Before The Veil
It is nineteen centuries since, as we are told, the night of Heathenism and Paganism was first dispelled by the divine light of Christianity; and two-and-a-half centuries since the bright lamp of Modern Science began to shine on the darkness of the ignorance of the ages.
Within these respective epochs, we are required to believe, the true moral and intellectual progress of the race has occurred. The ancient philosophers were well enough for their respective generations, but they were illiterate as compared with modern men (women) of science.
The ethics of Paganism perhaps met the wants of the uncultivated people of antiquity, but not until the advent of the luminous "Star of Bethlehem", was the true road to moral perfection and the way to salvation made plain.
Of old, brutishness was the rule, virtue and spirituality the exception. Now, the dullest may read the will of God in His revealed word; men (women) have every incentive to be good, and are constantly becoming better.
This is the assumption; what are the facts? On the one hand an unspiritual, dogmatic, too often debauched clergy; a host of sects, and three warring great religions; discord instead of union, dogmas without proofs, sensation-loving preachers, and wealth and pleasure-seeking parishioners' hypocrisy and bigotry, begotten by the tyrannical exigencies of respectability, the rule of the day, sincerity and real piety exceptional.
On the other hand, scientific hypotheses built on sand; no accord upon a single question; rancorous quarrels and jealousy; a general drift into materialism. A death-grapple of Science with Theology for infallibility - " a conflict of ages".
At Rome, the self-styled seat of Christianity, the putative successor to the chair of Peter is undermining social order with his invisible but omnipresent net-work of bigoted agents, and incites them to revolutionize Europe for his temporal as well as spiritual supremacy. We see him who calls himself the "Vicar of Christ", fraternizing with the anti-Christian Moslem against another Christian nation, publicly invoking the blessing of God upon the arms of those who have for centuries withstood, with fire and sword, the pretensions of his Christ to Godhood!
At Berlin - one of the great seats of learning - professors of modern EXACT sciences, turning their backs on the boasted results of enlightenment of the post Galileonian period, are quietly snuffing out the candle of the great Florentine; seeking, in short, to prove the heliocentric system, and even the earth's rotation, but the dreams of deluded scientists, Newton a visionary, and all past and present astronomers but clever calculators of unverifiable problems.
Between these two conflicting Titans - Science and Theology - is a bewildered public, fast losing all belief in man's (woman's) personal immortality, in a deity of any kind, and rapidly descending to the level of a mere animal existence. Such is the picture of the hour, illumined by the bright noonday sun of this Christian and scientific era!
Would it be strict justice to condemn to critical lapidation the most humble and modest of authors for ENTIRELY REJECTING THE AUTHORITY OF BOTH THESE COMBATANTS? Are we not bound rather to take as the true aphorism of this century, the declaration of Horace Greeley: " I accept UNRESERVEDLY the views of no man (woman), living or dead"? Such, at all events, will be our motto, and we mean that principle to be our constant guide throughout this work.
Among the many phenomenal outgrowths of our century, the strange creed of the so-called Spiritualists has arisen amid the tottering ruins of self-styled revealed religions and materialistic philosophies; and yet it alone offers a possible last refuge of compromise between the two. That this unexpected ghost of pre-Christian days finds poor welcome from our sober and positive century, is not surprising. Times have strangely changed; and it is but recently that a well known Brooklyn preacher pointedly remarked in a sermon, that could Jesus come back and behave in the streets of New York, as he did in those of Jerusalem, he would find himself confined in the prison of the Tombs.
What sort of welcome, then, could Spiritualism ever expect? True enough, the weird stranger seems neither attractive nor promising at first sight. Shapeless and uncouth, like an infant attended by seven nurses, it is coming out of its teens lame and mutilated. The name of its enemies is legion; its friends and protectors are a handful. But what of that? When was ever truth accepted a priori? Because the champions of Spiritualism have in their fanaticism magnified its qualities, and remained blind to its imperfections, that gives no excuse to doubt its reality.
A forgery is impossible when we have no model to forge after. The fanaticism of Spiritualists is itself a proof of the genuineness and possibility of their phenomena. They give us facts that we may investigate, not assertions that we must believe without proof. Millions of reasonable men and women do not so easily succumb to collective hallucination. And so, while the clergy, following their own interpretations of the BIBLE, and science its self-made CODES of possibilities in nature, refuse it a fair hearing, REAL science and TRUE religion are silent, and gravely waiting further developments.
