into our bodies in the water we swallow. Of a third class, out of hundreds that the Eastern Philosophers and Kabalists are acquainted with, Eliphas I discussing spiritistic phenomena, says:

They are neither the souls of the damned nor guilty; the elementary spirits are like children, curious and harmless, and torment people in proportion as attention is paid to them.

These he regards as the sole agents in all the meaningless and useless physical phenomena at seances. Such phenomena will be produced unless they be dominated “by wills more powerful than their own.” Such a will may be that of a living Adept, or, as there are none such at Western spiritual seances, these ready agents are at the disposal of every strong, vicious, earth-bound, human Elementary who has been attracted to the place. By such they can be used in combination with the astral emanations of the circle and medium, as stuff out of which to make materialized Spirits.

So little does Levi concede the possibility of Spirit-return in objective form that he says:

The good deceased come back in our dreams; the state of mediumism is an extension of dream, it is somnambulism in all its variety and ecstasies. Fathom the phenomenon of sleep and you will understand the phenomena of the spirits.

And again

According to one of the great dogmas of the Kabalah, the soul despoils itself in order to ascend, and thus would have to re-clothe itself in matter to descend. There is but one way for a spirit already liberated to manifest himself objectively on earth; he must get back into his body and resurrect. This is quite another thing from hiding under a table or a hat. Necromancy, or the evocation of materialized spirits, is horrible. It constitutes a crime against Nature. We have admitted in our former works the possibility of vampirism, and even undertaken to explain it. The phenomena now actually occurring in America and Europe unquestionably belong to this fearful malady. The mediums do not, it is true, eat the flesh of corpses [like one Sergeant Bertrand]; but they breathe in throughout their whole nervous organism the phosphoric emanations of putrefied corpses, or spectral light. They are not vampires, but they evoke vampires; for this reason, they are nearly all debilitated and sick (Science des Esprits. p.258).


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Henry Kunrath was a most learned Kabalist, and the greatest anthority among mediæval Occultists. He gives, in one of the clavicles of his Amphitheatrum Sapientiæ Æternæ, illustrative engravings of the four great classes of elementary Spirits, as they presented them selves during an evocation of ceremonial Magic, before the eyes of the Magus, when, after passing the threshold, he lifted the “Veil of Isis.” In describing them, Kunrath corroborates Eliphas Levi. He tells us they are disembodied, vicious men, who have parted with their divine Spirits and become Elementaries. They are so termed, because attracted by the earthly atmosphere and surrounded by the earth’s elements. Here Kunrath applies the term “Elementary” to doomed human souls, While Levi uses it, as we have seen, to designate another class of the same great family—Gnomes, Sylphs, Undines, etc.—sub-human entities.

I have before me a manuscript, intended originally for publication, but withheld for various reasons. The author signs himself “Zeus,” and is a Kabalist of more than twenty-five years’ standing. This experienced Occultist, a zealous devotee of Kunrath, expounding the doctrine of the latter, also says that the Kabalists divided the Spirits of the elements into four classes, corresponding to the four temperaments in man.

It is charged against me as a heinous offence that I aver that some men lose their souls and are annihilated. But this last-named authority, “Zeus,” is equally culpable, for he says:

They [ the Kabalists] taught that mail’s spirit descended from the great ocean of spirit, and is, therefore, per se, pure and divine, but its soul or capsule, through the [allegorical] fall of Adam, became contaminated with the world of darkness, or the world of Satan [evil] of which it must be purified, before it could ascend again to celestial happiness. Suppose a drop of water enclosed within a capsule remains whole, the drop of water remains isolated; break the envelope, and the drop becomes a part of the ocean, its individual existence has ceased. So it is with the spirit. So long as its ray is enclosed in its plastic mediator or soul, it has an individual existence. Destroy this capsule, the astral man then becomes an Elementary; this destruction may occur from the consequences of sin, in the most depraved and vicious, and the spirit returns back to its original abode—the individualization of man has ceased. . . . This militates with the idea of progression that Spiritualists generally entertain. If they understood the Law of harmony, they would see their error. It is only by this Law that individual life can be sustained; and the farther we deviate from harmony the more difficult it is to regain it.

To return to Levi, he remarks (La Haute Magie, vol. i. p. 319):


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When we die, our interior light [the soul] ascends agreeably to the attraction of its star [the spirit], but it must first of all get rid of the coils of the serpent [earthly evil—sin], that is to say, of the unpurified Astral Light which surrounds and holds it captive, unless, by the force of Will, it frees and elevates itself. This immersion of the living soul in the dead light [the emanations of everything that is evil, which pollute the earth’s magnetic atmosphere, as the exhalation of a swamp does the air] is a dreadful torture; the soul freezes and burns therein at the same time.

The Kabalists represent Adam as the Tree of Life, of which the trunk is Humanity; the various races, the branches; and individual men, the leaves. Every leaf has its individual life, and is fed by the one sap; but it can live only through the branch, as the branch itself draws its life through the trunk. Says the Kabalah:

The wicked are the dead leaves and the dead bark of the tree. They fall, die, are corrupted and changed into manure, which returns to the tree through the root.

My friend, Miss Emily Kislingbury, of London, secretary of the British National Association of Spiritualists, who is honoured, trusted and beloved by all who know her, sends me a spirit-communication obtained, in April, 1877, through a young lady, who is one of the purest and most truthful of her sex. The following extracts are singularly a propos to the subject under discussion.

Friend, you are right. Keep our Spiritualism pure and high, for there are those who would abase its uses. But it is because they know not the power of Spiritualism. It is true, in a sense, that the spirit can overcome the flesh, but there are those to whom the fleshly life is dearer than the life of the spirit; they tread on dangerous ground. For the flesh may so outgrow the spirit, as to withdraw from it all spirituality, and man becomes as a beast of the field, with no saving power left. These are they whom the church has termed “reprobate,” eternally lost, but they suffer not, as the church has taught, in conscious hells. They merely die, and are not; their light goes out, and has no conscious being. [Question]: But is this not annihilation? [Answer]: It amounts to annihilation; they lose their individual entities, and return to the great reservoir of spirit—unconscious spirit.

Finally, I am asked: “Who are the trained Seers?” They are those, I answer, who have been trained from their childhood, in the Pagodas, to use their spiritual sight; those whose accumulated testimony has not varied for thousands of years as to the fundamental facts of Eastern Philosophy; the testimony of each generation corroborating that of each preceding one. Are these to be trusted more, or less, than the communications of “bands”—each of whom contradicts the other as completely as the various religious sects, which are ready to cut each other’s throats—and of mediums, even the best of whom are


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ignorant of their own nature, and unsubjected to the wise direction and restraint of an Adept in Psychological Science?

No comprehensive idea of Nature can be obtained except by apply ing the Law of Harmony and analogy in the spiritual as well as in the physical world. “As above, so below,” is the old Hermetic axiom. If Spiritualists would apply this to the subject of their own researches they would see the philosophical necessity of there being in the world of Spirit, as was the world of Matter, a law of the survival of the fittest.

Respectfully,

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

THE KNOUT

AS WIELDED BY THE GREAT RUSSIAN THEOSOPHIST.

MR. COLEMAN’S FIRST APPEARANCE.

[From The Religio-Philosophical Journal, March 16th, 1878]

I HAVE read some of the assaults upon Colonel Olcott and myself that have appeared in the Journal. Some have amused me, others I have passed by unread; but I was quite unprepared for the good fortune that lay in store for me in embryo in the paper of Feb. 6th. The “Protest” of Mr.W. Emmette Coleman, entitled “Sclavonic Theosophy v. American Spiritualism” is the musky rose in an odoriferous bouquet. Its pungent fragrance would make the nose of a sensitive bleed, whose olfactory nerves would withstand the perfume of a garden full of the Malayan flower-queen—the tuberose; and yet, my tough, pug, Mongolian nose, which has smelt carrion in all parts of the world, proved itself equal even to this emergency.

“From the sublime to the ridiculous,” says the French proverb, “there is but a single step.” From sparkling wit to dull absurdity there is no more. An attack, to be effective, must have an antagonist to strike, for to kick against something that exists only in one’s imagination, wrenches man or beast. Don Quixote fighting the “air drawn” foes in his windmill, stands for ever the laughing-stock of all generations, and the type of a certain class of disputants, whom, for the moment, Mr. Coleman represents.

The pretext for two columns of abuse—suggesting, I am sorry to say, parallel sewers—is that Miss Emily Kislingbury, in an address before the B.N.A. of Spiritualists, mentioned Colonel Olcott’s name in connection with a leadership of Spiritualism. I have the report of her remarks before me, and find that she neither proposed Colonel Olcott to American Spiritualists as a leader, nor said that he had wanted “leadership,” desired it now, or could ever be persuaded to take it. Says Mr. Coleman:


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It is seriously proposed by your transatlantic sister, Miss Kislingburv . . . that American Spiritualists should select as their guardian guide . Col. H. S. Olcott!!

If anyone is entitled to this wealth of exclamation points it is Miss Kislingbury, for the charge against her from beginning to end is simply an unmitigated falsehood. Miss Kislingbury merely expressed the personal opinion that a certain gentleman, for whom she had a deserved friendship, would have been capable, at one time, of acting as a leader. This was her private opinion, to which she had as good a right as either of her defamers—who in a cowardly way try to use Col. Olcott and myself as sticks with which to break her head—have to their opinions. It may or may not have been warranted by the facts— that is immaterial. The main point is, that Miss Kislingbury has not said one word that gives the slightest pretext for Mr. Coleman’s attacking her on this question of leadership. And yet, I am not surprised at his course, for this brave, noble-hearted, truthful and spotless lady occupies too impregnable a position to be assailed, except indirectly. Someone had to pay for her plain speaking about American Spiritualism. What better scapegoat than Olcott and Blavatsky, the twin “theosophical Gorgons”!

What a hullabaloo is raised, to be sure, about Spiritualists declining to follow our “leadership.” In my “Buddhistico-Tartaric” ignorance I have always supposed that something must be offered before it can either be indignantly spurned or even respectfully declined. Have we offered to lead Spiritualists by the nose or by other portions of their anatomy? Have we ever proclaimed ourselves as “teachers,” or set ourselves up as infallible “guides”? Let the hundreds of unanswered letters that we have received from Spiritualists be our witness. Let us even include two letters from Mr. W. Emmette Coleman, from Leaven worth, Kansas, calling attention to his published articles of Jan. 13th, 20th, 27th, and Feb. 3rd (four papers), inviting controversy. He says in his communication of Jan. 23rd, 1877, to Col. Olcott, ‘‘I am in search of Truth”; therefore he has not all the truth. He asks Col. Olcott to answer certain “interrogatories”; therefore our opinions are admitted to have some weight. He says:

This address [the one he wants us to read and express our opinion upon] was delivered some time since; if of more recent date I [he] might modify somewhat.

Now Col. Olcott’s People from The 0ther World was published Jan., 1875; Mr. Coleman’s letter to the Colonel was written in Jan., 1877; and

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his present “Protest” to the Journal appeared Feb., 1878. It puzzles me to know how a man “in search of Truth” could lower himself so far as to hunt for it in the coat-pockets of an author whose work is

Clearly demonstrative of the utterly unscientific character of his researches, full of exaggerations, inaccuracies, marvellous statements recorded at second-hand without the slightest confirmation, lackadaisical sentimentalities, egotistical rhodomontades, and grammatical inelegancies and solecisms.

To go to a man for “Truth” who is characterized by The most fervid imagination and brilliant powers of invention,—according to Mr. Emmette Coleman—shows Mr. Coleman in a sorry light indeed! His only excuse can be that in January, 1877, when he invited Col. Olcott to discuss with him—despite the fact that the Theosophical Society had been established in 1875, and all our “heresies” were already in print—his estimation of Col. Olcott’s intellectual powers was different from what it is now, and that Mr. Coleman’s “address” has been left two years unread and unnoticed. Does this look like our offering ourselves as “leaders”? We address the great body of intelligent American Spiritualists. They have as much a right to their opinions as we to ours; they have no more right than we to falsely state the positions of their antagonists. But their would-be champion, Mr. Coleman, for the sake of having an excuse to abuse me, pretends to quote (see column 2, paragraph 1) from something I have published, a whole sentence that I defy him to prove I ever made use of. This is downright literary fraud and dishonesty. A man who is in “search of Truth” does not usually employ a falsehood as a weapon.

Good friends, whose enquiries we have occasionally, but rarely, answered, bear us witness that we have always disclaimed anything like “leadership”; that we have invariably referred you to the same standard authors whom we have read, the same old Philosophers we have studied. We call on you to testify that we have repudiated dogmas and dogmatists, whether living men or disembodied Spirits. As opposed to Materialists, Theosophists are Spiritualists, but it would be as absurd for us to claim the leadership of Spiritualism as for a Protestant priest to speak for the Romish Church, or a Romish Cardinal to lead the great body of Protestants, though both claim to be Christians! Recrimination seems to be the life and soul of American journalism, but I really thought that a spiritualistic organ had more congenial matter for its columns than such materialistic abuse as the present “Fort Leavenworth” criticism!


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One chief aim of the writer seems to be to abuse Isis Unveiled. My publisher will doubtless feel under great obligations for giving it such a notoriety just now, when the fourth edition is ready to go to press. That the fossilized reviewers of The Tribune and Popular Science Monthly—both admitted advocates of materialistic Science and unsparingly contemptuous denouncers of Spiritualism—should, without either of them having read my book, brand it as spiritualistic moon shine, was perfectly natural. I should have thought that I had written my first volume, holding up Modern Science to public contempt for its unfair treatment of psychological phenomena, to small purpose, if they had complimented me. Nor was I at all surprised that the critic of the New York Sun permitted himself the coarse language of a partizan and betrayed his ignorance of the contents of my book by terming me a “Spiritualist.” But I am sorry that a critic like Mr. Coleman, who professes to speak for the Spiritualists and against the Materialists, should range himself by the side of the flunkeys of the latter, when at least twenty of the first critics of Europe and America, not Spiritualists but well-read scholars, have praised it even more unstintedly than he has bespattered it. If such men as the author of The Great Dionysiak Myth and Poseidon—writing a private letter to a fellow arch and scholar, which he thought I would never see—says the design of my book is “simply colossal,” and that the book “is really a marvellous production” and has his “entire concurrence” in its views about:

(1) the wisdom of the ancient Sages; (2) the folly of the merely material Philosopher (the Emmette Colemans, Huxleys and Tyndalls);

(3) the doctrine of Nirvana; (4) archaic monotheism, etc.; and when the London Public Opinion calls it “one of the most extraordinary works of the nineteenth century” in an elaborate criticism; and when Alfred R. Wallace says:

I am amazed at the vast amount of erudition displayed in the chapters, and the great interest of the topics on which they treat; your book will open up to many Spiritualists a whole world of new ideas, and cannot fail to be of the greatest value in the enquiry which is now being so earnestly carried on,
—Mr. Coleman really appears in the sorry light of one who abuses for the mere sake of abusing.

What a curious psychological power I must have All the Journal writers, from the talented editor down to Mr. Coleman, pretend to account for the blind devotion of Col. Olcott to Theosophy, the over-partial panegyric of Miss Kislingbury, the friendly recantation of


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Dr. G. Bloede, and the surprisingly vigorous defence of myself by Mr. C. Sotheran, and other recent events, on the ground of my having psychologized them all into the passive servitude of hoodwinked dupes! I can only say that such Psychology is next door to miracle. That I could influence men and women of such acknowledged independence of character and intellectual capacity, would be at least more than any of your lecturing mesmerizers or “spirit-controls” have been able to accomplish. Do you not see, my noble enemies, the logical consequences of such a doctrine? Admit that I can do that, and you admit the reality of Magic, and my powers as an Adept. I never claimed that Magic was anything but Psychology practically applied. That one of your mesmerizers can make a cabbage appear a rose is only a lower form of the power you all endow me with. You give an old woman—whether forty, fifty, sixty or ninety years old (some swear I am the latter, some the former), it matters not; an old woman whose “Kalmuco-Buddhistico-Tartaric” features, even in youth, never made her appear pretty; a woman whose ungainly garb, uncouth manners and masculine habits are enough to frighten any bustled and corseted fine lady of fashionable society out of her wits—you give her such powers of fascination as to draw fine ladies and gentlemen, scholars and artists, doctors and clergymen, to her house by scores, to not only talk Philosophy with her, not merely to stare at her as though she were a monkey in red flannel breeches, as some of them do, but to honour her in many cases with their fast and sincere friendship and grateful kindness! Psychology! If that is the name you give it, then, although I have never offered myself as a teacher, you had better come, my friends, and be taught at once the “trick” (gratis—for, unlike other psychologizers, I never yet took money for teaching any thing to anybody), so that hereafter you may not be deceived into recognizing as—what Mr. Coleman so graphically calls—”the sainted dead of earth,” those pimple-nosed and garlic-breathing beings who climb ladders through trap-doors, and carry tow wigs and battered masks in the penetralia of their underclothing.

H. P. BLAVATSKY,

—“the masculine-feminine Sclavonic Theosoph from Crim-Tartary”—a title which does more credit to Mr. Coleman’s vituperative ingenuity than to his literary accomplishments.

INDIAN METAPHYSICS

[From the London Spiritualist, March 22nd, 1877.]

Two peas in the same pod are the traditional symbol of mutual resemblance, and the time-honoured simile forced itself upon me when I read the twin letters of our two masked assailants in your paper of Feb. 22nd. In substance they are so identical that one would suppose the same person had written them simultaneously with his two hands, as Paul Morphy will play you two games of chess, or Kossuth dictate two letters at once. The only difference between these two letters— lying beside each other on the same page, like two babes in one crib—is, that “M.A. Cantab’s” is brief and courteous, while “Scrutator’s” is prolix and uncivil.

By a strange coincidence both these sharp-shooters fire from behind their secure ramparts a shot at a certain “learned Occultist” over the head of Mr. C. C. Massey, who quoted some of that personage’s views, in a letter published May 10th, 1876. Whether in irony or otherwise, they hurl the views of this “learned Occultist” at the heads of Col. Olcott and myself, as though they were missiles that would floor us completely. Now the “learned Occultist” in question is not a whit more, or less, learned than your humble servant, for the very simple reason that we are identical. The extracts published by Mr. Massey, by permission, were contained in a letter from myself to him. More over it is now before me, and, save one misprint of no consequence, I do not find in it a word that I would wish changed. What is said there I repeat now over my signature—the theories of 1876 do not contradict those of 1878 in any respect, as I shall endeavour to prove, after pointing out to the impartial reader the quaking ground upon which our two critics stand. Their arguments against Theosophy— certainly “Scrutator’s”—are like a verdant moss, which displays a velvety carpet of green without roots and with a deep bog below.

When a person enters on a controversy over a fictitious signature, he


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should be doubly cautious, if he would avoid the accusation of abusing the opportunity of the mask to insult his opponents with impunity. Who or what is “Scrutator”? A clergyman, a medium, a lawyer, a philosopher, a physician (certainly not a metaphysician), or what? Quien sabe? He seems to partake of the flavour of all, and yet to grace none. Though his arguments are all interwoven with sentences quoted from our letters, yet in no case does he criticize merely what is written by us, but what he thinks we may have meant, or what the sentences might imply. Drawing his deductions, then, from what existed only in the depths of his own consciousness, he invents phrases, and forces constructions, upon which he proceeds to pour out his wrath. Without meaning to be in the least personal—for, though propagating “absurdities with the “utmost effrontery,” I should feel sorry and ashamed to be as impertinent with “Scrutator” as he is with us—yet, hereafter, when I see a dog chasing the shadow of his own tail, I will think of his letter.

In my doubts as to what this assailant might be, I invoked the help of Webster to give me a possible clue in the pseudonym. “Scrutator,” says the great lexicographer, is “one who scrutinizes,” and “scrutiny” he derives from the Latin scrutari, “to search even to the rags”; which scrutari itself he traces back to a Greek root, meaning “trash, trumpery.” In this ultimate analysis, therefore, we must regard the nom de plume, while very applicable to his letter of February 22nd, as very unfortunate for himself; for, at best, it makes him a sort of literary chiffonnier, probing in the dust-heap of the language for bits of hard adjectives to fling at us. I repeat that, when an anonymous critic accuses two persons of “slanderous imputations” (the mere reflex of his own imagination), and of “unfathomable absurdities,” he ought, at least, to make sure (1) that he has thoroughly grasped what he is pleased to call the “teachings” of his adversaries; and (2) that his own philosophy is infallible. I may add, furthermore, that when that critic permits himself to call the views of other people—not yet half digested by himself—”unfathomable absurdities,” he ought to be mighty careful about introducing as arguments into the discussion sectarian absurdities far more “unfathomable” and which have nothing to do with either Science or Philosophy.

I suppose [gravely argues “Scrutator”] a babe’s brain is soft and a quite unfit tool for intelligence, otherwise Jesus could not have lost His intelligence when He took upon Himself the body and the brain of a babe [!!?]


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The very opposite of Oliver Johnson evidently, this Jesus-babe of “Scrutator’s.”

Such an argument might come with a certain force in a discussion between two conflicting dogmatic sects, but if picked “even to rags” it seems but “utmost effrontery”—to use “Scrutator’s” own complimentary expression—to employ it in a philosophical debate, as if it were either a scientific or historically proved fact! If I refused, at the very start, to argue with our friend “M.A. Oxon.,” a man whom I esteem and respect as I do few in this world, only because he put forward a “cardinal dogma,” I shall certainly lose no time in debating Theosophy with a tattering Christian, whose scrutinizing faculties have not helped him beyond the acceptance of the latest of the world’s Avatâras, in all its unphilosophical dead-letter meaning, without even suspecting its symbolical significance. To parade in a would-be philosophical debate the exploded dogmas of any Church, is most ineffectual, and shows, at best, a great poverty of resource. Why does not “Scrutator” address hiss refined abuse, ex cathedra, to the Royal Society, whose Fellows doom to annihilation every human being, Theosophist or Spiritualist, pure or impure?

With crushing irony he speaks of us as “our teachers.” Now I remember having distinctly stated in a previous letter that we have not offered ourselves as teachers, but, on the contrary, decline any such office—whatever may be the superlative panegyric of my esteemed friend, Mr. 0. Sullivan, who not only sees in me “a Buddhist priestess” (!), but, without a shadow of warrant of fact, credits me with the foundation of the Theosophical Society and its Branches! Had Colonel Olcott been half as “psychologized” by me as a certain American Spiritualist paper will have it, he would have followed my advice and refused to make public our “views,” even though so much and so often importuned in different quarters. With characteristic stubbornness, however, he had his own way, and now reaps the consequence of having thrown his bomb into a hornet’s nest. Instead of being afforded opportunity for a calm debate, we get but abuse, pure and simple—the only weapon of partisans. Well, let us make the best of it, and join our opponents in picking the question “to rags.” Mr. C. C. Massey comes in for his share, too, and though fit to be a leader himself, is given by “Scrutator” a chief!

Neither of our critics seems to understand our views (or his own) so little as “Scrutator.” He misapprehends the meaning of Elementary,


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and makes a sad mess of Spirit and Matter. Hear him say that Elementary

Is a new-fangled and ill-defined term . . not yet two years old.

This sentence alone proves that he forces himself into the discussion, without any comprehension of the subject at issue. Evidently, he has neither read the mediæval nor modern Kabalists. Henry Kunrath is as unfamiliar to him as the Abbe Constant. Let him go to the British Museum, and ask for the Amphitheatrum Sapientiæ Æternæ Kunrath. He will find in it illustrative engravings of the four great classes of elementary Spirits, as seen during an evocation of ceremonial Magic by the Magus who lifts the Veil of Isis. The author explains that these are disembodied vicious men, who have parted with their divine Spirits, and become as beasts. After reading this volume, “Scrutator” may profitably consult Eliphas Levi whom he will find using the words “Elementary Spirits” throughout his Dogmae et Rituel de la Haute Magie, in both senses in which we have employed it. This is especially the case where (vol. i. p. 262, seq.) he speaks of the evocation of Apollonius of Tyana by himself. Quoting from the greatest Kabalistic authorities, he says:

When a man has lived well, the astral cadaver evaporates like a pure incense, as it mounts towards the higher regions; but if a man has lived in crime, his astral cadaver, which holds him prisoner, seeks again the objects of his passions and desires to resume its earthly life. It torments the dreams of young girls, bathes in the vapour of spilt blood, and wallows about the places where the pleasures of his life flitted by; it watches without ceasing over the treasures which it possessed and buried; it wastes itself in painful efforts to make for itself material organs [materialize itself] and live again. But the astral elements attract and absorb it; its memory is gradually lost, its intelligence weakens, all its being dissolves.

The unhappy wretch loses thus in succession all the organs which served its sinful appetites. Then it [this astral body, this “soul,” this all that is left of the once living man] dies a second time and for ever, for it then loses its personality and its memory. Souls which are destined to live, but which are not yet entirely purified, remain for a longer or shorter time captive in the astral cadaver, where they are refined by the odic light, which seeks to assimilate them to itself and dissolve. It is to rid themselves of this cadaver that suffering souls sometimes enter the bodies of living persons, and remain there for a time in a state which the Kabalists call embryonic [embryonnal]. These are the aerial phantasmas evoked by necromancy [ I may add, the “materialized Spirits” evoked by the unconscious necromancy of incautious mediums, in cases where the forms are not transformations of their own doubles]; these are larvæ, substances dead or dying with which one places himself en rapport.


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Further, Levi says (op. cit., p. 164):

The astral light is saturated with elementary souls. . . Yes, yes, these spirits of the elements do exist. Some wandering in their spheres, others trying to incarnate themselves, others, again already incarnated and living on earth; these are vicious and imperfect men.

And in the face of this testimony—which he can find in the British Museum, two steps from the office of The Spiritualist (!)—that since the Middle Ages the Kabalists have been writing about the Elementaries, and their potential annihilation, “Scrutator” permits himself to arraign Theosophists for their “effrontery” in foisting upon Spiritualists a “new-fangled and ill-defined term” which is “not yet two years old”!

In truth, we may say that the idea is older than Christianity, for it is found in the ancient Kabalistic books of the Jews. In the olden time they defined three kinds of “souls”—the daughters of Adam, the daughters of the angels and those of sin; and in the book of The Revolution of the Souls three kinds of “Spirits” (as distinct from material bodies) are shown—the captive, the wandering and the free Spirits. If “Scrutator” were acquainted with the literature of Kabalism, he would know that the term Elementary applies not only to one principle or constituent part, to an elementary primary substance, but also embodies the idea which we express by the term elemental—that which pertains to the four elements of the material world, the first principles or primary ingredients. The word “elemental” as defined by Webster, was not current at the time of Kunrath, but the idea was perfectly understood. The distinction has been made, and the term adopted by Theosophists for the sake of avoiding confusion. The thanks we get are that we are charged with propounding, in 1878, a different theory of the “Elementaries” from that of 1876!

Does anything herein stated either as from ourselves, or Kunrath, or Levi contradict the statement of the ‘‘learned Occultist’’ that:

Each atom, no matter where found, is imbued with that vital principle called spirit each grain of sand, equally with each minutest atom of the human body, has its inherent latent spark of the divine light?

Italicizing some words of the above, but omitting to emphasize the one important word of the sentence, i.e., “latent,” which contains the key to the whole mystery, our critic mars the sense. In the grain of sand, and each atom of the human material body, the Spirit is latent, not active; hence being but a correlation of the highest light, some-


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defined a materialized Spirit as “frozen whiskey,” was right in his way. A Copious vocabulary, indeed, that has but one term for God and for alcohol! With all their libraries of metaphysics, European nations have not even gone to the trouble of inventing appropriate words to elucidate metaphysical ideas. If they had, perhaps one book in every thousand would have sufficed to really instruct the public, instead of there being the present confusion of words, obscuring intelligence, and utterly hampering the Orientalist, who would expound his Philosophy in English. Whereas, in the latter language, I find but one word to express, perhaps, twenty different ideas, in the Eastern tongues, especially Sanskrit, there are twenty words or more to render one idea in its various shades of meaning.

We are accused of propagating ideas that would surprise the “average” Buddhist. Granted, and I will liberally add that the average Brâhmanist might be equally astonished. We never said that we were either Buddhists or Brâhmanists in the sense of their popular exoteric Theologies. Buddha, sitting on his Lotus, or Brahmâ, with any number of teratological arms, appeals to us as little as the Catholic Madonna or the Christian personal God, which stare at us from cathedral walls and ceilings. But neither Buddha nor Brahmâ represents to His respective worshippers the same ideas as these Catholic icons which we regard as blasphemous. In this particular who dares say that Christendom with its civilization has outgrown the fetichism of Fijians? When we see Christians and Spiritualists speaking so flippantly and confidently about God and the “materialization of Spirit,” we wish they might be made to share a little in the reverential ideas of the old Aryas.

We do not write for “average” Buddhists, or average people of any sort. But I am quite willing to match any tolerably educated Buddhist or Brâhman against the best metaphysicians of Europe, to compare views on God and on man’s immortality.

The ultimate abstract definition of this—call it God, Force, Principle, as you will—will ever remain a mystery to Humanity, though it attain to its highest intellectual development. The anthropomorphic ideas of Spiritualists concerning Spirit are a direct consequence of the anthropomorphic conceptions of Christians as to the Deity. So directly is the one the outflow of the other, that “Scrutator’s” handiest argument against the duality of a child and potential immortality is to cite

Jesus who increased in wisdom as His brain increased.

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Christians call God an Infinite Being, and then endow Him with every finite attribute, such as love, anger, benevolence, mercy! They call Him all-merciful, and preach damnation for three-fourths of Humanity in every church, all-just, and the sins of this brief span of life may not be expiated by even an eternity of conscious agony. Now, by some miracle of oversight, among thousands of mistranslations in the “Holy” Writ, the word “destruction,” the synonym of annihilation, was rendered correctly in King James’s version, and no dictionary can make it read either damnation or eternal torment. Though the Church consistently put down the “destructionists,” yet the impartial will scarcely deny that they come nearer than their persecutors to believing what Jesus taught, and what is consistent with justice, in teaching the final annihilation of the wicked.

To conclude, then, we believe that there is but one undefinable Principle in the whole Universe, which being utterly incomprehensible by our finite intellects, we prefer rather to leave undebated than to blaspheme Its majesty with our anthropomorphic speculations. We believe that all else which has being, whether material or spiritual, and all that may have existence, actually, or potentially in our idealism, emanates from this Principle. That everything is a correlation in one shape or another of this Will and Force; and hence, judging of the unseen by the visible, we base our speculations upon the teachings of the generations of Sages who preceded Christianity, fortified by our own reason.

I have already illustrated the incapacity of some of our critics to separate abstract ideas from complex objects, by instancing the grain of sand and the nail-paring. They refuse to comprehend that a philosophical doctrine can teach that an atom imbued with divine light, or a portion of the great Spirit, in its latent stage of correlation, may, not withstanding its reciprocal or corresponding similarity and relations to the one indivisible whole, be yet utterly deficient in self-consciousness. That it is only when this atom, magnetically drawn to its fellow-atoms, which had served in a previous state to form with it some lower complex object, is transformed at last, after endless cycles of evolution, into man—the apex of perfected being, intellectually and physically, on our planet—in conjunction with them it becomes, as a whole, a living soul, and reaches the state of intellectual self-consciousness.

A stone becomes a plant, a plant an animal, an animal a man, and man a Spirit, say the Kabalists. And here again, is the wretched necessity of trans-


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lating by the word “Spirit” an expression which means a celestial, or rather ethereal, transparent man. But if man is the crown of evolution on earth, what is he in the initiatory stages of the next existence, that man who, at his best—even when he is pretended to have served as a habitation for the Christian God, Jesus—is said by Paul to have been “made a little lower than the angels”? But now we have every astral spook transformed into an “angel”! I cannot believe that the scholars who write for your paper—and there are some of great intelligence and erudition who think for themselves, and whom exact science has taught that ex nihilo nihil fit who know that every atom of man’s body has been evolving by imperceptible gradations, from lower into higher forms, through the cycles—accept the unscientific and illogical doctrine that the simple unshelling of an astral man transforms him into a celestial Spirit and “angel” guide.

In Theosophical opinion a Spirit is a Ray, a fraction of the Whole; and the Whole being Omniscient and Infinite, Its fraction must partake, in degree, of the same abstract attributes. Man’s “Spirit” must become the drop of the Ocean, called “Ishvara-Bhâva”—the “I am one body, together with the universe itself” (I am in my Father, and my Father is in me), instead of remaining but the “Jiva-Bhâva the body only. He must feel himself not only a part of the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer, but of the Soul of the Three, the Parabrahman, Who is above these and is the vitalizing, energizing and ever-presiding Spirit. He must fully realize the sense of the word “Sahajanund,” that state of perfect bliss in Nirvana, which can only exist for the It, which has become coexistent with the “formless and actionless present time.” This is the state called “Vartamâna,” or the “ever still present,” in which there is neither past nor future, but one infinite eternity of present. Which of the controlling “spirits,” materialized or invisible, have shown any signs that they belong to the kind of real Spirits known as the “Sons of Eternity”? Has the highest of them been able to tell even as much as our own Divine Nous can whisper to us in moments when there comes the flash of sudden prevision? Honest communicating “intelligences” often answer to many questions: “We do not know; this has not been revealed to us.” This very admission proves that, while in many cases on their way to knowledge and perfection, yet they are but embryonic, undeveloped “Spirits”; they are inferior even to some living Yogis who, through abstract meditation, have united themselves with their personal individual Brahman, their Atman, and


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hence have overcome the “Agnyânam,” or lack of that knowledge as to the intrinsic value of one’s “self,” the Ego or self-being, so recommended by Socrates and the Delphic commandment.

London has been often visited by highly intellectual, educated Hindus. I have not heard of any one professing a belief in “materialized Spirits”

—as Spirits. When not tainted with Materialism, through demoralizing association with Europeans. and when free from superstitious sectarianism, how would one of them, versed in the Vedânta, regard these apparitions of the circle? The chances are that, after going the rounds of the mediums, he would say: “Some of these may be survivals of disembodied men’s intelligences, but they are no more spiritual than the average man. They lack the knowledge of ‘Dryananta,’ and evidently find themselves in a chronic state of ‘Mâyâ,’ i.e., possessed of the idea that ‘they are that which they are not.’ The ‘Vartamâna’ has no significance for them, as they are cognizant but of the ‘Vishania’ [that which, like the concrete numbers in mixed mathematics, applies to that which can be numbered]. Like simple, ignorant mortals, they regard the shadow of things as the reality, and vice versa, mixing up the true light of the ‘Vyatireka’ with the false light or deceitful appearance—the ‘Anvaya.’ . . . In what respect, then, are they higher than the average mortal? No; they are not spirits, not ‘Devas,’ they are astral ‘Dasyoos.’

Of course all this will appear to “Scrutator” “unfathomable absurdities,” for unfortunately, few metaphysicians shower down from Western skies. Therefore, so long as our English opponents will remain in their semi-Christian ideas, and not only ignore the old Philosophy, but the very terms it employs to render abstract ideas; so long as we are forced to transmit these ideas in a general way—particularly as it is impracticable without the invention of special words—it will be unprofitable to push discussion to any great lengths. We would only make ourselves obnoxious to the general reader, and receive from other anonymous writers such unconvincing compliments as “Scrutator” has favoured us with.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

New York, March 7th, 1877.

“H. M.” AND THE TODAS
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[From the London Spiritualist.]

I HAVE read the communication of “H. M.” in your paper of the 8th inst. I would not have mentioned the “Todas” at all in my book, if I had not read a very elaborate octavo work in 271 pp., by William S. Marshall, Lieut.-Col. of Her Majesty’s Bengal Staff Corps, entitled:

A Phrenologist among the Todas, copiously illustrated with photographs of the squalid and filthy beings to whom “H. M.” refers. Though written by a staff officer, assisted “by the Rev. Friedrich Metz, of the Basle Missionary Society, who had spent upwards of twenty years of labour” among them, “the only European able to speak the obscure Toda tongue,” the book is so full of misrepresentations—though both writers appear to be sincere— that I wrote what I did.

What I said I knew to be true, and I do not retract a single word. If neither “H. M.” nor Lieut.-Col. Marshall, nor the Rev. Mr. Metz have penetrated the secret that lies behind the dirty huts of the aborigines they have seen, that is their misfortune, not my fault.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

New York, March 18th, 1878.

THE TODAS
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[From the London Spiritualist.]

FOR my answer to the sneer of your correspondent “H. M.” about my opinion of the Todas a few lines sufficed. I only cared to say that what I have written in Isis Unveiled was written after reading Col. Marshall’s A Phrenologist among the Todas, and in consequence of what, whether justly or not, I believe to be the erroneous statements of that author. Writing about Oriental psychology, its phenomena and practitioners, as I did, I should have been ludicrously wanting in common sense if I had not anticipated such denials and contradictions as those of “H. M.” from every side. How would it profit the seeker after this Occult knowledge to face danger, privations, and obstacles of every kind to gain it, if, after attaining his end, he should not have facts to relate of which the profane were ignorant? A pretty set of critics are the ordinary travellers or observers, even though what Dr. Carpenter euphemistically calls a “scientific officer,” or “distinguished civilian,” when, confessedly, every European unfurnished with some mystical passport is debarred from entering any orthodox Brâhman’s house or the inner precincts of a pagoda. How we poor Theosophists should tremble before the scorn of those modern Daniels when the cleverest of them has never been able to explain the commonest “tricks” of Hindu jugglers, to say nothing of the phenomena of the Fakirs! These very savants answer the testimony of Spiritualists with an equally lofty scorn, and resent as a personal affront the invitation to even attend a seance.

I should therefore have let the “Todas” question pass, but for the letter of “Late Madras C. S.” in your paper of the 15thI feel bound to answer it, for the writer plainly makes me out to be a liar. He threatens me, moreover, with the thunderbolts that a certain other officer has concealed in his library closet.

It is quite remarkable how a man who resorts to an alias sometimes forgets that he is a gentleman. Perhaps such is the custom in your

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civilized England, where manners and education are said to be carried to a superlative elegance; but not so in poor, barbarous Russia, which a good portion of your countrymen are just now trying to strangle (if they can). In my country of Tartaric Cossacks and Kalmucks, a man who sets out to insult another does not usually hide himself behind a shield. I am sorry to have to say this much, but you have allowed me, without the least provocation and upon several occasions, to be unstintedly reviled by correspondents, and I am sure that you are too much of a man of honour to refuse me the benefit of an answer. “Late Madras, C. S.” sides with Mrs. Showers in the insinuation that I never was in India at all. This reminds me of a calumny of last year, originating with “spirits” speaking through a celebrated medium at Boston, and finding credit in many quarters.

It was, that I was not a Russian, did not even speak that language, but was merely a French adventuress. So much for the infallibility of some of the sweet “angels.” Surely, I will neither go to the trouble of exhibiting to any of my masked detractors, of this or the other world, my passports vise’s by the Russian embassies half a dozen times on my way to India and back. Nor will I demean myself by showing the stamped envelopes of letters received by me in different parts of India.

Such an accusation makes me simply laugh, for my word is, surely, as good as that of anybody else. I will only say that more’s the pity that an English officer, who was “fifteen years in the district,” knows less of the Todas than I, who, he pretends, never was in India at all. He calls Gopuram a “tower” of the pagoda. Why not the roof or any thing else as well? Gopuram is the sacred pylon, the pyramidal gate way by which the pagoda is entered; and yet I have repeatedly heard the people of southern India call the pagoda itself a Gopuram. It may be a careless mode of expression employed among the vulgar; but when we come to consult the authority of the best Indian lexicographers we find it accepted. In John Shakespear’s Hindustáni English Dictionary (edition of 1849, p. 1727) the word Gopuram is rendered as “an idol temple of the Hindus.” Has “Late Madras C. S.” or any of his friends, ever climbed up into the interior, so as to know who or what is concealed there? If not, then perhaps his fling at me was a trifle premature. I am sorry to have shocked the sensitiveness of such a philological purist, but really I do not see why, when speaking of the temples of the Todas—whether they exist or not—even a Brâhman Guru might not say that they had their Gopurams? Perhaps


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he, or some other brilliant authority in Sanskrit and other Indian languages, will favour us with the etymology of the word? Does the first syllable, go or gu, relate to the roundness of these “towers” as my critic calls them (for the word go does mean something round) or to gop, a cowherd, which gave its name to a Hindu caste and was one of the names of Krishna, Go-pal meaning the cowherd? Let these critics carefully read Col. Marshall’s work and see whether the pastoral tribe, whom he saw so much, and discovered so little about, whose worship (exoteric, of course) is all embraced in the care of the sacred cows and buffaloes, the distribution of the “divine fluid”—milk, and whose seeming adoration, as the missionaries tell us, is so great for their buffaloes that they call them the “gift of God,” could not be said to have their Gopurams, though the latter were but a cattle-pen, a tirieri, the maund, in short, into which the phrenological explorer crawled alone by night with infinite pains and—neither saw nor found anything. And because he found nothing he concludes they have no religion, no idea of God, no worship. About as reasonable an inference as Dr. W. B. Carpenter might come to if he had crawled into Mrs. Showers’ séance— room some night when all the “angels” and their guests had fled, and straightway reported that among Spiritualists there are neither mediums nor phenomena.

Col. Marshall I find far less dogmatic than his admirers. Such cautious phrases as “I believe,” “I could not ascertain,” “I believe it to be true,” and the like, show his desire to find out the truth, but scarcely prove conclusively that he has found it. At best it only comes to this, that Col. Marshall believes one thing to be true, and I look upon it differently. He credits his friend the missionary, and I believe my friend the Brâhman, who told me what I have written. Besides, I explicitly state in my book (see Isis, vol. ii. pp. 614, 615):

As soon as their [the Todas’] solitude was profaned by the avalanche of civilization . . the Todas began moving away to other parts as unknown and more inaccessible than the Neilgherri hills had formerly been.

The Todas, therefore, of whom my Brâhman friend spoke, and whom Capt. W. L. D. O’Grady, late manager of the Madras Branch Bank at Ootacamund, tells me he has seen specimens of, are not the degenerate remnants of the tribe whose phrenological bumps were measured by Col. Marshall. And yet, even what the latter writes of these, I from personal knowledge affirm to be in many particulars inaccurate. I may be regarded by my critics as over-credulous, but this is surely no


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reason why I should be treated as a liar whether by late or living Madras authorities of the C. S. Neither Capt. O’Grady, who was born at Madras and was for a time stationed on the Neilgherri hills, nor I, recognized the individuals photographed in Col. Marshall’s book as Todas. Those we saw wore their dark brown hair very long, and were much fairer than the Badagas, or any other Hindus in neither of which particulars do they resemble Col. Marshall’s types. “H. M.” says:

The Todas are brown, coffee-coloured, like most other natives.

But turning to Appleton’s Cyclopædia (vol. xii. p. 173), we read:

These people are of a light complexion, have strongly-marked Jewish features, and have been supposed by many to be one of the lost tribes.

“H. M.” assures us that the places inhabited by the Todas are not infested by venomous serpents or tigers; but the same Cyclopædia remarks that:

The mountains are swarming with wild animals of all descriptions, among which elephants and tigers are numerous.

But the “Late” (defunct?—is your correspondent a disembodied angel?) “Madras C. S.” attains to the sublimity of the ridiculous when, with biting irony in winding up, he says:

All good spirits, of whatever degree, astral or elementary, . . . prevent his [Capt. R. F. Burton’s] ever meeting with Isis—rough might be the unveiling

Surely unless that military Nemesis should tax the hospitality of some American newspaper, conducted by politicians, he could never be rougher than this Madras Grandison. And then, the idea of suggesting that, after having contradicted and made sport of the greatest authorities of Europe and America, to begin with Max Muller and end with the Positivists, in both my volumes, I should be appalled by Captain Burton, or the whole lot of captains in Her Majesty’s service—though each carried an Armstrong gun on his shoulder and a mitrailleuse in his pocket—is positively superb! Let them reserve their threats and terrors for my Christian countrymen.

Any moderately equipped sciolist (and the more empty-headed, the easier) might tear Isis to shreds, in the estimation of the vulgar, with his sophisms and presumably authoritative analysis; but would that prove him to be right, and me wrong? Let all the records of medial phenomena, rejected, falsified, slandered and ridiculed, and of mediums terrorized, for thirty years past, answer for me. I, at least, am not of the kind to be bullied into silence by such tactics, as “Late Madras”

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may in time discover; nor will he ever find me skulking behind a nom de plume when I have insults to offer. I always have had, as I now have, and trust ever to retain, the courage of my opinions, however unpopular or erroneous they may be considered; and there are not showers enough in Great Britain to quench the ardour with which I stand by my convictions.

There is but one way to account for the tempest which, for four months, has raged in The Spiritualist against Col. Olcott and myself, and that is expressed in the familiar French proverb—” Quand on veut tuer son chien, on dit qu’il est enrage".

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

New York, March 24th 1878.

THE AHKOOND OF SWAT

THE FOUNDER OF MANY MYSTICAL SOCIETIES.
—————

[From the New York Echo, 1878.]

OF the many remarkable characters of this century, Ghafur was one of the most conspicuous.

If there be truth in the Eastern doctrine that souls, powerful whether for good or bad, who had not time in one existence to work out their plans, are reincarnated, the fierceness of their yearnings to continue on earth thrusting them back into the current of their attractions, then Ghafur was a rebirth of that Felice Peretti, who is known in history as Pope Sixtus V., of crafty and odious memory. Both were born in the lowest class of society, being ignorant peasant boys and beginning life as herdsmen. Both reached the apex of power through craft and stealth and by imposing upon the superstitions of the masses. Sixtus, author of mystical books and himself a practitioner of the forbidden sciences to satisfy his lust for power and ensure impunity, became Inquisitor-General. Made Pope, he hurled his anathemas alike against Elizabeth of England, the King of Navarre, and other important personages. Abdul Ghafur, endowed with an iron will, had educated himself without colleges or professors except through association with the “wise men” of Khuttuk. He was as well versed in the Arabic and Persian literature of alchemy and astronomy as Sixtus was in Aristotle, and like him knew how to fabricate mesmerized talismans and amulets containing either life or death for those to whom they were presented. Each held millions of devotees under the subjection of their psycho logical influence, though both were more dreaded than beloved.

Ghafur had been a warrior and an ambitious leader of fanatics, but becoming a dervish and finally a pope, so to say, his blessing or curse made him as effectually the master of the Ameers and other Mussulmans as Sixtus was of the Catholic potentates of Europe.

Only the salient features of his career are known to Christendom.


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Watched, as he may have been, his private life, ambitions, aspirations for temporal as well as religious power, are almost a sealed book. But the one certain thing is, that he was the founder and chief of nearly every secret society worth speaking of among Mussulmans, and the dominant spirit in all the rest. His apparent antagonism to the Wahabees was but a mask, and the murderous hand that struck Lord Mayo was certainly guided by the old Abdul. The Biktashee Dervishes* and the howling, dancing, and other Moslem religious mendicants recognize his supremacy as far above that of the Sheik-ul-Islam of the faithful. Hardly a political order of any importance issued from Constantinople or Teheran—heretics though the Persians are—without his having a finger in the pie directly or indirectly. As fanatical as Sixtus, but more cunning yet, if possible, instead of giving direct orders for the extermination of the Huguenots of Islam, the Wahabees, he directed his curses and pointed his finger only at those among them whom he found in his way, keeping on the best, though secret, terms with the rest.

The title of Nasr-ed-Din (defender of the faith) he impartially applied to both the Sultan and the Shah, though one is a Sunnite and the other a Shiah. He sweetened the stronger religious intolerance of the Osman dynasty by adding to the old title of Nasr-ed-Din those of Saif-ed-Din (scimitar of faith) and Emir-el-Mumminiah (prince of the faithful). Every Emir-el-Sourey, or leader of the sacred caravan of pilgrims to Mekka, brought or sent messages to, and received advice and instructions from, Abdul, the latter in the shape of mysterious oracles, for which was left the full equivalent in money, presents and other offerings, as the Catholic pilgrims have recently done at Rome.

In 1847-8 the Prince Mirza, uncle of the young Shah and ex-governor of a great province in Persia, appeared in Tiflis, seeking Russian protection at the hands of Prince Woronzof, Viceroy of the Caucasus. Having helped himself to the crown jewels and ready money in the treasury, he had run away from the jurisdiction of his loving nephew, who was anxious to put out his eyes. Popular rumour asserted that his reason for what he had done was that the great dervish, Ahkoond, had thrice appeared to him in dreams, prompting him to take what he had and share his booty with the protectors of the faith of his principal wife (he brought twelve with him to Tiflis), a native of Cabul. The
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* To this day, no Biktashee would be recognized as Such unless he could claim possession of a certain medal with the seal of this high-pontiff” of all the Dervishes, whether they belong to one sect or the other.



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secret, though, perhaps, indirect influence he exercised on the Begum of Bhopal, during the Sepoy rebellion of 1857, was a mystery only to the English, whom the old schemer knew so well how to hoodwink. During his long career of Macchiavellism, friendly with the British, and yet striking them constantly in secret; venerated as a new prophet by millions of orthodox, as well as heretic Mussulmans; managing to preserve his influence over friend and foe, the old “Teacher” had one enemy whom he feared, for he knew that no amount of craft would ever win it over to his side. This enemy was the once mighty nation of the Sikhs, ex-sovereign rulers of the Punjab and masters of the Peshawur Valley. Reduced from their high estate, this warrior people are now under the rule of a single Mahârâjah—Puttiala—who is him self the helpless vassal of the British. From the beginning the Ahkoond had continually encountered the Sikhs in his path. Scarce would he feel himself conqueror over one obstacle, before his hereditary enemy would appear between him and the realization of his hopes. If the Sikhs remained faithful to the British in 1857, it was not through hearty loyalty or political convictions, so much as through sheer opposition to the Mohammedans, whom they knew to be secretly prompted by the Ahkoond.

Since the days of the great Nanak, of the Kshattriya caste, founder of the Sikh Brotherhood in the second half of the fifteenth century, these brave and warlike tribes have ever been the thorn in the side of the Mogul dynasty, the terror of the Moslems of India. Originating, as we may say, in a religious Brotherhood, whose object was to make away alike with Islamism, Brâhmanism, and other isms, including later Christianity, this sect evolved a pure monotheism in the abstract idea of an ever unknown Principle, and elaborated it into the doctrine of the “Brotherhood of Man.” In their view, we have but one Father- Mother Principle, with “neither form, shape, nor colour,” and we ought all to be, if we are not, brothers irrespective of distinctions of race or colour. The sacerdotal Brâhman, fanatical in his observance of dead-letter forms, thus became in the opinion of the Sikh as much the enemy of truth as the Mussulman wallowing in a sensual heaven with his houris, the joss-worshipping Buddhist grinding out prayers at his wheel, or yet the Roman Catholic adoring his jewelled Madonnas, whose complexion the priests change from white to brown and black to suit climates and prejudices. Later on, Arjuna, son of Ramdas, the fourth in the succession after Nanak, gathering together the doctrines


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of the founder and his son Angad, brought out a sacred volume, called Adi-garunth, and largely supplemented it with selections from forty- five Sutras of the Jains. While adopting equally the religious figures of the Vedas and Koran, after sifting them and explaining their symbolism, the Adi-garuizlh yet presents a greater similarity of ideas respecting the most elaborate metaphysical conceptions with those of the Jain school of Gurus. The notions of Astrology, or the influence of the starry spheres upon ourselves, were evidently adopted from that most prominent school of antiquity. This will be readily ascertained by comparing the commentaries of Abhayadeva Sun upon the original forty-five Sfttras in the Magadhi or Balabasha languages* with the Adigarunik. An old Jain Guru, who is said to have drawn the horoscope of Runjeet Singh, at the time of his greatest power, had foretold the downfall of the kingdom of Lahore. It was the learned Arjuna who retired into Amritsir, changed the sect into a politico- religious community, and instituted within the same another and more esoteric body of Gurus, scholars and metaphysicians, of which he became sole chief. He died in prison, under torture, by the order of Aurungzebe, into whose hands he had fallen, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. His son Govinda, a Guru (religious teacher) of great renown, vowed revenge against the race of his father’s murderers, and after various changes of fortune the Afghans were finally driven from the Punjab by the Sikhs in 1764. This triumph only made their hatred more bitter still, and from that moment until the death of Runjeet Singh, in 1839, we find them constantly aiming their blows at the Moslems. Mahâ Singh, the father of Runjeet, had set off the Sikhs into twelve mizals or divisions, each having its own chief (Sirdar), whose secret Council of State consisted of learned Gurus. Among these were Masters in spiritual Science, and they might, if they had had a mind, have exhibited as astonishing “miracles” and divine legerdemain as the old Mussulman Ahkoond. He knew it well, and for this reason dreaded them even more than he hated them for his defeat and that of his Ameer by Runjeet Singh.

One highly dramatic incident in the life of the “Pope of Sydoo” is the following well-authenticated case, which was much commented upon in his part of India about twenty years ago. One day, in 1858,
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* This valuable work is now being republished by Ookerdhabhoy Shewgee, and has been received by the Theosophical Society from the Editor through the President of the Bombay branch. When finished it will be the first edition of the Jain Bible, Sudra-Sangraha or Vihiva Punnutti Sudra in existence, as all their sacred books are kept in secret by the Jains.


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when the Ahkoond, squatting on his carpet, was distributing amulets, blessings and prophecies among his pious congregation of pilgrims, a tall Hindu who had silently approached and mingled in the crowd without having been noticed, suddenly addressed him thus: “Tell me, prophet, thou who prophesiest so well for others, whether thou knowest what will be thine own fate, and that of the ‘Defender of the Faith,’ thy Sultan of Stamboul, twenty years hence?”

The old Ghafur, overcome with violent surprise, stared at his interlocutor, but no answer came. In recognizing the Sikh he seemed to have lost all power of speech, and the crowd was under a spell.

“If not,” continued the intruder, “then I will tell thee. Twenty years more and your ‘Prince of the Faithful’ will fall by the hand of an assassin of his own house. Two old men, one the Dalai Lama of the Christians, the other the great prophet of the Moslems—thyself— will be simultaneously crushed under the heel of death. Then, the first hour will strike of the downfall of those twin foes of truth— Christianity and Islam. The first, as the more powerful, will survive the second, but both will soon crumble into fragmentary sects, which will mutually exterminate each other’s faith. See, thy followers are powerless, and I might kill thee now, but thou art in the hands of Destiny, and that knows its own hour.”

Before a hand could be lifted the speaker had disappeared. This incident of itself sufficiently proves that the Sikhs might have assassinated Abdul Ghafur at any time had they chosen so to do. And it may be that The Mayfair Gazette which in June, 1877, prophetically observed that the rival pontiffs of Rome and Swat might die simultaneously, had heard from some “old Indian” this story, which the writer also heard from an informant at Lahore.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

THE ARYA SAMAJ

CHRISTENDOM sends its missionaries to Heathendom at an expense of millions drained from the pockets of would-be pious folks, who court respectability. Thousands of homeless and penniless old men, women and children are allowed to starve for lack of funds, for the sake, perhaps, of one converted “heathen.” All the spare money of the charitable is absorbed by these dead-head travelling agents of the Christian Church. What is the result? Visit the prison cells of so-called Christian lands, crammed with delinquents who have been led on to felony by the weary path of starvation, and you will have the answer.

Read in the daily papers the numerous accounts of executions, and you will find that modern Christianity offers, perhaps unintentionally but none the less surely, a premium for murder and other heinous crimes. Is anyone prepared to deny the assertion? Remember that, while many a respectable unbeliever dies in his bed with the comfortable assurance from his next of kin, and good friends in general, that he is going to hell, the red-handed criminal has but to believe at his eleventh hour that the blood of the Saviour can and will save him, to receive the guarantee of his spiritual adviser that he will find himself when launched into eternity in the bosom of Christ, in heaven, and playing upon the traditional harp. Why, then, should any Christian deny himself the pleasure and profit of robbing, or even murdering, his richer neighbour? And such a doctrine is being promulgated among the heathen at the cost of an annual expenditure of millions.

But, in her eternal wisdom, Nature provides antidotes against moral as well as against mineral and vegetable poisons. There are people who do not content themselves with preaching grandiloquent discourses; they act. If such books as Higgins’ Anacalypsis, and that extraordinary work of an anonymous English author—a bishop, it is whispered—entitled Supernatural Religion, cannot awaken responsive

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echoes among the ignorant masses, other means can be, and are resorted to—means more effectual and which will bring fruit in the future, if hitherto prevented by the crushing hand of ecclesiastical and monarchical despotism. Those whom the written proofs of the fictitious character of biblical authority cannot reach, may be saved by the spoken word. And this work of disseminating the truth among the more ignorant classes is being ardently prosecuted by an army of devoted scholars and teachers, simultaneously in India and America.

The Theosophical Society has been of late so much spoken about; such idle tales have been circulated about it—its members being sworn to secrecy and hitherto unable, even if willing, to proclaim the truth about it—that the public may be gratified to know, at least, about one portion of its work. It is now in organized affiliation with the Arya Samâj of India, its Western representative, and, so to say, under the order of its chiefs. A younger Society than the Brâhmo Samaj it was instituted to save the Hindu from exoteric idolatries, Brâhmanism and Christian missionaries.

The purely Theistic movement connected with the Brâhmo Samâj had its origin in the same idea. It began early in the present century, but spasmodically and with interruption, and only took concrete shape under the leadership of Baboo Keshub Chunder Sen in 1858. Rammo bun Roy, who may be termed the combined Fénelon and Thomas Paine of Hindustan, was its parent, his first church having been organized shortly before his death in 1833. One of the greatest and most acute of controversial writers that our century has produced, his works ought to be translated and circulated in every civilized land. At his death, the work of the Brâhmo Samâj was interrupted. As Miss Collett says, in her Brahmo Year Book for 1878, it was only in October, 1839, that Debendra Nath Tagore founded the Tattvabodhini Sabhâ (or Society for the Knowledge of Truth), which lasted for twenty years, and did much to arouse the energies and form the principles of the young church of the Brahmo Samaj. But exoteric or open religion as it is now, it must have been conducted at first much on the principles of the secret societies, as we are informed that Keshub Chunder Sen, a resident of Calcutta and a pupil of the Presidency College, who had long before quitted the orthodox Brâhmanical Church and was searching for a purely Theistic religion, “had never heard of the Brâhmo Samâj before 1858” (see The Theistic Annual, 1878, p. 45).

Since then the Brâhmo Samâj, which he then joined, has flourished


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and become more popular every day. We now find it with Samâjes established in many provinces and cities. At least, we learn that in May, 1877, fifty Samâjes have notified their adhesion to the Society and eight of them have appointed their representatives. Native missionaries of the Theistic religion oppose the Christian missionaries and the orthodox Brâhmans, and the work is going on livelily. So much for the Brâhmo movement.

And now, with regard to the Arya Samâj, The Indian Tribune uses the following language in speaking of its founder:

The first quarter of the sixteenth century was no more an age of reformation in Europe than the one we now live in is, at this moment, in India. from amongst its own “Benedictines,” Swami Dyanand Saraswati has arisen, who, unlike other reformers, does not wish to set up a new religion of his own, but asks his country men to go back to the pristine purity and Theism of their Vedic religion. After preaching his views in Bombay, Poona, Calcutta, and the N. -W. Provinces, he came to the Punjab last year, and here it is that he found the most congenial soil.

It was in the land of the five rivers, on the banks of the Indus, that the Vedas were first compiled. It was the Punjah that gave birth to a Nanak. And it is the Punjab that is making such efforts for a revival of Vedic learning and its doctrines. And wherever Swami Dyanand goes, his splendid physique, his manly bearing, eloquence and his incisive logic tear down all opposition. People rise up and say: We shall remain no longer in this state for ourselves, we have bad enough of a crafty priesthood and a demoralizing idolatry, and we shall tolerate them no longer. We shall wipe off the ugliness of ages, and try to shine forth in the original radiance and effulgence of our Aryan ancestors.

The Svami is a most highly honoured Fellow of the Theosophical Society, takes a deep interest in its proceedings, and The Indian Spectator of Bombay, April 14th, 1878, spoke by the book when it said that the work of Pundit Dyanand “bears intimate relation to the work of the Theosophical Society.”

While the members of the Brâhmo Samaj may be designated as the Lutheran Protestants of orthodox Brâhmanism, the disciples of the Svami Dyanand should be compared to those learned mystics, the Gnostics, who had the key to those earlier writings which, later, were worked over into the Christian gospels and various patristic literature. As the above-named pre-Christian sects understood the true esoteric meaning of the Chrestos allegory, which is now materialized into the Jesus of flesh, so the disciples of the learned and holy Svami are taught to discriminate between the written form and the spirit of the word preached in the Vedas. And this is the principal point of difference between the Arya Samâj and the Brâhmos who, as it would seem, believe


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in a personal God and repudiate the Vedas, while the Aryas see an everlasting Principle, an impersonal Cause in the great “Soul of the universe” rather than a personal being, and accept the Vedas as supreme authority, though not of divine origin. But we may better quote in elucidation of the subject what the President of the Bombay Arya Samâj, also a Fellow of the Theosophical Society, Mr. Hurrychund Chintamon, says in a recent letter to our Society:

Pundit Dyanand maintains that as it is now universally acknowledged that the Vedas are the oldest books of antiquity, if they contain the truth and nothing but the truth in all unmutilated state, and nothing new can be found in other works of later date, why should we not accept the Vedas as a guide for Humanity? . . A revealed book or revelation is understood to mean one of two things, Viz.: (1) a book already written by some invisible hand and thrown into the world; or (2) a work written by one or more men while they were in their highest state of mental lucidity, acquired by profound meditation upon the problems of who man is, whence he came, whither he must go, and by what means he may emancipate himself from worldly delusions and sufferings. The latter hypothesis may be regarded as the more rational and correct.

Our Brother Hurrychund here describes those superior men whom we know as Adepts. He adds:

The ancient inhabitants of a place near Thibet, and adjoining a lake called Mansovara, were first called Deveneggury (Devanâgari) or godlike people. Their written characters were also called Deveneggury or Balbadha letters. A portion of them migrated to the North and settled there, and afterwards spread towards the South, while others went to the West. All these emigrants styled themselves Aryans, or noble, pure, and good men, as they considered that a pure gift had been made to humanity from the “Pure Alone.” These lofty souls were the authors of the Vedas.

What more reasonable than the claim that such Scriptures, emanating from such authors, should contain, for those who are able to penetrate the meaning that lies half concealed under the dead letter, all the wisdom which it is allowed to men to acquire on earth? The Chiefs of the Arya Samâj discredit “miracles,” discountenance superstition and all violation of natural law, and teach the purest form of Vaidic Philosophy. Such are the allies of the Theosophical Society. They have said to us: “Let us work together for the good of mankind,” and we will.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.



PARTING WORDS
—————

[From The Religio-Philosophical Journal, July 6th, 1878.]

So far as I can at present foresee, this will be the last time I shall ask you to print anything over my, to many Spiritualists, loathed signature, as I intend to start for India very soon. But I have once more to correct inaccurate statements. If I had had my choice, I would have preferred almost any other person than my very esteemed friend Dr. Bloede, to have last words with. Once an antagonist, a bitter and unjust one to me, as he himself admits, he has since made all the amends I could have asked of a scholar and a gentleman, and now, as all who read your valuable paper see, he does me the honour to call me friend. Honest in intent he always is, I am sure, but still a little prejudiced. Who of us but is so, more or less? Duty, therefore, compels me to correct the erroneous impression which his letter on “Secret Societies” (Journal of June 15th) is calculated to give about the Theosophical Society. How many “Fellows” we have, how the Society is flourishing, what are its operations or how conducted, no one knows or can know, save the presidents of its various branches and their secretaries. Therefore, Dr. G. Bloede, in saying that it has “failed in America and will fail in Europe,” speaks of that of which neither he nor any other outsider has knowledge. If the Society’s only object were the study of the phenomena called Spiritual, his strictures would be perfectly warranted; for it is not secrecy but privacy and exclusiveness that are demanded in the management of circles and mediums. It would have been absurd to make a secret society expressly for that purpose. At its beginning the Theosophical Society was started for that sole study, and therefore was, as you all know, open to any respectable person who wished to join it. We discussed “spiritual” topics freely, and were willing to impart to the public the results of all our experiments, and whatever some of us might have learned of the subject in the course of long studies. How our views and philosophy


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were received—no need to recall the old story again. The storm has already subsided; and the total of “Billingsgate” poured upon our devoted heads is preserved in three gigantic scrap-books whose contents I mean to immortalize some day. When through the writing and noble efforts of the Journal and other spiritual papers the secret of these varied and vexing phenomena, indiscriminately called spiritual, will be snatched at last, when the faithful of the orthodox church of Spiritualism will be forced to give up—partially at least—their many bigoted and preconceived notions, then the time will have come again for Theosophists to claim a hearing. Till then, its members retire from the arena of discussion and devote their whole leisure to the fulfilment of other and more important objects of the Society.

You perceive, then, that it is only when experience showed the necessity for its work to be enlarged, and its objects became various, that the T. S. thought fit to protect itself by secrecy. Since then, none but perjured witnesses, and we know of none, can have told about what we were doing, except as permitted by official sanction and announced from time to time. One of such objects of our Society we are willing to publicly announce.

It is universally known that this most important object is to antagonize Christianity* and especially Jesuitism. One of our most esteemed and valued members, once an ardent Spiritualist, but who must for the present be nameless, has but recently fallen a victim to the snares of this hateful body.

The nefarious designs of Jesuitism are plotted in secret and carried out through secret agencies. What more reasonable and lawful, there fore, than that those who wish to fight it should keep their own secret, likewise, as to their agencies and plans? We have among us persons in high position—political, military, financial and social—who regard Christianity as the greatest evil to humanity, and are willing to help pull it down. But for them to be able to do much and well, they must do it anonymously. The Church—”triple-headed snake” as a well known writer calls it—can no longer burn its enemies, but it can blast their social influence; can no longer roast their bodies, but can ruin their fortunes. We have no right to give our enemy, the Church, the names of our “Fellows,” who are not ripe for martyrdom, and so we
—————

* [In later days H. P. B. took great pains to explain that the ‘christianity’ which she so vigorously attacked, was all ecclesiastical system of dogmas to which she subsequently gave the name ‘‘churchianity,’’ and not the spiritual and moral teachings of Jesus.—Ens.]

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keep them secret. If we have an agent to send to India or to Japan, or China, or any other heathen country, to do something or confer with somebody in connection with the Society’s general plans against missionaries, it would be foolish, nay, criminal, to expose our agent to imprisonment under some malicious pretext, if not death, and even the latter is possible in the far-away East, and our scheme is liable to miscarry by announcing it to the dishonourable company of Jesus.

So, sir, to sum up in a word, Dr. Bloede has made a great mistake in supposing the Theosophical Society a “failure” in this or any other country. Where the Society counted three years ago its members by the dozen, it now counts them by the hundred and thousand. And so far from its threatening in any respect the stability of society or the advancement of spiritual knowledge, the Theosophical institution which now bears the name of the “Theosophical Society of the Arya Samâj of India” (being regularly chartered by and affiliated with that great body in the land of the Aryas) will be found some day, by the Spiritualists and all others who claim the right of thinking for them selves, to have been the true friend of intellectual and spiritual liberty—if not in America, at least in France and other countries, where an infernal priesthood thrusts innocent Spiritualists into prison by the help of a subservient judiciary and the use of perjured testimony. Its name will be respected as a pioneer of free thought and an uncompromising enemy of priestly and monkish fraud and despotism.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

New York, June 17th, 1878.

“NOT A CHRISTIAN”
—————

[From the Indian Spectator.]

BEFORE entering upon the main question that compels me to ask you kindly to accord me space in your esteemed paper, will you inform me as to the nature of that newly-horn infant prodigy which calls itself The Bombay Review? Is it a bigoted, sectarian organ of the Christians, or an impartial journal, fair to all, and unprejudiced as every respectable paper styling itself “Review” ought to be, especially in a place like Bombay, where such a diversity of religious opinions is to be found? The two paragraphs in the number of February 22nd, which so honour the Theosophical Society by a double notice of its American members, would force me to incline toward the former opinion. Both the editorial which attacks my esteemed friend, Miss Bates, and the apocalyptic vision of the modern Ezekiel, alias “Anthroposophist,” who shoots his rather blunt arrows at Col. Olcott, require an answer, if it were but to show the advisability of using sharper darts against Theosophists. Leaving the seer to his prophetic dream of langoutis and cow-dung, I will simply review the editorial of this Review which tries to be at the same time satirical and severe and succeeds only in being nonsensical. Quoting from another paper a sentence relating to Miss Bates, which describes her as “not a Christian,” it remarks in that bitter and selfish spirit of arrogance and would-be superiority, which so characterizes Christian sectarianism:

The public might have been spared the sight of the italicized personal explanation.

What “public” may I ask? The majority of the intelligent and reading public—especially of native papers—in Bombay as throughout India is, we believe, composed of non-Christians—of Parsis, Hindus, etc. And this public instead of resenting such “wanton aggressiveness,” as the writer pleases to call it, call but rejoice to find at least one European lady, who, at the same time that she is not a Christian,


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is quite ready, as a Theosophist, to call any respectable “heathen” her brother, and regard him with at least as much sympathy as she does a Christian. But this unfortunate thrust at Theosophy is explained by what follows:

In the young lady’s own interest the insult ought not to have been flung into the teeth of the Christian public.

Without taking into consideration the old and wise axiom, that honesty is the best policy, we can only regret for our Christian opponents that they should so soon “unveil” their cunning policy. While in the eyes of every honest “heathen” Theosophist, there can be no higher recommendation for a person than to have the reputation of being truthful even at the expense of his or her “interest,” our Christian Review unwittingly exposes the concealed rope of the mission machinery, by admitting that it is in the interest of every person here, at least—to appear a Christian or a possible convert, if he is not one de facto. We feel really very, very grateful to the Review for such a timely and generous confession. The writer’s defence of the “public” for which it speaks as one having authority is no less vague and unsatisfactory, as we all know that among the 240,000,000 of native population in India, Christians count but as a drop in an ocean. Or is it possible that no other public but the Christian is held worthy of the name or even of consideration? Had converted Brâhmans arrived here instead of Theosophists, and one of these announced his profession of faith by italicizing the words, not a heathen, we doubt whether the fear of hurting the feelings of many millions of Hindus would have ever entered the mind of our caustic paragraphist!

Nor do we find the sentence, “India owes too much to Christianity,” anything but arrogant and presumptuous talk. India owes much and everything to the British Government, which protects its heathen subjects equally with those of English birth, and would no more allow the one class to insult the other than it would revive the Inquisition. India owes to Great Britain its educational system, its slow but sure progress, and its security from the aggression of other nations; to Christianity it owes nothing. And yet perhaps I am mistaken, and ought to have made one exception. India owes to Christianity its mutiny of 1857, which threw it back for a century. This we assert on the authority of general opinion and of Sir John Kay, who declares, in his Sepoy War, that the mutiny resulted from the intolerance of the crusading missions and the silly talk of the Friend of India.


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I have done; adding but one more word of advice to the Review. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the latest international revision of the Bible—that infallible and revealed Word of God !—reveals 64,000 mistranslations and other mistakes, it is not the Theosophists—a large number of whose members are English patriots and men of learning—but rather the Christians who ought to beware of “wanton aggressiveness” against people of other creeds. Their boomerangs may fly back from some unexpected parabola and hit the throwers.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

Bombay, Feb. 25th, 1879.

THE RETORT COURTEOUS

[From the Indian Spectator.]

THERE is a story current among the Yankees of a small school boy, who, having been thrashed by a bigger fellow and being unable to hit him back, consoled himself by making faces at his enemy’s sister. Such is the position of my opponent of the world-famed Bombay Review. Realizing the impossibility of injuring the Theosophical Society, he “makes faces” at its Corresponding Secretary, flinging at her personal abuse.

Unfortunately for my masked enemies and fortunately for myself, I have five years’ experience in fighting American newspapers, any one of which, notwithstanding the grandiloquent style of the “Anthroposophists,” “B.’s” and “Onesimuses” is any day more than a match in humour, and especially in wit, for a swarm of such pseudonymous wasps as work on the Review. If I go to the trouble of noticing their last Saturday’s curry of weak arguments and impertinent personalities at all, it is simply with the object of proving once more that it requires more wit than seems to be at their command to compel my silence. Abuse is no argument; moreover, if applied indiscriminately it may prove dangerous sometimes.

Hence, I intend noticing but one particular point. As to their conceit, it is very delightful to behold! What a benevolent tone of patronage combined with modesty is theirs! How refreshing in hot weather to hear them saying of oneself:

We have been more charitable to her than she seems subsequently to deserve [!!].

Could dictatorial magnanimity be carried further? And this dithyrambic, which forces one’s recognition of the worth of the mighty ones “of broad and catholic views,” who control the fates of The Bombay Review, and have done in various ways so much “for the races of India” ! One might fancy he heard the “spirits” of Lord Mayo and Sir William Jones themselves blowing through the pipes of this earth shaking organ.

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Has it acquired its reverberant diapason from the patronage of all the native princes whose favours it so eagerly sought a while ago?

I have neither leisure nor desire to banter penny-a-line wit with such gold-medal experts, especially when I honestly write above my own signature and they hide themselves behind secure pseudonyms. Therefore, I will leave their claptrap about “weeds and Madame Sophy” to be digested by themselves, and notice but the insinuation about “Russian spies.” I agree with the Review editor when he says that it is the business of Sir Richard Temple and Sir Frank Souter to take care of such “spies.” And I will further add that it is these two gentlemen alone who have the right or the authority to denounce such people.

No other person, were he even the noblest of the lords instead of an anonymous writer, can or will be allowed to throw out such a malicious and mischievous hint about a woman and a citizen of the United States. He who does it risks being brought to the bar of that most just of all tribunals—a British Court. And if either of my ambuscaders wishes to test the question, pray let him put his calumny in some tangible shape. Such a vile innuendo—even when shaped into the sham-denial of a bazaar rumour, becomes something more serious than whole folios of the “flapdoodle” (the stuff—as sailors say—upon which fools are fed) which the Review’s Christian Shâstris serve up against Theosophy and Theosophists. In the interest of that youthful and boisterous paper itself, we hope that henceforth it will get its information from a more reliable source than the Bombay market places.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

Bombay, March 14th, 1879.

“SCRUTATOR” AGAIN

[Probably from the London Spiritualist.]

IF my memory has not altogether evaporated under the combined influences of this blazing Indian sun and the frequent misconstructions of your correspondents, there occurred, in March, 1878, an epistolary skirmish between one who prudently conceals his face behind the two masks of “Scrutator” and “M.A. Cantab.,” and your humble servant. He again attacks me in the character of my London Nemesis. Again he lets fly a Parthian shaft from behind the fence of one of his pseudonyms. Again he has found a mare’s nest in my garden—a chronological, instead of a metaphysical one this time. He is exercised about my age, as though the value of my statements would be in the least affected by either rejuvenating me to infancy, or ageing me into a double centenarian. He has read in the Revue Spirite for October last a sentence in which, discussing this very point, I say that I have not passed thirty years in India. And that:

C’est justement mon age—quoique fort respectable tel qu’il est—qui s’oppose violemmeet a cette chronologie, etc.

I reproduce the sentence exactly as it appears, with the sole exception of restoring the period after “l’Inde” in the place of the comma, which is simply a typographical mistake. The capital C which immediately follows would have conveyed to anyone except a “Scrutator” my exact meaning, viz., that my age itself, however respectable, is opposed to the idea that I had passed thirty years in India.

I do hope that my ever-masked assailant will devote some leisure to the study of French as well as of punctuation before he attacks again.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

Bombay, Feb., 1879.

MAGIC
—————

[From The Deccan Star, March 30th, 1879.]

IN The Indian Tribune of March 15th appears a letter upon the relations of the Theosophical Society with the Arya Samâj. The writer seems neither an enemy of our cause, nor hostile to the Society; therefore I will try in a gentle spirit to correct certain misapprehensions under which he labours.

As he signs himself “A Member,” he must, therefore, be regarded by us as a Brother. And yet he seems moved by an unwarranted fear to a hasty repudiation of too close a connection between our Society and his Samâj, lest the fair name of the latter be compromised before the public by some strange notions of ours. He says:

I have been surprised to hear that the Society embraces people who believe in magic. Should this, however, be the belief of the Theosophical Society, I could only assure your readers that the Arya Samâj is not in common with them in this respect. Only as far as Vedic learning and Vedic philosophy is concerned, their objects may be said to be similar.

It is these very points I now mean to answer.

The gist of the whole question is as to the correct definition of the word “Magic,” and understanding of what Vaidic “learning and philosophy” are. If by Magic is meant the popular superstitious belief in sorcery, witchcraft and ghosts in general; if it involves the admission that supernatural feats may be performed; if it requires faith in miracles—that is to say, phenomena outside natural law; then, on behalf of every Theosophist, whether a sceptic yet unconverted, a believer in and student of phenomena pure and simple, or even a modern Spiritualist so-called—i.e., one who believes mediumistic phenomena to be necessarily caused by returning human Spirits—we emphatically repudiate the accusation.

We did not see The Civil and Military Gazette, which seems so well acquainted with our doctrines; but if it meant to accuse any Theo-


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sophists of any such belief, then, like many other Gazettes and Reviews, it talked of that which it knew nothing about.

Our Society believes in no miracle, diabolical or human, nor in any-thing which eludes the grasp of either philosophical and logical induction, or the syllogistic method of deduction. But if the corrupted and comparatively modern term of “Magic” is understood to mean the higher study and knowledge of Nature and deep research into her hidden powers—those Occult and mysterious laws which constitute the ultimate essence of every element—whether with the ancients we recognize but four or five, or with the moderns over sixty; or, again, if by Magic is meant that ancient study within the sanctuaries, known as the “worship of the Light,” or divine and spiritual wisdom—as distinct from the worship of darkness or ignorance—which led the initiated High-priests of antiquity among the Aryans, Chaldæans, Medes and Egyptians to be called Maha, Magi or Maginsi, and by the Zoroastrians Meghistam (from the root Meh’ah, great, learned, wise)—then, we Theosophists “plead guilty.”

We do study that “Science of sciences,” extolled by the Eclectics and Platonists of the Alexandrian Schools, and practised by the Theurgists and the Mystics of every age. If Magic gradually fell into disrepute, it was not because of its intrinsic worthlessness, but through misconception and ignorance of its primitive meaning, and especially the cunning policy of Christian theologians, who feared lest many of the phenomena produced by and through natural (though Occult) law should give the direct lie to, and thus cheapen, ‘‘Divine biblical miracle,” and so forced the people to attribute every manifestation that they could not comprehend or explain to the direct agency of a personal devil. As well accuse the renowned Magi of old of having had no better knowledge of divine truth and the hidden powers and possibilities of physical law than their successors, the uneducated Parsi Mobeds, or the Hindu Mahârâjahs of that shameless sect known as the Vallabhâchâryas, both of whom yet derive their appellation from the Persian word Mog or Mag, and the Sanskrit Mahâ. More than one glorious truth has thus tumbled down through human ignorance from the sublime unto the ridiculous.

Plato, and even the sceptical Lucian, both recognized the high wisdom and profound learning of the Magi; and Cicero, speaking of those who inhabited Persia in his times, calls them “ sapientium et doctorum genus majorum.” And if so, we must evidently believe that


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these Magi or “magicians” were not such as London sees at a shilling a seat—nor yet certain fraudulent spiritual mediums. The Science of such Theurgists and Philosophers as Pythagoras, Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Bruno, Paracelsus, and a host of other great men, has now fallen into disrepute. But had our Brother Theosophist, Thomas Alva Edison. the inventor of the telephone and the phonograph, lived in the days of Galileo, he would have surely expiated on the rack or at the stake his sin of having found the means to fix on a soft surface of metal, and preserve for long years, the sounds of the human voice, for his talent would have been pronounced the gift of hell. And yet, such an abuse of brute power to suppress truth would not have changed a scientific discovery into a foolish and disreputable superstition.

But our friend “A Member,” consenting to descend to our level in one point at least, admits himself that in ‘‘Vedic learning and philosophy” the Arya Samâj and the Theosophical Society are upon a common ground. Then, I have something to appeal to as an authority which will be better still than the so-much-derided Magic, Theurgy and Alchemy. It is the Vedas themselves, for “Magic” is brought into every line of the sacred books of the Aryans. Magic is indispensable for the comprehension of either of the six great schools of Aryan philosophy. And it is precisely to understand them, and thus enable our selves to bring to light the hidden summum bonum of that mother of all Eastern Philosophies known as the Vedas, and the later Brâhmanical literature, that we study it. Neglect this study, and we, in common with all Europe, would have to set Max Muller’s interpretations of the Vedas far above those of Svami Dyanand Sarasvati, as given in his Veda .Bhashya. And we would have to let the Anglo-German Sanskritist go uncontradicted, when he says that with the exception of the Rik, none other of the four sacred books is deserving of the name of Veda, especially the Atharva Veda, which is absurd, magical nonsense, composed of sacrificial formulas, charms and incantations see his Lecture on the Vedas). This is, therefore, why, disregarding every misconception, we humbly beg to be allowed to follow the analytical method of such students and practitioners of “Magic” as Kapila— mentioned in the Shvetashvatara Upanishad as
The Rishi nourished with knowledge by the God himself—
Patanjali, the great authority of the Yoga, Shankarâchârya of theurgic memory, and even Zoroaster, who certainly learned his wisdom from the initiated Brâhmans of Aryavarta. And we do not see why, for

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that, we should be held up to the world’s scorn, as either superstitious fools or hallucinated enthusiasts, by our own brother of the Arya Samâj. I will say more. While the latter is, perhaps, in common with other “members” of the same Samâj, unable and perfectly Helpless to defend Svami Dyanand against the sophistry of such partial scoffers as a certain Pandit Mahesa Chandra Nyayaratna, of Calcutta, who would have us believe the Veda Bhashya a futile attempt at interpretation; we, Theosophists, do not shrink from assuming the burden. When the Svami affirms that Agni and Ishvara are identical, the Calcutta Pandit calls it “stuff.” To him Agni means the coarse, visible fire, with which one melts his ghee and cooks his rice cakes. Apparently he does not know, as he might, if he had studied “Magic”— that is to say, had familiarized himself with the views about the divine Fire or Light, “whose external body is Flame,” held by the mediæval Rosicrucians (the Fire-Philosophers) and all their initiated predecessors and successors—that the Vedic Agni is in fact and deed Ishvara and nothing else. The Svami makes no mistake when he says:

For Agni is all the deities and Vishnu is all the deities. For these two [divine] bodies, Agni and Vishnu, are the two ends of the sacrifice.

