Sound and Light, hearing and sight, are always associated. But sound is seen before it is heard. It is useless to demand or expect from the learned men of our age that which they are absolutely incapable of doing for us, until the next cycle changes and transforms entirely their inner nature by “improving the texture” of their spiritual minds. Unless there is an opening, however small, for the passage of a ray from a man’s higher self to chase the darkness of purely material conceptions from the seat of his intellect, his task can never be wrought to a successful termination. For the sun needs an eye to manifest its light. And this, we think, is the case with the materialist: he can judge psychic phenomena only by their external aspect, and no modification is, or ever can be, created in him, so as to open his insight to their spiritual aspect.
Insights to the wisdom-peddlers of Greece. Protagoras, followed by Gorgias and others, found Pythagoras’ title philosopher too narrow, and so they assumed the title of Sophist, signifying one who professes the power of making others wise, a wholesale and retail dealer in wisdom — a wisdom-monger, in the same sense as an iron-monger or fish-monger. Many Sophists, e.g., Euthydemus and Dionysiodorus, were empty disputants, sleight-of-word jugglers, but this was far from being their common character. Both Plato and Aristotle repeatedly admit the brilliancy of their talents and the extent of their acquirements. Gorgias will ever be cited as an example of prostituted genius from the immoral nature of his objects, and the baseness of his motives. These, and not his sophisms, constituted him a Sophist whose eloquence and logical skill rendered him only the more pernicious. The causes of the corruption that came about, first in private and next in public life, which displayed itself in all the free states and communities of Greece, but most of all in Athens, are themselves the effects of that passion for military glory and political preponderance, which may well be called the bastard and the parricide of liberty. Being hireling hunters of the young and rich, the Sophists offered to the vanity of youth and the ambition of wealth a substitute for that authority, which by the institutions of Solon had been attached to high birth and property, as the regular and ordinary results of comparative opulence and renowned ancestry. The minds of men were to be sensualized; and even if the arguments themselves failed, yet the principles so attacked were to be brought into doubt by the mere frequency of hearing all things doubted, and the most sacred of all now openly denied, and then insulted by sneer and ridicule. Religion, in its widest and purest sense, is the act of reverencing the Invisible, as the highest in nature and man. By celestial observations alone can even terrestrial charts be constructed scientifically. The first attempt of the Sophists was to separate ethics from the faith in the Invisible, and to stab morality through the side of religion — an attempt to which the idolatrous polytheism of Greece had furnished too many facilities. Polybius attributes the ruin of the Greek states to the frequency of perjury, which they had learnt from the Sophists, to laugh at as a trifle that broke no bones, nay, as in some cases, an expedient and justifiable exertion of the power given to us by nature over our own words, without which no man could have a secret that might not be extorted from him by the will of others. In the same spirit, the sage and observant historian attributes the growth and strength of the Roman republic to the general reverence of the invisible powers, and the consequent horror in which the breaking of an oath was held. Those who first made the laws were feeble creatures which, in fact, the greater numbers of men are. Laws, honour, and ignominy were all calculated for the advantage of the law-makers. But in order to frighten away the stronger, whom they could not coerce by fair contest, and to secure greater advantages for themselves than their feebleness could otherwise have procured, they preached up the doctrine that it was base and contrary to right to wish to have anything beyond others; and that in this wish consisted the essence of injustice. Another code of right was that the nobler and stronger should possess more than the weaker and more pusillanimous and, therefore, the stronger has a right to control the weaker for his own advantage. The language of sophistry is the power of barefaced selfishness that excludes partnership, a power which all men should have an interest in repelling. And if for power we substitute pleasure, and the means of pleasure, it is easy to construct a system well fitted to corrupt natures, and the more mischievous in proportion as it is less alarming. Music may be divided from poetry, and both may continue to exist, though with diminished influence. But religion and morals cannot be disjoined without the destruction of both; and that this does not take place to the full extent, we owe to the frequency with which both take shelter in the heart, and that men are always better or worse than the maxims which they adopt or concede. As sciences are systems based on principles, so is morality a principle without a system. Systems of morality are nothing more than the old books of casuistry generalized, even of that casuistry which the genius of Protestantism gradually worked off from itself like a heterogeneous bodily fluid, together with the practice of auricular confession. Selfishness it the origin and cause of all evil. It is the thorn in the soul which, unless a man shall have it removed, he can never soar above and be free as air. The word constitution has been altered to mean capitulation, a treaty imposed by the people on their own government (as on a conquered enemy), thus giving sanction to falsehood, and universality to anomaly. Popularise and philosophy and you will soon end in perverting every noble truth.