The whole question of phenomena rests on the correct comprehension of old philosophies. Whither, then, should we turn, in our perplexity, but to the ancient sages, since, on the pretext of superstition, we are refused an explanation by the modern? Let us ask them what they know of genuine science and religion; not in the matter of mere details, but in all the broad conception of these twin truths - so strong in their unity, so weak when divided. Besides, we may find our profit in comparing this boasted modern science with ancient ignorance; this improved modern theology with the "Secret doctrines" of the ancient universal religion. Perhaps we may thus discover a neutral ground whence we can reach and profit by both.
It is the Platonic philosophy, the most elaborate compend of the abstruse systems of old India, that can alone afford us this middle ground. Although twenty-two and a quarter centuries have elapsed since the death of Plato, the great minds of the world are still occupied with his writings. He was, in the fullest sense of the word, the world's interpreter. And the greatest philosopher of the pre-Christian era mirrored faithfully in his works the spiritualism of the Vedic philosophers who loved thousands of years before himself, and its metaphysical expression.
Vyasa, Djeminy, Kapila, Vrihaspati, Sumati, and so many others, will be found to have transmitted their indelible imprint through the intervening centuries upon Plato and his school. Thus is warranted the inference that to Plato and the ancient Hindu sages was alike revealed the same wisdom. So surviving the shock of time, what can this wisdom be but divine and eternal?
Plato taught justice as subsisting in the soul of its possessor and his greatest good. "Men, in proportion to their intellect, have admitted his transcendent claims." Yet his commentators, almost with one consent, shrink from every passage which implies that his metaphysics are based on a solid foundation, and not on ideal conceptions.
But Plato could not accept a philosophy destitute of spiritual aspirations; the two were at one with him. For the old Grecian sage there was a single object of attainment: REAL KNOWLEDGE. He considered those only to be genuine philosophers, or students of truth, who possess the knowledge of the really-existing, in opposition to the mere seeing; of the ALWAYS-EXISTING, in opposition to the transitory; and of that which exists PERMANENTLY, in opposition to that which waxes, wanes, and is developed and destroyed alternately.
"Beyond all finite existences and secondary causes, all laws, ideas, and principles, there is an INTELLIGENCE OF MIND (vous, nous, the spirit), the first principle of all principles, the Supreme Idea on which all other ideas are grounded; the Monarch and Lawgiver of the universe; the ultimate substance from which all things derive their being and essence, the first and efficient Cause of all the order, and harmony, and beauty, and excellency, and goodness, which pervades the universe - who is called, by way of preeminence and excellence, the Supreme Good, the God...'the God over all'...He is not the truth nor the intelligence, but "the father of it". Though this eternal essence of things may not be perceptible by our physical senses, it may be apprehended by the mind of those who are not wilfully obtuse.
"To you," said Jesus to his elect disciples, "it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to them...it is not given;....therefore speak I to them in parables (or allegories); because they seeing, see not, and hearing, they hear not, neither do they understand."
The philosophy of Plato, we are assured by Porphry, of the Neo-platonic School was taught and illustrated in the MYSTERIES. Many have questioned and even denied this; and Lobeck, in his AGLAOPHOMUS, has gone to the extreme of representing the sacred orgies as little more than an empty show to captivate the imagination. As though Athens and Greece would for twenty centuries and more have repaired every fifth year to Eleusis to witness a solemn religious farce!
Augustine, the papa-bishop of Hippo, has resolved such assertions. He declares that the doctrines of the Alexandrian Platonists were the original esoteric doctrines of the first followers of Plato, and describes Plotinus as a Plato resuscitated. He also explains the motives of the great philosopher for veiling the interior sense of what he taught.
(The accusations of atheism, the introducing of foreign deities, and corrupting of the Athenian youth, which were made against Socrates, afforded ample justification for Plato to conceal the arcane preaching of his doctrines. Doubtless the peculiar diction or 'jargon' of the alchemists was employed for a like purpose.
The dungeon, the rack, and the fagot were employed without scruple by Christians of every shade, the Roman Catholics especially, against all who taught even natural science contrary to the theories entertained by the Church. Pope Gregory the Great even inhibited the grammatical use of Latin as heathenish.