At one end of the ladder which stretches from heaven to earth is Ishvara—Spirit, Supreme Being, subjective, invisible and incomprehensible; at the other his visible manifestation, “sacrificial fire.”

So well has this been comprehended by every religious Philosophy of antiquity that the enlightened Parsi worships not gross flame, but the divine Spirit within, of which it is the visible type; and even in the Jewish Bible there is the unapproachable Jehovah and his down-rushing fire which consumes the wood upon the altar and licks up the water in the trench about it ( I Kings, xviii. 38). There is also the visible manifestation of God in the burning bush of Moses, and the Holy Ghost, in the Gospels of the Christians, descending like tongues of flame upon the heads of the assembled disciples on the day of Pentecost. There is not an Esoteric Philosophy or rather Theosophy, which did not apprehend this deep spiritual idea, and each and all are traceable to the Vaidic sacred books. Says the author of The Rosicrucians in his chapter on “The Nature of Fire,” and quoting R. Fludd, the mediæval Theosophist and Alchemist:

Wonder no longer then, if, in the religions of the Aryans, Medes and Zoroastrians, rejected so long as an idolatry, the ancient Persians and their masters, the Magi, concluding that they saw ‘‘All” in this supernaturally magnificent Element


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[fire] fell down and worshipped it; making of it the visible representation of the truest, but yet, in man’s speculations, in his philosophies, nay, in his commonest reason, impossible God; God being everywhere and in us, and indeed us, in the God-lighted man, and impossible to be contemplated or known outside, being All.

This is the teaching of the mediæval Fire-Philosophers known as the Brothers of the Rosie-Cross, such as Paracelsus, Kunrath, Van Helmont, and that of all the Illuminati and Alchemists who succeeded these, and who claimed to have discovered the eternal Fire, or to have “found out God in the Immortal Light”—that light whose radiance shone through the Yogis. The same author remarks of them:

Already, in their determined climbing unto the heights of thought, had these Titans of mind achieved, past the cosmical through the shadowy borders of the Real and Unreal, into Magic. For is Magic wholly false?

—he goes on to ask. No; certainly not, when by Magic is understood the higher study of divine, and yet not supernatural law, though the latter be, as yet, undiscovered by exact and materialistic phenomena, such as those which are believed in by nearly twenty millions of well- educated, often highly enlightened and learned persons in Europe and America. These are as real, and as well authenticated by the testimony of thousands of unimpeached witnesses, and as scientifically and mathematically proved as the latest discoveries of our Brother T. A. Edison. If the term “fool” is applicable to such men of Science and giants of intellect of the two hemispheres, as W. Crookes, F.R.S., Alfred Russel Wallace, the greatest Naturalist of Europe and a successful rival of Darwin, and as Flammarion, the French Astronomer, Member of the Academy of Sciences of France, and Professor Zöllner, the celebrated Leipzig Astronomer and Physicist, and Professor Hare, the great Chemist of America, and many another no less eminent Scientist, unquestioned authorities upon any other question but the so-called spiritual phenomena, and all firm Spiritualists themselves, often converted only after years of careful investigation—then, indeed, we Theosophists would not find ourselves in bad company, and would deem it an honour to be called “fools” were we even firm orthodox Spiritualists ourselves—i.e., believers in perambulating ghosts and materialized bhuts—which we are not. But we are believers in the phenomena of the Spiritualists (even if we do doubt their “spirits”), for we happen to know them to be actual facts. It is one thing to reject unproved theory, and quite another to battle against well-established facts. Everyone has a right to doubt, until further and stronger


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evidence, whether these modern phenomena which are inundating the Western countries, are all produced by disembodied “spirits”—for it happens to be hitherto a mere speculative doctrine raised up by enthusiasts; but no one is authorized—unless he can bring to contradict the fact, something better and weightier than the mere negations of sceptics—to deny that such phenomena do occur. If we Theosophists (and a very small minority of us), disclaim the agency of “spirits” in such manifestations, it is because we can prove in most instances to the Spiritualists, that many of their phenomena, whether of physical or psychological nature, can be reproduced by some of our Adepts at will, and without any aid of “spirits” or resort to either divine or diabolical miracle, but simply by developing the Occult powers of the man’s Inner Self and studying the mysteries of Nature. That European and American sceptics should deny such interference by Spirits, and, as a consequence discredit the phenomena themselves, is no cause for wonder. Scarcely liberated from the clutches of the Church, whose terrible policy, barely a century ago, was to torture and put to death every person who either doubted biblical “divine” miracle, or endorsed one which theology declared diabolical, it is but the natural force of reaction which makes them revel in their new-found liberty of thought and action. One who denies the Supreme and the existence of his own Soul, is not likely to believe in either Spirits or phenomena, without abundant proof. But that Eastern people, Hindus especially, of any sect, should disbelieve, is indeed an anomaly, considering that they all are taught the transmigration of Souls, and spiritual as well as physical evolution. The sixteenth chapter of the Mahabhárata, Harivansha Parva, is full of spiritual phenomena and the raising of Spirits. And if, ashamed of the now termed “superstitions” of their forefathers, young India turns, sunflower-like, but to the great luminaries of the West, this is what one of the most renowned men of Science of England, A. R. Wallace—a Fellow of the Royal as well as a member of the Theosophical Society—says of the phenomena in his Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, and On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, thus confirming the belief of old India:

Up to the time when I first became acquainted with the facts of Spiritualism, I was a confirmed philosophical sceptic. I was so thorough and confirmed a Materialist, that I could not at that time find a place in my mind for the conception of spiritual existence, or for any other genesis in the universe than matter and force. Facts, however, “are stubborn things.”


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Having explained how he came to become a Spiritualist, he considers the spiritual theory and shows its compatibility with natural selection. Having, he says:

Been led, by a strict induction from facts, to a belief—firstly, in the existence of a number of preter-human intelligences of various grades; and secondly, that some of these intelligences, although usually invisible and intangible to us, can and do act on matter, and do influence our minds—I am surely following a strictly logical and scientific course, in seeing how far this doctrine will enable us to account for some of those residual phenomena which Natural Selection alone will not explain. In the tenth chapter of my Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection I have pointed out what I consider to be some of these residual phenomena; and I have suggested that they may be due to the action of some of the various intelligences above referred to. I maintained, and still maintain, that this view is one which is logically tenable, and is in no way inconsistent with a thorough acceptance of the grand doctrine of evolution through Natural Selection.

Would not one think he hears in the above the voices of Manu, Kapila and many other Philosophers of old India, in their teachings about the creation, evolution and growth of our planet and its living world of animal as well as human species? Does the great modern Scientist speak less of “Spirits” and spiritual beings than Manu, the antediluvian scientist and prehistoric legislator? Let young and sceptical India read and compare the old Aryan ideas with those of modern Mystics, Theosophists, Spiritualists, and a few great Scientists, and then laugh at the superstitious theories of both.

For four years we have been fighting out our great battle against tremendous odds. We have been abused and called traitors by the Spiritualists, for believing in other beings in the invisible world besides their departed Spirits; we were cursed and sentenced to eternal damnation, with free passports to hell, by the Christians and their clergy; ridiculed by sceptics, looked upon as audacious lunatics by society, and tabooed by the conservative press. We thought we had drunk to the dregs the bitter cup of gall. We had hoped that at least in India, the country par excellence of psychological and metaphysical Science, we would find firm ground for our weary feet. But lo! here comes a brother of ours who, without even taking the trouble to ascertain whether or not the rumours about us are true, in case we do believe in either Magic or Spiritualism— Well! We impose impose ourselves upon no one. For more than four years we lived and waxed in power if not in wisdom—which latter our humble deputation of Theosophists was sent to search for here, so that we might impart ‘‘Vaidic learning and


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philosophy” to the millions of famished souls in the West, who are familiar with phenomena, but wrongly suffer themselves to be misled through their mistaken notions about ghosts and bhuts. But if we are to be repulsed at the outset by any considerable party of Arya Samâjists, who share the views of “A Member,” then will the Theosophical Society, with its 45,000 or so of Western Spiritualists, have to become again a distinct and independent body, and do as well as it can without a single “member” to enlighten it on the absurdity of Spiritualism and Magic.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

Bombay, March, 1879.

A REPUBLICAN CITIZEN
—————

[From The Banner of Light, May 13th 1879, but addressed to the Editor of

The Bombay Gazette.]

ON the very day of my return from a month’s travel, I am shown by the American Consul two paragraphs, viz., one in your paper of the 10th inst., which mentions me as the “Russian ‘Baroness,’” and one in The Times of India of the 8th, whose author had tried hard to be witty but only succeeded in being impertinent and calumnious. In this last paragraph I am referred to as a woman who called herself a “Russian Princess.”

With the original and selected matter in your contemporary you, of course, have nothing to do. If the editor can find “amusing” such slanderous tomfooleries as the extract in question from The Colonial Gazette and Star of India, and risk a suit for libel for circulating defamations of a respectable scientific Society, and vilifying its honoured President by calling him a “secret detective”—an outrageous lie, by the way—that is not your affair. My present business is to take the Gazette to task for thrusting upon my unwilling Republican head the baronial coronet. Know, please, once for all, that I am neither “Countess,” “Princess,” nor even a modest “Baroness”—whatever I may have been before last July. At that time I became a plain citizen of the United States of America. I value that title far more than any that could be conferred on me by King or Emperor. Being this, I could be nothing else, if I wished; for, as everyone knows, had I been even a princess of the royal blood before, once that my oath of allegi- ance was pronounced, I forfeited every claim to titles of nobility. Apart from this notorious fact, my experience of things in general, and peacocks’ feathers in particular, has led me to acquire a positive contempt for titles; since it appears that, outside the boundaries of their own fatherlands, Russian princes, Polish counts, Italian marquises and German barons, are far more plentiful inside than outside the police


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precincts. Permit me further to state—if only for the edification of The Times of India and a brood of snarling little papers searching around after the garbage of journalism—that I have never styled myself aught but what I can prove myself to be, namely, an honest woman, now a citizen of America, my adopted country, and the only land of true freedom in the whole world.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

Bombay, May 12th.

THE THEOSOPHISTS AND THEIR

OPPONENTS
—————

[From The Amrita Bazar Patrika, June 13th, 1879.]

I PRAY you to give me, in your Calcutta paper, space enough to reply to the mendacious comments of one of our religious neighbours upon the Theosophical Society. The Indian Christian Herald, in the number of April 4th (which unhappily has just now reached my eye), with a generosity peculiar to religious papers, filled two pages with pious abuse of our Society as a body. I gather from it, moreover, that The Friend of India had previously gone out of its way to vilify the Society, since the former paper observes that:

The Theosophical Society has merited the epithets employed about it by The Friend of India.

To my everlasting confusion be it said, that I am guilty of the crime of not only never reading, but also of never having so much as laid my eyes upon that last named veteran organ. Nor can any of our Theosophists be charged with abusing the precious privilege of reading the missionary journals, a considerable time having elapsed since each of us was weaned, and relinquished milk-and-water pap. Not that we shirk the somniferous task under the spur of necessity. Were not the proof of our present writing itself sufficient, I need only cite the case of the Bombay missionary organ, The Dnyanodaya, which, on the 17th ult., infamously libelled us, and on the 25th was forced by Colonel Olcott’s solicitor, Mr. Turner, to write an ample apology, in order to avoid a criminal prosecution for defamation of character. We regret now to see that while the truly good and pious writer of the Herald was able to rise to the level of Billingsgate, he would not (or dared not?) climb to the height of actionable slander. Truly prudence is a great virtue!

Confronted, as we all have so often been, with the intolerant bigotry

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—religious “zeal” they call it—and puerile anathemas of the clerical “followers of the meek and lowly Jesus,” no Theosophist is surprised to find the peas from the herald-shooter rattling against his armour. It adds to the clatter, but no one is mortally hurt. And, after all, how natural that the poor fellows who try to administer spiritual food to the benighted heathen—much after the fashion of the Strasburg goose-fatteners, who thrust balls of meal down the throats of the captive birds, unmasticated, to swell their livers—should shake at the intrusion of Europeans who are ready to analyze for the heathen these scripture-balls they are asked to grease with blind faith and swallow without chewing! People like us, who would have the effrontery to claim for the “heathen” the same right to analyze the Bible as the Christian clergy claim to analyze and even to revile the sacred Scriptures of other people, must of course be put down. And the very Christian Herald tries his hand. It says:

Let us without any bias or prejudice reflect ... about the Theosophical Society such a mortal degradation of persons [ Buddhist, Aryan, Jain, Parsi Hebrew and Mussulman Theosophists, included?] who can see nothing good in the Bible . . [and who] ought to remember that the Bible! is not only a blessed book, but our book [!]

The latter piece of presumptuous conceit cannot be allowed to pass unnoticed. Before I answer the preceding invectives I mean to demand a clear definition of this last sentence, “our Book.” Whose Book? The Herald’s? “Our” must mean that; for the seven thick volumes of the Speaker’s Commentary on the Old Testament *show that the possessive pronoun and the singular noun in question can no longer be used by Christians when speaking of the Bible. So numerous and glaring have been the mistakes and mistranslations detected by the forty divines of the Anglican Church, during their seven years’ revision of the Old Testament, that the London Quarterly Review (No. 294, April, 1879), the organ of the most extreme orthodoxy, is driven in despair to say:

The time has certainly passed when the whole Bible could be practically esteemed a single book, miraculously communicated in successive portions from heaven, put into writing no doubt by human hands, but at the dictation of the divine spirit.

So we see beyond question that if it is anybody’s “Book” it must be The Indian Christian Herald’s; for, in fact, its editors add:
—————

* The Bible, according to the authorized version (AD.1611), with an explanatory and critical commentary and a revision of the translation, by bishops and other clergy of the Anglican Church. Edited by F.C. Cook, MA., Canon of Exeter, Preacher at Lincohn’s Inn, Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen. Vols. i.-vi. The Old Testament. London, 1871-1876.

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We feel it to be no more a collection of books, but the book.

But here is another bitter pill for your contemporary. It says in a pious gush:

The words which had come from the prophets of the despised Israel have been the life-blood of the world’s devotion.

But the inexorable quarterly reviewer, after reluctantly abandoning to the analytical scalpels of Canon Cook and Bishop Harold Browne the Mosaic miracles—whose supernatural character is no longer affirmed, but they are allowed to be “natural phenomena”—turns to the pretended Old Testament prophecies of Christ, and sadly says:

In the poetical [psalms and songs] and the prophetical books especially the number of corrections is enormous.

And he shows how the commentators upon Isaiah and the other so-called prophets have reluctantly admitted that the time-worn verses which have been made to serve as predictive of Christ have in truth no such meaning. He says:

It requires an effort to break the association, and to realize how much less they [the prophecies] must have meant at first to the writers themselves. But it is just this that the critical expositor is bound to do . . . for this some courage is required, for the result is apt to seem like a disenchantment for the worse, a descent to an inferior level, a profanation of the paradise in which ardent souls have found spiritual sustenance and delight.

(Such “souls” as the Herald editor’s?) What wonder, then, that the explosion of these seven theological torpedoes—as the seven volumes of the Speaker’s Commentary may truly be called—should force the reviewer into saying:

To us, we confess, every attempt to place the older Scriptures on the same supreme pinnacle on which the New Testament of later Revelation stands, is doomed to failure.

The Herald is welcome to what is left of its “Book.”

How childishly absurd it was then of the Herald to make a whole Society the scapegoat for the sins of one individual! It is now universally known that the Society comprises fellows of many nationalities and many different religious faiths, and that its Council is made up of the representatives of these faiths; yet the Herald endorses the false hood that the Society’s principles are “a strange compound of Paganism and Atheism,” and its creed “a creed as comprehensive as it is incomprehensible.” What other answer does this calumny require than the fact that our President has publicly declared that it had “no


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creed to offer for the world’s acceptance,”* and that in art. viii of the Society’s Rules, appended to the printed Address, in an enumeration of the plans of the Society, the first paragraph says that it aims:

To keep alive in man his belief that he has a soul, and the Universe a God.

If this is a ‘‘compound of Paganism and Atheism,’’ then let the Heralad make the most of it.

But the Society is not the real offender; the clerical stones are thrown into my garden. The Herald’s quotation of an expression used by me, in commenting upon a passage of Sir John Kay’s Sepoy War making The Friend of India and Co. primarily responsible for that bloody tragedy, shows the whole animus. It was I who said (see Indian Spectator, March 2nd) that:

India owes everything to the British Government and not to Christianity

—i.e., to missionaries. I may have lost my “senses outright,” as The Indian Christian Herald politely remarks, but I think have enough left to see through the inane sophistries which they make do duty for arguments.

We have only to say to the Herald the following: (1) It is just because we do live in ‘‘an age of enlightenment and progress,’’ in which there is (or should be) room for every form of belief, that such Augustinian trades as the Herald’s are out of place. (2) We have not a Mortal hatred for Christianity and its Divine Founder,—for the tendency of the Society is to emancipate its fellows from all hatred or preference for any one exoteric form of religion—i.e., with more of the human than divine element in it—over another (see rules) neither can we hate a “Founder” whom the majority of us do not believe to have ever existed. (3) To “retain” a “reverence for the Bible” one must at some time have had it, and if our own investigations had not long since convinced us that the Bible was no more the “Word of God” than half a dozen other holy hooks, the present conclusions of the Anglican divines—at least as far as the Old Testament is concerned—would have removed the last vestige of doubt upon that point. And besides sundry American clergymen and bishops we have among our Fellows a vicar of the Church of England, who is one of its most learned antiquarians. (4) The assertion that the

Pure monotheism of the Vedas is a pure myth
—————

* The Theosophical Society and its Aim. Address delivered by Colonel H. S. Olcott, at the Framji Cowasji Hall, Bombay, March 23rd 1879.


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is a pure falsehood, beside being an insult to Max Muller and other Western Orientalists, who have proved the fact; to say nothing of that great Aryan scholar, preacher and reformer, Svami Dyanand Sarasvati.

“Degraded humanity” that we are, there must he indeed “some thing radically wrong and corrupt” in our “moral nature,” for, we confess to joy at seeing our Society constantly growing from accessions of some of the most influential laymen of different countries. And it moreover delights us to think that when we reach the bottom of the ditch, we will have as bedfellows half the Christian clergy, if the Speaker’s commentary makes as sad havoc with the divinity of the New Testament as it has with that of the Old. Our Indian Christian Pecksniff in righteous indignation exclaims:

How they managed to sink so low in the scale of moral and spiritual being must be a sadly interesting study for metaphysicians.

Sad, indeed; but sadder still to reflect that unless the editors of The Indian Christian Herald are protected by post-mortem fire-insurance policies, they are in danger themselves of eternal torment.

Whosoever shall say to his brother, Thou fool, shall be in danger of Hell fire,

says Lord Jesus, “the Desire of nations,” in Matthew, v. 22, unless—dreadful thought!—this verse should be also found a mistranslation.

H. P. BLAVATSKY,

Corresponding Secretary of the Theosophical Society.

[N.B.—We insert the above letter with great reluctance. The subject matter of the letter is not fit for our columns, and we have no sympathy with those who attack the religions creed of other men. The matter of fact is, a Calcutta paper attacks a body of men, and the latter are thrown at a great disadvantage if they are not allowed an opportunity by another paper of replying to the attack. It is from that feeling alone that we have given place to the above letter.—ED. A. B. Patrika.]

ECHOES FROM INDIA.

WHAT IS HINDU SPIRITUALISM?
—————

[ From The Banner of Light, Oct. 18th, 1879.]

PHENOMENA in India—beside the undoubted interest they offer in themselves, and apart from their great variety and in most instances utter dissimilarity from those we are accustomed to hear of in Europe and America—possess another feature which makes them worthy of the most serious attention of the investigator of Psychology.

Whether Eastern phenomena are to be accounted for by the immediate interference and help of the spirits of the departed, or attributed to some other and hitherto unknown cause, is a question which, for the present, we will leave aside. It can he discussed, with some degree of confidence, only after many instances have been carefully noted and submitted, in all their truthful and unexaggerated details, to an impartial and unprejudiced public. One thing I beg to reaffirm, and this is, that instead of exacting the usual “conditions” of darkness, harmonious circles, and nevertheless leaving the witnesses uncertain as to the expected results, Indian phenomena, if we except the independent apparitions of bhuts (ghosts of the dead), are never sporadic and spontaneous, but seem to depend entirely upon the will of the operator, whether he be a holy Hindu Yogi, a Mussulman Sâdhu, Fakir, or yet a juggling Jaddugar (sorcerer).

In this connection I mean to present numerous examples of what I here say; for whether we read of the seemingly supernatural feats produced by the Rishis, the Aryan patriarchs of archaic antiquity, or by Achâryas of the Paurânic days, or hear of them from popular traditions, or again see them repeated in our modern times, we always find such phenomena to be of the most varied character. Besides covering the whole range of those known to us through modern mediumistic agency, as well as repeating the mediæval pranks of the nuns of London and other historical possedees in cases of bhut obsession, we often recognize


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in them the exact counterparts—as once upon a time they must have been the originals—of biblical miracles. With the exception of two—those over which the world of piety goes most into raptures while glorifying the Lord, and the world of scepticism grins most sardonically—to wit, the anti-heliocentric crime performed by Joshua, and Jonah’s unpleasant excursion into the slimy cavern of the whale’s belly—we have to record as occasionally taking place in India, nearly every one of the feats which are said to have so distinguished Moses and other “friends of God.”

But alas for those venerable jugglers of Judæa! And alas for those pious souls who have hitherto exalted these alleged prophets of the forthcoming Christ to such a towering eminence! The idols have just been all but knocked off their pedestals by the parricidal hands of the forty divines of the Anglican Church, who now are known to have sorely disparaged the Jewish Scriptures. The despairing cry raised by the reviewer of the just issued Commentary on the “Holy” Bible, in the most extreme organ of orthodoxy (the London Quarterly Review for April, 1879), is only matched by his meek submission to the inevitable. The fact I am alluding to is one already known to you, for I speak of the decision and final conclusive opinions upon the worth of the Bible by the conclave of learned bishops who have been engaged for the last dozen years on a thorough revision of the Old Testament. The results of this labour of love may he summarized thus:

1. The shrinkage of the Mosaic and other “miracles” into mere natural phenomena. (See decisions of Canon Cook, the Queen’s Chaplain, and Bishop Harold Browne.)

2. The rejection of most of the alleged prophecies of Christ as such; the said prophecies now turning out to have related simply to contemporaneous events in Jewish national history.

3. Resolutions to place no more the Old Testament on the same eminence as the Gospels, as it would inevitably lead to the disparagement of the new one.

4. The sad confession that the Mosaic Books do not contain one word about a future life and the just complaint that:

Moses under divine direction [?] should have abstained from any recognition of man’s destiny beyond the grave, while the belief was prominent in all the religions around Israel.

This is:

confessed to be one of those enigmas which are the trial of our faith.


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And it is the “trial” of our American missionaries here also. Educated natives all read the English papers and magazines, and it now becomes harder than ever to convince these “heathen” matriculates of the ‘‘sublime truths” of Christianity. But this by way of a small parenthesis; for I mention these newly evolved facts only as having an important bearing upon Spiritualism in general, and its phenomena especially. Spiritualists have always taken such pains to identify their manifestations with the Bible miracles, that such a decision, coming from witnesses certainly more prejudiced in favour of than opposed to “miracles” and divine supernal phenomena, is rather a new and unexpected difficulty in our way. Let us hope that in view of these new religious developments, our esteemed friend Dr. Peebles, before committing himself too far to the establishment of “independent Christian churches,” will wait for further ecclesiastical verdicts, and see how the iconoclastic verdicts, and how the iconoclastic English divines will overhaul the phenomena of the New Testament. Maybe, if their consistency does not evaporate, they will have to attribute all the miracles worked by Jesus also to “natural phenomena”! Very happily for Spiritualists, and for Theosophists likewise, the phenomena of the nineteenth century cannot be as easily disposed of as those of the Bible. We have had to take the latter for nearly two thousand years on mere blind faith, though but too often they transcended every possible law of nature; while quite the reverse is our own case, and we can offer facts.

But to return. If manifestations of an Occult nature of the most various character may be said to abound in India, on the other hand, the frequent statements of Dr. Peebles to the effect that this country is full of native Spiritualists, are—how shall I say it?—a little too hasty and exaggerated. Disputing this point in the London Spiritualist of Jan. 8th, 1878, with a Madras gentleman, now residing in New York, he maintained his position in the following words:

I have met not only Sinhalese and Chinese Spiritualists, but hundreds of Hindu Spiritualists, gifted with the powers of conscious mediumship. And yet Mr. W. L. D. O’Grady, of New York, informs the readers of The Spiritualist (see issue Nov. 23rd) that there are No Hindu Spiritualists. These are ins words: “No Hindu is a Spiritualist.”

And as an offset to this assertion, Dr. Peebles quotes from the letter of an esteemed Hindu gentleman, Mr. Peary Chand Mittra, of Calcutta, a few words to the effect that he blesses God that his “inner vision is being more and more developed” and that he talks “with spirits.” We


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all know that Mr. Mittra is a Spiritualist, but what does it prove? Would Dr. Peebles be justified in stating that because H. P. Blavatsky and half a dozen other Russians have become Buddhists and Vedântists, Russia is full of Buddhists and Vedântists? There may be in India a few Spiritualists among the educated reading classes, scattered far and wide over the country, but I seriously doubt whether our esteemed opponent could easily find a dozen of such among this population numbering 240,000,000. There are solitary exceptions, which only go to strengthen a rule, as everyone knows.

Owing to the rapid spread of spiritualistic doctrines the world over, and to my having left India several years before, at the time I was in America I abstained from contradicting in print the great spiritualistic “pilgrim” and philosopher, surprising as such statements seemed to me, who thought myself pretty well acquainted with this country. India, unprogressive as it is, I thought might have changed, and I was not sure of my facts. But now that I have returned for the fourth time to this country, and have had over five months’ residence in it, after a careful investigation into the phenomena and especially into the opinions held by the people on this subject, and seven weeks of travelling all over the country, mainly for the purpose of seeing and investigating every kind of manifestations, I must be allowed to know what I am talking about, as I speak by the book. Mr. O’Grady was right. No “Hindu is a Spiritualist” in the sense we all understand the term. And I am now ready to prove, if need be, by dozens of letters from the most trustworthy natives who are educated by Brâhmans, and know the religious and superstitious views of their countrymen better than any one of us, that whatever else Hindus may be termed it is not Spiritualists. “What constitutes a Spiritualist?” very pertinently enquires, in a London spiritual organ, a correspondent with “a passion for definition” (see Spiritualist, June 13th 1879). He asks:

Is Mr. Crookes a Spiritualist, who, like my humble self, does not believe in spirits of the dead as agents in the phenomena?

He then brings forward several definitions, From the most latitudinarian to the most restricted definitions.

Let us see to which of these ‘‘definitions’’ the ‘‘Spiritualism’’ of the Hindus—I will not say of the mass, but even of a majority—would answer. Since Mr. Peebles—during his two short visits to India and while on his way from Madras, crossing the continent in its diameter from Calcutta to Bombay—could meet ‘‘ hundreds of Spiritualists,”


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then these must indeed form, if not the majority, at least a considerable percentage of the 240,000,000 of India. I will now quote the definitions from the letter of the enquirer who signs himself “A Spiritualist” (?), and add my own remarks thereupon

A—Everyone is a Spiritualist who believes in the immortalitv of the soul.

I guess not; otherwise the whole of Christian Europe and America would be Spiritualists ; nor does this definition A answer to the religious views of the Hindus of any sect, for while the ignorant masses believe in and aspire to Moksha, i.e., literal absorption of the spirit of man in that of Brahman, or loss of individual immortality, as means of avoiding the punishment and horrors of transmigration, the Philosophers, Adepts, and learned Yogis, such as our venerated master, Svami Dyanand Sarasvati, the great Hindu reformer, Sanskrit scholar, and supreme chief of the Vaidic Section of the Eastern division of the Theosophical Society, explain the future state of man’s Spirit, its progress and evolution, in terms diametrically opposite to the views of the Spiritualists. These views, if agreeable, I will give in some future letter.

B.—Anyone who believes that the continued conscious existence of deceased persons has been demonstrated by communication is a Spiritualist.

A Hindu whether an erudite scholar and Philosopher or an ignorant idolater, does not believe in ‘‘continued conscious existence,’’ though the former assigns for the holy, sinless soul, which has reached Svarga (heaven) and Moksha, a period of many millions and quadrillions of years, extending from one Pralaya* to the next. The Hindu believes in cyclic transmigration of the soul, during which there must be periods when the soul loses its recollections as well as the consciousness of its individuality; since, if it were otherwise, every person would distinctly remember all his previous existences, which is not the case. Hindu Philosophers are likewise consistent with logic. They at least will not allow an endless eternity of either reward or punishment for a few dozens of years of earthly life, whether this life be wholly blameless or yet wholly sinful.

C.—Anyone is a Spiritualist who believes in airy of the alleged objective phenomena, whatever theory he may favour about them, or even if he have none at all.
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* For the meaning of the word Pralaya see vol. ii. of Isis Unveiled. I am happy to say that not withstanding the satirical criticisms upon its Vaidic and Buddhistic portions by some American would—be’’ Orientalists, Svami Dyanand and the Rev. Sumangala of Ceylon, respectively the representatives of Vaidic and Buddhistic scholarship and literature in India—the first the best Sanskrit, and the other the most eminent Pali scholar—both expressed their entire satisfaction with the correctness of my esoteric explanations of their respective religions. Isis Unveiled is now being translated into Marathi and Hindi in India, and into Pâli in Ceylon.


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Such are “phenomenalists,” not Spiritualists, and in this sense the definition answers to Hindu beliefs. All of them, even those who, aping the modern school of Atheism, declare themselves Materialists, are yet phenomenalists in their hearts, if one only sounds them.

D and E.—Does not allow of Spiritualism without spirits, but the spirits need not be human.

At this rate Theosophists and Occultists generally may also be called Spiritualists, though the latter regard them as enemies; and in this sense only all Hindus are Spiritualists, though their ideas about human Spirits are diametrically opposed to those of the “Spiritualists.” They regard bhuts are the Spirits of those who died with unsatisfied desires, and who on account of their sins and earthly attractions, are earth-bound and kept back from Svarga (the “Elementaries” of the Theosophists)—as having become wicked devils, liable to be annihilated any day under the potent curses of much-sought-for and appreciated mediums.* The Hindu regards as the greatest curse a person can be afflicted with, possession and obsession by a bhut and the most loving couples often part if the wife is attacked by the bhut of a relative, who, it seems, seldom or never attacks any but women.

F.—Considers that no one has a right to call himself a Spiritualist who has any new-fangled notions about ‘‘Elementaries,’’ spirit of the medium, and so forth; or does not believe that departed human spirits, high and low, account for all the phenomena of every description.

This one is the most proper and correct of all the above given “definitions,” ‘from the standpoint of orthodox Spiritualism, and settles our dispute with Dr. Peebles. No Hindu were it even possible to bring him to regard bhuts as low, suffering Spirits on their way to progress and final pardon (?), could, even if he would, account for all the phenomena on this true spiritualistic theory. His religious and philosophical traditions are all opposed to such a limited idea. A Hindu is, first of all, a born metaphysician and logician. If he believes at all, and in whatever he believes, he will admit of no special laws called into existence for men of this planet alone, but will apply these laws throughout the universe; for he is a Pantheist before being anything else, and notwithstanding his possible adherence to some special sect. Thus Mr. Peebles has well defined the situation himself, in the following happy paradox, in his Spiritualist letter above quoted, and in which he says:
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[Evidently the word “medium” is here used for “exorcist.’’—EDS.]


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Some of the best mediums that it has been my good fortune to know, I met in Ceylon and India. And these were not mediums; for, indeed, they held converse with the Pays and Pesatsays, having their habitations in the air, the water, the fire, in rocks and trees, in the clouds, the rain, the dew, in mines and caverns!

Thus these “mediums” who were not mediums, were no more Spiritualists than they were mediums, and—the house (Dr. Peebles’ house) is divided against itself and must fall. So far we agree, and I will now proceed further on with my proofs.

As I mentioned before, Colonel Olcott and myself, accompanied by a Hindu gentleman, Mr. Mulji-Taker-Sing, a member of our Council, started on our seven weeks’ journey early in April. Our object was twofold: (1) to pay a visit to and remain for some time with our ally and teacher, Svami Dyanand, with whom we had corresponded so long from America, and thus consolidate the alliance of our Society with the Arya Samajes of India (of which there are now over fifty); and (2) to see as much of the phenomena as we possibly could; and, through the help of our Svami—a Yogi himself and an Initiate into the mysteries of the Vidya (or Secret Science)—to settle certain vexed questions as to the agencies and powers at work, at first hand. Certainly no one could find a better opportunity to do so than we had. There we were, on friendly relations of master and pupils with Pandit Dyanand, the most learned man in India, a Brâhman of high caste, and one who had for seven long years undergone the usual and dreary probations of Yogism in a mountainous and wild region, in solitude, in a state of complete nudity and constant battle with elements and wild beasts—the battle of the divine human Spirit and the imperial will of man against gross blind matter in the shape of tigers, leopards, rhinoceroses and bears, without noting venomous snakes and scorpions. The inhabitants of the village nearest to that mountain are there to certify that sometimes for weeks no one would venture to take a little food—a handful of rice—to our Svami; and yet, whenever they came, they always found him in the same posture and on the same spot—an open, sandy hillock, surrounded by thick jungle full of beasts of prey—and apparently as well without food and water for whole weeks, as if he were made of stone instead of human flesh and bones.* He has explained to us this mysterious secret which enables man to suffer and
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* Yogis and ascetics are not the only examples of such protracted fastings; for if those call be doubted, and sometimes utterly rejected by sceptical Science as void of any conclusive proof—for the phenomenon takes place in remote and inaccessible places—we have many of the Jains, inhabitants of populated towns, to bring forward as exemplars of the same. Many of them fast, abstaining even from one drop of water, for forty days at a time—and survive always.


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conquer at last the most cruel privations, which permits him to go without food or drink for days and weeks; to become utterly insensible to the extremes of either heat or cold; and finally, to live for days out side instead of within his body

During this voyage we visited the very cradle of Indian Mysticism, the hot-bed of ascetics, where the remembrance of the wondrous phenomena performed by the Rishis of old is now as fresh as it ever was during those days when the School of Patanjali—the reputed founder of Yogism—was filled, and where his Yog-Sânkhya is still studied with as much fervour, if not with the same powers of comprehension. To Upper India and the North-Western Provinces we went; to Allahabad and Cawnpore, with the shores of their sacred Ganga (Ganges) all studded with devotees; whither the latter, when disgusted with life, proceed to pass the remainder of their clays in meditation and seclusion, and become Sannyâsis, Gossains, Sadhus. Thence to Agra, with its Taj Mâhal, “the poem in marble,” as Bishop Heber happily called it, and the tomb of its founder, the great Emperor Adept, Akbar, at Secundra; to Agra, with its temples crowded with Shakti-worshippers, and to that spot, famous in the history of Indian Occultism, where the Jumna mixes its blue waters with the patriarchal Ganges, and which is chosen by the Shâktas (worshippers of the female power) for the performance of their pujâs. during winch ceremonies the famous black crystals or mirrors mentioned by P. B. Randolph are fabricated by the hands of young virgins. From there, again, to Saharampore and Meerut, the birthplace of the mutiny of 1857. During our sojourn at the former town, it happened to be the central railway point to which, on their return from the Hardwâr pilgrimage, flocked nearly twenty-five thousand Sannyâsis and Gossains, to numbers of whom Col. Olcott put close interrogatories, and with whom he conversed for hours. Then to Râjputana, the land inhabited by the bravest of all races in India, as well as the most mystically inclined—the Solar Race, whose Râjahs trace descent from the sun itself. We penetrated as far as Jeypore, the Paris, and at the same time the Rome of the Râjput land. We searched through plains and mountains, and all along the sacred groves covered with pagodas and devotees, among whom we found some very holy men, endowed with genuine wondrous powers, but the majority were unmitigated frauds. And we got into the favour of more than one Brâhman, guardian and keeper of his God’s secrets and the mysteries of his temple; but got no more evi-


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dence out of these “hereditary dead beats,” as Col. Olcott graphically dubbed them, than out of the Sannyâsis and exorcizers of evil spirits, as to the similarity of their views with those of the Spiritualists. Neither have we ever failed, whenever coming across any educated Hindu, to pump him as to the ideas and views of his countrymen about phenomena in general, and Spiritualism especially. And to all our questions, who it was in the case of holy Yogis, endowed “with miraculouns powers,” that produced the manifestations, the astonished answer was invariably the same: “He [ Yogi] himself having become one with Brahm, produces them,” and more than once our interlocutors got thoroughly disgusted and extremely offended at Col. Olcott’s irreverent question, whether the bhuts might not have been at work helping the Thaumaturgist. For nearly two months uninterruptedly our premises at Bombay—garden, verandahs and halls—were crammed from early morning till late at night with native visitors of the most various sects, races and religious opinions, averaging from twenty to a hundred and more a day, coming to see us with the object of exchanging views upon metaphysical questions, and to discuss the relative worth of Eastern and Western Philosophies—Occult Sciences and Mysticism included. During our journey we had to receive our brothers of the Arya Samâjes, which sent their deputations wherever we went to welcome us, and wherever there was a Samâj established. Thus we became intimate with the previous views of hundreds and thousands of the followers of Svami Dyanand, every one of whom had been converted by him from one idolatrous sect or another. Many of these were educated men, and as thoroughly versed in Vaidic Philosophy as in the tenets of the sect from which they had separated. Our chances, then, of getting acquainted with Hindu views, Philosophies and traditions, were greater than those of any previous European traveller; nay, greater even than those of any officials who had resided for years in India, but who, neither belonging to the Hindu faith nor on such friendly terms with them as ourselves, were neither trusted by the natives, nor regarded as and called by them “brothers” as we are.

It is, then, after constant researches and cross-questioning, extending over a period of several months, that we have come to the following conclusions, which are those of Mr. O’Grady: No Hindu is a Spiritualist; and, with the exception of extremely rare instances, none of them have ever heard of Spiritualism or its movements in Europe,


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least of all in America—with which country many of them are as little acquainted as with the North Pole. It is but now, when Svami Dvanand, in his learned researches, has found out that America must have been known to the early Aryans—as Arjuna, one of the five Pândavas, the friend and disciple of Christna, is shown in Paurânic history to have gone to Pâtâl(a) in search of a wife, and married in that country Ulupi, the widow daughter of Nâga, the king of Pâtâl(a), an antipodal country answering perfectly in its description to America, and unknown in those early days to any but the Aryans—that an interest for this country is being felt among the members of the Samâjes. But, as we explained the origin, development and doctrines of the Spiritual Philosophy to our friends, and especially the modus operandi of the mediums—i.e., the communion of the Spirits of the departed with living men and women, whose organisms the former use as modes of communication—the horror of our listeners was unequalled and undisguised in each case. ‘‘Communion with bhuts! ‘‘ they exclaimed. ‘‘Communion with souls that have become wicked demons, to whom we are ready to offer sacrifices in food and drink to pacify them and make them leave us quiet, but who never come but to disturb the peace of families; whose presence is a pollution! What pleasure or comfort can the Bellate [White foreigners find in communicating with them?” Thus, I repeat most emphatically that not only are there, so to say, no Spiritualists in India, as we understand the term, but I affirm and declare that the very suggestion of our so-called ‘‘Spirit intercourse’’ is obnoxious to most of them—that is to say, to the oldest people in the world, people who have known all about the phenomena for thousands upon thousands of years. Is this fact nothing to us, who have just begun to see the wonders of medium-ship? Ought we to estimate our cleverness at so high a figure as to make us refuse to take instruction from these Orientals, who have seen their holy men—nay, even their Gods and demons and the Spirits of the elements—performing ‘‘miracles’’ since the remotest antiquity? Have we so perfected a Philosophy of our own that we can compare it with that of India, which explains every mystery, and triumphantly demonstrates the nature of every phenomenon? It would he worth our while, believe me, to ask Hindu help, if it were but to prove, better than we can now, to the Materialists and sceptical Science, that, what ever may be the true theory as to the agencies, the phenomena, whether biblical or Vaidic, Christian or heathen, are in the natural


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order of this world, and have a first claim to scientific investigation. Let us first prove the existence of the Sphinx to the profane, and after wards we may try to unriddle its mysteries. Spiritualists will always have time enough to refute “antiquated doctrines” of old. Truth is eternal, and however long trampled down will always come out the brighter in the expiring twilight of superstition. But in one sense we are perfectly warranted in applying the name of Spiritualists to the Hindu Opposed as they are to physical phenomena as produced by the bhuts or unsatisfied souls of the departed, and to the possession by them of mediumistic persons, they still accept with joy those consoling evidences of the continued interest in themselves of a departed father or mother. In the subjective phenomena of dreams, in visions of clairvoyance or trance, brought on by the powers of holy men, they welcome the Spirits of their beloved ones, and often receive from them important directions and advice.

If agreeable to your readers I will devote a series of letters to the phenomena taking place in India, explaining them as I proceed. I sincerely hope that the old experience of American Spiritualists, massing in threatening force against iconoclastic Theosophists and their “superannuated” ideas will not be repeated; for my offer is perfectly impartial and friendly. It is with no desire to either teach new doctrines or carry on an unwelcome Hindu propaganda that I make it; but simply to supply material for comparison and study to the Spiritualists who think.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

Bombay, July, 1879.

MISSIONARIES MILITANT

[Probably from the Allahabad Pioneer; 1880.]

WE have just read the two dreary columns in The Pioneer of March 15th, “The Theosophists in Council,” by Mr. T. G. Scott. The Council of the Society having nothing more to say to the reverend polemic, who, in rejoinder to a brief card, treats the world to two columns of what Coleridge would call “a juggle of sophistry,” I, myself, would ask you to favour me with a brief space.

A few points of Mr. Scott’s most glaring misconceptions (?) about our Society may be noticed. We are said to have declared, at New York, that the Theosophical Society was hostile to the “Christian Church”; while at Mayo Hall, Allahabad, our President affirmed that his Society was not organized to fight “Christianity.” This is assumed to be a contradiction and a “change of base.” Now if there were enough “Christianity” in the “Christian Church” to be spoken of the gentleman’s point might be deemed well taken. But, in my humble opinion, this is not at all the case. Hence—though not at all hostile to “Christianity,” i.e., the ethics alleged to have been preached by Jesus of Nazareth—I, in common with many Theosophists, am very much so to the so-called “Church of Christ.” Collectively, this Church includes three great rival religions and some hundreds of minor sects, for the most part bitterly recriminative and mutually far more hostile to each other than we are to all. To accuse, therefore, the Theosophists—who may dislike the Methodist, Presbyterian, Jesuit, Baptist, or any other alleged “Christian” sect—of bitter hatred of “Christianity” in the abstract, is like accusing one of hating light because he opposes the use of either or all of the man new-fangled inventions of kerosene lamps, which, under the pretext of preserving the light, injure it! The Christianity of Jesus, dragged by its numberless sects around the arena of our century, appears like that car in the Slavonian fable (a version of one by Æsop) to which were harnessed all manner of creeping,

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swimming, and flying things. Each of these, following its own instinct, attempted to draw the car after its own fashion. Result: between the birds, animals, reptiles and fishes, the unfortunate vehicle was torn into fragments.

The reverend missionaries are hard to please in this country. When left unnoticed, they complain of the Theosophists ignoring the brave “six hundred”; and when we do notice them—which, indeed, happens only under compulsion—they begin abusing us in the most un-Christian and often, I am sorry to say, ungentlemanly way.

Thus, for instance, we had to call the strong hand of the law to our help in the case of The Dnyanodaya, a diminutive and sorry but quite a fighting little missionary weekly of Bombay, which called our Society names, and had to apologize in print for it. Now comes The Bengal Magazine of January; its Editor—by the by, a Christian reverend, but nevertheless very rude Bâbu—is advised to look out and consult the law, before he charges Colonel Olcott or anyone else with “hocus-pocus tricks’’ again; as the ‘‘gushing Colonel’’ may prove as little gushing and as active in his case as he was in that of the abusive little Dnyânodaya. And now Mr. T. G. Scott calls an article on “Missions in India” (Theosophist, January) a

Bold, but exceedingly ignorant attempt at making it appear that missions are a failure in India.

Ignorant as we newcomers maybe about Indian missionary questions, I must remind Mr. Scott that the person whom he stigmatizes with ignorance is a lady who has passed many years in India and has had ample opportunities for observation. Most military or civil employees of experience in India whom I have met take the same view of the matter that she does. I cannot imagine why Darwin and Tyndall should have been selected by Mr. Scott, out of the thousands of scientific and educated men now pulling Christianity to pieces, as “noisy characters”; nor why he should cite, in an issue created by modern biblical research, Newton, Kepler, Herschell or anyone else who lived before the recent advances of Science in this direction, and in days when, to deny not merely Christianity, but some minor dogma of the State religion was equivalent to self-condemnation to an auto da-fe As for the Christianity of Max Muller, Dr. Carpenter (a prince among Materialists) and the late Louis Agassiz, the less said the better. Might not his long string of high-sounding names have been profitably enlarged by the addition of those of the late Viscount Amberley and


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Lord Queensborough, of the “Church” of Moncure Conway, in which is preached the great Religion of Humanity from every “religion” and church?

Science is our guide, and truth is the spirit that we worship, says the noble Lord Queensborough in his letter recently published in The Statesman! Mr. Scott assures his readers that:
Never since the Apostles has it [Christanity] been so vigorous as now, the tendency is anything else than to infidelity and atheism.

But Lord Queensborough, in his letter to “E. C. H.” challenges the latter, and with him the whole world of Christians in these remarkable words:

Call us atheists and infidels if you will; . . . and I maintain, and will maintain, that the time has arrived for us to proclaim ourselves and to claim to be respected, as other religious bodies are; but as we never shall he, unless we stand forward and openly declare what our religion is . . . I am only acting as the mouthpiece of thousands, perhaps millions, with whom I have faith in common.

Churches of our religion already exist. I will name one in London, always as full as it can hold on Sundays—South Place Chapel, Finsbury, where Mr. Moncure Conway lectures.

Moncure Conway, I will remind Mr. Scott, instead of the Bible and Christianity preaches every Sunday from The Sacred Anthology, extracts from the Vedas, the Buddhist Sutras, the Koran, and so on. Many of his parishioners are fellows of the Theosophical Society. And now it is my turn to ask, “How does this tally with the utterances of” Mr. Scott, the missionary? Equally ill-timed was Mr. Scott’s quotation from the New Testament of the passage:

Jesus said, Other sheep I have, not of this fold.

For in the very mouth of Jesus are put also the words:

He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned (Mark xvi. 16).

To this Mr. Scott may, perhaps, repeat what he says in his two column letter:

The whole question of the nature and extent of future punishment is a matter of interpretation.

Exactly. So we, Theosophists and other heathen and “infidels,” who live in a century of free thought and in a country of religious freedom, avail ourselves of it.

And now all his points being answered, the reverend gentleman is


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at liberty to ventilate his ideas and pour his wrath upon the Theosophists wherever he likes. Yet, unless he can get his satisfaction from following the good example of other missionaries, and indulge in monologues of abuse, he can reckon but little upon us to answer him. It takes two for a dialogue; and whether as a Society or as individuals, we decline any further controversy on the subject with one who gives so few facts and so many words.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

THE HISTORY OF A “BOOK”
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[From the Allahahad Pioneer, March 12th, 1880.]

As the indications in the press all point towards a Russian reign of terror, either before or at the death of the Czar—most probably the former—a bird’s-eye view of the constitution of Russian society will enable us to better understand events as they transpire.

Three distinct elements compose what is now known as the Russian aristocracy. These may be broadly said to represent the primitive Slavonian, the primitive Tartar, and composite Russianized immigrants from other countries, and subjects of conquered states, such as the Baltic provinces. The flower of the haute noblesse, those whose hereditary descent places them beyond challenge in the very first rank, are the Rurikovilch, or descendants of the Grand Duke Rurik and [the ruling families of the aforetime separate principalities of Novgorod, Pskof, etc., which were welded together into the Muscovite empire. Such are the Princes Bariatinskv, Dolgorouki, Shonysky (now extinct, we believe), Tscherbatow, Ouroussov, Viazemsky, etc. Moscow has been the centre of the greater part of this princely class since the days of Catherine the Great; and though, in most cases, ruined in fortune, they are yet as proud and exclusive as the blue-blooded French families of the Quartier St. Germain. The names of some of the highest of these are virtually unknown outside of the limits of the empire, for, dissatisfied with the reforms of Peter and Catherine, and unable to make as fine a figure at the court as those whom they delighted to call parvenus, it has been their proud boast that they have never served in any subordinate capacity, and have not been brought in contact with Western Europe and its politics. Living only upon their remembrances, they have made a class apart and dwell on a sort of high social table-land, whence they look down upon commoner mortals. Many of the old families are extinct, and many of those that remain entirely reduced to genteel poverty.


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Rurik, as is well known, was not a Slav by birth, but a Varyago-Roos, though his nationality, as well as that of his people who came with him to Russia, is very much questioned unto this day, having been a matter of scientific dispute for several years between the two well-known professors of St. Petersburg, Kostornarof and Pogodine— the latter now dead. Implored by the Slays to come and reign over their country, Rurik is reported to have been addressed by the delegates in these ominous words: “Come with us, great prince for vast is our mother land; but there is little order in it”—words which their descendants might well report with as much, if not more, propriety now as then. Accepting the invitation, Rurik came in A.D. 861 to Novgorod, with his two brothers, and laid the foundation of Russian nationality. The “Rurikovitch,” then, are the descendants of this prince, his two brothers and his son, Igor, the line running through a long succession of princes and chiefs of principalities. The reigning house of Rurik became extinct at the death of Fredor, the son of Ivan the Terrible. After a period of anarchy, the Romanoffs, a family of petty nobles, came into power. But, as this was only in 1613, it was not without reason that the Prince P. Dolgorouki, a modern historian of Catherine II (a book prohibited in Russia), when smarting under the sense of a personal wrong, taunted the present Emperor with the remark:

Alexander II must not forget that it is little more than two centuries since the Romanoffs held the stirrups of the Princes Dolgorouki.

And this, despite the marriage of Mary, Princess Dolgorouki, with Michael Romanoff after he became Czar.

The Tartar princely families descend from the Tartar Khans and Magnates of the “Zolotaya Orda” (Golden Orda) of Kazan, who so long held Russia in subjection, but who were made tributary by Ivan III, father of Ivan the Terrible, in 1523-1530. Of the families of this blood which survive, the Princes Dondoukof, whose head was formerly Governor-General of Kiew, and more recently served in Bulgaria in a similar capacity, may be mentioned. These are, more or less, looked down upon by the “Rurikovitch,” as well as by old Lithuanian and Polish princely families, who hate the Russian descendants of Rurik, as these hate their Roman Catholic rivals. Then comes in the third element, the old Livonian and Esthonian Barons and Counts, the Kourland nobles and freiherrs, who boast of descending from the first Crusaders and look down upon the Slav aristocracy; and various


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foreign families invited into the country by successive sovereigns, a Western element engrafted upon the Russian stock. The names of the latter immigrés have been Russianized in some cases beyond recognition; as, for instance, the English Hamiltons, who have now become the “Khomoutoff!”

We have not the data which would enable us to give the numerical strength of either of the above classes; but an enumeration, made in the year 1842, showed a total of 551,970 noblemen of hereditary, and 257,346 of personal rank. This comprised all in the empire of different degrees of noble ranks, including the princely families and the under-stratum of nobility. There is an untitled nobility, the descendants of the old Boyars of Russia, often prouder of their family record than those who are known as princes. The Demidoff family, for instance, and the Narishkine, though frequently offered the ranks of prince and count, have always haughtily rejected the honour, maintaining that the Czar could make a prince any day, but never a Demidoff or a Narishkine.

Peter the Great, having abolished the princely privileges of the Boyars, and made the offices of the empire accessible to all, created the Tchin, or a caste of municipal employes and government officials, divided into fourteen classes, the first eight of which confer hereditary nobility upon the person holding one of them, and the six latter give but a personal nobility to the incumbent, and do not transmit gentility to the children. Office does not increase the nobility of incumbents already noble, but does lift the ignoble into a higher social rank (Tchinovnik, government employe was for years a term of scorn in the mouths of the nobles). It is only since Alexander came to the throne that all old edict was done away with, which deprived of noble rank and reduced to the peasantry any family which, for three successive generations, had not taken service under the government. Those were called Odnodvorizi, and among them some of the oldest families found themselves included in 1845, when the Emperor Nicholas ordered the examination of the titles of nobles. The nice distinctions among the above fourteen classes are as puzzling to a foreigner as the relative precedence of the various buttons of Chinese Mandarins, or the tails of the Pachas.

Besides these conflicting elements of high and low nobility, the direct descendants of the Boyars of old—the Slavonian peers in the palmy days of Russia, divided into petty sovereignties, who chose for


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themselves the prince they wanted to serve and left him at will, who were vassals, not subjects, had their own military retinue, and without whose approval no grand-ducal “ukasè” could be of any avail—and the ennobled Tchinovniks, sons of priests and petty traders, there are yet to be considered 79,000,000 of other people. These may be divided into the millions of liberated serfs (22,000,000), of crown peasants (16,000,000), who inhabit cities, preferring various trades and menial service to agriculture. The rest comprises (1) the Meshichanis, or petty bourgeois, one step higher than the peasant; (2) the enormous body of merchants and traders divided into three guilds; (3). the hereditary citizens, who have nothing to do with nobility; (4) the black clergy or the monks and nuns; and the secular clergy, or married priests—a caste apart and hereditary; and (5) the military class.

We will not include in our classification the 3,000,000 of Mohammedans, the 2,000,000 of Jews, the 250,000 Buddhists, the pagan Izors, the Savakots, and the Karels, who seem perfectly well satisfied with the Russian rule, thoroughly tolerant to their various worships.* These, with the exception of the higher educated Jews and some fanatical Mohammedans, care little as to the hand that rules them. But we will remind the reader of the fact that there are over one hundred different nations and tribes, who speak more than forty different languages, and are scattered over an area of 8,331,884 English square miles;† that the population of all Russia, European and Asiatic, is not above ten to the square mile; that the railroads are very few and easily controlled, and other means of transport scanty. How far it would be possible to effect a complete revolution throughout the Russian Empire, may well be a subject of conjecture. With so little to bind the many nationalities into one movement, it would seem to a foreigner an undertaking so hopeless as to discourage even an Internationalist or a Nihilist. Add to this the unquestionable devotion of the liberated serfs and peasantry to the Czar, in whom they see alike the benefactor of the oppressed, the vicegerent of God, and the head of their Church, and the case seems yet more problematical. At the same time, we must not forget the lessons of history, which has more than once shown us
—————

* By the last statistics, the Mohammedans have 4,189 mosques and 7,940 mutfis and mulahs in the Empire of Russia the Buddhists 389 places of worship and 4,400 priests; the Jews 445 synagogues and 4,935 rabbis, etc.

† According to the calculation made in 1856 by G. Schweitzer, Director of the Observatory of Moscow.


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how the very vastness of an empire and the lack of a common unity among its subjects have proved at some supreme crisis the most potent elements of its downfall.

St. Petersburg is, in reality, the aristocratic Parc aux Cerfs, a place of shameless profligacy and riotous excesses, with so little that is national in it that its very name is German. It is the natural port of entry for all the continental vices, as well as for the loose ideas about morality, religion and social duty, which are becoming so widely prevalent. The corrupting influence that Paris has upon France, St. Petersburg has upon Russia. An influential Russian magazine, Rousskeye Rye gave us only the other day the following picture of St. Petersburg society:

Russian society slumbers, or rather it feels heavy and somnolent. it lazily nods, only now and then opening its lifeless eyes, as might one who, after a heavy dinner, forced to sit in an unnatural position, cannot resist a lethargic drowsiness, and feels that he must either unbutton his uniform and draw a full breath, or— suffocate. But the dinner is an official one, and his body pinched in a state uniform too tight for him. The man is overcome with an irresistible somnolence ; he feels the blood rushing to his head, his legs tremble and his hand mechanically fumbles the button of the uniform to get one gasp of breath that would interrupt the unendurable torture. Such is the present condition of our society.

But while it is nodding under its threatened apoplexy, from a surfeit of indigestible food, those carnivorous jackals, who are always ready to eat and drink, and can digest whatever they pick up, do not sleep. The violation of the seventh commandment, intellectually as well as physically, having debased body, mind and soul is nestling in the very heart of the public. Adulterers of body, and of thought, and of knowledge and science, adulterers of labour—reign in our midst, are creeping out from every side as the representatives of society and the public, boasting of their brazen hardihood, successful wherever they go, having flung away’ all shame cast aside every’ concern to at least conceal the nakedness of their deeds, even from the eyes of those from whom they’ squeeze all that can be squeezed only from such a fool as—man. Government and treasury’ pilferers’, embezzlers of public and private properties; blacklegs and swindlers subsidized by numberless bubble companies, by stock companies and fraudulent enterprises; thimble-riggers and violators of women and children whom they’ debauch and ruin; contractors, money-lenders, bribed judges and venal counsel, bucket-shop keepers and sharpers of all nationalities, ever)’ religion, every social class. This is our modern social force. Like beasts of prey, hunting in packs, this force, gloating over its quarry, satiating itself, noisily crunching its restless, tireless jaws, imposing itself upon everyone, dares to offer itself as the patron of everything”—science ,literature, arts, and even thought itself. There it is, the kingdom of this world, flesh of the flesh, blood of the blood, made in the image of the animal from which the first germ of man evolved.


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Such are the social ethics of our contemporary Russia, on Russian testimony. If so, then it must have reached that culminating point from which it must either fall into the mire of dissolution, like old Rome, or gravitate towards regeneration through all the horrors and chaos of a “Reign of Terror.” The press teems with guarded complaints of “prostration of forces” among its representatives, the chronic signs of fast-impending social dissolution, and the profound apathy into which the whole Russian people seem to have fallen. The only beings full of life and activity, amid this lethargy of satiety, seem to be the omnipresent and ever-invisible Nihilists. Clearly there must be a change.

From all this social rottenness, the black fungus of Nihilism has sprung. Its hot-bed has been preparing for years, by the gradual sapping of moral tone and self-respect and the debauchery of the higher class, who always give the impulse to those below them for good or evil. All that lacked was the occasion and the man. Under the passport system of Nicholas, the chances for becoming polluted by Paris life were confined to a mere handful of rich nobles, whom the caprice of the Czar allowed to travel. Even they, the privileged of favour and fortune, had to apply for permission six months in advance, and pay a thousand roubles for their passport, with a heavy fine for each day in excess of the time granted, and the prospect of confiscation of their entire property should their foreign stay exceed three years. But under Alexander everything was changed; the emancipation of the serfs was followed by numberless reforms—the unmuzzling of the press, trial by jury, equalizing the rights of citizenship, free passports, etc. Though good in themselves, these reforms came with such a rush upon a people unaccustomed to the least of these privileges, as to throw them into a high fever. The patient, escaping from his strait-jacket, ran wildly about the streets. Then came the Polish Revolution of 1863, in which a number of Russian students participated. Reaction followed and repressive measures were reädopted one by one; but it was too late. The caged animal had tasted liberty, though ever so brief, and thence forth could not be docile as before. Where there had been one Russian traveller to Paris, Vienna and Berlin under the old reign, now there were thousands and tens of thousands; and just so many more agencies were at work to import fashionable vice and scientific scepticism. The names of John Stuart Mill, Darwin, and Buchner, were upon the lip of every beardless boy and heedless girl at the universities and colleges.


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The former were preaching Nihilism, the latter Women’s Rights and Free Love. The one let their hair grow like moujiks, and donned the red national shirt and kaflan of the peasantry; the other clipped their hair short and affected blue spectacles. Trades Unions, infected with the notions of the International, sprang up like mushrooms; and demagogues ranted to social clubs upon the conflict between labour and capital. The cauldron began to seethe. At last the man came.

The history of Nihilism can be summed up in two words. For their name they are indebted to the great novelist Tourguenief, who created Bazarof, and stamped the type with the name of Nihilist. Little did the famous author of Fathers and Sons imagine at that time into what national degeneration his hero would lead the Russian people twenty-five years later. Only “Bazarof”—in whom the novelist painted with satirical fidelity the characteristics of certain “Bohemian” negationists, then just glimmering on the horizon of student life—had little in common, except the name and materialistic tendency, with the masked Revolutionists and Terrorists of today. Shallow, bilious, and nervous, this studiosus medicine is simply an unquiet spirit of sweeping negation; of that sad, yet scientific scepticism reigning now supreme in the ranks of the highest intellect; a spirit of Materialism, sincerely believed in, and as honestly preached; the outcome of long reflections over the rotten remnants of man and frog in the dissecting room, where the dead man suggested to his mind no more than the dead frog. Outside of animal life everything to him is nihil; “a thistle,” growing out of a lump of mud, is all that man can look forward to after death. And thus this type—Bazarof—was caught up as their highest ideal by the university students. The “Sons” began destroying what the “Fathers” had built. . . . And now Tourguenief is forced to taste of the bitter fruits of the tree of his planting. Like the creator of Frankenstein, who could not control the mechanical monster that his ingenuity had constructed out of the putrefactions of the churchyard, he now finds his “type”—which was from the first hateful and terrible to him—grown into the ranting spectre of the Nihilist delirium, the red-handed Socialist. The press, at the initiative of the Moshovskye Vyedomosty—a centenarian paper—takes up the question and openly accuses the most brilliant literary talent of Russia, one whose sympathies are, and always have been, on the side of the “Fathers,” with having been the first to plant the poisonous weed.

Owing to the peculiar transitional state of Russian society between


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1850 and 1860, the name was hailed and adopted, and the Nihilists began springing up at every side. They captured the national literature, and their new doctrines were fast disseminated throughout the whole empire. And now Nihilism has grown into a power—an imperium in imperio: It is no more with Nihilism with which Russia struggles, but with the terrible consequences of the ideas of 1850. Fathers and Sons must henceforth occupy a prominent place, not only in literature, as quite above the ordinary level of authorship, but also as the creator of a new page in Russian political history, the end of which no man can foretell.

A FRENCH VIEW OF WOMEN’S

RIGHTS

[Probably from the Allahabad Pioneer.]

WITH a little book entitled Les Femmes qui Tuent et Les Femmes qui Votent, Alexandre Dumas, fils, has just entered the arena of social and political reform. The novelist, who began by picking up his Beatrices and Lauras in the social gutter, the author of La Dame aux Camelias and La Dame aux Perles, is regarded in France as the finest known analyst of the female heart. He now comes out in a new light; as a defender of Woman’s Rights in general, and of those women especially whom English people generally talk about as little as possible. If this gifted son of a still more gifted father never sank before to the miry depths of that modern French realistic school now in such vogue, the school headed by the author of L’Assommoir and Nana and so fitly nicknamed L’Ecole Ordurialiste it is because he is a born poet, and follows the paths traced out for him by the Marquis de Sade, rather than those of Zola. He is too refined to be the rival of writers like those who call themselves auteurs-naturalisles and romanciers-experimentalistes, who use their pen as the student in surgery his scalpel, plunging it into the depths of all the social cancers they can find.

Until now he idealized and beautified vice. In the work under review, he defends not only its right to exist under certain conditions, but claims for it a recognized place in the broad sunlight of social and political life.

His brochure of 216 pages, which has lately been published in the shape of a letter to J. Claretie, is now having an immense success. By the end of September, hardly a week after its appearance, it had already reached its sixth edition. It treats of two great social difficulties—the question of divorce, and the right of women to participate in elections. Dumas begins by assuming the defence of the several


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women who have recently played an important part in murder cases, in which their victims were their husbands and lovers.

All these women, he says, are the embodiment of the idea which for some time past has been fermenting in the world. It is that of the entire disenthralment of the woman from her old condition of slavery, created for her by the Bible, and enforced by tyrannical society. All these murders and this public vice, as we as the increasing mental labour of women, M. Dumas takes to be so many signs of one and the same aspiration—that of mastering man, getting the best of him, and competing with him in everything. What men will not give them willingly, women of a certain class endeavour to obtain by cunning. As a result of such a policy, he says, we see “those young ladies” acquiring an enormous influence over men in all social affairs and even in politics. Having amassed large fortunes, when older they appear as lady-patronesses of girls’ schools and of charitable institutions, and take a part in provincial administration. Their past is lost sight of; they succeed in establishing, so to say, an imperium in imperio, where they enforce their own laws, and manage to have them respected. This state of things is attributed by Dumas directly to the restriction of Woman’s Rights, to the state of legal slavery women have been subjected to for centuries, and especially to the marriage and anti-divorce laws. Answering the favourite objection of those who oppose divorce on the ground that its establishment would promote too much freedom in love, the author of Le Demi-Monde bravely pushes forward his last batteries and throws off the mask.

Why not promote such freedom? What appears a danger to some, a dishonour and shame to others,

Will become an independent and recognized profession in life—une carrière à part—a fact, a world of its own, with which all the other corporations and classes of society will have to reckon. It will not be long before everyone will have ceased to protest against its right to an independent and legal existence. Very shortly it will form itself into an integral, compact body; and the time will come when, between this world and the others, relations will be established as friendly as between two equally powerful and recognized empires.

With every year women free themselves more and more from empty formalism, and M. Dumas hopes there will never again be a reaction. If a woman is unable to give up the idea of love altogether, let her prefer unions binding neither party to anything, and let her be guided in this only by her own free will and honesty. Of course it is rather to


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review an important current of feeling in an important community than to discuss au fond the delicate questions with which M. Dumas deals, that we are taking notice of his book. We may thus leave the reader to his own reflections on this proposed reform, as also in reference to most of the points raised.

A certain Hubertine Auclaire, in France, has lately refused to pay her taxes on the plea that political rights belonging to man are denied to her as a woman; and Dumas, with this incident as a text, devotes the last part of this brochure to a defence of Woman’s Rights, as eloquent, impressive and original as other portions which will less bear discussion. He writes:

In 1847 political reformers thought it necessary to lower the electoral franchise and distribute the right of vote according to capacity.

That is, to limit it to intelligent men. The government refused, and this led to the Revolution of 1848. Scared, it gave the people the right of universal suffrage, extending the right to all, whether capable or incapable, provided the voters were only men. At present this right holds good, and nothing can abolish it. But women come, in their turn, and ask: “How about us? We claim the same privileges.”

What [asks Dumas] can be more natural, reasonable and just? There is no reason why woman should not have equal rights with man. What difference do you find between the two which warrants your refusing her such a privilege? None at all. Sex? her sex has no more to do with it than the sex of man. As to all other dissimilarities between us, they go far more to her credit than to ours. If one argues that Woman is by nature a weaker creature than man, and that it is his duty to take care of and defend her, we will answer that hitherto we have, it seems, so badly defended her that she had to pick up a revolver and take that defence into her own hands; and to remain consequent with ourselves we have to enter the verdict of “Not guilty” whenever she is caught in that act of self-defence.

To the plea that woman is intellectually weaker than man, and is shown to be so by sacred writings, the author sets off against the biblical Adam and Eve, Jacolliot’s translation of the Hindu legend in his Bible dans l’Inde, and contends that it was man, not woman, who became the first sinner and was turned out of Paradise. If man is endowed with stronger muscles, woman’s nerves surpass his in capacity for endurance. The biggest brain ever found—in weight and size—is now proved to have belonged to a woman. It weighed 2,200 grammes—400 more than that of Cuvier. But brain has nothing to do with the electoral question. To drop a ballot into the urn no one is required to have invented powder, or to be able to lift 500 kilogrammes.


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Dumas has an answer for every objection. Are illustrious women exceptions? He cites a brilliant array of great female names, and contends that the sex in which such exceptions are to be met has acquired a legal right to take part in the nomination of the village maires and municipal officers. The sex which claims a Blanche de Castille, an Elizabeth of England, another of Hungary, a Catherine II and a Maria Theresa, has won every right.

If so many women were found good enough to reign and govern nations, they surely must have been fit to vote. To the remark that women can neither go to war nor defend their country, the reader is reminded of such names as Joan of Arc, and the three other Joans, of Flanders, of Blois, and Joan Hachette. It was in memory of the brilliant defence and salvation of her native town, Beauvais, by the latter Joan, at the head of all the women of that city, besieged by Charles le Témeraire that Louis XI decreed that henceforth and for ever the place of honour in all the national and public processions should belong to women. Had woman no other rights in France, the fact alone that she was called upon to sacrifice1,800,000 of her sons to Napoleon the Great, ought to ensure to her every right. The example of Hubertine Auclaire will be soon followed by every woman in France. Law was ever unjust to woman; and instead of protecting her, it seeks but to strengthen her chains. In case of crimes committed, does law ever think of bringing forward as an extenuating circumstance, her weakness? On the contrary, it always takes advantage of it. The illegitimate child is given by it the right to find out who its mother was, but not its father. The husband can go anywhere, do whatever he pleases, abandon his family, change his citizenship, and even emigrate, without the consent or even knowledge of his wife.

She can do nothing of the kind. In case of a suspicion of her faith, he can deprive her of her marriage portion; and in case of guilt may even kill her. It is his right. Debarred from the benefits of a divorce, she has to suffer all, and finds no redress. She is fined, judged, sentenced, imprisoned, put to death, and suffers all the penalties of law just as much and under the same circumstances as he does, but no magistrate has ever thought of saying yet:

“Poor weak little creature Let us forgive her, for she is irresponsible, and so much lower than man

The whole eloquent, if sometimes rhapsodical plea in favour of women’s suffrage is concluded with the following suggestions:


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First, the situation will appear absurd; but gradually people will become accustomed to the idea, and soon every protest will die out. No doubt at first the idea of woman in this new role will have to become the subject of bitter criticism and satire. Ladies will be accused of ordering their hats a
a l'urne, their bodices au suffrage universel, and their skirts au scrutin secret. But what then ? After having served for a time as an object of amazement, then become a fashion and habit, the new system will be finally looked upon as a duty. At all events it has now become a claimed right. A few grandes dames in cities, some wealthy female landowners in provincial districts, and leaseholders in villages, will set the example, and it will be soon followed by the rest of the female population.

The book winds up with this question and answer:

I may, perhaps, be asked by some pious and disciplined lady, some fervent believer in time idea that humanity can only he rescued from perdition by codes and gospels, by the Roman law and Roman Church: ‘‘Pray, tell me, sir, where are we driving to with all these ideas ?“ “He, madame! ... we go where we were going to from the first, to that which must be, that is, the inevitable. We move slowly onward, because we call spare time, having some millions of years yet before us, and because we have to leave some work to do for those who are following us. For the present we are occupied in enfranchising women; when this is done we will try to enfranchise God. And as soon as full harmony will have been established between these three eternal principles—God, man and woman—our way will appear to us less dark before us, and we will journey on the quicker.”

Certainly the advocates of Woman’s Rights in England have never yet approached their subject from this point of view. Is the new method of attack likely to prove more effective than the familiar declamation of the British platform, or the earnest prosing of our own great woman’s champion, John Stuart Mill? This remains to be seen; but certainly for the most part the English ladies who fight this battle will be puzzled how to accept an ally whose sympathy is due to principles so frightfully indecorous as those of our present author.

H. P. Blavatsky.

OCCULT PHENOMENA
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[From the Bombay Gazette Oct. 29th, 1880.]

IN the issue of the 19th instant of your worthy contemporary, I find over two columns devoted to the doubtful glorification, but mostly to the abuse, of my humble individuality. There is a long confidential letter from Colonel Olcott to an officer of our Society, obtained surreptitiously by somebody, and marked “private”—a word showing in itself that the document was never meant for the public eye—and an editorial, principally filled with cheap abuse, and venomous, though common-place, suggestions. The latter was to be expected, but I would like information upon the following points: (1) How did the editor come into possession of a document stolen from the desk of the President of the Bombay Branch of the Theosophical Society? and (2) having got it, what right had he to publish it at all, without first obtaining consent from the writer or addressee—a consent which he could never have obtained? and (3) how is such an action to be characterized? If the law affords no redress for a wrong like this I am content, at least, to abide the verdict of every well-bred man or woman who shall read the letter and comments thereon. This private letter having been written about, but not by me, I abandon this special question to be settled between the offended and the offender, and touch but upon the one which concerns me directly.

I have lived long enough in this world of incessant strife, in which the “survival of the fittest” seems to mean the triumph of the most unprincipled, to have learned that when I have once allowed my name to appear in the light of a benevolent genius, for the production of “cups,” “saucers” and “brooches,” I must bear the penalty; especially when the people are so foolish as to take the word “Magic” either in its popular superstitious sense—that of the work of the devil—or in that of jugglery. Therefore and precisely because I am an “elderly lady from Russia via America,” the latter country of unlimited freedom


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—especially in newspaper personal abuse—has toughened me to the extent of being indifferent as to the sneering and jeering of news papers upon questions they do not understand at all; provided they are witty and remain within the limits of propriety and do no harm but to myself. Being neither a professional medium nor a professional anything, and making my experiments in “Occult phenomena” only in the presence of a few friends—rarely before anyone who is not a member of our Society—I have a right to claim from the public a little more fairness and politeness than are usually accorded to paid jugglers and even alleged Thaumaturgists. And if my friends will insist upon publishing about “Occult phenomena” taking place in their presence, they should at least preface their narratives with the following warning: Pukka Theosophy believes in no miracle, whether divine or devilish; recognizes nothing as supernatural; believes only in facts and Science; studies the laws of Nature, both Occult and patent; and gives attention particularly to the former, just because exact Science will have nothing to do with them.

Such laws are those of Magnetism in all its branches, Mesmerism, Psychology, etc. More than once in the history of its past has Science been made the victim of its own delusions as to its professed infallibility; and the time must come when the perfection of Asiatic Psychology and its knowledge of the forces of the invisible world will be recognized, as were the circulation of the blood, electricity, and so forth, after the first sneers and lampoons died away. The “silly attempts to hoodwink individuals” will then be viewed as honest attempts at proving to this generation of Spiritualists and believers in past ‘‘miracle—mongers,” that there is naught miraculous in this world of Matter and Spirit, of visible results and invisible causes; naught—but the great wickedness of a world of Christians and Pagans, alike ridiculously superstitious in one direction, that of their respective religions, and malicious whenever a purely disinterested and philanthropic effort is made to open their eyes to the truth. I beg leave to further remark that personally I never bragged of anything I might have done, nor do I offer any explanation of the phenomena, except to utterly disclaim the possession of any miraculous or supernatural powers, or the performing of anything by jugglery—i.e., with the usual help of confederates and machinery. That’s all. And surely, if there is anything like a sense of justice left in society, I am amenable to neither statutory nor social laws for gratifying the interest of members


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of our Society, and the wishes of my personal friends, by exhibiting to them in privacy various phenomena, in which I believe far more firmly than any of them, since I know the laws by which they are produced, and am ready to stand any amount of personal newspaper abuse when ever these results are told to the public. The “official circles at Simla” was an incorrect and foolish phrase to use. I never produced anything in the ‘‘official circles’’ ; but I certainly hope to have impressed a few persons belonging to such “official circles” with the sense that I was neither an impostor nor a “hood of official personages,” for whom, moreover, so long as I live up to the law of the country, and respect it (especially considering my natural democratic feelings, strengthened by my American naturalization), I am not bound to have any more respect than each of them personally deserves in his individual capacity. I must add, for the personal gratification of the Editor of your contemporary, and in the hope that this will soothe his irate feelings, that of the five eye-witnesses to the “cup” production, three (two of these of the “official circle”) utterly disbelieve the genuineness of the phenomenon, though I would be pleased to know how, with all their scepticism, they would be able to account for it. I do not imitate the indiscretion of the Editor and mention names, but leave the public to draw such inferences as they please.

I am a private individual, and no one has a right to call upon me to rise and explain. Therefore, by causing Colonel Olcott’s stolen letter to be followed by a paragraph entitled “The way they treat ‘occult phenomena’ in England,” giving an account of the arrest of Miss Houghton, a medium who obtained money under false pretences, the Editor, by the implied innuendo which likens my case to hers, became guilty of one more unprovoked and ungentlemanly insult towards me, who obtain neither money nor favours of any sort for my ‘‘phenomena,” and lays himself open to very hard reprisals. The only benefit I have ever derived from my experiments, when made public, is newspaper abuse and more or less unfavourable comments upon my unfortunate self all over the country. This, unless my convictions were strong indeed, would amount to obtaining Billingsgate and martyrdom under false pretences, and begging a reputation for insanity. The game would hardly be worth the candle, I think.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

Amritzur, Oct. 25th 1880.

HINDU WIDOW- MARRAGE
—————

[The following is a copy of a letter received by Dewan Bahadar Ragunath Row from Madame Blavatsky.]

MY DEAR SIR,—I have not made a study of Hindu law, but I do know something of the principles of Hindu religions, or rather ethics, and of those of its glorious Founders. I regard the former as almost the embodiment of justice, and the latter as ideals of spiritual perfectibility. When then anyone points out to me in the existing canon any text, line or word that violates one’s sense of perfect justice, I instinctively know it must be a later perversion of the original Smriti. In my judgment, the Hindus are now patiently enduring many outrageous wrongs that were cunningly introduced into the canon, as opportunity offered, by selfish and unscrupulous priests for their personal benefit, as occurred in the case of Suttee, the burning of widows. The marriage laws are another example. To marry a child, without her knowledge or consent to enter the married state, and then to doom her to the awful, because unnatural, fate of enforced celibacy if the boy-child to whom she was betrothed should die (and one half of the human race do die before coming of age), is something actually brutal, devilish. It is the quintessence of injustice and cruelty, and I would sooner doubt the stars of heaven than believe that any one of those star-bright human souls called Rishis had ever consented to such a base and idiotic cruelty. If a female has entered the marital relation, she should, in my opinion, remain a chaste widow if her husband should die. But if a betrothed boy—husband of a non-consenting and irresponsible child-wife should die, or if, upon coming to age, either of them should be averse from matrimony, and prefer to take tip the religious life, to devote themselves to charitable occupations, to study, or for other good reasons wish to remain celibate, then they ought to be allowed to do so. We personally know of several cases where the males or females are so bent upon becoming Chelâs that they prefer death


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rather than to enter or continue in—as the cases severally may be— the married state. My woman’s instinct always told me that for such there was comfort and protection in the Hindus law of the Rishis, which was based upon their spiritual perceptions, hence upon the perfect law of harmony and justice which pervades all nature. And now, upon reading your excellent pamphlet, I perceive that my instincts had not deceived me.

Wishing every possible success to your noble and highly philanthropical enterprise, believe me, dear sir, with respect,

Yours fraternally,

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

Mylapore, June 3rd, 1882.

“OPPRESSED WIDOWHOOD” IN

AMERICA
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[From The Philosophic Enquirer ; July 15 1883.]

HAVING read an article signed with the above pseudonym in The Philosophic Enquirer of July 1st, in which the hapless condition of the Hindu widow is so sincerely bewailed, the idea struck me that it may not be uninteresting to your readers, the opponents as well as the supporters of child-marriage and widow-marriage, to learn that the sacerdotal caste of India is not a solitary exception in the cruel treatment of those unfortunates whom fate has deprived of their husbands. Those who look upon the re-marriage of their bereaved females with horror, as well as those who may yet be secretly sighing for Suttee, will find worthy sympathizers among the savage and fierce tribe of the Talkotins of Oregon (America). Says Ross Cox in his Adventures on the Columbia River:

The ceremonies attending the dead are very singular and quite peculiar to this tribe. During the nine days the corpse is laid out the widow of the deceased is obliged to sleep alongside it from sunset to sunrise; and from this custom there is on relaxation even during the hottest days of summer [ the ceremony of cremation is being performed, and the doctor (or ‘‘medicine man “) is trying for the last time his skill upon the corpse, and using useless incantations to bring hint back to life,] the widow must lie on the pile, add after the fire is applied to it she cannot stir until the doctor orders her to be removed, which, however, is never done until her body is completely covered with blisters.

After being placed on her legs she is obliged to pass her hands gently through the flames and collect some of the liquid fat which issues front the corpse, with which she is permitted [?] to wet her face and body! When the friends of the deceased observe the sinews of the legs and arms beginning to contract they compel the unfortunate widow to go again on the pile, and by dint of hard pressing to straighten those members.

If during her husband’s lifetime she has been known to have omitted administering to him savoury food, or neglected his clothing, etc., she is now made to suffer severely for such lapses of duty by his relations, who frequently fling her On


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the funeral pile, from which she is dragged by her friends, and thus between alternate scorching and cooling she is dragged backwards and forwards until she falls into a state of insensibility.

After which she is saved and allowed to go.

But if the widow was faithful, respectful and a good wife, then:

After the process of burning the corpse has terminated, the widow collects the larger bones, which she rolls up in an envelope of birch bark, and which she is obliged for some years afterwards to carry on her back. She is now considered and treated as a slave [as in India]; all the laborious duties of cooking, collecting fuel, etc., devolve on her. She must obey the orders of all the women and even of the village children, and the slightest mistake or disobedience subjects her to the infliction of a heavy punishment. The wretched widow, to avoid this complicated cruelty, often commits suicide. Should she, however, linger on for three or four years, the friends of her husband agree to relieve her from her painful mourning. This is a ceremony of much consequence. . . . Invitations are sent to the inhabitants of the various friendly villages, and when the feast commences presents are distributed to each visitor. The object of their meeting is then explained, and the woman is brought forward, still carrying on her back the bones of her late husband, which are now removed and placed in a carved box, which is nailed to a post twelve feet high.

Her conduct as a faithful widow is next highly eulogized, and the ceremony of her manumission is completed by one man powdering on her head the down of birds and another pouring on it the contents of a bladder of oil! She is then at liberty to marry again or lead a life of single blessedness; but few of them, I believe, wish to encounter the risk attending a second widowhood.

H. P. B.

“ESOTERIC BUDDHISM” AND ITS

CRITIC
—————

[From Light, 1883.]