Materialism is the offspring of theological and dogmatic anthropomorphism. Every nation made a god of its own and, in its great ignorance and superstition, served, and flattered, and tried to propitiate that god. There can be no conscious meeting in Kama-loka, hence no grief. We meet those we loved only in Devachan, that subjective world of perfect bliss, which succeeds the Kama-loka. Kama-loka may be compared to the dressing-room of an actor, in which he divests himself of the costume of the last part he played before rebecoming himself properly. Once we realize that form is merely a temporary perception dependent on our physical senses and the idiosyncrasies of our physical brain, and has no existence on its own, then this illusion that formless cause cannot be causative of forms will soon vanish. Virtuous living alone, if uninformed by esoteric philosophy and unillumined by divine wisdom, cannot lead to friendship and interior communion with God. John Stuart Mill was a case of a wonderful development of the intellectual and terrestrial side of psyche or soul, but Spirit he rejected as all Agnostics do.
Mankind is at best a sorry herd of Panurgian sheep, following blindly the leader that happens to suit it at the moment. The majority, at any rate, hates to think for itself, and ignores the tremendous problems of man’s inner nature. “Old times” are just like “modern times”; nothing is changed as to magical practices except that they have become still more esoteric and arcane, and that the caution of the adepts increases in proportion to the traveller’s curiosity. Magic is indissolubly blended with the Religion of every country and is inseparable from its origin. It is as impossible for History to name the time when it was not, as that of the epoch when it sprang into existence, unless the doctrines preserved by the Initiates are taken into consideration. Modern society, on the authority of some men of Science, calls Magic charlatanry. Still, the whole ancient world, with its Scholars and Philosophers, its Sages and Prophets, believed in it. Where is the country in which it was not practiced? At what age was it banished, even from our own country? In the New World as in the Old Country (the latter far younger than the former), the Science of Sciences was known and practiced from the remotest antiquity. The Mexicans had their Initiates, their Priest-Hierophants and Magicians, and their crypts of Initiation. The Mexican pyramids are those of Egypt, built according to the same secret canon of proportion as those of the Pharaohs, and the Aztecs appear to have derived their civilization and religion in more than one way from the same source as the Egyptians and, before these, the Indians. Among all these three peoples arcane Natural Philosophy, or Magic, was cultivated to the highest degree. Herodotus knew that the real purpose of the pyramid was very different from that which he assigns to it. Were it not for his religious scruples, he might have added that, externally, it symbolized the creative principle of nature, and illustrated also the principles of geometry, mathematics, astrology, and astronomy. Internally, it was a majestic fane, in whose sombre recesses were performed the Mysteries, and whose walls had often witnessed the initiation-scenes of members of the royal family. The porphyry sarcophagus, which Professor Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer-Royal of Scotland, degrades into a corn-bin, was the baptismal font, upon emerging from which, the neophyte was “born again,” and became an adept. Democritus applied himself to discover the method by which the Theurgists could produce them; in a word, his philosophy brought him to the conclusion that Magic was entirely confined to the application and the imitation of the laws and the works of nature. The true Theosophist knows indubitably that the Secret Doctrine of the East contains the Alpha and the Omega of Universal Science; that in its obscure texts, under the luxuriant, though perhaps too exuberant, growth of allegorical Symbolism, lie concealed the corner- and the key-stones of all ancient and modern knowledge. That Stone, brought down by the Divine Builder, is now rejected by the too-human workman, and this because, in his lethal materiality, man has lost every recollection, not only of his holy childhood, but of his very adolescence, when he was one of the Builders himself; when “the morning stars sang together, and the Sons of God shouted for joy,” after they had laid the measures for the foundations of the earth — to use the deeply significant and poetical language of Job, the Arabian Initiate. But those who are still able to make room in their innermost selves for the Divine Ray, and who accept, therefore, the data of the Secret Sciences in good faith and humility, they know well that it is in this Stone that remains buried the absolute in Philosophy, which is the key to all those dark problems of Life and Death, some of which, at any rate, may find an explanation in these volumes. Like an immense boa constrictor, Error, in every shape, encircles mankind, trying to smother in her deadly coils every aspiration towards truth and light. But Error is powerful only on the surface, prevented as she is by Occult Nature from going any deeper; for the same Occult Nature encircles the whole globe, in every direction, leaving not even the darkest corner unvisited. And, whether by phenomenon or miracle, by spirit-hook or bishop’s crook, Occultism must win the day, before the present era reaches Shani’s (Saturn’s) triple septenary” of the Western Cycle in Europe, in other words — before the end of the twenty-first