The offense of Socrates consisted in unfolding to his disciples the arcane doctrine concerning the gods, which was taught in the Mysteries and was a capital crime. He also was charged by Aristophanes with introducing the new god Dinos into the republic as the demiurgos or artificer, and the lord of the solar universe.
The Heliocentric system was also a doctrine of the Mysteries; and hence, when Aristarchus the Pythagorean taught it openly, Cleanthes declared that the Greeks ought to have called him to account and condemned him for blasphemy against the gods, " - (Plutarch).
But Socrates had never been initiated, and hence divulged nothing which had ever been imparted to him.)
As to the MYTHS, Plato declares in the GORGIAS and the PHAEDON that they were the vehicles of great truths well worth the seeking. But commentators are so little EN RAPPORT with the great philosopher as to be compelled to acknowledge that they are ignorant where "the doctrinal ends, and the mythical begins."
Plato put to flight the popular superstition concerning magic and daemons, and developed the exaggerated notions of the time into rational theories and metaphysical conceptions. Perhaps these would not quite stand the inductive method of reasoning established by those who apprehend the existence of that higher faculty of insight or intuition, as affording a criterion for ascertaining truth.
Basing all his doctrines upon the presence of the Supreme Mind, Plato taught that the NOUS, spirit or rational soul of man, being "generated by the Divine Father," possessed a nature kindred, or even homogenous with the Divinity, and was capable of beholding the eternal realities.
This faculty of contemplating reality in a direct and immediate manner belongs to God alone; the aspiration for this knowledge constitutes what is really meant by PHILOSOPHY - the love of wisdom.
The love of truth is inherently the love of good; and so predominating over every desire of the soul, purifying it and assimilating it to the divine, thus governing every act of the individual, it raises man to a participation and communion with Divinity, and restores him to the likeness of God.
"This flight," says Plato in the THAETETUS, "consists in becoming like God, and this assimilation is the becoming just and holy with wisdom."
The basis of this assimilation is always asserted to be the preexistence of the spirit or NOUS. In the allegory of the chariot and winged steeds, given in the PHAEDRUS, he represents the psychical nature as composite and two-fold; the THUMOS, or EPITHUMETIC part, formed from the substances of the world of phenomena; and the ---, the essence of which is linked to the eternal world. The present earth-life is a fall and punishment.
The soul dwells in "the grave which we call THE BODY," and in its incorporate state, and previous to the discipline of education, the noetic or spiritual element is "asleep". Life is thus a dream, rather than a reality. Like the captives in the subterranean cave, described in THE REPUBLIC, the back is turned to the light, we perceive only the shadows of objects, and think them the actual realities.
Is not this the idea of MAYA, or the illusion of the senses in physical life, which is so marked a feature in Buddhistical philosophy? But these shadows, if we have not given ourselves up absolutely to the sensuous nature, arouse in us the reminiscence of that higher world that we once inhabited.
"The interior spirit has some dim and shadowy recollection of its antenatal state of bliss has some dim and shadowy recollection of its antenatal state of bliss, and some instinctive and proleptic yearnings for its return." It is the province of the discipline of philosophy to disinthrall it from the bondage of sense, and raise it into the empyrean of pure thought, to the vision of eternal truth, goodness, and beauty.
"The soul," says Plato, in the THEATETUS, "cannot come into the form of a man (woman) if it has never seen the truth. this is a recollection of those things which our soul formerly saw when journeying with Deity, despising the things which we now say ARE, and looking up to that which REALLY IS.
Wherefore the NOUS, or spirit, of the philosopher (or student of the higher truth) alone is furnished with wings; because he (she), to the best of his (her) ability, keeps these things in mind, of which the contemplation renders even Deity itself divine. By making the right use of these things remembered from the former life, by constantly perfecting himself in the perfect mysteries, a man (woman) becomes truly perfect - an initiate into the diviner wisdom."
Hence we may understand why the sublimer scenes in the Mysteries were always in the night. The life of the interior spirit is the death of the external nature; and the night of the physical world denotes the day of the spiritual. Dionysus, the night-sun, is, therefore, worshipped rather than Helios, orb of day.
