Writings
of H P Blavatsky
Cardiff
Theosophical Society in
Theosophy
House
206
Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24 -1DL
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831 – 1891)
The Founder of Modern Theosophy
Elementals
By
H
P Blavatsky
THE Universal Æther was not, in the eyes of the ancients, simply a
tenantless something, stretching throughout the expanse of heaven; it was for
them a boundless ocean, peopled like our familiar earthly seas, with Gods,
Planetary Spirits, monstrous and minor creatures, and having in its every
molecule the germs of life from the potential up to the most developed. Like
the finny tribes
which swarm in our oceans and familiar bodies of water, each kind
having its habitat in some spot to which it is curiously adapted, some
friendly, and some inimical to man, some pleasant and some frightful to behold,
some seeking the refuge of quiet nooks and land-locked harbours, and some
traversing great areas of water; so the various races of the Planetary,
Elemental, and other Spirits, were believed by them to inhabit the different
portions of the great ethereal ocean, and to be exactly adapted to their
respective conditions.
According to the ancient doctrines, every member of this varied
ethereal
population, from the highest "Gods" down to the soulless
Elementals, was evolved by the ceaseless motion inherent in the astral light.
Light is force, and the latter is produced by the will. As this will proceeds
from an intelligence which cannot err, for it is absolute and immutable and has
nothing of the material organs of human thought in it, being the superfine pure
emanation of the ONE LIFE itself, it proceeds from the beginning of time,
according to immutable laws, to evolve the elementary fabric requisite for
subsequent generations of what we term human races. All of the latter, whether
belonging to this planet or to some other of the myriads in space, have their
earthly bodies evolved in this
matrix out of the bodies of a certain class of these elemental
beings--the primordial germ of Gods and men--which have passed away into the
visible worlds.
In the Ancient Philosophy there was no missing link to be supplied
by what Tyndall calls an "educated imagination"; no hiatus to be
filled with volumes of materialistic speculations made necessary by the absurd
attempt to solve an equation with but one set of quantities; our
"ignorant" ancestors traced the law of evolution throughout the whole
universe. As by gradual progression from the star-cloudlet to the development
of the physical body of man, the rule holds good, so from the Universal Æther
to the incarnate human spirit, they traced one
uninterrupted series of entities. These evolutions were from the
world of Spirit into the world of gross Matter: and through that back again to
the source of all things. The "descent of species" was to them a
descent from the Spirit, primal source of all, to the "degradation of
Matter." In this complete chain of unfoldings the elementary, spiritual
beings had as distinct a place, midway between the extremes, as Mr. Darwin's
missing-link between the ape and man.
No author in the world of literature ever gave a more truthful or
more poetical description of these beings than Sir E. Bulwer-Lytton, the author
of Zanoni. Now, himself "a thing not of matter" but an "idea of
joy and light," his words sound more like the faithful echo of memory than
the exuberant outflow of mere imagination. He makes the wise Mejnour say to
Glyndon:
Man is arrogant in proportion of his ignorance. For several ages he
saw in the countless worlds that sparkle through space like the bubbles of a
shoreless ocean, only the petty candles . . . that Providence has been pleased
to light for no other purpose but to make the night more agreeable to man. . .
.
Astronomy has corrected this delusion of human vanity, and man now
reluctantly confesses that the stars are worlds, larger and more glorious than
his own. . . . Everywhere, in this immense design, science brings new life to
light. . . . Reasoning, then, by evident analogy, if not a leaf, if not a drop
of water, but is, no less than yonder star, a habitable and breathing
world--nay, if even man himself is a world to other lives, and millions and
myriads dwell in the rivers of his blood, and inhabit man's frame, as man
inhabits earth--common sense (if our schoolmen had it) would suffice to teach
that the circumfluent infinite which you call space--the boundless impalpable
which divides earth from the moon and stars--is filled also with its correspondent
and appropriate life. Is it not a visible absurdity to suppose that being is
crowded upon every leaf, and yet absent from the immensities of space! The law
of the great system forbids the waste even of an atom; it knows no
spot where something of life does not breathe. . . . Well, then, can you
conceive that space, which is the infinite itself, is alone a waste, is alone
lifeless, is less useful to the one design of universal being . . . than the
peopled leaf, than the swarming globule? The microscope shows you the creatures
on the leaf; no mechanical tube is yet invented to discover the nobler and more
gifted things that hover in the illimitable air. Yet between these last and man
is a mysterious and terrible affinity. . . . But first, to penetrate this
barrier, the soul with which you listen must be sharpened by intense
enthusiasm, purified from all earthly desires. . . . When thus prepared,
science can be brought to aid it; the sight itself may be rendered more
subtile, the nerves more acute, the spirit more alive and outward, and the
element itself--the
air, the space--may be made, by certain secrets of the higher
chemistry, more palpable and clear. And this, too, is not Magic as the
credulous call it; as I have so often said before, Magic (a science that
violates Nature) exists not; it is but the science by which Nature can be
controlled. Now, in space there are millions of beings, not literally
spiritual, for they have all, like the animalculæ unseen by the naked eye,
certain forms of matter, though matter so delicate, air-drawn, and subtile,
that it is, as it were, but a film, a gossamer, that clothes the spirit. . . .