Bottom.— me play the lion. . . . I will roar, that I will do any man’s heart good to hear me. . . . I will make the Duke say,...” Let him roar, let him roar again.” ... Masters, you ought to consider with yourselves; to bring in—God shield us!—a lion among ladies, is a most dreadful thing; for, there is not a more fearful wild-fowl than your lion living; and we ought to look to it.

Nay, you must name his name, and half his face must be seen through the lion’s neck; and he himself must speak through, saying thus, or to the same defect:

“Ladies,” or “fair ladies [or Theosophists] I would wish you,” or “I would request you,” or “I would entreat you,” not to fear, not to tremble If you think I come hither as a lion, . . . no, I am no such thing: I am a man . . . and there indeed let him name his name.—Midsummer Night’s Dream.

IN Light of July 21st in the “Correspondence,” appears a letter signed “G. W., M.D.” Most transparent initials these, which “name the name” at once, and show the writer’s face “through the lion’s neck.” The communication consists of just fifty-eight paragraphs, containing an equal number of sneering, rancorous, vulgar, personal flings, the whole distributed over three and a half columns. It pretends to criticize, while only misquoting and misinterpreting Eastern Esotericism. Its author would create a laugh at the expense of Mr. Sinnett’s book, and succeeds in showing us what a harmless creature is the “lion,” “wild-fowl” though he may be; and where he would make a show of wit, the letter is only—nasty.

I should not address your public, even in my private capacity, but that the feelings of many hundreds of my Asiatic brothers have been outraged by this, to them, ribald attack upon what they hold sacred. For them, and at their instance, I protest. It might be regarded as beneath contempt had it come from an outsider upon whom rested no obligation to uphold the dignity of the Theosophical Society; in such case it would have passed for a clumsy attempt to injure an unpalatable cause: that of Esoteric Buddhism. But when it is a wide-open secret


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that the letter came from a member of about five years’ standing, and one who, upon the protogenesis of the “British Theosophical Society” as the “London Lodge of the Theosophical Society,” retained membership, the case has quite another aspect. The cutting insult having been inflicted publicly and without antecedent warning, it appears necessary to enquire as to the occult motive.

I shall not stop to remark upon the wild resume which, professedly “a criticism from a European and arithmetical standpoint,” passed muster with you. Nor shall I lose time over the harmless flings at “incorrigible Buddhists and other lunatics,” beyond remarking àpro of “moon” and “dust-bins” that the former seems to have found a good symbol of herself as a “dust-bin” in the heads of those whose perceptive faculties seem so dusty as to prevent the entrance of a single ray of Occult light. Briefly then, since the year 1879 when we came to India, the author of the letter in question has made attempts to put himself into communication with the “Brothers.” Besides trying to enter into correspondence with Colonel Olcott’s Guru, he sent twice, through myself letters addressed to the Mahâtmâs. Being, as it appears, full of one-sided prejudiced questions, suggesting to Buddhist Philosophers the immense superiority of his own “Esoteric” Christianity over the system of the Lord Buddha, which is characterized as fruitful of selfishness, human blindness, misanthropy and spiritual death, they were returned by the addressees for our edification and to show us why they would not notice them. Whoever has read a novelette contributed by this same gentleman to The Psychological Review and entitled “The Man from the East” will readily infer what must have been his attitude towards the “Himalayan” and Tibetan Mystics. A Scotch doctor, the hero, meets at a place in Syria, in an Occult Brother hood, a Christian convert from this “Himalayan heathen Brotherhood,” who—a Hindu against his late Adept Masters the self-same libels as are now repeated in the letter under notice.
—————

* The shot at Theosophy being badly aimed, flew wide of the mark; but still, like Richard III, “G. W., M.D.” resolved, as it appears, to keep up the gunnery— The mythical hero of the story would seem to have met at Paris with a certain pseudo-Brâhman, a convert to Roman Catholicism, who is giving himself out as an ex-Chela—his statements and all corroborative ones to the contrary notwithstanding; he may have misled, if not the mythical Scotch doctor, at least the actual “M.D.’’ of London. And, by the way, our French Fellows may as well know, that unless this pretender ceases his bogus revelations as to the phenomenal powers of our Mahatmas being “of the devil” a certain native gentleman who has known this convert of the Jesuits from childhood, will expose him most fully—H. P. B.


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If not to fight with foreign enemies,
Yet to beat down these rebels here at home.

The three indignant answers called out by “G. W., M.D.,” having emanated from an English lady and two genuine English gentlemen, are, in my humble opinion, too dignified and mild for the present case. So brutal an attack demanded something stronger than well-bred protests; and at the risk of being taken by “G. W., M.D.” as the reverse of well-bred, I shall use plain words about this whilom friend, but now traitor—I hope to show the term is not too harsh. As an ardent Theosophist, the grateful loyal friend of the author denounced—who deserves and has the regard of Mahâtmâ Koot-Hoomi—and as the humble pupil of Those to whom I owe my life and the future of my soul, I shall speak. While I have breath, I shall never allow to pass unnoticed such ugly manifestations of religious intolerance, nay, bigotry, and personal rancour resulting from envy, in a member of our Society.

Before closing, I must notice one specially glaring fact. Touched evidently to the quick by Mr. Sinnett’s very proper refusal to let one so inimical see the “Divine Face” (yes, truly Divine, though not so much so as the original) of the Mahâtmâ, “G. W., M.D.” with a sneer of equivocal propriety, calls it a mistake. He says:

For just as some second-class saints have been made by gazing on halfpenny prints of the Mother of God, so who can say that if my good friend had permitted my sceptical eyes to look on the Divine face of Koot-Hoomi I might not forthwith have been converted into an Esoteric Buddhist?

Impossible; an Esoteric Buddhist never broke his pledged word; and one who upon entering the Society gave his solemn word of honour, in the presence of witnesses, that he would.

Defend the interests of the Society and the honour of a brother Theosophist, when unjustly assailed, even at the peril of my [his] own life,

and then could write such a letter, would never be accepted in that capacity. One who unjustly assails the honour of hundreds of his Asiatic brothers, slanders their religion and wounds their most sacred feelings, may be a very esoteric Christian, but certainly is a disloyal Theosophist. My perceptions of what constitutes a man of honour may be very faulty, but I confess that I could not imagine such a one making public caricatures upon confessedly “private instructions.” (See second column, paragraph 14 of his letter.) Private instructions of this sort, given at confidential private meetings of the Society in


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advance of their publication, are exactly what the entering member’s word of honour’’ pledges him not to reveal.

The broken faith made thee prey for worms;
What canst thou swear by now?

Your correspondent deprecates

At the outset this Oriental practice of secrecy; [he knows] that secrecy and cunning are ever twin sisters, [and it appears to him childish and effeminate [to pretend] by secret Words and signs to enshrine great truths behind a veil, which is only useful as a concealment of ignorance and nakedness.

Indeed: so he is not an “Esoteric Christian” after all, else I have misread the Bible. For what I find there in various passages, of which I cite but one, shows me that he is as disloyal to his own Master and Ideal Christ, as he is to Theosophy:

And he said unto them [his own disciples], Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God; but unto them that are without [the ‘‘G.W., M.D.’s’’ of the day] all these things are done in parables: that seeing they may see and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them. ( iv. 11, 12.)

Shall we characterize this also as “childish and effeminate,” say that the twins sisters ‘‘secrecy and cunning” lurk behind this veil, and that in this instance, as usual, it was “only useful as a concealment of ignorance and nakedness”? The grandeur of Esoteric Buddhism is that it hides what it does from the vulgar, not “lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins forgiven them,” or as they would say, “cheat their Karma”—but lest by learning prematurely that which can safely be trusted only to those who have proved their unselfishness and self—abnegation, even the wicked, the sinners should be hurt.

And now, may the hope of Bottom be realized, and some London Duke say to this harmless lion: “Let him roar, let him roar again.”

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

Nilgherry Hills, Aug. 23rd, 1883.

MR. A. LILLIE’S DELUSIONS
—————

[From Light, 1884.]

I WRITE to rectify the many mistakes—if they are, indeed, only “mistakes”—in Mr. Lillie’s last letter that appeared in Light of August 2nd, in answer to the Observations on his pamphlet by the President of the London Lodge.

I. This letter, in which the author of Buddha and Early Buddhism proposed to Consider briefly some of the notable omissions made in the “Observations,’

begins with two most notable assertions concerning myself, which are entirely false, and which the author had not the slightest right to make. He says:

For fourteen years (1860 to 1874) Madame Blavatsky was all avowed Spiritualist, controlled by a spirit called “John King” ... she attended many seances.

But this would hardly prove anyone to be a Spiritualist, and, more over, all these assertions are entirely false. I say the word and under line it, for the facts in them are distorted, and made to fit a preconceived and very erroneous notion, started first by the Spiritualists, whose interest it is to advocate “spirits” pure and simple, and to kill, if they can, which is rather doubtful, belief in the wisdom, if not in the very existence, of our revered Masters.

Though I do not at all feel bound to unbosom my private life to Mr. Arthur Lillie, nor do I recognize in him the right of demanding it, yet out of respect to a few Spiritualists whom I esteem and honour, I would set them right once for all on the subject. As that period of my life (1873-1879) in America, with all its spiritual transactions, will be given very soon in a new book called Madame Blavatsky, published by friends, and one which I trust will settle, once and for ever, the many wild and unfounded stories told of me, I will briefly state only the following.

The unwarranted assumption mentioned above is very loosely based

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on one single document, namely, Colonel Olcott’s People from the other World. As this book was written partly before, and partly after, my first acquaintance with Colonel Olcott, and as he was a Spiritualist, which he has never denied, I am not responsible for his views of me and my “power” at that time. He wrote what he then thought the whole truth, honestly and sincerely; and as I had a determined object in view, I did not seek to disabuse him too rudely of his dreams. It was only after the formation of the Theosophical Society in 1875, that he learned the whole truth. I defy anyone, after that period, to find one word from his pen that would corroborate his early views on the nature of my supposed “mediumship.” But even then, when writing of me in his book, he states distinctly the following:

Her mediumship is totally different from that of any other person I ever met, for instead of being controlled by spirits to do their will, it is she who seems to control them to do her bidding.

Strange “mediumship,” one that resembled in no way any that even Colonel Olcott—a Spiritualist of thirty years’ standing—had ever met with! But when Colonel Olcott says in his book (p. 453) that instead of being controlled by, it is I who control the so-called spirits, he is yet made to say by Mr. Lillie, who refers the public to Colonel Olcott’s book, that is I who was controlled! Is this a misstatement and a misquotation, I ask, or is it not?

Again, it is stated by Mr. Lillie that I conversed with this “spirit” (John King) during fourteen years, “constantly in India and else where.” To begin with, I here assert that I had never heard the name of “John King” before 1873. True it is, I had told Colonel Olcott and many others that the form of a man, with a dark pale face, black beard, and white flowing garments and fettah, that some of them had met about the house and my rooms, was that of a “John King.” I had given him that name for reasons that will be fully explained very soon, and I laughed heartily at the easy way the astral body of a living man could be mistaken for, and accepted as, a spirit. And I had told them that I had known that “John” since 1860; for it was the form of an Eastern Adept, who has since gone for his final initiation, passing through and visiting us in his living body on his way, at Bombay. Whether Messrs. Lillie and Co. believe the statement or not, I care very little, as Colonel Olcott and other friends know it now to be the true one. I have known and conversed with many a “John King” in my life—a generic name for more than one spook—but, thank heaven,


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I was never yet “controlled” by one! My rnedium-ship has been crushed out of me a quarter of a century or more; and I defy loudly all the “spirits” of the Kâma Loka to approach—let alone to control me—now. Surely it is Mr. Arthur Lillie who must be “controlled” by some one to make untruthful statements which can be so easily refuted as this one.

2. Mr. Lillie asks for

Information about the seven years’ initiation of Madame Blavatsky.

The humble individual of this name has never heard of such an initiation. With that accuracy in the explanation of Esoteric terms that so preeminently characterizes the author of Buddha and Early Buddhism, the word may be intended for ‘‘instruction”? If so, then I should be quite justified in first asking Mr. Lillie what right he has to cross-examine me. But since he chooses to take such liberties with my name, I will tell him plainly that he himself knows nothing, not merely of initiations and Tibet, but even of exoteric—let alone Esoteric—Buddhism. What he pretends to know about Lamaism he has picked tip from the hazy information of travellers, who, having forced them selves into the borderland of Tibet, pretend on that account to know all that is within the country closed for centuries to the average traveller. Even Csomo de Koros knew very little of the real gyelukpas and Esoteric Lamaism, except what he was permitted to know, for he never went beyond Zanskar and the lamasery of Phagdal—erroneously spelt by those who pretend to know all about Tibet, Pugdal which is incorrect, just because there are no meaning-less names in Tibet’, as Mr. Lillie has been taught to say. And I will tell him also that I have lived at different periods in Little Tibet as well as in Great Tibet, and that these combined periods form more than seven years.

Yet I have never stated either verbally or over my signature that I had passed seven consecutive years in a convent. What I have said, and repeat now, is that I have stopped in Lamaistic convents; that I have visited Tzi-gadze, the Teshu Hlumpo territory anti its neighbour hood, and that I have been further into, and have visited such places of Tibet as have never been visited by other Europeans, and such as he can never hope to visit.

Mr. Lillie had no right to expect more “ample details” in Mr. Finch’s pamphlet. Mr. Finch is an honourable man, who speaks of the private life of a person only so far as that person permits him. My friends and those whom I respect and for whose opinion I care, have ample


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evidence—from my family for instance—that I have been in Tibet, and this is all I care for. As to—

The names, perhaps, of three or four ... English [ Anglo-Indian] officials, who would certify

to having seen me when I passed, I am afraid their vigilance would not be found at the height of their trustworthiness. Only two years back, as I can prove by numerous witnesses, when journeying from Chandernagore to Darjeeling, instead of proceeding to it direct, I left the train half-way, was met by friends with a conveyance, and passed with them into the territory of Sikkhim where I found my Master and Mahâtmâ Kuthumi. Thence I went five miles across the old border land of Tibet.

Upon my return, five days later, to Darjeeling, I received a kind note from the Deputy Commissioner. It notified me in the politest of terms that, having heard of my intention of going over to Tibet, the government could not allow me to proceed there before I had received permission to that effect from Simla, nor could it accept the responsibility of my safety,

The Râjah of Sikkhim being very averse to allow travellers on his territory, etc.

This I would call shutting the stable-door when the steed is stolen. Nor had the very “trustworthy” official even heard that a month before Mr. Sinnett had kindly procured for me permission, since I went to Sikkhim but for a few days, and no farther than the old Tibetan borderland. The question is not whether the Anglo-Indian Government will or will not grant such permission, but whether the Tibetans will let one cross their territory. Of the latter, I am sure any day. I invite Mr. Lillie to try the same. He may at the same time study with profit geography, and ascertain that there are other routes than those laid down into Tibet, besides via “English officials.” He tries his best to make me out, in plain words, a liar. He will find it even more difficult than to disprove that he knows nothing of either Tibet or Buddhism or our “Byang Tisubs.”

I will surely never lose my time in showing that his accusations against One, Whom no insult of his can reach, are perfectly worthless. There are numbers of men quite as intelligent as he believes himself to be, whose opinion of our Mahâtmâs’ letters is the reverse of his. He can “suppose” that the authorities by him cited knew more about Tibet than our Masters; others think they do not; and the thousand


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and one blunders of his Buddha and Early Buddhism show us what these authorities are worth when trusted literally. As to his trying to insinuate that there is no Mahâtmâ Kuthumi at all, the idea alone is absurd. He will have to dispose, before he does anything more, of a certain lady in Russia, whose truthfulness and impartiality no one who knows her would ever presume to question, who received a letter from that Master so far back as 1870. Perchance a forgery also? As to my having been in Tibet, at Mahâtmâ Kuthumi's house, I have better proof in store—when I believe it needed—than Mr. Lillie’s rancorous ingenuity will ever be able to make away with.

If the teachings of Mr. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism are considered atheistic, then I am an atheist too. And yet I would not deny what I wrote in Isis, as quoted by Mr. Finch. If Mr. Lillie knows no difference between an anthropomorphic extra-cosmic God, and the Divine Essence of the Advaitis and other Esotericists, then, I must only lose a little more of my respect for the R. A. S. in which he claims membership; and it may justify the more our assertions that there is more knowledge in “Bâbu (?) Subba Row’s” solitary head than in dozens of the heads of “Orientalists” about London we know of. The same with regard to the Master’s name. If Mr. Lillie tells us that “Kuthumi ” is not a Tibetan name, we answer that we never claimed it to be one. Everyone knows that the Master is a Punjabi, whose family was settled for years in Cashmere. But if he tells us that an expert at the British Museum ransacked the Tibetan dictionary for the words “Kut” and “Humi,” “and found no such words,” then I say: Buy a better dictionary or replace the expert by a more “expert” one. Let Mr. Lillie try the glossaries of the Moravian Brothers and their alphabets. I am afraid he is ruining terribly his reputation as an Orientalist. Indeed, before this controversy is settled he may leave in it the last shreds of his supposed Oriental learning.

Lest Mr. Lillie should take my omitting to answer a single one of his very indiscreet questions as a new pretext for printing some impertinence, I say: I was at Mentana during the battle in October, 1867, and left Italy in November of the same year for India. Whether I was sent there, or found myself there by accident, are questions that pertain to my private life, with which, it appears to me, Mr. Lillie has no concern. But this is on a par with his other ways of dealing with his opponents.

Mr. Lillie’s other sarcasms touch me very little, for I know their

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value. I may let them pass without any further notice. Some persons have an extraordinarily clever way of avoiding an embarrassing position by trying to place their antagonists in the same situation. For instance, Mr. Lillie could not answer the criticisms made on his Buddha and Early Buddhism in The Theosophist, nor has he ever attempted to do so. But he applied himself instead to collect every vile rumour and idle gossip about me, its editor. Why does he not show, to begin with, that his reviewer was wrong? Why does he not, by contradicting our statements, firmly establish his own authority as an Orientalist, showing first of all that lie is a genuine scholar, who knows the subject he is talking about, before he allows himself to deny and contradict other people’s statements in matters which he knows still less about? He does nothing of the kind, however—not a word, not a mention of the scourging criticism that he is unable to relute. Instead of that, one finds the offended author trying to throw ridicule on his reviewers, probably so as to lessen the value of what they have to say of his own book. This is clever, very clever strategy—whether it is equally honourable remains, withal, an open question.

It might be difficult, after the conclusions reached by qualified scholars in India concerning his first book, to secure much attention in The Theosophist for his second, but if this volume in turn were examined with the care almost undeservedly devoted to the first, and if it were referred to the authority of such real Oriental scholars and Sanskritists as Mr. R. T. H. Griffith, for instance, I think it would be found that the aggregate blundering of the two books put together might excite even as much amusement as the singular complacency with which the author betrays himself to the public.

H. P. BLAVATSKY.

August 3rd, 1884.

WHAT IS THEOSOPHY?
—————

[Vol. I. No. I, October, 1879.]

THIS question has been so often asked, and misconception so widely prevails, that the editors of a journal devoted to an exposition of the world’s Theosophy would be remiss, were its first number issued with-out coming to a full understanding with their readers. But our heading involves two further queries: what is the Theosophical Society; and what are the Theosophists? To each an answer will be given.

According to lexicographers, the term Theosophia is composed of two Greek words—Theos, “God,” and sophia, “wisdom.” So far, correct. But the explanations that follow are far from giving a clear idea of Theosophy. Webster defines it most originally as

A supposed intercourse with God and superior spirits, and consequent attainment of superhuman knowledge, by physical processes, as by the theurgic operations of some ancient Platonists, or by the chemical processes of the German fire-philosophers.

This, to say the least, is a poor and flippant explanation. To attribute such ideas to men like Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, Jamblichus, Porphyry, Proclus, shows either intentional misrepresentation, or Mr. Webster’s ignorance of the philosophy and motives of the greatest geniuses of the later Alexandrian School. To impute to those whom their contemporaries as well as posterity styled “Theodidaktoi,” God- taught, a purpose to develop their psychological, spiritual perceptions by “physical processes,” is to describe them as materialists. As to the concluding fling at the fire-philosophers, it rebounds from them to fall home among our most eminent modern men of science, those in whose mouths the Rev. James Martineau places the following boast: “Matter is all we want; give us atoms alone and we will explain the universe.”

Vaughan offers a far better, more philosophical definition. He says:

A Theosophist is one who gives you a theory of God or the works of God, which has not revelation, but an inspiration of his own for its basis.

In this view every great thinker and philosopher, especially every founder of a new religion, school of philosophy, or sect is necessarily a Theosophist. Hence Theosophy and Theosophists have existed ever


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since the first glimmering of nascent thought made man seek instinctively for the means of expressing his own independent opinions.

There were Theosophists before the Christian era, notwithstanding that the Christian writers ascribe the development of the eclectic Theosophical system to the early part of the third century of their era. Diogenes Laertius traces Theosophy to an epoch antedating the dynasty of the Ptolemies; and names as its founder an Egyptian Hierophant called Pot-Amun, the name being Coptic and signifying a priest consecrated to Amun, the God of Wisdom. But history shows it revived by Ammonius Saccas, the founder of the Neo-Platonic School. He and his disciples called themselves “Philalethians”—lovers of the truth; while others termed them the ‘‘Analogists,” on account of their method of interpreting all sacred legends, symbolical myths and mysteries, by a rule of analogy or correspondence, so that events which had occurred in the external world were regarded as expressing operations and experiences of the human soul. It was the aim and purpose of Ammonius to reconcile all sects, peoples and nations under one common faith—a belief in one Supreme Eternal, Unknown and Unnamed Power, governing the universe by immutable and eternal laws. His object was to prove a primitive system of Theosophy, which at the beginning was essentially alike in all countries; to induce all men to lay aside their strifes and quarrels, and unite in purpose and thought as the children of one common mother; to purify the ancient religions, by degrees corrupted and obscured, from all dross of human element, by uniting and expounding them upon pure philosophical principles. Hence, the Buddhistic, Vedantic and Magian, or Zoroastrian, systems were taught in the Eclectic Theosophical School along with all the philosophies of Greece. Hence also, that preeminently Buddhistic and Indian feature among the ancient Theosophists of Alexandria, of due reverence for parents and aged persons; a fraternal affection for the whole human race; and a compassionate feeling for even the dumb animals. While seeking to establish a system of moral discipline, which enforced upon people the duty to live according to the laws of their respective countries, to exalt their minds by the research and contemplation of the one Absolute Truth; his chief object, in order, as he believed, to achieve all others, was to extract from the various religions teachings, as from a many-chorded instrument, one full and harmonious melody, which would find response in every truth-loving heart.


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Theosophy is, then, the archaic Wisdom the esoteric doctrine once known in every ancient country having claims to civilization. This “Wisdom” all the old writings show us as an emanation of the divine Principle; and the clear comprehension of it is typified in such names as the Indian Budh, the Babylonian Nebo, the Thoth of Memphis, the Hermes of Greece; in the appellations, also, of some goddesses—Metis, Neitha, Athena, the Gnostic Sophia finally the Vedas, from the word “to know.” Under this designation, all the ancient philosophers of the East and West, the Hierophants of old Egypt, the Rishis of Aryávartta, the Theodidaktoi of Greece, included all knowledge of things occult and essentially divine. The Mercavah of the Hebrew rabbis, the secular and popular series, were thus designated as only the vehicle, the outward shell which contained the higher esoteric knowledge. The Magi of Zoroaster received instruction and were initiated in the caves and secret lodges of Bactria; the Egyptian and Grecian Hierophants had their aporrheta, or secret discourses, during which the Mystés became an Epoptes Seer.

The central idea of Eclectic Theosophy was that of a single Supreme Essence, Unknown and Unknowable, for—”How could one know the knower?” as enquires the Brihadáranyaka Upanishad Their system was characterized by three distinct features: the theory of the above named Essence; the doctrine of the human soul—an emanation from the latter, hence of the same nature; and its theurgy. It is this last science which has caused the Neo-Platonists to be so misrepresented in our era of materialistic science. Theurgy being essentially the art of applying the divine powers of man to the subordination of the blind forces of nature, its votaries were first termed magicians—a corruption of the word “Magh,” signifying a wise, or learned man—and then derided. Sceptics of a century ago would have been as wide of the mark if they had laughed at the idea of a phonograph or telegraph. The ridiculed and the “infidels” of one generation generally become the wise men and saints of the next.

As regards the Divine Essence and the nature of the soul and spirit, modern Theosophy believes now as ancient Theosophy did. The popular Din of the Aryan nations was identical with the Iao of the Chaldæans and even with the Jupiter of the less learned and philosophical among the Romans; and it was just as identical with the Jahve of the Samaritans, the Tiu or “Tiusco” of the Northmen, the Duw of the Britons, and the Zeus of the Thracians. As to the Absolute


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Essence, the One and All—whether we accept the Greek Pythagorean, the Chaldæan Kabalistic, or the Aryan philosophy in regard to it, it will all lead to one and the same result. The Primeval Monad of the Pythagorean system, which retires into darkness and is itself Darkness for human intellect) was made the basis of all things; and we can find the idea in all its integrity in the philosophical systems of Leibnitz and Spinoza. Therefore, whether a Theosophist agrees with the Kabalah which, speaking of En-Soph propounds the query: “Who, then, can comprehend It, since It is formless and Non-existent?”; or, remembering that magnificent hymn from the Rig Veda (book x, hymn 129)—enquires:

Who knows from whence this great creation sprang?
Whether his will created or was mute.
He knows it—or perchance even He knows it not;

or, again, accepts the Vedântic conception of Brahma, who in the Upanishads is represented as “without life, without mind, pure,” unconscious, for—Brahma is “Absolute Consciousness”; or even, finally, whether, siding with the Svâbhâvikas of Nepaul, he maintains that nothing exists but “Svabhâva” (substance or nature) which exists by itself without any creator; any one of the above conceptions can lead but to pure and absolute Theosophy—that Theosophy which prompted such men as Hegel, Fichte and Spinoza to take up the labours of the old Grecian philosophers and speculate upon the One Substance, the Deity, the Divine All proceeding from the Divine Wisdom, incomprehensible, unknown and unnamed, by any ancient or modern religious philosophy, with the exception of Christianity and Mohammedanism. Every Theosophist, then, holding to a theory of the Deity “which has not revelation, but an inspiration of his own for its basis,” may accept any of the above definitions, or belong to any of these religions, and yet remain strictly within the boundaries of Theosophy. For the latter is belief in the Deity as the ALL, the source of all existence, the infinite that cannot be either comprehended or known, the universe alone revealing It, or, as some prefer it, Him, thus giving a sex to that, to anthropomorphize which is blasphemy True Theosophy shrinks from brutal materialization; it prefers believing that, from eternity retired within itself, the Spirit of the Deity neither wills nor creates; but that, from the infinite effulgency everywhere going forth from the Great Centre, that which produces all visible and invisible things is but a Ray containing in itself the generative and conceptive power,


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which, in its turn, produces that which the Greeks called Macrocosm, the Kabalists Tikkun or Adam Kadmon—the archetypal man—and the Aryans Purusha, the manifested Brahmâ, or the Divine Male. Theosophy believes also in the Anastasis or continued existence, and in transmigration (evolution) or a series of changes in the soul * which can be defended and explained on strict philosophical principles, and only by making a distinction between Paramâtmâ (transcendental, supreme soul) and Jivâtmâ (animal, or conscious soul) of the Vedântins.

To fully define Theosophy we must consider it under all its aspects. The interior world has not been hidden from all by impenetrable darkness. By that higher intuition acquired by Theosophia, or God-knowledge, which carried the mind from the world of form into that of formless spirit, man has been sometimes enabled in every age and every country to perceive things in the interior or invisible world. Hence the “Samadhi,” or Dhyân Yog Samâdhi, of the Hindu ascetics; the ‘‘ Daimonion—photisma,’’ or spiritual illumination of the Neo—Platonists; the “sidereal confabulation of soul,” of the Rosicrucians or fire-philosophers; and, even the ecstatic trance of mystics and of the modern mesmerists and spiritualists, are identical in nature, though various as to manifestation. The search after man’s diviner “self,” so often and so erroneously interpreted as individual communion with a personal God, was the object of every mystic, and belief in its possibility seems to have been coëval with the genesis of humanity, each people giving it another name. Thus Plato and Plotinus call “Noëtic work” that which the Vogin and the Shrotriya term Vidyâ.

By reflection, self-knowledge and intellectual discipline, the soul can be raised to the vision of eternal truth, goodness and beauty—that is, to the Vision of God— thus is the epopteia,

said the Greeks, and Porphyry adds:

To unite one’s soul to the Universal Soul requires but a perfectly’ pure mind. Through self-contemplation, perfect chastity, and purity of body, we may approach nearer to It, and receive, in that state, true knowledge and wonderful insight.

And Svami Dayânand Sarasvati, who has read neither Porphyry nor other Greek authors, but who is a thorough Vedic scholar, says in his

Veda Bhashya:,
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* In a series of at-tides entitled ‘‘The World’s Great Theosophists,’ ‘ we intend showing that from Pythagoras, who got his wisdom in India, down to our best known modern philosophers and Theosophists—David Hume, Shelley, and the Spiritists of France included—many believed end yet believe in metempsychosis, or reincarnation of the soul, however unelaborated the system of the Spiritists may be considered.


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To obtain Dikshâ (highest initiations) and Yoga, one has to practise according to the rules. The soul in human body can perform the greatest wonders by knowing the Universal Spirit (or God) and acquainting itself with the properties and qualities (occult) of all the things in the universe. A human being (a Dikshita or initiate) can thus acquire a power of seeing and hearing at great distances.

Finally, Alfred R. Wallace, F.R.S., a spiritualist and yet a confessedly great naturalist, says, with brave candour:

It is “spirit” that alone feels, and perceives, and thinks—that acquires knowledge, and reasons and aspires ... there not unfrequently occur individuals so constituted that the spirit can perceive independently of the corporeal organs of sense, or can, perhaps, wholly or partially, quit the body for a time and return to it again ... the spirit ... communicates with spirit easier than with matter.

We can now see how, after thousands of years have intervened between the age of the Gymnosophists * and our own highly civilized era, notwithstanding, or, perhaps, just because of such an enlightenment which pours its radiant light upon the psychological as well as upon the physical realms of nature, over twenty millions of people to-day believe, under a different form, in those same spiritual powers, that were believed in by the Yogins and the Pythagoreans, nearly 3,000 years ago. Thus, while the Aryan mystic claimed for himself the power of solving all the problems of life and death, when he had once obtained the power of acting independently of his body, through the Atmâ—”self or “soul”; and the old Greeks went in search of Atme—the Hidden One, or the God-Soul of man, with the symbolical mirror of the Thesmopnorian mysteries; so the Spiritualists of to-day believe in the faculty of the spirits, or the souls of the disembodied persons, to communicate visibly and tangibly with those they loved on earth. And all these, Aryan Yogins, Greek philosophers, and modern Spiritualists, affirm that possibility on the ground that the embodied soul and its never embodied spirit—the real self—are not separated from either the Universal Soul or other spirits by space, but merely by the differentiation of their qualities; as in the boundless expanse of the universe there can be no limitation. And that when this difference is once removed—according to the Greeks and Aryans by abstract contemplation, producing the temporary liberation of the imprisoned soul ; and according to Spiritualists, through mediumship—such a union between embodied and disembodied spirits becomes possible. Thus was it that Patanjali’s Yogins, and, following in their steps,
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* The reality of the Yoga-power was affirmed by many Greek and Roman writers, who call the Yogins Indian Gymnosophists; by Strabo, Lucan, Plutarch, Cicero, Pliny, etc.


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Plotinus, Porphyry and other Neo-Platonists, maintained that in their hours of ecstasy they had been united to, or rather become as one with, God, several times during the course of their lives. This idea, erroneous as it may seem in its application to the Universal Spirit, was, and is, claimed by too many great philosophers to be put aside as entirely chimerical. In the case of the Theodidaktoi, the only controvertible point, the dark spot on this philosophy of extreme mysticism, was its claim to include that which is simply ecstatic illumination under the head of sensuous perception. In the case of the Yogins, who maintained their ability to see Ishvara “face to face,” this claim was successfully overthrown by the stern logic of Kapila. As to the similar assumption made for their Greek followers, for a long array of Christian ecstatics, and, finally, for the last two claimants to “God seeing” within these last hundred years Böhme and Swedenborg—this pretension would and should have been philosophically and logically questioned, if a few of our great men of science who are Spiritualists had had more interest in the philosophy than in the mere phenomenalism of Spiritualism.

The Alexandrian Theosophists were divided into neophytes, initiates and masters, or Hierophants; and their rules were copied from the ancient Mysteries of Orpheus, who, according to Herodotus, brought them from India. Ammonius obliged his disciples under oath not to divulge his higher doctrines, except to those who were proved thoroughly worthy and initiated, and who had learned to regard the gods, the angels and the demons of other peoples, according to the esoteric Hyponoia, or under-meaning. Epicurus observes:

The Gods exist, but they are not what the hoi polloi, the uneducated multitude, suppose them to be. He is not an atheist who denies the existence of the Gods whom the multitude worship, but he is such who fastens on these gods the opinions of the multitude.

In his turn, Aristotle declares that of the Divine Essence pervading the whole world of nature, what are styled the Gods are simply the first principles.

Plotinus, the pupil of the ‘‘God-taught” Ammonius, tells us that the secret gnosis or the knowledge of Theosophy, has three degrees— opinion, science and illumination.

The means or instrument of the first is sense, or perception; of the second, dialectics; of the third, intuition. To the last, reason is subordinate; it is absolute knowledge, founded on the identification of the mind with the object known.

Theosophy is the exact science of psychology, so to say; it stands in


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relation to natural, uncultivated mediumship, as the knowledge of a Tyndall stands to that of a school-boy in physics. It develops in man a direct beholding; that which Schelling denominates “a realization of the identity of subject and object in the individual”; so that under the influence and knowledge of hyponoia man thinks divine thoughts, views all things as they really are, and, finally, “becomes recipient of the Soul of the World,” to use one of the finest expressions of Emerson. “I, the imperfect, adore my own perfect”—he says in his superb Essay on The Over Besides this psychological, or soul-state, Theosophy cultivated every branch of sciences and arts. It was thoroughly familiar with what is now commonly known as mesmerism. Practical theurgy or “ceremonial magic,” so often resorted to in their exorcisms by the Roman Catholic clergy, was discarded by the Theosophists. It is but Jamblichus alone who, transcending the other eclectics, added to Theosophy the doctrine of Theurgy. When ignorant of the true meaning of the esoteric divine symbols of nature, man is apt to miscalculate the powers of his soul, and, instead of communing spiritually and mentally with the higher, celestial beings, the good spirits (the gods of the theurgists of the Platonic school), he will unconsciously call forth the evil, dark powers which lurk around humanity—the undying, grim creations of human crimes and vices—and thus fall from Theurgia (white magic) into goetia (or black magic, sorcery). Yet, neither white nor black magic are what popular superstition under stands by the terms. The possibility of “raising a spirit,” according to the key of Solomon, is the height of superstition and ignorance. Purity of deed and thought can alone raise us to an intercourse “with the gods,” and attain for us the goal we desire. Alchemy, believed by so many to have been a spiritual philosophy as well as a physical science, belonged to the teachings of the Theosophical school.

It is a noticeable fact that neither Zoroaster, Buddha, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Confucius, Socrates, nor Ammonius Saccas, committed anything to writing. The reason for it is obvious. Theosophy is a double-edged weapon and unfit for the ignorant or the selfish. Like every ancient philosophy, it has its votaries among the moderns; but, until late in our own days, its disciples were few in number, and of the most various sects and opinions.

Entirely speculative, and founding no schools, they have still exercised a silent influence upon philosophy; and no doubt, when the time arrives, many ideas thus silently propounded may yet give new directions to human thought,


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remarks Mr. Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie, IX° ... himself a mystic and a Theosophist, in his large and valuable work, The Royal Masonic Cyclopædia ( articles “Theosophical Society of New York” and “Theosophy,” p. 73I ).* ” Since the days of the fire-philosophers, they had never formed themselves into societies, for, tracked like wild beasts by the Christian clergy, to be known as a Theosophist often amounted, hardly a century ago, to a death-warrant. The statistics show that, during a period of 150 years, no less than 90,000 men and women were burned in Europe for alleged witchcraft. In Great Britain only, from AD. 1640 to 1660, but twenty years, 3,000 persons were put to death for compact with the “Devil.” It was but late in the present century—in 1875 some progressed mystics and Spiritualists, unsatisfied with the theories and explanations of Spiritualism, started by its votaries, and finding that they were far from covering the whole ground of the wide range of phenomena, formed at New York, America, an association which is now widely known as the Theosophical Society. And now, having explained what is Theosophy, we will, in a separate article, explain what is the nature of our Society, which is also called the ‘‘Universal Brotherhood of Humanity.”
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* The Royal Masonic Cyclopædia of History, Rites, Symbolism and Biography. Edited bv Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie, IXº (Cryptonymus), Hon. Member of the canongate Kilwinning Lodge, No. 2, Scotland.. New York: J. W. Bouton, 706, Broadway. 1877.

WHAT ARE THE THEOSOPHISTS?
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ARE they what they claim to be—students of natural law, of ancient and modern philosophy, and even of exact science? Are they Deists, Atheists, Socialists, Materialists, or Idealists; or are they but a schism of modern Spiritualism—mere visionaries? Are they entitled to any consideration, as capable of discussing philosophy and promoting real science; or should they be treated with the compassionate toleration which one gives to “harmless enthusiasts”? The Theosophical Society has been variously charged with a belief in “miracles” and “miracle working”; with a secret political object—like the Carbonari; with being spies of an autocratic Czar; with preaching socialistic and nihilistic doctrines; and, mirabile dietu, with having a covert understanding with the French Jesuits, to disrupt modern Spiritualism for a pecuniary consideration! With equal violence they have been denounced as dreamers, by the American Positivists; as fetish-worshippers, by some of the New York press; as revivalists of “mouldy superstitions,” by the Spiritualists ; as infidel emissaries of Satan, by the Christian Church; as the very types of “gobe-mouche,” by Prof. W. B. Carpenter, F.R.S.; and, finally, and most absurdly, some Hindu opponents, with a view to lessening their influence, have flatly charged them with the employment of demons to perform certain phenomena. Out of all this pother of opinions, one fact stands conspicuous—the Society, its members, and their views, are deemed of enough importance to be discussed and denounced: Men slander only those whom they hate—or fear.

But, if the Society has had its enemies and traducers, it has also had its friends and advocates. For every word of censure, there has been a word of praise. Beginning with a party of about a dozen earnest men and women, a month later its numbers had so increased as to necessitate the hiring of a public hall for its meetings; within two years it had working branches in European countries. Still later, it found itself in alliance with the Indian Arya Samâj, headed by. the


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learned Pandit Dayânand Sarasvati Svâmi, and the Ceylonese Buddhists, under the erudite H. Sumangala, High Priest of Adam’s Peak and President of the Vidyodaya College, Colombo.

He who would seriously attempt to fathom the psychological sciences, must come to the sacred land of ancient Aryâvartta. None is older than she in esoteric wisdom and civilization, however fallen may be her poor shadow—modern India. Holding this country, as we do, for the fruitful hot-bed whence proceeded all subsequent philosophical systems, to this source of all psychology and philosophy a portion of our Society has come to learn its ancient wisdom and ask for the impartation of its weird secrets. Philology has made too much progress to require at this late day a demonstration of this fact of the primogenitive nationality of Aryâvartta. The unproved and prejudiced hypothesis of modern chronology is not worthy of a moment’s thought, and it will vanish in time like so many other unproved hypotheses. The line of philosophical heredity, from Kapila through Epicurus to James Mill; from Patanjali through Plotinus to Jacob Böhme, can be traced like the course of a river through a landscape. One of the objects of the Society’s organization was to examine the too transcendent views of the Spiritualists in regard to the powers of disembodied spirits; and, having told them what, in our opinion at least, a portion of their phenomena are not, it will become incumbent upon us now to show what the are. So apparent is it that it is in the East, and especially in India, that the key to the alleged “supernatural” phenomena of the Spiritualists must be sought, that it has recently been conceded in the Allahabad Pioneer (Aug. 11, 1879), an Anglo-Indian daily journal .which has not the reputation of saying what it does not mean. Blaming the men of science who, “intent upon physical discovery, for some generations have been too prone to neglect super-physical investigation,” it mentions “the new wave of doubt” (Spiritualism) which has “latterly disturbed this conviction.” To a large number of persons, including many of high culture and intelligence, it adds, “the super natural has again asserted itself as a fit subject of enquiry and research. And there are plausible hypotheses in favour of the idea that among the ‘sages’ of the East . . there may be found in a higher degree than among the more modernized inhabitants of the West traces of those personal peculiarities, whatever they may be, which are required as a Condition precedent to the occurrence of supernatural phenomena.” And then, unaware that the cause he pleads is one of the chief aims

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and objects of our Society, the editorial writer remarks that it is “the only direction in which, it seems to us, the efforts of the Theosophists in India might possibly be useful. The leading members of the Theosophical Society in India are known to be very advanced students of occult phenomena already, and we cannot but hope that their professions of interest in Oriental philosophy . . . may cover a reserved intention of carrying out explorations of the kind we indicate.”

While, as observed, one of our objects, it yet is but one of many; the most important of which is to revive the work of Ammonius Saccas, and make various nations remember that they are the children “of one mother.” As to the transcendental side of the ancient Theosophy, it is also high time that the Theosophical Society should explain. With how much, then, of this nature-searching, God-seeking science of the ancient Aryan and Greek mystics, and of the powers of modern spiritual mediumship, does the Society agree? Our answer is: With it all. But if asked what it believes in, the reply will be: “As a body— nothing.” The Society, as a body, has no creed, as creeds are but the shells around spiritual knowledge; and Theosophy in its fruition is spiritual knowledge itself—the very essence of philosophical and theistic enquiry. Visible representative of Universal Theosophy, it can be no more sectarian than a Geographical Society, which represents universal geographical exploration without caring whether the explorers be of one creed or another. The religion of the Society is an algebraical equation, in which so long as the sign of equality (=) is not omitted, each member is allowed to substitute quantities of his own, which better accord with climatic and other exigencies of his native land, with the idiosyncrasies of his people, or even with his own. Having no accepted creed, our Society is very ready to give and take, to learn and teach, by practical experimentation, as opposed to mere passive and credulous acceptance of enforced dogma. It is willing to accept every result claimed by any of the foregoing schools or systems, that can be logically and experimentally demonstrated. Conversely, it can take nothing on mere faith, no matter by whom the demand may be made.

But when we come to consider ourselves individually, it is quite another thing. The Society’s members represent the most varied nationalities and races, and were born and educated in the most dissimilar creeds and social conditions. Some of them believe in one thing, others in another. Some incline towards the ancient magic, or

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secret wisdom that was taught in the sanctuaries, which was the very opposite of supernaturalism or diabolism; others in modern spiritual ism, or intercourse with the spirits of the dead; still others in mesmerism or animal magnetism, or only an occult dynamic force in nature. A certain number have scarcely yet acquired any definite belief, but are in a state of attentive expectancy; and there are even those who call themselves materialists, in a certain sense. Of atheists and bigoted sectarians of any religion, there are none in the Society; for the very fact of a man’s joining it proves that he is in search of the final truth as to the ultimate essence of things. If there be such a thing as a speculative atheist, which philosophers may deny, he would have to reject both cause and effect, whether in this world of matter, or in that of spirit. There may be members who, like the poet Shelley, have let their imagination soar from cause to prior cause adinfinitum, as each in its turn became logically transformed into a result necessitating a prior cause, until they have thinned the Eternal into a mere mist. But even they are not atheist in the speculative sense, whether they identify the material forces of the universe with the functions with which the theists endow their God, or otherwise; for once that they cannot free themselves from the conception of the abstract ideal of power, cause, necessity, and effect, they can be considered as atheists only in respect to a personal God, and not to the Universal Soul of the pantheist. On the other hand the bigoted sectarian, fenced in, as he is, with a creed upon every paling of which is written the warning ‘‘No Thorough fare,” can neither come out of ins enclosure to join the Theosophical Society, nor, if he could, has it room for one whose very religion for bids examination. The very root idea of the Society is free and fearless investigation.

As a body, the Theosophical Society holds that all original thinkers and investigators of the hidden side of nature, whether materialists— those who find in matter “the promise and potency of all terrestrial life,” or Spiritualists—that is. those who discover in spirit the source of all energy and of matter as well—were and are, properly, Theosophists. For to be one, one need not necessarily recognize the existence of any special God or Deity. One need but worship the spirit of living nature, and try to identify oneself with it. To revere that Presence, the invisible Cause, which is yet ever manifesting itself in its incessant results; the intangible, omnipotent, and omnipresent Proteus: indivisible in its Essence, and eluding form, yet appearing under all and every

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form; who is here and there, and everywhere and nowhere; is ALL, and NOTHING; ubiquitous yet one; the Essence filling, binding, bound ing, containing everything; contained in all. It will, we think, be seen now, that whether classed as theists, pantheists or atheists, such men are near kinsmen to the rest. Be lie what lie may, once that a student abandons the old and trodden highway of routine, and enters upon the solitary path of independent thought—Godward—he is a Theosophist; an original thinker, a seeker after the eternal truth with “an inspiration of his own” to solve the universal problems.

With every man that is earnestly searching in his own way after a knowledge of the Divine Principle, of man’s relations to it, and nature’s manifestations of it, Theosophy is allied. It is likewise the ally of honest science, as distinguished from much that passes for exact, physical science, so long as the latter does not poach on the domains of psychology and metaphysics.

And it is also the ally of every honest religion—to wit, a religion willing to be judged by the same tests as it applies to the others. Those books, which contain the most self-evident truth, are to it inspired (not revealed). But all books it regards, on account of the human element contained in them, as inferior to the Book of Nature; to read which and comprehend it correctly, the innate powers of the soul must be highly developed. Ideal laws can be perceived by the intuitive faculty alone; they are beyond the domain of argument and dialectics, and no one can understand or rightly appreciate them through the explanations of another mind, even though this mind be claiming a direct revelation. And as this Society, which allows the widest sweep in the realms of the pure ideal, is no less firm in the sphere of facts, its deference to modern science and its just representatives is sincere. Despite all their lack of a higher spiritual intuition, the world’s debt to the representatives of modern physical science is immense; hence, the Society endorses heartily the noble and indignant protest of that gifted and eloquent preacher, the Rev. 0. B. Frothingham, against those who try to undervalue the services of our great naturalists. “Talk of Science as being irreligious, atheistic,” he exclaimed in a recent lecture, delivered at New York, “Science is creating a new idea of God. It is due to Science that we have any conception at all of a living God. If we do not become atheists one of these days under the maddening effect of Protestantism, it will be due to Science, because it is disabusing us of hideous illusions that tease and embar-


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rass us, and putting us in the way of knowing how to reason about the things we see....”

And it is also due to the unremitting labours of such Orientalists as Sir W. Jones, Max Muller, Burnouf, Colebrooke, Haug, St. Hilaire, and so many others, that the Society, as a body, feels equal respect and veneration for Vedic, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, and other old religions of the world; and a like brotherly feeling toward its Hindu Sinhalese, Pârsi, Jain, Hebrew and Christian members as individual students of “self,” of nature, and of the divine in nature.

Born in the United States of America, the Society was constituted on the model of its Mother Land. The latter, omitting the name of God from its constitution lest it should afford a pretext one day to make a state religion, gives absolute equality to all religions in its laws. All support and each is in turn protected by the State. The Society, modelled upon this constitution, may fairly be termed a “Republic of Conscience.”

We have now, we think, made clear why our members, as individuals, are free to stay outside or inside any creed they please, provided they do not pretend that none hut themselves shall enjoy the privilege of conscience, and try to force their opinions upon the others. In this respect the rules of the Society are very strict. It tries to act upon the wisdom of the old Buddhistic axiom, “Honour thine own faith, and do not slander that of others”; echoed back in our present century, in the “Declaration of Principles” of the Brahma Samâj, which so nobly states that “no sect shall be vilified, ridiculed, or hated.” In Section VI of the Revised Rules of the Theosophical Society, recently adopted in General Council, at Bombay, is this mandate:

It is not lawful for any officer of the Parent Society to express, by word or act, any hostility to, or preference for, any one section (sectarian division, or group within the Society) more than another. All must be regarded and treated as equally the objects of the Society’s solicitude and exertions. All have an equal right to have the essential features of their religious belief laid before the tribunal of an impartial world.

In their individual capacity, members may, when attacked, occasionally break this rule, but, nevertheless, as officers, they are restrained, and the rule is strictly enforced during the meetings. For above all human sects stands Theosophy in its abstract sense; Theosophy, which is too wide for any of them to contain, but which easily contains them.

In conclusion, we may state that, broader and far more universal in its views than any existing mere scientific Society, it has plus science


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its belief in every possibility, and determined will to penetrate into those unknown spiritual regions which exact science pretends that its votaries have no business to explore. And, it has one quality more than any religion, in that it makes no difference between Gentile, Jew, or Christian. It is in this spirit that the Society has been established upon the footing of a Universal Brotherhood.

Unconcerned about politics, and all political organizations, the Society cares but little about the outward human management of the material world. The whole of its aspirations are directed towards the occult truths of the visible and invisible worlds. Whether the physical man be under the rule of an empire or a republic, concerns only the man of matter. His body may be enslaved; as to his soul, he has the right to give to his rulers the proud answer of Socrates to his judges. They have no sway over the inner man.

Such, then, is the Theosophical Society, and such its principles, its multifarious aims, and its objects. Need we wonder at the past misconceptions of the general public, and the easy hold the enemy has been able to find to lower it in the public estimation. The true student has ever been a recluse, a man of silence and meditation. With the busy world his habits and tastes are so little in common that, while he is studying, his enemies and slanderers have undisturbed opportunities. But time cures all, and lies are but ephemera. Truth alone is eternal.

About a few of the Fellows of the Society who have made great scientific discoveries, and some others to whom the psychologist and the biologist are indebted for the new light thrown upon the darker problems of the inner man, we will speak later on. Our object now was but to prove to the reader that Theosophy is neither “a new-fangled doctrine,” a political cabal, nor one of those societies of enthusiasts which are born to-day but to die to-morrow. That not all of its members can think alike, is proved by the Society being organized in two great divisions—the Eastern and the Western—and the latter being divided into numerous sections, according to races and religious views. One man’s thought, infinitely various as are its manifestations, is not all-embracing. Denied ubiquity, it must necessarily speculate but in one direction; and once transcending the boundaries of exact human knowledge, it has to err and wander, for the ramifications of the one central and absolute Truth are infinite. Hence, we occasionally find even the greater philosophers losing themselves in the labyrinths of speculation, thereby provoking the criticism of posterity. But as


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all work for one and the same object, namely the disenthralment of human thought, the elimination of superstitions, and the discovery of truth, all are equally welcome. The attainment of these objects, all agree, can best be secured by convincing the reason and warming the enthusiasm of the generation of fresh young minds that are just ripening into maturity, and making ready to take the place of their prejudiced and conservative fathers. And, as each—the great ones as well as small—have trodden the royal road to knowledge, we listen to all, and take both small and great into our fellowship. For no honest searcher comes back empty-handed, and even he who has enjoyed the least share of popular favour can lay at least his mite upon the one altar of Truth.

ANTIQUITY OF THE VEDAS
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[Vol. I. No. 1, October, 1879.]

A JOURNAL interested like The Thesophist in the explorations of arch and archaic religions, as well as the study of the occult in nature, has to be doubly prudent and discreet. To bring the two conflicting elements—exact science and metaphysics—into direct contact, might create as great a disturbance as to throw a piece of potassium into a basin of water. The very fact that we are predestined and pledged to prove that some of the wisest of Western scholars have been misled by the dead letter of appearances, and that they are unable to discover the hidden spirit in the relics of old, places us under the ban from the first. With those sciolists who are neither broad enough nor sufficiently modest to allow their decisions to be reviewed, we are necessarily in antagonism. Therefore it is essential that our position in relation to certain scientific hypotheses, perhaps tentative and only sanctioned for want of better ones, should be clearly defined at the outset.

An infinitude of study has been bestowed by the arch and the Orientalists upon the question of chronology, especially in regard to comparative theology. So far their affirmations as to the relative antiquity of the great religions of the pre-Christian era are little more than plausible hypotheses. How far back the national and religious Vedic period, so-called, extends, “it is impossible to tell,” confesses Prof. Max Muller; nevertheless he traces it “to a period anterior to 1000 B.C.,” and brings us to “1100 or 1200 B.C., as the earliest time when we may suppose the collection of the Vedic hymns to have been finished.” Nor do any other of our leading scholars claim to have finally settled the vexed question, especially delicate as it is in its bearing upon the chronology of the book of Genesis. Christianity, the direct outflow of Judaism and in most cases the state religion of their respective countries, has unfortunately stood in their way. Hence scarcely two scholars agree; and each assigns a different date to the


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Vedas and the Mosaic books, taking care in every case to give the latter the benefit of the doubt. Even that leader of the leaders in philological and chronological questions, Prof. Muller, hardly twenty years ago allowed himself a prudent margin by stating that it will be difficult to settle “whether the Veda ‘is the oldest of books,’ and whether some of the portions of the Old Testament may not be traced back to the same or even an earlier date than the oldest hymns of the Veda.” The Theosophist is, therefore, quite warranted in either adopting or rejecting as it pleases the so-called authoritative chronology of science. Do we err, then, in confessing that we rather incline to accept the chronology of that renowned Vedic scholar, Svâmi Dayânand Sarasvati, who unquestionably knows what he is talking about, has the four Vedas by heart, is perfectly familiar with all Sanskrit literature, has no such scruples as the Western Orientalists in regard to public feelings, nor desire to humour the superstitious notions of the majority, nor has any object to gain in suppressing facts. We are only too conscious of the risk in withholding our adulation from scientific authorities. Yet, with the common temerity of the heterodox, we must take our course, even though, like the Tarpeia of old, we be smothered under a heap of shields, a shower of learned quotations from those “authorities.” We are far from feeling ready to adopt the absurd chronology of a Berosus or even Syncellus, though in truth they appear absurd only in the light of our preconceptions. But between the extreme claims of the Brâhmans and the ridiculously short periods conceded by our Orientalists for the development and full growth of that gigantic literature of the ante-Mahabharatan period, there ought to be a just mean. While Svami Dayânand Sarasvati asserts that: “The Vedas have now ceased to be objects of study for nearly 5,000 years,” and places the first appearance of the four Vedas at an immense antiquity; Prof. Muller, assigning for the composition of even the earliest among the Brâhmanas, the years from about 1000 to 800 B.C., hardly dares, as we have seen, to place the collection and the original composition of the Sanhitâ, of Rig Vedic hymns, earlier than 1200 to 1500 before our era! * Whom ought we to believe, and which of the two is the better informed? Cannot this gap of several thousand years be closed, or would it be equally difficult for either of the two cited authorities to give data which would be regarded by science as thoroughly convincing?
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* Chips from a German Workshop, Lecture on the Vedas, p.II


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It is as easy to reach a false conclusion by the modern inductive method as to assume false premises from which to make deductions. Doubtless Prof. Max Muller has good reasons for arriving at his chronological conclusions. But so has Dayânand Sarasvati Pandit. The gradual modifications, development, and growth of the Sanskrit language are sure guides enough for an expert philologist. But that there is a possibility of his having been led into error would seem to suggest itself upon considering a certain argument brought forward by Svâmi Dayânand. Our respected friend and teacher maintains that both Prof. Muller and Dr. Wilson have been solely guided in their researches and conclusion by the inaccurate and untrustworthy commentaries of Sâyana, Mahidara and Uvata; commentaries which differ diametrically from those of a far earlier period as used by himself in connection with his great work, the Veda Bháshya. A cry was raised at the outset of this publication that Svâmi’s commentary is calculated to refute Sâyana and the English interpreters. Pandit Dayânand very justly remarks:

For this I cannot be blamed; if Sâyana has erred and the English interpreters have chosen to take him as their guide, the delusion cannot be long maintained. Truth alone can stand, and falsehood must fall.*

And if, as he claims, his Veda Bháshya is entirely founded on the old commentaries of the ante-Mahâbhâratan period to which the Western scholars have had no access, then, since his were the surest guides of the two classes, we cannot hesitate to follow him rather than the best of our European Orientalists.

But, apart from such primâ facie evidence, we would respectfully request Prof. Max Muller to solve us a riddle. Propounded by himself; it has puzzled us for over twenty years, and pertains as much to simple logic as to the chronology in question. Clear and undeviating, like the Rhône through the Geneva lake, the idea runs through the course of his lectures, from the first volume of Chips down to his last discourse. We will try to explain. All who have followed his lectures as attentively as ourselves will remember that Prof. Max Muller attributes the wealth of myths, symbols and religious allegories in the Vedic hymns, as in Grecian mythology, to the early worship of nature by man. To quote his words:

In the hymns of the Veda, we see man left to himself to solve the riddle of this world. . . . He is awakened from darkness and slumber by the light of the sun, and him whom his eyes cannot behold, and who seems to grant him the daily
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* Answer to the Objections to the Veda Bhashya.


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pittance of his existence he calls “his life, his breath, his brilliant Lord and Protector.” He gives names to all the powers of nature, and after he has called the fire “Agni,’’ the sunlight “Indra,” the storms ‘‘Maruts,” and the dawn “Ushas,” they all seem to grow naturally into beings like himself, nay, greater than himself.*

This definition of the mental state of primitive man, in the days of the very infancy of humanity, and when hardly out of its cradle, is— perfect. The period to which he attributes these effusions of an infantile mind is the Vedic period, and the time which separates us from it is, as claimed above, 3,000 years. So much impressed seems the great philologist with this idea of the mental feebleness of mankind at the time when these hymns were composed by the most venerable Rishis, that in his Introduction to the Science of Religion (p. 278) we find the Professor saying:

Do you still wonder at polytheism or at mythology? Why, they are inevitable. They are, if you like, a parler enfantin of religion. But the world has its child hood, and when it was a child it spoke as a child [nota bane, 3,000 years ago], it understood as a child, it thought as a child the fault rests with us if we insist on taking the language of children for the language of men.......
The language of antiquity is the language of childhood . . . The parler enfantin in religion is not extinct . . . as, for instance, the religion of
India.

Having read thus far we pause and think. At the very close of this able explanation we meet with a tremendous difficulty, the idea of which must have never occurred to the able advocate of the ancient faiths. To one familiar with the writings and ideas of this Oriental scholar, it would seem the height of absurdity to suspect him of accepting the biblical chronology of 6,ooo years since the appearance of the first man upon earth as the basis of his calculations. And yet the recognition of such chronology is inevitable if we have to accept Prof. Muller’s reasons at all; for here we run against a purely arithmetical and mathematical obstacle, a gigantic miscalculation of proportion.

No one can deny that the growth and development of mankind— mental as well as physical—must be analogically measured by the growth and development of man. An anthropologist, if he cares to go beyond the simple consideration of the relations of man to other members of the animal kingdom, has to be in a certain way a physiologist as well as an anatomist; for, as much as ethnology, his is a progressive science, which can be well treated but by those who are able to follow
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* Chips from a German Workshop, vol. i. p. 68.


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up retrospectively the regular unfolding of human faculties and powers, assigning to each a certain period of life. Thus no one would regard a skull in which the wisdom-tooth, so-called, should be apparent, as the skull of an infant. Now, according to geology, recent researches, Prof. W. Draper tells us:

Give good reasons to believe that under low and base grades the existence of man can be traced back into the tertiary times. In the old glacial drift of Scotland the relics of man are found along with those of the fossil elephant.

Now, the best calculations, so far, assign a period of 240,000 years since the beginning of the last glacial period. Making a proportion between 240,000 years—the least age we can accord to the human race—and the twenty-four years of a man’s life, we find that 3,000 years ago, or the period of the composition of the Vedic hymns, mankind would be just twenty-one, the legal age of majority, and certainly a period at which man ceases using, if he ever will, the “parler enfantin,” or childish lisping. But, according to the views of the lecturer, it follows that man was, 3,000 years ago, at twenty-one, a foolish and undeveloped—though a very promising—infant, and at twenty-four has become the brilliant, acute, learned, highly analytical and philosophical man of the nineteenth century. Or, still keeping our equation in view, in other words, the Professor might as well say that an individual who was a nursing baby at 12 noon, on a certain day, would at 12.20 p.m. on the same day have become an adult, speaking high wisdom instead of his ‘‘ parler enfantin

It really seems the duty of the eminent Sankritist and Lecturer on Comparative Theology to get out of this dilemma. Either the Rig Veda. hymns were composed but 3,000 years ago, and, therefore cannot be expressed in the “language of childhood”—man having lived in the glacial period—but the generation which composed them must have been composed of adults, presumably as philosophical and scientific in the knowledge of their day as we are in our own; or we have to ascribe to them an immense antiquity in order to carry them back to the days of man’s mental infancy. And in this latter case, Prof. Max Muller will have to withdraw a previous remark, expressing the doubt

Whether some of the portions of the Old Testament may not be traced back to the same or even an earlier date than the oldest hymns of the Vedas.

PERSIAN ZOROASTRIANISM AND

RUSSIAN VANDALISM
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[Vol. I. No. I, October, 1879.]

Few persons are capable of appreciating the truly beautiful and æsthetic; fewer still of revering those monumental relics of bygone ages, which prove that even in the remotest epochs mankind worshipped a Supreme Power, and people were moved to express their abstract conceptions in works which should defy the ravages of time. The Vandals—whether Slavic Wends, or some barbarous nation of Germanic race—came at all events from the North. A recent occurrence is calculated to make us regret that Justinian did not destroy them all; for it appears that there are still left in the North worthy scions of those terrible destroyers of monuments of arts and sciences, in the persons of certain Russian merchants who have just perpetrated an act of inexcusable Vandalism. According to the late Russian papers, the Moscow arch-millionaire, Kokoref, with his Tiflis partner the Armenian Crœsus Mirzoef is desecrating and about to totally destroy the oldest relic in the world of Zoroastrianism—
the “Attesh-Gag” of Baku.

Few foreigners, and perhaps as few Russians, know anything of this venerable sanctuary of the fire-worshippers beside the Caspian Sea. About twenty versts from the small town of Baku in the valley of Apsheron in Russian Georgia, and among the barren, desolated steppes of the shores of the Caspian, there stands—alas! rather stood, but a few months ago—a strange structure, something between a mediæval cathedral and a fortified castle. It was built in unknown ages, and by builders as unknown. Over an area of so more than a square mile, a tract known as the Fiery Field, upon which the structure stands, if one but digs from two to three inches into the sandy earth, and applies a lighted match, a jet of fire will stream up, as if from a spout.* The “Guebre Temple,” as the building is sometimes termed,
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* A bluish flame is seen to arise there, but this fire does not consume, “and if a person finds him self in the middle of it, he is not sensible of any warmth.”—See Kinneir’s Persia, p. 35.


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is carved out of one solid rock. It is an enormous square enclosed by crenelated walls, and at the centre of the square, a high tower, also rectangular, resting upon four gigantic pillars. The latter were pierced vertically down to the bed-rock and the cavities were continued up to the battlements where they opened out into the atmosphere; thus forming continuous tubes through which the inflammable gas stored up in the heart of the mother rock was conducted to the top of the tower. This tower has been for centuries a shrine of the fire-worshippers, and bears the symbolical representation of the trident—called tirsut. All around the interior face of the external wall are excavated the cells, about twenty in number, which served as habitations for past generations of Zoroastrian recluses. Under the supervision of a High Mobed, here, in the silence of their isolated cloisters, they studied the Ayesta, the Vendidad the Yashna—especially the latter, it seems, as the rocky walls of the cells are inscribed with a greater number of quotations from the sacred songs. Under the tower-altar three huge bells were hung. A legend says that they were miraculously produced by a holy traveller, in the tenth century, during the Mussulman persecution, to warn the faithful of the approach of the enemy. But a few weeks ago the tall tower-altar was yet ablaze with the same flame that local tradition affirms had been kindled thirty centuries ago. At the horizontal orifices in the four hollow pillars burned four perpetual fires, fed uninterruptedly from the inexhaustible subterranean reservoir. From every merlon on the walls, as well as from every embrasure, flashed forth a radiant light, like so many tongues of fire; and even the large porch overhanging the main entrance was encircled by a garland of fiery stars, the lambent lights shooting forth from smaller and narrower orifices. It was amid these impressive surroundings that the Guebre recluses used to send up their daily prayers, meeting under the open tower-altar; every face reverentially turned toward the setting sun as they united their voices in a parting evening hymn. And as the luminary—the “Eye of Ahura-mazda”—sank lower and lower down the horizon, their voices grew lower and softer, until the chant sounded like a plaintive and subdued murmur. . . . A last flash— and the sun is gone; and as darkness follows daylight almost suddenly in these regions, the departure of the Deity’s symbol was the signal for a general illumination, unrivalled even by the greatest fireworks at regal festivals. The whole field seemed nightly like one blazing prairie. .


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Till about 1840, Attesh-Gag was the chief rendezvous for all the fire-worshippers of Persia. Thousands of pilgrims came and went; for no true Guebre could die happy unless he had performed the sacred pilgrimage at least once during his lifetime. A traveller—Koch—who visited the cloister about that time, found in it but five Zoroastrians, with their pupils. In 1878, about fourteen months ago, a lady of Tiflis, who visited the Attesh-Gag, mentioned in a private letter that she found there but one solitary hermit, who emerges from his cell but to meet the rising and salute the departing sun. And now, hardly a year later, we find in the papers that Messrs. Kokoref and Co. are busy erecting on the Fiery Field enormous buildings for the refining of petroleum! All the cells but the one occupied by the poor old hermit, half ruined and dirty beyond expression, are inhabited by the firm’s workmen; the altar over which blazed the sacred flame is now piled high with rubbish, mortar and mud, and the flame itself turned off in another direction. The bells are now, during the periodical visits of a Russian priest, taken down and suspended in the porch of the superintendent’s house; heathen relics being as usual used—though abused—by the religion which supplants the previous worship. And all looks like the abomination of desolation It is a matter of surprise to me,” writes a Baku correspondent in the St. Petersburg Viedomosti, who was the first to send the unwelcome news, “that the trident, the sacred tirsut itself, has not as yet been put to some appropriate use in the new firm’s kitchen it then so absolutely necessary that the millionaire Kokoref should desecrate the Zoroastrian cloister, which occupies such a trifling compound in comparison to the space allotted to his manufactories and stores? And shall such a remarkable relic of antiquity be sacrificed to commercial greediness which can after all neither lose nor gain one single rouble by destroying it?’’

It must, apparently, since Messrs. Kokoref and Co. have rented the whole field from the Government, which seems to feel quite indifferent to this idiotic and useless Vandalism. It is now more than twenty years since I visited Attesh-Gag for the last time. In those days besides a small group of recluses, it had the visits of many pilgrims. And since it is more than likely that ten years hence people will hear no more of it, I may give a few more details of its history. Our Pârsi friends will, I am sure, feel an interest in a few legends gathered by me on the spot.


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A veil seems to be drawn over the origin of Attesh-Gag. Historical data are scarce and contradictory. With the exception of some old Armenian chronicles which mention it incidentally as having existed before Christianity was brought into the country by St. Nina during the third century * there is no mention of it anywhere else, so far as I know.

Tradition informs us—how far correctly is not for me to decide— that long before Zarathushtra, the people, who now are called in contempt by the Mussulmans and Christians “Guebres,” and who term themselves “Behedin” (followers of the true faith) recognized Mithra, the Mediator, as their sole and highest God—who included within himself all the good as well as the bad Gods. Mithra representing the two natures of Ormazd and Ahriman combined, the people feared him, whereas they would have had no need of fearing, but only of loving and reverencing him as Ahura-Mazda, were Mithra without the Ahriman element.
—————

* Though St. Nina appeared in Georgia in the third, it is not before the fifth century that the idolatrous Gronzines were converted to christianity by the thirteen Syrian Fathers. They came under the leadership of both St. Antony and St. John of Zedadzene—so called, because he is alleged to have travelled to the Caucasian regions on purpose to fight and conquer the chief idol Zeda! And thus while—as incontrovertible proof of the existence of both—the opulent tresses of the black hair of St. Nina are preserved to this day as relics, in Zion cathedral at Tiflis—the thaumaturgic John has immortalized his name still more. Zeda, who was the Baal of Trans-Caucasus, had children sacrificed to him, as the legend tells us, on the top of the zedadzene mount, about eighteen versts from Tiflis. It is there that the saint defied the idol—or rather Satan under the guise of a stone statue—to single combat, and miraculously conquered him, i.e., threw down and trampled upon the idol. Dot he did not stop there in the exhibition of his powers. The mountain peak is of immense height, and being only a barren rock at its top, spring water is nowhere to be found on its summit. But in commemoration of his triumph, the saint had a spring appear at the very bottom of the deep, and—as people assert—fathomless well dug down into the very bowels of the mountain, and the gaping mouth of which was situated near the altar of the god Zeda, just in the centre of his temple. It was into this opening that the limbs of the murdered infants were cast down after the sacrifice. The miraculously spring, however, was soon dried up, and for many centuries no water appeared. But when Christianity was firmly established, the water began reappearing on the seventh day of every May, and continues to do so till the present time. Strange to say this fact does not pertain to the domain of legend, but is one that has provoked an intense curiosity even among men of science, such as the eminent geologist, Dr. Abich, who resided for years at Tifiis. Thousands upon thousands proceed yearly upon pilgrimage to zedadzene on the seventh of May, and all witness the “miracle.” From early morning water is heard bobbling down at the rocky bottom of the well; and, as noon approaches, the parched-op walls of the month beco moist, and clear, cold, sparkling water seems to come out from every pore of the rock; it rises higher and higher, bubbles, increases, until at last having reached the very brim it suddenly stops, and a prolonged shoot of triumphant Joy bursts from the fanatical crowd. This cry seems to shake the very depths of the mountain like a sudden discharge of artillery and awakens the echo for miles around. Everyone hurries to fill a vessel with the miraculous water. There are necks wrung and heads broken on that day at zedadzene, not everyone who survives carries home a provision of the crystal fold. Toward evening the water begins decreasing as mysteriously as it had appeared, and at midnight the well is again perfectly dry. Not a drop of water, nor a trace of any spring, could be found by the engineers and geologists bent upon discovering the “trick.” For a whole year the sanctuary remains deserted, and there is not even a janitor to watch the poor shrine. The geologists have declared that the soil of the mountain precludes the possibility of having springs concealed in it. Who will explain the puzzle?


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One day as the God, disguised as a shepherd, was wandering about the earth, he came to Baku, then a dreary, deserted sea-shore, and found an old devotee of his quarrelling with his wife. Upon this barren spot wood was scarce, and she would not give up a certain portion of her stock of cooking fuel to be burned upon the altar. So the Ahriman element was aroused in the God, and, striking the stingy old woman, he changed her into a gigantic rock. Then, the Ahura-Mazda element prevailing, he, to console the bereaved widower, promised that neither he nor his descendants should ever need fuel any more, for he would provide such a supply as should last till the end of time. So he struck the rock again and then struck the ground for miles around, and the earth and the calcareous soil of the Caspian shores were filled up to the brim with naphtha. To commemorate the happy event the old devotee assembled all the youths of the neighbourhood and set himself to excavating the rock—which was all that remained of his ex-wife. He cut the battlemented walls, and fashioned the altar and the four pillars, hollowing them all to allow the gases to rise and escape through the top of the merlons. The God Mithra upon seeing the work ended, sent a lightning flash, which set the fire upon the altar ablaze, and lit up every merlon upon the walls. Then, in order that it should burn the brighter, he called forth the four winds and ordered them to blow the flame in every direction. To this day Baku is known under its primitive name of “Baadey-ku-ba which means literally the gathering of winds.

The other legend, which is but a continuation of the above, runs thus: For countless ages time devotees of Mithra worshipped at Ins shrines, until Zarathushtra, descending from heaven in the shape of a “Golden Star,” transformed himself into a man, and began teaching a new doctrine. He sung the praises of the One but Triple God—the supreme Eternal, the in comprehensible essence “Zervana-Akarna,” which emanating from itself ‘‘Primeval Light,’’ the latter in its turn produced Ahura-Mazda. But this process required that the “Primeval One” should previously absorb in itself all the light from the fiery Mithra, and thus left the poor God despoiled of all his brightness. Losing his right of undivided supremacy, Mithra, in despair, and instigated by his Ahrimanian nature, annihilated himself for the time being, leaving Ahriman alone, to fight out his quarrel with Ormazd, as best he could. Hence the prevailing duality in nature since that time until Mithra returns; for he promised to his faithful devotees to


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come back some day. Only, since then, a series of calamities fell upon the fire-worshippers. The last of these was the invasion of their country by the Moslems in the seventh century, when these fanatics began most cruel persecutions against the Behedin. Driven away from every quarter, the Guebres found refuge but in the province of Kerman, and in the city of Yezd. Then followed heresies. Many of the Zoroastrians abandoning the faith of their forefathers became Moslems; others, in their unquenchable hatred for the new rulers, joined the ferocious Kurds and became devil-,
as well as fire-worshippers. These are the Yezids. The whole religion of these strange sectarians—with the exception of a few who have more weird rites, which are a secret to all but to themselves—consists in the following. As soon as the morning sun appears, they place their two thumbs crosswise one upon the other, kiss the symbol, and touch their brows with them in reverential silence. Then they salute the sun and turn back into their tents. They believe in the power of the devil, dread it, and propitiate the “fallen angel” by every means; getting very angry whenever they hear him spoken of disrespectfully by either a Mussulman or a Christian. Murders have been committed by them on account of such irreverent talk, but people have become more prudent of late.

With the exception of the Bombay community of Pârsis, fire-worshippers are, then, to be found but in the two places before mentioned, and scattered around Baku. In Persia some years ago, according to statistics they numbered about 100,000 men, I doubt, though, whether their religion has been preserved as pure as even that of the Gujarâti Pârsis, adulterated as is the latter by the errors and carelessness of generations of uneducated Mobeds. And yet, as is the case of their Bombay brethren, who are considered by all the travellers as well as Anglo-Indians, as the most intelligent, industrious and well-behaved community of the native races, the fire-worshippers of Kerman and Yezd bear a very high character among the Persians, as well as among the Russians of Baku. Uncouth and crafty some of them have become, owing to long centuries of persecution and spoliation; but the unanimous testimony is in their favour, and they are spoken of as a virtuous, highly moral, and industrious population. “As good as the word of a Guebre” is a common saying among the Kurds, who repeat it without being in the least conscious of the self-condemnation contained in it.

I cannot close without expressing my astonishment at the utter ignorance as to their religion, which seems to prevail in Russia even


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among the journalists. One of them speaks of the Guebres, in the article of the St. Petersburg Viedomosti above referred to, as of a sect of Hindu idolaters, in whose prayers the name of Brahmâ is constantly invoked. To add to the importance of this historical item, Alexandre Dumas (senior) is quoted, as mentioning in his work, Travels in the Caucasus, that during his visit to Attesh-Gag, he found in one of the cells of the Zoroastrian cloister “two Hindu idols”! Without forgetting the charitable dictum: De mortuis nil nisi bonum, we cannot refrain from reminding the correspondent of our esteemed contemporary of a fact which no reader of the novels of the brilliant French writer ought to be ignorant of, namely, that for the variety and inexhaustible stock of historical facts, evolved out of the abysmal depths of his own consciousness, even the immortal Baron Münchausen was hardly his equal. The sensational narrative of his tiger-hunting in Mingrelia, where, since the days of Noah, there never was a tiger, is yet fresh in the memory of his readers.

CROSS AND FIRE
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[Vol. I. No. 2, November, 1879.]

PERHAPS the most widespread and universal symbols in the old astronomical systems which have passed down the stream of time to our century, and have left traces everywhere in the Christian religion as else where, are the Cross and the Fire, the latter the symbol of the sun. The ancient Aryans used them both as the symbols of Agni. Whenever the ancient devotee desired to worship Agni—says E. Burnouf (Science des Religions, ch. x.)—he arranged two pieces of wood in the form of a cross, and by a peculiar whirling and friction obtained fire for his sacrifice. As a symbol it is called Svastika, and as an instrument manufactured out of a sacred tree and in possession of every Brâhman, it is known as Arani.

The Scandinavians had the same sign and called it Thor’s Hammer, as bearing a mysterious magneto-electric relation to Thor, the God of Thunder, who, like Jupiter armed with his thunderbolts, holds in his hand this ensign of power, not only over mortals but also the mischievous spirits of the elements, over which he presides. In Masonry it appears in the form of the grand master’s mallet; at Allahabad it may be seen on the fort as the Jaina Cross, or the talisman of the Jaina kings; and the gavel of the modern judge is no more than this crux dissimulata, as de Rossi the arch calls it; for the gavel is the sign of power and strength, as the hammer represented the might of Thor, who in the Norse legend splits a rock with it. Dr. Schliemann found it in terra-cotta discs, on the site, as he believes, of ancient Troy, in the lowest strata of his excavations; which indicated, according to Dr. Lundy, “an Aryan civilization long anterior to the Greek—say from two to three thousand years B.C.” Burnouf calls it the oldest form of the Cross known, and affirms that “it is found personified in the ancient religion of the Greeks under the figure of Prometheus, the fire-bearer crucified on Mount Caucasus, while the celestial bird—the


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Shyena of the Vedic hymns—daily devours his entrails.” Boldetti (Osservazioni, 15, p. 60) gives a copy from the painting in the cemetery of St. Sebastian, representing a Christian convert and gravedigger named Diogenes, who wears on both his legs and right arm the signs of the Svastika. The Mexicans and the Peruvians had it, and it is found as the sacred Tan in the oldest tombs of Egypt.

It is, to say the least, a strange coincidence, remarked even by some Christian clergymen, that Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, should have symbols identical with the Indian God Agni. While Agnus Dei expiates and takes away the sins of the world, in one religion, the God Agni in the other, likewise expiates sins against the Gods, man, the manes, the soul and repeated sins, as shown in the six prayers accompanied by six oblations (Colebrooke Essays, vol. i. p. 190).

If, then, we find these two—the Cross and the Fire—so closely associated in the esoteric symbolism of nearly every nation, it is because on the combined powers of the two rests the whole plan of universal law. In astronomy, physics, chemistry, in the whole range of natural philosophy, in short, they always come out as the invisible cause and the visible result; and only metaphysics and alchemy —or shall we say meta-chemistry, since we prefer coming a new word to shocking sceptical ears—can fully and conclusively solve their mysterious meaning. An instance or two will suffice for those who are willing to think over hints.

The central point, or the great central Sun of the Kosmos, as the Kabalists call it, is the Deity. It is the point of intersection between the two great conflicting powers—the centripetal and the centrifugal forces—which drive the planets into their elliptical orbits, making them trace a cross in their path through the Zodiac. These two terrible, though as yet hypothetical and imaginary powers, preserve harmony and keep the universe in steady, unceasing motion; and the four bent points of the Svastika typify the revolution of the earth upon its axis. Plato calls the universe a “blessed god,” made in a circle and decussated in the form of the letter X. So much for astronomy.

In Masonry the Royal Arch degree retains the Cross as the triple Egyptian Tau. It is the mundane circle with the astronomical cross upon it rapidly revolving; the perfect square of the Pythagorean mathematics in the scale of numbers, as its occult meaning is interpreted by Cornelius Agrippa. Fire is heat—the central point; the perpendicular ray represents the male element—spirit, and the hori-


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zontal one the female element—matter. Spirit vivifies and fructifies matter, and everything proceeds from the central point, the focus of life, and light, and heat, represented by the terrestrial fire. So much again for physics and chemistry; for the field of analogies is boundless, and universal laws are immutable and identical in their outward and inward applications. Without intending to he disrespectful to anyone, or to wander far away from truth, we think we may say that there are strong reasons to believe that in their original sense the Christian Cross as the cause, and eternal torment by hell-fire as the direct effect of negation of the former, have more to do with these two ancient symbols than our Western theologians are prepared to admit.

If Fire is the Deity with some heathens, so in the Bible God is like wise the Life and the Light of the world.

If the Holy Ghost and Fire cleanse and purify the Christian, Lucifer is also Light, and the ‘‘Son of the morning.’’

Turn where we will, we are sure to find these conjoint relics of ancient worship among almost every nation and people. From the Aryans, the Chaldæans, the Zoroastrians, Peruvians, Mexicans, Scandinavians, Celts, and ancient Greeks and Latins, they have descended in their completeness to the modern Pârsi. The Phœnician Cabiri and the Greek Dioscuri are partially revived in every temple, cathedral, and village church; while, as will now be shown, the Christian Bulgarians have even preserved the sun-worship more than a thousand years since they were converted to Christianity. And yet they appear none the less pagans than they were before, for this is how they keep Christmas and New Year’s Day. To this time they call this festival Sourjvaki, as it falls in with the festival in honour of the ancient Slavonian God Sourja. In the Slavonian mythology this Deity—Sourja or Sourva— evidently identical with the Aryan Surya—sun—is the God of heat, fertility and abundance. The celebration of this festival is of immense antiquity as, far before the clays of Christianity, the Bulgarians worshipped Sourva, and consecrated New Year’s Day to this God, praying him to bless their fields with fertility, and send them happiness and prosperity. This custom has remained among them in all its primitive heathenism, and though it varies according to localities, yet the rites and ceremonies are essentially the same.

On the eve of New Year’s Day, the Bulgarians do no work, and are obliged to fast. Young betrothed maidens are busy preparing a large platiy (cake) in which they place roots and young shoots of various


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forms, to each of which a name is given, according to the shape of the root. Thus one means the house, another represents the garden; others again, the mill, the vineyard, the horse, a hen, a cat, and so on, according to the landed property and worldly possessions of the family. Even articles of value such as jewelry and bags of money are represented in this emblem of the horn of abundance. Besides all these, a large and ancient silver coin is placed inside the cake; it is called babkaand and is tied two ways with a red thread, which forms a cross. This coin is regarded as the symbol of fortune. After sunset and other ceremonies including prayers, addressed in the direction of the departing luminary, the whole family assemble about a large round table, called paralya, on which are placed the above-mentioned cake, dry vegetables, corn, a wax taper, and finally a large censer containing incense of the best quality, to perfume the God. The head of the family, usually the oldest in the family—either the grandfather or the father himself— taking up the censer with the greatest veneration in one hand, and the wax taper in the other, begins walking about the premises, incensing the four corners, beginning and ending with the east, and reads various invocations, which close with the Christian “Our Father, which art in heaven,” addressed to Sourja. The taper is then laid away to be preserved throughout the whole year, till the next festival. It is thought to have acquired marvellous healing properties, and is lighted only upon occasions of family sickness, in which case it is expected to cure the patient.