In the Mysteries were symbolized the preexisting condition of the spirit and soul, and the lapse of the latter into earth-life and Hades, the miseries of that life, the purification of the soul, and its restoration to divine bliss, or reunion with spirit. Theon, of Smyrna, aptly compares the philosophical discipline to the mystic rites: "Philosophy," says he, "may be called the initiation into the true arcana, and the instruction in the genuine Mysteries.
There are five parts of this initiation:
I..., the previous purification;
ll., the admission to participation in the arcane rites;
lll., the epoptic revelation;
lV., the investiture or enthroning;
V. - the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communication with God, and the enjoyment of that felicity which arises from intimate converse with divine beings....
Plato denominates the EPOPTEIA, or personal view, the perfect contemplation of things which are apprehended intuitively, absolute truths and ideas. He also considers the binding of the head and crowning as analogues to the authority which any one receives from his instructors, of leading others into the same contemplation.
The fifth gradation is the most perfect felicity arising from hence, and, according to Plato, an assimilation to divinity as far as is possible to human beings.
Such is Platonism. "Out of Plato," says Ralph Waldo Emerson, "come all things that are still written and debated among men (women) of thought." He absorbed the learning of his times - of Greece from Philolaus to Socrates; then of Pythagoras in Italy; then what he could procure from Egypt and the East. He was so broad that all philosophy, European and Asiatic, was in his doctrines; and to culture and contemplation he added the nature and qualities of the poet.
The followers of Plato generally adhered strictly to his psychological theories. Several, however, like Xenocrates, ventured into bolder speculations. Speusippus, the nephew and successor of the great philosopher, was the author of the NUMERICAL ANALYSIS, a treatise on the Pythagorean numbers. Some of his speculations are not found in the written DIALOGUES; but as he was a listener to the unwritten lectures of Plato, the judgment of Enfield is doubtless correct, that he did not differ from his master.
He was evidently, though not named, the antagonist whom Aristotle criticised, when professing to cite the argument of Plato against the doctrine of Pythagoras, that all things were in themselves numbers, or rather, inseparable from the idea of numbers. He especially endeavoured to show that the Platonic doctrine of ideas differed essentially from the Pythagorean, in that it presupposed numbers and magnitudes to exist apart from things. He also asserted that Plato taught that there could be no REAL knowledge, if the object of that knowledge was not carried beyond or above the sensible.
But Aristotle was no trustworthy witness. He misrepresented Plato, and he almost caricatured the doctrines of Pythagoras. There is a canon of interpretation, which should guide us in our examinations of every philosophical opinion: "The human mind has, under the necessary operation of its own laws, been compelled to entertain the same fundamental ideas, and the human heart to cherish the same feelings in all ages."
It is certain that Pythagoras awakened the deepest intellectual sympathy of his age, and that his doctrines exerted a powerful influence upon the mind of Plato.
His cardinal idea was that there existed a permanent principle of unity beneath the forms, changes, and other phenomena of the universe. Aristotle asserted that he taught that "numbers are the first principles of all entities." Ritter has expressed the opinion that the formula of Pythagoras should be taken symbolically, which is doubtless correct.
Aristotle goes on to associate these NUMBERS with the "forms" and "ideas" of Plato. He even declares that Plato said: "forms are numbers," and that "ideas are substantial existences - real beings." Yet Plato did not so teach. He declared that the final cause was the Supreme Goodness... "Ideas are objects of pure conception for the human reason, and they are attributes of the Divine Reason." Nor did he ever say that "forms are numbers." What he did say may be found in the TIMAUS: "God formed things as they first arose according to forms and numbers."
It is recognized by modern science that all the higher laws of nature assume the form of quantitative statement. This is perhaps a fuller elaboration or more explicit affirmation of the Pythagorean doctrine. Numbers were regarded as the best representations of the laws of harmony which pervade the cosmos. We know too that in chemistry the doctrine of atoms and the laws of combination are actually and, as it were, arbitrarily defined by numbers. As Mr. W. Archer Butler has arithmetic in its development, a realized geometry in its repose."