century AD. People laugh at Magic! Men of Science, Physiologists and Biologists, deride the potency and even the belief in the existence of what is called in vulgar parlance “Sorcery” and “Black Magic.” The archaeologists have their Stonehenge in England with its thousands of secrets, and its twin-brother Carnac of Brittany, and yet there is not one of them who even suspects what has been going on in its crypts, and its mysterious nooks and corners, for the last century. More than that, they do not even know of the existence of such “magic halls” in their Stonehenge, where curious scenes are taking place, whenever there is a new convert in view. The conscience of the Roman Catholic priest is most likely at peace. He works personally for no selfish purpose, but with the object of “saving a soul” from “eternal damnation.” In his view, if Magic there be in it, it is holy, meritorious and divine Magic. Such is the power of blind faith. Hence, when we are assured by trustworthy and respectable persons of high social standing, and unimpeachable character, that there are many well-organized societies among the Roman Catholic priests which, under the pretext and cover of Modern Spiritualism and mediumship, hold séances for the purposes of conversion by suggestion, directly and at a distance. [1] The Adept of the “Left Hand” throws a spell without ceremony and by his sole disapproval, upon those with whose conduct he is dissatisfied, and whom he thinks it necessary to punish; he casts a spell, even by his pardon, over those who do him injury, and the enemies of Initiates never long enjoy impunity for their wrong-doing. The executioners of martyrs always perish miserably; and the Adepts are the martyrs of Intelligence. Providence seems to despise those who despise them, and puts to death those who would seek to prevent them from living. The legend of the Wandering Jew is the popular poetry of this arcanum. A people had sent a sage to crucifixion; that people had bidden him “Move on!” when he tried to rest for one moment. Well! that people will become subject, henceforth, to a similar condemnation; it will become entirely proscribed, and for long centuries it will be bidden “Move on! move on!” finding neither rest nor pity. Our modern Symbologist is superlatively clever only at detecting phallic worship and sexual emblems even where none were ever meant. But for the true student of Occult Lore, White or Divine Magic could no more exist in Nature without its counterpart Black Magic, than day without night, whether these be of twelve hours or of six months’ duration. For him everything in that Nature has an occult — a bright and a night-side to it. True, Left-hand Magic has lost its name, and along with it its rights to recognition. But its practice is in daily use; and its progeny, “magnetic influence,” “power of oratory,” “irresistible fascination,” “whole audiences subdued and held as though under a spell,” are terms recognized and used by all, generally meaningless though they now are. The real truth is that Magic is still in full sway amidst mankind, however blind the latter to its silent presence and influence on its members, however ignorant society may be, and remain, to its daily and hourly beneficent and maleficent effects. The world is full of such unconscious magicians — in politics as well as in daily life, in the Church as in the strongholds of Free-Thought. Most of those magicians are “sorcerers” unhappily, not metaphorically but in sober reality, by reason of their inherent selfishness, their revengeful natures, their envy and malice. The true student of Magic, well aware of the truth, looks on in pity, and, if he be wise, keeps silent. For every effort made by him to remove the universal cecity is only repaid with ingratitude, slander, and often curses, which, unable to reach him, will react on those who wish him evil. Lies and calumny — the latter a teething lie, adding actual bites to empty harmless falsehoods — become his lot, and thus the well-wisher is soon torn to pieces, as a reward for his benevolent desire to enlighten. [1] Consult “Papal dispensation for murder and mayhem,” in the same series. — Editor
Buddha’s doctrine shows evil immanent, not in matter which is eternal, but in the illusions created by it; and through the changes and transformations of matter generating life be-cause these changes are conditioned and such life is ephemeral. And, as life is death, so death is life, and the whole great cycle of lives forms but One Existence — the worst day of which is on our planet.
While every vice is hid by hypocrisy, every virtue is suspected to be hypocrisy. Christian societies roll around the mire of hypocrisy, steeped in false pretence. Deceit and hypocrisy are at work for dear self’s sake, in every nation as in every individual. Selfishness, whether it breeds ambition for aggrandizement of territory, or competition in commerce at the expense of one’s neighbour, can never be regarded as a virtue. The middle classes are honeycombed with false smiles, false talk, and mutual treachery. For the majority, religion has become a thin veil thrown over the corpse of spiritual faith. Our century is a boastful age, as proud as it is hypocritical; as cruel as it is dissembling. There are more hypocrites in a square yard of our “civilized soil” than antiquity has bred of them on all its idolatrous lands. Instead of courtesy and sincerity, we have feigned politeness and falsification on every plane; falsification of moral food, and the same falsification of eatable food. Sanctimonious hypocrisy has stifled genuine religious spirit, which is now regarded as madness.