After this ceremony, the old man takes his knife and cuts the cake into as many slices as there are members of the household present. Each person, on receiving his or her share, makes haste to open and search the piece. The happiest for the ensuing year, is he or she who gets the part containing the old coin crossed with the scarlet thread; he is considered the elect of Sourja, and everyone envies the fortunate possessor. Then in order of importance come the emblems of the house, the vineyard, and so on; and according to his finding, the finder reads his horoscope for the coming year. Most unlucky is he who gets the cat; he turns pale and trembles. Woe to him and misery, for he is surrounded by enemies, and has to prepare for great trials.

At the same time, a large log which represents a flaming altar, is set up in the chimney-place, and fire is applied to it. This log burns in honour of Sourja, and is intended as an oracle for the whole house. If it burns the whole night through till morning, without the flame


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dying out, it is a good sign; otherwise the family prepares to see death that year, and deep lamentations end the festival. Neither the montzee (young bachelor), nor the mommee (the maiden), sleep that night. At midnight begins a series of soothsaying, magic, and various rites, in which the burning log plays the part of the oracle. A young bud thrown into the fire and bursting with a loud snap, is a sign of happy and speedy marriage. Long after midnight the young couples leave their respective homes, and begin visiting their acquaintances from house to house, offering and receiving congratulations, and rendering thanks to the Deity. These couples are called Souryakari, and each male carries a large branch ornamented with red ribbons, old coins, and the image of Sourja, and as they wend their way, they sing in chorus. Their chant is as original as it is peculiar, and merits translation, though of course it must lose in being rendered into a foreign language. The following stanzas are addressed by them to those they visit:

Sourva, Sourva, Lord of the season,

Happy New Year mayst thou send:

Health and fortune on this household,

Success and blessings till next year.

With good crops and full ears,

With gold and silk, and grapes and fruit,

With barrels full of wine, and stomachs full,

You and your house be blessed by the God . .

His blessing on you all. Amen! Amen! Amen!

The singing Sourvakari, recompensed for their good wishes with a present at every house, go home at early dawn. And this is how the symbolical exoteric Cross and Fire-worship of old Aryâvartta go hand in hand in Christian Bulgaria.

WAR IN OLYMPUS
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[Vol. I. No. 2, November, 1879.]

DARK clouds are gathering over the hitherto cold and serene horizon of exact science, which forebode a squall. Already two camps are forming among the votaries of scientific research. One wages war on the other, and hard words are occasionally exchanged. The apple of discord in this case is—Spiritualism. Fresh and illustrious victims are yearly decoyed away from the impregnable strongholds of materialistic negation, and ensnared into examining and testing the alleged spiritual phenomena. And we all know that when a true Scientist examines them without prejudice well, he generally ends like Professor Hare, Mr. William Crookes, F.R.S., the great Alfred Russell Wallace, another F.R.S., and so many other eminent men of science—he passes over to the enemy.

We are really curious to know what will be the new theory advanced in the present crisis by the sceptics, and how they will account for such apostasy of several of their luminaries, as has just occurred. The venerable accusations of non compos mentis and “dotage” will not bear another refurbishing. The eminent perverts are increasing numerically so fast, that if mental incapacity is charged upon all of them who experimentally satisfy themselves that tables can talk sense, and mediums float through the air, it might augur ill for science; there might soon be none but weakened brains in the learned societies. They may, possibly, for a time find some consolation in accounting for the lodgment of the extraordinary “delusion” in very scholarly heads, upon the theory of atavism—the mysterious law of latent transmission, so much favoured by the modern schools of Darwinian evolutionism— especially in Germany, as represented by that thorough-going apostle of the modern “struggle for culture,” Ernst Hæckle professor at Jena. They may attribute the belief of their colleagues in the phenomena to certain molecular movements of the cell in the ganglia of their once


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powerful brains, hereditarily transmitted to them by their ignorant mediæval ancestors. Or, again, they may split their ranks, and establishing an imperium in imperio “divide and conquer” still. All this is possible; but time alone will show which of the parties will come off best.

We have been led to these reflections by a row now going On between German and Russian professors—all eminent and illustrious savants. The Teutons and Slavs, in the case under observation, are not fighting according to their nationality, but conformably to their respective beliefs and unbeliefs. Having concluded, for the occasion, an offensive as well as a defensive alliance, regardless of race—they have broken up in two camps, one representing the Spiritualists, and the other the sceptics. And now war to the knife is declared. Leading one party, are Professors Zollner, Ulrizzi and Fichte, Butlerof and Wagner, of the Leipzig, Halle and St. Petersburg Universities; the other follows Professors Wundt, Mendelevef and a host of other German and Russian celebrities. Hardly has Zollner—a most renowned astronomer and physicist——printed his confession of faith in Dr. Slade’s mediumistic phenomena and, set his learned colleagues aghast when Professor Ulrizzi, of the Halle University, arouses the wrath of the Olympus of science by publishing a pamphlet entitled, The so-called Spiritulism a Scientific Question, intended as a complete refutation of the arguments of Professor Wundt, of the Leipzig University, against the modern belief, and contained in another pamphlet called by its auther Spiri- tualism—The so-called Scientific Question. And now steps in another active combatant, Mr. Butlerof, Professor of Chemistry and Natural Sciences in St. Petersburg, who narrates his experiments in London, with the medium Williams, and thus rouses up a most ferocious polemic. The humoristical illustrated paper Kladderadatsch executes a war-dance, and shouts with joy, while the more serious conservative papers are indignant. Pressed behind their last entrenchments by the cool and uncontrovertible assertions of a most distinguished naturalist, the critics, led forward by the St. Petersburg star, Mr. Burenin, seem desperate, and evidently short of ammunition, since they are reduced to the expedient of trying to rout the enemy with the most remarkable paradoxes. The pro and con of the dispute are too interesting, and our posterity might complain, were the incidents suffered to be left beyond the reach of English and American readers interested in Spiritualism, by remaining confined to the German and Russian newspapers. So,

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Homer-like, we will follow the combatants and condense this modern Iliad for the benefit of our friends.

After several years of diligent research and investigation of the phenomena, Messrs Wagner and Butlerof both distinguished savants and professors of St. Petersburg University, became thoroughly convinced of the reality of the weird manifestations. As a result, both wrote numerous and strong articles in the leading periodicals in defence of the ‘‘mischievous epidemic’’—as in his moments of ‘‘ unconscious cerebration” and “prepossession” in favour of his own hobby, Dr. Carpenter calls Spiritualism. Both of the above eminent gentle men are endowed with those precious qualities, which are the more to be respected as they are so seldom met with among our men of science. These qualities, admitted by Mr. Burenin, their critic, himself, are:

(1) a serious and profound conviction that what they defend is true; (2) an unwavering courage in stating at every hazard, before a prejudiced and inimical public that such is their conviction; (3) clearness and consecutiveness in their statements; (4) the serene calmness and impartiality with which they treat the opinions of their opponents; (5) a full and profound acquaintance with the subject under discussion. The combination of the qualities enumerated, adds their critic,

Leads us to regard the recent article by Professor Butlerof, Empiricism and dogmatism in the Domain of Mediumship as one of those essays whose commanding significance cannot be denied and winch are sure to strongly impress the readers. Such articles are positively rare in our periodicals; rare because of the originality of the author’s conclusions; and because of the clear, precise, and serious presentation of facts.

The article so eulogized may be summed up in a few words. We will not stop to enumerate the marvels of spiritual phenomena witnessed by Professor Zöllner with Dr. Slade and defended by Professor Butlerof, since they are no more marvellous than the latter gentleman’s personal experience in this direction with Mr. Williams, a medium of London, in 1876. The seances took place in a London hotel in the room occupied by the Hon. Alexandre Aksakof, Russian Imperial Councillor, in which, with the exception of this gentleman, there were but two other persons—Professor Butlerof and the medium. Confederacy was thus utterly impossible. And now, what took place under these conditions, which so impressed one of the first scientists of Russia? Simply this:

Mr. Williams, the medium, was made to sit with his hands, feet, and even his body tightly bound with cords to his chair, which was placed


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in a dead-wall corner of the room, behind Mr. Butlerof’s plaid hung across so as to form a screen. Williams soon fell into a kind of lethargic stupor, known among Spiritualists as the trance condition, and ‘spirits” began to appear before the eyes of the investigators. Various voices were heard, and loud sentences pronounced by the “invisibles,” from every part of the room; things—toilet appurtenances and so forth—began flying in every direction through the air, and finally “John King”—a sort of king of the spooks, who has been famous for years— made his appearance bodily. But we must allow Professor Butlerof to tell his phenomenal story himself.

We first saw several bright lights moving in the air, and inmediately after appeared the full figure of “John King.” His apparition is generally preceded by a greenish phosphoric light which, gradually becoming brighter, illuminates, more and more, the whole bust of “John King.” Then it is that those present perceive that the light emanates from some kind of luminous object held by the ‘‘spirit.’’ The face of a man with a thick black beard becomes clearly distinguishable: the head is enveloped in a white turban. The figure appeared outside the cabinet (that is to say, the screened corner where the medium sat), and finally approached us. We saw it each time for a few seconds; then rapidly waning, the light was extinguished and the figure became invisible to reappear again in a moment or two; then from the surrounding darkness “John’s” voice was heard proceeding from the spot on which he had appeared mostly, though not always, when he had already disappeared. “John” asked us: “What can I do for you?” and Mr. Aksakof requested him to rise up to the ceiling and speak to us. In accordance with the wish expressed, the figure suddenly appeared above the table and towered majestically above our heads to the ceiling, which became all illuminated with the luminous object held in the spirit’s hand, when ‘‘John’’ was quite under the ceiling he shouted down to us: ‘‘Will that do?"

During another seance M. Butlerof asked “John” to approach him quite near, which the ‘‘spirit” did, and so gave him the opportunity of seeing clearly “the sparkling, clear eyes of John.” Another spirit, ‘‘Peter,” though he never put in a visible appearance during the seances, yet conversed with Messrs. Butlerof and Aksakof, wrote for them on paper furnished by them, and so forth.

Though the learned Professor minutely enumerates all the precautions he had taken against possible fraud, the critic is not yet satisfied, and asks, pertinently enough:

Why did not the respectable savant catch ‘‘John’’ in his arms, when the spirit was hut a foot distant from him? Again, why did not both Messrs. Aksakof and Bntlerof try to get hold of “John’s” legs, when he was mounting to the ceiling? Indeed they ought to have done all tins, if they are really so anxious to learn the truth for their own sake, as for that of science, when they struggle to lead on


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toward the domains of the “other world.” And, had they complied with such a simple and, at the same time, very little scientific test, there would be no more need for them, perhaps, to . . . further explain the scientific importance of the spiritual manifestations.

That this importance is not exaggerated, and has as much significance for the world of science, as for that of religious thought, is proved by so many philosophical minds speculating upon the modern “delusion.” This is what Fichte, the learned German savant, says of it.

Modern Spiritualism chiefly proves the existence of that which, in common par. lance, is very vaguely and inaptly termed “aftftarilion of spirits.” If we concede the reality of such apparitions, then they become an undeniable, practical proof of the continuation of our personal, conscious existence (beyond the portals of death). And such a tangible, fully demonstrated fact cannot he otherwise but beneficent in this epoch, which, having fallen into a dreary denial of immortality, thinks, in the proud self-sufficiency of its vast intellect, that it has already happily left behind it every superstition of the kind.

If such a tangible evidence could be really found, and demonstrated to us, beyond any doubt or cavil, reasons Fichte further on :

If the reality of the continuation of our lives after death were furnished us upon positive proof, in strict accordance with the logical elements of experimental natural sciences, then it would be, indeed, a result with which, owing to its nature and peculiar significance for humanity, no other result to be met with in all the history of civilization could he compared. The old problem of man’s destination upon earth would thus be solved, and consciousness in humanity would he elevated one step. That which, hitherto, could be revealed to man but in the domain of blind faith, presentiment and passionate hope, would become to him—positive knowledge; he would have acquired the certainty that he was a member of an eternal, a spiritual world, in which he would continue living, and that his temporary existence upon this earth forms but a fractional portion of a future eternal life, and that it is only there that he would be enabled to perceive, and fully comprehend his real destiny. Having acquired this profound conviction, mankind would be thoroughly impressed with a new and animating comprehension of life, and its intellectual perceptions opened to an idealism strong with incontrovertible facts. This would prove tantamount to a complete reconstruction of man in relation to his existence as an entity and his mission upon earth; it would be, so to say, a “new birth.” Whoever has lost all inner convictions as to his eternal destiny’, his faith in eternal life, whether the ease be that of an isolated individuality, a whole nation, or time representative of a certain epoch, he or it may be regarded as having had uprooted, and to the very core, all sense of that invigorating force which alone lends itself to self-devotion and to progress. Such a man becomes what was inevitable—an egotistical, selfish, sensual being, concerned wholly for his self-preservation. His culture, his enlightenment and civilization, can serve him but as a help and ornament toward that life of sensualism, or, at best, to guard him from all that can harm it.


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Such is the enormous importance attributed by Professor Fichte of Germany, and Professor Butlerof of Russia, to the spiritual phenomena; and we may say the feeling is more than sincerely echoed in England by Mr. A. R. Wallace, F.R.S.

An influential American scientific journal uses equally strong language when speaking of the value that a scientific demonstration of the survival of the human soul would have for the world. If Spiritualism prove true, it says,

It will become the one grand event of the world’s history; it will give an unperishable lustre of glory to the nineteenth century. Its discoverer will have no rival in renown, and his name will be written high above any other. If the pretensions of Spiritualism have a rational foundation, no more important work has been offered to men of science then their verification. (Scientific American, 1874, as quoted in Olcott’s People from The Other World, Preface, p. v.)

And now we will see what the stubborn Russian critic (who seems to be but the mouth-piece of European materialistic science), has to say in response to the unanswerable arguments and logic of Messrs. Fichte and Butlerof. If scepticism has no stronger arguments to oppose to Spiritualism but the following original paradox, then we will have to declare it worsted in the dispute. Instead of the beneficial results foretold by Fichte in the case of the final triumph of Spiritualism, the critic forecasts quite a different state of things.

As soon as such scientific methods shall have demonstrated, beyond doubt or cavil, to the general satisfaction, that our world is-crammed with souls of men who have preceded us, and whom we will all join in turn; as soon as it shall be proven that these “souls of the deceased” call communicate with mortals, all the earthly physical science of the eminent scholars will vanish like a soap-bubble, and will have lost all its interest for us living men. Why should people care for their proportionately short life upon earth, once that they have the positive assurance and conviction of another life to come after bodily death; a death which does not in the least preclude conscious relations with the world of the living, or even their post mortem participation in all its interests? Once that, with the help of science, based on mediumistic experiments and the discoveries of Spiritualism, such relations shall have been firmly established, they will naturally become every day more and more intimate; an extraordinary friendship will ensue between this and the ‘‘other’’ world; that other world will begin divulging to this one the most occult mysteries of life and death, and the hitherto most inaccessible laws of time universe—those which now exact the greatest efforts of man’s mental powers. Finally, nothing will remains for us in this temporary world to either do or desire, but to pass away as soon as possible into the world of eternity. No inventions, no observations, no sciences will be any more needed! Why should people exercise their brains, for instance, in perfecting the telegraphs, when nothing else will he required but to


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be on good terms with spirits in order to avail of their services for the instantaneous transmission of thoughts and objects, not only from Europe to America, but even to the moon, if so desired? The following are a few of the results which a communion de facto between this world and the “other,’’ that certain men of science are hoping to establish by the help of Spiritualism, will inevitably lead us to: the complete extinction of all science, and even of the human race, which will be ever rushing onward to a better life. The learned and scholarly phantasists who are so anxious to promote the science of Spiritualism, of a close communication between the two worlds, ought to bear the above in mind.

To which the ‘‘scholarly phantasists’’ would be quite warranted in answering that one would have to bring his own mind to the exact measure of microscopic capacity required to elaborate such a theory as this, before he could take it into consideration at all. Is the above meant to be offered as an objection for serious consideration? Strange logic! We are asked to believe that, because these men of science, who now believe in naught but matter, and thus try to fit every phenomenon—even of a mental and spiritual character—to the Procrustean bed of their own preconceived hobbies, would find themselves, by the mere strength of circumstances, forced in their turn, to fit these cherished hobbies to truth, however unwelcome, and to facts wherever found—that because of that, science will lose all its charm for humanity. Nay—life itself will become a burden! There are millions upon millions of people who, without believing in Spiritualism at all, yet have faith in another and a better world. And were that blind faith to become positive knowledge indeed, it could but better humanity.

Before closing his scathing criticism upon the “credulous men of science,” our reviewer sends one more bomb in their direction, which unfortunately, like many other explosive shells, misses the culprits and wounds the whole group of their learned colleagues. We translate the missile verbatim, this time for the benefit of all the European and American academicians.

Speaking of Butlerof and his article, he adds:

The eminent professor, among other things, makes the most of the strange fact that Spiritualism gains with every day more and more converts within the corporation of our great scientists. He enumerates a long list of English and German names among illustrious men of science, who have more or less confessed themselves in favour of the spiritual doctrines. Among these names we find such as are quite authoritative, those of the greatest luminaries of science. Such a fact is, to say the least, very striking, and, in any case, lends a great weight to Spiritualism. But we have only to ponder coolly over it, to come very easily to the conclusion that it is just among such great men of science that Spiritualism is most likely to spread


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and find ready converts. With all their powerful intellects and gigantic knowledge, our great scholars are firstly, men of sedentary habits, and, secondly, they are, with scarcely an exception, men with diseased and shattered nerves, inclined toward an abnormal development of an overstrained brain. Such sedentary men are the easiest to hoodwink; a clever charlatan will make an easier prey of and bamboozle with far more facility, a scholar than an unlearned but practical man. Hallucination will far sooner get hold of persons inclined to nervous receptivity, especially if they once concentrate themselves upon some peculiar ideas, or a favourite hobby. This, I believe, will explain the fact that we see so many men of science enrolling themselves in the army of Spiritualists.

We need not stop to enquire how Messrs. Tyndall, Huxley, Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Lewes, and other eminent scientific and philosophical sceptics, will like such a prospect of rickety ganglionic centres, collective softening of the brain, and the resulting “hallucinations.” The argument is not only an impertinent naivete but a literary monstrosity.

We are far from agreeing entirely with the views of Professor Butler, or even Mr. Wallace, as to the agencies at work behind the modern phenomena; yet between the extremes of spiritual negation and affirmation, there ought to be a middle ground; only pure philosophy can establish truth upon firm principles; and no philosophy can he complete unless it embraces both physics and metaphysics. Mr. Tyndall, who declares in Science and Man that “metaphysics will be welcomed when it abandons its pretensions to scientific discovery, and consents to be ranked as a kind of poetry,” opens himself to the criticism of posterity. Meanwhile, he must not regard it as an impertinence if his Spiritualistic opponents retort with the answer that “physics will always be welcomed, when it abandons its pretension to psychological discovery.” The physicists will have to consent to be regarded in a near future as no more than supervisors and analysts of physical results, who have to leave the spiritual causes to those who believe in them. Whatever the issue of the present quarrel, we fear, though, that Spiritualism has made its appearance a century too late. Our age is preeminently one of extremes. The earnest philosophical, yet reverent, doubters are few, and the name for those who rush to the opposite extreme is—Legion. We are the children of our century. Thanks to that same law of atavism, it seems to have inherited from its parent—the eighteenth—the century of both Voltaire and Jonathan Edwards—all its extreme scepticism, and, at the same time, religious credulity and bigoted intolerance. Spiritualism is an abnormal and premature outgrowth, standing between the two; and, though it stands

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right on the highway to truth, its ill-defined beliefs make it wander on through by-paths which lead to anything but philosophy. Its future depends wholly upon the timely help it can receive from honest science—that science which scorns no truth. It was, perhaps, when thinking of the opponents of the latter, that Alfred de Musset wrote the following magnificent apostrophe:

Sleep’st thou content, Voltaire?

And thy dread smile hovers it still above

Thy fleshless bones. . . . ?

Thine age they call too young to understand thee;

This one should suit thee better—
Thy men are born!

And the huge edifice that, day and night, thy great hands undermined,
Is fallen upon us. . . .

A LAND OF MYSTERY
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[Vol. I. Nos. 6, 7, 9 and 11, March, April, June and August, 1880.]

WHETHER one surveys the imposing ruins of Memphis or Palmyra; stands at the foot of the great pyramid of Ghizeh; wanders along the shores of the Nile; or ponders amid the desolate fastnesses of the long-lost and mysterious Petra; however clouded and misty the origin of these pre-historic relics may appear, one nevertheless finds at least certain fragments of firm ground upon which to build conjecture. Thick as may be the curtain behind which the history of these anti- quities is hidden, still there are rents here and there through which one may catch glimpses of light. We are acquainted with the descendants of the builders; and, however superficially, we also know the story of the nations whose vestiges are scattered around us. Not so with the antiquities of the New World of the two Americas. There, all along the coast of Peru, all over the Isthmus and North America, in the canyons of the Cordilleras, in the impassable gorges of the Andes, and, especially, beyond the valley of Mexico, lie, ruined and desolate, hundreds of once mighty cities, lost to the memory of men, and having themselves lost even a name. Buried in dense forests, entombed in inaccessible valleys, sometimes sixty feet underground, from the day of their discovery until now they have ever remained a riddle, baffling all enquiry, and they have been muter than the Egyptian Sphinx herself. We know nothing of America prior to the Spanish Conquest—positively nothing. No chronicles, not even comparatively modern ones, survive; there are no traditions, even among the aboriginal tribes, as to its past events. We are as ignorant of the races that built these cyclopean structures as of the strange worship that inspired the antediluvian sculptors who carved upon hundreds of miles of walls, of monuments, monoliths and altars, these weird hieroglyphics, these groups of animals and men, pictures of an unknown life and lost arts—scenes so fantastic and wild, at times, that they involuntarily suggest


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the idea of a feverish dream, whose phantasmagoria suddenly crystallized into granite at the wave of some mighty magician’s hand, to bewilder the coming generations for ever and ever. So late as the beginning of the present century the very existence of such a wealth of antiquities was unknown. The petty, suspicious jealousy of the Spaniards had, from the first, created a Chinese wall between their American possessions and the too curious traveller; and the ignorance and fanaticism of the conquerors, and their carelessness as to all but the satisfaction of their insatiable greed, had precluded scientific research. Even the enthusiastic accounts of Cortez and his army of brigands and priests, and of Pizarro and his robbers and monks, as to the splendour of the temples, palaces and cities of Mexico and Peru, were long discredited. In his History of America, Dr. Robertson goes so far as to inform his reader that the houses of the ancient Mexicans were

Mere huts, built with turf or mud, or the branches of trees, like those of the rudest Indians.*

And, upon the testimony of some Spaniards, he even risked the assertion that there was not

In all the extent of that vast empire a single monument or vestige of any building more ancient than the Conquest.

It was reserved to the great Alexander Humboldt to vindicate the truth. In 1803 a flood of new light was poured into the world of arch by this eminent and learned traveller. In this he luckily proved but the pioneer of future discoverers. He then described but Mitla, or the Vale of the Dead, Xoxichalco, and the great pyramidal Temple of Cholula. But after him came Stephens, Catherwood, and Squier; and in Peru, D’Orbigny and Dr. Tschuddi. Since then numerous travellers have visited and given us accurate details of many of the antiquities. But how many more yet remain not only unexplored, but even unknown, no one can tell. As regards prehistoric buildings, both Peru and Mexico are rivals of Egypt. Equalling the latter in the immensity of her cyclopean structures, Peru surpasses her in their number; while Cholula exceeds the grand pyramid of Cheops in breadth, if not in height. Works of public utility, such as walls, fortifications, terraces, water-courses, aqueducts, bridges, temples, burial-grounds, whole cities, and exquisitely paved roads, hundreds of
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* See Stephens’ Central America.

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miles in length, stretch in an unbroken line, almost covering the land as with a net. On the coast they are built of sun-dried bricks; in the mountains, of porphyritic lime, granite and silicated sandstones. Of the long generations of peoples who built them, history knows nothing, and even tradition is silent. As a matter of course, most of these lithic remains are covered with a dense vegetation. Whole forests have grown out of the cities’ broken hearts, and, with a few exceptions, everything is in ruin. But one may judge of what once was by that which yet remains.

With a most flippant unconcern, the Spanish historians refer nearly every ruin to Incal times. No greater mistake can be made. The hieroglyphics which sometimes cover whole walls and monoliths from top to bottom are, as they were from the first, a dead letter to modern science. But they were equally a dead letter to the Incas, though the history of the latter can be traced to the eleventh century. They had no clue to the meaning of these inscriptions, but attributed all such to their unknown predecessors; thus barring the presumption of their own descent from the first civilizers of their country. Briefly, the Incal history runs thus:

Inca is the Quichua title for chief or emperor, and the name of the ruling and most aristocratic race or rather caste of the land which was governed by them for an unknown period, prior to, and until, the Spanish Conquest. Some place their first appearance in Peru from regions unknown in 1021; others, also, on conjecture. at five centuries after the biblical “flood,” and according to the modest notions of Christian theology. Still the latter theory is undoubtedly nearer truth than the former. The Incas, judged by their exclusive privileges, power and ‘‘infallibility,’’ are the antipodal counterpart of the Brâhmanical caste of India. Like the latter, the Incas claimed direct descent from the Deity, which, as in the case of the Suryavansha dynasty of India, was the Sun. According to the sole but general tradition, there was a time when the whole of tile population of the now New World was broken tip into independent, warring and bar barian tribes. At last the “Highest” Deity—the Sun—took pity upon them, and, in order to rescue the people from ignorance, sent down upon earth to teach them his two children, Manco Capac, and his sister and wife, Mama Ocollo Huaco—the counterparts, again, of the Egyptian Osiris, and his sister and wife, Isis, as well as of the several Hindu Gods and demi-Gods and their wives. These two made their appear-


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ance on a beautiful island in Lake Titicaca—of which we will speak further on—and thence proceeded northward to Cuzco, later on the capital of the Incas, where they at once began to disseminate civilization. Collecting together the various races from all parts of Peru, the divine couple then divided their labour. Manco Capac taught men agriculture, legislation, architecture and arts; while Mama Ocollo instructed the women in weaving, spinning, embroidery and house keeping. It is from this celestial pair that the Incas claimed their descent; and yet they were utterly ignorant of the people who built the stupendous and now ruined cities which cover the whole area of their empire, and which then extended from the equator over thirty-seven degrees of latitude, and included not only the western slope of the Andes, but the whole mountain chain with its eastern declivities to the Amazon and Orinoco. As the direct descendants of the Sun, they were the high priests of the state religion, and at the same time emperors and the highest statesmen in the land; in virtue of which, they, again like the Brâhmans arrogated to themselves a divine superiority over the ordinary mortals, thus founding, like the “twice born,” an exclusive and aristocratic caste—the Inca race. Considered as the son of the Sun, every reigning Inca was the high priest, the oracle, chief captain in war, and absolute sovereign; thus realizing the double office of Pope and King, and so long anticipating the dream of the Roman Pontiffs. To his command the blindest obedience was exacted; his person was sacred; and he was the object of divine honours. The highest officers of the land could not appear shod in his presence; this mark of respect pointing again to an Oriental origin; while the custom of boring the ears of the youths of royal blood and inserting in them golden rings, ‘‘which were increased in size as they advanced in rank, until the distension of the cartilage became a positive deformity,” suggests a strange resemblance between the sculptured portraits of many of them that we find in the more modern ruins, and the images of Buddha and of some Hindu deities, not to mention our contemporary dandies of Siam, Burmah and Southern India. Once more like India, in the palmy days of the Brâhman power, no one had the right to receive an education or study religion except the young men of the privileged Inca caste. And, when the reigning Inca died, or, as it was termed, “was called home to the mansion of his father,” a very large number of his attendants and his wives were made to die with him, during the ceremonies of his obsequies, just as we find in the


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old annals of Râjasthân, and down to the but just abolished custom of Sati. Taking all this into consideration, the arch cannot remain satisfied with the brief remark of certain historians that:

In this tradition we trace only another version of the story of the civilization Common to all primitive nations, and that imposture of a celestial relationship whereby designing rulers and cunning priests have sought to secure their ascendency among men.

No more is it an explanation to say that:

Manco Capac is the almost exact counterpart of the Chinese Foh, the Hindu Buddha, the terrestrial Osiris of Egypt, the Quetzacoatl of Mexico, and Votan of Central America.

For all this is but too evident. What we want to learn is, how came these nations, so antipodal to each other as India, Egypt and America, to offer such extraordinary points of resemblance, not only in their general religious, political and social views, but sometimes in the minutest details. The task much-needed is to find out which one of them preceded the other; to explain how these peoples came to plant at the four corners of the earth nearly identical architecture and arts, unless there was a time when, as asserted by Plato and believed in by more than one modern archæologist, no ships were needed for such a transit, as the two worlds formed but one continent.

According to the most recent researches, there are five distinct styles of architecture in the Andes alone, of which the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco was the latest. And this one, perhaps, is the only structure of importance which, according to modern travellers, can be safely attributed to the Incas, whose imperial glories are believed to have been the last gleam of a civilization dating back for untold ages. Dr. E. R. Heath, of Kansas, thinks that

Long before Manco Capac the Andes had been the dwelling-place of races whose beginnings must have been coeval with the savages of Western Europe. The gigantic architecture points to the cyclopean family, the founders of the Temple of Babel and the Egyptian pyramids. The Grecian scroll found in man)’ places is borrowed (?) from the Egyptians; the mode of burial and embalming their dead points to Egypt.

Further on, this learned traveller finds that the skulls taken from the burial-grounds, according to craniologists, represent three distinct races: the Chinchas, who occupied the western part of Peru from the Andes to the Pacific; the Aymaras, dwellers of the elevated plains of Peru and Bolivia, on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca; and the Huancas, who “occupied the plateau between the chains of the Andes,


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north of Lake Titicaca to the ninth degree of south latitude.’’ To confound the buildings of the epoch of the Incas in Peru, and of Montezuma and his Caciques, in Mexico, with the aboriginal monuments, is fatal to archæology. While Cholula, Uxmal, Quiche, Pachacamac and Chichen were all perfectly preserved and occupied at the time of the invasion of the Spanish banditti, there are hundreds of ruined cities and works which were in the same state of ruin even then; whose origin was as unknown to the conquered Incas and Caciques as it is to us; and which are undoubtedly the remains of unknown and now extinct peoples. The strange shapes of the heads and profiles of the human figures upon the monoliths of Copan are a warrant for the correctness of the hypothesis. The pronounced difference between the skulls of these races and the Indo-European skulls was at first attributed to mechanical means, used by the mothers for giving a peculiar conformation to the head of their children during infancy, as is often done by other tribes and peoples. But, as the same author tells us, the finding in

A mummy of a fœtus of seven or eight months having the same conformation of skull, has placed a doubt as to the certainty of this fact.

And besides hypothesis, we have scientific and unimpeachable proof of a civilization that must have existed in Peru ages ago. Were we to give the number of thousands of years that have probably elapsed since then, without first showing good reasons for the assumption, the reader might feel like holding his breath. So let us try.

The Peruvian guano (huano), that precious fertilizer, composed of the excrement of sea-fowls, intermixed with their decaying bodies, eggs, remains of seal, and so on, which has accumulated upon the isles of the Pacific and the coast of South America, and its formation, are now well known. It was Humboldt who first discovered and drew the world’s attention to it in 1804. And, while describing the deposits as covering the granite rocks of the Chincas and other islands to the depth of fifty or sixty feet, he states that the accumulation of the preceding 300 years, since the conquest, had formed only a few lines in thick-ness. How many thousands of years, then, it required to form this deposit sixty feet deep, is a matter of simple calculation. In this connection we may now quote something of a discovery spoken of in the ‘‘Peruvian Antiquities.” *
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* A paper published by Dr. F. R. heath in the Kansas City Review of Science and Industry, November, 1878.


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Buried sixty-two feet under the ground, on the Chinca islands, stone-idols and water-pots were found, while thirty-three and thirty-five feet below the surface were wooden idols. From beneath the guano on the Guanapi islands, just south of Truxillo, and Macabi just north, mummies, birds and birds’ eggs, gold and silver ornaments were taken. On the Macabi the labourers found some large valuable golden vases, which they broke up and divided among themselves, even though offered weight for weight in gold coin, and thus relics of the greatest interest to the scientist have been lost for ever. He who can determine the centuries necessary to deposit thirty and sixty feet of guano on these islands, remembering that since the Conquest three hundred years ago, no appreciable increase in depth has been noted, can give you an idea of the antiquity of these relics.

If we confine ourselves to a strictly arithmetical calculation, then allowing twelve lines to an inch, and twelve inches to a foot, and allowing one line to every century, we are forced to believe that the people who made these precious gold vases lived 864,000 years ago! Leave an ample margin for errors, and give twelve lines to a century—say an inch to every 100 years—and we will yet have 72,000 years back a civilization which—if we judge by its public works, the durability of its constructions, and the grandeur of its buildings—equalled, and in some things certainly surpassed, our own.

Having well-defined ideas as to the periodicity of cycles, for the world as well as for nations, empires and tribes, we are convinced that our present modern civilization is but the latest dawn of that which already has been seen an innumerable number of times upon this planet. It may not be exact science, but it is both inductive and deductive logic, based upon theories far less hypothetical and more palpable than many another theory, held as strictly scientific. To express it in the words of Prof. T. E. Nipher, of St. Louis, “we are not the friends of theory but of truth,” and until truth is found, we welcome every new theory, however unpopular at first, for fear of rejecting in our ignorance the stone which may in time become the very corner-stone of the truth.

The errors of scientific men are well-nigh countless, not because they are men of science, but because they are men, says the same scientist; and further quotes the noble words of Faraday:

Occasionally, and frequently the exercise of the judgment ought to end in absolute reservation. It may be very distasteful and a great fatigue to suspend a conclusion, but as we are not infallible, so we ought to he cautions. (Experimental Researches, 24th Series.)

It is doubtful whether, with the exception of a few of the most prominent ruins, a detailed account of the so-called American anti-


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quities ever was attempted. Yet, in order to bring out the more prominently a point of comparison, such a work would be absolutely necessary. If the history of religion and of mythology and—far more important—the origin, developing and final grouping of the human species are ever to be unravelled, we have to trust to archæological research rather than to the hypothetical deductions of philology. We must begin by massing together the concrete imagery of the early thought, more eloquent in its stationary form than the verbal expression of the same, the latter being but too liable, in its manifold interpretations, to be distorted in a thousand ways. This would afford us an easier and more trustworthy clue. Archæological Societies ought to have a whole cyclopædia of the world’s remains, with a collation of the most important of the speculations as to each locality. For, however fantastic and wild some of these hypotheses may seem at first glance, yet each has a chance of proving useful at some time. It is often more beneficial to know what a thing is not than to know what it is, as Max Muller truly tells us.

It is not within the limits of an article in our paper that any such object could be achieved. Availing ourselves, though, of the reports of the Government surveyors, trustworthy travellers, men of science, and even our own limited experience, we will try in future issues to give to our Hindu readers, who possibly may never have heard of these antiquities, a general idea of them. Our information is drawn from every reliable source; the survey of the Peruvian antiquities being mostly due to Dr. Heath’s able paper, above mentioned.

II.

Evidently we Theosophists are not the only iconoclasts in this world of mutual deception and hypocrisy. We are not the only ones who believe in cycles, and, opposing the biblical chronology, lean towards those opinions which are secretly shared by so many, but publicly avowed by so few. We Europeans are just emerging from the very bottom of a new cycle, and progressing upwards, while the Asiatics— Indians especially—are the lingering remnants of the nations which filled the world in the previous and now departed cycles. Whether the Aryans sprang from the archaic Americans, or the latter from the prehistoric Aryans, is a question which no living man can decide. But that there must have been an intimate connection at some time between the old Aryans, the pre-historic inhabitants of America—whatever


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might have been their name—and the ancient Egyptians, is a matter more easily proved than contradicted. And probably, if there ever was such a connection, it must have taken place at a time when the Atlantic did not yet divide the two hemispheres as it does now.

In his Peruvian Antiquities, Dr. Heath, of Kansas City—rara avis among scientific men, a fearless searcher, who accepts truth wherever he finds it, and is not afraid to speak it out in the very face of dogmatic opposition—sums up his impressions of the Peruvian relics in the following words:

Three times the Andes sank hundreds of feet beneath the ocean level, and again were slowly brought to their present height. A man’s life would be too short to count even the centuries consumed in this operation. The coast of Peru has risen eighty feet since it felt the tread of Pizarro. Supposing the Andes to have risen uniformly and without interruption, 70,000 years must have elapsed before they reached their present altitude.

Who knows, then, but that Jules Verne’s fanciful idea* regarding the lost continent Atlantis may be near the truth? Who can say that, where now the Atlantic Ocean is, a continent did not formerly exist, with its dense population, advanced in the arts and sciences, who, as they found their land sinking beneath the waters, retired part east and part west, thus populating the two hemispheres? This would explain the similarity of their arch structures and races, and their differ-ences, modified by and adapted to the character of their respective climates and countries. Thus would the llama and camel differ, although of the same species; thus the algoraba and espino trees; thus the Iroquois Indians of North America and the most ancient Arabs call the constellation of the “Great Bear” by the same name; thus various nations, cut off from all intercourse or knowledge of each other, divide the zodiac into twelve constellations, apply to them the same names, and the Northern Hindus apply the name Andes to their Himalayan mountains, as did the South Americans to their principal chain.† Must we fall in the old rut, and suppose no other means of populating the Western Hemisphere except “by way of Behring’s Strait”? Must we still locate a geographical Eden in the East, and suppose a land, equally adapted to man and as old geologically, must wait the aimless wanderings of the “lost tribes of Israel” to become populated?

Go where we may, to explore the antiquities of America—whether of Northern, Central, or Southern America—we are first of all impressed with the magnitude of these relics of ages and races unknown, and then with the extraordinary similarity they present to the mounds and
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* This "idea" is plainly expressed and asserted as a fact by Plato in his Banquet; and was taken up by Bacon in his New Atlantis.

† The name America,” said I, in Isis Unveiled (vol. ii. p. 591(, three years ago, ‘may one day he found closely related to Meru, the sacred mount in the centre of the seven continents.” When first discovered, America was found to bear among some native tribes the name of Atlanta. In the states of Central America we find the name Amerih, signifying, like I a great mountain. The origin of the Kamas Indians of America is also unknown.


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ancient structures of old India, of Egypt and even of some parts of Europe. Whoever has seen one of these mounds has seen all. Who ever has stood before the cyclopean structures of one continent can have a pretty accurate idea of those of the other. Only be it said—we know still less of the age of the antiquities of America than even of those in the Valley of the Nile, of which we know next to nothing. But their symbolism—apart from their outward form—is evidently the same as in Egypt, India and elsewhere. As before the great pyramid of Cheops in Cairo, so before the great mound, 100 feet high, on the plain of Cahokia—near St. Louis (Missouri)—which measures 700 feet long by 800 feet broad at the base, and covers upwards of eight acres of ground, having 20,000,000 cubic feet of contents, and the mound on the banks of Brush Creek, Ohio, so accurately described by Squier and Davis, one knows not whether to admire more the geometrical precision, prescribed by the wonderful and mysterious builders in the form of their monuments, or the hidden symbolism they evidently sought to express. The Ohio mound represents a serpent, upwards of 1,000 feet long. Gracefully coiled in capricious curves, it terminates in a triple coil at the tail.

The embankment constituting the effigy is upwards of five feet in height, by thirty feet at the centre of the body, slightly diminishing towards the tail.*

The neck is stretched out and its mouth wide open, holding within its jaws an oval figure.

Formed by an embankment four feet in height, this oval is perfectly regular in outline, its transverse and conjugate diameters being 160 and eighty feet respectively, say the surveyors. The whole represents the universal cosmological idea of the serpent and the egg. This is easy to surmise. But how came this great symbol of the Hermetic wisdom of old Egypt to find itself represented in North America? How is it that the sacred buildings found in Ohio and elsewhere, these squares, circles, octagons, and other geometrical figures, in which one recognizes so easily the prevailing idea of the Pythagorean sacred numerals, seem copied from The Book of Numbers? Apart from the complete silence as to their origin, even among the Indian tribes, who have otherwise preserved their own traditions in every case, the antiquity of these ruins is proved by the existence of the largest and most ancient forests growing on the buried cities. The prudent archæologists of America have generously assigned them 2,000 years. But by whom built, and whether their
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* Smithsonian contributions to Knowledge, vol. i.


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authors migrated, or disappeared beneath victorious armies, or were swept out of existence by some direful epidemic, or a universal famine, are questions, “probably beyond the power of human investigation to answer,” they say. The earliest inhabitants of Mexico, of whom history has any knowledge—more hypothetical than proven—are the Toltecs. These are supposed to have come from the North and believed to have entered Anahuac in the seventh century A.D. They are also credited with having constructed in Central America, where they spread in the eleventh century, some of the great cities whose ruins still exist. In this case it is they who must also have carved the hieroglyphics that cover some of the relics. How is it, then, that the pictorial system of writing of Mexico, which was used by the conquered people and learned by the conquerors and their missionaries, does not Yet furnish the keys to the hieroglyphics of Palenque and Copan, not to mention those of Peru? And these civilized Toltecs themselves, who were they, and whence did they come? And who are the Aztecs that succeeded them? Even among the hieroglyphical systems of Mexico, there were some which the foreign interpreters were precluded. the possibility of studying. These were the so-called schemes of judicial astrology “given but not explained in Lord Kingsborough’s published collection,” and set down as purely figurative and symbolical, “intended only for the use of the priests and diviners and possessed of an esoteric significance.” Many of the hieroglyphics on the monoliths of Palenque and Copan are of the same character. The “priests and diviners” were all killed off by the Catholic fanatics—the secret died with them.

Nearly all the mounds in North America are terraced and ascended by large graded ways, sometimes square, often hexagonal, octagonal or truncated, but in all respects similar to the teocallis of Mexico, and to the topes of India. As the latter are attributed throughout this country to the work of the five Pândus of the Lunar Race, so the cyclopean monuments and monoliths on the shores of Lake Titicaca, in the republic of Bolivia, are ascribed to giants, the five exiled brothers ‘‘from beyond the mounts.’’ They worshipped the moon as their progenitor and lived before the time of the “Sons and Virgins of the Sun.” Here, the similarity of the Aryan with the South American tradition is again but too obvious, and the Solar and Lunar races—the Surya Vansha and the Chandra Vansha—reäppear in America.

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One hundred and sixty miles long and from fifty to eighty broad, and discharges through the valley of El Desaguadero, to the south-east into another lake, called. Lake Aullagas, which is probably kept at a lower level by evaporation or filtration, since it has no known outlet. The surface of the lake is 12,846 feet above the sea, and it is the most elevated body of waters of similar size in the world.

As the level of its waters has very much decreased in the historical period, it is believed on good grounds that they once surrounded the elevated spot on which are found the remarkable ruins of Tiahuanaco.

The latter are without any doubt aboriginal monuments pertaining to an epoch which preceded the Incal period, much as the Dravidian and other aboriginal peoples preceded the Aryans in India. Although the traditions of the Incas maintain that the great law-giver and teacher of the Peruvians, Manco Capac—the Manu of South America—diffused his knowledge and influence from this centre, yet the statement is unsupported by facts. If the original seat of the Aymara, or “Inca” race was there, as claimed by some, how is it that neither the Incas, nor the Aymaras, who dwell on the shores of the lake to this day, nor yet the ancient Peruvians, had the slightest knowledge concerning their history? Beyond a vague tradition which tells us of “giants” having built these immense structures in one night, we do not find the faintest clue. And we have every reason to doubt whether the Incas are of the Aymara race at all. The Incas claim their descent from Manco Capac, the son of the Sun, and the Aymaras claim this legislator as their instructor and the founder of the era of their civilization. Yet neither the Incas of the Spanish period could prove the one, nor the Aymaras the other. The language of the latter is quite distinct from the Inichua—the tongue of the Incas; and they were the only race that refused to give up their language when conquered by the descendants of the Sun, as Dr. Heath tells us.

The ruins afford every evidence of the highest antiquity. Some are built on a pyramidal plan, as most of the American mounds are, and cover several acres; while the monolithic doorways, pillars and stone idols, so elaborately carved, are “sculptured in a style wholly different from any other remains of art yet found in America.” D’Orbigny speaks of the ruins in the most enthusiastic manner. He says:

These monuments consist of a mound raised nearly 100 feet, surrounded with pillars—of temples from 600 to 1,200 feet in length, opening precisely towards the east, and adorned with colossal angular columns—of porticoes of a single stone, covered with reliefs of skilful execution, displaying symbolical representations of the Sun, and the condor, his messenger—of basaltic statues loaded with bas-reliefs,


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in which the design of the carved head is half Egyptian—and lastly, of the interior of a palace formed of enormous blocks of rock, completely hewn, whose dimensions are often twenty-one feet in length, twelve in breadth, and six in thickness. In the temples and palaces, the portals are not inclined, as among those of the Incas, but perpendicular; and their vast dimensions, and the imposing masses of which they are composed, surpass in beauty and grandeur all that were afterwards built by the sovereigna of Cuzco.

Like the rest of his fellow-explorers, M. D’Orbigny believes these ruins to have been the work of a race far anterior to the Incas.

Two distinct styles of architecture are found in these relics of Lake Titicaca. Those of the island of Coati, for instance, bear every feature in common with the ruins of Tiahuanaco ; so do the vast blocks of stone elaborately sculptured, some of which, according to the report of the surveyors in 1846, measure

Three feet in width by eighteen feet in length, and six feet in thickness;

while on some of the islands of the Lake Titicaca there are monuments of great extent;

But of true Peruvian type, believed to be the remains of temples destroyed by the Spaniards.

The famous sanctuary, with the human figure in it, belongs to the former. Its doorway, ten feet high, thirteen feet broad, with an opening six feet four inches by three feet two inches, is cut from a single stone.

Its east front has a cornice, in the centre of which is a human figure of strange form, crowned with rays, interspersed with serpents with crested heads. On each side of this figure are three rows of square compartments, filled with human and other figures, of apparently symbolic design.

Were this temple in India, it would undoubtedly be attributed to Shiva; but it is at the Antipodes, where neither the foot of a Shaiva nor one of the Naga tribe has ever penetrated to the knowledge of man, though the Mexican Indians have their Nargal, or chief sorcerer and serpent worshipper. The ruins standing on an eminence, which, from the water-marks around it, seems to have been formerly an island in Lake Titicaca, and:

The level of the lake now being 135 feet lower, and its shores twelve miles distant, this fact, in conjunction with others, warrants the belief that these remains antedate any others known in America.*

Hence, all these relics are unanimously ascribed to the same

Unknown and mysterious people who preceded the Peruvians, as the Tulhuatecas or Toltecs did the Aztecs. It seems to have been the seat of the highest and most
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* New .American Cyclopædia, art. “Teotihuacan.”


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ancient civilization of South America and of a people who have left the most gigantic monuments of their power and skill.

And these monuments are all either Dracontias—temples sacred to the Snake—or temples dedicated to the Sun.

Of this same character are the ruined pyramids of Teotihuacan and the monoliths of Palenque and Copan. The former are some eight leagues from the city of Mexico on the plain of Otumla, and are considered among the most ancient in the land. The two principal ones are dedicated to the Sun and Moon, respectively. They are built of cut stone, square, with four stories and a level area at the top. The larger, that of the Sun, is 221 feet high, 680 feet square at the base, and covers an area of eleven acres, nearly equal to that of the great pyramid of Cheops. And yet, the pyramid of Cholula, higher than that of Teotihuacan by ten feet according to Humboldt, and having 1,400 feet square at the base, covers an area of forty-five acres!

It is interesting to hear what the earliest writers—time historians who saw them during the first conquest—say even of some of the most modern of these buildings, of the great temple of Mexico, among others. It consisted of an immense square area, Surrounded In a wall of stone and lime, eight feet thick, with battlements, ornamented with many stone figures in the form of serpents.

says one. Cortez shows that 500 houses might be easily placed within its enclosure. It was paved with polished stones, so smooth, that ‘‘the horses of the Spaniards could not move over them without slipping,’’ writes Bernal Diaz. In connection with this, we must remember that it was not the Spaniards who conquered the Mexicans, but their horses. As a horse was never seen before by this people in America, until the Europeans landed it on the coast, the natives, though excessively Brave, were so awestruck at the sight of horses and the roar of the artillery, that they took the Spaniards to be of divine origin and sent them human beings as sacrifices. This superstitious panic is sufficient to account for the fact that a handful of men could so easily conquer incalculable thousands of warriors.

According to G6mara, the four walls of the enclosure of the temple corresponded with the cardinal points. In the centre of this gigantic area arose the great temple, an immense pyramidal structure of eight stages, faced with stone, 300 feet square at the base and 120 feet in height, truncated, with a level summit, upon which were situated two


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towers, the shrines of the divinities to whom it was consecrated—Tezcatlipoca and Huitzlipochtli. It was here that the sacrifices were performed, and the eternal fire maintained. Clavigero tells us that, besides this great pyramid, there were forty other similar structures consecrated to various divinities. The one called Tezcacalli,

The House of the Shining Mirrors, sacred to Tezcatlipoca, the God of Light, the Soul of the World, the Vivifier, the Spiritual Sun.

The dwellings of priests, who, according to Zarate, amounted to 8,000, were near by, as well as the seminaries and the schools. Ponds and fountains, groves and gardens, in which flowers and sweet smelling herbs were cultivated for use in certain sacred rites and the decoration of altars, were in abundance; and, so large was the inner yard, that:

Eight thousand or 10,000 persons had sufficient room to dance in it upon their solemn festivities,

says Solis. Torquemada estimates the number of such temples in the Mexican empire at 40,000, but Clavigero, speaking of the majestic Teocalli (literally, houses of God) of Mexico, estimates the number higher.

So wonderful are the features of resemblance between the ancient shrines of the Old and the New World that Humboldt remains unable to express his surprise. He exclaims:

What striking analogies exist between the monuments of the old continents and those of the Toltecs who built these colossal structure, truncated pyramids, divided by layers, like the temple of Belus at Babylon ! Where did they take the model of these edifices?

The eminent naturalist might have also enquired whence the Mexicans got all their Christian virtues, being but poor pagans. The code of the Aztecs, says Prescott:

Evinces a profound respect for the great principles of morality, and as clear a perception of these principles as is to be found in the most cultivated nations.

Some of these are very curious inasmuch as they show such a similaritv to some of the Gospel ethics. “He who looks too curiously on a woman, commits adultery with his eyes,’’ says one of them. ‘‘ Keep peace with all; hear injuries with humility; God, who sees, will avenge you,” declares another. Recognizing but one Supreme Power in Nature, they addressed it as the Deity

By whom see live, omnipresent, that knoweth all thoughts and giveth all gifts, without whom man is as nothing; invisible, incorporeal, of perfection and purity, under whose wings we find repose and a sure defence.


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And, in naming their children, says Lord Kingsborough:

They used a ceremony strongly resembling the Christian rite of baptism, the lips and bosom of the infant being sprinkled with water, and the Lord implored to wash away the sin that was given to it before the foundation of the world, so that the child might be born anew. Their laws were perfect; justice, contentment and peace reigned in the kingdom of these benighted heathens, when the brigands and the Jesuits of Cortez landed at Tabasco. A century of murders, robbery, and forced conversion, were sufficient to transform this quiet, inoffensive and wise people into what they are now. They have fully benefited by dogmatic Christianity. And he, who ever went to Mexico, knows what that means. The country is full of bloodthirsty Christian fanatics, thieves, rogues, drunkards, debauchees, murderers, and the greatest liars the world has ever produced! Peace and glory to your ashes, 0 Cortez and Torquemada! In this case at least, will you never he permitted to boast of tile enlighten roar Christianity has poured out on the poor, and once virtuous heathens!

III.

The ruins of Central America are no less imposing. Massively built, with walls of a great thickness, they are usually marked by broad stairways leading to the principal entrance. When composed of several stories, each successive story is usually smaller than that below it, giving the structure the appearance of a pyramid of several stages. The front walls, either made of stone or stuccoed, are covered with elaborately carved, symbolical figures; and the interior divided into corridors and dark chambers, with arched ceilings, the roofs supported by overlapping courses of stones,

Constituting a pointed arch, corresponding in type with the earliest monuments of the Old World.

Within several chambers at Palenque, tablets, covered with sculptures and hieroglyphics of fine design and artistic execution, were discovered by Stephens. In Honduras, at Copan, a whole city—temples, houses and grand monoliths intricately carved—was unearthed in an old forest by Catherwood and Stephens. The sculpture and general style of Copan are unique, and no such style or even anything approaching it has been found anywhere else, except at Quirigua and in the islands of Lake Nicaragua. No one can decipher the weird hieroglyphical inscriptions on the altars and monoliths. With the exception of a few works of uncut stone,


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To Copan we may safely assign an antiquity higher than to any of the other monuments of Central America with which we are acquainted,

says the New American Cyclopædia. At the period of the Spanish conquest Copan was already a forgotten ruin, concerning which only the vaguest traditions existed.

No less extraordinary are the remains of the different epochs in Peru. The ruins of the temple of the Sun at Cuzco are yet imposing, notwithstanding that the depredatory hand of the Vandal Spaniard passed heavily over it. If we may believe the narratives of the conquerors themselves, they found it on their arrival, a kind of fairy-tale castle. With its enormous circular stone wall completely encompassing the principal temple, chapels and buildings, it is situated in the very heart of the city, and even its remains justly provoke the admiration of the traveller.

Aqueducts opened within the sacred enclosure; and within it were gardens and walks among shrubs and flowers of gold and silver, made in imitation of the productions of nature. It was attended by 4,000 priests. The ground for 200 paces around the temple was considered holy, and no one was allowed to pass within this boundary but with naked feet.*

Besides this great temple, there were 300 other inferior temples at Cuzco. Next to the latter in beauty was the celebrated temple of Pachacamac. Still another great temple of the Sun is mentioned by Humboldt; and,

At the base of the hill of Cannar was formerly a famous shrine of the Sun, consisting of the universal symbol of that luminary, formed by nature upon the face of a great rock.

Roman tells us

That the temples of Peru were built upon high ground or the top of the hills, and were surrounded by three and four circular embankments of earth, one within the other.

Other remains seen by myself—especially mounds—are surrounded by two, three and four circles of stones. Near the town of Cayambe, on the very spot on which Ulloa saw and described an ancient Peruvian temple, “perfectly circular in form and open at the top,” there are several such cromlechs. Quoting from an article in the Madras Times of 1876, Mr. J. H. Rivett-Carnac gives, in his Arch Notes, the following information upon some curious mounds in the neighbour hood of Bangalore: †
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* La Vega.

† ‘‘On Ancient Sculpturing on Rocks in Kumaon, India, similar to those found on Monoliths and Rocks in Europe.” By J. H. Rivett-Carnac, Bengal Civil Service, C.I.E., F.S.A., M.R.A.S., F.G.S., etc.


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Near the village there are at least one hundred cromlechs plainly to be seen. These cromlechs are surrounded by circles of stones, some of them with concentric circles three and four deep. One very remarkable in appearance has four circles of large stones around it, and is called by the natives “Pandavara Gudi” or the temple of the Pandus. This is supposed to be the first instance where the natives popularly imagine a structure of this kind to have been the temple of a bygone, if not of a mythical, race. Many of these structures have a triple circle, some a double, and a few single circles of stone round them.

In the thirty-fifth degree of latitude, the Arizona Indians in North America have their rude altars to this day, surrounded by precisely such circles, and their sacred spring, discovered by Major Alfred R. Calhoun, F.G.S., of the United States Army Survey Commission, is surrounded with the same symbolical wall of stones as is found in Stonehenge and elsewhere.

By far the most interesting and full account we have read for a long time of the Peruvian antiquities is that from the pen of Dr. Heath, of Kansas, already mentioned. Condensing the general picture of the remains into the limited space of a few pages in a periodical,* he yet manages to present a masterly and vivid picture of the wealth of these remains. More than one speculator has grown rich in a few days through his desecrations of the “huacas.” The remains of count less generations of unknown races who had slept there undisturbed— who knows for how many ages?—are now left by the sacrilegious treasure-hunter to crumble into dust under the tropical sun. Dr. Heath’s conclusions, more startling, perchance, than his discoveries, are worthy of being recorded. We will repeat in brief his descriptions:

In the Jeguatepegue valley in Peru in 10° 24' S. latitude, four miles north of the port of Pacasmayo, is the Jeguatepegue river. Near it, beside the southern shore, is an elevated platform “one-fourth of a mile square and forty feet high, all of adobes, or sun-burnt bricks. A wall of fifty feet in width connects it with another,” 150 feet high, 200 feet across the top, and 500 at the base, nearly square. This latter was built in sections of rooms, ten feet square at the base, six feet at the top and about eight feet high. All of this same class of mounds—temples to worship the sun, or fortresses, as they may be—have on the northerly side an incline for an entrance. Treasure-seekers have cut into this one about half-way, and it is said 150,000 dollars’ worth of gold and silver ornaments were found.

Here many thousands of men were buried, and beside the skeletons were found in abundance ornaments of gold, silver, copper, coral beads, etc.
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* See Kansas City Review of Science and Industry, November, 1878


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On the north side of the river are the extensive ruins of a walled city, two miles wide by six long. . . follow the river to the mountains. All along you pass ruin after ruin and huaca after huaca (burial places).

At Tolon there is another ruined city. Five miles further up the river

There is an isolated boulder of granite, four and six feet in its diameters, covered with hieroglyphics; fourteen miles further, a point of mountain at the junction of two ravines is covered to a height of more than fifty feet with the same class of hieroglyphics—birds, fishes, snakes, cats, monkeys, men, sun, moon, and many odd and now unintelligible forms. The rock on which these are cut is a silicated sand stone, and many of the lines are an eighth of an inch deep. In one large stone there are three holes, twenty to thirty inches deep, six inches in diameter at the orifice and two at the apex . . .At Anchi, on the Rimac river, upon the face of a perpendicular wall 200 feet above the river-bed, there are two hieroglyphics, representing an imperfect B and a perfect D. In a crevice below them, near the river, were found buried 25,000 dollars’ worth of gold and silver. When the Incas learned of the murder of their chief, what did they do with the gold they were bringing for his ransom ? Rumour says they buried it. . . May not these markings at Yonan tell something, since they are on the road and near to the Incal city?

The above was published in November, 1878; when in October, 1877, in Isis Unveiled (vol. i. p. 595), I gave a legend which, from circumstances too long to explain, I hold to be perfectly trustworthy, relating to these same buried treasures for the Inca’s ransom, a journal more satirical than polite classed it with the tales of Baron Münchausen. The secret was revealed to me by a Peruvian. At Arica, going from Lima, there stands an enormous rock, which tradition points to as the tomb of the Incas. As the last rays of the setting Still strike the face of the rock one can see curious hieroglyphics inscribed upon it. These characters form one of the land-marks that show how to get at the immense treasures buried in subterranean corridors. The details are given in Isis, and I will not repeat them. Strong corroborative evidence is now found in more than one recent scientific work, and the statement may be less pooh—poohed now than it was then. Some miles beyond Vonan, on a ridge of a mountain 700 feet above the river, are the walls of another city. Six and twelve miles further are extensive walls and terraces seventy-eight miles from the coast “you zig-zag up the mountain side 7,000 feet, then descend 2,000” to arrive at Coxamolca, the city where, unto this day, stands the house in which Atahualpa, the unfortunate Inca, was held prisoner by the treacherous Pizarro. It is the house which the Inca “promised to fill with gold


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as high as he could reach in exchange for his liberty” in 1532; he did fill it with 17,500,000 dollars’ worth of gold, and so kept his promise. But Pizarro, the swineherd of Spain and the worthy acolyte of the priest Hernando de Lugues, murdered him, notwithstanding his pledge of honour. Three miles from this town

There is a wall of unknown make, cemented; the cement is harder than stone itself. . . At Chepen there is a mountain with a wall twenty feet high, the summit being almost entirely artificial. Fifty miles south of Pacaomayo, between the seaport of Huanchaco and Truxillo, are the ruins of Chan-Chan, the capital city of the Chimoa kingdom. . . . The road from the port to the city crosses these ruins, entering by a causeway about four feet from the ground, and leading from one great mass of ruins to another; beneath tins is a tunnel.

Be they forts, castles, palaces, or burial mounds called “huacas,” all bear the name “huaca.” Hours of wandering on horseback among these ruins give only a confused idea of them, nor can any explorers there point out what were palaces and what were not. . . . The highest enclosures must have cost an immense amount of labour.

To give an idea of the wealth found in the country by the Spaniards we copy the following, taken from the records of the municipality in the city of Truxillo by Dr. Heath. It is a copy of the accounts that are found in the Book of Fifths of the Treasury in the years 1577 and 1578, of the treasures found in the “Huaca of Toledo” by one man alone.

Firstly.—In Truxillo, Peru, on July 22nd, 1577, Don Gracia Gutierrez de Toledo presented himself at the royal treasury, to give into the royal chest a fifth. He brought a bar of gold 19 carats ley and weighing 2,400 Spanish dollars, of which the fifth being 708 dollars, together with 1½ per cent, to the chief assayer, were deposited in the royal box.

Secondly.—On December 12th he presented himself with five bars of gold, 15 and 19 carats ley, weighing 8,918 dollars.

Thirdly.—On January 7th, 1578, he came with his fifth of large bars and plates of gold, 115 in number, 15 to 20 carats 1ey, weighing 153280 dollars.

Fourthly—On March 8th he brought sixteen bars of gold, 14 to 21 carats ley, weighing 21,118 dollars.

Fifthly.—On April 5 he brought different ornaments of gold, being little belts of gold and patterns of corn-heads and other things, of 14 carats ley, weighing 6,272 dollars.

Sixthly.—On April 20th he brought three small bars of gold, 20 carats ley, weighing 4,170 dollars.

Seventhly.—On July 12th he came with forty.seven bars, 14 to 21 carats ley, weighing 77,312 dollars.


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Eightly.—On the same day he came back with another portion of gold and ornaments of corn-heads and pieces of effigies of animals, weighing 4,704 dollars.

The sum of these eight bringings amounted to 278,174 gold dollars or Spanish ounces. Multiplied by sixteen gives 4,450,784 silver dollars. Deducting the royal fifth 985,953.75 dollars—left 3,464,830.25 dollars as Toledo’s portion! Even after this great haul, effigies of different animals of gold were found from time to time. Mantles also adorned with square pieces of gold, as well as robes made with feathers of divers colours, were dug up. There is a tradition that in the huaca of Toledo there were two treasures, known as the great and little fish. The smaller only has been found. Between Huacho and Supe, the latter being 120 miles north of Callao, near a point called Atahuangri, there are two enormous mounds resembling the Campana and San Mignel, of the Huatica valley, soon to be described. About five miles from Patavilea (south, and near Supe) is a place called Paramonga,’’ or the fortress. The ruins of a fortress of great extent are here visible; the walls are of tempered clay, about six feet thick The principal building stood on an eminence, but the walls were continued to the foot of it, like regular circumvallations; the ascent winding round the hill like a labyrinth, having many angles which probably served as outworks to defend the place. In this neighbourhood much treasure has been excavated, all of which must have been concealed by the pre-Historic Indians, as we have no evidence of the Incas ever having occupied this part of Peru after they had subdued it.

Not far from Ancon, on a circuit of six to eight miles,

On every side you see skulls, legs, arms and whole skeletons lying about in the sand. . . At Parmayo, fourteen miles further down north,

and on the sea—shore is another great burying-ground. Thousands of skeletons lie about, thrown out by the treasure-seekers. It has more than half a mile of cutting through it. . . . It extends up the face of the hill from the sea-shore to the height of about 8oo feet.

. . .Whence come these hundreds and thousands of peoples who are buried at Ancon ? Time and time again the archæologist finds himself face to face with such questions, to winch he can only shrug his shoulder and say with the natives—’’Quien Sabe?’’—who knows?

Dr. Hutchinson writes, under date of October 3oth, 1872, in the South Pacific Times :

I am come to the conclusion that Chancay is a great city of the dead, or has been an immense ossuary of Peru; for go where you will, on a mountain top or level plain, or by the sea-side, you meet at every turn skulls and bones of all description.

In the Huatica valley, which is an extensive ruin, there are seventeen mounds, called huacas,’’ although, remarks the writer, they present more the form of fortresses or castles than burying-grounds.” A triple wall surrounded the city. These walls are often three yards


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in thickness and from fifteen to twenty feet high. To the east of these is the enormous mound called Huaca of Pando . . and the great ruins of fortresses, which natives entitle Huaca of the Bell. La Campana, the Huacas of Pando, consisting of a series of large and small mounds, and extending over a stretch of ground incalculable without being measured, form a colossal accumulation. The ‘‘Bell’’ mound is 110 feet high. Towards Callao there is an oblong plateau (278 yards long and ninety-six across), having on the top eight gradations of declivity, each from one to two yards lower than its neighbour, and making a total in length and breadth of about 278 yards, according to the calculation of J. B. Steere, of Michigan, Professor of Natural History.

The square plateau first mentioned, at the base consists of two divisions each measuring a perfect square forty-seven to forty eight yards; the two joining form the square of ninety-six yards. Besides this, is another square of forty-seven to forty-eight yards. On the top, returning again, we find the same symmetry of measurement in the multiples of twelve, nearly all the ruins in this valley being the same, which is a fact for the curious. Was it by accident or design?

The mound is a truncated pyramidal form, and is calculated to contain a mass of 14,641,820 cubit feet of material. . . . The “Fortress” is a huge structure, eighty feet high and 150 yards in measurement. Many large square rooms show their outlines on the top, but are filled with earth. Who brought this earth here, and with what object was the filling-up accomplished? The work of obliterating all space in these rooms with loose earth must have been almost as great as the construction of the building itself. . . . Two miles south we find another similar structure, more spacious and with a greater number of apartments. . . It is nearly 170 yards in length, and 168 in breadth, and ninety-eight feet high. The whole of these ruins• • • were enclosed by high walls of adobes—large mud bricks— some from one to two yards in thickness, length and breadth. The “huaca” of the “Bell” contains about 20,220,840 cubic feet of material, while that of “San Miguel” has 25,650,800. These two buildings, with their terraces, parapets and bastions, with a large number of rooms and squares, are now filled up with earth!

Near “Mira Flores” is Ocheran—the largest mound in the Huatica valley. It has ninety-five feet of elevation and a width of fifty-five yards on the summit, and a total length of 428 yards, or 1,284 feet,


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another multiple of twelve. It is enclosed by a double wall, 8 yards in length by 700 across, thus enclosing 117 acres. Between Ocharas and the ocean are from fifteen to twenty masses of ruins like those already described.

The Inca temple of the Sun, like the temple of Cholula on the plains of Mexico, is a sort of vast terraced pyramid of earth. It is from 200 to 300 feet high, and forms a semi-lunar shape that is beyond half a mile in extent. Its top measures about ten acres square. Many of the walls are washed over with red paint, and are as fresh and bright as when centuries ago it was first put on. . . . In the Canete valley, opposite the Chincha Guano Islands, are extensive ruins, described by Squier. From the hill called “Hill of Gold,” copper and silver pins were taken like those used by ladies to pin their shawls; also tweezers the pulling out the hair of the eyebrows, eyelids and whiskers, as well as silver cups.

Dr. Heath observes:

The coast of Peru extends from Tumbey to the river Loa, a distance of 1,233 miles. Scattered over this whole extent there are thousands of ruins besides those just mentioned, while nearly every hill and spire of the mountains have upon them or about them some relic of the past; and in every ravine, from the coast to the central plateau, there are ruins of walls, cities, fortresses, burial-vaults and miles and miles of terraces and water-courses. Across the plateau and down the eastern slope of the Andes to the home of the wild Indian, and into the unknown inpenetrable forest, still you find them. In the mountains, however, where showers of rain and snow with the terrific thunder and lightning are nearly constant a numher of months each year, the ruins are different. Of granite, porphyritic lime and silicated sandstone, these massive, colossal, cyclopean structures have resisted the disintegration of time, geological transformations, earthquakes, and the sacrilegious, destructive hand of the warrior and treasure-seeker. The masonry composing these walls, temples, houses, towers, fortresses, or sepulchres, is uncemented, held in place by the inchne of the walls from the perpendicular, and adaptation of each stone to the Place destined for it, the stones having from six to many sides, each dressed and smoothed to fit another or others with such exactness that the blade of a small penknife cannot be inserted in any of the seams thus formed, whether in the central parts entirely hidden or on the internal or external surfaces. These stones, selected with no reference to uniformity in shape or size, vary from one-half cubic foot to 1,500 cubic feet solid contents, and if, in the many, many millions of stones you could find one that would fit in time place of another, it would he purely accidental. In “Triumph Street,” in time city of Cuzco, in a part of the wall of the ancient house of the Virgins of the Sun, is a very large stone, known as “the stone of the twelve corners,” since it is joined with those that surround it, by twelve faces, each having a different angle. Besides these twelve


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faces it has its internal one, and no one knows how many it has on its back that is hidden in the masonry. In the wall in the centre of the Cuzco fortress there are stones thirteen feet high, fifteen feet long, and eight feet thick, and all have been quarried miles away. Near this city there is an oblong smooth boulder, eighteen feet in its longer axis and twelve feet in its lesser. On one side are large niches cut out, in which a man can stand, and, by swaying his body, can cause the stone to rock. These niches apparently were made solely for this purpose. One of the most wonderful and extensive of these works in stone is that called Ollantay-Tambo, a ruin situated thirty miles north of Cuzco, in a narrow ravine on the bank of the river Urubamba. It consists of a fortress constructed on the top of a sloping, craggy eminence. Extending from it to the plain below is a stony stairway. At the top of the stairway are six large slabs, twelve feet high, five feet wide and three feet thick, side by side, having between them and on top narrow strips of stone about six inches wide, frames, as it were, to the slabs, and all being of dressed stone. At the bottom of the hall, part of which was made by hand, and at the foot of the stairs, a stone wall ten feet wide and twelve feet high extends some distance into the plain. In it are many niches all facing the sooth.

The ruins in the islands in Lake Titicaca, where local history begins, have often been described.

At Tiahuanaco, a few miles south of the lake, there are stones in the form of columns, partly dressed, placed in line at certain distances from each other, and having an elevation above the ground of from eighteen to twenty feet. In this same line there is a monolithic doorway, now broken, ten feet high by thirteen wide. The space cut out for the door is seven feet four inches high by three feet two inches wide. The whole face of the stone above the door is engraved. Another, similar, but smaller, lies on tho ground beside it. These stones are of hard porphyry, and differ geologically from the surrounding rock; hence we infer they must have been brought from elsewhere.

At “Chavin de Huanta.’’ a town in the province of Huari, there are some ruins worthy of note. The entrance to them is by an alley.way, six feet wide and nine feet high, roofed over with sandstone partly dressed, of more than twelve feet in length. On each side there are rooms twelve feet wide, roofed over by large pieces of sandstone, one and a half feet thick and front six to nine feet wide. The walls of the rooms are six feet thick and have some loopholes in them, probably for ventilation. In the floor of thus passage there is a very narrow entrance to a subterranean passage that passes beneath the river to the other side. From this many huacas. stone drinking vessels, instruments of copper and silver, and a skeleton of an Indian sitting were taken. The greater part of these ruins were situated over aqueducts. The bridge to these castles is made of three stones of dressed granite, twenty-four feet long, two feet wide by one and a half thick. Some of the granite stones are covered with hieroglyphics.

At Corralones, twenty-fonr miles front Arequipa, there are hieroglyphics engraved on masses of granite, which appear as if painted with chalk. There are figures of men, llamas, circles, parallelograms, letters like an R and an 0, and even remains of a system of astronomy.

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At Huaytar, in the province of Castro Virreina, there is an edifice with the same engravings.

At Nazca, in the province of Ica, there are some wonderful ruins of aqueducts, four to five feet high and three feet wide, very straight, double-walled, of unfinished stone, flagged on top.

At Quelap, not far from Chochapayas, there have lately been examined some extensive works; a wall of dressed stone, 560 feet wide, 3,660 long, and 150 feet high. The lower part is solid. Another wall above this has 600 feet length, 500 width, and the same elevation of 150 feet. There are niches over both walls three feet long, one and a half wide and thick, containing the remains of the ancient inhabitants, some naked, others enveloped in shawls of cotton of distinct colours and well embroidered.

Following the entrances of the second and highest wall, there are other sepulchres like small ovens, six feet high and twenty-four in circumference; in their base are flags, upon which some cadavers reposed. On the north side there is on the perpendicular rocky side of the mountain a brick wall, having small windows, 600 feet from the bottom. No reason for this, nor means of approach, can now be found. The skilful construction of utensils of gold and silver that were found here, the ingenuity and solidity of this gigantic work of dressed stone, make it also probably of pre-Incal date. . . Estimating 500 ravines in the 1,200 miles of Peru, and ten miles of terraces of fifty tiers to each ravine, which would only be five miles of twenty-five tiers to each side, we have 250,000 miles of stone wall, averaging three to four feet high—enough to encircle this globe ten times. Surprising as these estimates may seem, I am fully convinced that all actual measurement would more than double them, for these ravines vary from thirty to 100 miiles in length. While at San Mateo, a town in the valley of the river Rimac, where the mountains rise to a height of 1,500 or 2,000 feet above the river bed, I counted 200 tiers, none of which were less than four and many more than six miles long.

Dr. Heath then very pertinently enquires:

Who then were these people, cutting through sixty miles of granite; transplanting blocks of hard porphyry, of Baalbec dimensions, miles from the place where quarried, across valleys thousands of feet deep, over mountains, along plains, leaving no trace of how or where they carried them; people (said to be) ignorant of the use of wood, with the feeble llama their only beast of burden; who after having brought these stones fitted them into other stones with mosaic precision; terracing thousands of miles of mountain side; building lulls of adobes and earth, and huge cities; leaving works in clay, stone, copper, silver, gold and embroidery, many of which cannot he duplicated at the present age; people apparently vying with Dives in riches, Hercules in strength and energy, and the ant and bee industry?

Callao was submerged in 1746 and entirely destroyed. Lima was ruined in 1678; in 1746 only twenty houses out of 3,000 were left standing, while the ancient cities in the Huatica and Lurin valleys still remain in a comparatively good state of preservation. San Miguel de


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Puiro, founded by Pizarro in 1531, was entirely destroyed in 1855, while the old ruins near by suffered little. Arequipo was thrown down in August, 1868, but the ruins near show no change. In engineering, at least, the present may learn from the past. We hope to show that it may in most things else.

IV.

To refer all these cyclopean constructions, then, to the days of the Incas, is, as we have shown before, yet more inconsistent, and seems even a greater fallacy than that too common one of attributing every rock-temple of India to Buddhist excavators. As many authorities show—Dr. Heath among the rest—Inca history only dates back to the eleventh century A.D., and the period, from that time to the Conquest, is utterly insufficient to account for such grandiose and innumerable works; nor do the Spanish historians know much of them. Nor again, must we forget that the temples of heathendom were odious to the narrow bigotry of the Roman Catholic fanatics of those days; and that, whenever the chance offered, they either converted them into Christian churches or razed them to the ground. Another strong objection to the idea lies in the fact that the Incas were destitute of a written language, and that these antique relics of bygone ages are covered with hieroglyphics.

It is granted that the temple of the Sun, at Cuzco, was of Incal make, but that is the latest of the five styles of architecture visible in the Andes, each probably representing an age of human progress.

The hieroglyphics of Peru and Central America have been, are, and will most probably remain for ever as dead a letter to our cryptographers as they were to the Incas. The latter like the barbarous ancient Chinese and Mexicans kept their records by means of a quipus (or knot in Peruvian)—a cord, several feet long, composed of different coloured threads, from which a multicoloured fringe was suspended; each colour denoting a sensible object, and knots serving as ciphers. Says Prescott:

The mysterious science of the quipus supplied the Peruvians with the means of communicating their ideas to one another, and of transmitting them to future generations.

Each locality, however, had its own method of interpreting these elaborate records, hence a quipus was only intelligible in the place where it was kept. Dr. Heath writes:

Many quipus have been taken from the graves, in an excellent state of preservation in colour and texture, but the lips that alone could pronounce the verbal key have


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for ever ceased their function, and the relic-seeker has failed to note the exact spot where each was found, so that the records, which could tell so much we want to know, will remain sealed till all is revealed at the last day

—if anything at all is revealed then. But what is certainly as good as a revelation now, while our brains are in function, and our mind is acutely alive to some preeminently suggestive facts, is the incessant discoveries of archæology, ethnology and other sciences. It is the almost irrepressible conviction that man having existed upon earth millions of years—for all we know—the theory of cycles is the only plausible theory to solve the great problems of humanity, the rise and fall of numberless nations and races, and the ethnological differences among the latter. This difference—which, though as marked as the one between a handsome and intellectual European and a Digger Indian, yet makes the ignorant shudder and raise a great outcry at the thought of destroying the imaginary “great gulf between man and brute creation ‘‘—might thus be well accounted for. The Digger Indian, then, in company with many other savage, though to him superior, nations, which are evidently dying out to afford room to men and races of a superior kind, would have to be regarded in the same light as so many dying-out species of animals—and no more. Who can tell but that the forefathers of this flat-headed savage—forefathers who may have lived and prospered amidst the highest civilization before the glacial period—were in arts and sciences far beyond those of the present civilization, though, it may be, in quite another direction? That man has lived in America, at least 50,000 years ago, is now proved scientifically and remains a fact beyond doubt or cavil. In a lecture delivered at Manchester, in June last, by Mr. H. A. Allbutt, Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society, the lecturer stated the following:

Near New Orleans, in one part of the modern delta, in excavating for gas works, a series of beds, almost wholly made up of vegetable matter, were dug through. In the excavation, at a depth of sixteen feet from the upper surface, and beneath four buried forests, one on the top of the other, the labourers discovered some charcoal and the skeleton of a man, the cranium of which was reported to be that of the type of the aboriginal Red Indian race. To this skeleton Dr. Dowler ascribed all antiquity of some 50,000 years.

The irresistible cycle in the course of time brought down the descendants of the contemporaries of the late inhabitant of this skeleton, and intellectually as well as physically they have degenerated, as the present elephant has degenerated from his proud and monstrous forefather, the antediluvian Sivatherium, whose fossil remains are still


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found in the Himalayas, or, as the lizard has from the plesiosaurus. Why should man be the only species upon earth which has never changed in form since the first day of his appearance upon this planet? The fancied superiority of every generation of mankind over the preceding one is not yet so well established as to make it impossible for us to learn some day that, as in everything else, the theory is a two-sided question—incessant progress on the one side, and an as irresistible decadence on the other, of the cycle.

Even as regards knowledge and power, the advance, which some claim as a characteristic feature of humanity, is effected by exceptional individuals who arise in certain races under favourable circumstances only, and is quite compatible with long intervals of immobility, and even of decline,*

says a modern man of science. This point is corroborated by what we see in the modern degenerate descendants of the great and powerful races of ancient America—the Peruvians and the Mexicans.

How changed! How fallen from their greatness must have been the Incas, when a little band of 160 men could penetrate, uninjured, to their mountain homes, murder their worshipped kings and thousands of their warriors, and carry away their riches, and that, too, in a country where a few men with stones could resist an army successfully! Who could recognize in the present Inichua and Aymara Indians their noble ancestry?

Thus writes Dr. Heath, and his conviction that America was once united with Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, seems as firm as our own. There must exist geological and physical cycles as well as intellectual and spiritual; globes and planets, as well as races and nations, are born to grow, progress, decline and—die. Great nations split, scatter into small tribes, lose all remembrance of their integrity, gradually fall into their primitive state and—disappear, one after the other, from the face of the earth. So do great continents. Ceylon must have formed, once upon a time, part of the Indian continent. So, to all appearance, was Spain once joined to Africa, the narrow channel between Gibraltar and the latter continent having been once upon a time dry land. Gibraltar is full of large apes of the same kind as those which are found in great numbers on the opposite side of the African coast, whereas nowhere in Spain is either a monkey or ape to be found at any place whatever. And the caves of Gibraltar are also full of gigantic human bones, supporting the theory that they belong to an antediluvian race of men. The same Dr. Heath mentions the town
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* Journal of Science for February, art. “The Alleged Distinction between Man and Brute.’’


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of Eten in 10° S. latitude of America, in which the inhabitants of an unknown tribe of men speak a monosyllabic language that imported Chinese labourers understood from the first day of their arrival. They have their own laws, customs and dress, neither holding nor permitting communication with the outside world. No one can tell whence they came or when; whether it was before or after the Spanish Conquest. They are a living mystery to all who chance to visit them.

With such facts before us to puzzle exact science herself, and show our entire ignorance of the past, verily, we recognize no right of any man on earth— in geography or ethnology, in exact or abstract sciences—to tell his neighbour, “So far shalt thou go, and no further!”

But recognizing our debt of gratitude to Dr. Heath of Kansas, whose able and interesting paper has furnished us with such a number of facts and suggested such possibilities, we can do no better than quote his concluding reflections:

Thirteen thousand years ago, Vega or a lyræ was the north polar star; since then how many changes has she seen in our planet! How many nations and races spring into life, rise to their zenith of splendour, and then decay; and when we shall have been gone thirteen thousand years, and once more she resumes her post at the north, completing a “Platonic or Great Year,” think you that those who shall fill our places on the earth at that time will be more conversant with our history than we are of those that have passed? Verily might we exclaim, in terms almost psalmistic, “Great God, Creator and Director of the Universe, what is man that Thou art mindful of him!’’

Amen! ought to be the response of such as yet believe in a God who is “the Creator and Director of the Universe.”

WHICH FIRST—THE EGG OR THE

BIRD?