The key to the Pythagorean dogmas is the general formula of unity in multiplicity, the one evolving the many and pervading the many. This is the ancient doctrine of emanation in few words. Even the apostle Paul accepted it as true..... Out of him and through him and in him all things are. This, as we can see by the following quotation, is purely Hindu and Brahmanical:
"When the dissolution - Pralaya - had arrived at its term, the great Being - Para-Atma or Para-Purusha - the Lord existing through himself, out of whom and through whom all things were, and are and will be....resolved to emanate from his own substance the various creatures" (Manava - Dharma - Sastra, book l, slokas 6 and 7).
The mystic Decad 1+2+3+4 = 10 is a way of expressing this idea. The One is God, the Two, matter; the Three, combining Monad and Duad, and partaking the nature of both, is the phenomenal world; the Tetrad, or form of perfection, expresses the emptiness of all; and the Decad, or sum of all, involves the entire cosmos. The universe is the combination of a thousand elements, and yet the expression of a single spirit - a chaos to the sense, a cosmos to the reason.
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The whole of this combination of the progression of numbers in the idea of creation is Hindu. The Being existing through himself, Swayambhu or Swayambhuva, as he is called by some, is one. He emanates from himself the CREATIVE FACULTY, Brahma or Purusha (the divine male (female)), and the one becomes TWO; out of this Duad, union of the purely intellectual principle with the principle of matter, evolves a third, which is Viradj, the phenomenal world. It is out of this invisible and incomprehensible trinity, the Brahmanic Trimurty, that evolves the second triad which represents the three faculties - the creative, the conservative, and the transforming.
These are typified by Brahma, Vishnu and Siva, but are again and ever blended into one. UNITY, Brahma, or as the VEDAS called him, AUM or the abbreviated Trimurty. It is but under this trinity, ever active and tangible to all our senses, that the invisible and unknown Monas can manifest itself to the world of mortals. When he (she) becomes SARIRA, or he (she) who puts on a visible form, he (she) typifies all the principles of matter, all the germs of life, he (she) is Purusha, the god (female god) of the three visages, or triple power, the essence of the Vedic triad.
"Let the Brahmas know the sacred Syllable (Aum), the three words of the Savitri, and read the VEDAS daily." (Manu, book iv, sloka 125).
"After having produced the universe, He whose power is incomprehensible vanished again, absorbed in the Supreme Soul....Having retired into the primitive darkness, the great Soul remains within the unknown and is void of all form...."
"When having again reunited the subtile elementary principles, it introduces itself into either a vegetable or animal seed, it assumes at each a new form."
"It is thus that, by an alternative waking and rest, the Immutable Being causes to revive and die eternally all the existing creaatures, active and inert" (Manu, book i, sloka 50, and others).
He who has studied Pythagoras and his speculations on the Monad, which, after having emanated the Duad retires into silence and darkness, and thus creates the Triad can realize whence came the philosophy of the great Samian Sage, and after him that of Socrates and Plato.
Speusippus seems to have taught that the psychical or thumetic soul was immortal as well as the spirit or rational soul, and further on we will show his reasons. He also - like Philolaus and Aristotle, in his disquisitions upon the soul - makes of aether an element; so that there were five principal elements to correspond with the five regular figures in Geometry.
This became also a doctrine of the Alexandrian school. Indeed, there was much in the doctrines of the Philaletheans which did not appear in the works of the older Platonists, but was doubtless taught in substance by the philosopher himself, but with his usual reticence was not committed to writing as being too arcane for promiscuous publication.
Speusippus and Xenocrates after him, held, like their great master, that the ANIMA MUNDI, or world-soul, was not the Deity, but a manifestation. Those philosophers never conceived of the One as an animate nature. The original One did not EXIST, as we understand the term. Not till he had united with the many - emanated existence (the monad and duad) was a being produced.
The ----, honored - the something manifested, dwells in the centre as in the circumference, but it is only the reflection of the Deity - the World-Soul. In this doctrine we find the spirit of esoteric Buddhism.
A man's idea of God, is that image of blinding light that he sees reflected in the concave mirror of his own soul, and yet this is not, in very truth, God, but only His reflection. His glory is there, but, it is the light of his own Spirit that the man sees, and it is all he can bear to look upon. THE CLEARER THE MIRROR, THE BRIGHTER WILL BE THE DIVINE IMAGE. But the external world cannot be witnessed in it at the same moment. But the external world cannot be witnessed in it at the same moment.