Yet, in truth, these races differ most widely . . . some of surpassing wisdom,
some of horrible malignity; some hostile as fiends to men, others gentle as
messengers between earth and heaven.
Such is the insufficient sketch of Elemental Beings void of Divine
Spirit, given by one whom many with reason believed to know more
than he was prepared to admit in the face of an incredulous public. We have
underlined the few lines than which nothing can be more graphically
descriptive. An Initiate, having a personal knowledge of these creatures, could
do no better.
We may pass now to the "Gods," or Daimons, of the ancient
Egyptians and Greeks, and from these to the Devas and Pitris of the still more
ancient Hindû Âryans. Who or what were the Gods, or Daimonia, of the Greeks and
Romans? The name has since then been monopolized and disfigured to their own
use by the Christian Fathers. Ever following in the footsteps of old Pagan
Philosophers on the well-trodden highway of their speculations, while, as ever,
trying to pass these off as new tracks on virgin soil, and themselves as the
first pioneers in a hitherto pathless forest of eternal truths--they repeated
the Zoroastrian ruse: to make a clean sweep of all the Hindû Gods and Deities,
Zoroaster had called
them all Devs, and adopted the name as designating only evil
powers. So did the Christian Fathers. They applied the sacred name of
Daimonia-the divine Egos of man--to their devils, a fiction of diseased brains,
and thus dishonoured the anthropomorphized symbols of the natural sciences of
wise antiquity, and made them all loathesome in the sight of the ignorant and
the unlearned.
What the Gods and Daimonia, or Daimons, really were, we may learn
from Socrates, Plato, Plutarch, and many other renowned Sages and Philosophers
of pre-Christian, as well as post-Christian days. We will give some of their
views.
Xenocrates, who expounded many of the unwritten theories and
teachings of his master, and who surpassed Plato in his definition of the
doctrine of invisible magnitudes, taught that the Daimons are intermediate
beings between the divine perfection and human sinfulness,2 and he divides them
into classes, each subdivided into many others. But he states expressly that
the individual or personal Soul is the leading guardian Daimon of every man,
and that no Daimon 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 either to open or close his perceptions to the Divine voice.
Heracleides, who adopted fully the Pythagorean and Platonic views
of the human Soul, its nature and faculties, speaking of Spirits, calls them
"Daimons with airy and vaporous bodies," and affirms that Souls
inhabit the Milky Way before descending "into generation" or
sublunary existence. Again, when the author of Epinomis locates between the highest
and lowest Gods (embodied Souls) three classes of Daimons, and peoples the
universe with invisible beings, he is more rational than either our modern
Scientists, who make between the two extremes one vast hiatus of being, the
playground of blind forces, or the Christian Theologians, who call every pagan
God, a dæmon, or devil. Of these three classes the first two are invisible;
their bodies are pure
ether and fire (Planetary Spirits); the Daimons 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.