I Beg to present my warmest thanks to Mr. William Simpson, F.R.G.S., the distinguished artist and antiquary, who last year extended his researches to Peshawur valley and elsewhere, and thereby so enriched the Lahore Museum, for kindly presenting me with a copy of his very valuable paper, “Buddhist Architecture: Jellalabad,” enriched with seven illustrations. Our thanks are none the less due to Mr. Simpson, that in one point, and a very important one too, it is impossible for either our Society or myself, to agree with his conclusions. The feature of Mr. Simpson’s interesting and learned paper is, to quote the words of Mr. James Fergusson, F.R.G.S., Past Vice-President, that every “form of art was imported into India, and nothing ever came out of it” (the italics are mine). Mr. Simpson builds his hasty conclusions upon the fact that most of the capitals of the pillars and pilasters in the ruins of the valley of the Kabul river, are Corinthian, and “the bases and mouldings generally are such as are most unmistakably derived from the far west,” and finally that a “number of bell-shaped capitals, surmounted by double animals which look like a reminiscence of the pillars of Persepolis,” are also found in the caves of Karli, and other caves of India, as well as in the valley of Peshawur.

I will not limit my protest in this case to merely pointing to the words of Mr. Fergusson, who cautiously remarks that “the similarity is, however, so remote that it is hardly sufficient to sustain Mr. Simpson’s assertion that every form of art was imported into India, and nothing ever came out of it.” But I will humbly suggest that in a country like India, whose past history is a total blank, every attempt to decide the age of the monuments, or whether their style was original or borrowed, is now pretty much as open a question as it was a century ago. A new discovery may any day annihilate the theory of the day


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before. Lack of space forbids me to enter upon the discussion more elaborately. Therefore, I will permit myself only to say that Mr. Simpson’s present “assertion” remains as hypothetical as before. Otherwise, we would have to decide a priori, whether India or Greece borrowed from the other in other important cases now pending. Besides “Corinthian pillars” and “double animals,” once so dear to the Persepolitans, we have, here, the solar race of the Hari-Kula (Sun family) whose deeds must have been a copy of, or the model for, the labours and very name of the Grecian Sun-God Hercules. No less is it a matter for the consideration of philologists and archæologists which of the two—the Egyptian Sphinx, called by them Harimukh, or Har-M-Kho (the Sun in his resting-place) or the lofty Himalaya peak, also called Harimukh (the mouth of the Sun) in the range to the north of Cashmir, owes its name to the other.

THE PRALAYA OF MODERN

SCIENCE

[Vol. II. No. I, October, 1880.]

IF’ Science is right, then the future of our Solar System—hence of what we call the universe—offers but little of hope or consolation for our descendants. Two of her votaries, Messrs. Thompson and Klausius, have simultaneously reached the conclusive opinion that the universe is doomed at some future, and not very remote period, to destruction. Such is also the theory of several other astronomers, one and all describing the gradual cooling off and the final dissolution of our planet in terms nearly identical with those used by the greatest Hindu and even some of the Greek sages. One might almost think he were reading over again Manu, Kanâda, Kapila and others. The following are some of the newest theories of our Western pandits.

All the ponderable masses which must have separated themselves at the evolution or first appearance upon the earth from the primeval mass of matter, will reunite themselves again into one gigantic and boundless heavenly body, every visible movement in this mass will be arrested, and alone the molecular motion will remain, which will equally spread throughout this ponderous body under the form of heat,

say our scientists. Kanâda, the atomist, the old Hindu sage, said as much. He remarks:

In creation two atoms begin to be agitated, till at length they become separated from their former union and then unite, by which a new substance is formed, which possesses the qualities of the things from which it arose.

Lohschmidt, the Austrian professor of mathematics and astronomy and the English astronomer, Proctor, treating of the same subject, have both arrived at another and different view of the cause from which will come the future dissolution of the world. They attribute it to the gradual and slow cooling of the sun, which must result in the final extinction of this planet some day. All the planets will then, following


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the law of gravitation, tumble in upon the inanimate cold luminary, and coalesce with it into one huge body. If this thing should happen, says the German savant, and such a period begins, then it is impossible that it should last for ever, for such a state would not be one of absolute equilibrium. During a wonderful period of time, the sun, gradually hardening, will go on absorbing the radiant heat from the universal space, and concentrating it around itself.

But let us listen to Professor Tay upon this question. According to his opinion, the total cooling off of our planet will bring with it this unavoidable death. Animal and vegetable life which will have, previous to that event, shifted its quarters from the northern and already frozen regions to the equator, will then finally and for ever disappear from the surface of the globe, without leaving behind any trace of its existence. The earth will be wrapped in dense cold and darkness; the now ceaseless atmospheric motion will have changed into complete rest and silence; the last clouds will have poured upon the earth their last rain; the course of the streams and rivers bereaved of their vivifier and motor—the sun—will be arrested, and the seas frozen into a mass. Our globe will have no other light than the occasional glimmering of the shooting stars, which will not yet have ceased to penetrate into and become inflamed in our atmosphere. Perhaps, too, the sun under the influence of the cataclysm of the solar mass, will yet exhibit for a time some signs of vitality, and heat and light will reenter it for a short space of time; but the reaction will not fail to reassert itself, for the sun, powerless and dying, will again become extinct, and this time for ever. Such a change was remarked and actually took place in the now extinct constellations of the Swan, the Crown, and the Ophiucus in the first period of their cooling And the same fate will reach all the other planets, which, meanwhile, obeying the law of inertia, will go on revolving around the extinct sun Further on the learned astronomer depicts the last year of the expiring globe in the very words of a Hindu philosopher describing the Pralaya:

Cold and death blow from the northern pole, and spread along the entire face of the earth, nine-tenths of which have already expired. Life, hardly perceptible, is all concentrated at her heart—the equator—in the few remaining regions which are yet inhabited, and where reigns a complete confusion of tongues and nationalities. The surviving representatives of the human race are soon joined by the largest specimens of animals which are also driven there by the intense cold. One object, one aspiration, huddles together all this varied mass of beings—the struggle for life. Groups of animals without distinction of kinds crowd together


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into one herd in the hope of finding some heat in the rapidly freezing bodies; snakes threaten no more with their poisonous fangs, nor lions and tigers with their sharp claws; all that each of them begs for is life—nothing but life, life to the last minute! At last comes that last day, and the pale and expiring rays of the sun illuminate the following gloomy scene: the frozen bodies of the last of the human family, dead from cold and lack of air, on the shores of a likewise rapidly freezing motionless sea.

The words may not be precisely those of the learned professor, for they are utilized from notes taken in a foreign language, but the ideas are literally his. The picture is indeed gloomy, but the ideas, based upon scientific mathematical deductions, are not new, and we have read in a Hindu author of the pre-Christian era a description of the same catastrophe as given by Manu in a language far superior to this one. The general reader is invited to compare, and the Hindu reader to see in this one more corroboration of the great wisdom and knowledge of his forefathers, who anticipated the modern researches in almost every thing.

Strange noises are heard proceeding from every point. . . . These are the precursors of the Night of Brahmâ. Dusk rises at the horizon and the sun passes away. Gradually light pales, heat diminishes, uninhabitable spots multiply on the earth, the air becomes more and more rarefied, the springs of waters dry up, the great rivers see their waves exhausted, the ocean shows its sandy bottom, and plants die. . . . Life and motion lose their force; planets can hardly gravitate in space; they are extinguished one by one. Surya flickers and goes out; matter falls into dissolution, and Brahmâ (the creative force) merges back into Dyaus, the unrevealed, and his task being accomphshed he falls asleep. . .

Night for the universe has come! (By VAMADEVA.)

THE YOGA PHILOSOPHY*

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[ Vol. II. Nos. 2, 4 and 7, November,1880, and January and April, 1881.]

[Yoga, or human hibernation, being only prolonged sleep, it is interesting to notice that there are instances on record of individuals sleeping for weeks, months, nay, even for years.]

We have ourself known a Russian lady—Mme. Kashereninoff—whose sister, then an unmarried lady about twenty-seven, slept regularly for six weeks at a time. After that period she would awake, weak but not very exhausted, and ask for some milk, her habitual food. At the end of a fortnight, sometimes three weeks, she would begin to show the mistakable signs of somnolence, and at the end of a month fall into her trance again. Thus it lasted for seven years, she being considered by the populace a great saint. It was in 1841. What became of her after that we are unable to say.

[Yoga has been differently defined by different authorities. Some have defined it as mental abstraction some have defined it as silent prayer; some have defined it as the Union of the inspired to the expired air; some have defined it as the union of mind to soul. But by Yoga, I understand the art of suspending the respiration and circulation. Yoga is chiefly divided into Râja Yoga and Hatha Yoga.]

Here the author falls into an unmistakable error He confounds the Râja with the Hatha Yogins, whereas the former have nothing to do with the physical training of the Hatha nor with any other of the innumerable sects who have now adopted the name and emblems of Yogins. Wilson, in his Essays on the Religions of the Hindus, falls into the same confusion, and knows very little, if anything at all of the true Râja Yogins, who have no more to do with Shiva than with Vishnu, or any other deity. Alone, the most learned among the Shankara’s Dandins of Northern India, especially those who are settled in Râjputâna, would be able—if they were willing—to give some correct notions about the
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* The paragraphs in small type within square brackets are summarized from an article in The Theosophist to which H. P. B. attached notes. We insert them to render the comments intelligible.


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Râja Yogins; for these men, who have adopted the philosophical tenets of Shankara’s Vedânta are, moreover, profoundly versed in the doctrines of the Tantras—termed devilish by those who either do not understand them or reject their tenets with some preconceived object. If in speaking of the Dandins we have used above the phrase beginning with the conjunction “if,” it is because we happen to know how carefully the secrets of the real Yogins—nay even their existence itself—are denied within this fraternity. It is comparatively but lately that the usual excuse adopted by them, in support of which they bring their strongest authorities, who affirm that the Yoga state is unattainable in the present or Kali age, has been set afloat by them. “From the unsteadiness of the senses, the prevalence of sin in the Kali, and the shortness of life, how can exaltation by Yoga be obtained?” enquires Kâshikhanda. But this declaration can be refuted in two words and with their own weapons. The duration of the present Kali Yuga is 432,000 years, of which 4,979 have already expired. It is at the very beginning of Kali Yuga that Krishna and Arjuna were born. It is since Vishnu’s eighth incarnation that the country had all its historical Yogins, for as to the prehistoric ones, or those claimed as such, we do not find ourselves entitled to force them upon public notice. Are we then to understand that none of these numerous saints, philosophers and ascetics from Krishna down to the late Vishnu Brahmachari Bawa of Bombay had ever reached the “exaltation by Yoga”? To repeat this assertion is simply suicidal to their own interests.

It is not that among the Hatha Yogins—men who at times had reached through a physical and well-organized system of training the highest powers as “wonder workers”—there has never been a man worthy of being considered as a true Yogin. What we say is simply this: the Râja Yogin trains but his mental and intellectual powers, leaving the physical alone and making but little of the exercise of phenomena simply of a physical character. Hence it is the rarest thing in the world to find a real Yogin boasting of being one, or willing to exhibit such powers—though he does acquire them as well as the one practising Hath Yoga, but through another and far more intellectual system. Generally they deny these powers point-blank, for reasons but too well grounded. The former need not even belong to any apparent order of ascetics, and are oftener known as private individuals than members of a religious fraternity, nor need they necessarily be Hindus. Kabir, who was one of them, fulminates against most of the later sects


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of mendicants who occasionally become warriors when not simply brigands, and sketches them with a masterly hand:

I never beheld, such a Yogin , 0 brother! who, forgetting his doctrine, roves about in negligence. He follows professedly the faith of Mahadeva and calls himself an eminent teacher: the scene of his abstraction is the fair or the market. Maya. is the mistress of the false saint. When did Dattatraya demolish a dwelling When did Sukhadeva collect an armed host? When did Nârada mount a matchlock? When did Vyâsadeva blow a trumpet? etc.

Therefore, whenever the author—Dr. Paul—speaks of Râja Yoga, the Hatha simply is to be understood.

[Minute directions then follow for the practising of postures, the repetition of Mantras; and Yamyasana and Pranayama, or the inspiration and suspension of the breath.]

All the above are, as we said before, the practices of Hatha Yoga, and conducive but to the production of physical phenomena affording very rarely flashes of real clairvoyance, unless it be a kind of feverish state of artificial ecstasy. If we publish them, it is merely for the great value we set upon this information as liable to afford a glimpse of truth to sceptics, by showing them that even in the case of the Hatha Yogins, the cause for the production of the phenomena as well as the results obtained can be all explained scientifically; and that therefore there is no need to either reject the phenomena a priori and without investigation or to attribute them to any but natural, though occult powers, more or less latent in every man and woman.

[Dr. Paul next describes the eight varieties. Kumbhaka, which Yogins practise with a view to study the nature of the Soul. Khechari Mudra. is the lengthening the tongue by splitting and then “milking” it until it is long enough to be turned back into the gullet, and, with its point, to press the epiglottis and so close the rima glottidis, which confines the inspired air within the system, the lungs and intestines being completely filled. By this practice he becomes insensible to every thing that is external. ‘‘Without it,” says Dr. Paul, “He can never be absorbed into God.”]

As the science and study of Yoga Philosophy pertains to Buddhist, Lamaic and other religions supposed to be atheistical, i.e., rejecting belief in a personal deity, and as a Vedântin would by no means use such an expression, we must understand the term “absorption into God” in the sense of union with the Universal Soul, or Parama-Purusha—the primal or One Spirit.

[Directions are then given for the practice of Mulabandha, a process by which youth is said to be restored to an old man.]


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This posture will hardly have the desired effect unless its philosophy is well understood and it is practised from youth. The appearance of old age, when the skin has wrinkled and the tissues have relaxed, can be restored but temporarily, and with the help of Mâyâ. The Mulabandha is simply a process to throw oneself into sleep (thus gaining the regular hours of sleep).

[Ujjayi Kumbhaka. Assume the posture called Sukhasana, render the two nostrils free by the first Kumbhaka, inspire through both nostrils, fill the stomach and throat with the inspired air, and then expire slowly through the left nostril. He that practises this Kumbhaka cures all diseases dependent upon deficient inhala tion of oxygen.

And if anyone feels inclined to sneer at the novel remedy employed by the Yogins to cure “coryza,” “worms” and other diseases—which is only a certain mode of inhalation—his attention is invited to the fact that these illiterate and superstitious ascetics seem to have only anticipated the discoveries of modern science. One of the latest is reported in the last number of the New York Medical Record (Sept.,1888), under the title of “A New and Curious Plan for Deadening Pain.” The experiments were made by Dr Bonwill, a well-known physician of Philadelphia, in 1872, and have been since successfully applied as an an We quote it from the Dubuque Daily Telegraph :

In 1875 Dr. A. Hewson made a favourable report of his experience with it to the International Medical Congress, and at a recent meeting of the Philadelphia County Medical Society several papers were read on the subject, and much discussion followed. In using the method, the operator merely requests the patient to breathe rapidly, making about one hundred respirations per minute, ending in rapid puffing expirations. At the end of from two to five minutes an entire or partial absence of pain results for half a minute or more, and during that time teeth may be drawn or incisions made. The patient may be in any position, but that recommended is lying on the side, and it is generally best to throw a handkerchief over the face to prevent distraction of the patient’s attention. When the rapid breathing is first begun the patient may feel some exhilaration , following this comes a sensation of fulness in the head or dizziness. The face is at first flushed and afterwards pale or even bluish, the heart beats rather feebly and fast, but the sense of touch is not affected, nor is consciousness lost. The effect is produced more readily in females than in males, and in middle—aged more easily than in the old; children can hardly be made to breathe properly. It is denied that there is any possible danger. Several minor operations, other than dental ones, have been successfully made by this method, and it is claimed that in dentistry, surgery and obstetrics it may supplant the common anæsthetics. Dr. Hewson’s explanation is that rapid breathing diminishies the oxygenation of the blood, and that the resultant excess of carbonic acid temporarily poisons the nerve centres. Dr. Bonwill gives several explanations, one


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being the specific effect of carbonic acid, another the diversion of will-force produced by rapid voluntary muscular action, and, third, the damming up of the blood in the brain, due to the excessive amount of air passing into the lungs. The Record is not satisfied with the theories, but considers it well proved that pain may be deadened by the method, which it commends to the profession for the experimental determination of its precise value.

And if it be well proved that about one hundred respirations per minute ending in rapid puffing expirations can successfully deaden pain, then why should not a varied mode of inhaling oxygen be productive of other and still more extraordinary results, yet unknown to Science, but awaiting her future discoveries?

[After speaking at some length concerning Samâdhi and of the various branches of Raja Yoga, Dr. Paul’s remarks call forth the following note.]

This system, evolved by long ages of practice until it was brought to bear the above-described results, was not practised in India alone in the days of antiquity The greatest philosophers of all countries sought to acquire these powers, and, certainly, behind the external ridiculous postures of the Yogins of to-day, lies concealed the profound wisdom of the archaic ages, one that included among other things a perfect knowledge of what are now termed physiology and psychology. Ammonius Saccas, Porphyry, Proclus and others practised it in Egypt; and Greece and Rome did not hesitate at all in their time of philosophical glory to follow suit. Pythagoras speaks of the celestial music of the spheres that one hears in hours of ecstasy, Zeno finds a wise man who, having conquered all passions, feels happiness and emotion but in the midst of torture. Plato advocates the man of meditation and likens his powers to those of the divinity and we see the
Christian ascetics themselves through a mere life of contemplation and self-torture acquire powers of levitation or æthrobacy, which, though attributed to the miraculous intervention of a personal God, are nevertheless real and time result of physiological changes in the human body Says Patanjali:

The Yogin will hear celestial sounds, the songs and conversations of celestial choirs. He will have the perception of their touch in their passage through the air,

which, translated into more sober language, means that the ascetic is enabled to see with the spiritual eye in the Astral Light, hear with the spiritual ear subjective sounds inaudible to others, and live and feel, so to say, in the Unseen Universe.

The Yogin is able to enter a dead or a living body by the path of the senses, and in this body to act as though it were his own.

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The “path of the senses”; our physical senses, supposed to originate in the astral body, the ethereal counterpart of man, or the jivâtma, which dies with the body; the senses are here meant in their spiritual sense—volition of the higher principle in man. The true Râja Yogin is a stoic; and Kapila, who deals but with the latter—utterly rejecting the claim of the Hatha Yogins to converse during Samâdhi with the Infinite Ishvara—describes their state in the following words:

To a Yogin in whose mind all things are identified as spirit, what is infatuation ? What is grief? He sees all things as one; he is destitute of affections; he neither rejoices in good nor is offended with evil. . . A wise man sees so many false things in those which are called true, so much misery in what is called happiness, that he turns away with disgust he who in the body has obtained liberation (from the tyranny of the senses) is of no caste, of no sect, of no order, attends to no duties, adheres to no shastras, to no formulas, to no works of merit; he is beyond the reach of speech; he remains at a distance from all secular concerns; he has renounced the love and the knowledge of all sensible objects; he flatters none, he honours none, he is not worshipped, he worships none; whether he practises and follows the customs of his fellow-men or not this is his character.

And a selfish and a disgustingly misanthropical one this character would be were it that for which the True Adept was striving. But it must not be understood literally, and we shall have something more to say upon the subject in the following article, which will conclude Dr. Paul’s essay on yoga Philosophy.

[One of the practices followed by the Hatha Yogin is called Dhauti. This is the act of swallowing a bandage of linen moistened with water, measuring three inches in breadth and fifteen cubits in length. This is rather a difficult process. But very few fakirs can practise it.]

And a happy thing it is that the process is so difficult, as we do not know of anything half so disgusting. No true Râja Yogin will ever condescend to practise it. Besides, as every physician can easily tell, the process, if repeated, becomes a very dangerous one for the experimenter. There are other “processes” still more hideous, and as use less for psychological purposes.

[Nor does his hair grow during the time he remains buried.]

In reference to the arrest of the growth of the hair, some adepts in the secret science claim to know more than this. They prove their ability to completely suspend the functions of life each night during the hours intended for sleep. Life then is, so to say, held in total abeyance. The wear and tear of the inner as well as the outer organ-


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ism being thus artificially arrested, and there being no possibility of waste, these men accumulate as much vital energy for use in their waking state as they would have lost in sleep, during which state, if natural, the process of energy and expense of force is still mechanically going on in the human body. In the induced state described, as in that of a deep swoon, the brain no more dreams than if it were dead. One century, if passed, would appear no longer than one second, for all perception of time is lost for him who is subjected to it. Nor do the hairs or nails grow under such circumstances, though they do for a certain time in a body actually dead, which proves, if anything can, that the atoms and tissues of the physical body are held under conditions quite different from those of the state we call death. For, to use a physiological paradox, life in a dead animal organism is even more intensely active than it ever is in a living one, which, as we see, does not hold good in the case under notice. Though the average sceptic may regard this statement as sheer nonsense those who have experienced this in themselves know it as an undoubted fact.

Two certain fakirs from Nepaul once agreed to try the experiment. One of them, previous to attempting the hibernation, underwent all the ceremonies of preparation as described by Dr. Paul, and took all the necessary precautions; the other simply threw himself by a process known to himself and others into that temporary state of complete paralysis which imposes no limits of time, may last months as well as hours, and which is known in certain Tibetan lamaseries as .

The result was that while the hair, beard and nails of the former had grown at the end of six weeks, though feebly Yet perceptibly, the cells of the latter had remained as closed and inactive as if he had been transformed for that lapse of time into a marble statue. Not having personally seen either of these men, or the experiment, we can vouch only in a general way for the possibility of the phenomenon, not for the details of this peculiar case, though we would as soon doubt our existence as the truthfulness of those from whom we have the story. We only hope that among the sceptical and materialistic who may scoff, we may not find either people who nevertheless accept with a firm and pious conviction the story of the resurrection of the half decayed Lazarus amid other like miracles, or yet those who while ready to crush a Theosophist for his beliefs, would never dare to scoff at those of a Christian.

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[A Yogin acquires an increase of specific gravity by swallowing great draughts of the air, and compressing the same within the system.]

This is what, three years ago, in describing the phenomenon in Isis Unveiled we called “interpolarization.” (See vol. i. op. cit., pp.23 and 24.)

[On the powers resulting from Prâpti, it is said . .]

As a deaf and dumb person learns to understand the exact meaning of what is said simply from the motion of the lips and face of the speaker, and without understanding any language phonetically, other and extra senses can be developed in the soul as well as in the physical mind of a mute, a sixth and equally phenomenal sense is developed as the result of practice, which supplies for him the lack of the other two.

Magnetic and mesmeric aura, or “fluid,” can he generated and intensified in every man to an almost miraculous extent, unless he be by nature utterly passive.

We have known of such a faculty (divining the thoughts of others) to exist in individuals who were far from being adepts or Yogins, and had never heard of the latter It can be easily developed by intense will, perseverance and practice, especially in persons who are born with natural analytical powers, intuitive perception, and a certain aptness for observation and penetration. These may, if they only preserve perfect purity, develop the faculty of divining people’s thoughts to a degree which seems almost supernatural. Some very clever but quite uneducated detectives in London and Paris, develop it in themselves to an almost faultless perfection. It can also be helped by mathematical study and practice. If then such is found to be the case with simple individuals, why not in men who have devoted to it a whole life, helped on by a study of the accumulated experience of many a generation of mystics and under the tuition of real adepts?

The dual soul is no fancy and may be one day explained in scientific language, when the psycho-physiological faculties of man shall be better studied, when the possibility of many a now-doubted phenomenon is discovered, and when truth will no longer be sacrificed to conceit, vanity and routine. Our physical senses have nothing to do with the spiritual or psychological faculties. The latter begin their action where the former stop, owing to that Chinese wall about the soul empire, called matter.

[Concerning the power called Vashitva, it is observed . .]


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Perhaps the Hobilgans and the Shaberons of Tibet might have something to tell us if they chose. The great secret which enwraps the mystery of the reincarnations of their great Dalay-Lamas, their supreme Hobilgans, and others who as well as the former are supposed, a few days after their enlightened souls have laid aside their mortal clothing, to reincarnate themselves in young, and, previously to that, very weak bodies of children, has never yet been told. These children, who are invariably on the point of death when designated to have their bodies become the tabernacles of the souls of deceased Buddhas, recover immediately after the ceremony, and, barring accident, live long years, exhibiting trait for trait the same peculiarities of temper, characteristics and predilections as the dead man’s. Vashitva is also said to be the power of taming living creatures and of making them obedient to one’s own wishes and orders.

[Pythagoras who visited India, is said to have tamed by the influence of his will or word a furious bear, prevented an ox from eating beans, and stopped an eagle in its flight.]

These are mesmeric feats and it is only by (in)exact scientists that mesmerism is denied in our days. It is largely treated of in Isis, and the power of Pythagoras is explained in vol. i. p. 283, et seq.

[Ishatwa or divine power. When the passions are restrained from their desires, the mind becomes tranquil and the soul is awakened.]

In which case it means that the soul, being liberated from the yoke of the body through certain practices, discipline and purity of life, during the lifetime of the latter, acquires powers identical with its primitive element, the universal soul. It has overpowered its material custodian; the terrestrial gross appetites and passions of the latter, from being its despotic masters, have become its slaves, hence the soul has become free henceforth to exercise its transcendental powers,
untrammelled by any fetters.

[ regard to restoring the dead to life.]

Life once extinct can never be recalled, but another life and another soul can sometimes reanimate the abandoned frame, if we may believe learned men who were never known to utter an untruth.

Wherever the word “soul” has occurred in the course of the above comments, the reader must bear in mind that we do not use it in the sense of an immortal principle in man, but in that of the group of personal qualities which are but a congeries of material particles whose term of survival beyond the physical, or material, personality is for a


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longer or shorter period, proportionately with the grossness or refinement of the individual. Various correspondents have asked whether the Siddhis of Yoga call only be acquired by the rude training of Hatha Yoga; and The Journal of Science (London) assuming that they cannot, launched out in the violent expressions which were recently quoted in these pages. But the fact is that there is another, an unobjectionable and rational process, the particulars of which cannot be given to tile idle enquirer, and which must not even be touched upon at the latter end of a commentary like the present one. The subject may be reverted to at a more favourable time.

A YEAR OF THEOSOPHY
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[Vol. II. No. 4, January,1881.]

THE dial of time marks off another of the world’s hours......

And as the old year passes into eternity, like a rain-drop falling into the ocean, its vacant place on the calendar is occupied by a successor which, if one may credit the ancient prophetic warnings of Mother Shipton and other seers, is to bring woe and disaster to some portions of the world. Let it go with its joys and triumphs, its badness and bitterness, if it but leave behind for our instruction the memory of our experience and the lesson of our mistakes. Wise is he who lets “the dead past bury its dead,” and turns with courage to meet the fresher duties of the New Year; only the weak and foolish bemoan the irrevocable. It will be well to take a brief retrospect of those incidents of the year 1880 (A.D.) which possess an interest for members of the Theosophical Society. The more so since, in consequence of the absence from Bombay of the President and Corresponding Secretary, the anniversary day of the Society was not publicly celebrated.

It will not be necessary to enter minutely into those details of administration which, however important in themselves as links, weak or strong, in the general chain of progress, and however they may have taxed the patience, nerves, or other resources of the chief officers, do not at all interest the public. It is not so much explanation as results that are demanded, and these in our case abound. Even our worst enemy would he forced to admit, were he to look closely into our transactions, that the Society is immeasurably stronger morally, numerically, and as regards a capacity for future usefulness, than it was a year ago. Its name has become most widely known; its fellow ship has been enriched by the accession of some very distinguished men; it has planted new branch societies in India, Ceylon and else where; applications are now pending for the organization of still other branches, in California, India, Australia and elsewhere; its Magazine

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has successfully entered the second volume; its local issues with the government of India have been finally and creditably settled; a mischievous attempt by a handful of malcontents at Bombay to disrupt it has miserably failed.* It has made official alliances with the Sanskrit Samâj of Benares, that is to say, with the most distinguished body of orthodox Sanskrit pandits in the world, with the other Sabhâ of which Pandit Râma Misra Shâstri is manager, and with the Hindu Sabhâ, of Cochin State; while, at the same time, strengthening its fraternal relations with the Arya Samâjes of the Punjab and North-Western Provinces. Besides all this, we can point with joy and pride to the results of the late mission to Ceylon, where, within the space of fifty-seven days, seven branch societies of Buddhist laymen, one Ecclesiastical Council of Buddhist priests, and one scientific society were organized, and some hundreds of new fellows were added to our list.

All this work could not be accomplished without great labour, mental anxiety and physical discomfort. If to this be added the burden of a correspondence with many different countries, and the time required for making two journeys to Northern India and one to Ceylon, our friends at a distance will see that whatever other blame may properly attach to the founders, who have never claimed infallibility of any sort, that of laziness is assuredly not to be cast in their teeth. Nor, when they learn that the work done since leaving America, the travelling expenses and the fitting and maintenance of the Head quarters’ establishment have cost some Rs. 20,000, while the cash receipts of the treasurer (exclusive of those from Ceylon, Rs. 2,440, which sum is set aside as a special fund to be used in the interests of Buddhism) have been only one thousand two hundred and forty rupees, all told, including one donation of Rs.200 from the universally respected Mâhârani Svarnamayi, and another of Rs. 20 from a well-wisher in Bengal, will those who direct the Society’s affairs be regarded by them as making money out of their offices? And these figures. which may most readily be verified, are our only answer to the calumnies which have maliciously been circulated by some who did not and others who did know the truth.

The trip to Ceylon occupied twenty-seven days in all, the second one to Northern India 125 days. Thus the founders have been absent
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* Secret letters by former members denouncing its founders, sent to Parisian and other Theosophists, and pretending that the Bombay Society was virtually extinct (its best members having resigned), were sent hack to us with new protestations of friendship and loyalty and expressions Of scorn for the conspirators.—[Ed. Theos.]


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from Bombay on duty twenty-nine weeks out of the fifty-two; their travels extending through twenty-five degrees of latitude, from Lahore at the extreme north of India to Matara, the southernmost point of ancient Lanka. Each of the Indian Presidencies has contributed a quota of new members; and at the former capital of the late lion hearted Runjeet Singh, a branch was recently organized by Sikhs and Punjabis under the title of the “Punjab Theosophical Society.” During the twelvemonth, President Olcott delivered seventy-nine lectures and addresses, a majority of which were interpreted in the Hindi, Urdu, Guzerati and Singhalese languages.

Many misconceptions prevail as to the nature and objects of the Theosophical Society. Some—Sir Richard Temple in the number— fancy it is a religious sect; many believe it is composed of atheists; a third party are convinced that its sole object is the study of occult science and the initiation of green hands into the Sacred Mysteries. If we have had one we certainly have had a hundred intimations from strangers that they were ready to join at once if they could be sure that they would shortly be endowed with Siddhis, or the power to work occult phenomena. The beginning of a new year is a suitable time to make one more attempt—we wish it could be the last—to set these errors right. So, then, let us again say: (1) The Theosophical Society teaches no new religion, aims to destroy no old one, promulgates no creed of its own, follows no religious leader, and distinctly and emphatically is not a sect nor ever was one. It admits worthy people of any religion to membership on condition of mutual tolerance and mutual help to discover truth. The founders have never consented to be taken as religious leaders, they repudiate any such idea, and they have not taken and will not take disciples. (2) The Society is not composed of atheists, nor is it any more conducted in the interest of atheism than in that of deism or polytheism. It has members of almost every religion, and is on equally friendly terms with each and all. ( Not a majority, nor even a respectable minority numerically speaking, of its fellows are students of occult science or ever expect to become adepts. All who care for the information have been told what sacrifices are necessary in order to gain the higher knowledge, and few are in a position to make one tenth of them. He who joins our Society gains no Siddhis by that act, nor is there any certainty that he will even see any phenomena, let alone meet with an adept. Some have enjoyed both these opportunities, and so the possibility of the phenomena and the

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existence of Siddhis do not rest upon our unverified assertions. Those who have seen things have perhaps been allowed to do so on account of some personal merit detected by those who showed them the Siddhis, or for other reasons known to themselves and over which we have no control.

For thousands of years these things have, whether rightly or wrongly, been guarded as sacred mysteries, and Asiatics at least need not be reminded that often even after months or years of the most faithful and assiduous personal service, the disciples of a Yogi have not been shown “miracles” or endowed with powers. What folly, therefore, to imagine that by entering any society one might make a short cut to adeptship! The weary traveller along a strange road is grateful even to find a guide-post that shows him his way to his place of destination. Our Society, if it does naught else, performs this kindly office for the searcher after truth. And it is much.

Before closing, one word must be said in correction of an unfortunate impression that has got abroad. Because our pamphlet of rules mentions a relationship between our Society and certain proficients in Occult Science, or “Mahâtmâs,” many persons fancy that these great men are personally engaged in the practical direction of its affairs; and that in such a case, being primarily responsible for the several mistakes that have occurred in the admission of unworthy members and in other matters, they can neither be so wise, so prudent, nor so far-seeing as is claimed for them. It is also imagined that the President and Corresponding Secretary (especially the latter) are, if not actually Yogis and Mahâtmâs themselves, at least persons of ascetic habits, who assume superior moral excellence. Neither of these suppositions is correct, and both are positively absurd. The administration of the Society is, unless in exceptionally important crises, left to the recognized officials, and they are wholly responsible for all the errors that are made. Many may doubtless have been made, and our management may be very faulty, but the wonder is that no more have occurred, if the multiplicity of duties necessarily imposed upon the two chief officers and the world-wide range of activity be taken into account. Colonel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky do not pretend to asceticism, nor would it be possible for them to practise it while in the thick of the struggle to win a permanent foothold for the Society in the face of every possible obstacle that a selfish, sensuality-loving world puts in the way. What either of them has heretofore been, or either


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or both may in the future become, is quite a different affair. At present they only claim to be trying honestly and earnestly, so far as their natural infirmities of character permit, to enforce by example and precept the ideas which are embodied in’ the purposes and rules of the Theosophical Society. Once or twice ill-wishers have publicly taunted us with not having given practical proofs of our alleged affection for India. Our final vindication must be left to posterity, which always renders that justice that the present too often denies. But even now— if we may judge by the tone of our correspondence, as well as by the enthusiasm which has everywhere greeted us in the course of our journeyings—a palpably good effect has been produced by our appeals to the educated Indian public. The moral regeneration of India and the revival of her ancient spiritual glories must be exclusively the work of her own sons. All we can do is to apply the match to the train, to fan the smouldering embers into a genial warmth, and this we are trying to do. One step in the right direction, it will doubtless be conceded, is the alliance effected with the Benares pandits.

“A WORD WITH OUR FRIENDS”
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[ II. No. 4 (Supplement), January, 1881.]

THAT cause must be weak and desperate, indeed, that has to resort to the arts of the slanderer to prop it up and injure its victims. And it is truly lamentable to see people adopting these tactics against the Theosophical Society and its founders. Soon after we reached India we were obliged to begin legal proceedings against a missionary organ, to compel its editor to apologize for some base slanders he had indulged in; and readers of The Theosophist are aware of the conduct of the Christian party in Ceylon, and their utter discomfiture at Panadure. However great our efforts to avoid any conflict with them, some strange fatality seems to be for ever urging these good people to adopt questionable measures to hasten their own ultimate ruin. Our Society has been their favourite mark. The most recent shot was fired at Benares by a well-known convert to the Christian faith, who, unable to lay hold upon anything disreputable in our Indian career, did his best to injure us in a certain important direction by sneeringly suggesting to a very high personage that Colonel Olcott was a man of no position in his own country, and had doubtless come to India as an adventurer, to make money out of the people. Happily his venom was poured into unsympathetic ears. Yet, as he is a man of a certain influence, and others of our friends have also been similarly approached by him and other enemies of ours, such calumnies as these cannot be well over looked. We are quite aware that a document of such a nature as the present, if launched on the public without a word of explanation, would give rise to criticism, and perhaps be thought in bad taste, unless very serious amid important reasons can be shown for its appearance. Such reasons unquestionably exist, even were no account to be taken of the malicious plot of our Benares opponent. When, in addition to this, we reflect that ever since we landed in this country, impelled by motives, sincere and honest—though, perhaps, as we now find it our-


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selves, too enthusiastic, too unusual in foreigners to be readily believed in by natives without some more substantial proof than our simple word—we have been surrounded by more enemies and opponents than by friends and sympathizers; and that we two are strangers to rulers as well as the ruled, we believe that no available proof should be with held that will show that, at least, we are honest and peaceful people, if not actually that which we know ourselves to be—most sincere friends of India and her sons. Our personal honour, as well as the honour of the whole Society, is at stake at the present moment. “Tell me what your friends are and I will tell you what you are,” is a wise saying. A man at Colonel Olcott’s time of life is not likely to so change in character as to abandon his country, where he has such an honourable past and where his income was so large as it was, to come to India and turn “adventurer.” Therefore, we have concluded, with Colonel Olcott’s permission, to give the following details. They are but a few out of many now lying before us, that show his honourable, efficient and faithful career, both as a member of the Bar, a private gentleman, and a public official, from the year 1853 down to the very moment of his departure from the United States for India. As Colonel Olcott is not a man to sound his own praises, the writer, his colleague, may state that his name has been widely known in America for nearly thirty years as a promoter of various public reforms. It was he who founded (in 1856) the first scientific agricultural school there upon the Swiss model; it was he again who aided in introducing a new crop now universally cultivated; addressed three state legislatures upon the subject by invitation; wrote three works upon agriculture, of which one passed through seven editions, and was introduced into the school libraries; was offered by Government a botanical mission to Caffraria, and, later, the Chief Commissionership of Agriculture, and was offered by M. Evangelides, of Greece, the Professorship of Agriculture in the University of Athens. He was at one time Agricultural Editor of Horace Greeley’s great journal, The Tribune, and also American Correspondent of The Mark Lane Express. For his public services in connection with agricultural reform he was voted two medals of honour by the National (U. S.) Agricultural Society, and a silver goblet by the American Institute.

The breaking out of the fearful civil war in America called every man to serve his country. Colonel Olcott after passing through four battles and one siege (the capture of Fort Macon), and after recovering


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from a severe illness contracted in the field, was offered by the late Secretary of War the highly honourable and responsible appointment of Special Commissioner of the War Department; and two years later, was, at the request of the late Secretary of the Navy, ordered on special duty in connection with that branch of the service, additional to his regular duties in the War Department. His services were most conspicuous, as his papers—which include a complimentary report to the U.S. Senate, by the Secretary of the Navy—prove.

At the close of the war the national army of one million men was quietly disbanded, and was reäbsorbed back into the nation as though nothing had happened. Colonel Olcott resumed his profession, and was shortly invited to take the secretaryship and practical direction of the National Insurance Convention—a conference or league of the officials of the various state governments for the purpose of codifying and simplifying the laws affecting insurance companies. Accepting, he was thus for two years or more in the closest contact with, and the trusted adviser of some of the leading state public functionaries of the Union ; and a statute drafted by him, in connection with another well-known legal gentleman (Mr. Abbott) was passed by ten state legislatures and became law. What his public services were in this connection, and how he was thanked and honoured for them, may readily be seen by consulting the two large volumes of the
Convention’s ‘‘Transactions,’’ which are in the Library of the Theosophical Society, at Bombay.

This brings us down to the year 1872. In 1876 he was deputed by His Honour the Mayor of New York City to collect a public subscription in aid of a charitable object. In 1877 he was one of an International Committee chosen by the Italian residents of New York to erect a monument to Mazzini, in Central Park. The same year he was Honorary Secretary of a National Committee—one member of which was the just elected President of the United States, General Garfield

—formed to secure a worthy representation of American arts and industries at the Paris “Exposition Universelle,” of 1878. In the following year he left New York for India, and just before sailing received from the President and Secretary of State a diplomatic pass port, such as is only issued to the most eminent American citizens, and circular autograph letters recommending him to the particular favour of all U.S. Ministers and Consuls, as a gentleman who had been requested to promote in every practicable and proper way the

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mutual commercial relations of the United States and India. And now if the enemies of the Theosophical Society can produce an “adventurer” with such a record and such testimonials of integrity and capacity, by all means let them name their man.

(Signed) H. P. BLAVATSKY.

QUESTIONS ANSWERED ABOUT

YOGA VIDYA
————

[Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1881.]

A HINDU gentleman of the Madras Presidency propounds a number of questions about Occult Science which we answer in these columns, as the information is often demanded of us and we can reach all at once in this way.

Q.—Do you or Colonel Olcott undertake to teach this wonderful Vidyâ to anyone who may be anxious to learn it?

A.—No; the correspondent is referred to our January number for remarks upon this point.

Q.—Would you like to give proofs of the existence of occult powers in man to anyone who may be sceptically inclined, or who may desire to have his faith strengthened, as you have given to Mr. and Mrs. —— and the editor of The Amrita Bazar Patrika?

A—We would “like” that everyone should have such proofs who needs them, but, as the world is rather full of people—some twenty- four crores being in India alone—the thing is impracticable. Still such proofs have always been found by those who sought them in earnest, from the beginning of time until now. We found them—in India. But then we spared neither time nor trouble in journeying round the world.

Q.—Can you give such proofs to one like myself, who is at a great distance; or must I come to Bombay?

A.—Answered above. We would not undertake to do this thing, even if we could, for we would be run down with thousands of curiosity-seekers, and our life become a burden.

Q.—Can a married man acquire the Vidyâ?

A.—No, not while a Grihasta. You know the invariable rule was that a boy was placed at a tender age under his Guru for this training;


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he stopped with him until he was twenty—five to thirty; then lived as a married man fifteen to twenty years; finally retired to the forest to resume his spiritual studies. The use of liquors, of beef, and certain other meats and certain vegetables, and the relations of marriage, prevent spiritual development.

Q.—Does God reveal himself by inspiration to a Yogi?

A.—Every man has his own ideas about “God.” So far as we have learned, the Yogi discovers his God in his inner self, his Atmâ. When he reaches that point he is inspired—by the union of himself with the Universal, Divine Principle—Parabrahman. With a personal God—a God who thinks, plots, rewards, punishes and repents are not acquainted. Nor do we think any Yogi ever saw such a one—unless it be true, as a missionary affirmed the other day, at the close of Colonel Olcott’s lecture at Lahore, that Moses, who had murdered a man in Egypt, and the adulterous murderer (David), were Yogis!

Q.—If any Adept has power to do anytlnng he likes, as Colonel Olcott said in his lecture at Simla,* can he make me, who am hungering and thirsting after the Vidyâ, a thorough Adept like himself?

A.—Colonel Olcott is no Adept and never boasted of being one. Does our friend suppose any Adept ever became such without making himself one, without breaking through every impediment through sheer force of will and soul-power? Such adeptship would be a mere farce. “An Adept becomes, he is not made,” was the motto of the ancient Rosicrucians.

Q.—How is it that in the presence of such clear proof the most civilized nations still continue to be sceptical?

A.—The peoples referred to are Christian, and although Jesus declared that all who believed in him should have the power to do all manner of wonders (see Mark, xxvi. 17, 18), like a Hindu Yogi’s, Christendom has been waiting in vain some eighteen centuries to see them. And now, having become total disbelievers in the possibility of such Siddhis, they must come to India to get their proofs, if they care for them at all.

Q.—Why does Colonel Olcott fix the year 1848 as the time from which occult phenomena have occurred?

A .—Our friend should read more carefully, and not put us to the trouble to answer questions that are quite useless. What Colonel Olcott did say was that modern Spiritualism dates from 1848.
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* Colonel Olcott said nothing of the kind.


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Q.—Are there any such mediums in India as William Eddy, in whose presence materialized forms can be seen?

A.—We do not know, but suspect there are. We heard of a case at Calcutta where a dead girl revisited her parents’ house in broad day light, and sat and conversed with her mother on various occasions. Mediumship can be easily developed anywhere, but we think it a dangerous thing and decline to give instructions for its development. Those who think otherwise can find what they want in any current number of the London Spiritualist, The Medium and Daybreak the Melbourne Harbinger of Light, the American Banner of Light, or any other respectable Spiritualistic organ.

Q.—How do these mediums get their powers; by a course of training, or as the result of an accident of their constitution?

A.—Mediums are mainly so from birth; theirs is a peculiar psycho physiological constitution. But some of the most noted mediums of our times have been made so by sitting in circles. There is in many persons a latent mediumistic faculty, which can be developed by effort and the right conditions. The same remark applies to adeptship. We all have the latent germs of adeptship in us, but in the case of some individuals it is infinitely easier to bring them into activity than in others.

Q.—Colonel Olcott repudiates the idea of spirit agency as necessary to account for the production of phenomena, yet I have read that a certain scientist sent spirits to visit the planets and report what they saw there.

A—Perhaps reference is made to Professor William Denton, the American geologist, author of that interesting work, The Soul of Things. His explorations were made through psychometry, his wife—a very intellectual lady though a great sceptic as to spirits—being the psychometer. Our correspondent should read the book.

Q.—What becomes of the spirits of the departed?

A—There is but one “Spirit”—Parabrahman, or by whatever other name one chooses to call the Eternal Principle. The “souls” of the departed pass through many other stages of existence after leaving this earth-body, just as they were in many others anterior to their birth as men and women here. The exact truth about this mystery is known only to the highest Adepts; but it may be said even by the lowest of the neophytes that each of us controls his future rebirths, making each next succeeding one better or worse according to his present efforts and deserts.


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Q.—Is asceticism necessary for Yoga?

A—Yoga exacts certain conditions which will be found described at p. 47 of our December number. One of these conditions is seclusion in a place where the Yogi is free from all impurities—whether physical or moral. In short, he must get away from the immoral atmosphere of the world. If anyone has by such study gained powers, he cannot remain long in the world without losing the greater part of his powers— and that the higher and nobler part. So that, if any such person is seen for many consecutive years labouring in public, and neither for money nor fame, it should be known that he is sacrificing himself for the good of his fellow-men. Some day such men seem to suddenly die, and their supposed remains are disposed of; but yet they may not be dead. “Appearances are deceitful,” the proverb says.

THE MISSING LINK
———————

[Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1881.]

A GOOD many of the Western papers are terribly excited over a bit of news just arrived in Europe from Saigon. The most radical and freethinking of them crow over the fact—as well they may in the interest of truth—as though the thickest, and hitherto most impenetrable of the veils covering Mother Nature’s doings had been removed for ever, and anthropology had no more secrets to learn. The excitement is due to a little monster, a seven-year-old boy, now on exhibition at Saigon. The child is a native of Cambodia, quite robust and healthy, yet exhibiting in his anatomy the most precious and rare of physical endowments—a real tail, ten inches long and one and a half thick at its root!

This original little sample of humanity—unique, we believe, of his kind—is now made out by the disciples of Darwin and Hæckel to be the bona (bony?) fide missing link. Let us suppose, for argument’s sake, that the evolutionists (whose colours we certainly wear) are right in their hypothesis, and that the cherished theory of having baboons for our ancestors turns out true. Will every difficulty in our way be then removed? By no means: for then more than ever shall we have to try to solve the hitherto insoluble problem, which comes first, the man or the ape? It will be the Aristotelean egg and chicken problem of creation over again. We can never know the truth until some streak of good chance shall enable science to witness at different periods and under various climates either women giving birth to apes, graced with a caudal appendage, or female orang-outangs becoming mothers of tail less, and, moreover, semi-human children, endowed with a capacity for speech at least as great as that of a moderately clever parrot or mina.

Science is but a broken reed for us in this respect, for science is just as perplexed, if not more so, than the rest of us common mortals. So little is it able to enlighten us upon the mystery, that the men of most


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learning are those who confuse us the most in some respects. As in regard to the heliocentric system, which, after it had been left an undisputed fact for more than three centuries, found in the later part of our own a most serious opponent in Dr. Shroepfer, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Berlin, so the Darwinian theory of the evolution of man from an anthropoid, has among its learned opponents one, who, though an evolutionist himself, is eager to oppose Darwin, and seeks to establish a school of his own.

This new “perfectionist” is a professor in the Hungarian town of Fünfkirchen, who is delivering just now a series of lectures through out Germany. ‘‘Man,’’ says he, ‘‘whose origin must be placed in the Silurian mud, whence he began evoluting from a frog, must necessarily some day reëvolute into the same animal.” So far, well and good. But the explanations going to prove this hypothesis, which Professor Charles Deezy accepts as a perfectly established fact, are rather too vague to enable us to build anything like an impregnable theory upon them. He tells us:

In time primitive days of the first period of evolution there lived a huge, frog. like, mammalian animal, inhabiting the seas, but which, being of the amphibious kind, lived likewise on land, breathing in the air as easily as it did in water, its chief habitat, though, was in the salt sea-water. This frog-like creature is now what we call—man (!) and his marine origin is proved by the fact that. he cannot live without salt.

There are other signs about man, almost as impressive as the above, by which this origin can be established, if we may believe this new prophet of science. For instance:

A well-defined remnant of fins, to be seen between his thumbs and fingers, as also his insurmountable tendency towards the element of water;

a tendency, we remark passim, more noticeable in the Hindu than the Highlander!

No less does the Hungarian scientist set himself against Darwin’s theory of man descending from the ape. According to his new teaching,

It is not the anthropoid which begot man, but the latter who is the progenitor of the monkey. The ape is merely a man returned once more to its primitive, savage state.

Our Professor’s views as to geology and the ultimate destruction of our globe, coupled with his notions regarding the future state of man kind, are no less original, and are the very sweetest fruit of his Tree of


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Scientific Knowledge. Provoking though they do general hilarity, they are nevertheless given out by the “learned” lecturer in quite a serious spirit, and his works are placed among the text-hooks for colleges. If we have to credit his statement, then we must believe that “the moon is slowly but surely approaching the earth.” The result of such an indiscretion on the part of our fair Diana is to be most certainly the following:

The sea waves will some day immerse our globe and gradually submerge all the continents. Then man, unable to live any longer on dry land, will have but to return to his primitive form, i.e., be will rebecome an aquatic animal—a man-frog.

And the life—insurance companies will have to shut up shop and become bankrupts—he might have added. Daring speculators are advised to take their precautions in advance.

Having permitted ourselves this bit of irreverence about science—those, rather, who abuse their connection with it—we may as well give here some of the more acceptable theories respecting the missing link. These are by no means so scarce as bigots would like to make us believe, Schweinfurth and other great African travellers vouchsafe for the truth of these assertions and believe they have found races which may, after all, be the missing links—between man and ape. Such are the Akkas of Africa; those whom Herodotus calls the Pigmies (ii. 32) and the account of whom—notwithstanding it came from the very pen of the father of history—was until very recently believed to he erroneous and they themselves myths of a fabled nation. But, since the public has had the most trustworthy narratives of European travellers, we have learned to know better, and no one any longer thinks that Herodotus has confounded in his account men and the cynocephaloid apes of Africa.

We have but to read the description of the orang-outang and of the chimpanzee to find that these animals—all but the hairy surface—answer in nearly every respect to these Akkas. They are said to have large cylindrical heads on a thin neck, and a body about four feet high; very long arms, perfectly disproportionate, as they reach far lower than their knees; a chest narrow at the shoulders and widening tremendously toward the stomach, which is always enormous; knees thick, and hands of an extraordinary beauty of design (a characteristic of monkeys’ hands, which, with the exception of their short thumbs, have wonderfully neat and slender fingers tapering to the ends, and always prettily shaped finger nails). The Akkas’ walk is vacillating,


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which is due to the abnormal size of their stomach, as in the chimpanzee and the orang-outang. Their cranium is large, profoundly depressed at the root of the nose, and surmounted by a contracting forehead sloping directly backward; a projecting mouth with very thin lips, and a beardless chin—or rather no chin at all. The hair on their heads does not grow, and though less noisy than the orang-outang they are enormously so when compared with other men. On account of the long grass which often grows twice their own size in the regions they inhabit, they are said to jump like so man grasshoppers, to make enormous strides, and to have all the outward motions of big anthropoids.

Some scientists think—this time with pretty good reason—that the Akkas, more even than the Matimbas, of which d’Escayrac de Lauture gives such interesting accounts, the Kimosas and the Bushmen, of austral Africa, are all remnants of the missing link.

HYPNOTISM
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[Vol. II. No.5 , February,1881.]

THE views of medical men in regard to hypnotism or seif-mesmerization have been greatly strengthened of late. This is evident from the report by Dr. Grishhorn, of St. Petersburg, at the latest meeting of the Society of the St. Petersburg Physicians, on November 18th (Dec. 1st), a report which is full of interest. Until recently, the phenomena of hypnotism have been only accepted under a quasi protest, while mesmerism and clairvoyance were regarded and denounced by the best authorities in science as pure charlatanism. The greatest physicians remained sceptical as to the reality of the phenomena, until one after the other came to learn better; and these were those, of course, who had the patience to devote some time and labour to personal experiment in this direction. Still many have thus acquired the profound conviction that there exists in man a faculty—mysterious and yet unexplained—which causes him under a certain degree of self- concentration to become as rigid as a statue and lose more or less his consciousness. That once in such a nervous state, at times his spiritual and mental faculties will seem paralyzed, and the mechanical action of the body alone remain; while at others it will be quite the contrary; his physical senses becoming benumbed, his mental and spiritual faculties will acquire a most wonderful degree of acuteness.

Last summer Dr. Grishhorn made, with Professor Berger, a series of hypnotic experiments and observations in the Breslau Hospital for Nervous Diseases. One of the first patients experimented upon was a young girl of about twenty, who suffered acutely from rheumatic pain. Professor Berger, applying to the tip of her nose a small hammer used for auscultations, directed her to concentrate all her attention upon the spot touched. Hardly a few minutes had elapsed, when, to his utmost astonishment, the girl became quite rigid. A bronze statue could not be more motionless and stiff. Then Dr. Grishhorn tried every kind of


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experiment in order to ascertain that the girl did not play a part. A lighted candle was closely approached to her eyes, and it was found that the pupil did not contract; the eyes remaining opened and glassy, as if the person had been dead. He then passed a long needle through her lip and moved it in every direction; but the two doctors remarked neither the slightest sign of pain, nor, what was most strange, was there a single drop of blood. He called her by her name; there came no answer. But when, taking her by the hand, he began to converse with her, the young girl answered all his questions, though feebly at first and as if compelled by an irresistible power.

The second experiment proved more wonderful yet. It was made with a young soldier, who had just been brought into the hospital, and who proved ‘‘what the Spiritualists call a medium’’—says the official report. This last experiment finally convinced Drs. Grishhorn and Berger of the reality of the doubted phenomena. The soldier, a German, ignorant of a single word of Russian, spoke in his trance with the doctor in that language, pronouncing the most difficult words most perfectly, without the slightest foreign accent. Suffering from a paralysis of both legs, during his hypnotic sleep he used them freely, walking with entire ease, and repeating every movement and gesture made by Dr. Grishhorn with absolute precision. The Russian sentences he pronounced very rapidly, while his own tongue he spoke very slowly. He even went so far as to write, at the doctor’s dictation, a few words in that language, quite unknown to him, and in the Russian characters.

The debates upon this most important report by a veil-known physician were announced to take place at the next meeting of the Society of the St. Petersburg Medical Practitioners. As soon as the official report of the proceedings is published, we will give it to our readers. It is really interesting to witness how the men of science are gradually being led to acknowledge facts which they have hitherto so bitterly denounced.

Hypnotism, we may add, is nought but the Trâtaka of the Yogi, the act of concentrating his mind on the tip of the nose, or on the spot between the eyebrows. It was known and practised by the ascetics in order to produce the final Samâdhi, or temporary deliverance of the soul from the body; a complete disenthralment of the spiritual man from the slavery of the physical with its gross senses. It is being practised unto the present day.

THE LEAVEN OF THEOSOPHY
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[Vol. II. No. 6, March, 1881.]

Those of us whose duty it is to watch the Theosophical movement and and its progress can afford to be amused at the ignorant conceit displayed by certain journals in their criticisms upon our Society and its officers. Some seem to think that when they have flung their handful of dirt we must certainly be overwhelmed. One or two have even gone so far as, with mock sympathy, to pronounce us already hopelessly disrupted. It is a pity we cannot oblige them, but so it is, and they must make the best of the situation. Our Society as a body might certainly be wrecked by mismanagement or the death of its founders, but the idea which it represents and which has gained so wide a currency, will run on like a crested wave of thought until it dashes upon the hard beach where materialism is picking and sorting its pebbles. Of the thirteen persons who composed our first hoard of officers, in 1875, nine were Spiritualists of greater or less experience. It goes without saying, then, that the aim of the Society was not to destroy but to better and purify Spiritualism. The phenomena we knew to be real, and we believed them to be the most important of all current subjects for investigation. For, whether they should finally prove to be traceable to the agency of the departed, or but manifesta- tions of occult natural forces acting in concert with latent psycho physiological human powers, they opened up a great field of research, the outcome of which must be enlightenment upon the master problem of life: Man and his Relations. We had seen phenomenalism running riot and twenty millions of believers clutching at one drifting theory after another in the hope to gain the truth. We had reason to know that the whole truth could only be found in one quarter, the Asiatic schools of philosophy, and we felt convinced that the truth could never be discovered until men of all races and creeds should join like brothers in the search. So taking our stand upon that ground, we began to point the way eastward.


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Our first step was to lay down the proposition that, even admitting the phenomena to be real, they need not of necessity be ascribed to departed souls We showed that there was ample historical evidence that such phenomena had from remotest times been exhibited by men who were not mediums, who repudiated the passivity exacted of mediums, and who simply claimed to produce them by cultivating inherent powers in their living selves. Hence the burden of proving that those wonders were and could only be done by the dead with the agency of passive medial agents, lay with the Spiritualists.

To deny our proposition involved either the repudiation of the testimony of the most trustworthy authorities in many countries and in different epochs, or the wholesale ascription of mediumship to every wonder-worker mentioned in history. The latter horn of the dilemma had been taken. Reference to the works of the most noted Spiritualistic writers, as well as to the newspaper organs of the movement, will show that the thaums, or ‘‘miracles’’ of every ‘‘magician,” saint, religious leader, and ascetic, from the Chaldæan Magians, the ancient Hindu saint, the Egyptian Jannes and Jambres, the Hebrew Moses and Jesus, and the Mussulman prophet, down to the Benares sannyâsi of M. Jacolliot, and the common fakir of to-day, who has made Anglo Indian mouths gape with wonder, have each and all been spoken of as true mediumistic marvels. This was the best that could be done with a difficult subject, but it could not prevent Spiritualists from thinking. The more they have thought, read and compared notes, during the past five years, with those who have travelled in Asia and studied psychological science as a science, the more has the first acrid feeling against our Society abated. We noticed this change in the first issue of this magazine. After only five years of agitation, without abuse from us or any aggressive propagandism on our part, the leaven of this great truth has begun to work. It can be seen on every side. We are now kindly asked to show Europe and America experimental proofs of the correctness of our assertions. Little by little a body of persons, including some of the best minds in the movement, has come over to our side and many now cordially endorse our position: that there can be no spiritual intercourse either with the souls of the living or the dead, unless it is preceded by self-spiritualization, the conquest of the meaner self, the education of the nobler powers within us. The serious dangers, as well as the more evident gratifications of mediumship, are becoming gradually appreciated. Phenomenalism, thanks to the


369————————————————————THE LEAVEN OF THEOSOPHY.

splendid works of Professor Zöllner, Mr. Crookes, Mr. Varley, and other able experimentalists, is tending towards its proper limits of a problem of science. There is a thoughtful and more and more earnest study of spiritual philosophy. We see this, not alone among the Spiritualists of Great Britain, Australasia and the United States, but also among the intellectual and numerous classes of the continental spiritists and the magnetists. Should nothing occur to break the present harmony and impede the progress of ideas, we may well expect, within another five years, to see the entire body of investigators of the phenomena of mesmerism and mediumism more or less imbued with a conviction that the greatest psychological truth in its most unadulterated form, can be found in the Indian Philosophies. And let it be remembered we ascribe this great result not to anything we few may personally have done or said, but to the gradual growth of a conviction that the experience of mankind and the lessons of the past can no longer be ignored.

It would be easy to fill many pages with extracts from the journalism of to-day that sustain the above views, but we forbear. Wherever these lines are read—and that will be by subscribers in almost every quarter of the globe—their truth will not be denied by impartial observers. Merely to show the tendency of things, let us take the following excerpts from the Spiritual Notes and the Revue Spirite, organs respectively of the spiritualist and the spiritist parties. The first says:

From Certain delicate yet well-defined signs of the times we are led to believe that a great change is gradually passing over the spirit of that system which, for the last thirty years, has been called by the not altogether happy title of Modern Spiritualism. This change is observable, not perhaps so much in the popular aspect of the subject, which will doubtless always remain more or less one of sign and wonder. It is probably necessary that such should be the case. It is very likely a sine qua non that there should always be a fringe of the purely marvellous to attract the criers of Lo here “ “Lo there!” from whose numbers the higher and inner circle of initiates may be from time to time recruited. It is here we discern the great value, with all their possible abuses, of physical manifestations, materializations, and the like. These form the alphabet of the neophyte. But the change which strikes us at the present moment is what we may call the rapid growth of the initiate class as opposed to the neophytes; the class of those who have quite grown out of the need of these sensible wonders (a need through which, however, they have duly passed) and who are prepared to pass to the sublimest heights of the spiritual philosophy. We cannot but regard this as an eminently happy sign, because

it is the evidence of normal growth. We have had first the blade, then the ear,

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but now we have the full corn in the ear. Among the many evidences of this change we note two especially, each of which has been mentioned already in these columns in its single aspect. One is the publication of Dr. Wyld’s book on Christian Theosophy, the other the formation and development of the secret society called the Guild of the Holy Spirit. We are not prepared to commit ourselves to all the doctrines of Dr. Wyld’s book. The Guild would probably be too ecclesias tical in its structure for many of our readers—it is founded, we may mention, by a clergyman of the Church of England—but in each case we notice what is called a “levelling up.” We perceive that the paramount idea is not to call spirits from the vasty deep—not to force the hand of the spirit world, so to say, and to compel its denizens to come “down” or “up” to us, but so to regulate life as to open up the dormant sense on our side, and enable us to see those who are not in a land that is very far off, from which they have come up or down to us. This, we happen to know, is preëminently the case with the Guild, which, beginning by being regulative of life and worship, includes a margin for any amount of thaumaturgical element. We may not say more, but we may also point to every page of Dr. Wyld’s book as an indication of a similar method; and we notice the supervention of that method with much satisfaction. It will never be the popular method, but its presence, however secret, in our midst, will work like leaven, and affect the whole mass of “Modern Spiritualism.”

COUNT ST. GERMAIN
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[Vol. II. No. 8, May, 1881.]

AT long intervals have appeared in Europe certain men whose rare intellectual endowments, brilliant conversation, and mysterious modes of life have astounded and dazzled the public mind. The article now copied from All the Year Round relates to one of these men—the Count St. Germain. In Hargrave Jennings’ curious work, The Rosicrucians, is described another, a certain Signor Gualdi, who was once the talk of Venetian society. A third was the historical personage known as Alessandro di Cagliostro, whose name has been made the synonym of infamy by a forged Catholic biography. It is not now intended to compare these three individuals with each other or with the common run of men. We copy the article of our London contemporary for quite another object. We wish to show how basely personal character is traduced without the slightest provocation—unless the fact of one’s being brighter in mind, and more versed in the secrets of natural law can be construed as a sufficient provocation to set the slanderer’s pen and the gossip’s tongue in motion. Let the reader attentively note what follows. The writer in All the Year Round says:

This famous adventurer [ Count St. Germain] is supposed to have been a Hungarian by birth, but the early part of his life was by himself carefully wrapped in mystery. His person and his title alike stimulated curiosity. His age was unknown and his parentage equally obscure. We catch the first glimpse of him in Paris, a century and a quarter ago, filling the court and the town with his renown. Amazed Paris saw a man—apparently of middle age——a man who lived in magnificent style, who went to dinner parties where he ate nothing, but talked incessantly and with exceeding brilliancy on every imaginable topic. His tone was perhaps over trenchant—the tone of a man who knows perfectly what he is talking about. Learned, speaking every civilized language admirably, a great musician, an excellent chemist, he played the part of a prodigy, and played it to perfection. Endowed with extra ordinary confidence or consummate impudence, he not only laid down the law magisterially concerning the present, but spoke without hesitation of events 200 years old. His anecdotes of remote occurrences were related with extraordinary


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minuteness. He spoke of scenes at the court of Francis I. as if he had seen them, describing exactly the appearance of the king, imitating his voice, manner and language, affecting throughout the character of an eye-witness. In like style he edified his audience with pleasant stories of Louis XIV., and regaled them with vivid descriptions of places and persons. Hardly saying in so many words that he was actually present when the events happened, he yet contrived, by his great graphic power, to convey that impression . . . intending to astonish, he succeeded completely. Wild stories were current concerning him. He was reported to be 300 years old, and to have prolonged his life by the use of a famous elixir. Paris went mad about him. He was questioned constantly about his secret of longevity, and was marvellously adroit in his replies, denying all power to make old folks young again, but quietly asserting his possession of the secret of arresting decay in the human frame. Diet, he protested, was, with his marvellous elixir, the true secret of long life, and he resolutely refused to eat any food but such as had been specially prepared for him-—oatmeal, groats and the white meat of chickens. On great occasions he drank a little wine, sat up as late as anyone would listen to him, but took extraordinary precautions against the cold. To ladies he gave mysterious cosmetics to preserve their beauty unimpaired; to men, he talked openly of his method of transmuting metals, and of a certain process for melting down a dozen little diamonds into one large stone. These astounding assertions were backed by the possession of apparently boundless wealth, and a collection of jewels of rare size and beauty.

From time to time this strange being appeared in various European capitals, under various names, as Marquis de Montferrat, Count Bellamare, at Venice; Chevalier Schoening, at Pisa; Chevalier Weldon, Milan; Count Soltikoff, at Genoa; Count Tzarogy at Schwalbach, and, finally, as Count St. Germain at Paris; but, after his disaster at the Hague, no longer seems so wealthy as before, and has at times the appearance of seeking his fortune. At Tournay, he is “interviewed” by the renowned Chevalier de Seingalt, who finds him in an Armenian robe and pointed cap, with a long beard descending to his waist, and ivory wand in hand—the complete make-up of a necromancer. St. Germain is surrounded by a legion of bottles, and is occupied in developing the manufacture of hats upon chemical principles. Senigalt being indisposed, the Count offers to physic him gratis and offers to dose him with an elixir, which appears to have been æther; but the other refuses, with many polite speeches. It is the scene of the two augurs. Not being allowed to act as physician, St. Germain determines to show his power as an alchemist, takes a twelve-sons piece from the other augur, puts it on red-hot charcoal, and works with a blow-pipe, the piece of money is fused and allowed to cool. “Now,” says St. Germain, “take your money again.” “But it is gold.” “Of the purest.” Augur No. 2 does not believe in the transmutation and looks on the whole operation as a trick; but he pockets the piece, nevertheless, and finally presents it to the celebrated Marshal Keith, then governor of Neuchatel.

Again, in pursuit of dyeing and other manufacturing schemes, St. Germain turned up at St. Petersburg, Dresden and Milan. Once he got into trouble and was arrested in a petty town of Piedmont on a protested bill of exchange; but he

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pulled out a hundred thousand crowns’ worth of jewels, paid on the spot, bullied the governor of the town like a pickpocket, and was released with the most respectful excuses.

Very little doubt exists that during one of his residences in Russia, he played an important part in the revolution which placed Catherine II. on the throne. In support of this view, Baron Gleichen cites the extraordinary attention bestowed on St. Germain at Leghorn, 1770, by Count Alexis Orloff, and a remark made by Prince Gregory Orloff to the Margrave of Onspach during his stay at Nureniberg.

After all, who was he ?—the son of a Portuguese king or of a Portuguese Jew? Or did he in his old age tell the truth to his protector and enthusiastic admirer, Prince Charles of Hesse Cassel? According to the story told by his last friend, he was the son of a Prince Rakoczy of Transylvania, and his first wife a Tekely. He was placed, when an infant, under the protection of the last of the Medici. When he grew up and heard that his two brothers, sons of the Princess Hesse Rheinfels, of Rothenburg, had received the names of St. Charles and St. Elizabeth, he determined to take the name of their holy brother St. Germanus. What was the truth? One thing alone is certain, that he was a protege of the last Medici. Prince Charles, who appears to have regretted his death, which happened in 1783, very sincerely tells us that he fell sick, while pursuing his experiments in colours at Ekrenforde, and died shortly after, despite the innumerable medicaments prepared by his own private apothecary. Frederick the Great, who, despite his scepticism, took a queer interest in astrologers, said of him, “This is a man who does not die.” Mirabeau adds epigrammatically, “he was always a careless fellow, and at last, like his predecessors, forgot not to die.”

And now we ask what shadow of proof is herein afforded either that St. Germain was an “adventurer,” that he meant to “play the part of a prodigy,” or that he sought to make money out of dupes. Not one single sign is there of his being other than what he seemed, viz., a possessor of ample means to support honestly his standing in society. He claimed to know how to fuse small diamonds into large ones, and to transmute metals, and backed his “assertions” by the possession of apparently boundless wealth and a collection of jewels of rare size and beauty. Are “adventurers” like this? Do charlatans enjoy the confidence and admiration of the cleverest statesmen and nobles of Europe for long years, and not even at their deaths show in one thing that they were undeserving? Some encyclopædists (see New American Cyclopædia xiv. 266) say: “He is supposed to have been employed during the greater part of his life as a spy at the courts at which he resided.” But upon what evidence is this supposition based? Has anyone found it in any of the state papers in the secret archives of either of those courts? Not one word, not one shred of fact to build this base calumny upon, has ever been found. It is simply a malicious he. The treatment


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this great man, this pupil of Indian and Egyptian hierophants, this proficient in the secret wisdom of the East, has had from Western writers, is a stigma upon human nature. And so has the stupid world behaved towards every other person who, like St. Germain, has revisited it after long seclusion devoted to study, with his stores of accumulated esoteric wisdom, in the hope of bettering it, and making it wiser and happier.

One other point should be noticed. The above account gives no particulars of the last hours of the mysterious Count or of his funeral. Is it not absurd to suppose that if he really died at the time and place mentioned, he would have been laid in the ground without the pomp and ceremony, the official supervision, the police registration which attend the funerals of men of his rank and notoriety? Where are these data? He passed out of public sight more than a century ago, yet no memoir contains them. A man who so lived in the full blaze of publicity could not have vanished, if he really died then and there, and left no trace behind. Moreover, to this negative we have the alleged positive proof that he was living several years after 1784. He is said to have had a most important private conference with the Empress of Russia in 1785 or 1786, and to have appeared to the Princess de Lamballe when she stood before the tribunal, a few moments before she was struck down with a billet, and a butcher-boy cut off her head; and to Jeanne Dubarry, the mistress of Louis XV. as she waited on her scaffold at Paris the stroke of the guillotine in the Days of Terror of 1793.

A respected member of our Society, residing in Russia, possesses some highly important documents about Count St. Germain, and for the vindication of the memory of one of the grandest characters of modern times, it is hoped that the long-needed but missing links in the chain of his history may speedily be given to tile world through these columns.

LAMAS AND DRUSES.
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[Vol. II. No. 9, June, 1881.]

Mr. L. OLIPHANT’S new work, Land of Gilcad, attracts considerable attention. Reviews appeared some time since, but we had to lay the subject aside, until now, for lack of space. We shall now have something to say, not of the work itself—though justice can hardly be sufficiently done to the writings of that clever author—but of what he tells us respecting the Druses, those mystics of Mount Lebanon of whom so little is known. We may perchance shed some new light on the subject. Mr. Oliphant thinks that

The Druse has a firm conviction that the end of the world is at hand. Recent events have so far tallied with the enigmatical prophecies of his sacred books, that he looks forward to the speedy resurrection of El Hakim, the founder and divine personage of the sect. In order to comprehend this, the connection between China and Druse theology has to be remembered. The souls of all pious Druses are supposed to be occupying in large numbers certain cities in the west of China. The end of the world will be signalized by the approach of a mighty army from the East against the contending powers of Islam and Christianity. This army will be under the command of the Universal Mind and will consist of millions of Chinese Unitarians. To it Christians and Mahomedans will surrender and march before it to Mecca. El Hakim will then appear; at his command the Caaba will be demolished by fire from Heaven, and the resurrection of the dead will take place. Now that Russia has come into collision with China, the Druses see the fulfilment of their sacred prophecies, and are eagerly waiting for an Armageddon in which they believe themselves destined to play a prominent part. (Pioneer.)

Mr. Laurence Oliphant is in our opinion one of England’s best writers. He is also more deeply acquainted with the inner life of the East than most of the travellers and writers who have written on the subject—not even excepting Captain and Mrs. R. Burton. But even this acute and observing intellect could hardly fathom the secret of the profoundly mystical beliefs of the Druses. To begin with, El Hakim is not the founder of their sect. Their ritual and dogmas were never made known but to those who had been admitted into their brother-


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hood. Their origin is next to unknown. As to their external religion, or rather what has transpired of it, that can be told in a few words. The Druses are believed to be a mixture of Kurds, Mardi-Arabs, and other semi-civilized tribes. We humbly maintain that they are the descendants of and a mixture of, mystics of all nations, mystics who, in the face of cruel and unrelenting persecution by the orthodox Christian Church and orthodox Islamism, have, ever since the first centuries of the Mohammedan propaganda, been gathered together, and who gradually made a permanent settlement in the fastnesses of Syria and Mount Lebanon, where they had from the first found refuge. Since then they have preserved the strictest silence upon their beliefs and truly occult rites. Later on their warlike character, great bravery and unity of purpose, which made their foes, whether Mussulmans or Christians, equally fear them, helped them toward forming an independent community, or, as we may term it, an imperium in imperio They are the Sikhs of Asia Minor, and their polity offers many points of similarity with the late “commonwealth” of the followers of Guru Nânak, even extending to their mysticism and indomitable bravery. But the two are even more closely related to a third and far more mysterious community of religionists, of which nothing or next to nothing is known by outsiders: we mean that fraternity of Tibetan Lamaists, known as the Brotherhood of Khe-lang, who mix but little with the rest. Even Csoma de Körös, who passed several years with the Lamas, learned hardly more of the religion of these Chakravartins (wheel-turners) than what they chose to let him know of their exoteric rites, and of the Khe-langs he learned positively nothing.

The mystery that hangs over the scriptures and religion of the Druses is far more impenetrable than that connected with the Amritsar and Lahore “Disciples,” whose Grantha is well known and has been translated into European languages more than once. Of the alleged forty-five sacred books* of the Lebanon mystics none were ever seen, let alone examined, by any European scholar.

Many manuscripts have never left the underground Holoweys (place
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* The work presented by Nasr-Allah to the French king as a portion of the Druse scriptures, and translated by Petis de la Croix in 1701 is pronounced a forgery. Not one of the copies now in the possession of the Bodleian, Vienna, or Vatican Libraries is genuine; and, besides, each of them is a copy from the other. Great was always the curiosity of the travellers, and greater yet the efforts of the indomitable and ever-prying missionary, to penetrate behind the veil of Druse worship, but all have resulted in failure. The strictest secrecy as to the nature of their beliefs, the peculiar rites practised in their subterranean Holoweys, and the contents of their canonical books was enjoined upon their followers by H’amsa and Boha-eddin, the chief and first disciple of the former.


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of religious meeting), invariably built under the meeting-room on the ground floor, and the public Thursday assemblies of the Druses are simply blinds intended for over-curious travellers and neighbours.

Verily a strange sect are the disciples of H’amsa, as they call themselves. Their Okhal or spiritual teachers, besides having, like the Sikh Akali, the duty of defending the visible place of worship, which is merely a large unfurnished room, are also the guardians of the Mystical Temple and the “wise men,” or the Initiates of their mysteries—as their name of Okhal implies, Akl being in Arabic “intelligence” or “wisdom.” It is improper to call them Druses, as they regard it as an insult; nor are they in reality the followers of Daruzi a heretical pupil of H’amsa, but the true disciples of the latter. The origin of that personage, who appeared among them in the eleventh century, coming from Central Asia, and whose secret or mystery name is El Hamma, is quite unknown to our European scholars. His spiritual titles are “Universal Source or Mind,” “Ocean of Light,” and “Absolute or Divine Intelligence.” They are, in short, repetitions of those of the Tibetan Dalai-Lama, whose appellation, “Path to the Ocean,” * means Path or “Way to the Ocean of Light” (Intelligence) or Divine Wisdom—both titles being identically the same. It is curious that the Hebrew word lamad should also mean the “God-taught.”

An English Orientalist recently found that the religion of Nânak had a good deal of Buddhism in it (art. ‘‘ Diwali,’’ in Calcutta Review). This would only be natural, since the Empire of Hindustan is the land of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. But that the religion of the Druses, between whose geographical and ethnological position and that of the Hindus there is an abyss, should be so, is far more incomprehensible and strange. Yet it is a fact. They are more Lamaists in their beliefs and certain rites, than any other people on the face of the globe. The fact may be contradicted, but it will only be because Europe knows next to nothing of either. Their system of government is set down as feudal and patriarchal, while it is as theocratic as that of
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* Lama ‘‘ means path or road in the vulgar Tibetan language, but in that figurative sense it conveys the meaning of way ; as the ‘way to wisdom or salvation.” strangely enough it also means ‘cross.” It is the Roman figure X or ten, the emblem of perfection or perfect number, and stood for ten with the Egyptians, Chinese, Phœnicians, Romans, etc. It is also found in the Mexican secular calendars. The Tartars call it Lama from the Scytho-Turanian word lamh, hand (from the number of fingers on both hands), and it is synonymuos with the fad of the Chaldees, “and thus became the name of a cross, of the High Priest of time Tartars, and of the Lamaic Messenger of God,” says the author of The Book of God, in the “commentaries on the Apocalypse.” With the Irish, luam signifies the head of the church, a spiritual chief.


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the Lamaists—or as that of the Sikhs, as it used to be. The mysterious representation of the Deity appears in H’amsa, whose spirit is said to guide them, and periodically reincarnate itself in the person of the chief Okhal of the Druses, as it does in the Guru-Kings of the Sikhs, some of whom, like Guru Govind, claimed to be the reIncarna tions of Nânak, while the Dalai Lamas of Tibet claim to be those of Buddha. The latter, by the way, are loosely called Shaberons and Kuhilghans (both in various degrees reincarnations not of Buddha, the man, but of his Buddh-like divine spirit) by Abbe Huc and others, without any regard to the difference in the appellation: El Hamma or H’amsa came from the “land of the Word of God.” Where was that land? Swedenborg, the Northern Seer, advised his followers to search for the LOST WORD among the hierophants of Tartary, Tibet and China. To this we may add a few explanatory and corroborative facts. Ll’hassa, the theocratic metropolis of Tibet, is commonly translated as “God land,” that is to say, this is the only English equivalent that we can find .*

Though separated by the Karakorum range and Little Tibet, the Great Tibet is on the same Asiatic plateau in which our biblical scholars designate the table-land of Pamir,† as the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of the mythical Adam. Tibet, or Ti-Boutta will yield, etymologically, the words Ti—which is the equivalent for God in Chinese—and Buddha or Wisdom: the land then of the Wisdom Deity, or the incarnations of Wisdom. It is also called “Bod-Jid.” Now “Jid” and “Jod” are synonymous apocalyptic and phallic names for the Deity—Yod being the Hebrew name for God. G. Higgins shows in his Celtic Druids, the Welsh Druids altering the name Bod-Jid into Budd-ud, which with them too meant the “Wisdom of Jid “— what people now call “God.”‡

The religion of the Druses is said to be a compound of Judaism, Mohammedanism and Christianity, strongly tinged with Gnosticism
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* And a most unsatisfactory term it is, as the Lamaists have no conception of the anthropomorphic deity which the English word ‘God’’ represents. For Buddha (the latter name being quite unknown to the common people) is their equivalent expression for that All-embracing, Superior Good or Wisdom from which all proceeds as does the light from the sun, the cause being nothing personal, but simply all abstract principle. And it is this that in all our Theosophical writing, for the want of a better word, we have to term ‘God-like” and “Divine.’’

† There are several Pamirs in Central Asia. There is the Alichur Pamir which lies more north than either; the Great Palmir with Lake Victoria in its vicinity; Taghdumbash Pamlr and the Little Pamir more south; and eastward another chain of Pamirs dividing Mustagh Pass and Little Guhjal. We would like to know on which of these we have to look for the garden of Eden.

‡ The name in Hebrew for sanctuary is te-bah, and ti-boutta and te-bet, also a cradle of the human race, thebeth meaning a box,” the “ark” of Noah and the floating cradle of Moses.


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and the Magian system of Persia. Were people to call things by their right names, sacrificing all self-conceit to truth, they might confess things otherwise. They could say, for instance, that Mohammedanism being a compound of Chaldeeism, Christianity and Judaism; Christianity a mixture of Judaism, Gnosticism and Paganism; and Judaism a wholesale Egypto-Chaldæan Kabalism, masquerading under different names and fables, made to fit the bits and scraps of the real history of the Israelite tribes—the religious system of the Druses would then be found one of the last survivals of the archaic Wisdom-Religion. It is entirely based on that element of practical mysticism of which branches have from time to time sprung into existence. They pass under the unpopular names of Kabalism, Theosophy and Occultism. Except Christianity—which owing to the importance it gives to the principal prop of its doctrine of salvation (we mean the dogma of Satan) had to anathematize the practice of theurgy—every religion, including Judaism and Mohammedanism, credits these above-named branches. Civilization having touched with its materialistic, all-levelling and all-destroying hand even India and Turkey amid the din and chaos of crumbling faiths and old sciences, the reminiscence of archaic truths is now fast dying out.

It has become popular and fashionable to denounce “the old and mouldy superstitions of our forefathers,’’ verily even amongst the most natural allies of the students of theurgy or occultism—the Spiritualists. Among the many creeds and faiths striving to follow the cyclic tide, and helping it themselves to sweep away the knowledge of old, strangely blind to the fact that the same powerful wave of materialism and modern science also sweeps away their own foundations, the only religions which have remained as alive as ever to these forgotten truths of old, are those which from the first have kept strictly aloof from the rest. The Druses, while outwardly mixing with Moslems and Christians, and alike ever ready to read the Kurán as well as the Gospels in their Thursday public meetings, have never allowed an uninitiated stranger to penetrate the mysteries of their own doctrines. Intelligence alone, they say, communicates to the soul (which to them is mortal, though it survives the body) the enlivening and divine spark of the Supreme Wisdom, or Ti-meami, but it must be screened from all non-believers in H’amsa. The work of the soul is to seek Wisdom, and the substance of earthly wisdom is to know Universal Wisdom, or ‘‘God,” as other religionists call that principle. This is the doctrine


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of the Buddhists and Lamaists who say “Buddha” where the Druses say ‘‘Wisdom”—one word being the translation of the other. ‘‘In spite of their external adoption of the religious customs of the Moslems, of their readiness to educate their children in Christian schools, their use of the Arabic language, and their free intercourse with strangers, the Druses remain even more than the Jews a peculiar people” says a writer.