In the ecstatic Yogin, in the illuminated Seer, the spirit will shine like the noonday sun; in the debased victim of earthly attraction, the radiance has disappeared, for the mirror is obscured with the stains of matter. Such men deny their God, and would willingly deprive humanity of soul at one blow.
NO GOD, NO SOUL? Dreadful, annihilating thought! The maddening nightmare of a lunatic - Atheist; presenting before his fevered vision, a hideous, ceaseless procession of sparks of cosmic matter created by NO ONE; self-appearing, self-existent, and self-developing; this Self NO Self, for it is NOTHING and NOBODY; floating onward from NOWHENCE, it is propelled by no Cause, for there is none, and it rushes NOWHITHER.
And this in a circle of Eternity blind, inert, and - CAUSELESS. What is even the erroneous conception of the Buddhistic Nirvana in comparison! The Nirvana is preceded by numberless spiritual transformations and metempsychoses, during which the entity loses not for a second the sense of its own individuality, and which may last for millions of ages before the Final NO-Thing is reached.
Though some have considered Speusippus as inferior to Aristotle, the world is nevertheless indebted to him for defining and expounding many things that Plato had left obscure in his doctrine of the Sensible and Ideal. His maxim was "The Immaterial is known by means of scientific thought, the Material by scientific perception."
Xenocrates expounded many of the unwritten theories and teachings of his master. He too held the Pythagorean doctrine, and his system of numbers and mathematics in the highest estimation. Recognising but three degrees of knowledge - THOUGHT, PERCEPTION, and ENVISAGEMENT (or knowledge by INTUITION), he made the former busy itself with all that which is BEYOND the heavens; Perception with things in the heavens; Intuition with the heavens themselves.
We find again these theories, and nearly in the same language in the Manava - Dharma - Sastra, when speaking of the creation of man (woman);
"He (the supreme) drew from his own essence the immortal breath which PERISHETH NOT IN THE BEING, and to this soul of the being he gave the Ahancara (consciousness of the EGO) sovereign guide."
Then he gave to that soul of the being (man/woman) the intellect formed of THE THREE QUALITIES, and the five organs of the outward perception.
These three qualities are Intelligence, Conscience, and Will; answering to the Thought, Perception, and Envisagement of Xenocrates.
The relation of numbers to Ideas was developed by him further than by Speusippus, and he surpassed Plato in his definition of the doctrine of Invisible Magnitudes. Reducing them to their ideal primary elements, he demonstrated that every figure and form originated out of the smallest indivisible line.
That Xenocrates held the same theories as Plato in relation to the human soul (supposed to be a number) is evident, though Aristotle contradicts this, like every other teaching of this philosopher.
This is conclusive evidence that many of Plato's doctrines were delivered orally, even were it shown that Xenocrates and not Plato was the first to originate the theory of indivisible magnitudes. He derives the Soul from the first Duad, and calls it a self-moved number.
Theophrastus remarks that he entered and eliminated this Soul-theory more than any other Platonist. He built upon it the cosmological doctrine, and proved the necessary existence in every part of the universal space of a successive and progressive series of animated and thinking though spiritual beings. The Human Soul with him is a compound of the most spiritual properties of the Monad and the Duad, possessing the highest principles of both.
If, like Plato and Prodicus, he refers to the Elements as to Divine Powers, and calls them gods, neither himself nor others connected any anthropomorphic idea with the appellation. Krishche remarks that he called them gods only that these elementary powers should not be confounded with the daemons of the nether world (the Elementary Spirits).
As the Soul of the World permeates the whole Cosmos, even beasts must have in them something divine. This, also, is the doctrine of Buddhists and the Hermetists, and Manu endows with a living soul even the plants and the tiniest blade of grass.
The daemons, according to this theory, are intermediate beings between the divine perfection and human sinfulness, and he divides them into classes, each subdivided in many others. But he states expressly that the individual or personal soul is the leading guardian daemon of every man (woman), and that no daemon has more power over us than our own. Thus the Daimonion of Socrates is the god or Divine Entity which inspired him all his life.