They are very rarely, if ever, converted; they marry within their own race, and adhere most tenaciously to their traditions, baffling all efforts to discover their cherished secrets. Yet neither are they fanatical nor do they covet proselytes.

In his Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, Huc speaks with great surprise of the extreme tolerance and even outward respect shown by the Tibetans to other religions. A Grand Lama or a “living Buddha,’’ as he calls him, whom the two missionaries met at Choang Long, near Koum-Boum, certainly had the best of them in good breeding as well as tact and deference to their feelings. The two French men, however, neither understood nor appreciated the act, since they seemed quite proud of the insult offered by them to the Hobilgan. ‘‘We were waiting for him seated on the kang, and purposely did not rise to receive him, but merely made him a slight salutation,’’ boasts Hue (Vol. ii. pp. 35, 36). The Grand Lama “did not appear disconcerted,’’ though; upon seeing that they as ‘‘purposely withheld from him’’ an invitation to sit down ‘‘he only looked at them surprised,’’ as well he might. A breviary of theirs having attracted his attention, he demanded ‘‘permission to examine it,” and then carrying it solemnly to his brow, he said: “It is your book of prayer; we must always honour and reverence other people’s prayers.” It was a good lesson, yet they understood it not. We would like to see that Christian missionary who would reverently carry to his brow the Vedas, the Tripitaka, or the Grantha, and publicly honour other people’s prayers! White the Tibetan “savage,” the heathen Hobilgan, was all affability and politeness, the two French “Lamas of Jehovah,” as Abbe Hue called his companion and himself, behaved like two uneducated bullies. And to think that they even boast of it in print!

No more than the Druses do the Lamaists seek to make proselytes. Both people have their “schools of magic,” those in Tibet being attached to some La-khang (lamaseries), and those among the Druses in the closely—guarded crypts of initiation, no stranger being even allowed


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inside the buildings. As the Tibetan Hobilgans are the incarnations of Buddha’s spirit, so the Druse Okhals—erroneously called “Spiritualists” by some writers—are the incarnations of H’amsa. Both peoples have a regular system of pass-words and signs of recognition among the neophytes, and we know them to be nearly identical.

In the mystical system of the Druses there are five “Messengers” or interpreters of the “Word of the Supreme Wisdom,” who occupy the same position as the five chief Bodhisattvas, or Hobilgans of Tibet, each of whom is the bodily temple of the spirit of one of the five Buddhas. Let us see what can be made known of both classes. The names of the five principal Druse “Messengers,” or rather their titles—as these names are generic, in both the Druse and Tibetan hierarchies, and the title passes at the death of each to his successor—are:

(1) H’amsa,* or El Hamma (Spiritual Wisdom), considered as the Messiah, through whom speaks Incarnate Wisdom.

(2) Ismail-Ti-meami (the Universal Soul). He prepares the Druses before their initiation to receive “Wisdom.”

(3) Mohammed (the Word). His duty is to watch over the behaviour and necessities of the brethren; a kind of bishop.

(4) Se-lama (the Preceding), called the “Right Wing”

(5) Mokshatana, Boha-eddin (the Following), named the “Left Wing.”

These last are both messengers between H’amsa and the Brotherhood. Above these living mediators who remain ever unknown to all but the chief 0khals, stand the ten incarnates of the “Supreme Wisdom,” the last of whom is to return at the end of the cycle, which is fast approaching, though no one but El Hamma knows the day last “Messenger,” in accordance with the cyclic recurrences of events, being also the first who came with H’amsa, hence Boha-eddin. The names of the Druse incarnations are Ali A-llal, who appeared in India (Kabir, we believe); Albar, in Persia; Alya, in Yemen; Moill and Kahim, in Eastern Africa; Moessa and Had-di, in Central Asia; Albou
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* Very curiously the Druses identify their H’amsa with Hemsa, the Prophet Mahomet’s uncle, who, they say, tired of the world and its deceitful temptations, simulated death at the battle of Dhod, A.D. 625, and retired to the fastnesses of a great mountain in central Asia, where he became a saint, he never died in spirit. When several centuries after that he appeared among them it was in his second spiritual body, and when their Messiah had, after founding the Brotherhood, disappeared, Se-lama and Boha-eddin were the only ones to know the retreat of their Master. They alone knew the bodies into which he went on successively reincarnating himself, as he is not permitted to die until the return of the Highest Messenger, the last one of the ten Avatârs, He alone—the now invisible but expected one—stands higher than H’amsa. But it is not, as erroneously believed, “El Hakim,” the Fatimite Khalif of bad name.


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and Manssour, in China; and Budea, that is Boha-eddin,* in Tartary, whence he came and whither he returned. This last one, some say, was dual-sexed on earth. Having entered into El Hakim—the Khalif, a monster of wickedness—he caused him to be assassinated, and then sent H’amsa to preach and to found the Brotherhood of Lebanon. El Hakim, then, is but a mask. It is Budea, i.e., Boha-eddin, they expect.†

And now for the Lamaic hierarchy. Of the living or incarnate Buddhas there are five also, the chief of whom is Dalay, or rather Talay, Lama—from tale, “ocean” or “sea”; he being called “Ocean of Wisdom.” Above him, as above H’amsa, there is but the “Supreme Wisdom,” the abstract principle from which emanated the five Buddhas—Maitrei-Buddha (the last Bodhisattva or Vishnu in the Kalki Avatar), the tenth “Messenger” expected on earth, included. But this will be the One Wisdom, and will incarnate itself in the whole humanity collectively, not in a single individual. But of this mystery no more at present. These five Hobilgans are distributed in the following order:

(i) Talay-Lama, of Lha-ssa, the incarnation of the “spiritual, passive” wisdom, which proceeds from Gautama or Siddhârtha Buddha, or Fo.

(2) Bande-cha-an Rem-boo-tchi, at Djashi-Loombo. He is “the active earthly wisdom.”

(3) Sa-deha-fo, or the “Mouthpiece of Buddha,” otherwise the ‘‘Word,” at Ssamboo.

(4) Khi-sson-Tamba, the “Precursor” (of Buddha) at the Grand Kooren.

( 5)Tchang-Zya-Fo-Lang, in the Altai Mountains. He is called the “Successor” (of Buddha).

The Shaberons are one degree lower. They, like the chief Okhals of the Druses, are the Initiates of the great wisdom or Buddha, esoteric religion. This double list of the “five” shows great similarity at least between the polity of the two systems. The reader must bear in mind that they have sprung into their present visible conditions nearly at the same time. It was from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries that
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* One of the names of Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, was Budea.

† In the Druse system there is no room for a personal deity, unless a portion of the divine impersonal and abstract wisdom incarnates itself in a mortal man. The deific principle with them is the essence of Life, the All, and as impersonal as the Parabrahm of the Vedântins or the Nirvana state of the Buddhists, ever invisible, all-pervading and incomprehensible to be known but by occasional incarnations of the spirit in human form. These ten incarnations or human avatârs, as above specified, are called the ‘Temples of Ti-meam” (Universal Spirit).


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modern Lamaism evolved its ritual and popular religion, which serves the Hobilgans and Shaberons as a blind, even against the average Chinaman and Tibetan. It was in the eleventh century that H’amsa founded the Brotherhood of Lebanon, and till now no one has acquired its secrets!

It is supremely strange that both the Lamas and the Druses should have the same mystical statistics. They reckon the bulk of the human race at 1,332,000,000. When good and evil, they say, will come to an equilibrium in the scales of human actions (now evil is far the heavier), then the breath of “Wisdom” will annihilate in the wink of an eye just 666,000,000 of men. The surviving 666,000,000 will have “Supreme Wisdom” incarnated in them.* This may have and probably has an allegorical meaning. But what relation might it possibly bear to the number of the “beast” of St. John’s Revelation?

If more were known than really is of the religions of Tibet and the Druses, then would scholars see that there is more affinity between Turanian Lamaists and the Semitic “El Hammists,” or Druses, than was ever suspected. But all is darkness, conjecture and mere guess work whenever the writers speak of either the one or the other. The little that has transpired of their beliefs is generally so disfigured by prejudice and ignorance that no learned Lama or Druse would ever recognize a glimpse of likeness to his faith in these speculative phantasies. Even the profoundly suggestive conclusion to which Godfrey Higgins came (Celtic Druids, part i. p. 101) however true is but half so. “It is evident,” he writes, “that there was a secret science possessed somewhere [by the ancients] which must have been guarded by the most solemn oaths . . . and I cannot help suspecting that there is still a secret doctrine known only in the deep recesses of the crypts of Tibet.”

To conclude with the Druses. As Se-lama and Boha-eddin—- names more than suggestive of the words “Lama” and “Buddha”—are the only ones entrusted with the secret of H’amsa’s retreat, and having the means of consulting with their Master, they from time to time bring his directions and commands to the Brotherhood; so even to
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* The Hindus have the same belief. In the Deva-Yuga they will all be Devs or Gods, see Lama-nim-tshen -po, or “Great Road to Perfection,’’ a work of the fifteenth century. The author of this book is the great reformer of Lamaism, the famous Tzong-ka-pa, from whose hair sprang up the famous Koum.boum letter tree, a tree whose leaves all bear sacred Tibetan inscriptions, according to tradition. This tree was seen by Abbe Hue some forty years ago, and was seen last year by the Hungarian traveller Count Szitcheny, who, however, begging his pardon, could not, under its physical surroundings, have carried away a branch of it as he pretends to have done.


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this day do the Okhals of that name travel every seventh year through Bussora and Persia into Tartary and Tibet to the very west of China, and return at the expiration of the eleventh year, bringing fresh orders from “El Hamma.” Owing to the expectation of war between China and Russia, only last year a Druse messenger passed through Bombay on his way to Tibet and Tartary. This would explain the “superstitious” belief that “the souls of all pious Druses are supposed to be occupying in large numbers certain cities in China.” It is around the plateau of the Pamirs—they say, with the biblical scholars—that the cradle of the true race must be located—but the cradle of initiated humanity only, of those who have for the first time tasted of the fruit of knowledge, and those are in Tibet, Mongolia, Tartary, China and India, where also the souls of their pious and initiated brethren transmigrate and become “sons of God.” What this language means every Theosophist ought to know. They discredit the fable of Adam and Eve, and say that they who first ate of the forbidden fruit, and thus became Elohim, were Enoch or Hermes (the supposed father of Masonry), and Seth Sat-an, the father of secret wisdom and learning, whose abode, they say, is now in the planet Mercury, and whom the Christians were kind enough to convert into a chief devil, the “fallen angel.” Their evil one is an abstract principle, and called the “Rival.”

The “millions of Chinese Unitarians” may mean Tibetan Lamas, Hindus and others of the East, as well as Chinamen. It is true that the Druses believe in and expect their resurrection day in Armageddon, which, however, they pronounce otherwise. As the phrase occurs in the Apocalypse it may seem to some that they got the idea from St. John’s Revelation. It is nothing of the kind. On that day, which, according to the Druse teaching, will consummate the great spiritual plan, “the bodies of the wise and faithful will be absorbed into the absolute essence, and transformed from the many into the One.” This is preeminently the Buddhist idea of Nirvana, and that of the Vedântin final absorption into Parabrahm. Their “Persian Magianism and Gnos-
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* Buddha is son of and (according to the Brâhmanic notion) of vishnu; Maia is mother of Mercury by Jupiter. Buddha means the wise,” and Mercury is God of Wisdom (Hermes) and the planet sacred to Gautama Buddha is Mercury; Venus and Isis presided over navigation, as Mary or Maria, the Madonna, presides now. Is not the latter hymned to this day by the Church:

" Ave Maria, stella .
Dei mater alma”?
or
" Hail, Star of time Sea,
Mother of God”
—thus identified with Venus?


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ticism” makes them regard St. John as Oannes, the Chaldæan man-fish, hence connects their belief at once with the Indian Vishnu and the Lamaic symbology. Their “Armageddon” is simply “Ramdagon," * and this is how it is explained.

The sentence in Revelation is no better interpreted than so many other things by Christians, while even the non-Kabalistic Jews know nothing of its real meaning. Armageddon is mistaken for a geographical locality—the elevated table of Esdraelon or Ar-mageddon, the mountain of Megiddo, where Gideon triumphed over the Midianites.† It is an erroneous notion, for the name in the Revelation refers to a mythical place mentioned in one of the most archaic traditions of the heathen east, especially among the Turanian and Semitic races. It is simply a kind of purgatorial Elysium, in which departed spirits are collected to await the day of final judgment. That it is so is proved by the verses in Revelation: “And he gathered them together into a place called . . . Armageddon. And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air” (xvi. 16, 17). The Druses pronounce the name of that mystical locality “Ramdagon.” It is, then, highly probable that the word is an anagram, as shown by the author of the “Commentary on the Apocalypse.” It means “Rama-Dagon,”‡ the first signifying
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* Rama, of the solar race, is an incarnation of Vishnu--a Sun-God. In the “Matsya,” or first Avatar, in order to save humanity from final destruction (see Vishnu Purana) that God appears to King Satyavrata and the seven saints who accompany him on the vessel to escape universal deluge, as an enormous fish with one stupendous horn. To this horn the king is commanded by Hari to tie the ship with a serpent (the emblem of eternity( instead of a cable. The Dalay-Lania, besides his name of “Ocean,” is also called Sarou, which in Tibetan means the “unicorn,” or one-horned. He wears on his head-gear a prominent horn, set over a Yung-dang, or mystic cross, which is the Jain and Hindu Svastika. The “fish” and the sea or water are the most archaic emblems of the Messiahs, or incarnations of divine wisdom, among all the ancient peoples. Fishes play a prominent figure on old christian medals; and in the catacombs of Rome the “Mystic cross” or “Anchor” stands between two fishes as supporters. Dagh.dae, the name of Zaratushtra’s mother, means the “Divine Fish” or Holy Wisdom. The “Mover on the waters,” whether we call him Narayana or Abatur (the Kabalistic Superior Father and “Ancient of the World”( or “Holy spirit” is all one. According to Codex Nazaræus, Kabalah and Genesis, the Holy Spirit when moving on the waters mirrored himself—and ‘‘Adani Kadmon was born.’’ Mare in Latin is the sea, water is associated with every creed. Mary and Venus are both patronesses of the sea and of sailors—and both mothers of Gods of Love whether divine or earthly. The mother of Jesus is called Mary or Mariah—the word meaning in Hebrew mirror, that in which we find but the reflection instead of a reality, and 600 years before Christiatnty there was Maya, Buddha’s mother, whose name means illusion-—identically the same. Another curious “coincidence” is found in the selections of new Dalay-Lamas in Tibet. The new incarnation of Buddha is ascertained by a curious ichthyomancy with three gold fishes. Shutting themselves up in the Buddha-La (temple), the Hobilgans place three gold fish in an urn, and on one of these ancient emblems of Supreme Wisdom shortly appears the name of the child into whom the soul of the late Dalay-Lama is supposed to have transmigrated.

† It is not the “Valley of Megeddo,” for there is no such valley known, Dr. Robinson’s typo graphical and biblical notions being no better than hypotheses.

‡ Rama is also womb and valley, and in Tibetan “goat”; Dag is fish, from Dagon, the man-fish, or perfect wisdom.

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Sun-God of that name, and the second “Dagon,” or the Chaldæan Holy Wisdom incarnated in their “Messenger,” Oannes, the Man-Fish, and descending on the “Sons of God” or the Initiates of whatever country; those, in short, through whom Deific Wisdom occasionally reveals itself to the world.

A REPLY TO OUR CRITICS

OUR FINAL ANSWER TO SEVERAL OBJECTIONS.
—————

[Vol II. No.10, July, 1881.]

IN the ordinary run of daily life speech may be silver, while “silence is gold.” With the editors of periodicals devoted to some special object “silence” in certain cases amounts to cowardice and false pretences. Such shall not be our case.

We are perfectly aware of the fact that the simple presence of the word “Spiritualism” on the title-page of our journal “causes it to lose in the eyes of materialist and sceptic fifty per cent of its value”—for we are repeatedly told so by many of our best friends, some of whom promise us more popularity, hence an increase of subscribers, would we but take out the “contemptible” term and replace it by some other, synonymous in meaning, but less obnoxious phonetically to the general public. That would be acting tinder false pretences. The undisturbed presence of the unpopular word will indicate our reply.

That we did not include ‘‘Spiritualism’’ among the other subjects to which our journal is devoted “in the hopes that it should do us good service among the Spiritualists” is proved by the following fact: From the first issue of our Prospectus to the present day, subscribers from “spiritual” quarters have not amounted to four per cent on our subscription list. Yet, to our merriment, we are repeatedly spoken of as “Spiritualists” by the press and our opponents. Whether really ignorant of or purposely ignoring our views, they tax us with belief in spirits. Not that we would at all object to the appellation—too many far worthier and wiser persons than we firmly believing in ‘‘Spirits’’—but that would he acting under “false pretences” again. And so we are called a “Spiritualist” by persons who foolishly regard the term as a ‘‘brand,” while the orthodox Spiritualists, who are well aware that we attribute their phenomena to quite another agency than spirits, resent our peculiar opinions as an insult to their belief, and in their turn ridicule and oppose us.


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This fact alone ought to prove, if anything ever will, that our journal pursues an honest policy. That, established for the one and sole object, namely, for the elucidation of truth, however unpopular, it has remained throughout true to its first principle—that of absolute impartiality. And that as fully answers another charge, viz., that of publishing views of our correspondents with which we often do not concur ourselves. ‘‘Your journal teems with articles upholding ridiculous superstitions and absurd ghost-stories,” is the complaint in one letter. “You neglect laying a sufficient stress in your editorials upon the necessity of discriminating between facts and error, and in the selection of the matter furnished by your contributors,” says another. A third one accuses us of not sufficiently rising “from supposed facts to principles, which would prove to our readers in every case the former no better than fictions.” In other words, as we understand it, we are accused of neglecting scientific induction. Our critics may be right, but we also are not altogether wrong. In the face of the many crucial and strictly scientific experiments made by our most eminent savants, it would take a wiser sage than King Solomon himself to decide now between fact and fiction. The query, “What is truth?” is more difficult to answer in the nineteenth than in the first century of our era. The appearance of his “evil genius” to Brutus in the shape of a monstrous human form, which, entering his tent in the darkness and silence of the night, promised to meet him in the plains of Philippi, was a fact to the Roman tyrannicide; it was but a dream to his slaves, who neither saw nor heard anything on that night. The existence of an antipodal continent and the heliocentric system were facts to Columbus and Galileo years before they could actually demonstrate them; yet the existence of America, as that of our present solar system, was as fiercely denied several centuries back as the phenomena of Spiritualism are now. Facts existed in the “pre-scientific past,” and errors are as thick as berries in our scientific present. With whom then is the criterion of truth to be left? Are we to abandon it to the mercy and judgment of a prejudiced society, constantly caught trying to subvert that which it does not understand; ever seeking to transform sham and hypocrisy into synonyms of “propriety” and “respectability”? Or shall we blindly leave it to modern exact science, so-called? But science has neither said her last word nor can her various branches of knowledge rejoice in their qualification of exact but so long as the hypotheses of yesterday are not upset by the dis-


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coveries of to-day. “Science is atheistic, phantasmagorical, and always in labour with conjecture. It can never become knowledge per se. Not to know is its climax,” says Prof. A. Wilder, our New York Vice- President, certainly more of a man of science himself than many a scientist better known than he is to the world. Moreover, the learned representatives of the Royal Society have as many cherished hobbies, and are as little free of prejudice and preconception as any other mortals. It is perhaps to religion and her handmaid theology, with her “seventy-times seven” sects, each claiming and none proving its right to the claim of truth, that in our search for it we ought to humbly turn? One of our severe Christian Areopagites actually expresses the fear that “even some of the absurd stories of the Purãnas have found favour with The Theosophist.” But let him tell us, Has the Bible any less “absurd ghost-stories” and “ridiculous miracles” in it than the Hindu Puránas and Buddhist Maha Jataka, or even one of the most “shamefully superstitious publications” of the Spiritualists? (We quote from his letter.) We are afraid in one and all it is but

Faith, fanatic faith, once wedded fast
To some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last

and—we decline accepting anything on faith. In common with most of the periodicals we remind our readers in every number of The Theosophist so that its “Editors disclaim responsibility for opinions expressed by contributors,” with some of which they (we) do not agree. And that is all we can do. We never started out in our paper as teachers, but rather as humble and faithful recorders of the innumerable beliefs, creeds, scientific hypotheses, and—even “superstitions” current in the past ages and now more than lingering yet in our own. Never having been a sectarian—i.e., an interested party—we maintain that in the face of the present situation, during that incessant warfare, in which old creeds and new doctrines, conflicting schools and authorities, revivals of blind faith and incessant scientific discoveries, running a race as though for the survival of the fittest, swallow up and mutually destroy and annihilate each other—daring indeed were that man who would assume the task of deciding between them! Who, we ask, in the presence of those most wonderful and most unexpected achieve ments of our great physicists and chemists would risk to draw the line of demarcation between the possible and the impossible? Where is the honest man who, conversant at all with the latest conclusions of archæology, philology, palæography and especially Assyriology, would


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undertake to prove the superiority of the religious “superstitions” of the civilized Europeans over those of the “heathen,” and even of the fetish-worshipping savages?

Having said so much, we have made clear, we hope, the reason why, believing no mortal man infallible, nor claiming that privilege for ourselves, we open our columns to the discussion of every view and opinion, provided it is not proved absolutely supernatural. Besides, whenever we make room for “unscientific” contributions it is when these treat upon subjects which lie entirely out of the province of physical science—generally upon questions that the average and dogmatic scientist rejects a priori and without examination, but which the real man of science finds not only possible, but after investigation very often fearlessly proclaims the disputed question as an undeniable fact. In respect to most transcendental subjects the sceptic can no more disprove than the believer prove his point. Fact is the only tribunal we submit to, and recognize it without appeal. And before that tribunal a Tyndall and an ignoramus stand on a perfect par. Alive to the truism that every path may eventually lead to the highway as every river to the ocean, we never reject a contribution simply because we do not believe in the subject it treats upon, or disagree with its conclusions. Contrast alone can enable us to appreciate things at their right value; and unless a judge compares notes and hears both sides he can hardly come to a correct decision. Dum vitant stulti vitia in contraria is our motto; and we seek to walk prudently between the many ditches without rushing into either. For one man to demand from another that he shall believe like himself, whether in a question of religion or science, is supremely unjust and despotic. Besides, it is absurd. For it amounts to exacting that the brains of the convert, his organs of perception, his whole organization, in short, be reconstructed precisely on the model of that of his teacher, and that he shall have the same temperament and mental faculties as the other has. And why not his nose and eyes, in such a case? Mental slavery is the worst of all slaveries. It is a state over which brutal force having no real power, it always denotes either an abject cowardice or a great intellectual weakness.

Among many other charges, we are accused of not sufficiently exercising our editorial right of selection. We beg to differ and contradict the imputation. As every other person blessed with brains instead of calves’ feet jelly in his head we certainly have our opinions upon things


391————————————————————A REPLY TO OUR CRITICS.

in general, and things occult especially, to some of which we hold very firmly. But these being our personal views, and though we have as good a right to them as any, we have none whatever to force them for recognition upon others. We do not believe in the activity of “departed spirits”—others, and among these many of the Fellows of the Theosophical Society, do, and we are bound to respect their Opinions so long as they respect ours. To follow every article from a contributor with an Editor’s Note correcting “his erroneous ideas” would amount to turning our strictly impartial journal into a sectarian organ. We decline such an office of
“Sir Oracle.”

The Theosophist is a journal of our Society. Each of its Fellows being left absolutely untrammelled in his opinions, and the body representing collectively nearly every creed, nationality and school of philosophy, every member has a right to claim room in the organ of his Society for the defence of his own particular creed and views. Our Society being an absolute and an uncompromising Republic of conscience, preconception and narrow-mindedness in science and philosophy have no room in it. They are as hateful and as much denounced by us as dogmatism and bigotry in theology; and this we have repeated usque ad nauseam.

Having explained our position, we will close with the following parting words to our sectarian friends and critics. The materialists and sceptics who upbraid us in the name of modern science—the dame who always shakes her head and finger in scorn at everything she has not yet fathomed—we would remind of the suggestive but too mild words of the great Arago: “He is a rash man who outside of pure mathematics pronounces the word ‘impossible.’” And to theology, which under her many orthodox masks throws mud at us from behind every secure corner, we retort by Victor Hugo’s celebrated paradox:

“In the name of Religion we protest against all and every religion!”

“THE CLAIMS OF OCCULTISM”
————

[Vol. II. No. 12, September, 1881.]

THIS IS the heading of an article I find in a London publication, a new weekly called Light, and described as a “Journal Devoted to the Highest Interests of Humanity, both Here and Hereafter.” It is a good and useful journal; and, if I may judge from the only two numbers I have ever seen, one whose dignified tone will prove far more persuasive with the public than the passionate and often rude remarks passed on their opponents and sceptics by its “spiritual” contemporaries. The article to which I wish to call attention is signed by a familiar name (nom de plume), “M.A. Oxon.,” that of a profoundly sympathetic writer, of a personal and esteemed friend—of one, in short, who, I trust, whether he remains friendly or antagonistic to our views, would never confound the doctrine with its adherents, or, putting it more plainly, visit the sins of the Occultists upon Occultism and vice versa.

It is with considerable interest and attention, then, that the present writer has read “The Claims of Occultism.” As everything else coming from “M.A. Oxon.’s” pen, it bears a peculiar stamp, not only of originality but of that intense individuality, that quiet but determined resolution to bring every new phasis, every discovery in Psychological sciences back to its (to him) first principles—Spiritualism. And when writing the word, I do not mean by it the vulgar “seance-room” Spiritualism, which “M.A. Oxon.” has from the very first out grown, but that primitive idea which underlies all the subsequent theories, the old parent root from which have sprung the modern weeds, namely, belief in a guardian angel or a tutelary spirit, who, whether his charge is conscious of it or not—i.e., mediumistic or non mediumistic—is placed by a still higher power over every (baptized?) mortal to watch over his actions during life. And this, if not the correct outline of “M.A. Oxon.’s” faith, is undoubtedly the main idea


393————————————————————“THE CLAIMS OF OCCULTISM.”

of all the Christian-born Spiritualists, past, present, and future. The doctrine, Christian as it now may be—and preeminently Roman Catholic it is—has not originated, as we all know, with the Christian, but with the Pagan world. Besides being represented in the tutelary daimon of Socrates—that ancient “guide” of whom our Spiritualists make the most they can—it is the doctrine of the Alexandrian Greek theurgists, of the Zoroastrians, and of the later Babylonian Jews, one, moreover, sadly disfigured by the successors of all these—the Christians. It matters little though, for we are now concerned but with the personal views of “MA. Oxon.,” which he sets in opposition to those of some Theosophists.

His doctrine then seems to us more than ever to centre in, and gyrate around, that main idea that the spirit of the living man is incapable of acting outside of the body independently and per se; but that it must needs be like a tottering baby guided by his mother or nurse—be led on by some kind of spiritual strings by a disembodied spirit, an individuality entirely distinct from, and at some time even foreign to him self, as such a spirit can only be a human soul, having at some period or other lived on this planet of ours. I trust that I have now correctly stated my friend’s belief, which is that of most of the intellectual, progressive and liberal Spiritualists of our day, one, moreover, shared by all those Theosophists who have joined our movement by deserting the ranks of the hoi polloi of Spiritualism. Nevertheless, and bound though we be to respect the private opinions of those of our Brother-Fellows who have started out in the research of truth by the same path as “M.A. Oxon.,” however widely they may have diverged from the one we ourselves follow, yet we will always say that such is not the belief of all the Theosophists—the writer included. For all that, we shall not follow the nefarious example set to us by most of the Spiritualists and their papers, which are as bitter against us as most of the missionary sectarian papers are against each other and the infidel Theosophists. We will not quarrel, but simply argue, for “Light! more light!” is the rallying cry of both progressive Spiritualists and Theosophists. Having thus far explained myself, “M.A. Oxon.” will take, I am sure, en bon seigneur every remark that I may make on his article in Light which I here quote verbatim. I will not break his flowing narrative, but limit my answers to modest footnotes.

It is now some years since Spiritualists were startled by the publication of two ponderous volumes by Madame Blavatsky, under the title of Isis Unveiled. Those

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who mastered the diversified contents of those large and closely-printed pages, upwards of twelve hundred in number, bore away a vague impression that Spiritualism had been freely handled not altogether to its advantage, and that a portentous claim had been more or less darkly set up for what was called Occultism. The book was full of material—so full that I shall probably be right in saying that no one has mastered its contents so as to folly grasp the author’s plan; but the material sadly needed reducing to order, and many of the statements required elucidation, and some, perhaps, limitation.* Moreover, the reader wanted a guide to pilot him through the difficulties that he encountered on every hand; and, above all, he sorely needed some more tangible hold on the his history and pretensions of the mysterious Brotherhood for whom the author made such tremendous claims.†

It seemed vain for any seeker after truth to attempt to enter into relations, how ever remote, with any adept of the order of which Madame Blavatsky is the visible representative. All questions were met with polite or decisive refusal to submit to any examination of the pretensions made. The Brothers would receive an enquirer only after he had demonstrated his truth, honesty and courage by an indefinitely prolonged probation. They sought no one; they promised to receive none.‡ Meantime, they rejected no one who was persevering enough to go forward in the prescribed path of training by which alone the divine powers of time human spirit can, they allege, be developed.

The only palpable outcome of all this elaborate effort at human enlightenment was the foundation in America of the Theosophical Society, which has been the accepted, though not the prescribed, organization of the Occult Brotherhood.§ They would utilize the Society, but they would not advise as to the methods by which it should be regulated, nor guarantee it any special aid, except in so far as to
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* It is not the first time that the just reproach is unjustly laid at my door. It is but too true that “the material sadly needed reducing to order,’’ but it never was my province to do so, as I gave out one detached chapter after the other, and was quite ignorant, as Mr. 5innett correctly states in The Occult World, whether I had started upon a series of articles, one book or two books. Neither did I much care. It was my duty to give out some hints, to point to the dangerous phases of modern .Spiritualism, and to bring to bear upon that question all the assertions and testimony of the ancient world and its sages that I could find, as all evidence to corroborate my conclusions. I did the best could and knew how. If the critics of Isis Unveiled but consider that (1) its author had never studied the English language, and after learning it in her childhood colloquially had not spoken it before coming to America half-a-dozen of times during a period of many years; (2) that most of the doctrines (or shall we say hypotheses?) given had to be translated from an Asiatic language; and (3) that most, if not all of the quotations from, and references to, other works—some of these out of print and many inaccessible but to the few—and which the author personally had never read or seen, though the passages quoted were proved in each instance minutely correct, then my friends would perhaps feel less critically inclined. However, Isis Unveiled is but a natural entree en matiere in the above article, and I must not lose time over its merits or demerits.

† Indeed, the claims made for a ‘‘brother-hood’’ of living men were never half as pretentious as those which are daily made by the Spiritualists on behalf of the disembodied souls of dead people.

‡ No more do they now.

§ We beg to draw to this sentence the attention of all those of our Fellows and friends in the West as in India, who felt inclined to either disbelieve in, or accuse the ‘‘Brothers of the First Section’’ on account of the administrative mistakes and shortcomings of the Theosophical Society. From the first the Fellows were notified that the First Section might issue occasionally orders to those who knew them personally, yet had never promised to guide, or even protect, either the body or its members.


395————————————————————THE CLAIMS OF OCCULTISM.”

give the very guarded promise that whatever aid might at any time be vouchsafed by them to enquiring humanity, would come, if at all, through that channel. It must be admitted that this was a microscopically small crumb of comfort to fall from so richly laden a table as Madame Blavatsky had depicted. But Theosophists had to be content, or, at least, silent; and so they betook themselves, some of them, to reflection.

What ground had they for belief in the existence of these Brothers, adepts who had a mastery over the secrets of nature which dwarfed the results of modern scientific research, who had gained the profoundest knowledge—Know thyself”—and could demonstrate by actual experiment the transcendent powers of the human spirit, spurning time and space, and proving the existence of soul by the methods of exact experimental science? What ground for such claims existed outside of that on which the Theosophical Society rested?

For a long time the answer was of the vaguest. But eventually evidence was gathered, and in this book* we have Mr. Sinnett coming forward to give us the benefit of his own researches into the matter, and especially to give us his correspondence with Koot Hoomi, an adept and member of the Brotherhood, who had entered into closer relations, still however of a secondary nature,†with him than had been vouchsafed to other men. These letters are of an extremely striking nature, and their own intrinsic value is high. This is greatly enhanced by the source from which they come, and the light they throw upon the mental attitude of these Tibetan recluses to whom the world and the things of the world are alike without interest, save in so far as they call ameliorate man’s state, and teach him to develop and use his powers.

Another fruitful subject of questioning among those who leaned to theosophical study was as to the nature of these occult powers. It was impossible to construct from Isis Unveiled any exact scheme, supported by adequate testimony, or by sufficient evidence from any proper source, of what was actually claimed for the adept. Madame Blavatsky herself, though making no pretension to having attained the full development of those whose representative she was, possessed certain occult powers that seemed to the Spiritualist strangely like those of mediumship‡ This, however, she disclaimed with much indignation. A medium, she explained, was but a poor creature, a sort of conduit through which any foul stream might be conveyed, a gas-pipe by means of which gas of a very low power of illumination reached this earth And much pain was taken to show that the water was very foul, and that time gas was derived from a source that, if at all spiritual, was such as we, who craved true illumination, should by no means be content with. It is
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* The Occult World, by A. P. Sinnett.

† With Mr. Sinnett, and only so far. His relations with a few other Fellows have been as personal as they could desire.

‡ Medium, in the sense of the postman who brings a letter from one living person to another; in the sense of an assistant electrician whose master tells him how to turn this screw and arrange that wire in the battery; never in the sense of a Spiritual medium. “Madame Blavatsky’’ neither needed nor did she ever make use of either dark seance-rooms, cabinets, “ trance-state,” “harmony,” nor any of the hundreds of conditions required by the passive mediums who know not what is going to occur. She always knew beforehand, and could state what was going to happen save infallibly answering each time for complete success.


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impossible to deny that the condition of public Spiritualism in America, at the time when these strictures were passed upon it, was such as to warrant grave censure. It had become sullied in the minds of observers, who viewed it from without, and who were not acquainted with its redeeming features, by association with impurity and fraud. The mistake was to assume that this was the complexion of Spiritualism in itself, and not of Spiritualism as depraved by adventitious causes. This, however, was assumed. If we desired true light, then we were told that we must crush out medium-ship, close the doors through which the mere Spiritual loafers come to perplex and ruin us, and seek for the true adepts who alone could safely pilot us in our search. These, it was explained, had by no means given up the right of entrance to their Spiritual house to any chance spirit that might take a fancy to enter. They held the key and kept intruders out, while, by unaided powers of their own, they performed wonders before which medial phenomena paled. This was the only method of safety; and these powers, inherent in all men, though susceptible of development only in the purest, and then with difficulty, were the only means by which the adept worked.

Some Theosophists demonstrated by practical experiment that there is a foundation of truth in these pretensions. I am not aware whether anyone has found himself able to separate quite conclusively between his own unaided efforts and those in which external spirit has had a share. There is, however, one very note worthy fact which gives a clue to the difference between the methods of the Spiritualist and the Occultist. The medium is a passive recipient of spirit-influence. The adept is an active, energizing, conscious creator of results which he knowingly produces, and of which evidence exists and can be sifted. Spiritualists have been slow to accept this account of what they are familiar with in another shape. Theosophists have been equally slow to estimate the facts and theories of Spiritualism with candour and patience. Mr. Sinnett records many remarkable experiences of his own, which are well worthy of study, and which may lead those who now approach these phenomena from opposite sides to ponder whether there may not be a common ground on which they can meet. We do not know so much of the working of spirit that we can afford to pass by contemptuously any traces of its operation. Be we Spiritnalists or Theosophists—odd names to ticket our selves with—we are all looking for evidence of the whence and whither of humanity. We want to know somewhat of the great mystery of life, and to pry a little into the no less sublime mystery of death. We are gathering day by day more evidence that is becoming bewildering in its minute perplexities. We want to get light from all sources; let us be patient, tolerant of divergent opinion, quick to recognize the tiny hold that any one soul can have on truth, and the multiform variety in which that which we call truth is presented to mans view. Is it strange that we should see various sides of it? Can we not see that it most needs be so? Can we not wait for the final moment of reconciliation, when we shall see with clearer eye and understand as now we cannot?

There is much in Mr. Sinnett’s little book that may help those who are trying to assume this mental attitude. The philosophy that it contains is clearly stated, and affords rich material for thought. The facts recorded are set forth with scientific


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accuracy, and must profoundly impress the careful and candid reader. The glimpses revealed of this silent Brotherhood, in its lonely home on one of the slopes of the mountains of Tibet, working to solve the mighty problem, and to confer on humanity such benefits as it can receive, are impressive enough even to the Philistine sceptic. If they should indeed be flashes of a greater truth, now only dimly revealed, the importance of such revelation is not to be measured in words.

Be this, however, as it may—and there are many points on which light is necessary before a decisive opinion may be pronounced—there is no doubt whatever that the philosophy contained in Mr. Sinnett’s book is similar to that which the great students of Theosophy in ages past have arrived at. It is a mere piece of nineteenth-century arrogance to pooh-pooh it as unworthy of attention by those on whom has flashed the dazzling light of the spirit circle. The facts recorded are at least as scientifically conclusive as any recorded as having happened in a dark seance, or under the ordinary conditions of Spiritualistic investigation. The letters of Koot Hoomi are fruitful of suggestion, and will repay careful study on their own merits. The whole book contains only 172 pages, and will not, therefore, unduly tax the reader’s patience. If any instructed Spiritualist will read it, and can say that there is nothing in it that adds to his knowledge, he will at least have the satisfaction of having read both sides of the question, and that should present itself to all candid thinkers as a paramount and imperative duty.

A NOTE ON ELIPHAS LEVI

[Vol. III. No. I, October, 1881]

[ To the Editor of “The Theosophist.”

MADAM,—Since you have published a posthumous letter of my master and beloved friend, the late Eliphas Levi, I think it would be agreeable to you to publish, if judged suitable, a few extracts of the many manuscripts in my possession, written expressly for, and given to, me by my ever• regretted master.

To begin with, I send you “Stray Thoughts on Death and Satan ‘‘ from his pen. I cannot close this letter without expressing the deep indignation aroused in me by the base diatribes published in the London Spiritualist against your society and its members. Every honest heart is irritated at such unfair treatment, especially when proceeding from a man of honour as Mr. Harrison (editor of The Spiritualist) who admits in his journal anonymous contributions that are tantamount to libels.

With the utmost respect, I remain, Madam,

Yours devotedly.

(Baron) J. Spedalieri.

Marseilles, July 29th, 1881.]

It is with feelings of sincere gratitude that we thank Baron Spedalieri for his most valuable contribution. The late Eliphas Levi was the most learned Kabalist and Occultist of our age in Europe, and every thing from his pen is precious to us, in so far as it helps us to compare notes with the Eastern Occult doctrines and, by the light thrown upon both, to prove to the world of Spiritualists and Mystics, that the two systems—the Eastern Aryan, and the Western or the Chaldæo-Jewish Kabalah—are one in their principal metaphysical tenets. Only, while the Eastern Occultists have never lost the key to their esotericism, and are daily verifying and elaborating their doctrines by personal experiments, and by the additional light of modern science, the Western or Jewish Kabalists, besides having been misled for centuries by the introduction of foreign elements in it such as Christian dogmas, dead— letter interpretations of the Bible, etc., have most undeniably lost the true key to the esoteric meaning of Simeon Ben Iochai’s Kabalah, and are trying to make up for the loss by interpretations emanating from

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the depths of their imagination and inner consciousness. Such is evidently the case with J. K., the self-styled London “adept,” whose anonymous and powerless vilifications of the Theosophical Society and its members are pertinently regarded by Baron Spedalieri as “tanta mount to libels.” But we have to be charitable. That poor descendant of the biblical Levites—as we know him to be—in his pigmy efforts to upset the Theosophists, has most evidently fractured his skull against one of his own “occult” sentences. There is one especially in The Spiritualist (July 22nd), to which the attention of the mystically inclined is drawn further down, as this paragraph is most probably the cause of the sad accident which befell so handsome a head. Be it as it may, but it now disables the illustrious J. K. from communicating ‘‘scientifically his knowledge’’ and forces him at the same time to remain, as he expresses it, “in an incommunicable ecstatic state.” For it is in no other “state” that our great modern adept—the literary man of such a “calibre” that to suspect him of “ignorance” becomes equal, in audacity, to throwing suspicion upon the virtue of Cæsar's wife—could possibly have written the following lines, intended by him, we believe, as a lucid and clear exposition of his own psycho-kabalistic lore as juxtaposed to the “hard words,” “outlandish verbiage,” “moral and philosophical platitudes,” and “jaw-breakers” of “the learned Theosophists.”

These are the “gems of occult wisdom” of the illustrious Jewish Kabalist who, like a bashful violet, hides his occult learning under two modest initials.

In every human creature there lies latent in the involitional part of the being a sufficient quantity of the omniscient, the absolute. To induce the latent absolute, which is the involitional part of our volitional conscious being, to become manifest, it is essential that the volitional part of our being should become latent. After the preparatory purification from acquired depravities, a kind of introversion has to take place; the involitional has to become volitional, by the volitional
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* "To accuse a literary man, of my calibre of ignorance, is as amusing a mistake as it would have been to charge Porson of ignorance of Greeks’’ he writes in The Spiritualist of July 8th .. " The occult is my special subject, and there is but little that I do not know he adds. Now, the above sentence settles the question at once for us. Not only no ‘‘ adept,’’ but no layman or profane of the most widely recognized intellect and ability would ever have dared, under the penalty of being henceforth and for ever regarded as the most ridiculously conceited of Æsop’s heroes, to use such a sentence when speaking of himself! So stupidly arrogant and cowardly impertinent behind the shield of his initials has he shown himself in his transparent attacks upon far better and more worthy men than himself in the above—named Spiritualist that it is the first and certainly the last time that we do him the honour of noticing him in these columns. Our Journal has a nobler task, we trust, than to be polemizing with those, whom in vulgar parlance the world generally terms—bullies.


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becoming involitional. When the conscious becomes semi-unconscious, the, to us, formerly unconscious becomes fully conscious. The particle of the omniscient that is within us, the vital and growing, sleepless, involitional, occult or female principle being allowed to express itself in the volitional, mental, manifest, or masculine part of the human being, while the latter remains in a state of perfect passivity, the two formerly dissevered parts become reunited as one holy (wholly) perfect being, and then the divine manifestation is inevitable.

Very luckily, J. K. gives us himself the key to this grandiloquent gush by adding:

Necessarily, this is only safely practicable while living in uncompromisingly firm purity, for otherwise there is danger of unbalancement—insanity, or a questionable form of mediumship.

The italics are ours. Evidently with our immaculate “adept” the “involitional, occult or female principle” was not allowed to “express itself in the volitional, mental, manifest, or masculine part” of his being, and—behold the results

For the edification of our Hindu readers, who are unprogressive enough to refuse to read the lucubrations of J. K., or follow the mental “grand trapeze” performed by this remarkable “adept” on the columns of The Spiritualist, we may add that in the same article he informs his English readers that it is “Hindu mystification, acting on Western credulity” which “brought out the Theosophical Society.” “Hindu philosophy,” according to that great light of the nineteenth century, is no ‘‘philosophy” but rather ‘‘ mysticism.”

Following the track of the mystifying and mystified Hindus they [ The Theosophists] consider the four above faculties [Siddhis of Krishna], Anima, Mahima, Laghima and Garima to be time power they [We] have to strive for.

Indeed, what a ludicrous confusion of effect with cause! The injury to the brain must have been serious indeed. Let us hope that timely and repeated lotions of “witch-hazel” or the “universal magic balm” will have its good effects. Meanwhile, we turn the attention of our Hindu readers and students of Occultism to the identity of the doctrines taught by Éliphas Lèvi (who is also contemptuously sneered at, and sent by the “adept” to keep company with “Brothers,” “Yogis,” and “Fakirs”) in every essential and vital point with those of our Eastern initiates.

THE SIX=POINTED AND FIVE=POINTED

STARS
———

[Vol. III. No. 2, November, 1881.]

OUR authorities for representing the pentagram or the five-pointed star as the microcosm, and the six-pointed double triangle as the macrocosm, are all the best known Western Kabalists—mediæval and modern. Éliphas Lévi (Abbé Constant) and, we believe, Kunrath, one of the greatest occultists of the past ages, give their reasons for it. In Hargrave Jennings’ Rosicrucians the correct cut of the microcosm with man in the centre of the pentagram is given. There is no objection whatever to publish their speculations save one—the lack of space in our journal, as it would necessitate an enormous amount of explanations to make their esoteric meaning clear. But room will always be found to correct a few natural misconceptions which may arise in the minds of some of our readers, owing to the necessary brevity of our editorial notes. So long as the question raised provokes no discussion to show the interest taken in the subject, these notes touch but superficially upon every question. The excellence of the above-published paper [ Six-pointed and Five-pointed Stars,” by Krishna Shankar Lalshankar], and the many valuable remarks contained in it, afford us now an opportunity for correcting such errors in the author’s mind.

As understood in the West by the real Kabalists, Spirit and Matter have their chief symbolical meaning in the respective colours of the two interlaced triangles, and relate in no way to any of the lines which bind the figures themselves. To the Kabalist and Hermetic philosopher, everything in nature appears under a triune aspect; everything is a multiplicity and trinity in unity, and is so represented by him symbolically in various geometrical figures. “God geometrizes,” says Plato. The “Three Kabalistic Faces” are the “Three Lights” and the “Three Lives” of Ain-Suph (the Parabrahman of the Westerns), which is also called the “Central Invisible Sun.” “The Universe is

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his Spirit, Soul and Body,” his ‘‘Three Emanations.’’ This triune nature—the purely Spiritual, the purely Material, and the Middle nature (or imponderable matter, of which man’s astral soul is composed)—is represented by the equilateral triangle, whose three sides are equal because these three principles are diffused throughout the universe in equal proportions, and——the one law in nature being perfect equilibrium—are eternal and coexistent. The Western symbology then, with a trifling variation, is identically the same as that of the Aryans. Names may vary, and trifling details may be added, but the fundamental ideas are the same. The double triangle, representing symbolically the macrocosm, or great universe, contains in itself the ideas of Unity, of Duality (as shown in the two colours, and two triangles—the universe of Spirit and that of Matter), of Trinity, of the Pythagoræan Tetraktys, the perfect Square, up to the Dodekagon and the Dodekahedron. The ancient Chaldæan Kabalists—the masters and inspirers of the Jewish Kabalah—were neither the Anthropomorphizers of the Old Testament, nor those of the present day. Their Ain—Suph—the Endless and the Boundless—’’ has a form and then has no form,’’ says the Zohar,* and forthwith explains the riddle by adding: ‘‘The Invisible assumed a Form when he called the Universe into existence.” That is to say, the Deity can only be seen and conceived of in objective nature—pure pantheism. The three sides of the triangles represent to the Occultists as they do to the Aryans—Spirit, Matter, and the Middle nature (the latter identical in its meaning with ‘‘Space”); hence also the creative, preservative and destructive energies, typified in the ‘‘Three Lights.” The first Light infuses intelligent, conscious life throughout the universe, thus answering to the creative energy. The second Light incessantly produces forms out of preexistent cosmic matter within the cosmic circle, and hence is the preservative energy. The third Light produces the whole universe of gross physical matter. As the latter keeps gradually receding from the central spiritual Light, its brightness vanes, and it becomes Darkness or Evil, leading to Death. Hence it becomes the destructive energy, which we find ever at work on forms and shapes—the temporary and the changing. The ‘‘Three Kabalistic Faces’’ of the ‘‘Ancient of the Ancient’’— ‘‘has no face”—are the Aryan deities called respectively Brahmâ and Rudra or Shiva. The double triangle of the Kabalists is enclosed
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* The Book of Splendour written by Simeon Ben Iochai, in the first century B.C. according to others in the year AD.80.


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within a circle represented by a serpent swallowing its own tail (the Egyptian emblem of the eternity), and sometimes by a simple circle (see the theosophical seal). The only difference we can see between the Aryan and the Western symbology of the double triangle—according to the author’s explanation—lies in his omission to notice the profound and special meaning in that which, if we understand him rightly, he terms “the zenith and the zero.” With the Western Kabalists, the apex of the white triangle loses itself in the zenith, the world of pure immateriality or unalloyed Spirit, while the lower angle of the black triangle pointing downward towards the nadir shows—to use a very prosaic phrase of the mediæval Hermetists—pure, or rather “impure matter,” as the “gross purgations of the celestial fire” (Spirit) drawn into the vortex of annihilation, that lower world, where forms and shapes and conscious life disappear to be dispersed and return to the mother fount (Cosmic Matter). So with the central point and the central cavity, which, according to the Paurânik teaching, “is considered to be the seat of the Avyakta Brahma, or Unmanifested Deity.”

The Occultists, who generally draw Simple central geometrical point (which, having neither length, breadth nor thickness, represents the invisible
“Central Sun,’’ the Light of the ‘‘ Unmanifested Deity”), often place the Crux Ansata (the “handled cross,” or the Egyptian Tau), at the zenith of which, instead of a mere upright line, they substitute a circle, the symbol of limitless, uncreated Space. Thus modified, this cross has nearly the same


significance as the “Mundane Cross” of the ancient Egyptian Hermetists, a cross within a circle Å

Therefore, it is erroneous to say that the editorial note stated that the double triangle represented “Spirit and Matter only,” for it represents so many emblems that a volume would not suffice to explain them. Says our critic:
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* The meaning is the same in the Egyptian pyramid. A French archæologist of some renown, Dr. Rebold, shows the great culture of the Egyptians, 5,000 B.C., by stating upon various authorities that there were at that time no less than ‘‘ thirty or forty colleges of the initiated priests who studied occult sciences and practical magic.”

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If, as you say, the double triangle is made to represent universal spirit and matter only, the objection that two sides—or any two things—cannot form a triangle, or that a triangle cannot be made to represent one—spirit alone, or matter alone—-as you appear to have done by the distinction of white and black—remains unexplained.

Believing that we have now sufficiently explained some of the difficulties, and shown that the Western Kabalists always had regard to the ‘‘trinity in unity’’ and vice versa, we may add that the Pythagoræans explained away the “objection” especially insisted upon by the writer of the above words about 2,500 years ago. The sacred numbers of that school—whose cardinal idea was that there existed a permanent principle of Unity beneath all the forces and phenomenal changes of the universe—did not include the number two or the Duad among the others. The Pythagoræans refused to recognize that number, even as an abstract idea, precisely on the ground that in geometry it was impossible to construct a figure with only two straight lines. It is obvious that for symbolical the number cannot be identified with any circumscribed figure, whether a plane or a solid, geometric figure; and thus, as it could not he made to represent a unity in a multiplicity as any other polygonal figure can, it could not be regarded as a sacred number. The number two, represented in geometry by a double horizontal line =, and in the Roman numerals by a double perpendicular line | | , and, a line having length, but not breadth or thickness, another numeral had to be added to it before it could be accepted. It is only in conjunction with number one, thus becoming the equilateral triangle, that it can be called a figure. It thus becomes evident why, in symbolizing Spirit and Matter (the Alpha and Omega in the Kosmos), the Hermetists had to use two triangles interlaced (both a ‘‘trinity in unity’’), making the one typifying Spirit white with chalk, and the other typifying Matter black with charcoal.

To the question, what do the two other angles of the white triangle signify, if the one ‘‘white point ascending heavenward symbolizes Spirit”—we answer that, according to the Kabalists. the two lower points signify ‘‘Spirit falling into generation,’’ i.e., the pure divine Spark already mixed with the Matter of the phenomenal world. The same explanation holds good for the two base angles of time black triangle; the third points showing respectively the progressive purification of Spirit, and the progressive grossness of Matter. Again, to say that ‘‘any thought of upward or downward’’ in ‘‘the sublime idea of the Kosmos” seems “not only revolting but unreal,” is to object to


405—————————————————THE SIX-POINTED AND FIVE-POINTED STARS.

anything abstract being symbolized in a concrete image. Then why not make away with all the signs altogether, including that of Vishnu and with all the learned Paurânik explanations thereof given by the writer? And why should the Kabalistic idea be more revolting than that of “Death, Devourer, Time,” the latter word being a synonym of Endless Eternity—represented by a circle surrounding the double triangle? Strange inconsistency, and one, moreover, which clashes entirely with the rest of the article! If the writer has not met “any where with the idea of one triangle being white and the other black,” it is simply because he has never studied, nor probably even seen the writings and illustrations of Western Kabalists.

The above explanations contain the key to the Pythagoræan general formula of unity in multiplicity, the One evolving the man, and pervading the many and the whole. Their mystic Dekad (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10), expresses the entire idea; it is not only far from being ‘‘revolting’’ but it is positively sublime. The One is the Deity; the Two Matter—the figure so despised by them as Matter per se can never be a conscious unity.* The Three (or Triangle), combining Monad and Duad, partaking of the nature of both, becomes the Triad or the phenomenal world. The Tetrad or sacred Tetraktys, the form of perfection with the Pythagoræans expresses at the same time the emptiness of all— Mayâ. While the Dekad, or sum of all, involves the entire Kosmos. ‘‘The universe is the combination of a thousand elements, and yet the expression of a single element—absolute harmony or spirit—a chaos to the sense, a perfect kosmos to reason,” we say in Isis Unveiled.

Pythagoras learned his philosophy in India. Hence, the similarity in the fundamental ideas of the ancient Brâhmanical Initiates and the Pythagorists. And when in defining the Shatkon, the writer says it “represents the great universe (Brahmânda)—the whole endless Mahâ kâsha—with all the planetary and stellar worlds contained in it,’’ he only repeats in other words the explanation given by Pythagoras and the Hermetic philosophers of the hexagonal star or the “double triangle,” as shown above.

Nor do we find it very difficult to fill up the gap left in our brief note in the August number as to the ‘‘remaining three points of the two triangles,’’ and the three sides of each element of the ‘‘double triangle’’ or of the circle surrounding the figure. As the Hermetists symbolized
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* Compare in Kapila sânkhya— Purusha and Prakriti only the two combined when forming a unity can manifest themselves in this world of the senses.

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everything visible and invisible they could not fail to symbolize the macrocosm in its completeness.

The Pythagoreans who included in their Dekad the entire Kosmos, held the number twelve in still higher reverence as it represented the sacred Tetraktys multiplied by three, which gave a trinity of perfect squares called tetrads. The Hermetic philosophers or Occultists following in their steps
represented this number twelve in the double triangle’’—the great universe or the macrocosm as shown in this figure—and included in it the pentagram, or the microcosm, called by them the little universe.
Dividing the twelve letters of the outer angles into four groups of triads, or three groups of tetrads, they obtained the Dodekagon, a regular geometric polygon, bounded by twelve equal sides and containing twelve equal angles, which symbolized with the ancient Chaldæans the twelve “great gods,”* and with the Hebrew Kabalists the ten Sephiroth, or creative powers of nature, emanated from Sephira (Divine Light), herself the chief Sephiroth and emanation from Hakoma, the Supreme (or Unmanifested) Wisdom, and Ain-Suph the Endless; viz., three groups of triads of the Sephiroth and a fourth triad, composed of Sephira, Ain-Suph and Hakoma, the Supreme Wisdom which ‘‘cannot he understood by reflection,’’ and which ‘‘lies concealed within and without the cranium of Long Face,’’† the uppermost head of the upper triangle forming the ‘‘Three Kabalistic Faces,” making up the twelve. Moreover, the twelve figures give two squares or the double Tetraktys, representing in the Pythagoræan symbology the two worlds—the spiritual and the physical. The eighteen inner and six central angles yield, besides twenty-four, twice the sacred macrocosmic number, also the twenty-four ‘‘divine unmanifested
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* According to Haug's Aitareya Brahmana , the Hindu Manas or[ Mind] or Bhagavan creates no more than the Pythagoræan Monas. He enters the Egg of the World and emanates from it as Brahmâ as itself (Bhagavan) has no first cause (Apârva). Brahma, as Prajapati, manifests himself as the androgyne Sephira and the ten Sephiroth) as twelve bodies or attributes which are represented by the twelve Gods symbolizing (1) Fire, (2) the Sun, (3) Soma, (4) all living Beings, (5)( Vâyu, (6) Death—Shiva, (7) Earth, (8) Heaven, (9) Agni, (10) Aditya, (11) Mind,( 12) the great Infinite cycle which is not to be stopped. This, with a few variations, is purely the Kabalistic idea of the Sephroth.

† Idra Rabba, vi. 58.


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powers.” These it would be impossible to enumerate in so short a space. Besides, it is far more reasonable in our days of scepticism to follow the hint of Iamblichus, who says, that “the divine powers always felt indignant with those who rendered manifest the composition of the Icosahedron,” viz., those who delivered the method of inscribing in a sphere the Dodekahedron, one of the five solid figures in geometry, contained by twelve equal and regular pentagons—the secret Kabalistic meaning of which our opponents would do well to study.

In addition to all this, as shown in the “double triangle” above, the pentagram in the centre gives the key to the meaning of the Hermetic philosophers and Kabalists. So well known and widespread is this double sign that it may be found over the entrance door of the Lha khang (temples containing Buddhist images and statues), in every Gong-pa (lamasery), and often over the relic-cupboard, called in Tibet Doong-ting.

The mediæval Kabalists give us in their writings the key to its meaning. “Man is a little world inside the great universe”—Paracelsus teaches. And again: “A microcosm, within the macrocosm, like a fœtus he is suspended by his three principal spirits in the matrix of the universe.” These three spirits are described as double: (1) the spirit of the elements (terrestrial body and vital principle); (2) the spirit of the stars (sidereal or astral body and the will governing it); (3) the spirits of the spiritual world (the animal and the spiritual souls); the seventh principle being an almost immaterial spirit or the divine Augoeides, Atmâ, represented by the central point, which corresponds to the human navel. This seventh principle is the personal God of every man, say the old Western and Eastern Occultists.

Therefore it is that the explanations given by our critic of the Shatkon and Panchkon rather corroborate than destroy our theory. Speaking of the five triangles composed of “five times five” or twenty-five points, he remarks of the pentagram that it is a “number otherwise corresponding with the twenty-five elements making a living human creature.” Now we suppose that by “elements” the writer means just what the Kabalists say when they teach that the emanations of the twenty-four divine “unmanifested powers “—the “unexisting” or “central point” being the twenty-fifth—make a perfect human being. But without disputing upon the relative value of the words “element” and “emanation,” and strengthened moreover as we find the above sentence by the author’s additional remark that “the entire figure” of the


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microcosm, “the inner world of individual living being,” is “a figure which is the sign of Brahmâ, the deified creative energy”—in what respect, we ask, does the above sentence so much clash with our statement that some proficients in Hermetic philosophy and Kabalists regard the five points of the pentagram as representing the five cardinal limbs of the human body? We are no ardent disciple or follower of the Western Kabalists, yet we maintain that in this they are right. If the twenty-five elements represented by the five-pointed star make up a “living human creature” then these elements are all vital, whether mental or physical, and the figure symbolizing “creative energy” gives the more force to the Kabalistic idea. Every one of the five gross elements—earth, water, fire, air (or “wind”) and ether— enters into the composition of man, and whether we say “five organs of action” or the “five limbs” or even the “five senses,” it means all one and the same thing, if we would refrain from hair-splitting.

Most undoubtedly the “proficients” could explain their claim at least as satisfactorily as the writer who controverts and denies it, in explaining his own. In the Codex Nazaræus most Kabalistic of books—the Supreme King of Light and the chief Æon, Mano, emanates the five Æons—he himself with the Lord Ferho (the “Unknown Formless Life” of which he is an emanation) making up the seven, which typify again the seven principles in man; the five being purely material and semi-material, and the higher two almost immaterial and spiritual. Five refulgent rays of light proceed from each of the seven Æons, five of these shooting through the head, the two extended hands, and the two feet of man represented in the five-pointed star, one enveloping him as with a mist and the seventh settling like a bright star over his head. The illustration may be seen in several old books upon the codex Nazaræus and the Kabalah. What wonder, then, that since electricity or animal magnetism streams most powerfully from the five cardinal limbs of man, and since the phenomena of what is now called “mesmeric” force had been studied in the temples of ancient Egypt and Greece, and mastered as it may never hope to be mastered in our age of idiotic and à priori denial, the old Kabalists and philosophers who symbolized every power in nature, should, for reasons perfectly evident for those who know anything of the arcane sciences and the mysterious relations which exist between numbers, figures and ideas, have chosen to represent “the five cardinal limbs of man”—the head, the two arms and the two legs—in the five points of the pentagram?


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Eliphas Lévi the modern Kabalist, goes as far, if not farther, than his ancient and mediæval brethren, for, he says in his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (p. 175):

The Kabalistic use of the pentagram can determine the countenance of unborn infants, and an initiated woman might give to her son the features of Nereus or Achilles, or those of Louis XIV or Napoleon.

The Astral Light of the Western Occultists is the Akâsha of the Hindus. Many of the latter will not study its mysterious correlations, either under the guidance of initiated Kabalists or that of their own initiated Brâhmans, preferring to Prajnâ Pârarnitâ—their own conceit. And yet both exist and are identical.

THE GRAND INQUISITOR
————

[Vol. III. Nos. 2 and 3, November and December, 1881.]

[Dedicated by the Translator to those sceptics who clamour so loudy’, both in print and private letters—” Show us the wonder-working ‘Brothers,’ let them come out publicly and—we will believe in them !‘‘]

[The following is an extract from M. Dostoevsky’s celebrated novel, The Brothers Karamazof the last publication from the pen of the great Russian novelist, who died a few months ago, just as the concluding chapters appeared in print. Dostoevsky is beginning to be recognized as one of the ablest and profoundest among Russian writers. His characters are invariably typical portraits drawn from various classes of Russian society, strikingly life-like and realistic to the highest degree. The following extract is a cutting satire on modern theology generally and the Roman Catholic religion in particular. The idea is that Christ revisits earth, coming to Spain at the period of the Inquisition, and is at once arrested as a heretic by the Grand Inquisitor. One of the three brothers of the story, Ivan, a rank materialist and an atheist of the new school, is supposed to throw this conception into the form of a poem, which he describes to Alyosha—the youngest of the brothers a young Christian mystic brought up by a ‘‘saint’’ in a monastery—as follows : ]

‘‘Quite impossible, as you see, to start without an introduction,” laughed Ivan. “Well, then, I mean to place the event described in the poem in the sixteenth century, an age—as you must have been told at school—when it was the great fashion among poets to make the denizens and powers of higher worlds descend on earth and mix freely with mortals. . . . In France all the notaries’ clerks, and the monks in their cloisters as well, used to give grand performances, dramatic plays in which long scenes were enacted by the Madonna, the angels, the saints, Christ, and even by God Himself. In those days, everything was very artless and primitive. An instance of it may be found in Victor


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Hugo’s drama, Notre Dame de Paris, where, at the Municipal Hall, a play called Le Bon Jugement de la Très-sainte et Gracieuse Vierge Marie, is enacted in honour of Louis XI, in which the Virgin appears personally to pronounce her ‘good judgement.’ In Moscow, during the prepetrean period, performances of nearly the same character, chosen especially from the Old Testament, were also in great favour. Apart from such plays, the world was overflooded with mystical writings, ‘verses’—the heroes of which were always selected from the ranks of angels, saints and other heavenly citizens answering to the devotional purposes of the age. The recluses of our monasteries, like the Roman Catholic monks, passed their time in translating, copying, and even producing original compositions upon such subjects, and that, remember, during the Tartar period! . In this connection, I am re- minded of a poem compiled in a convent—a translation from the Greek, of course—called ‘The Travels of the Mother of God among the Damned,’ with fitting illustrations and a boldness of conception inferior nowise to that of Dante. The ‘Mother of God’ visits hell, in company with the Archangel Michael as her cicerone to guide her through the legions of the ‘damned.’ She sees them all, and is witness to their multifarious tortures. Among the many other exceedingly remarkable varieties of torments—every category of sinners having its own—there is one especially worthy of notice, namely, a class of the ‘damned’ sentenced to gradually sink in a burning lake of brimstone and fire. Those whose sins cause them to sink so low that they no longer can rise to the surface are for ever forgotten by God, i.e., they fade out from the omniscient memory, says the poem—an expression, by the way, of an extraordinary profundity of thought, when closely analyzed. The Virgin is terribly shocked, and falling down upon her knees in tears before the throne of God, begs that all she has seen in hell—all, all without exception, should have their sentences remitted to them. Her dialogue with God is colossally interesting. She supplicates, she will not leave Him. And when God, pointing to the pierced hands and feet of her Son, cries, ‘How can I forgive His executioners?’ she then commands that all the saints, martyrs, angels and archangels, should prostrate themselves with her before the Immutable and the Changeless One and implore Him to change His wrath into mercy and—forgive them all. The poem closes upon her obtaining from God a compromise, a kind of yearly respite of tortures between Good Friday and Trinity, a chorus of the ‘dawned’


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singing loud praises to God from their ‘bottomless pit,’ thanking and telling Him :

Thou art right, 0 Lord, very right,
Thou hast condemned us justly.

“My poem is of the same character.

“In it, it is Christ who appears on the scene. True, He says nothing, but only appears and passes out of sight. Fifteen centuries have elapsed since He left the world with the distinct promise to return ‘with power and great glory’; fifteen long centuries since His prophet cried, ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord!’ since He Himself had foretold, while yet on earth, ‘Of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven but my Father only.’ But Christendom expects Him still.

‘‘It waits for Him with the same old faith and the same emotion; aye, with a far greater faith, for fifteen centuries have rolled away since the last sign from heaven was sent to man,

And blind faith remained alone
To lull the trusting heart,
As heav’n would send a sign no more.

“True, again, we have all heard of miracles being wrought ever since the ‘age of miracles’ passed away to return no more. We had, and still have, our saints credited with performing the most miraculous cures; and, if we can believe their biographers, there have been those among them who have been personally visited by the Queen of Heaven. But Satan sleepeth not, and the first germs of doubt, an ever-increasing unbelief in such wonders, already had begun to sprout in Christendom as early as the sixteenth century. It was just at that time that a new and terrible heresy first made its appearance in the north of Germany.* A great star ‘shining as it were a lamp . . . fell upon the fountains of waters’ . . and ‘they were made bitter.’ This ‘heresy’ blasphemously denied ‘miracles.’ But those who had remained faithful believed all the more ardently. The tears of mankind ascended to Him as heretofore, and the Christian world was expecting Him as confidently as ever; they loved Him and hoped in Him, thirsted and hungered to suffer and die for Him just as many of them had done before. So many centuries had weak, trusting humanity implored Him, crying with ardent faith and fervour: ‘How long, 0 Lord, holy and true, dost Thou not come!’ So many long centuries hath it
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* Luther’s reform.


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vainly appealed to Him, that at last, in His inexhaustible compassion, He consenteth to answer the prayer. . He decideth that once more, if it were but for one short hour, the people—His long-suffering, tortured, fatally sinful, yet loving and child-like, trusting people—shall behold Him again. The scene of action is placed by me in Spain, at Seville, during that terrible period of the Inquisition, when, for the greater glory of God, stakes were flaming all over the country,

Burning wicked heretics,
In grand auto-da-fes.

‘‘This particular visit has, of course, nothing to do with the promised Advent, when, according to the programme, ‘after the tribulation of those days,’ He will appear ‘coming in the clouds of heaven.’ For, that ‘coming of the Son of Man,’ as we are informed, will take place as suddenly ‘as the lightning cometh out of the east and shineth even unto the west.’ No; this once, He desired to come unknown, and appear among His children, just when the bones of the heretics, sentenced to be burnt alive, had commenced crackling at the flaming stakes. Owing to His limitless mercy, He mixes once more with mortals and in the same form in which He was wont to appear fifteen centuries ago. He descends, just at the very moment when before king, courtiers, knights, cardinals, and the fairest dames of court, before the whole population of Seville, upwards of a hundred wicked heretics are being roasted, in a magnificent auto-da-fé ad majorem Dei gloriam, by the order of the powerful Cardinal Grand Inquisitor.

• • • He comes silently and unannounced; et all—how strange—yea, all recognize Him, at once! The population rushes towards Him as if propelled by some irresistible force; it surrounds, throngs, and presses around, it follows Him Silently, and with a smile of boundless compassion upon His lips, He crosses the dense crowd, and moves softly on. The Sun of Love burns in His heart, and warm rays of Light, Wisdom and Power beam forth from His eyes, and pour down their waves upon the swarming multitudes of the rabble assembled around, making their hearts vibrate with returning love. He extends His hands over their heads, blesses them, and from mere contact with Him, aye, even with His garments, a healing power goes forth. An old man, blind from his birth, cries, ‘Lord, heal me, that I may see Thee!’ and the scales falling off the closed eyes, the blind man beholds Him. . . . The crowd weeps for joy, and kisses the ground upon which He treads. Children strew flowers along His path and sing to


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Him, ‘Hosanna! ‘ It is He, it is Himself, they say to each other, it must be He, it can be none other but He! He pauses at the portal of the old cathedral, just as a wee white coffin is carried in, with tears and great lamentations. The lid is off, and in the coffin lies the body of a fair girl-child, seven years old, the only child of an eminent citizen of the city. The little corpse lies buried in flowers. ‘He will raise thy child to life! ‘ confidently shouts the crowd to the weeping mother. The officiating priest who had come to meet the funeral procession, looks perplexed, and frowns. A loud cry is suddenly heard, and the bereaved mother prostrates herself at His feet. ‘If it be Thou, then bring back my child to life!’ she cries beseechingly. The procession halts, and the little coffin is gently lowered at His feet. Divine compassion beams forth from His eyes, and as He looks at the child, His lips are heard to whisper once more, ‘Talitha Cumi’—and ‘straightway the damsel arose.’ The child rises in her coffin. Her little hands still hold the nosegay of white roses which after death was placed in them, and, looking round with large astonished eyes she smiles sweetly. . . . The crowd is violently excited. A terrible commotion rages among them, the populace shouts and loudly weeps, when suddenly, before the cathedral door, appears the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor himself is a tall, gaunt—looking old man of nearly fourscore years and ten, with a stern, withered face, and deeply sunken eyes, from the cavity of which glitter two fiery sparks. He has laid aside his gorgeous cardinal’s robes in which he had appeared before the people at time auto-da-fé of the enemies of the Romish Church, and is now clad in his old, rough, monkish cassock. His sullen assistants and slaves of the ‘holy guard’ are following at a distance. He pauses before the crowd and observes. He has seen all. He has witnessed the placing of the little coffin at His feet, the calling back to life. And now, his dark, grim face has grown still darker; his bushy grey eyebrows nearly meet, and his sunken eye flashes with sinister light. Slowly raising his finger, he commands his minions to arrest Him.

“Such is his power over the well-disciplined, submissive and now trembling people, that the thick crowds immediately give way, and scattering before the guard, amid dead silence and without one breath of protest, allow them to lay their sacrilegious hands upon the stranger and lead Him away. . . . That same populace, like one man, now bows its head to the ground before the old Inquisitor, who blesses it


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and slowly moves onwards The guards conduct their prisoner to the ancient building of the Holy Tribunal; pushing Him into a narrow, gloomy, vaulted prison-cell, they lock Him in and retire.

“The day wanes, and night—a dark, hot, breathless Spanish night— creeps on and settles upon the city of Seville. The air smells of laurels and orange blossoms. In the Cimmerian darkness of the old Tribunal Hall the iron door of the cell is suddenly thrown open, and the Grand Inquisitor, holding a dark lantern, slowly stalks into the dungeon. He is alone, and, as the heavy door closes behind him, he pauses at the threshold, and, for a minute or two, silently and gloomily scrutinizes the Face before him. At last, approaching with measured steps, he sets his lantern down upon the table and addresses Him in these words:

“‘It is Thou! Thou!’ . . Receiving no reply, he rapidly

continues: ‘Nay, answer not; be silent!.. And what couldst

Thou say? . . I know but too well Thy answer Besides,

Thou hast no right to add one syllable to that which was already uttered by Thee before. . . Why shouldst Thou now return, to impede us in our work? For Thou hast come but for that only, and Thou knowest it well. But art Thou as well aware of what awaits Thee in the morning? I do not know, nor do I care to know who Thou mayest be: be it Thou or only Thine image, tomorrow I will condemn and burn Thee on the stake, as the most wicked of all the heretics; and that same people, who to-day were kissing Thy feet, tomorrow at one bend of my finger, will rush to add fuel to Thy funeral pile. . . Wert Thou aware of this?’ he adds, speaking as if in solemn thought, and never for one instant taking his piercing glance off the meek Face before him.”

‘‘I can hardly realize the situation described—what is all this, Ivan?” suddenly interrupted Alyosha, who had remained silently listening to his brother. “Is this an extravagant fancy, or some mistake of the old man, an impossible quid pro quo?”

“Let it be the latter, if you like,’’ laughed Ivan, ‘‘since modern realism has so perverted your taste that you feel unable to realize any thing from the world of fancy. . . . Let it be a quid pro quo. if you so choose it. Again, the Inquisitor is ninety years old, and he might have easily gone mad with his one idée fixe of power; or, it might have as well been a delirious vision, called forth by dying fancy, overheated by the auto-da-fé of the hundred heretics in that forenoon. . . . But


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what matters for the poem, whether it was a quid ptro quo or an uncontrollable fancy? The question is, that the old man has to open his heart; that he must give out his thought at last; and that the hour has come when he does speak it out, and says loudly that which for ninety years he has kept secret within his own breast.”

“And his prisoner, does He never reply? Does He keep silent, looking at him, without saying a word?”

“Of course; and it could not well be otherwise,” again retorted Ivan. “The Grand Inquisitor begins from his very first words by telling Him that He has no right to add one syllable to that which He had said before. To make the situation clear at once, the above preliminary monologue is intended to convey to the reader the very fundamental idea which underlies Roman Catholicism—as well as I can convey it, his words mean, in short: ‘Everything was given over by Thee to the Pope, and everything now rests with him alone; Thou hast no business to return and thus hinder us in our work.’ In this sense the Jesuits not only talk but write likewise.

“‘Hast thou the right to divulge to us a single one of the mysteries of that world whence Thou comest?’ enquires of Him my old Inquisitor, and forthwith answers for Him, ‘Nay, Thou hast no such right. For, that would be adding to that which was already said by Thee before; hence depriving people of that freedom for which Thou hast so stoutly stood up while yet on earth. . Anything new that Thou wouldst now proclaim would have to be regarded as an attempt to interfere with that freedom of choice, as it would come as a new and a miraculous revelation superseding the old revelation of fifteen hundred years ago, when Thou didst so repeatedly tell the people: “The truth shall make you free.” Behold then, Thy “free” people now adds the old man with sombre irony. ‘Yea it has cost us dearly,’ he continues, sternly looking at his victim. ‘But we have at last accomplished our task, and—in Thy name For fifteen long centuries we had to toil and suffer owing to that “freedom”; but now we have prevailed and our work is done, and well and strongly it is done. . . . Believest not Thou it is so very strong? . . . And why shouldst Thou look at me so meekly as if I were not worthy even of Thy indignation?

Know then, that now, and only now, Thy people feel fully sure and satisfied of their freedom; and that only since they have them selves and of their own free will delivered that freedom unto our hands by placing it submissively at our feet. But then, that is what we have


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done. Is it that which Thou hast striven for? Is this the kind of ‘‘freedom” Thou hast promised them?’’’

“Now again, I do not understand,” interrupted Alyosha. “Does the old man mock and laugh?”

“Not in the least. He seriously regards it as a great service done by himself, his brother monks and Jesuits, to humanity, to have conquered and subjected unto their authority that freedom, and boasts that it was done but for the good of the world. ‘For only now,’ he says (speaking of the Inquisition) ‘has it become possible to us, for the first time, to give a serious thought to human happiness. Man is born a rebel, and can rebels be ever happy? . . . Thou hast been fairly warned of it, but evidently to no use, since Thou hast rejected the only means which could make mankind happy; fortunately at Thy departure Thou hast delivered the task to us. . . . Thou hast promised, ratifying the pledge by Thy own words, in words giving us the right to bind and unbind . . . and surely, Thou couldst not think of depriving us of it now!’”

“But what can he mean by the words, ‘Thou hast been fairly warned’?” asked Alexis.

“These words give the key to what the old man has to say for his justification. But listen—
‘The terrible and wise spirit, the spirit of self-annihilation and nonbeing,’ goes on the Inquisitor, ‘the great spirit of negation conversed with Thee in the wilderness, and we are told that he “tempted” Thee.

Was it so? And if it were so, then it is impossible to utter anything more truthful that what is contained in his three offers, which Thou didst reject, and which are usually called “temptations.” Yea; if ever there was on earth a genuine, striking wonder produced, it was on that day of Thy three temptations, and it is precisely in these three short sentences that the marvellous miracle is contained. If it were possible that they should vanish and disappear for ever, without leaving any trace, from the record and from the memory of man, and that it should become necessary again to devise, invent, and make them reappear in Thy history once more, thinkest Thou that all the world’s sages, all the legislators, initiates, philosophers and thinkers, if called upon to frame three questions which should, like these, besides answering the magnitude of the event, express in three short sentences the whole future history of this our world and of mankind—dost Thou believe, I ask Thee, that all their combined efforts could ever create

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anything equal in power and depth of thought to the three propositions offered Thee by the powerful and all-wise spirit in the wilderness? Judging of them by their marvellous aptness alone, one can at once perceive that they emanated not from a finite, terrestrial intellect, but indeed, from the Eternal and the Absolute. In these three offers we find, blended into one and foretold to us, the complete subsequent history of man; we are shown three images, so to say, uniting in them all the future axiomatic, insoluble problems and contradictions of human nature, the world over. In those days, the wondrous wisdom contained in them was not made so apparent as it is now, for futurity remained still veiled; but now, when fifteen centuries have elapsed, we see that everything in these three questions is so marvellously fore seen and foretold, that to add to, or to take away from, the prophecy one jot, would be absolutely impossible!

“‘Decide then Thyself,’ sternly proceeded the Inquisitor, ‘which of ye twain was right: Thou who didst reject, or he who offered? Remember the subtle meaning of question the first, which runs thus: Wouldst Thou go into the world empty-handed? Wouldst Thou venture thither with Thy vague and undefined promise of freedom, which men, dull and unruly as they are by nature, are unable so much as to understand, which they avoid and fear ?—for never was there anything more unbearable to the human race than personal freedom! Dost Thou see these stones in the desolate and glaring wilderness? Command that these stones be made bread—and mankind will run after Thee, obedient and grateful like a herd of cattle. But even then it will be ever diffident and trembling, lest Thou shouldst take away Thy hand, and they lose thereby their bread! Thou didst refuse to accept the offer for fear of depriving men of their free choice; for where is there freedom of choice where men are bribed with bread? Man shall not live by bread alone—was Thine answer. Thou knewest not, it seems, that it was precisely in the name of that earthly bread that the terrestrial spirit would one day rise against, struggle with, and finally conquer Thee, followed by the hungry multitudes shouting: ‘‘Who is like unto that Beast, who maketh fire come down from heaven upon the earth!” Knowest Thou not that, but a few centuries hence, and the whole of mankind will have proclaimed in its wisdom and through its mouth piece, Science, that there is no more crime, hence no more sin on earth, but only hungry people? “Feed us first and then command us to be virtuous!” will be the words written upon the banner lifted against


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Thee—a banner which shall destroy Thy Church to its very foundations, and in the place of Thy Temple shall raise once more the terrible Tower of Babel; and though its building be left unfinished, as was that of the first one, yet the fact will remain recorded that Thou couldst, but wouldst not, prevent the attempt to build that new tower by accepting the offer, and thus saving mankind a millennium of useless suffering on earth. And it is to us that the people will return again. They will search for us everywhere; and they will find us under ground in the catacombs, as we shall once more be persecuted and martyred—and they will begin crying unto us: “Feed us, for they who promised us the fire from heaven have deceived us!” It is then that we will finish building their tower for them. For they alone who feed them shall finish it, and we shall feed them in Thy name, and lying to them that it is in that name. Oh, never, never, will they learn to feed themselves without our help! No science will ever give them bread so long as they remain free, so long as they refuse to lay that freedom at our feet, and say. “Enslave, but feed us!” That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves. And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious. Thou hast promised to them the bread of life, the bread of heaven; but I ask Thee again, can that bread ever equal in the sight of the weak and the vicious, the ever-ungrateful human race, their daily bread on earth? And even supposing that thousands and tens of thousands follow Thee in the name of, and for the sake of, Thy heavenly bread, what will become of the millions and hundreds of millions of human beings too weak to scorn the earthly for the sake of Thy heavenly bread? Or is it but those tens of thousands chosen among the great and the mighty, that are so dear to Thee, while the remaining millions, innumerable as the grains of sand in the seas, the weak and the loving, have to be used as material for the former? No, no! In our sight and for our purpose the weak and the lowly are the more dear to us. True, they are vicious and rebellions, but we will force them into obedience, and it is they who will admire us the most. They will regard us as gods, and feel grateful to those who have consented to lead the masses and bear their burden of freedom by ruling over them—so terrible will that freedom at last appear to men! Then we will tell them that it is


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in obedience to Thy will and in Thy name that we rule over them. We will deceive them once more and lie to them once again—for never, never more will we allow Thee to Come among us. In this deception we will find our suffering, for we must needs lie eternally, and never cease to lie!

“‘Such is the secret meaning of “temptation” the first, and that is what Thou didst reject in the wilderness for the sake of that freedom which Thou didst prize above all. Meanwhile Thy tempter’s offer contained another great world-mystery. By accepting the “bread,” Thou wouldst have satisfied and answered a universal craving, a ceaseless longing alive in the heart of every individual human being, lurking in the breast of collective mankind, that most perplexing problem—”whom or what shall we worship?” There exists no greater or more painful anxiety for a man who has freed himself from all religious bias, than how he shall soonest find a new object or idea to worship. But man seeks to bow before that only which is recognized by the greater majority, if not by all his fellow-men, as having a right to be worshipped; whose rights are so unquestionable that men agree unanimously to bow down to it. For the chief concern of these miserable creatures is not to find and worship the idol of their own choice, but to discover that which all others will believe in, and consent to bow down to in a mass. It is that instinctive need of having a worship in common that is the chief suffering of every man, the chief concern of mankind from the beginning of times. It is for that universality of religious worship that people destroyed each other by sword. Creating gods unto themselves, they forthwith began appealing to each other: “Abandon your deities, come and bow down to ours, or death to ye and your idols “ And so will they do till the end of this world; they will do so even then, when all the gods themselves have disappeared, for then men will prostrate themselves before and worship some idea. Thou didst know, Thou couldst not be ignorant of, that mysterious fundamental principle in human nature, and still Thou hast rejected the only absolute banner offered Thee, to which all the nations would remain true, and before which all would have bowed—the banner of earthly bread, rejected in the name of freedom and of ‘‘ bread in the kingdom of God’’ ! Behold, then, what Thou hast done furthermore for that ‘‘ freedom’s” sake! I repeat to Thee, man has no greater anxiety in life than to find some one to whom he can make over that gift of freedom with which the unfortunate creature is born. But he


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alone will prove capable of silencing and quieting their consciences, that shall succeed in possessing himself of the freedom of men. With “daily bread” an irresistible power was offered Thee, show a man “bread” and he will follow Thee, for what can he resist less than the attraction of bread? but if, at the same time, another succeed in possessing himself of his conscience—oh! then even Thy bread will be forgotten, and man will follow him who seduced his conscience. So far Thou wert right. For the mystery of human being does not solely rest in the desire to live, but in the problem—for what should one live at all? Without a clear perception of his reasons for living, man will never consent to live, and will rather destroy himself than tarry on earth, though he be surrounded with bread. This is the truth. But what has happened? Instead of getting hold of man’s freedom, Thou hast enlarged it still more! Hast Thou again forgotten that to man rest and even death are preferable to a free choice between the knowledge of Good and Evil? Nothing seems more seductive in his eyes than freedom of conscience, and nothing proves more painful. And behold! instead of laying a firm foundation whereon to rest once for all man’s conscience, Thou hast chosen to stir up in him all that is abnormal, mysterious, and indefinite, all that is beyond human strength, and hast acted as if Thou never hadst any love for him, and yet Thou wert He who came to “lay down His life for His friends”! Thou hast burdened man’s soul with anxieties hitherto unknown to him. Thirsting for human love freely given, seeking to enable man, seduced and charmed by Thee, to follow Thy path of his own free-will, instead of the old and wise law which held him in subjection, Thou hast given him the right henceforth to choose and freely decide what is good and bad for him, guided but by Thine image in his heart. But hast Thou never dreamt of the probability, nay, of the certainty, of that same man one day rejecting finally, and controverting even Thine image and Thy truth, once he would find himself laden with such a terrible burden as freedom of choice? That a time would surely come when men would exclaim that Truth and Light cannot be in Thee, for no one could have left them in a greater perplexity and mental suffering than Thou hast done, lading them with so many cares and insoluble problems. Thus, it is Thyself who hast laid the foundation for the destruction of Thine own kingdom and no one but Thou is to be blamed for it.

“‘ Meantime, every chance of success was offered Thee. There are three Powers, three unique Forces upon earth, capable of conquering

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for ever by charming the conscience of these weak rebels—men—for their own good; and these Forces are: Miracle, Mystery and Authority. Thou hast rejected all the three, and thus wert the first to set them an example. When the terrible and all-wise spirit placed Thee on a pinnacle of the temple and said unto Thee, “If Thou be the son of God, cast Thyself down, for it is written, He shall give His angels charge concerning Thee: and in their hands they shall bear Thee up, lest at any time Thou dash Thy foot against a stone! “—for thus Thy faith in Thy father should have been made evident, Thou didst refuse to accept his suggestion and didst not follow it. Oh, undoubtedly, Thou didst act in this with all the magnificent pride of a god, but then men—that weak and rebel race—are they also gods, to understand Thy refusal? Of course, Thou didst well know that by taking one single step forward, by making the slightest motion to throw Thyself down, Thou wouldst have tempted ‘‘the Lord Thy God,’’ lost suddenly all faith in Him, and dashed Thyself to atoms against that same earth which Thou camest to save, and thus wouldst have allowed the wise spirit which tempted Thee to triumph and rejoice. But then, how many such as Thee are to be found on this globe, I ask Thee? Couldst Thou ever for a moment imagine that men would have the same strength to resist such a temptation? Is human nature calculated to reject miracle, and trust, during the most terrible moments in life, when the most momentous, painful and perplexing problems struggle within man’s soul, to the free decisions of his heart for the true solution? Oh, Thou knewest well that that action of Thine would remain recorded in books for ages to come, reaching to the confines of the globe, and Thy hope was, that following Thy example, man would remain true to his God, without needing any miracle to keep his faith alive! But Thou knewest not, it seems, that no sooner would man reject miracle than he would reject God likewise, for he seeketh less God than ‘‘a sign’’ from Him. And thus, as it is beyond the power of man to remain without miracles, so, rather than live without, he will create for himself new wonders of his own making; and he will bow to and worship the soothsayer’s miracles, the old witch’s sorcery, were he a rebel, a heretic, and an atheist a hundred times over. Thy refusal to come down from the cross when people, mocking and wagging their heads were saying to Thee—”Save Thyself if Thou he the son of God, and we will believe in Thee,” was due to the same determination—not to enslave man through miracle, but to obtain faith in Thee freely and


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apart from any miraculous influence. Thou thirstest for free and uninfluenced love, and refusest the passionate adoration of the slave before a Potency which would have subjected his will once for ever. Thou judgest of men too highly here, again, for, though rebels they be, they are born slaves and nothing. more. Behold, and judge of them once more, now that fifteen centuries have elapsed since that moment. Look at them, whom Thou didst try to elevate unto Thee! I swear man is weaker and lower than Thou hast ever imagined him to be! Can he ever do that which Thou art said to have accomplished? By valuing him so highly Thou hast acted as if there were no love for him in Thine heart, for Thou hast demanded of him more than he could ever give—Thou, who lovest him more than Thyself! Hadst Thou esteemed him less, less wouldst Thou have demanded of him, and that would have been more like love, for his burden would have been made thereby lighter. Man is weak and cowardly. What matters it, if he now riots and rebels throughout the world against our will and power, and prides himself upon that rebellion? It is but the petty pride and vanity of a school-boy. It is the rioting of little children, getting up a mutiny in the class—room and driving their schoolmaster out of it. But it will not last long, and when the day of their triumph is over, they will have to pay dearly for it. They will destroy the temples and raze them to the ground, flooding the earth with blood. But the foolish children will have to learn some day that, rebels though they be and riotous from nature, they are too weak to maintain the spirit of mutiny for any length of time. Suffused with idiotic tears, they will confess that He who created them rebellious undoubtedly did so but to mock them. They will pronounce these words in despair, and such blasphemous utterances will but add to their misery—for human nature cannot endure blasphemy, and takes her own revenge in the end.

“‘And thus, after all Thou hast suffered for mankind and its freedom, the present fate of men may be summed up in three words:

Unrest, Confusion, Misery! Thy great prophet John records in his vision, that he saw, during the first resurrection of the chosen servants of God—”the number of them which were sealed” in their foreheads, “twelve thousand” of every tribe. But were they, indeed, as many? Then they must have been gods, not men. They had shared Thy Cross for long years, suffered scores of years’ hunger and thirst in dreary wildernesses and deserts, feeding upon locusts and roots—and of these children of free love for Thee, and self-sacrifice in Thy name,


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Thou mayest well feel proud. But remember that these are but a few thousands—of gods, not men; and how about all others? And why should the weakest be held guilty for not being able to endure what the strongest have endured? Why should a soul incapable of containing such terrible gifts be punished for its weakness? Didst Thou really come to, and for, the “elect” alone? If so, then the mystery will remain for ever mysterious to our finite minds. And if a mystery, then were we right to proclaim it as one, and preach it, teaching them that neither their freely given love to Thee nor freedom of conscience were essential, but only that incomprehensible mystery which they must blindly obey even against the dictates of their conscience. Thus did we. We corrected and improved Thy teaching and based it upon “Miracle, Mystery, and Authority.” And men rejoiced at finding themselves led once more like a herd of cattle, and at finding their hearts at last delivered of the terrible burden laid upon them by Thee, which caused them so much suffering. Tell me, were we right in doing as we did? Did not we show our great love for humanity, by realizing in such a humble spirit its helplessness, by so mercifully lightening its great burden, and by permitting and remitting for its weak nature every sin, provided it be committed with our authoriza- tion? For what, then, hast Thou come again to trouble us in our work? And why lookest Thou at me so penetratingly with Thy meek eyes, and in such a silence? Rather shouldst Thou feel wroth, for I need not Thy love, I reject it, and love Thee not, myself. Why should I conceal the truth from Thee? I know but too well with whom I am now talking! What I had to say was known to Thee before, I read it in Thine eye. How should I conceal from Thee our secret? If per chance Thou wouldst hear it from my own lips, then listen: We are not with Thee, but with him, and that is our secret! For centuries have we abandoned Thee to follow him, yes—eight centuries. Eight hundred years now since we accepted from him the gift rejected by Thee with indignation; that last gift which he offered Thee from the high mountain, when, showing all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, he saith unto Thee: “All these things will I give Thee, if Thou wilt fall down and worship me!” We took Rome from him and the glaive of Cæsar and declared ourselves alone the kings of this earth, its sole kings, though our work is not yet fully accomplished. But who is to blame for it? Our work is but in its incipient stage, but it is nevertheless started. We may have long to wait until its culmina-


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tion, and mankind have to suffer much, but we shall reach the goal some day, and become sole Cæsars, and then will be the time to think of universal happiness for men.

“‘Thou couldst accept the glaive of Cæsar Thyself; why didst Thou reject the offer? By accepting from the powerful spirit his third offer Thou wouldst have realized every aspiration man seeketh for himself on earth; man would have found a constant object for worship; one to deliver his conscience up to, and one that should unite all together into one common and harmonious ant-hill; for an innate necessity for universal union constitutes the third and final affliction of mankind. Humanity as a whole has ever aspired to unite itself universally. Many were the great nations with great histories, but the greater they were, the more unhappy they felt, as they felt the stronger necessity of a universal union among men. Great conquerors, like Timoor and Tchengis-Khan, passed like a cyclone upon the face of the earth in their efforts to conquer the universe, but even they, albeit unconsciously, expressed the same aspiration towards universal and common union. In accepting the kingdom of the world and Cæsar's purple, one would found a universal kingdom and secure to mankind eternal peace. And who can rule mankind better than those who have possessed themselves of man’s conscience, and hold in their hand man’s daily bread? Having accepted Cæsar's glaive and purple, we had, of course, but to deny Thee, to henceforth follow him alone. Oh, centuries of intellectual riot and rebellious free-thought are yet before us, and their science will end by anthropophagy, for having begun to build their Babylonian tower without our help they will have to end by anthropophagy. But it is precisely at that time that the Beast will crawl up to us in full submission, and lick the soles of our feet, and sprinkle them with tears of blood. And we shall sit upon the scarlet-coloured Beast, and lifting up high the golden cup “full of abomination and filthiness,” shall show written upon it the word ‘‘Mystery” ! But it is only then that men will see the beginning of a kingdom of peace and happiness. Thou art proud of Thine own elect, but Thou hast none other but these elect, and we will give rest to all. But that is not the end. Many are those among Thine elect and the labourers of Thy vineyard, who, tired of waiting for Thy coming, already have carried and will yet carry, the great fervour of their hearts and their spiritual strength into another field, and will end by lifting up against Thee Thine own banner of freedom. But it is Thyself Thou hast to thank. Under our


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rule and sway all will be happy, and will neither rebel nor destroy each other as they did while under Thy free banner. Oh, we will take good care to prove to them that they will become absolutely free only when they have abjured their freedom in our favour and submit to us absolutely. Thinkest Thou we shall be right or still lying? They will convince themselves of our rightness, for they will see what a depth of degrading slavery and strife that liberty of Thine has led them into. Liberty, Freedom of Thought and Conscience, and Science will lead them into such impassable chasms, place them face to face before such wonders and insoluble mysteries, that some of them—more rebellious and ferocious than the rest—will destroy themselves; others—rebellious but weak—will destroy each other; while the remainder, weak, helpless and miserable, will crawl back to our feet and cry: “Yes; right were ye, oh Fathers of Jesus; ye alone are in possession of His mystery, and we return to you, praying that ye save us from ourselves!” Receiving their bread from us, they will clearly see that we take the bread from them, the bread made by their own, hands, but to give it back to them in equal shares and that without any miracle; and having ascertained that, though we have not changed stones into bread, yet bread they have, while every other bread turned verily in their own hands into stones, they will be only too glad to have it so Until that day, they will never be happy. And who is it that helped the most to blind them, tell me? Who separated the flock and scattered it over ways unknown if it be not Thee? But we will gather the sheep once more and subject them to our will for ever. We will prove to them their own weakness and make them humble again, whilst with Thee they have learnt but pride, for Thou hast made more of them than they ever were worth. We will give them that quiet, humble happiness, which alone benefits such weak, foolish creatures as they are, and having once had proved to them their weakness, they will become timid and obedient, and gather around us as chickens around their hen. They will wonder at and feel a superstitious admiration for us, and feel proud to be led by men so powerful and wise that a handful of them can subject a flock a thousand millions strong. Gradually men will begin to fear us. They will nervously dread our slightest anger, their intellects will weaken, their eyes become as easily accessible to tears as those of children and women ; but we will teach them an easy transition from grief and tears to laughter, childish joy and mirthful song. Yes; we will make them work like slaves, but during their recreation hours they shall have an


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innocent child-like life, full of play and merry laughter. We will even permit them sin, for, weak and helpless, they will feel the more love for us for permitting them to indulge in it. We will tell them that every kind of sin will be remitted to them, so long as it is done with our permission; that we take all these sins upon ourselves, for we so love the world, that we are even willing to sacrifice our souls for its satisfaction. And, appearing before them in the light of their scapegoats and redeemers, we shall be adored the more for it. They will have no secrets from its. It will rest with us to permit them to live with their wives and concubines, or to forbid them, to have children or remain childless, either way depending on the degree of their obedience to us; and they will submit most joyfully to us. The most agonizing secrets of their souls—all, all will they lay down at our feet, and we will authorize and remit them all in Thy name, and they will believe us and accept our mediation with rapture, as it will deliver them from their greatest anxiety and torture—that of having to decide freely for themselves. And all will be happy, all except the one or two hundred thousands of their rulers. For it is but we, we the keepers of the great Mystery who will be miserable. There will be thousands of millions of happy infants, and one hundred thousand martyrs who have taken upon themselves the curse of knowledge of good and evil. Peaceable will be their end, and peacefully will they die, in Thy name, to find behind the portals of the grave—but death. But we will keep the secret in violate, and deceive them for their own good with the mirage of life eternal in Thy kingdom. For, were there really anything like life beyond the grave, surely it would never fall to the lot of such as they! People tell us and prophesy of Thy coming and triumphing once more on earth; of Thy appearing with the army of Thy elect, with Thy proud and mighty ones; but we will answer Thee that they have saved but themselves while we have saved all. We are also threatened with the great disgrace which awaits the whore, “Babylon the great, the mother of harlots’’—who sits upon the Beast, holding in her hands the Mystery, the word written upon her forehead ; and we are told that the weak ones, the lambs shall rebel against her and shall make her desolate and naked. But then will I arise, and point out to Thee the thousands of millions of happy infants free from any sin. And we who have taken their sins upon us, for their own good, shall stand before Thee and say: ‘‘Judge us if Thou canst and darest! ‘‘ Know then that I fear Thee not. Know that I too have lived in the dreary wilderness,


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where I fed upon locusts and roots, that I too have blessed the freedom with which Thou hast blessed men, and that I too have once prepared to join the ranks of Thy elect, the proud and the mighty. But I awoke from my delusion and refused since then to serve insanity. I returned to join the legion of those who corrected Thy mistakes. I left the proud and returned to the really humble, and for their own happiness. What I now tell Thee will come to pass, and our kingdom shall be built, I tell Thee, not later than tomorrow. Thou shalt see that obedient flock which at one simple motion of my hand will rush to add burning coals to Thy stake, on which I will burn Thee for having dared to come and trouble us in our work. For, if there ever was one who deserved more than any of the others our inquisitorial fires—it is Thee! Tomorrow I will burn Thee. Dixi.’”

Ivan paused. He had entered into the situation and had spoken with great animation, but now he suddenly burst out laughing.

“But all that is absurd!” suddenly exclaimed Alyosha, who had hitherto listened perplexed and agitated but in profound silence. “Your poem is a glorification of Christ, not an accusation, as you, perhaps, meant it to be. And who will believe you when you speak of ‘freedom’? Is it thus that we Christians must understand it? It is Rome (not all Rome, for that would be unjust), but the worst of the Roman Catholics, the Inquisitors and the Jesuits, that you have been exposing! Your Inquisitor is an impossible character. What are these sins they are taking upon themselves? Who are those keepers of mystery who took upon themselves a curse for the good of mankind? Who ever met them? We all know the Jesuits, and no one has a good word to say in their favour; but when were they as you depict them? Never, never! The Jesuits are merely a Romish army making ready for their future temporal kingdom, with a mitred emperor—a Roman high priest at their head. That is their ideal and object, without any mystery or elevated suffering. The most prosaic thirsting for power, for the sake of the mean and earthly pleasures of life, a desire to enslave their fellow-men, something like our late system of serfs, with themselves at the head as landed proprietors—that is all that they can be accused of. They may not believe in God, that is also possible, but your suffering Inquisitor is simply—a fancy!”

“Hold, hold!” interrupted Ivan, smiling. “Do not be so excited. A fancy, you say; be it so! Of course, it is a fancy. But stop. Do you really imagine that all this Catholic movement during the last centuries

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is naught but a desire for power for the mere purpose of ‘mean pleasures’? Is this what your Father Paissiy taught you?”

“No, no, quite the reverse, for Father Paissiy once told me some thing very similar to what you yourself say, though, of course, not that. Something quite different,” suddenly added Alexis, blushing.

“A precious piece of information, notwithstanding your ‘not that.’ I ask you, why should the Inquisitors and the Jesuits of your imagination live but for the attainment of ‘mean material pleasures’? Why should there not be found among them one single genuine martyr, suffering under a great and holy idea and loving humanity with all his heart? Now let us suppose that among all these Jesuits thirsting and hungering but after ‘mean material pleasures’ there may be one, just one like my old Inquisitor, who had himself fed upon roots in the wilderness, suffered the tortures of damnation while trying to conquer flesh, in order to become free and perfect, but who had never ceased to love humanity, and who one day prophetically beheld the truth; who saw as plain as he could see that the bulk of humanity could never be happy under the old system, that it was not for them that the great Idealist had come and died and dreamt of His Universal Harmony. Having realized that truth, he returned into the world and joined— intelligent and practical people. Is this so impossible?”

“Joined whom? What intelligent and practical people?” exclaimed Alyosha quite excited. “Why should they be more intelligent than other men, and what secrets and mysteries can they have? They have neither. Atheism and infidelity is all the secret they have. Your Inquisitor does not believe in God, and that is all the Mystery there is in it!”

“It may be so. You have guessed rightly there. And it is so, and that is his whole secret; but is this not the acutest of sufferings for such a man as he, who killed all his young life in asceticism in the desert, and yet could not cure himself of his love toward his fellow-men? Toward the end of his life he becomes convinced that it is only by following the advice of the great and terrible spirit that the fate of these millions of weak rebels, these ‘half-finished samples of humanity created in mockery’ can be made tolerable. And once convinced of it, he sees as clearly that to achieve that object, one must follow blindly the guidance of the wise spirit, the fearful spirit of death and destruction, hence accept a system of lies and deception and lead humanity consciously this time toward death and destruction,


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and moreover, be deceiving them all the while in order to prevent them from realizing where they are being led, and so force the miserable blind men to feel happy, at least while here on earth. And note this: a wholesale deception in the name of Him, in whose ideal the old man had so passionately, so fervently, believed during nearly his whole life! Is this no suffering? And were such a solitary exception found amidst, and at the head of; that army ‘that thirsts for power but for the sake of the mean pleasures of life,’ think you one such man would not suffice to bring on a tragedy? Moreover, one single man like my Inquisitor as a principal leader, would prove sufficient to discover the real guiding idea of the Romish system with all its armies of Jesuits, the greatest and chiefest agents of that system. And I tell you that it is my firm conviction that the solitary type described in my poem has at no time ever disappeared from among the chief leaders of that movement. Who knows but that terrible old man, loving humanity so stubbornly and in such an original way, exists even in our days in the shape of a whole host of such solitary exceptions, whose existence is not due to mere chance, but to a well-defined association born of mutual consent, to a secret league, organized several centuries back, in order to guard the Mystery from the indiscreet eyes of the miserable and weak people, and only in view of their own happiness? And so it is; it cannot be otherwise. I suspect that even Masons have some such Mystery underlying the basis of their organization, and that it is just the reason why the Roman Catholic clergy hate them so, dreading to find in them rivals, competition, the dismemberment of the unity of the idea, for the realization of which one flock and one Shepherd are needed. However, in defending my idea, I look like an author whose production is unable to stand criticism. Enough of this.”

“You are, perhaps, a Mason yourself!” exclaimed Alyosha. “YOU do not believe in God,” he added, with a note of profound sadness in his voice. But suddenly remarking that his brother was looking at him with mockery, “How do on mean then to bring your poem to a close?” he unexpectedly enquired, casting his eyes downward, “or does it break off here?”

“My intention is to end it with the following scene: Having disburdened his heart, the Inquisitor waits for some time to hear his prisoner speak in His turn. His silence weighs upon him. He has seen that his captive has been attentively listening to him all the time, with His eyes fixed penetratingly and softly on the face of his jailer, and evi-


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dently bent upon not replying to him. The old man longs to hear His voice, to hear Him reply; better words of bitterness and scorn than His silence. Suddenly He rises; slowly and silently approaching the Inquisitor, He bends towards him and softly kisses the bloodless, four-score-and-ten-year-old lips. That is all the answer. The Grand Inquisitor shudders. There is a convulsive twitch at the corner of his mouth. He goes to the door, opens it, and addressing Him, ‘Go,’ he says, ‘go, and return no more . . do not come again . never, never!’ and—lets Him out into the dark night. The prisoner vanishes.’’

“And the old man?”

“The kiss burns his heart, but the old man remains firm in his own ideas and unbelief.”

“And you, together with him? You too!” despairingly exclaimed Alyosha, while Ivan burst into a still louder fit of laughter.

THE BRIGHT SPOT OF LIGHT
————

[Vol. III. No. 2, November, 1881.]

[ MADAME,— In the last issue of your valuable journal a member of the New York Theosophical Society seeks to be enlightened as to the cause of a bright spot of light which he has often seen. I also am equally curious to have an explanation. I attribute it to the highest concentration of the soul. As soon as I place myself in that prescribed attitude, suddenly a bright spot appears before me which fills my heart with delight, this being regarded as a special sign by the Indian devotee that he is in the right path, leading to ultimate success in the Yoga practice, that he is blessed by the special grace of the Almighty.

One evening, sitting on the ground cross-legged, in that state of concentration when the soul soars into high regions, I was blessed with a shower of flowers—a most brilliant sight, which I long to see again. I tried to catch at flowers so rare, but they eluded my grasp and suddenly disappeared, leaving me much disappointed. Finally two flowers fell on me, one touching my head and the other my right shoulder, but this time also the attempt to seize them was unsuccessful. What can it be, if not a response that God has been pleased with his worshipper, meditation being, I believe, the unique way of spiritual worship.

September 18th, 1881.]

It depends. Those of our orthodox native contributors who worship some particular God—or, if they so prefer, the one Îshvara under some particular name—are too apt to attribute every psychological effect, induced by mental concentration during the hours of religious meditation, to their special deity, whereas, in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred, such effects are due simply to purely psycho-physiological effects. We know a number of mystically-inclined people who see such “lights” as that described above as soon as they concentrate their thoughts. Spiritualists attribute them to the agency of their departed friends; Buddhists (who have no personal God) to a pre-nirvânic state; Pantheists and Vedântins to Mâyá—or the illusion of the senses; and Christians—to a foresight of the glories of Paradise. The modern Occultists say that, when not directly due to cerebral action, the normal functions of which are certainly impeded by such


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an artificial mode of deep concentration—these lights are glimpses of the Astral Light, or, to use a more “scientific” expression, of the “Universal Ether,” firmly believed in by more than one man of science, as proved by Stewart and Tait’s Unseen Universe. Like the pure blue sky closely shrouded by thick vapours on a misty day, so is the Astral Light concealed from our physical senses during the hours of our normal daily life. But when, concentrating all our spiritual faculties we succeed, for the time being, in paralyzing their enemy (the physical senses), and the inner man becomes, so to say, distinct from the man of matter—then the action of the ever-living spirit, like a breeze that clears the sky from its obstructing clouds, sweeps away the mist which lies between our normal vision and the Astral Light, and we obtain glimpses into, and of that Light.

The days of “smoking furnaces” and “burning lamps” which form part of the biblical visions are long gone by—to return no more. But whoever, refusing natural explanations, prefers supernatural ones, is, of course, at liberty to imagine that an “Almighty God” amuses us with visions of flowers, and sends burning lights’ before making “covenants” with his worshippers.

“IS IT IDLE TO ARGUE FURTHER?”
————

[Vol. III. No. 4, January, 1882.]

SAYS Light in its “Notes by the Way,” edited by “M.A. Oxon.”:

The current number of The Theosophist contains an important manifesto, which establishes and defines the ground finally taken up by that body. Shortly put, it is one of complete antagonism to Spiritualism. The Spiritualist believes that it is possible for spirits of the departed to communicate with this earth. Whatever divergence of opinion there may be among us in respect of other matters, we are agreed on this, the cardinal article of our faith. Our daily experience affirms its truth. The consentient testimony of the most experienced among us agrees that, whether there be, or whether there be not, other agencies at work, the spirits we know of are human spirits who have once lived on this earth. To this the Theosophist returns the simple answer that we are mistaken. No spirits communicate with earth for the sufficient reason that they cannot. It is idle to argue further. We can but go on our way with the assured conviction that, whatever may be the case in the east, we find that the departed spirits of mankind are both able and willing to communicate with us in the west. And no metaphysical theorizing as to what cannot be disposes in any degree of what is.

The Theosophist is forced to take exception to the form of statement of “facts” above used. As it now stands, it is but a short series of speculative deductions from the very superficially defined doctrines in our “Fragments of Occult Truth,” which give a by no means complete idea of what is really taught in the doctrine, scraps of which were explained in the article now most incorrectly styled a “manifesto.” We regret the necessity to contradict once more our esteemed opponent, who seems to be giving up the Theosophists in despair. But were we also to conclude it “idle to argue further,” then the position taken up by us would, indeed, give rise again to endless misinterpretations. The question of man’s state after death, the future progress of his soul, spirit and other principles—whatever anyone may call them—was hardly touched upon in the short article under our critic’s notice. In itself the subject embraces a field of boundless extent and of the most


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metaphysical intricacy, one which would demand volumes of commentaries and explanations to be thoroughly sifted and understood. Yet superficially sketched as our ideas may have been in the “Fragments”—which was but an answer to the direct questions, not to say reproaches, of an esteemed brother, resident in Australia—we nevertheless fail to detect in it such passages or ideas as justify “M.A. Oxon.” in saying that our doctrine is “one of complete antagonism to Spiritualism.” It is not half so antagonistic as he believes it to be, as we will try to prove.

“The Spiritualist believes that it is possible for spirits of the de parted to communicate with this earth,” says the writer . . . “and to this the Theosophist returns the simple answer that we are mistaken.” In this sentence alone, as a kernel in a nut-shell, lies hidden the reason of that partial antagonism. Had “M.A. Oxon.,” slightly modifying the construction of the above-quoted sentence—written instead that “it is possible for spirits yet embodied on this earth to communicate with the spirits of the departed”—then would there have been hardly any antagonism at all to deplore. What we hold and do maintain is that all of the so-called “physical phenomena,” and “materializations” especially, are produced by something, to which we refuse the name of “spirit.” In the words of the President of our Berhampore Branch (Babu Nobin Krishna Banerjee, President of the Adhi Bhautic Bhratru Theosophical Society): “We, Hindus [and along with them the European disciples of Eastern philosophy] are trying to spiritualize our grosser material selves, while the American and European Spiritualists are endeavouring in their se’ance-roorns to materialize spirits.” These words of wisdom well show the opposite tendencies of the Eastern and the Western minds—namely, that while the former are trying to purify matter, the latter do their best to degrade spirit. Therefore what we say is, that ninety-nine times out of one hundred, “materializations” so-called, when genuine, and whether they be partial or’ complete, are produced by what we call “shells,” and occasionally, perhaps, by the living medium’s astral body—but certainly never in our humble opinion, by “disembodied” spirits them selves.

While we sincerely regret this divergence of opinions with Light, we feel inclined to smile at the naivete’ of some other Spiritualist opponents; as, for instance, at that of the editor of the London Spiritualist, who, in his leading editorial of Nov. 18th, entitled “Speculation-


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Spinning,” calls the scraps of occult doctrine given in our “Fragments” “unscientific,” reproaching the writer (than whom there is no abler metaphysician, nor closer or more acute and clever logician among Anglo-Indian writers) with a want of “scientific method” in the presentation of his facts! At the same time, the editorial informs us that by “facts” it does not “necessarily mean physical facts, for there are demonstrable truths outside the realms of physics.” Precisely. And it is upon just such “facts,” the existence of which is based for us upon evidence which we “have weighed and examined” for ourselves, that we maintain the demonstrability of the deductions and final conclusions at which we have arrived. These we preach but to those who really want to know them. As none, they say, are so blind as they who will not see, we abstain from offering our doctrines to such as find them offensive—among whom are some Spiritualists. But to the masses of impartial readers whose minds are not yet wedded to this or that theory, we present our facts and tell them to see, hear and judge for themselves; and there have been some who have not found our theories merely “speculation-spinning,” based upon hypotheses and the crass sentimentalism of a faith—welcome, because of its implied promises of a life hereafter—but theories resting upon the logical and stern deduction from facts, which constitute in themselves a knowledge. Now, what are these facts, and what do they show and teach us?

First of all, and as a rule—the rare exceptions to which but confirm it the more—we find that the so-called “disembodied spirits,” instead of becoming the wiser for being rid of the physiological impediments and the restraints of their gross material senses, would seem to have become far more stupid, far less perspicacious and, in every respect, worse than they were during their earthly life. Secondly, we have to take note of the frequent contradictions and absurd blunders; of the false information offered, and the remarkable vulgarity and common place exhibited during their interviews with mortals; in materializing seances their oral utterances being invariably vulgar common-place, and their inspirational speeches or second-hand communication through trance and other mediums frequently so. Adding to this the undeniable fact which shows their teachings reflecting most faithfully the special creed, views, and thoughts of the sensitive or medium used by them, or of a sitter or sitters, we have already sufficient proof to show that our theory, that they are “shells” and not disembodied spirits at


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all, is far more logical and “scientific” than that of the Spiritualists.* Speaking here in general, we need not take into consideration exceptional cases, instances of undeniable spiritual identity with which we are sure to find our arguments met by our spiritual opponents. No one ever thought of calling “Imperator” a “shell”; but then the latter, whether a living or a disembodied spirit, neither materializes himself objectively, nor is it yet proved to the satisfaction of anyone except “MA. Oxon.” himself that “he” descends to the medium, instead of the spirit of the latter ascending to meet his instructor.

Thus, we maintain that “spirits” are no more what they claim to be, than the chrysalis shell is the butterfly which left it. That their personations of various individuals, whom they sometimes represent, are mostly due to the accidental contact of an “elementary” or “eidôlon” (attracted by the medium and the intense magnetic desire of the circle present) with the personal “aura” of this or that individual. The thoughts of the latter, the various acts and scenes in his past life, the familiar and beloved faces of his departed ones, are then all drawn out of the all-containing depths of the Astral Light and utilized. At times this is done successfully, but frequently the thing proves a total failure. Only while the former are, as a rule, recorded, the mention of the latter is tacitly avoided; no spiritualistic journal having ever been edited with that special view. So much for materialization and physical phenomena. As for the rest, we are at one with the Spiritualists with but slight variances, more of form than of substance.
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* We will not go to the trouble of showing how much, or rather how little, of ‘‘ scientific method’’ is to be generally found in The Spiritualist. But while speaking of science and its methods, we may simply remark that though both our theories (theosophical and spiritualistic) are sure to be viewed by the men of science as “speculation-spinning ‘‘ and metaphysical windmills, yet the hypotheses of spiritualists—as broadly accepted and whether “scientifically” or unscientifically stated—are certain, to be pronounced by the majority of men of real science, not merely unscientific, but very unphilosophical and illogical as well.

FRAGMENTS OF OCCULT TRUTH
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[Vol. III. Nos. 1, 6 and 12, October,1881, March and September, 1882.]

I.

WE have received from a brother Theosophist an interesting and temperate note on some supposed errors of occultists when dealing with the phenomena of spiritualism. The subject is one of universal interest, and we shall therefore require no apology for publishing some fragments of the lessons taught us on the subject in the occult schools, which may possibly both help to remove some difficulties and tend to convey to spiritualists generally a clearer conception of the causes of many of the phenomena of which they have had experience.

“Those Theosophists who deny to departed spirits a legitimate share in the marvellous phenomena” are few indeed, for the great majority of Theosophists concern themselves with spiritualism very little, if at all. Indeed our members may be divided into five principal classes and described as follows:

(1) Men profoundly concerned in the revival of their respective religious philosophies in all their pristine purity—Buddhist devotees outnumbering all others They neither know of nor do they care for spiritualism.

(2) Students of various philosophies, searchers after truth whence so ever it may come. They neither believe nor disbelieve in spirits. They are open to conviction, but will accept nothing on second-hand testimony.

(3) Materialists, freethinkers, agnostics, who care as little for occultism as they do for spiritualism. Their only concern is to free the masses from the fetters of ignorance and superstition and educate them. Many, indeed most of them, are philanthropists who hold it more expedient to devote their energies to the assistance of the living than to occupy their time in conversations with the dead.

(4) Spiritualists and spiritists who could not well be accused of such “heresy.” And finally,

(5) Occultists who do not number a half per cent in the Theosophical Society.


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These latter are the only “Theosophists” who are really open to the above accusation, and even these, if we look beyond the veil of words, which more or less conceals the ideas of both spiritualists and occultists, will prove to differ less widely on these points from the views of philosophical spiritualists than is at first apparent. For, in this as in so many other cases, it is in a great measure to the different significations attached to the same terms by the two parties that their apparent irreconcilable divergence is due. “Words,” as Bacon, we think, says, “mightily perplex the wisdom of the wisest, and like a Tartar’s bow, shoot backward into the minds of those that follow them”; and so here the conflict of opinions between spiritualists and occultists is solely due to the fact that the former, overrating the quality and character of the communicating entities, dignify with the name of “spirits” certain reliquiæ of deceased human beings, while the occultists reserve the name of Spirit for the highest principle of human nature, and treat these reliquiæ as mere eidôlons, or astral simulacra, of the real Spirit.

In order to understand clearly the view of the occultists, it is necessary to glance at the constitution of the living human being. Even the spiritualistic theory teaches that man is a trinity, composed of (1) a higher spirit or the “spiritual soul” as ancient philosophers designated it; (2) its envelope—the ethereal form or shadow of the body— called by the Neo-platonists the “animal soul”; and (3) the physical body.

Although from one point of view this is broadly correct, yet, accord ing to occultists, to render our conceptions of this truth clearer and follow out successfully the course of man after death, it is necessary to further subdivide these three entities and resolve them into their constituent principles. This analysis being almost wholly unknown to western nations, it is difficult in some cases to find any English words by which to represent the occult subdivisions, but we give them in the least obscure phraseology that we can command.

DIVISIONS OF THE SPIRITUALISTS.

1. The Body.SUBDIVISIONS OF THE OCCULTISTS.

1. The Physical Body composed wholly of matter in its grossest and most tangible form.

2. The Vital Principle (or Jivatman) a form of force, indestructible. When it is disconnected with one set of atoms, it immediately becomes attracted by others.440————————————————————

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2. The Animal Soul or Perisprit.3. The Astral Body (Linga Sharira)— composed of highly etherealized matter. In its habitual passive state the perfect but very shadowy duplicate of the body; its activity, consolidation, and form depend entirely on the Kama Rupa.

4. The Astral Shape (Kama Rupa) or body of desire—a principle defining the configuration of

5. The Animal or Physical Intelligence or Consciousness or Ego—analogous to, though proportionally higher in degree than the reason, instinct, memory, imagination, etc., existing in the higher animals.3.The Spiritual Soul or Spirit,6. The Higher or Spiritual Intelligence
or Consciousness, or Spiritual Ego—in
which mainly resides the state of consciousness of the perfect man, though the lower dimmer animal consciousness coexists in No. 5.

7. The Spirit—an emanation from the Absolute; uncreate, eternal; a state rather than a being.Now the change that we call death only immediately affects the first three constituents; the body decomposes to enter into new combinations, and the vital force is dissipated to help to animate new organisms, and the astral human form (Linga Sharira) dies with the body.

There remain four principles. As a rule (we except the cases of the higher adepts), one of two things occurs in accordance with the universal law of affinity. If the spiritual Ego has been in life material in its tendencies, placing its main enjoyment in, and centering its desires on, material objects and the gratification of earthly desires, then, at death, it
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* Western science, of course, as a rule, holds that animals have no conscious ego, but this we know to be erroneous; they possess no spiritual, but they do possess an animal consciousness, Could men communicate with them they would discover not only this, but also that many of the anthropoid apes possess an intelligence, consciousness, etc., little inferior to that of lunatics, madmen, and some desperately wicked and depraved men who have, in fact, become animals, through the loss, temporary or permanent, of their sixth and seventh principles, even while the combination of the other five principles is still intact, i.e., even during life. Was it some hazy tradition of the truth handed down through the Romish church, which has ever possessed some secret knowledge of the teachings of the ancient mysteries, or was it the great poet’s soul’s own glimpses into the Astral Light, that made Dante represent the souls of several of his enemies as already in the “Inferno” though the men themselves still lived upon earth? Of course this fragment of truth was utterly distorted by the malign influence of the then prevalent material hell superstition, but it was quite possible, as the modern west has still to realize, that the souls of some of these evil men might have already passed away (though not to the fabled Inferno), whilst the men themselves still lived.

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continues to cling blindly to the lower elements of its late combination, and the true spirit severs itself from these and passes away elsewhere. To follow its course is beside the question at present, since the remaining principles in which personal or animal consciousness remains have parted with it for ever, and it would require a complete exposition of the entire philosophy of occultism to fully explain its course; suffice it to say now, that it passes away—taking with it no fragment of the individual consciousness of the man with which it was temporarily associated—to fulfill its mission, still guided and governed, by the irresistible cyclic impulse which first projected it through the veil of primitive cosmic matter.

But if, on the other hand, the tendencies of the Ego have been towards things spiritual, if its aspirations have been heavenwards—we use a conventional term—if it has, when weighed, as it were, in the balance, a greater affinity for the spiritual than for the earthly constituents, with their accompanying desires, of the combination in which it recently took part, then will it cling to the spirit, and with this pass into the adjoining so-called world of effects, in reality a state, and not a place, and there, purified of much of its still remaining material taints, evolve out of itself by the spirit’s aid a new Ego, to be reborn, after a brief period of freedom and enjoyment, in the next higher world of causes, an objective world similar to this present globe of ours, but higher in the spiritual scale, where matter and material tendencies and desires play a far less important part than here.

In either case, it is not a matter of judgment, of salvation and damnation, of heaven and hell, but solely the operation of the universal law of affinity or attraction, which makes the Ego cling in one case to the more material, in the other to the spiritual components of the late aggregation now separated by death. Now neither during gestation in the subjective world of effects, nor during the temporary period of enjoyment, in its newly evolved Ego-hood, of the fruits of good deeds, its karma on earth, nor after its entry into the higher objective world of causes, can the Ego reenter this present world. During the first period it is, so to speak, dormant, and can no more issue from the state in which it is developing than a child can come out of its mother’s womb to pay a visit before the period of pregnancy concludes. During the second period, however ethereal and purified of gross matter the regenerated Ego may be, it is still subject to the physical and universal laws of matter. It cannot, even if it would, span the abyss that


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separates its state from ours. It can be visited in spirit by men, but it cannot descend into our grosser atmosphere and reach us. It attracts, it cannot be attracted; its spiritual polarity presenting an insuperable obstacle. Once reborn into the higher world, and apart from the physical impossibility of any communication between its world and ours, to all but the very highest adepts, the new Ego has become a new person; it has lost its old consciousness linked with earthly experiences, and has acquired a new consciousness, which, as time rolls on, will be interpenetrated by its experiences in that higher sphere. The time will come, no doubt, but many steps higher on the ladder, when the Ego will regain its consciousness of all its past stages of existence; but in the next higher world of causes, or activity, to our own, the new Ego has no more remembrance of its earthly career than we here have of the life that preceded this present one.

Therefore it is that the occultists maintain that no “spirits” of the departed can appear or take part in the phenomena of séance-rooms. To what can appear and take part in these, the occultists refuse the name of “spirits.”

But it may be asked what is it that can appear?

We reply—merely the animal souls or perisprits of the deceased. It might appear from what we have said that, while this, according to our previous exposition, would be true in the case of the spiritually-minded, in that of the materially-minded we should have these and the spiritual Ego or consciousness. But such is not the case. Immediately on the severance of the spirit, whether at death, or, as we have already hinted is sometimes the case, before death, the spiritual Ego is dissipated and ceases to exist. It is the result of the action of spirit on matter, and it might, to render the matter more clear, be described as a combination of spirit and matter, just as flame is the result of the combination of oxygen with the substance being oxygenized, and might loosely be described as the combination of the two. Withdraw the oxygen and the flame ceases; withdraw the spirit, and the spiritual Ego disappears. The sense of individuality in spirit cannot exist without combination with matter. Thus the pure planetary spirits, when first propelled into the circle of necessity, have no individual consciousness, only the absolute consciousness which they share with all fragments of the spirit hitherto entirely uncombined with matter. As they, entering into generation, descend the ladder and grow gradually more and more hemmed in by matter and isolated from the universal spirit, so the


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sense of individuality, the spiritual Ego-ship, grows. How finally, on reäscending the circle, step by step, they regain, on reunion with the universal, the absolute consciousness, and simultaneously all the individual consciousnesses which they have developed at each stage of their descending and ascending progress, is one of the highest mysteries.

But to return to the spiritual Ego-ship developed on this earth; if too tainted to follow the spirit in its upward course, it is, as it were, forth with torn asunder from it. Left in the terrestrial atmosphere without the sustaining spirit that gave it existence, it has to disappear as the flame does when the oxygen is exhausted. All the material elements which, in combination with the spirit, gave it consistency, fly by the law of affinity to join the three other principles that constitute the perisprit or natural soul, and the spiritual Ego ceases to exist.

Thus alike in all cases that remain, all that can appear are the shells of the deceased, the two principles which we call the animal or surviving astral souls or animal Ego.

But there is this to be noted. As the clay, as Saadi says, long retains traces of the perfume of the roses which once honoured it with their companionship, so the etherealized matter which has been in combination with spirit, long retains a power of resisting disintegration. The more pure the spiritual Ego, the less of the matter, which in combination with the spirit went to form it, does it leave behind clinging to the two principles; the more impure, the greater the mass of such spirit-vitalized matter which remains to invigorate the reliquiæ.

Thus it follows that, in the case of the pure and good, the shells rapidly disintegrate; and the animal soul, having ever been kept in subjection, is feeble and will-less; and it can very rarely, if ever, happen that such should involuntarily appear or manifest themselves, for their vitality, desires and aspirations existed almost exclusively in what has passed away. No doubt a power exists which can compel even these to appear, a power taught by the evil science of necromancy, rightly denounced by all good men of old. But why evil, it may be asked? Because until these shells have dissipated, a certain sympathy exists between them and the departed spiritual Ego which is gestating in the fathomless womb of the adjoining world of effects; and to disturb the shells by necromantic sorcery is at the same time to disturb the foetal spiritual Ego.

We have said that these shells in such cases rapidly decay, the


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rapidity being exactly proportional to the purity of the departed spiritual Ego; and we may add that similarly the rapidity of gestation of the new Ego is proportional to the purity of the old Ego out of which it is evolved. Happily necromancy is unknown to modern spiritualists, so that it is next to impossible that the reliquiæ of the good and pure should ever appear in the se’ance-room. No doubt, the simulacra of some spiritual Egos whose fate trembled in the balance, whose affinities, earthwards and heavenwards, to use the popular phraseology, were nearly equal, who have left behind too much of the matter that was combined to form them, who will lie long in fœtal bonds before being able to develop the new Ego-hood; no doubt, we say, such simulacra may survive longer and may occasionally appear under exceptional conditions in se’ance-rooms, with a dim, dazed consciousness of their past lives. But even this, owing to the conditions of the case, will be rare, and they will never be active or intelligent, as the stronger portions of their wills, the higher portions of their intelligence, have gone elsewhere.

Nature draws no hard and fast lines, though in the balance of forces very slight differences in opposing energies may produce the most divergent results. All entities shade off from one end to the other of the chain by imperceptible degrees, and it is impossible for man to gauge the exact degree of purity of the deceased at which the voluntary reappearance of his reliquiæ through the agency of mediumship becomes impossible; but it is absolutely true that, broadly speaking, as a law, it is only the reliquiæ of non-spiritually-minded men, whose spiritual Egos have perished, that appear in séance-rooms, and are dignified by spiritualists with the title of “spirits of the departed.”

These shells, these animal souls, in whom still survive the major portions of the intelligence, will-power and knowledge that they possessed when incorporated in the human combination, invigorated too by the reässimilation of the spirit-vitalized matter that once combined with the spirit to compose their spiritual Ego, are often powerful and highly intelligent, and continue to survive for lengthened periods, their intense desire for earthly life enabling them to seize from the decaying simulacra of the good and feeble the material for prolonged existence.

To these eidola occultists are used to give the name of elementaries, and these, by the aid of the half-intelligent forces of nature which are attracted to them, perform most of the wonders of the seance-rooms.

445————————————————————FRAGMENTS OF OCCULT TRUTH.

If to these shells, these eidola which have lost their immortality, and whence the divine essence has for ever departed, the spiritualists insist on applying the title of “spirits of the dead,” well and good; they are not spirits at all, they are of the earth earthy, all that remains of the dead when their spirits have flown, but if this be understood, and it be nevertheless considered desirable to call them that to which thee are the precise antithesis, it is after all merely a case of misnomer.

But let there be no mistake as to what they are; hundreds and thousands of lost and ruined men and women all over the globe attest the degradation to which constant subjection to their influence in mediumship too generally leads, and we who know the truth should ill discharge our duty if we did not warn all spiritualists, in the strongest terms possible, against allowing the misuse of terms to mislead them as to the real nature and character of the disembodied entities with which they so constantly and confidingly deal.

Now probably spiritualists will admit that our views would explain the vast mass of trash, frivolous nonsense and falsehood communicated through mediums, as also the manner in which so many of these, good and honest to begin with, gradually grow into immoral impostors. But many objections will be raised. One man will say: “I have repeatedly conversed with my late father; a better, kinder-hearted, more spiritual- minded man never lived; and on one occasion he told me a fact, unknown to me, and, I believe to everyone living, which I subsequently verified.”

Nothing is simpler; the father’s image was in the son’s mind; thus put en rapport the disembodied elementary which, if of one of the more intelligent classes, has glimpses of things in the astral light, and can here and there dimly distinguish the pictures which record every deed, word and thought—pictures which we are all unconsciously incessantly evolving, pictures which survive long after those who originated them have passed away—the elementary, we say, scanning these, easily picks up sufficient facts for its purpose, and by its will materializes itself partly out of matter drawn from the medium’s body, partly out of inert cosmic matter drawn to it by the help of the elementals or half-blind forces of nature which it and probably the medium also, has attracted, and stands forth the counterpart of the dead father and talks of things known only to that dead father. Of course, if the matter talked of were known to any present, both elementary and medium, if in a trance, could equally know it, but we have purposely supposed one of


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those rare cases which are considered to be the strongest proofs of “spirit identity,” as it is called. Of course, too, everything that has once passed before that son’s mind, intonation of voice, tricks of manner, infirmities of temper, though apparently forgotten at the moment, are really indelibly recorded in his memory, as is proved by their immediate recognition when reproduced by the elementary who has gathered them out of those dormant records.

And it must be remembered that these apparently strong and perfect cases are very rare, and that the elernentaries, if they personate people of any note, usually make gross blunders, and almost without exception betray their falsehood in one way or another—Shakespeare and Milton dictating trash, Newton grossly ignorant of his own Principia, and Plato teaching a washed-out Neo-platonic or sentimental Christian philosophy, and so on. At the same time undoubtedly in rare cases the ghostly relics of very clever, very bad and very determined, men constitute disembodied entities of high intelligence, which survive for a lengthened period, and the more wicked and more material they are in all their tendencies, the longer do they escape disintegration.

The Orthodox Church is much nearer the truth when it calls the entities that are mostly dealt with in s “devils” than are the spiritualists who call them “spirits.” We do not mean that they are generally actively malevolent, but their magnetic attractions are evil, and they incline and lead those with whom they have much to do to the same evil material passions which have been their own ruin.

Naturally spiritualists will object that this cannot be true, since despite the mass of folly and gibberish or worse often heard in se’ance rooms, the purest sentiments and really lofty ideas and teachings are not rarely expressed through mediums.

Several points have, however, to be borne in mind. In the first place, though proved unfit for further development, and, therefore, doomed in most cases by the eternal law of the survival of the fittest to be disintegrated and, losing personal consciousness, to be worked up again in the lower worlds into new combinations, all elementaries are by no means actively wicked all round. When weighed in the balance, their whole natures have proved to have a greater affinity to matter than to spirit, and they are, therefore, incapable of further progress, but when dealing with a pure circle and speaking through a still pure medium—very few mediums, indeed, continue thus after a long course of mediumship—the better and less degraded side of their nature comes out, and

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it is quite possible for elementaries to have a perfect intellectual knowledge and appreciation of virtue and purity and enlightened conceptions of truth, and yet be innately vicious in their tendencies. We meet plenty of men who have a sentimental love for virtue, and yet whose lives are one unbroken course of lust and self-indulgence; and as the men were, so are the elementaries, their reliquiæ. If we at times speak bitterly of popular modern Christianity, it is because we know that, with all its other ennobling and saving tendencies, on this all-important point it leads to the destruction of myriads of souls. For it leads to the belief that it signifies little what a man does, if he only believes that his sins are forgiven him, and that by relying on the merits of Jesus Christ he may escape the vengeance of the Lord. But there is no anthropomorphic Lord, no vengeance, no forgiveness; there is simply the action of a natural law impressed on the universe by the Absolute, simply a question of balance of affinities; and they, whose deeds and general tendencies are earthly, go down in the scale, rarely, very rarely, to rise again in their own identities; while those in whom these tendencies are spiritual pass upwards.

It is not, however, possible to enter here into the great questions thus glanced at, and we return to the subject of high, or comparatively high, teachings through mediums.

Now it must not for a moment be supposed that all we hear from these latter comes from elementaries. In the first place, a great many well-known mediums are clever impostors. There are notorious trance mediums, especially women, who steadily work up for their so-called trance orations, and these being really clever, and working at good books, deliver essays of a respectable, and at times almost first-class, character. There is no spiritual influence at work here; the only apparently abnormal feature in these cases is that persons possessing such fair abilities should be willing thus to prostitute them; and that people who can talk so well and touchingly of truth and purity, should yet live such lives of falsehood and immorality. Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor has ever found a response in too many human hearts, and has in all ages rung the annihilation-knell of too many personalities.

In the second place, in the case of pure and genuine mediums, who, in trance, pass entirely under the influence of their own seventh principle, the Augoeidês of the Greeks, the whole teachings come from the medium’s own soul, and it is very rare to obtain thus anything higher


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than what the medium’s own intellect, when in a state of spiritual excitement, could produce.

It may be said that, in many such cases, the medium says himself or herself, that it is Judge Edmonds, or the late Bishop of , who is teaching him or her, but this is merely due to the intervention of mischievous elementaries who are always crowding about every medium, and who, if he is too pure to enable them to get command over him, yet, ever anxious to get a finger in every pie, confuse and deceive him. Only an adept can clearly and consciously place the spiritual Ego wholly under the domination of the spirit. Mediums who, in trance, unconsciously succeed in doing this, are unaware of the source whence they derive their perceptions, and can be made, by any elementary exerting any influence over them, through any weak point in their character, to believe that these are derived from it. The same, though in a minor degree, is the case with those rare, high, because specially pure, mediums, whose Ego and Spirit can soar together when the rest of the combination is in a trance, into the astral light, and there can read all the highest thoughts that man has ever thought. True, the Ego of the highest and best mediums can reproduce in this material world only in a fragmentary and confused manner what it reads in the astral light; but still even this reproduction is sometimes of a character far transcending the capacities alike of the medium and all those present. How it comes that the thoughts thus fished up like pearls out of the astral light come often to be attributed by the medium to spirits, we have already explained.

But an even more common source of inspiration of mediums is the mind of one or more of those present. When in a trance, the spiritual soul—the sixth and seventh principles—can read all that is recorded in the mind or memory of those towards whom it is in any way attracted; and the medium’s utterances will in such cases be quite up to the highest standard of those with whom it is thus en rapport; and if these are pure, highly cultivated persons, the teachings thus received will be equally pure and intellectual. But here again the unconscious medium as a whole does not know whence these perceptions are being derived. In its spiritual soul it knows no doubt, but in its combination with the other principles—a combination necessary for the writing or speaking of those perceptions—it is quite in the dark, and can be impressed by any elementary at hand of sufficient force, with any conception in regard to the point that it chooses to convey.

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In truth, rnediumship is a dangerous, too often a fatal, capacity; and if we oppose spiritualism, as we have ever consistently done, it is not because we question the reality of the phenomena which, we know, can and do occur, despite the multitudes of fraudulent imitations, and which our adepts can reproduce at will without danger to themselves, but because of the irreparable spiritual injury—we say nothing of the mere physical sufferings—which the pursuit of spiritualism inevitably entails on nine-tenths of the mediums employed. We have seen scores, nay, rather hundreds, of ordinarily good, pure, honest men and women, who, but for the cultivation of this evil capacity for the reception of impressions by elernentaries, might, and would in all probability, have lived lives leading to higher things; but who, through the gradual pernicious influence of these low, earth-bound natures, have sunk from bad to worse, ending, often prematurely, lives that could lead but to spiritual ruin.

These are no speculations—we speak that we do know—and if one in five mediums, who habitually exercise their capacity, escapes the doom that overtakes so many, these exceptions cannot justify the spiritualists in aiding and abetting the crowd of professional mediums who gamble away their immortality with the lower material influences. The practice of rnediumship for good purposes, at rare intervals, by virtuous mediums, intermediately ever careful to strengthen their moral and spiritual natures by pure lives and holy aspirations, is one thing; and the habitual practice, in a worldly, careless, undevout spirit, for gain, is another; and this latter cannot be too strongly denounced, alike in the highest interests of the mediums and of the sitters who employ them.

“Evil communications corrupt good manners,” is an eternal truth, trite and hackneyed though it be, and no evil communications are so evil as those subtle influences that radiate from the low, bestial elementaries who crowd the séance of immoral, or more or less demoralized mediums, too weak and low to make themselves heard or seen, but strong enough in their intensely material tendencies, to diffuse a moral poison into the mental atmosphere of all present.

That men, bewildered amidst the crumbling ruins of effete religions, should madly grasp at every clue by which there seems some faint hope of penetrating the cloud-covered labyrinth of the mystery of the universe, is neither wonderful nor reprehensible; but it is not through mediums, the prey of every idle spook and elementary, that the great


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truth is to be reached, but by that rigorous course of study, self-discipline and self-purification which is taught in the temple of occultism to which theosophy is in the present day the high road.

II.

What constitutes real knowledge? The question lies at the very threshold of occult study. It is, in actual practice, the first put before a regular student of occultism who is taken in hand by the teachers of the occult world. And the student is taught—or is led to see—that there are two kinds of knowledge, the real and the unreal; the real concerned with eternal verities and primal causes, the unreal with illusory effects. So far the statement seems to deal with abstractions too vague to challenge denial. Each school of thinkers will admit as much, reserving to itself the assumption that the illusory effects are those considerations which have fascinated its rivals; the eternal verities its own conclusions. But we no sooner come to a clear under standing as to what mental presentiments must be classed as illusory effects, than we find the first proposition of occult philosophy at war with the whole current practice of the world at large, as regards all classes of scientific investigation. All physical science and a good deal of what the western world is pleased to call metaphysical speculation, rests on the crude and superficial belief that the only way in which ideas can enter the mind, is through the channels of the senses. The physicist devotes all his efforts to the careful elimination from the mass of materials on which he builds up his conclusions, of everything except that which he conceives to be real fact—and it is exactly that which he conceives to be real fact, anything clearly appealing to the senses—which the profound philosophy of eastern occultism deliberately condemns at starting, as, in its nature, illusory effect, transitory secondary consequence of the real underlying fact. And in acting thus, does occult philosophy make an arbitrary choice between rival methods, as a chemist might select one or other of two different methods of analysis? Not at all. Real philosophy cannot make any choice arbitrarily; there is but one eternal verity, and, in pursuit of that, thought is forced to travel along one road. The knowledge which appeals to the senses cannot but deal with illusory effects, for all the forms of thus world and its material combinations are but pictures in the great dissolving view of evolution; there is no eternity in any of them. By mere inference from physical facts, science, proceeding on


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its own methods, will recognize that there was a time before any of the life germs on this earth, whatever they may be, had settled into the forms in which they manifest themselves now. Assuredly there will come a time when all these forms will disappear in the progress of cosmic change. What preceded them, provoking their evolution from fiery nebulæ what traces will they leave behind? From nothing they came, into nothing they will return—according to the doubly irrational reply which is the only logical inference from the physical philosophy which makes them the real facts, the only basis of real knowledge.

It must be remembered of course that the unreal knowledge proceeding from the observation of illusory, because transitory and secondary effects, hangs together satisfactorily as regards the short chain it is able to construct. This it is which leads so many, in many respects powerful, minds, to blind contentment with it. Some of the laws of matter can be detected, if not understood, by mere observation of matter. But it is obvious that the something out of which matter proceeded, the something into which it will return, cannot be observed by material senses. In what other way can observation be extended beyond the range of material senses? Only if it can be so extended, is any knowledge attainable by man which has to do with eternal verities and primal causes; which is real, as distinguished from the transitory and the unreal. Promptly, in ignorance of the methods by which observation can be extended beyond the range of the senses, the physicist declares: Concerning the hypothetical eternal verities you can only dream and indulge in illusory conjecture—all mere brain-spun fancy. Thus the world at large, not content with hugging illusions and calling them realities, spurns the reality and denounces it as illusion.

But can the eternal verity be reached? Even if hard facts be acknowledged as illusion so far as they are transitory, is not that which is exempt from change removed from observation? Must we not follow up the theoretical admission of the possibility of real knowledge, by the practical admission that no human being can ever have anything to do with it? Now the consistent materialist who honestly believes that a man is simply a structure of gas, phosphates, and chemical elements, functioning entirely within itself, would have to be answered by reference to facts, which it is unnecessary to rehearse, in dealing with controversialists who recognize at all events that the living body includes a spiritual principle, and that the spiritual principle is capable


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of a life apart from the body when the body itself is dead. There can be no difficulty for a spiritualist in the way of the conception that, if the spirit of a man lives, observes, thinks, and communicates its impressions, after the body is burned or buried, so, under peculiar conditions, that same spirit may separate itself from the body temporarily during life, and may thus come into such relation with the world of spirit as to take direct cognizance of its phenomena. Now it is quite clear that, relatively to our own at all events, such a world is a world of eternal verities. We know that this world is fleeting and transitory. It is readily conceivable, and all analogies suggest the conclusion, which every sort of spiritual statement confirms, that the world of Spirit is more durable. That knowledge is real which lasts, and that is unreal which passes away—as in the case of an initiated adept who brings back upon earth with him the clear and distinct recollection, correct to a detail, of facts gathered, and the information obtained in the invisible sphere of realities; the spirit of man, which comes into direct and conscious relations with the world of spirit, acquires real knowledge; while the spirit of man which lives imprisoned in the body and is merely fed through the senses with crumbs of knowledge, possesses the unreal only.

But when the imprisoned spirit does not itself rise into direct relations with the world of spirit, but is visited by an emanation from the world of spirit—or by a spirit, to work with the spiritualistic hypothesis for a moment—is it entitled to assume that it is coming into possession of real knowledge? Surely not; for though discussing spiritual things it is acquiring its knowledge in no way which essentially differs from the method by which mere knowledge of the purely physical sort, knowledge of illusory effects, is acquired. The spiritualist, even when himself a medium receiving communications, is taking in knowledge just as unreal, just as untrustworthy, and liable to be distorted by an erroneous observation as that which is dealt with by the wholly unspiritual observer of matter.

Who possesses the real knowledge as contradistinguished from the unreal? the student of occultism is asked, and he is taught to reply— that which we have shown to be the only possible reply adepts alone possess the real knowledge, their minds alone being en rapport with the universal mind.” Now, according to the teaching of the adepts, spiritualists, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, are mistaken when they think themselves in contact with the spirits of departed

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friends, or with benevolent beings of another sphere; and to those who know something of who and what the adepts are, that is conclusive as to the fact. But the fact being so, every conception of spiritualism which conflicts with it must be explainable—every incident of spiritualism must be susceptible of transfer to some group of phenomena which can be shown to be something different from what spiritualists imagine it. While the phenomena of spiritualism are thrown off in all directions so freely, it is nearly impossible to follow them up in every case, and, as regards the general subject, it is best to try and explain why the phenomena of spiritualism cannot be what spiritualists think them, rather than why each in turn is actually something else. First then as regards automatic writing; we need not go further than personal experience to show that the production through a medium’s arm, of handwriting, the facsimile of that produced in life by an alleged spirit, is no proof of the alleged spirit’s identity at all, or even of its individuality. A certain Russian lady who was afflicted or gifted, whichever way the reader likes to put it, with medium-ship in her youth, was “controlled” for about six years by a “spirit” who came evening after evening and wrote reams through the child’s arm in the usual automatic way. The spirit professed to be that of an old lady who had lived in a part of Russia far away from that in which she was then manifesting herself. She gave many details of her life and family and told how her son had committed suicide. Sometimes the son came himself, “in spirit,” and controlled the little medium’s arm and gave long accounts of his remorse and sufferings consequent on the crime of self-murder. The old lady was eloquent on the subject of heaven and its inhabitants, including the Virgin Mary. Needless to say that she was garrulous concerning the circumstances of her own death and the interesting ceremony of the last sacrament. But she also wrote of worldly matters. She gave a detailed account of a petition she had presented to the Emperor Nicholas, and the text of it, word for word. She wrote partly in Russian, partly in German, which the child-medium knew very slightly at the time. Eventually one of the young lady’s relatives went to the place where the spirit had lived. Yes; she was well remembered; she had been troubled by a dissolute son who committed suicide; she had gone away to Norway where it was believed she had died, and so on. All the automatic communications were verified, in short, and the petition was turned up in the archives of the Home


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Office at St. Petersburg. The handwriting was perfectly reproduced. Now what better identification could a spirit have? Would not a spiritualist say of such an experience, “I know that the spirits of dead persons can communicate and prove their continued individuality”? A year after the identification of the deceased person at the place where she had lived, and of the petition, there came to—,where the young medium and her relations were living, an officer who proved to be the nephew of the “spirit.” He chanced to show the child a miniature. She recognized it as that of the spirit. Explanations ensued, and it turned out that the officer’s aunt was not dead at all, nor was her son. In all other respects the mediumistic communications were perfectly well substantiated. The son had attempted to commit suicide, but the bullet with which he had shot himself had been extracted and his life had been saved.

Now, without going further, this story as a mere statement of facts is enough to answer the spiritualists’ contention as to automatic writing. It shows that, without the instrumentality of any deceased person’s “spirit” at all, automatic writing attributed by spiritualists to the agency of such spirits may take place; therefore, that no weight can be attached to the experiences on which the spiritualist relies. But we may go somewhat further and endeavour to account for the Russian story at any rate by the occult “hypothesis” as some of our readers will no doubt regard it. Who or what was the intelligence writing through the hand of the Russian child-medium? The devil? as the priests of the Greek Church contended; some lying spirit? as the spiritualists might suggest; the elementaries? as some readers of occult literature might conceive. No; it was the fifth principle of the medium herself, her animal or physical soul, the portion of the universal Proteus, and it acted as the soul of the clairvoyant acts during the sleep of the body. The officer who ultimately showed the miniature had been acquainted with the family several years previously. The medium had seen the picture when quite a young child, but had for gotten it utterly. She had also played with various things that had belonged to the “spirit,” and had been in her nephew’s possession.

Preserving faithfully the memory of all it saw and heard in the “astral light,” or in the “soul of things”—many readers will, no doubt, comprehend the allusion here to Denton’s book of that name—while playing with the miniature and other trifles, the young medium’s inner self years afterwards, owing to some associations of memory, began

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unconsciously reproducing these pictures. Little by little the inner self, or fifth principle, was drawn into the current of those personal or individual associations and emanations, and once the mediumistic impulse given, nothing would arrest its progress. The facts accurately observed by the “flying soul” were inextricably mixed up with pure fancy, derived from the teaching to which the medium had been subjected, and hence the account of heaven and the Virgin Mary.

Mutatis mutandis, a similar explanation would, in all probability, meet the case not merely of automatic writing, but also of the guiding or protecting spirit who mentally impresses the medium, and has been seen by seers and seeresses. That the teaching of this intelligence generally confirms the spiritualistic doctrine of progression from place to place and so forth, is a strong indication that it is really an emanation from the medium’s own mind; and the fact that the supposed spirit has been seen by clairvoyant mediums cannot be taken as proof of its objective existence. The pictures in the astral light present all the appearance of reality to those who can discern them, and the appearance of the “spirit” we have spoken of was as real to our child-medium as that of any spirit ever materialized in the wonderful se’ance-room of the Eddy brothers in America, though the good lady herself was all the while quietly attending to her knitting, with the breadth of Europe between her and the family circle which she had unconsciously entered as a spectral guest.

The difficulty of distinguishing between the creations of the seer’s brain and spectral or spiritual phenomena really external to himself appears to be the cause of the confusion into which untrained, uninitiated observers fall when natural mediumistic gifts enable them to cross the threshold of the astral world and awake to a perception of the wonders hanging like an aura around the physical planet. From Socrates to Swedenborg, from Swedenborg to the latest clairvoyant, no uninitiated seer has ever seen quite correctly. But whatever confusing influences have been brought to bear on natural seers of past times, none have been beset with the artificial bewilderments that cloud the faculties of the modern spiritualistic medium. A mass of prepossessions occupy his mind at starting; every observation he makes is twisted into the mould of an elaborate, predetermined theory; and every picture presented to his finer senses is distorted to suit the expectations of his fancy and coloured to the complexion of a previously formulated creed. The spiritualist may honestly believe himself a seeker after truth, but


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the spiritualist who is himself in any degree a medium is fascinated by the creations of his faith and borne away on an induced current into a phantasmagorial world peopled with his own imaginings. Their apparent reality confirms the conjectures from which they spring, and all suggestions which claim a reconsideration of their character seem almost a blasphemy to their eager devotee, But to the student of occult philosophy there is a grander beauty in the consistent teaching of adeptship than in the startling excitement of mediumistic revelation, while over it all there shines for him the solemn light of absolute truthfulness. Mediumship may give sudden glimpses of unsuspected wonder, as bits of a strange landscape may be momentarily revealed by lightning, but the science of adeptship casts the steady light of day upon the whole scene. Surely the spiritualists, who have at least shot leagues ahead in intelligence of the mere materialistic moles of their purblind generation in so far as they recognize that there is a landscape to be seen if it can only be lighted up, will not deliberately prefer to guess at its features by the help of occasional flashes from the fitful planes of mediumship, but will accept the aid of that nobler illumination which the elevated genius and untiring exertion of occult sages of the east have provided for those whose spiritual intuitions enable them to appreciate its sublimity and confide their aspirations to its guidance.

III

What reply could we give to one who is in no way satisfied with our explanations of spiritualistic phenomena, who still clings to the theories of spiritualists and rejects the facts of the occultists?

But one may, naturally enough, say that this is begging the question, and that he sees no reason why the doctrines propounded by the latter should be any more accepted as facts than those espoused by the former.

Let us see how the case stands. Suppose a number of people go to see a conjurer’s performance; all manner of wonderful tricks are exhibited; the more intelligent of the spectators begin evolving hypotheses to explain how these are performed; night after night the performances, though often a good deal varied in details, are repeated. The most intelligent of the spectators also return, night after night, more and more intent on discovering time rationale of the wonders they witness. They gradually work out what appears to be a fairly consistent theory of all that so astonishes them, and, getting into conver-


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sation with some of the performers, find that these to a great extent confirm their conclusions. Thereupon they feel convinced that their views are correct, and accept their theories as facts But for all that they are still before the footlights; they have never been behind the curtain; they have never actually seen how the surprising results they witness are really brought about, and these so-called facts of theirs are still merely theories.

But now some of the spectators become acquainted with people who do habitually go behind the scenes, who have examined the whole apparatus, who can make the performers play whatever tricks they like, and who can, with their apparatus perform precisely the same, and other even more astonishing feats, and these men tell the ingenious spectators that their theories are quite wrong, and that the facts of the case are so and so.

Now, surely it will be admitted that it is neither begging the question nor presumption on the part of those who have the entree behind the scenes, but the simple truth, when they assert that their knowledge represents facts while the conclusions of the ordinary spectators are only theories.

Such precisely are the relative positions of the spiritualists and the occultists; meaning, of course, by these latter, not the humble lay disciples who indite these papers, but their pastors, masters and living spiritual guides.

“But how am I to know,” a spiritualist may enquire, “that these Masters of yours can really go behind the scenes? You say so; but what proof is there of this?”

Now, in the first place, it is a fact, and this everyone may prove for himself, that each and all who will lead the life can satisfy themselves that the Masters really can do this, and thus become entirely independent alike of our and all other persons’ testimony.

The fact is that, as we know, the Masters possess the power of controlling absolutely all the elementals and elementaries to whom, with some exceptions, are due the objective phenomena, not the work, unconscious or conscious, of the medium himself, of the séance-room. And it is the possession and exhibition of this power which makes us consider their assertion that they have been behind the scenes and do know all about it, proved, and that induces us to accept their statements of what takes place and is done as fact.

It will be borne in mind that we have never denied that communica-


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tion in a certain sense can be established between men and real spirits of deceased persons. What we have maintained is that, except in certain cases, of which hereafter, only shells, not true spirits, can appear or operate in the séance-room.

We said of the spirit in our first “Fragment”: “It can be visited in spirit by men; it cannot descend into our grosser atmosphere and reach us. It attracts; it cannot be attracted.”

Nor have we ever disputed that there was a state, out of which the spiritualist’s conceptions of the Summer Land have no doubt arisen, in which the spirits of those who have passed away receive the reward of their deserts. To this state, known to Tibetan occultists as the Devachan, we especially alluded in that first paper when we said, “nor during the temporary period of its enjoyment in its newly-evolved Ego-hood of the fruits of its good deeds.”

Therefore, we are far from desiring to contest a correspondent’s assertion that by magnetic action he has succeeded in placing some of the incorporeal principles of certain sensitives en rapport, if not, as he says, with the world of spirit—a very large world indeed—at any rate with certain spiritual entities.

It is quite certain that in the case of pure sensitives this can be accomplished, but what we contend is that the information thus obtained will never be reliable. For this there are several reasons. In the first place the principles that cognize in such a case are different from those that give outward expression to the matters cognized, and in the case of no untrained seer can the transfer of the impressions from the spiritual faculties which record, to the more physical faculties which publish, be perfectly effected. Even supposing both sensitive and magnetizer to be absolutely free from all preconceived ideas about, or expectations in regard to, the subjects investigated, still in the mere transfer of the observations from one to the other class of faculties, mistakes and misconceptions must occur.

But further, it is not too much to say that it is quite impossible for the spiritual faculties of any untrained seer even to record correctly in the first instance. Even our physical powers of observation require careful training before they will serve us faithfully. See how utterly unable young children are, as a rule, to judge distances; and just as the physical faculties are untrained in the child, so are the spiritual faculties untrained in the magnetic sensitive. No doubt in the course of years, if their health and circumstances permit their constantly explor-


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ing the unseen world, even such untrained sensitives may acquire for themselves a certain amount of experience and training, and become capable of comparatively accurate observation; but such sensitives have been few, and even the very best have fallen far short of accuracy. So that under the most exceptionally favourable conditions you have first an imperfect record; and, second, a more or less erroneous presentation of that imperfect record.

But in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, either or both sensitive and magnetizer have well-defined preconceptions of what they think ought to be the case, and then, however honest and conscientious both may be, these preconceptions will more or less colour the evidence given. Indeed, so certainly is this the case that, broadly speaking, there is twice the probability of error in the case of a magnetized sensitive to what there is in the case of a seer who, without the intervention of a magnetizer, can by “hypnotism” of one kind or another, unaided, place himself en rapport with spiritual entities. Thus a Swedenborg would be much less likely to err than the best sensitive requiring the intervention of a magnetizer to awaken the super-sensuous faculties.

But there is yet another source of error. Even the best and purest sensitive can only be placed en rapport with a particular spiritual entity, and can only know, see and feel what that particular entity knows, sees and feels. Now no spiritual entity in Devachan, or while hibernating prior to passing out of this earth’s attraction, is in a position to generalize; and it is, broadly speaking, only with such that a sensitive can be placed en rapport. It lives in a paradise or dream of its own creating, and it is utterly unable to give any idea of how others are faring. Each individual spirit in Devachan dreams its own dream, lives in its own Summer Land (but it is a state, not a land), surrounded by all the people and things it loves and longs for. But these are ideal, and the very people by whom it believes itself surrounded may be each dreaming his own dream in his own ideal paradise; or some of them may be still on earth or even passing through the remorseless wheels of annihilation. And through the veils that surround each spirit’s dream of felicity there is no peeping down to earth, a glimpse of which would necessarily mingle some bitterness with the cup of happiness; nor is there any conscious communication with the flying souls that come, as it were, to learn where the spirits are, what they are doing, and what they think, feel and see.


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What, then, is being en rapport? It is simply an identity of molecular vibration between the astral part of the incarnated sensitive and the astral part of the disincarnate personality. The spirit of the sensitive gets “odylized,” so to speak, by the aura of the spirit, whether the latter be hibernating in the earthly region or dreaming in the Devachan; identity of molecular vibration is established, and for a brief space the sensitive becomes the departed personality and writes in its handwriting, uses its language and thinks its thoughts. At such times sensitives may believe that those with whom they are for the moment en rapport descend to earth and communicate with them, whereas, in reality, it is merely their own spirits, which, being correctly attuned to those others, are for the time blended with them.

Many of the subjective spiritual communications are genuine, where the sensitive is pure-minded; but they only reflect in each case the ideas of a single spirit, unable to see beyond the limits of its own mental chrysalis or ideal paradise; further, it is impossible for the un initiated sensitive to observe and record altogether correctly what it does see and hear during its amalgamation; it is equally impossible for the sensitive to transfer intact the impressions recorded by the super-sensuous faculties to the senses through which alone they can be communicated to the world, and such communications will be still further vitiated by any preexisting conceptions or beliefs inhering in the minds of either sensitive or magnetizer or both.

But our critic says that, having compared the descriptions of things spiritual given to him by different sensitives when in trance, he found a general harmony, “each and all describing worlds or spheres more beautiful than this, peopled by forms in human shape, exhibiting a higher average intelligence.” But what else could he expect, lie a pure-minded, educated European of the present day, dealing also with pure, more or less educated sensitives? If he had tried a native Australian sensitive and had studiously kept his own mind passive, he would have heard a very different story. Nay, though a certain skeleton of truth—but partial truth—runs through all genuine communications, he will find the widest discrepancies in details between the so-called facts elicited by himself and those elicited by equally good observers with equally pure mediums in France, Germany and America.

It is unnecessary, however, to press this point further now; all we desire for the moment to make clear is that while we in no way dispute the genuineness of this class of communications, for the above reasons

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we know them to be necessarily unreliable, necessarily more or less incorrect and inaccurate.

And now as to automatic handwriting of a high class, we would remark that it may possibly be that there is really a distinct spiritual entity impressing the writer’s mind. In other words, there may, for all we know, be some spirit with whom his spiritual nature becomes habitually, for the time, thoroughly harmonized, and whose thoughts, language, etc., become his for the time, the result being that this spirit seems to communicate with him. All we said before was that a similar explanation to that we had offered of the facts of a certain case would in all probability meet a certain correspondent’s case. But if he feels confident that this explanation does not fit his case, then it is possible, though by no means probable, that he habitually passes into a state of rapper! with a genuine spirit, and, for the time, is assimilated therewith, thinking, to a great extent, if not entirely, the thoughts that spirit would think, and writing in its handwriting.

But even so, it should not be thought that such a spirit is consciously communicating with the medium, or knows in any way, anything of him or any other person or thing on earth. It is simply that, the rapport established, he becomes for the nonce assimilated with that other personality, and thinks, speaks and writes as it would have done on earth.

As for the figure of the fine, intelligent and benevolent-looking man, seen repeatedly by the seers and seeresses, this may well be a real astral picture of the earth-life form of that very spirit, drawn into the aura of our correspondent by the synchronism of his and that spirit’s nature.

Many other explanations are possible; the variety of the causes of phenomena is great, and one need be an adept and actually look into and examine what transpires in order to be able to explain in each case what really underlies it; but this much is certain, that no good benevolent person who passed away upwards of a century ago can possibly be visiting here on earth and advising and comforting a medium. The molecules of his astral nature may from time to time vibrate in perfect unison with those of the spirit of some such a person now in Devachan, and the result may be that he appears to be in communication with that spirit and to be advised by him, and clairvoyants may see in the astral light a picture of the earth-life form of that spirit, but, so far as we have as yet been instructed, this is the nearest approach to the ordinary spiritualistic hypothesis that is possible.

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No doubt had a “guide,” to which a certain correspondent refers, not departed from this earth so very long ago, another explanation, to which we will refer later, more in consonance with spiritualistic views, would have been possible, though extremely improbable.

To take up again another point, even despite their unobjectionable character, teachings may come from mere reliquiæ of men or personalities not sufficiently spiritual for further progress. In our first “Fragment” we distinctly said, “All elementaries are by no means actively wicked all round . . . when, speaking through a still pure medium the better and less degraded side of their nature comes out, and it is quite possible for elementaries to have a perfect intellectual knowledge and appreciation of virtue and purity, and enlightened conceptions of truth, and yet be innately vicious in their tendencies.”

It is perfectly possible that the admirable teachings referred to by a critic may have come from a high class, though still lost personality, too intellectual to show in its true colours before him and his friend, and yet capable of playing a very different part in a less pure circle.

But it is far more likely that the medium’s spirit really came en rapport with some spiritual entity in Devachan, the thoughts, knowledge and sentiments of which formed the substance, while the medium’s own personality and preexisting ideas more or less governed the form of the communication. We attach no special importance to the particular form of words in which the message was given. This may be the medium’s share of the communication, when for the moment he identifies his spiritual nature with that of the spiritual entity.

But, as a broad rule, such appearances only take place within a few minutes after, or shortly before, the physical death. Of course we mean the real death; the last portion of the frame that dies is the brain—which is often alive and thronged with images long after, or, at any rate, for many hours and days after life has been pronounced to be extinct. It is true that the period intervening between death and the entry into the gestation state, varies in the case of persons dying a natural death, from a few hours to a few years, but it is quite abnormal for the spirit to appear during this period, except within a very short period after death. Putting aside the case of adepts and those trained by them to that end, the Ego within a few moments after death, sinks into a state of unconsciousness from which it does not recover until the struggle between the higher and lower nature has been fought out; and there remains inside the sphere of the earth’s attraction—Kâma Loka,


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the Region of Desire—only the shell, either (in the rarer case of personalities doomed to annihilation) a two and a half principle shell, or (in the case in which the higher principles have triumphed, and have passed on, taking with them the better portions of the fifth principle) a one and a half principle shell, soon to disintegrate.

Even when a “spirit” appears “a few days after death,” it is really an unconscious appearance. The spirit sunk in its post-mortem trance (of course, for all its comparative ethereality and non-corporeality, a space-occupying and material entity) is borne about by magnetic currents, swayed here and there like dead leaves whirling in the bosom of a stream. Thus carried, it may pass within the range of vision of some seer, or its reflection in the astral light may be caught by the inner eye of a clairvoyant. The spirit itself will have no more consciousness of such an appearance than a person passing through a room in which, unknown to him, there happens to be a mirror, is of having cast a reflection therein. Usually the position and aspect of the forms indicate unmistakably the unconsciousness of the spirit, but this is not invariable; the mental activity of the spirit may revive in a succession of dreams, restoring a subjective consciousness, while objective unconsciousness still prevails, and in such cases the form may assume a conscious and animated, or even transfigured appearance; all depends on the character and intensity of the dreams, and these again depend upon the degree of the spirituality and purity of the deceased.

It is not at all necessary (nor indeed, is it possible under our present hypothesis) that any real conscious communication should pass between the dormant spirit and the seer. It is sufficient for the latter to come into direct rapport with the spirit or its astral image, to think precisely what the spirit, if still conscious and in earth-life, would have thought.