It depends on man (woman) either to open or close his (her) perceptions to the Divine voice. Like Speusippus he ascribed immortality to the psychical body, or irrational soul. But some Hermetic philosophers have taught that the soul has a separate continued existence only so long as in its passage through the spheres any material or earthly particles remain incorporated in it; and that when absolutely purified, the latter are ANNIHILATED, and the quintessence of the soul alone becomes blended with its DIVINE spirit (the RATIONAL), and the two are thenceforth one.
Zeller states that Xenocrates forbade the eating of animal food, not because he saw in beasts something akin to man (woman), as he ascribed to them a dim consciousness of God, but, "for the opposite reason, lest the irrationality of animal souls might thereby obtain a certain influence over us." But we believe that it was rather because, like Pythagoras, he has the Hindu sages for his masters and models.
Cicero depicted Xenocrates utterly despising everything except the highest virtue; and describes the stainlessness and severe austerity of his character. "To free ourselves from the subjection of sensuous existence, to conquer the Titanic elements in our terrestrial nature through the Divine one, is our problem." Zeller makes him say: "Purity, even in the secret longings of our heart, is the greatest duty, and only philosophy and the initiation into the Mysteries help toward the attainment of this object."
Crantor, another philosopher associated with the earliest days of Plato's Academy, conceived the human soul as formed out of the primary substance of all things, the Monad or One and the Duad or the Two. Plutarch speaks at length of this philosopher, who like his master believed in souls being distributed in earthly bodies as an exile and punishment.
Herakleides, though some critics do not believe him to have strictly adhered to Plato's primal philosophy, taught the same ethics. Zeller presents him to us imparting, like Hicetas and Ecphantus, the Pythagorean doctrine of the diurnal rotation of the earth and the immobility of the fixed stars, but adds that he was ignorant of the annual revolution of the earth around the sun, and of the heliocentric system. But we have good evidence that the latter system was taught in the Mysteries, and that Socrates died for ATHEISM, ie, for divulging this sacred knowledge.
Herakleides adopted fully the Pythagorean and Platonic views of the human soul, its faculties and its capabilities. He describes it was a luminous, highly ethereal essence. He affirms that souls inhabit the milky way before descending "into generation" or sublunary existence. His daemons or spirits are airy and vaporous bodies.
In the EPINOMIS is fully stated the doctrine of the Pythagorean numbers in relation to created things. As a true Platonist its author maintains that wisdom can only be attained by a thorough inquiry into the occult nature of the creation; it alone assures us an existence of bliss after death. The immortality of the soul is greatly speculated upon in this treatise; but its author adds that we can attain to this knowledge only through a complete comprehension of the numbers; for the man (woman), unable to distinguish the straight line from a curved one will never have wisdom enough to secure a mathematical demonstration of the INVISIBLE, i.e., we must assure ourselves of the objective existence of our soul (astral body) before we learn that we are in possession of a divine and immortal spirit.
Iamblichus says the same thing; adding, moreover, that it is a secret belonging to the highest initiation. The Divine Power, he says, always felt indignant with those "who rendered manifest the composition of the ICOSTAGONUS," viz., who delivered the method of inscribing in a sphere the dodecahedron.
The idea that 'numbers' possessing the greatest virtue, produce always what is good and never what is evil, refers to justice, equanimity of temper, and everything that is harmonious. When the author speaks of every star as an individual soul, he only means what the Hindu initiates and the Hermeticists taught before and after him, viz, : that every star is an independent planet, which, like our earth, has a soul of its own, every atom of matter being impregnated with the divine influx of the soul of the world.
It breathes and lives; it feels and suffers as well as enjoys life in its way. What naturalist is prepared to dispute it on good evidence? Therefore, we must consider the celestial bodies as the images of the gods; as partaking of the divine powers in their substance; and though they are not immortal in their soul-entity, their agency in the economy of the universe is entitled to divine honours, such as we pay to minor gods.
The idea is plain, and one must be malevolent indeed to misrepresent it. If the author of EPINOMIS places these fiery gods higher than the animals, plants, and even mankind (humankind), al of which, as earthly creatures, are assigned by him a lower place, who can prove him wholly wrong? One must needs go deep indeed into the profanity of the abstract metaphysics of the old philosophies, who would understand that their various embodiments of the nature of the First Cause, its attributes and method.