In the case of communication through magnetic sensitives, the magnetizer, tenderly attached to the deceased, by the exertion of his magnetic power unconsciously places the sensitive en rapport with the spirit of the deceased with which for the time the spirit of the sensitive is more or less perfectly identified, leading to an idea of seeing the deceased, as he was wont to appear when on earth, and receiving from him messages or indications, of which the sensitive really became cognizant when the two spirits were for the moment blended.

Transfigurations, under the same conditions, are less doubtful in character, and there are three ways of explaining them:

Firstly: the mesmeric action of the magnetizer places the sensitive’s


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spirit en rapport with that of his dearly-loved deceased friend. Then, what! for the time the identity of the two is established, the nature of the deceased taken on by the sensitive, being much more spiritual and powerful than the sensitive’s own, and his physical constitution being of such a nature as to admit such changes, the body of the subject begins at once to exhibit an analogous change, corresponding to the change undergone by his spiritual nature in consequence of the amalgamation.

Secondly: the transfiguration may be due to the intensity and clearness of the deceased friend’s face in the operator’s thought. That face being so strongly impressed on his memory, it is but natural that his memory, owing to its intensified activity during such séances, should be throwing off an unusual amount of energy, and solidifying, so to say, the familiar image on the etheric waves of his aura. Thus, unknown to himself, he may rouse it up into sympathetic action which, transforming the image from a subjective into an objective picture, finally causes it to move on, guided by the current of attraction, until it settles upon, and so is found reflected in the medium’s face. The images we find in the endless galleries of space, nailed on to the indestructible walls of Akâsha, are but lifeless and empty masks after all, the pictorial records of our thoughts, words, and deeds. In a case recently referred to by a correspondent, the invisible reality in the magnetizer’s aura threw an objective adumbration on the plastic features of his sensitive, and the phenomenon was produced.

Thirdly: thought, memory and will are the energies of the brain, and, like all other forces of nature—to use the language of modern science—have two general forms, the potential and the kinetic form of energy. Potential thought clairvoyantly discerns and chooses its subject in the astral light; the will becomes the motor power that causes it to move, that directs and guides it whithersoever it likes, and it is thus that the adept produces his occult phenomena, whether of a physical or spiritual character. But the latter can also occur without any intervention of an intelligent will. The passive condition of the medium leaves him an easy prey to the pranks of the elementaries, as well as to those semi-intelligent elemental beings ever basking and masquerading in the sidereal light, and such a phenomenon may as easily occur of itself, simply owing to surrounding favourable conditions. The sidereal image of a person we think of will remain pale and quiescent in its indelible impression on the ether, until its atoms


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are propelled into action by the strong magnetic attraction which emanates from the molecular tissues of the medium, saturated as they are with the mesmerizer’s thought full of the image. Hence the phenomenon of transfiguration.

These transfigurations are rare, but we have known of a good many instances, and some very remarkable ones will be found recorded in Colonel Olcott’s work, entitled People from the Other World.

The above probably explains all the features of the particular case referred to; but to enable us to assert positively in any case that the occurrence was brought about in this or that way, it is essential that we should be acquainted with every single detail. So long as we only have the barest outlines to deal with, all we can pretend to offer are more or less probable solutions.

A critic tells us that even if we explain one or two cases, he still finds an unbroken line of stubborn facts opposing our explanations, behind which he is unable to penetrate. We can only promise that if he will furnish us with accurate details of all cases within his personal knowledge which, in his opinion, are not explicable by the occult doctrines, we will show him that they are so explicable or abandon the field.

But we must lay down two conditions. First, we will only accept cases of which he has a complete personal knowledge; we will not accept cases picked up out of books and papers. Our critic is a reliable, philosophical observer, from whom we are sure to get facts carefully observed and accurately recorded. With these we can have no difficulty in dealing. But as for cases recorded here there and every where, many are, to our knowledge, pure inventions, while many more, although recorded in good faith, have been so transformed in the process of observation and record that it would be hopeless to discuss them.

Secondly, he must not be surprised if, in the course of our explanations, all kinds of new facts not hitherto touched on are brought to notice. The subject is a vast one. There are wheels within wheels, laws within laws, exceptions to all these. Hitherto we have purposely only endeavoured to convey a general conception of the more important features of the truth. If exact accuracy of detail is required, every one of our general laws will require certain provisoes and limitations, To detail only what we know in regard to these spiritual phenomena would occupy several complete numbers of The Theosophist, and if our


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explanation had to include the whole system of elementals—future men during a coming cycle—and other obscure powers and forces which cannot even be mentioned, several octavo volumes would be needed to contain it.

The same critic says:

If the proof call only be obtained by a practical renunciation of the world, a severance of all human ties, affections and responsibilities, of what use is it to humanity? Only one in a million may avail themselves of it, and how many of time remaining nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine, would have faith in his testimony.

We are compelled to point out that he is in error in his premisses, and that his conclusions, even were these premisses correct, are untenable. For even admit that only one in a million would consent to avail themselves of the opportunity afforded for obtaining proof, would this be any reason for the remaining nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine refusing to accept their evidence? Is this so in practice? Certainly not! At the present time not more than one in a million (if so many) are willing to avail themselves of the opportunity of obtaining for themselves proof of the facts of astronomy. Yet the remainder accept these facts, perfectly satisfied with the knowledge that anyone who chooses to go through the necessary training and study can acquire that proof, and that all who have gone through that training are agreed as to the sufficiency of the proof.

Astronomy is a science with the name and general bearing of which all fairly educated men are familiar. Occultism is a science which has hitherto been veiled in the most profound secrecy, and of which, so far, none but occultists have possessed any knowledge. But once let mankind be familiarized with the idea, let it become known that any one who chooses to make the necessary sacrifices can obtain the proofs, and that those who have obtained the proofs consider them conclusive, and the mass of mankind will be quite content to accept the facts, even on the testimony of the one in a million who does undertake the verification of the assertions of his predecessors.

But our correspondent’s assumptions are erroneous; a practical renunciation of the world in the sense in which the apostle exhorted all Christians to be in the world but not of the world is doubtless essential, but it is by no means requisite to sever all human ties and affections, nor can it ever be permitted, much less required, to abjure human responsibilities. These latter may change in character, and


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may—indeed must—-with increased knowledge and power, assume a wider reach, and the affections must broaden and become more cosmopolitan, but it is self-abnegation, not selfishness, and a devotion to the welfare of others, that smoothes the path to adeptship.

Again, as regards the freedom from error claimed for the teachings of occultism, it is needless to point out the difference between empiricism and science, and the uninitiated are empiricists, the occultists, scientists. This will be obvious at once when it is borne in mind that, for thousands of years, hundreds of initiates have been exploring the unseen world; that the results of their explorations have been recorded and collected, and discrepancies eliminated by fresh verifications; that the facts ascertained have been generalized, and the laws governing them deduced therefrom, and the correctness of these deductions verified by experiment. Occultism is, therefore, in every sense of the word an exact science, while the teachings of the very ablest untrained seer who has worked single-handed can only be empiric.

When in our first article we said we know (an expression to which a critic, perhaps rightly, takes objection) we only said this in the sense that, talking to people ignorant of mathematics, we should say that we know that the curve described by the moon in space is a form of an epicycloid represented by such and such an equation—not meaning thereby that we had ourselves investigated this somewhat abstruse problem, but that we were aware of the method by which this was solved, and knew that numerous competent mathematicians had so solved it, and had all arrived at the same solution. Surely those ignorant alike of mathematics and of the work of mathematician could by no means as reasonably say in reply, that they knew that the orbit of the moon was something wholly different it is not our experiences, though these collectively are considerable, on which we rely, as our critic seems to fancy. For all we know, his experiences may exceed ours, and, be this as it may, we should certainly never have presumed to traverse authoritatively his views on the strength of our own experiences or knowledge. What we rely on are the generalized results of the experiences during a vast period of time of a large body of trained psychists who have ever made the attainment of truth, in matters spiritual, the foremost object of their desire, and the promotion, though in secret, of the welfare of mankind their primary duty.


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And now, having attempted to answer certain objections to our previous ‘‘Fragments,’’ we think it might be well to develop a little further one doctrine that we broached in our first paper, and explain more in detail why we are so strongly opposed to habitual mediumism.

Broadly speaking, the objective phenomena of spiritualists (of subjective communications we have already spoken) are the work of, or at any rate result from, the activities or intervention of elementals, half intelligent nature forces, entities which in a far distant cycle, after passing through all the lower objective kingdoms will ultimately he born as men; and elementaries or shells. These shells are of two kinds: first, those belonging to men whose sixth and seventh principles having attracted to themselves the quintessence, as it were, of the fifth also, have moved on to fresh developments. These shells consist of the fourth, and only a portion of the fifth principles. Half or more of the personal memory is gone and the more animal or material instincts only survive. This relic, this dross left behind in the crucible when the refined gold was taken, is commonly the ‘‘angel guide’’ of the average medium. Such entities, of course, only survive for a time; gradually all consciousness departs and they disintegrate. Only highly mediumistic natures attract these, and only certain of these. The purer the personality the less their vitality, the shorter their period of survival, and time less the chance of their contributing to mediumistic displays. The more full of blemishes, the more disfigured by sins and animal desires, the personality, the greater the vitality of its reliquiæ the longer their survival, and the greater the chance of their finding their way into the séance-room. The man, as a whole, may have been a good man, good may have actively predominated in him, and yet the worse portions of his nature, his lower and more animal instincts standing now alone and unneutralized by all the better portions of his character, may be evil enough.

It is impossible that any real good can come of intercourse even with this class of shell; it will not be actively wicked, it is too imperfect and weak for that, but yet its influence in the long run cannot be elevating. But, besides this, it is wrong to encourage such shells into activity or convey to them a fresh impulse such as they often obtain through mediums, since a strong sympathy continues to subsist between the departed personality and its reliquiæ, and any excitement of these latter, any galvanization of them with a fictitious renewed life, such as results from mediums dealing with them, distinctly disturbs


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the gestation of the personality, hinders the evolution of its new Ego-hood, and delays thereby its entry into the state of felicity (Devachan) in which, in its new Ego-hood, it reaps the fruits of its good deeds, prior to reincarnation and rebirth here, if it has not completed its appointed tale of earth-lives, or in the next superior planet.

But the other kind of elementary is far more dangerous as a rule to deal with. In this case the man has been weighed in the balance and found wanting—his personality has to be blotted out—the fourth and fifth principles are intact; and more than this, the fifth will have assimilated all that there may he left of personal recollection and perception of its personal individuality in the sixth. This second class of shell is in every way more enduring, more active, and in the majority of cases, distinctly wicked. No doubt it can stiffer no injury from its intercourse with men, but these latter must inevitably deteriorate in consequence of association with shells of this class. Fortunately these are not, comparatively speaking, very numerous; of course, absolutely, there have been millions of millions of such, but, to the credit of human nature be it said that the personalities that have to be absolutely blotted out form but a fractional percentage of the whole.

Moreover, shells of this nature do not remain for any great length of time in the atmosphere of this earth, but like straws floating near a whirlpool, get caught up by and dragged down in that terrible maelstrom which hurries off the failures towards disintegration, to the planet of matter and death—the mental as well as time physical satellite of our earth!

As for the elementals, rudimentary men no doubt, but more embryonic even than the spirit that sleeps in the mineral, these, though capable of becoming powerful forces in association with shells, under the spells of sorcerers and under the guidance of adepts, are, as a rule, irresponsible, purblind, neutral entities, taking moral and mental character and colour from the active and more developed spiritual entity with or under whose control they work; but even these, though themselves incapable of being injured, may become very dangerous to mediums with any inherent evil tendencies.

Here then in elementals and elementaries are to he found the majority probably of the performers of the physical phenomena of spiritualists. Association with no one of these three classes can possibly benefit mankind as a whole. The variety of natures is so infinite that we do not assert that in no case has any human being benefited by inter-


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course with any individual specimen of either class. But we do say that, broadly speaking, nothing but harm can be expected from association with such. Further, in the case of one of the three classes, mediumistic intercourse inflicts a distinct injury upon innocent beings.

But though elementaries and elementals constitute a large proportion of the performers, there are other classes of actors. We do not pretend—we are not permitted—to deal exhaustively with the question at present, but we may refer to one of the most important classes of entities who can participate in objective phenomena other than elementaries and elementals.

This class comprises the spirits of conscious sane suicides. They are spirits and not shells, because there is not in their case, at any rate until later, a total and permanent divorce between the fourth and fifth principles on the one hand and the sixth and seventh on the other. The two are divided, they exist apart, but a line of connection still unites them, they may yet reunite, and the sorely threatened personality avert its doom; the fifth principle still holds in its hands the clue by which, traversing the labyrinth of earthly sins and passions, it may regain the sacred penetralia. But for the time, though really a spirit, and therefore so designated, it is practically not far removed from a shell.

This class of spirit can undoubtedly communicate with men, but as a rule its members have to pay dearly for exercising the privilege, while it is scarcely possible for them to do otherwise than lower and debase the moral nature of those with and through whom they have much communication. It is merely, broadly speaking, a question of degree; of much or little injury resulting from such communication the cases in which real, permanent good can arise are too absolutely exceptional to require consideration.

Understand how the case stands. The unhappy being revolting against the trials of life—trials, the results of it own former actions, trials, heaven’s merciful medicine for the mentally and spiritually diseased—determines, instead of manfully taking arms against a sea of troubles, to let the curtain drop, and, as it fancies, end them.

It destroys the body, but finds itself precisely as much alive mentally as before. It had an appointed life-term determined by an intricate web of prior causes, which its own willful sudden act cannot shorten. That term must run out its appointed sands. You may smash the


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lower half of the hour-glass so that the impalpable sand shooting from the upper bell is dissipated by the passing aerial currents as it issues, but that stream will run on, unnoticed though it remain, until the whole store in that upper receptacle is exhausted.

So you may destroy the body, but not the appointed period of sentient existence, foredoomed, because simply the effect of a plexus of causes, to intervene before the dissolution of the personality; this must run on for its appointed period.

This is so in other cases; for example, those of the victims of accident or violence—they, too, have to complete their life-term, and of these, too, we may speak on another occasion; but here it is sufficient to notice that, whether good or bad, their mental attitude at the time of death alters wholly their subsequent position. They, too, have to wait on within the Region of Desires until their wave of life runs on to and reaches its appointed shore; but they wait on, wrapped in dreams soothing and blissful or the reverse, according to their mental and moral state at and prior to the fatal hour, but nearly exempt from further material temptations, and, broadly speaking, incapable, except just at the moment of real death, of communicating suo motu with mankind though not wholly beyond the possibility of reach of the higher forms of the “accursed science,” necromancy. The question is a profoundly abstruse one. It would be impossible to explain within the brief space still remaining to us how the conditions immediately after death in the case of the man who deliberately lays down (not merely risks) his life from altruistic motives in the hope of saving those of others, and of him who deliberately sacrifices his life from selfish motives in the hopes of escaping trials and troubles which loom before him, differ so entirely as they do. Nature or Providence, Fate or God being merely a self—adjusting machine, it would at first sight seem as if the results must be identical in both cases. But machine though it be, we must remember that it is a machine sui geueris:

Out of himself he span

Th’ eternal web of right and wrong,
And ever feels the subtlest thrill,
The slenderest thread along !

—a machine compared with whose perfect sensitiveness and adjustment the highest human intellect is but a coarse clumsy replica.

And we must remember that thoughts and motives are material, and at times marvellously potent material forces, and we may then begin


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to comprehend why the hero sacrificing his life on pure altruistic grounds, sinks as his life-blood ebbs away into a sweet dream, wherein

All that he wishes and all that he loves
Come smiling around Ins sunny way,

only to wake into active or objective consciousness when reborn in the Region of Happiness, while the poor, unhappy and misguided mortal who, seeking to elude fate, selfishly loosens the silver string and breaks the golden bowl, finds himself terribly alive and awake, instinct with all the evil cravings and desires that embittered his world-life, without a body in which to gratify them, and capable of only such partial alleviation as is possible by more or less vicarious gratification, and this only at the risk of the complete rupture with his sixth and seventh principles, and consequent ultimate annihilation after prolonged periods of suffering.

Let it not be supposed that there is no hope for this class—the sane, deliberate suicide. If, bearing steadfastly his cross, he suffers his punishment patiently, striving against carnal appetites—still alive in him in all their intensity, though, of course, each in proportion to the degree to which it had been indulged in earth-life—if, we say, he bears this humbly, never allowing himself to be tempted here or there into unlawful gratifications of unholy desires then, when his fated death—hour strikes, his four higher principles reunite, and in the final separation that then ensues all may be well with him, and he may pass on to the gestation period and its subsequent developments.

Till the predestined death-knell rings he has his chance; he may wipe out in suffering and repentance many a sad black score from the page of Karma, but—and this is the point we desire to impress upon spiritualists—he may add a hundred fouler ones to the sad blots already damning the record.

It is not merely for the sake of the mediums, not merely “for the sake of those that sit at meat with these,” but, above all, for the sake of these miserable half-lost brothers and sisters that we appeal.

Suddenly cut short in careers always more or less deeply befouled in all sane suicides—and we speak only of these, for insane suicides are but victims—by one of the deadliest sins, rage, hatred, lust or greed, they awake to find themselves haunted by their besetting sin in all its intensity. Around them are mediums, many of them throwing themselves open to what they idly dream to be angel guides. They have but to obsess these only too willing partners, to share in their evil


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gratifications, or collecting out of their aura and loosely coherent physical organizations, and from even fouler sources, the tombs and shambles, materials to form a fragile physical organization of their own, revel with their mediums in all imaginable iniquity. These are the incubi and succubæ of rnediæval times, these are the “spirit wives” and “husbands” of modern days, and these, when merely obsessing and not assuming a separate objective form, are the demons of drunkenness, gluttony, hatred and malice, the memorials of whose fiendish excesses crowd the sad records alike of the present and the past.

Evil to begin with, and separated (though not as yet irrevocably) from their sixth and seventh principles, and such restraining influence as these may have insensibly exercised, these spirits too often pass from bad to worse, develop into true psychic vampires, driving victim after victim to destruction, inciting to and glorying in, the foulest, the most incredible crimes, to be swept at last, when the appointed death-hour strikes, on the flood-tide of their own enormities, far out of the earth’s aura into regions where annihilation alone drops the curtain on æons of unimaginable misery.

And many of these, veritable fiends as they become, were not so very, very had in this life—’’shady lots,” perhaps, in modern phraseology, with some rebellious, bitter, angry taint in the character which led them to suicide, but, after all, very far removed from the demons which they eventually become; and this awful and incredible development devil-wards which they underwent, though indirectly facilitated by the separation of their highest principles, was primarily and almost exclusively due to the temptations, the facilities for the gratification of their worst desires, held out to them by mediums, recognized as such or not, of the low physical-manifestation type.

Alas! for the great hulk of such mediums. Alas! for too many of their spiritualistic admirers and associates. Little do they dream that two-thirds of all the most monstrous crimes in the world have their origin in this low physical mediumistic capacity. Unrecognized as such, hundreds of miserable mediums perish on the scaffold, declaring, and declaring truly, that they were egged on to the crimes for which they suffer by a devil, in reality an obsessing spirit, mostly of this class. In thousands and thousands of cases the gross sins, drunkenness, gluttony, lewdness, bestiality in all its forms, which spread desolation to innumerable happy hearths and plunge in misery and


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disgrace countless happy households, are all really traceable to this same class of spirit, deriving alike the intensity of its evil desires and the power to do harm, from that fatal capacity for mediumship of the low class favourable to physical manifestations.

And this mediuinship is a plant that, like a noxious weed, under encouraging influences, spreads as time runs on. Do the spiritualists who deal so complacently with, nay, who so greedily run after, these physical-manifestation mediums, reflect on, or at all realize, what they are doing? It is not merely that both they themselves and the mediums are running a fearful risk of moral shipwreck through this intercourse—this can to a certain extent be guarded against, though it too seldom is, by perfect purity of word thought and deed; and again the medium may, though this, too, is rare, be naturally so well-disposed that the obsessing spirit, if not already rabidly evil, may do little harm; but what is alike beyond control of medium and his or her supporters is diffusion, as the mediumship is developed, of mediumistic germs through the âkâshic atmosphere, which, finding here and there appropriate soils in the weakest and most sensual natures, will produce later a crop of more degraded mediums, destined certainly to include many of the vilest sinners, if not several of the deepest-dyed criminals of the age.

This form of mediumship is a deadly weed, and so far from being encouraged into reproduction—and that is what the spiritualists as a body do—it should be starved out by disuse whenever and wherever it is recognized. Unfortunately, it will always exist, springing up sporadically here and there; and, though dwarfed in habit, contributing largely to the loathsome annals of sin and crime; but it is truly monstrous to aid the propagation of this curse in all intensified form, by aiding and abetting the development and function of prominent specimens.

Let none who do this dream that they can escape the consequences. All who share in transactions by which sin and misery are multiplied for others must share the recoil. They may act in ignorance, in good faith, and so escape the moral taint—the most grievous of the Consequences of evil—but they can by no means escape the other consequences, and they will have to brave in coming lives the angry buffets of a retributive justice, which, though sleeping during the present, never sleeps during a second life.

NOTES ON SOME ARYAN-ARHAT

ESOTERIC TENETS*
———

[Vol. III. No. 4, January, 1882.]

NOTES

THE Tibetan esoteric Buddhist doctrine teaches that Prakriti is cosmic matter, out of which all visible forms are produced; Akâsha is also cosmic matter, but still more imponderable, its spirit, as it were; Prakriti being the body or substance, and Akâsha-Shakti its soul or energy.

Prakriti, Svabhâvat or Akâsha is Space, as the Tibetans have it; Space filled with whatsoever substance or no substance at all, i.e., with substance so imponderable as to be only metaphysically conceivable. Brahman, then, would be the germ thrown into the soil of that field, and Shakti, that mysterious energy or force which develops it, and which is called by the Buddhist Arahats of Tibet, Fohat.

“That which we call Form (Rupa) is not different from that which we call Space (Shûnyatâ) . . . Space is not different from Form. Form is the same as Space; Space is the same as Form. And so with the other Skandhas, whether Vedanâ, or Sanjua, or Sanskâra or Vijnana they are each the same as their opposite.” (Book of Sin-king or the “Heart Sûtra.” Chinese translation of the Maha-Prajna-Paramita-Hridaya-Sutra; chapter on the “Avalokiteshvara,” or Manifested Buddha.)

So that, the Aryan and Tibetan or Arhat doctrines agree perfectly in substance, differing but in names given and the way of putting it, a distinction resulting from the fact that the Vedântin Brâhmans believe in Parabrahman, a deific power, impersonal though it may be, while the Buddhists entirely reject it.

APPENDICES.

I.

The country called Si-dzang by the Chinese, and Tibet by Western geographers, is mentioned in the oldest books preserved in the province
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* The following area collection of notes and appendices on an article, entitled ‘The Aryan-Arhat Esoteric Tenets on the sevenfold Principle in Man,”
by T. Suhba Row, BA., B.L.—EDS.


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of Fo-kien (the chief headquarters of the aborigines of China) as the great seat of occult learning in the archaic ages. According to these records, it was inhabited by the ‘‘Teachers of Light,’’ the ‘‘Sons of Wisdom” and the “Brothers of the Sun.” The Emperor Vu, the “Great” (2207 B.C.), a pious mystic, is credited with having obtained his occult wisdom and the system of theocracy established by him—for he was the first one to unite in China ecclesiastical power with temporal authority—from Si-dzang. That system was the same as with the old Egyptians and the Chaldees—that which we know to have existed in the Brâhmanical period in India, and to exist now in Tibet—namely, all the learning, power, the temporal as well as the secret wisdom were concentrated within the hierarchy of the priests and limited to their caste. Who were the aborigines of Tibet is a question which no ethno- grapher is able to answer correctly at present. They practise the Bhon religion, their sect was pre-buddhistic and anti-buddhistic, and they are to he found mostly in the province of Kam—that is all that is known of them. But even that would justify the supposition that they are the greatly degenerated descendants of mighty and wise fore-fathers. Their ethnical type shows that they are not pure Turanians, and their rites—now those of sorcery, incantations, and nature—worship—remind one far more of the popular rites of the Babylonians, as found in the records preserved on the excavated cylinders, than, as alleged by some, of the religious practices of the Chinese sect of Tao-sse—a religion based upon pure reason and spirituality. Generally, little or no difference is made even by the Kyelang missionaries who mix greatly with these people on the borders of British Lahoul— and ought to know better—between the Bhons and the two rival Buddhist sects, the Yellow Caps and the Red Caps. The latter of these have opposed the reform of Tzong-ka-pa from the first, and have always adhered to old Buddhism, so greatly mixed up now with the practices of the Bhons. Were our Orientalists to know more of them, and compare the ancient Babylonian Bel or Baal worship with the rites of the Bhons, they would find an undeniable connection between the two. It is out of the question to begin an argument here to prove the origin of the aborigines of Tibet as connected with one of the three great races which superseded each other in Babylonia, whether we call them the Akkadians (invented by F. Lenormant), or the primitive Turanians, Chaldees and Assyrians. Be it as it may, there is reason to call the Trans-Himalayan esoteric doctrine Chaldæo-Tibetan And,


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when we remember that the Vedas came—agreeably to all traditions— from the Mansarova Lake in Tibet, and the Brâhmans themselves from the far north, we are justified in looking on the esoteric doctrines of every people who once had or still have them, as having proceeded from one and the same source, and to thus call it the “Aryan-Chaldæo-Tibetan” doctrine, or Universal Wisdom Religion. “Seek for the Lost Word among the hierophants of Tartary, China and Tibet,” was the advice of Swedenborg, the seer.

II.

The Vedas, Brâhmanism, and along with these Sanskrit, were importations into what we now regard as India. They were never indigenous to its soil. There was a time when the ancient nations of the West included under the generic name of India many of the countries of Asia now classified under other names. There was an Upper, a Lower, and a Western India, even during the comparatively late period of Alexander; and Persia, Iran, is called Western India in some ancient classics, and the countries now named Tibet, Mongolia, and Great Tartary were considered as forming part of India. When we say, therefore, that India has civilized the world and was the Alma Mater of the civilizations, arts and sciences of all other nations (Baby- lonia, and perhaps even Egypt, included), we mean archaic, prehistoric India, India of the time when the great Gobi was a sea, and the lost Atlantis formed part of an unbroken continent which began at the Himalayas and ran down over Southern India, Ceylon, Java, to far-away Tasmania.

III.

To ascertain such disputed questions [as to whether or not the Tibetan adepts are acquainted with the “esoteric doctrine taught by the residents of the sacred Island”), we have to look into and study well the Chinese sacred and historical records—a people whose era begins nearly 4,600 years back (2697 B.C.). A people so accurate—by whom some of the most important “inventions” of modern Europe and its so much boasted modern science (such as the compass, gun powder, porcelain, paper, printing, etc.), were anticipated, known, and practised thousands of years before these were rediscovered by the Europeans—ought to receive some trust for their records.

From Lao-tze down to Hiouen-Thsang their literature is filled with allusions and references to that Island and the wisdom of the Himâ-


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layan adepts. In the Catena of Buddhist Scriptures from the chinese, by the Rev. Samuel Beal, there is a chapter “On the Tian-Ta’i School of Buddhism” (pp. 244-258), which our opponents ought to read. Translating the rules of that most celebrated and holy school and sect in China founded by Chin-che-chay, called the wise one, in the year of our era, on coming to the sentence, “That which relates to the one garment (seamless) worn by the Great Teachers of the Snowy Mountains, the school of the Haimavatas” (p. 256), the European translator places after it a sign of interrogation, as well he may. The statistics of the school of the Haimavatas or of our Himâlayan Brother-hood, are not to be found in the General Census Records of India. Further, Mr. Beal translates a rule relating to “the great professors of the higher order who live in mountain depths remote from men,’’ the Aranyakas, or hermits.

So, with respect to the traditions concerning this Island, and apart from the (to them) historical records of it preserved in the Chinese and Tibetan Sacred Books, the legend is alive to this day among the people of Tibet. The fair Island is no more, but the country where it once bloomed remains there still, and the spot is well known to some of the “Great Teachers of the Snowy Mountains,” however much convulsed and changed its topography may have been by the awful cataclysm. Every seventh year these teachers are believed to assemble in Schambha-la, the “happy land.” According to the general belief it is situated in the north-west of Tibet. Some place it within the unexplored central regions, inaccessible even to the fearless nomadic tribes; others hem it in between the range of the Gangdisri Mountains and the northern edge of the Gobi Desert, south and north, and the more populated regions of Khoondooz and Kashmir, of the Gya-Pheling (British India) and China, west and east, which affords to the curious mind a pretty large latitude to locate it in. Others still place it between Namur Nur and the Kuen-Lun Mountains—but one and all firmly believe in Scham-bha-la, and speak of it as a fertile, fairy-like land, once an island, now an oasis of incomparable beauty, the place of meeting of the inheritors of the esoteric wisdom of the god-like inhabitants of the legendary Island.

In connection with the archaic legend of the Asian Sea and the Atlantic Continent, is it not profitable to note a fact known to all modern geologists—that the Himalayan slopes afford geological proof that the substance of those lofty peaks was once a part of an ocean floor?


479—————————————NOTES ON SOME ARYAN-ARHAT ESOTERIC TENETS.

IV.

We have already pointed out that, in our opinion, the whole difference between the Buddhistic and Vedântic philosophies was that the former was a kind of rationalistic Vedântism, while the latter might be regarded as transcendental Buddhism. If the Aryan esotericism applies the term Jivâtma to the seventh principle, the pure, and per se unconscious, spirit—it is because the Vedânta postulating three kinds of existence—(1) the Paramârthika, the true, the only real one; (2) the Vyavahârika, the practical; and (3) the Pratibhâshika, the apparent or illusory life—makes the first Life or Jiva, the only truly existent one. Brahma or the One Self is its only representative in the universe, as it is the universal Life, while the other two are but its ‘‘phenomenal appearances,” imagined and created by ignorance, and complete illusions suggested to us by our blind senses. The Buddhists, on the other hand, deny either subjective or objective reality even to that one Self-Existence. Buddha declares that there is neither Creator nor an Absolute Being. Buddhist rationalism was ever too alive to the insuperable difficulty of admitting one absolute consciousness, as in the words of Flint—”wherever there is consciousness there is relation, and wherever there is relation there is dualism.” The One Life is either absolute and unconditioned (Mukta) and can have no relation to anything nor to anyone; or it is bound and conditioned (Baddha), and then it cannot be called the Absolute; the limitation, moreover, necessitating another deity as powerful as the first to account for all the evil in this world. Hence, the Arahat secret doctrine on cosmogony admits but of one absolute, indestructible, eternal and uncreated Unconsciousness (so to translate), of an element (the word being used for want of a better term) absolutely independent of everything else in the universe; a something ever present or ubiquitous, a Presence which ever was, is, and will be, whether there is a God, gods, or none; whether there is a universe or no universe; existing during the eternal cycles of Mahâ Yugas, during Pralayas and during the periods of Manvantara; and this is Space, the field for the operation of the eternal Forces and natural Law, the basis (as our correspondent rightly calls it) upon which take place the eternal intercorrelations of Akâsha-Prakriti, guided by the unconscious regular pulsations of Shakti—the breath or power of a conscious Deity, the theists would say—the eternal energy of an eternal, unconscious Law, say the Buddhists. Space then, or Fan Bar-nang (Mahâ Shûnyatâ) or, as it is called by Lao-tze, the “Emptiness,” is the nature


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of the Buddhist Absolute. (See Confucius’ Praise of the Abyss.) The word Jiva, then, could never be applied by the Arahats to the seventh principle, since it is only through its correlation or contact with matter that Fohat (the Buddhist active energy) can develop active conscious life; and since to the question “How can unconsciousness generate consciousness?”—the answer would be: “Was the seed which generated a Bacon or a Newton
self-conscious?”

THE THOUGHTS OF THE DEAD*
————

[Vol. III. No. 4, January, 1882.]

A MAN dies of a contagious disease; months after his death, aye, years—a bit of clothing, an object touched by him during his sickness, may communicate the disease to a person more physiologically sensitive than the persons around him, while having no effect upon the latter. And why should not an idea, a thought exercise the same influence? Thought is no less material nor objective than the imponderable and mysterious germs of various infectious diseases, the causes of which are such a puzzle for science. Since the mind of a living person can so influence another mind that the former can force the latter to think and believe whatever it will—in short, can psychologize that other mind, so can the thought of a person already dead. Once generated and sent out, that thought will live upon its own energy. It has become independent of the brain and mind which gave it birth. So long as its concentrated energy remains undissipated, it can act as a potential influence when brought into contact with the living brain and nervous system of a person susceptibly predisposed. The unhealthy action thus provoked may lead the sensitive into a temporary insanity of self-delusion, that quite clouds the sense of his own individuality. The morbid action thus once set up, the whole floating group of the dead man’s thoughts rushes into the sensitive’s brain, and he can give what seems test after test of the presence of the deceased and convince the predisposed investigator that the individuality of the “control,” “guide,” or communicating intelligence is thoroughly established.
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* The above is a Note appended to an article, entitled “Lakshmibai the Authentic Story of a Bhût by Piarai Lall Chachondia.

DREAMLAND AND SOMNAMBULISM
———

[Vol. III. No. 4, January, 1882.]

[To the Editor.

(1) ARE dreams always real? If so, what produces them? If not real, may they not nevertheless have in themselves some deep significance?

(2) Can you tell me something about antenatal states of existence and the transmigration of the soul?

(3) Can you give me anything that is worth knowing about psychology as suggested by this article?*

Yours most fraternally and obediently,

JEHANGIR CURSETJI TARACHAND.

Bombay, Nov. 10th, 1882.]

To put our correspondent’s request more exactly, he desires The Theosophist to cull into the limits of a column or two the facts embraced within the whole range of all the sublunar mysteries with “full explanations.” These would embrace:

(1) The complete philosophy of dreams, as deduced from their physiological, biological, psychological and occult aspects.

(2) The Buddhist Jâtakas (rebirths and migrations of our Lord Shâkya Muni), with a philosophical essay upon the transmigrations of the 387,000 Buddhas who ‘‘turned the wheel of faith,’’ during the successive revelations to the world of the 125,000 other Buddhas, the saints who can “overlook and unravel the thousand-fold knotted threads of the moral chain of causation,” throwing in a treatise upon the Nidânas the chain of twelve causes with a complete list of their two millions of results, and copious appendices by some Arhats, “who have attained the stream which flows into Nirvana.”

(3) The compounded reveries of the world-famous psychologists; from the Egyptian Hermes and his Book of the Dead; Plato’s definition of the Soul, in Timæus; and so on, down to Drawing-Room Nocturnal chats with a Disembodied Soul, by the Rev. Adramelech Romeo Tiberius Toughskin from Cincinnati. Such is the modest task proposed.
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* A dream-story from Chambers’ Journal.


483———————————————————DREAMLAND AND SOMNAMBULISM.

Our physical senses are the agents by means of which the astral spirit, or “conscious something” within, is brought, by contact with the external world, to a knowledge of actual existence; while the spiritual senses of the astral man are the media, the telegraphic wires by means of which he communicates with his higher principles, and obtains therefrom the faculties of clear perception of, and vision into, the realms of the invisible world. The Buddhist philosopher holds that by the practice of the Dhyânas one may reach “the enlightened condition of mind, which exhibits itself by immediate recognition of sacred truth, so that on opening the Scriptures [or any books whatsoever?] their true meaning at once flashes into the heart.” (Beal’s Catena,

p. 255.)

In dreaming, or in somnambulism, the brain is asleep only in parts, and is called into action through the agency of the external senses, owing to some peculiar cause; a word pronounced, a thought, or picture lingering dormant in one of the cells of memory, and awakened by a sudden noise, the fall of a stone, suggesting instantaneously to this half-dreamy fancy of the sleeper walls of masonry, and so on. When one is suddenly startled in his sleep without becoming fully awake, he does not begin and terminate his dream with the simple noise which partially awoke him, but often experiences in his dream a long train of events concentrated within the brief space of time the sound occupies, and to be attributed solely to that sound. Generally dreams are induced by the waking associations which precede them. Some of them produce such an impression that the slightest idea in the direction of any subject associated with a particular dream may bring its recurrence years after.

Tartini, the famous Italian violinist, composed his “Devil’s Sonata” under the inspiration of a dream. During his sleep he thought the devil appeared to him and challenged him to a trial of skill upon his own private violin, brought straight from the infernal regions; which challenge Tartini accepted. When he awoke, the melody of the ‘‘Devil’s Sonata’’ was so vividly impressed upon his mind that he there and then noted it down; but on getting as far as the finale all further recollection of it was suddenly obliterated, and he had to lay aside the incomplete piece of music. Two years later he dreamt the very same thing, and in his dream tried to make himself recollect the finale upon awaking. The dream was repeated owing to a blind street- musician fiddling on his instrument under the artist’s window.


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Coleridge in a like manner composed his poem, ‘‘ Kublai—Khan,” in a dream. On awaking, he found the now—famous lines so vividly impressed upon his mind that he wrote them down. ‘rise dream was due to the poet falling asleep in Ins chair while reading the following words in Purchas’ Pilgrimage: “Here the Khan Kublai commanded a palace to he built ..... enclosed within a wall.”

The popular belief, that among the vast number of meaningless dreams there are some in which presages are frequently given of coming events, is shared by many Well—informed persons, but not at all by science. Yet there are numberless instances of well-attested dreams which were verified by subsequent events, and which, therefore, may be termed prophetic. The Greek and Latin classics teens with records of remarkable dreams, some of which have become historical. Faith in the spiritual nature of dreaming was as widely disseminated among the Pagan philosophers as among the Christian fathers of the church, nor is belief in soothsaying and interpretations of dreams (oneiromancy limited to the heathen nations of Asia, since the Bible is full of them. This is what Eliphas Levi, the great modern Kabalist, says of such divinations, visions and prophetic dreams, in his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (i. 356, 357):

Somnambulism, premonitions and second sight are but a disposition, whether accidental or habitual, to dream, awake, or during a voluntary, self-induced, or yet natural sleep; i.e., to perceive [and guess by intuition] the analogical reflections of the astral light .....The paraphernalia and instruments of divinations are simply means for [magnetic] communications between the divinator and him who consults him they serve to fix and concentrate two wills [ in the same direction] upon the same sign or object ; the queer, complicated, moving figures helping to collect the reflections of the astral fluid. Thus one is enabled at times to see in the grounds of a coffee cup, or in the clouds, in the white of an egg, etc., fantastic forms having their existence only in the translucid [or the seer’s imagination]. Vision-seeing in the water is produced by the fatigue of the dazzled optic nerve, which ends by ceding its functions to the translucid, and calling forth a cerebral illusion, which makes the simple reflections of the astral light appear as real images. Thus the fittest persons for thus kind of divination are those of a nervous temperament whose sight is weak and imagination vivid, children being the best of all adapted for it. But let no one misinterpret the nature of the function attributed by us to imagination in the art of divination. We see through our imagination doubtless, and that is the natural aspect of the miracle; but we see actual and true things, and it is in this that lies the marvel of the natural phenomenon. We appeal for corroboration of what we say to the testimony of all the adepts.

ARE DREAMS BUT IDLE VISIONS?
————

[Vol. III. No. 4, January, 1882.]

“DREAMS are interludes which fancy makes,” Dryden tells us—perhaps to show that even a poet will make occasionally his muse sub-servient to sciolistic prejudice.

The instance of prevision in dream given above [in a letter addressed to The Theosophist] is one of a series of what may be regarded as exceptional cases in dream-life, the generality of dreams being, indeed, but “interludes which fancy makes.” It is the policy of materialistic, matter-of-fact science to superbly ignore such exceptions, on the ground, perchance, that the exception confirms the rule—or, we rather think, to avoid the embarrassing task of explaining such exceptions. Indeed, if one single instance stubbornly refuses classification, with “strange coincidences”—so much in favour with sceptics—then prophetic, or verified, dreams would demand an entire remodeling of physiology; as in regard to phrenology, the recognition and acceptance by science of prophetic dreams (hence the recognition of the claims of theosophy and spiritualism) would, it is contended, “carry with it a new educational, social, political, and theological science.” Result: Science will never recognize either dreams, spiritualism, or occultism.

Human nature is an abyss, which physiology (and indeed modern science in general) has sounded less deeply than some who have never heard the word physiology pronounced. Never are the high censors of the Royal Society more perplexed than when brought face to face with that insolvable mystery—man’s inner nature. The key to it is—man’s dual being. It is that key that they refuse to use, well aware that if once the door of the adytum be flung open they will be forced to drop one by one their cherished theories and final conclusions—more than once proved to have been no better than hobbies, starting from false or incomplete premisses. If we must remain satisfied with the half explanations of physiology as regards meaningless dreams, how account in such case for the numerous facts of verified dreams?


486——————————————————————A M0DERN PANARION.

To say that man is a dual being, that in man (to use the words of Paul) “there is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body”; and that, therefore, he must of necessity have a double set of senses—is tantamount in the opinion of the educated sceptic to uttering an unpardonable and most unscientific fallacy. Yet it has to be uttered, science notwithstanding.

Man is undeniably endowed with a double set of senses; with natural or physical senses (these to be safely left to physiology to deal with); and with sub-natural or spiritual senses (belonging entirely to the province of psychological science). The word “sub,” let it be well understood, is used here in a sense diametrically opposite to that given to it—in chemistry, for example. In our case it is a prefix, as in “sub-tonic” or “sub-bass” in music. Indeed, as the aggregate sound of nature is shown to be a single definite tone, a key-note vibrating from and through eternity; having an undeniable existence per se, yet possessing an appreciable pitch only for “the acutely fine ear”* so the definite harmony or disharmony of man’s external nature is seen by the observant to depend wholly on the character of the key-note struck for the outer by the inner man. It is the spiritual Ego or Self that serves as the fundamental base, determining the tone of the whole life of man—that most capricious, uncertain and variable of all instruments, which more than any other needs constant tuning; it is its voice alone, which like the sub-bass of an organ, underlies the melody of his whole life, whether its tones are sweet or harsh, harmonious or wild, legato or pizzicato.

Therefore, we say, man, in addition to the physical, has also a spiritual brain. if the former is wholly dependent for the degree of its receptivity on its own physical structure and development, it is, on the other hand, entirely subordinate to the latter, inasmuch as it is the spiritual Ego alone (according as it leans more towards its two highest principles,† or towards its physical shell) that can impress more or less vividly the outer brain with the perception of things purely spiritual or immaterial. Hence it depends on the acuteness of the mental feelings of the inner Ego, on the degree of spirituality of its faculties, to transfer the impression of the scenes its semi-spiritual brain perceives, the words it hears, and what it feels, to the sleeping physical
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* This tone is held by the specialists to be the middle F of the piano.

† The sixth principle, or spiritual soul, and the seventh—the purely spiritual principle, the Spirit or Parabrahman, the emanation from the unconscious Absolute.
(See “Fragments of Occult Truth,” Theosophist, October, 1881.)

487————————————————————ARE DREAMS BUT IDLE VISIONS?

brain of the outer man. The stronger the spirituality of the faculties of the latter, the easier it will be for the Ego to awake the sleeping hemispheres, rouse into activity the sensory ganglia and the cerebellum, and impress the former (always in full inactivity and rest during the deep sleep of man) with the vivid picture of the subject so transferred. In a sensual, unspiritual man, in one whose mode of life and animal proclivities and passions have entirely disconnected his fifth principle or animal, astral Ego from its higher spiritual soul; as also in him whose hard, physical labour has so worn out the material body as to render him temporarily insensible to the voice and touch of his astral soul—in both cases during sleep the brain remains in a com- plete state of an or full inactivity. Such persons rarely, if ever, have any dreams at all, least of all “visions that come to pass.” In the former, as the waking time approaches, and his sleep becomes lighter, the mental changes as they begin to occur will constitute dreams in which intelligence will play no part; his half-awakened brain suggesting but pictures which are only the hazy grotesque reproductions of his wild habits in life; while in the latter (unless strongly preoccupied with some exceptional thought) his ever-present instinct of active habits will not permit him to remain in that state of semi- sleep during which, as consciousness begins to return, dreams of various kinds are seen, but will arouse him at once without any interlude to full wakefulness. On the other hand, the more spiritual a man, the more active his fancy, the greater is the probability of his receiving in vision correctly the impressions conveyed to him by his all-seeing, ever-wakeful Ego. The spiritual senses of the latter, unimpeded as they are by the interference of the physical senses, are in direct intimacy with his highest spiritual principle. This principle (though per se a quasi-unconscious part of the utterly unconscious, because utterly immaterial, Absolute*) having in itself the inherent capabilities of
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* To this teaching every kind of exception will be taken by the theists and various objections raised by the spiritualists. It is evident that we cannot be expected to give, within the narrow limits of a short article, a full explanation of this highly abstruse and esoteric doctrine. To say that the Absolute consciousness is “unconscious’’ of its consciousness (hence to the limited intellect of man most be ‘Absolute Unconsciousness ‘‘) seems like speaking of a square triangle. We hope to develop the proposition more fully in one of the forthcoming numbers of “Fragments of Occult Truth,’’ of which we may publish a series. We will then prove, perhaps, to the satisfaction of the non-prejudiced that the Absolute, or thee Unconditioned, and (especially) the Unrelated, is a mere fanciful abstraction, a fiction, unless we view it from the standpoint, and in the light of, the more educated pantheist. To do so, we will have to regard the Absolute merely as the aggregate of all intelligences, the totality of all existences, incapable of manifesting itself except through the inter relationship of its parts, as it is absolutely incognizable and non-existent outside its phenomena. and depends entirely on its ever-correlating forces, dependent in their turn on the One Great Law.


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omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence, as soon as its pure essence comes in contact with pure sublimated and (to us) imponderable matter, imparts these attributes in a degree to the as pure astral Ego. Hence highly spiritual persons will see visions and dreams during sleep and even in their hours of wakefulness. These are the sensitives, the natural-born seers, now loosely termed “spiritual mediums,” there being no distinction made between a subjective seer, a “neurypnological” subject, and even an adept—one who has made himself independent of his physiological idiosyncracies and has entirely subjected the outer to the inner man. Those less spiritually endowed will see such dreams only at rare intervals; the accuracy of the dreams depending on the intensity of the dreamer’s feeling in regard to the perceived object.

Thus, in this question of verified dreams, as in so many others, modern science stands before an unsolved problem, the insolvable nature of
which has been created by her own materialistic stubbornness, and her time-cherished routine-policy. For, either man is a dual being, with an inner Egos—* this Ego being the “real’’ man, distinct from, and independent of, the outer man proportionally to the prevalency or weakness of the material body; an Ego, the scope of whose senses stretches far beyond the limit granted to the physical senses of man; an Ego which survives the decay of its external covering, at least for a time, even when an evil course of life has made it fail to achieve a perfect union with its spiritual higher Self, i.e., to blend its individuality with it (the personality gradually fading out in each case)—or the testimony of millions of men embracing several thousands of years—the evidence furnished in our own century by hundreds of the most educated men, often by the greatest lights of science—all this evidence, we say, goes for naught. With the exception of a handful of scientific authorities—surrounded by an eager crowd of sceptics and sciolists, who, having never seen anything, claim, therefore, the right of denying everything—the world stands condemned as a gigantic lunatic asylum! It has, however, a special department in it. It is reserved for those who, having proved the soundness of their minds, must of necessity be regarded a impostors and liars.

Has then the phenomenon of dreams been so thoroughly studied by
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* Whether with one solitary Ego, or Soul, as the spiritualists affirm, or with several—i.e., composed of seven principles, as eastern esotericism teaches—is not the question at issue for the present. Let us first prove by bringing our joint experience to bear, that there is in man something beyond Büchner’s force and matter.


489———————————————————ARE DREAMS BUT IDLE VISIONS?

materialistic science, that she has nothing more to learn, since she speaks in such authoritative tones upon the subject? Not in the least. The phenomena of sensation and volition, of intellect and instinct, are, of course, all manifested through the channels of the nervous centres, the most important of which is the brain. The peculiar substance through which these actions take place has two forms, the vesicular and the fibrous, of which the latter is held to be simply the propagator of the impressions sent to or from the vesicular matter. Yet while this physiological office is distinguished, or divided by science into three kinds—the motor, sensitive and connecting—the mysterious agency of intellect remains as mysterious and as perplexing to the great modern physiologists as it was in the days of Hippocrates. The scientific suggestion that there may be a fourth series associated with the operations of thought has not helped towards solving the problem; it has failed to shed even the slightest ray of light on the unfathomable mystery. Nor will they ever fathom it unless our men of science accept the hypothesis of Dual Man.

SPIRITUALISM AND OCCULT TRUTH
————

[Vol. II No. 5, February, 1882.]

The Spiritualist of Nov. 18th takes notice of the article published in The Theosophist for October under the heading “Fragments of Occult Truth,”
but it does not quite appreciate the objects with which that article was put forward, and still less the importance of its contents. To make further explanations intelligible to our own readers, however, we must first represent The Spiritualist’s present remarks, which, under the heading of “Speculation-Spinning,” are as follows:

The much-respected author of the best standard text-book on Chemistry in the English language, the late Prof. W. Allen Miller, in the course of a lecture at the Royal Institution, set forth certain facts, but expressed an objection to make known a speculative hypothesis which apparently explained the causes of the facts, he said that tempting but inadequately proved hypotheses, when once implanted in the mind, were most difficult to eradicate; they sometimes stood in the way of the discovery of truth, they often promoted experiments in a wrong direction, and were better out of the heads than in the heals of young students of science.

The man who prosecutes original research must have some speculation in his head as he tries each new experiment. Such experiments are questions put to Nature, and her replies commonly dash to the ground one such speculation after another, but gradually guide the investigator into the true path, and reveal the previously unknown law, which can thenceforth be safely used in the service of man kind for all time.

Very different is the method of procedure among some classes of psychologists. With them a tempting and plausible hypothesis enters the mind, but instead of considering it to be mischievous to propagate it as possessing authority before it is verified, it is thought clever to do so; the necessity for facts and proof is ignored, and it may be that a church or school of thought is set up, which people-are requested to join in order that they may fight for the new dogma. Thus unproved speculations are forced upon the world with trumpet tongues by one class of people, instead of being tested, and, in most eases, nipped in the bud, according to the method of the man of science.*

The religious periodicals of the day abound with articles consisting of nothing
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* We do not want to he cruel, but where can one find ‘‘ unproved speculations ‘‘ more unproved, or that would be nipped in the bud’’ by the man of science’’ with a more ready hand than those that are weekly expressed in The Spiritualist?


491———————————————————SPIRITUALISM AND OCCULT TRUTH.

but speculations advanced by the authors as truths and as things to be upheld and fought over. Rarely is the modest statement made, “This may explain some points which are perplexing us, but until the verity of the hypothesis has been firmly demonstrated by facts, you must be careful not to let it rest in your mind as truth.” By “facts” we do not necessarily mean physical facts, for there are demonstrable truths outside the realm of physics.

The foregoing ideas have often occurred to us while reading the pages of The Theosophist, and have been revived by an interesting editorial article in the last number of that journal, in which the nature of the body and spirit of man is definitely mapped out in seven clauses.* There is not one word of attempt at proof; and the assertions can only carry weight with those who derive their opinions from the authoritative allegations of others, instead of upon evidence which they have weighed and examined for themselves; and the remarkable point is that the writer shows no signs of consciousness that any evidence is necessary. Had the scientific method been adopted, certain facts or truths would have been made to precede each of the seven clauses, coupled with the claim that those truths demonstrated the assertions in the clauses, and negatived all hypotheses at variance therewith.

Endless speculation-spinning is a kind of mental dissipation, which does little good to the world or to the individuals who indulge therein, and has sometimes had in Europe a slight tendency to impart to the latter signs of Pharisaical self-consciousness of their being advanced religionists and philosophers, living in a diviner air than those who work to base their opinions on well-verified truths. If the speculators recognized their responsibility and imitated the example set them by the great and good Prof. Allen Miller, nine-tenths of their tune would be set at liberty for doing good work in the world, the wasting of oceans of printing ink would be avoided, and mental energy which might be devoted to high uses would no longer run to waste. The minds of habitual dreamers and speculators may he compared to windmills incessantly at work grinding nothing.†

Just at present there is far too much mental speculation afloat, and far too few people putting good ideas into practical form. Here in London, within the past year, grievous iniquities which might have been prevented, and grievous wrongs which might have been redressed, have abounded, and too few people have been at work ameliorating the sorrows and the sins immediately around them.

Now we do not want to discuss these questions with The Spiritualist in the way that rival religious sects might debate their differences. There can be no sectarianism in truth-seeking, and when we regard the spiritualists as seriously mistaken in many of the most important of the conclusions to which they have come, they must certainly be recognized as truth-seekers like ourselves. As a body, indeed, they are entitled to all possible honour for having boldly pursued their
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* The Theosophist, pp. 18, 19, October, 1881.

† Verily so. For over thirty years have the dreamers and speculators upon the rationale of ‘‘ spiritual ‘‘ phenomena set their windmills to work night and day, and yet, hitherto, mortals and helping Spirits have ground out for the world but—husks.


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experiences to unpopular conclusions, caring more for what presented itself to them as the truth than for the good opinion of society at large. The world laughed at them for thinking their communications some thing beyond fraudulent tricks of impostors, for regarding the apparitions of their cabinets as visitors from another world. They knew quite well that the communications in a multitude of cases were no more frauds than they were baked potatoes, that people who called them such were talking utter folly, and in the same way that whatever the materialized “spirits” were, they were not in anything like all cases, even if they might be in some, the pillows and nightgowns of a medium’s assistant. So they held on gallantly, and reaped a reward which more than compensated them for the silly success of ignorant outsiders, in the consciousness of being in contact with superhuman phenomena, and in the excitement of original exploration. Nothing that has ever been experienced in connection with such excitement by early navigators in unknown seas, can even have been comparable to the solemn interest which spiritual enquirers (of the cultivated kind) must have felt at first as they pushed off in the frail canoe of medium-ship, out into the ocean of the unknown world. And if they had realized all its perils one might almost applaud the courage with which they set sail, as warmly as their indifference to ridicule. But the heretics of one age sometimes become the orthodox of the next, and, so apt is human nature to repeat its mistakes, that the heirs of the martyrs may sometimes develop into the persecutors of a new generation. This is the direction in which modern spiritualism is tending, and that tendency, of all its characteristics, is the one we are chiefly concerned to protest against. The conclusions of spiritualism, in accurate and premature as they are, are settling into the shape of orthodox dogma; while the facts of the great enquiry, numerous as they are, are still chaotic and confused, their collectors insist on working them up into specific doctrines about the future state, and they are often as intolerant of any dissent from these doctrines as the old fashioned religionists were of them.

In fact, they have done the very thing which The Spiritualist, with an inaptitude born of complete misapprehension of what occult science really is, now accuses us of having done—they have given themselves wholly over to “speculation-spinning.” It is fairly ludicrous to find this indictment laid at our door on account of our “Fragments.” The argument of that paper was to the effect that spiritualists should not


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jump to conclusions, should not weave hasty theories, on the strength of séance-room experiments. Such and such appearances may present themselves; beware of misunderstanding them. You may see an apparition standing before you which you know to be perfectly genuine, that is to say, no trumpery imposture by a fraudulent medium, and it may wear the outward semblance of a departed friend, but do not on that account jump to the conclusion that it is the spirit of your departed friend, do not spin speculations from the filmy threads of any such delusive fabric. Listen first to the wisdom of the ancient philosophies in regard to such appearances, and permit us to point out the grounds on which we deny what seems to be the plain and natural inference from the facts. And then we proceeded to explain what we have reason to know is the accepted theory of profound students of the ancient philosophy. We were repeating doctrines as old as the pyramids, but The Spiritualist not having hitherto paid attention to them, seems really to imagine that we have thrown them off on the spur of the moment as a hypothesis, as Figuier does with his conjectures in The Day after Death or Jules Verne with his, in his Voyage Round the Moon. We cannot, it is true, quote any printed edition of the ancient philosophies, and refer the reader to chapter and verse, for an article on the seven principles; but assuredly all profound students of mystic literature will recognize the exposition on which we ventured, as supported, now in one way, now in another, by the cautiously obscure teaching of occult writers. Of course, the conditions of occult study are so peculiar that nothing is more difficult than to give one’s “authorities’’ for any statement connected with it, but none the less is it really just as far from being ‘‘up in a balloon’’ as any study can be. It has been explained repeatedly that the continuity of occult knowledge amongst initiated adepts is the attribute about it which commends their explanations—absolutely to the acceptance of those who come to understand what initiation means, and what kind of people adepts are. From Swedenborg onwards there have been many seers who profess to gather their knowledge of other worlds from actual observation, but such persons are isolated, and subject to the delusions of isolation. Any intelligent man will have an intuitive perception of this, expressing itself in a reluctance on his part to surrender himself entirely to the assurances of any such clairvoyants. But in the case of regularly initiated seers it must be remembered that we are dealing with a long—an extraordinarily long—series of persons who, warned of the con-


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fusing circumstances into which they pass when their spiritual perceptions are trained to range beyond material limits, are so enabled to penetrate to the actual realities of things, and who constitute a vast organized body of seers, who check each other’s conclusions, test each other’s discoveries and formulate their visions into a science of spirit as precise and entirely trustworthy as, in their humble way, are the conclusions, as far as they go, of any branch of physical science. Such initiates are in the position, as regards spiritual knowledge, that the regularly taught professor of a great university is in, as regards literary knowledge, and anyone can appreciate the superior claims of instruction which might be received from him, as compared with the crude and imperfect instruction which might be offered by the merely self-taught man. The initiate’s speculations, in fact, are not spun at all; they are laid out before him by the accumulated wisdom of ages, and he has merely followed, verified and assimilated them.

But, it may be argued, if our statement about the teachings of this absolutely trustworthy occult science claims to be something more than assertion and hypothesis, it is an assertion, and, for the world at large, an hypothesis, that any such continuously—taught body of initiates is anywhere in existence. Now, in reference to this objection, there are two observations to be made. Firstly, that there is a large mass of writings to be consulted on the subject and just as spiritualists say to the outer world, “if you read the literature of spiritualism, you will know how preposterous it is to continue denying or doubting the reality of spiritual phenomena,” so we say to spiritualists, ‘‘if you will only read the literature of occultism it will be very strange if you still doubt that the continuity of initiation has been preserved.” Secondly, we may point out that you may put the question about the existence of initiates altogether aside, and yet find in the philosophy of occultism, as expounded by those who do labour under the impression that they have received their teaching from competent instructors, such inherent claims to intellectual adoption, that it will be strange if you do not begin to respect it as an hypothesis. We do not say that the “Fragments” given in our October number constitute a sufficiently complete scheme of things to command conviction, in this way, on their own intrinsic merits, but we do say that even taken by themselves they do not offend intuitive criticism in the way that the alternative spiritual theory does. By degrees, as we are enabled to bring out more ore from the mine which yielded the “Fragments,” it will be found that every


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fresh idea presented for consideration fits in with what has gone before, fortifies it, and is fortified by it in turn. Thus, is it not worth notice that even some notes we published in our December number in answer to enquiries about creation, help the mind to realize the way in which, and the materials with which, the elementaries in the one case, in the other the automatically acting Kâma Rûpa of the medium, may fashion the materialized apparition which the spiritualist takes for the spirit of his departed friend? It sometimes happens that a materialized spirit will leave behind as a memento of his visit some little piece cut from his spiritual (?) drapery. Does the spiritualist believe that the bit of muslin has come from the region of pure spirit from which the disembodied soul descends? Certainly no philosophically minded spiritualist would, but if as regards the drapery such a person would admit that this is fashioned from the cosmic matter of the universe by the will of the spirit which makes this manifest (accepting our theory so far), does it not rationally follow that all the ‘‘material’’ of the materialized visitor must probably be also so fashioned? And in that case, if the will of a spirit without form can produce the particular form which the sitter recognizes as his dead friend, does he not do this by copying the features required from some records to which, as a spirit, he has access; and, in that case again, is it not clear that some other spirit would equally have that power? Mere reflection, in fact, on the principles of creation will lead one straight to a comprehension of the utter worthlessness of resemblance in a materialized spirit, as a proof of identity.

Again, the facts of spiritual experience itself fortify the explanation we have given. Is it not the case that most spiritualists of long experience—omitting the few circumstanced in the very peculiar way that “M.A. Oxon.” is, who are not in pursuit of dead friends at all— are always reduced sooner or later to a state of absolute intellectual exasperation by the unprogressive character of their researches. How is it that all these twenty years that spiritualists have been conversing with their departed friends their knowledge of the conditions of life in the next world is either as hazy still as the rambling imagination of a pulpit orator, or, if precise at all, grotesquely materialistic in its so-called spirituality? If the spirits were what the spiritualists think them, is it not obvious that they must have made the whole situation more intelligible than it is—for most people—whereas, if they are, what we affirm that they are really, is it not obvious that all they could do is exactly what they have done?


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But, to conclude for the present, surely there need be no hostility, as some spiritual writers seem to have imagined, between the spiritualists and ourselves, merely because we bring for their consideration a new stock of ideas—new, indeed, only as far as their application to modern controversies is concerned, old enough as measured by the ages that have passed over the earth since they were evolved. A gardener is not hostile to roses because he prunes his bushes and proclaims the impropriety of letting bad shoots spring up from below the graft. With the spiritualists, students of occultism must always have bonds of sympathy which are unthought of in the blatant world of earth-bound materialism and superstitious credulity. Let them give us a hearing; let them recognize us as brother-worshippers of truth, even though found in unexpected places. They cannot prove so oblivious of their own traditions as to refuse audience to any new plea, because it may disturb them in a faith they find comfortable. Surely it was not to be comfortable that they first refused to swim with the stream in matters of religious thought, and deserted the easy communion of respectable orthodoxy. Will spiritualism conquer incredulity only to find itself already degraded into a new church, sinking, so to speak, into arm chairs in its second childhood, and no longer entitled to belief or vigorous enough for further progress? It is not a promising sign about a religious philosophy when it looks too comfortable, when it promises too indulgent an asylum for our speckled souls with houris of the Mohammedan Elysium, or the all too homelike society of the spiritualist’s “Summer-land.” We bring our friends and brethren in spiritualism no mere feather-headed fancies, no light-spun speculation, when we offer them some toil-won fragments of the mighty mountain of occult knowledge, at the base of whose hardly accessible heights we have learned to estimate their significance and appreciate their worth. Is it asked why we do not spread out the whole scroll of this much-vaunted philosophy for their inspection at once, and so exhibit clearly its all-sufficing coherence? That question at least will hardly be asked by thoughtful men who realize what an all-sufficient philosophy of the universe must be. As well might Columbus have been expected to bring back America in his ships to Spain. “Good friends, America will not come,” he might have said, “but it is there across the waters, and if you voyage as I have done, and the waves do not smother you, mayhap you will find it too.”

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[Vol. III. No. 6, March, 1882.]

So little is known by Europeans of what is going on in Tibet, and even in the more accessible Bhûtan, that an Anglo-Indian paper—one of those which pretend to know, and certainly discuss every imaginable subject, whether they really know anything of it or not—has actually come out with the following scrap of valuable information:

It may not be generally known that the Deb Râjâ of Bhütan, who died in June last, but whose decease has been kept dark till the Present moment, probably to prevent disturbances, is our old and successful opponent of 1864-5.

The Bhûtan Government consists of a spiritual chief, called the Dharm Râjâ, an incarnation of Buddha [?!! ] who never dies, and a civil ruler called the Deb Râjâ in whom is supposed to centre all authority.

A more ignorant assertion could hardly have been made. It may be argued that Christian writers believe even less in Buddha’s reincarnations than the Buddhists of Ceylon, and, therefore, trouble themselves very little whether or not they are accurate in their statements. But in such a case, why touch the subject at all? Large sums are annually spent by Governments to secure old Asiatic manuscripts and learn the truth about old religions and peoples, and it is not showing respect for either science or truth to mislead people interested in them by a flippant and contemptuous treatment of facts.

On the authority of direct information received at our Headquarters, we will try to give a more correct view of the situation than has hitherto been had from books. Our informants are firstly, some very learned Lamas; secondly, European gentleman and traveller, who prefers not to give his name; and thirdly, a highly educated young Chinaman, brought up in America, who has since preferred to the luxuries of worldly life and the pleasures of western civilization, the comparative privations of a religious and contemplative life in Tibet. Both of the last-named gentlemen are Fellows of the Theosophical Society. A


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message from our “celestial” brother, who never lose an opportunity of corresponding with us, has been just received by Darjeeling.

In the present article, beyond contradicting the queer notion of the Bhûtanese Dharma Râjâ being “a incarnation of Buddha,” we will only point out a few absurdities, in which some prejudiced writers have indulged.

It certainly has never been known—at any rate in Tibet—that the spiritual chief of the Bhûtanese is “an incarnation of Buddha, who never dies.” The Dug-pa,* or Red Caps, belong to the old Nyang-na-pa sect, who resisted the religious reform introduced by Tsong-kha-pa between the latter part of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries. It was only after a lama came to them from Tibet in the tenth century and converted them from the old Buddhist faith (so strongly mixed up with the Bhon practices of the aborigines) into the Shammar sect, that the Bhûtanese, in opposition to the reformed Gyelukpas, set up a regular system of reincarnations. It is not Buddha, however, or Sang-gyas, as he is called by the Tibetans, who incarnates himself in the Dharma Râjâ, but quite another personage; one of whom we will speak about later on.

Now what do the Orientalists know of Tibet, its civil administration, and especially its religion and its rites? Only what they have learned from the contradictory, and in every case imperfect, statements of a few Roman Catholic monks, and of two or three daring lay travellers, who, ignorant of the language, could scarcely be expected to give us even a bird’s-eye view of the country. The missionaries who introduced themselves stealthily into Lhassa † in 1719, were suffered to remain there but a short time and were finally forcibly expelled from Tibet. The letters of the Jesuits Desideri, and Johann Grueber, and especially of Fra della Penna, teem with the greatest absurdities.‡ Certainly as superstitious, and apparently far more so than the ignorant Tibetans themselves, on whom they father every iniquity, one has but to read these letters to recognize in them that spirit of odium theologicum
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* The term Dug-pa in Tibet is depreciatory. They themselves pronounce it Dog-pa, Irons from the root to ‘bind’’ (religious binders to the old faith); while the paramount sect (the Gyeluk-pa, Yellow caps) and the people use the word in the sense of mischief-makers, “sorcerers.” The Bhûtanese are generally called Dug-pa throughout Tibet and even in some parts of Northern India.

† Out of twelve capuchin friars who, under the leadership of Father della Penna, established a mission at Lhassa, nine died shortly after, and only three returned home to tell the tale. (See Tibet, by Clements R. Markham.)

‡ See Appendix to Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet. By Clements R. Markham, C.B., F.R.S.; Trübner and co., London.

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felt by every Christian, and especially Catholic missionaries for the “heathen” and their creeds; a spirit which blinds one entirely to a sense of justice. And when could any better opportunity have been found to ventilate their monkish ill-humour and vindictiveness than in the matter of Tibet, the very land of mystery, mysticism and seclusion? Beside these few prejudiced “historians,” but five other men of Europe have ever stepped into Tibet. Of these five, Bogle, Hamilton, and Turner penetrated no farther than its borderlands; Manning (the only European who is known to have set his foot into Lha-ssa* died without revealing its secrets, for reasons suspected, though never admitted, by his only surviving nephew, a clergyman, and Csoma di Körös, never went beyond Zanskar and the lamasery of Phäg-dal.†

The regular system of the Lamaic incarnations of Sang-gyas, or Buddha, began with Tsong-kha-pa. This reformer it not the incarnation of one of the five celestial Dhyâns, or heavenly Buddhas, as is generally supposed, who are said to have been created by Shâkya Muni after he had risen to Nirvana, but that of Amita, one of the Chinese names for Buddha. The records preserved in the Gon-pa (lamasery) of Tda-shi Hlum-po (pronounced in English Teshu Lumbo) show that Sang-gyas incarnated himself in Tsong-kha-pa, in consequence of the great degradation his doctrines had fallen into. Until then there had been no other incarnations than those of the five celestial Buddhas and of their Bodhisattvas, each of the former having created (read, over shadowed with his spiritual wisdom) five of the last-named—there were, and now are in all, but thirty incarnations, five Dhyâns and twenty-five Bodhisattvas. It was because, among many other reforms, Tsong-kha-pa forbade necromancy (which is practised to this day with the most disgusting rites by the Bhons, the aboigines of Tibet, with whom the Red Caps, or Shammars, have always fraternized), that the latter resisted his authority. This act was followed by a split between the two sects. Separating entirely from the Gyalukpas, the Dugpas (Red Caps) from the first in a great minority, settled in various parts
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* We speak of the present century. It is very dubious whether the two missionaries, Huc and Gabet, ever entered kha-ssa. The Lamas deny it.

† We are well aware that the name is generally written Pugdal, but it is erroneous to do so. Pugdal means nothing, and the Tibetans do not give meaningless names to their sacred buildings. We do not know how Csoma di Koros spells it, but, as in the case of Pho-ta-la of Lha-ssa loosely spelt Potala—the lamasery of Phag-dal derives its name from Phag-pa (phag, eminent in holiness, buddha-like, spiritual; and pha, man, father) the title of Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva who incarnates himself in the Dalai-Lamas of Lha-ssa. The valley of the Ganges, where Buddha preached and lived, is also called Phag-yul, the holy, spiritual land ; the word Phag coming from the one root; pha or pho being the corruption of Fo )or Buddha) as the Tibetan alphabet contains no letter F.


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of Tibet, chiefly on its borderlands, and principally in Nepaul and Bhûtan. But, while they retained a sort of independence at the monastery of Sakya-Djong, the Tibetan residence of their spiritual (?) chief, Gong-sso Rimbo-chay, the Bhûtanese have been from their beginning the tributaries and vassals of the Dalai-Lamas. In his letter to Warren Hastings in 1774, the Tda-shi Lama, who calls the Bhûtanese “a rude and ignorant race,” whose “Deb Râjah is dependent upon the Dalai Lama,” omits to say that they are also the tributaries of his own state, and have been so for over three centuries and a half. The Tda-shi Lamas have always been more powerful and more highly considered than the Dalai-Lamas. The latter are the creation of the Tda-shi Lama, Nabang-Lob-Sang, the sixth incarnation of Tsoug-kha-pa—himself an incarnation of Amitabha, or Buddha. This hierarchy was regularly installed at Lha-ssa, but it originated only in the latter half of the seventeenth century.*

In Mr. C. R. Markham’s highly interesting work above noticed, the author has gathered every scrap of information that had ever been brought to Europe about that terra incognita. It contains one passage, which, to our mind, sums up in a few words the erroneous views taken by the Orientalists of Lamaism in general, and of its system of perpetual reincarnation especially. This passage runs as follows:

It was indeed at about the period of Hiuen-Thsang’s journey that Buddhism first began to find its way into Tibet, both from the direction of China and that of India; but it came in a very different form from that in which it reached Ceylon several centuries earlier. Traditions, metaphysical speculations, and new dogmas, had overlaid the original Scriptures with an enormous collection of more recent revelation. Thus Tibet received a vast body of truth, and could only assimulate a portion for the establishment of popular belief. Since the original Scriptures had been conveyed into Ceylon by the son of Asoka, it had been revealed to the devout Buddhists of India that their Lord had created the five Dhyâni or celestial Buddhas, and that each of these had created five Boddhisatwas, or beings in the course of attaining Buddhahood. The Tibetans took firm hold of this phase of the Buddh- istic creed, and their distinctive belief is that the Boddhisatwas continue to remain in existence for the good of mankind by passing through a succession of human beings from the cradle to the grave. This characteristic of their faith was gradually
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* Says Mr. Markham in Tibet (p. xvii. preface): “Gedun-tubpa. another great reformer, was contemporary with Tsong-kha-pa, having been born in 1339, and dying in 1474 [having thus lived 135 years]. He built the monastery at Teshu Lumbo [Tda-shi Hium-po] in 1445, and it was in the person of this perfect Lama, as he was called, that the system of perpetual incarnation commenced. He was himself the incarnation of Boddhisatwa Padma Pani, and on his death he relinqoished the attainment of Buddhahood that he might be born again and again for the benefit of mankind. When he died his successor was found as an infant by the possession of certain divine marks.’’


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developed, and it was long before it received its present form; * but the succession of incarnate Boddhisatwas was the idea towards which the Tibetan mind tended from the first.

At the same time, as Max Muller says:

The most important element of the Buddhist reform has always been its social and moral code, not its metaphysical theories. That moral code, taken by itself, is one of the most perfect which the world has over known; and it was this blessing that the introduction of Buddhism brought into Tibet. †

The “blessing” has remained and spread all over the country, there being no kinder, purer-minded, more simple or sin-fearing nation than the Tibetans, missionary-slanders notwithstanding.‡ But yet, for all that, the popular Lamaism, when compared with the real esoteric, or Arahat Buddhism of Tibet, offers a contrast as great as the snow trodden along a road in the valley, to the pure and undefiled mass which glitters on the top of a high mountain peak.§ A few of such mistaken notions about the latter, we will now endeavour to correct as far as it is compatible to do so.

Before it can be clearly shown how the Bhûtanese were forcibly brought into subjection, and their Dharma Râjâ made to accept the “incarnations” only after these had been examined into, and recognized at Lha-ssa, we have to throw a retrospective glance at the state of the Tibetan religion during the seven centuries which preceded the
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* Its “present” is its earliest form, as we will try to show further on. A correct analysis of any religion viewed from its popular aspect only becomes impossible—least of all Lamaism, or esoteric Buddhism as disfigured by the untutored imaginative fervour of the populace. There is a vaster difference between the Lamaism of the learned classes of the clergy and the ignorant masses of their parishioners than there is between the christianity of a Bishop Berkeley and that of a modern Irish peasant. Hitherto Orientalists have made themselves superficially acquainted only with the beliefs and rites of popular Buddhism in Tibet, chiefly through the distorting glasses of missionaries, which throw out of focus every religion but their own. The same course has been followed in respect to sinhalese Buddhism, the missionaries having, as colonel Olcott observes in the too brief preface to his Buddhist catechism, for many years been taunting the sinhalese with the “puerility and absurdity of their religion” when, in point of fact, what they talk of is not orthodox Buddhism at all. Buddhist folklore and fairy stories are the accretions of twenty-six centuries.

† Introduction to the Science of Religion, p. xiv.

‡ The reader has not to compare in Mr. Markham’s Tibet the warm, impartial and frank praises bestowed by Bogle and Turner on the Tibetan character and moral standing and the enthusiastic eulogies of Thomas Manning to the address of the Dalai-Lama and his people, with the three letters of the three Jesuits in the “Appendix,” to enable himself to form a decisive opinion, while the former three gentlemen, impartial narrators, having no object to distort truth, hardly and sufficient adjectives to express their satisfaction with the Tibetans, the three “men of God” pick no better terms for the Dalai-Lamas and the Tibetans than “their devilish God the Father,” “vindictive devils,’ “fiends who know how to dissemble,’’ who are “cowardly, arrogant, and proud,” “dirty and immoral.” etc., all in the same strain for the sake of truth and christian charity!

§ As Father Desideri has it in one of his very few correct remarks about the Lamas of Tibet, “though many may know how to read their mysterious books, not one can explain them “—an observation by the by, which might be applied with as much justice to the christian as to the Tibetan clergy. (see Tibet, p. 306.)


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reform. As said before, a Lama had come to Bhûtan from Kam----that province which had always been the stronghold and the hot-bed of the Shammar or Bhon rites*—between the ninth and tenth centuries, and had converted them into what he called Buddhism. But in those days, the pure religion of Shâkya Muni had already commenced degenerating into that Lamaism, or rather fetichism, against which four centuries later Tsong-kha-pa arose with all his might. Though three centuries had only passed since Tibet had been converted (with the exception of a handful of Shammars and Bhons), yet esoteric Buddhism had crept far earlier into the country. It had begun superseding the ancient popular rites ever since the time when the Brâhrnans of India, getting again the upper hand over Asoka’s Buddhism, were silently preparing to oppose it, an opposition which culminated in their finally and entirely driving the new faith out of the country. The brotherhood or community of the ascetics known as the Byang-tsiub—the “Accom plished” and the “Perfect”—existed before Buddhism spread in Tibet, and was known, and so mentioned in the pre-buddhistic books of China as the fraternity of the “great teachers of the snowy mountains.”

Buddhism was introduced into Bod-yul in the beginning of the seventh century by a pious Chinese princess, who had married a Tibetan king,† who was converted by her from the Bhon religion into Buddhism, and had become since then a pillar of the faith in Tibet, as Asoka had been nine centuries earlier in India. It was he who sent his minister (according to European Orientalists), his own brother, the first Lama in the country (according to Tibetan historical records) to India. This brother minister returned ‘with the great body of truth contained in the Buddhist canonical Scriptures; framed the Tibetan alphabet from the Devanâgari of India, and commenced the translation of the canon from Sanskrit (which had previously been translated from Pâli, the old language of Magadha) into the language of the country.” (See Markham’s Tibet.) ‡
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* The Shammar sect is not, as wrongly supposed, a kind of corrupted Buddhism, but an offshoot of the Bhon religion, itself a degenerated remnant of the chaldæan mysteries of old, now a religion entirely based upon necromancy, sorcery and soothsaying. The introduction of Buddha’s name in it means nothing.

† A widely-spread tradition tells us that after ten years of married life she renounced it, with her husband’s consent, and in the garb of a nun (a Ghelung-ma, or Ani) she preached Buddhism all over the country, as, several centuries earlier, the Princess Sanghamitta, Asoka’s daughter, preached it in India and ceylon.

‡ But what he does not say (for none of the writers he derives his information from knew it) is that this princess is the one who is believed to have reincarnated herself since then in a succession of female Lamas or Rim ani— precious nuns. Durjiay Pan-mo of whom Bogle speaks (his Tda-shi Lama’s half-sister), and the superior of the nunnery on the Lake Yam-dog-ccho or Piate-Lake was one of such reincarnations.


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TIBET.

Under the old rule and before the reformation, the high Lamas were often permitted to marry, so as to incarnate themselves in their own direct descendants—a custom which Tsong-kha-pa abolished, strictly enjoining celibacy on the Lamas. The Lama Enlightener of Bhûtan had a son whom he had brought with him. In this son’s first male child born after his death, the Lama had promised the people to reincarnate him self. About a year after the event—so goes the religious legend—the son was blessed by his Bhûtanese wife with triplets, all the three boys! Under this embarrassing circumstance, which would have floored any other casuists, the Asiatic metaphysical acuteness was fully exhibited. The spirit of the deceased Lama, the people were told, incarnated him self in all the three boys. One had his Om, the other his Han, the third his Hoong; or in Sanskrit, Buddha, divine mind ; Dharma, matter or animal soul; and Sangha, the union of the former two in our phenomenal world. It is this pure Buddhist tenet which was degraded by the cunning Bhûtanese clergy to serve the better their ends. Thus their first Lama became a triple incarnation, three Lamas, one of whom, they say, got his “body,” the other his “heart,” and the third his “word” or “wisdom.” This hierarchy lasted with power undivided until the fifteenth century, when a Lama named Dukpa Shab-tung, who had been defeated by the Gyalukpas of Gay-don Toob-pa Bhûtan at the head of his army of monks. Conquering the whole country, he proclaimed himself their first Dharma Râjâ, or Lama Rimbochay—thus starting a third “Gem” in opposition to the two Gyalukpa “Gems.” But this “Gem” never rose to the eminence of a Majesty, least of all was he ever considered a “Gem of Learning” or wisdom. He was defeated very soon after his proclamation by Tibetan soldiers, aided by Chinese troops of the Yellow Sect, and forced to come to terms. One of the clauses was the permission to reign spiritually over the Red Caps in Bhûtan, provided he consented to reincarnate himself in Lha-ssa after his death, and make the law hold good for ever. No Dharma Râjâ since then was ever proclaimed or recognized, unless he was born either at Lha-ssa or on the Tda-shi Hlum-po territory. Another clause was to the effect that the Dharma Râjâs should never permit public exhibitions of their rites of sorcery and necromancy, and the third that a sum of money should be
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* The builder and founder of Tda-shi Hlum (Teshu-lumbo) called the Perfect Lama,’’ or Panchhen—the “Precious Jewel ‘‘—from the words, Pan-chhen great teacher, and Rim_bochay priceless jewel. While the Dalai-Lama is only Gyalba Rim-bochay, or “Gem of Kingly Majesty,” the Tda-shi Lama of Tzi-gadze is Panchhen Rim-bochay or the Gem of Wisdom and Learning.


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paid yearly for the maintenance of a lamasery, with a school attached where the orphans of Red Caps and the converted Shammars should be instructed in the “Good Doctrine” of the Gyalukpas. That the latter must have had some secret power over the Bhûtanese, who are among the most inimical and irreconcilable of their Red-capped enemies, is proved by the fact that Lama Duk-pa Shab-tung was reborn at Lha-ssa, and that to this day the reincarnated Dharma Râjâ are sent and installed at Bhûtan by the Lha-ssa and Tzi-gadze authorities. The latter have no concern in the administration save their spiritual authority, and leave the temporal government entirely in the hands of the Deb-Râjâ and the four Pen-lobs, called in Indian official papers Penlows, who in their turn are under the immediate authority of the Lha-ssa officials.

From the above it will be easily understood that no Dharma Râjâ was ever considered as an incarnation of Buddha. The expression that the latter “never dies” applies but to the two great incarnations of equal rank—the Dalai and the Tda-shi Lamas. Both are incarnations of Buddha, though the former is generally designated as that of Avalokiteshvara, the highest celestial Dhyân. For him who under stands the puzzling mystery by having obtained a key to it, the Gordian knot of these successive reincarnations is easy to untie. He knows that Avalokiteshvara and Buddha are one as Amita-pho* (pronounced Fo) or Amita-Buddha is identical with the former. What the mystic doctrine of the initiated Phag-pa or “saintly men” (adepts) teaches upon this subject, is not to be revealed to the world at large.
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* In Tibet pho and pha—pronounced with a soft labial breath-like sound—means at the same time “man, father.” So Phayul is native land; Pho-nya, angel, messenger of good news; Pha-me, ancestors, etc.,

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