Again when the author of EPINOMIS locates between these highest and lowest gods (embodied souls) three classes of daemons, and peoples the universe with invisible beings, he is more rational than our modern scientists, who make between the two extremes one vast hiatus of being, the playground of blind forces.
Of these three classes the first two are invisible; their bodies are pure ether and fire (planetary spirits); the daemons of the third class are clothed with vapoury bodies; they are usually invisible, but sometimes making themselves concrete become visible for a few seconds. These are the earthly spirits, or our astral souls.
It is these doctrines, which, studied analogically, and on the principle of correspondence, led by the ancient, and may now lead the modern Philaletheian step by step toward the solution of the greatest mysteries.
On the brink of the dark chasm separating the spiritual from the physical world stands modern science, with eyes closed, and head averted, pronouncing the gulf impassable and bottomless, though she holds in her hand a torch which she need only lower into the depths to show her her mistake. But across this chasm, the patient student of Hermetic philosophy has constructed a bridge.
In his FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE Tyndall makes the following sad confession: "If you ask me whether science has solved, or is likely in our day to solve the problem of this universe. I must shake my head in doubt." If moved by an afterthought, he corrects himself later, and assures his audience that experimental evidence has helped him to discover, in the opprobrium-covered matter, the "promise and potency of every quality of life," he only jokes. It would be as difficult for Professor Tyndall to offer any ultimate and irrefutable proofs of what he asserts, as it was for Job to insert a hook into the nose of the leviathan.
To avoid confusion that might easily arise by the frequent employment of certain terms in a sense different from that familiar to the reader, a few explanations will be timely. We desire to leave no pretext either for misunderstanding or misrepresentation. Magic may have one signification to one class of readers and another to another class.
We shall give it the meaning which it has in the minds of its Oriental students and practitioners. And so with the words HERMETIC SCIENCE, OCCULTISM, HIEROPHANT ADEPT, SORCERER, etc.; there has been little agreement of late as to their meaning. Though the distinctions between the terms are very often insignificant - merely ethnic - still, it may be useful to the general reader to know just what that is.
We give a few alphabetically.
AETHROBACY
The Greek name for walking or being lifted in the air; LEVITATION, so called, among modern spiritualists. It may be either conscious or unconscious; in the one case, it is magic; in the other, either disease or a power which requires a few words of elucidation.
A symbolical explanation of aethrobacy is given in an old Syriac manuscript which was translated in the fifteenth century by one Malchus, an alchemist. In connection with the case of Simon Magus, one passage reads thus:
"Simon, laying his face upon the ground, whispered in her ear, "O mother Earth, give me, I pray thee, some of thy breath; and I will give thee mine; LET ME LOOSE O mother, that I may carry thy words to the stars, and I will return faithfully to thee after a while." And the Earth strengthening her status, none to her detriment, sent her genius to breathe of her BREATH on Simon, WHILE HE BREATHED ON HER; and the stars rejoiced to be visited by the mighty One."
The starting point here is the recognized electro-chemical principle that bodies similarly electrified repel each other, while those differently electrified repel each other, while those differently electrified mutually attract. "The most elementary knowledge of chemistry," says Professor Cooke, "shows that, while radicals of opposite natures combine most eagerly together, two metals, or two closely allied metalloids, show but little affinity for each other."
The earth is a magnetic body' in fact, as some scientists have found, it is one vast magnet, as Paracelsus affirmed some 300 years ago. It is charged with one form of electricity - let us call it positive - which it evolves continuously by spontaneous action, in its interior or centre of motion. Human bodies, in common with all other forms of matter, are charged with the opposite form of electricity - negative.
That is to say, organic or inorganic bodies, if left to themselves will constantly and involuntarily charge themselves with, and evolve the form of electricity opposed to that of the earth itself. Now, what is weight? Simply the attraction of the earth. "Without the attractions of the earth you would have no weight," says Professor Stewart; and if you are had an earth twice as heavy as this, you would have double the attraction."
How then, can we get rid of this attraction? According to the electrical law above stated, there is an attraction between our planet and the organisms upon it, which holds them upon the surface of the ground. But the law of gravitation has been counteracted in many instances, by levitations of persons and inanimate objects; how account for this? The condition of our physical systems, say theurgic philosophers, is largely dependent upon the action of our will.
Helena Blavatsky
Isis Unveiled
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