The fact is, that the word Daimon was given by the ancients, and
especially by the Philosophers of the Alexandrian school, to all kinds of
spirits, whether good or bad, human or otherwise, but the appellation was often
synonymous with that of Gods or angels. For instance, the
"Samothraces" was a designation of the Fane-gods; worshipped at
Samothracia in the Mysteries. They are considered as identical with the
Cabeiri, Dioscuri, and Corybantes. Their names were mystical--denoting Pluto,
Ceres or Proserpina, Bacchus, and Æsculapius or Hermes, and they were all
referred to as Daimons. Apuleius, speaking in the same symbolical and veiled
language, of the two Souls, the human and the divine, says:
The human soul is a demon that our language may name genius. She is
an
immortal god, though in a certain sense she is born at the same
time as the man in whom she is. Consequently, we may say that she dies in the
same way that she is born.Eminent men were also called Gods by the ancients.
Deified during life, even their "shells" were reverenced during a
part of the Mysteries.
Belief in Gods, in Larvæ and Umbræ, was a universal belief then, as
it is fast becoming--now. Even the greatest Philosophers, men who have passed
to posterity as the hardest Materialists and Atheists--only because they
rejected the grotesque idea of a personal extra-cosmic God--such as Epicurus,
for instance, believed in Gods and invisible beings. Going far back into
antiquity, out of the great body of Philosophers of the pre-Christian ages, we
may mention Cicero, as
one who can least be accused of superstition and credulity.
Speaking of those whom he calls Gods and who are either human or atmospheric
spirits, he says:
We know that of all livings beings man is the best formed, and, as
the gods belong to this number, they must have a human form. . . . I do not
mean to say that the gods have body and blood in them; but I say that they seem
as if they had bodies with blood in them. . . . Epicurus, for whom hidden
things were as tangible as if he had touched them with his finger, teaches us
that gods are not generally visible, but that they are intelligible; that they
are not bodies having a certain solidity . . . but that we can recognize them
by their passing images; that as there are atoms enough in the infinite space
to produce such images, these are produced before us . . . and make us realize
what are these happy, immortal beings.3If, turning from Greece and Egypt to the
cradle of universal civilization, India, we interrogate the Brâhmans and their
most admirable Philosophies, we find them calling their Gods and
their Daimonia by such a number and variety of appellations, that the
thirty-three millions of these Deities would require a whole library to contain
only their names and attributes. We will choose for the present time only two
names out of the Pantheon. These groups are the most important as well as the least
understood by the Orientalists--their true nature having been all along wrapped
in obscurity by the unwillingness of the Brâhmans to divulge their
philosophical secrets. We will speak of but the Devas and the Pitris.
The former aerial beings are some of them superior, others
inferior, to man. The term means literally the Shining Ones, the resplendent;
and it covers spiritual
beings of various degrees, including entities from previous
planetary periods, who take active part in the formation of new solar systems
and the training of infant humanities, as well as unprogressed Planetary
Spirits, who will, at spiritualistic séances, simulate human deities and even
characters on the stage of human history.
As to the Deva Yonis, they are Elementals of a lower kind in
comparison with the Kosmic "Gods," and are subjected to the will of
even the sorcerer. To this class belong the gnomes, sylphs, fairies, djins,
etc. They are the Soul of the elements, the capricious forces in Nature, acting
under one immutable Law, inherent in these Centres of Force, with undeveloped
consciousness and bodies of plastic mould, which can be shaped according to the
conscious or unconscious will of the human being who puts himself en rapport
with them. It is by attracting some of the beings of this class that our modern
spiritualistic mediums invest the fading shells of deceased human beings with a
kind of individual force.
These beings have never been, but will, in myriads of ages
hence, be evolved into men. They belong to the three lower
kingdoms, and pertain to the Mysteries on account of their dangerous nature.
We have found a very erroneous opinion gaining ground not only
among
Spiritualists--who see the spirits of their disembodied fellow
creatures
everywhere--but even among several Orientalists who ought to know
better. It is generally believed by them that the Sanskrit term Pitris means
the spirits of our direct ancestors; of disembodied people. Hence the argument
of some Spiritualists that fakirs, and other Eastern wonder-workers, are
mediums; that they themselves confess to being unable to produce anything
without the help of the Pitris, of whom they are the obedient instruments. This
is in more than one sense erroneous, the error being first started, we believe,
by M. L. Jacolliot,
in his Spiritisme dans le Monde, and Govinda Swami; or, as he
spells it, "the fakir Kovindasami's" phenomena. The Pitris are not
the ancestors of the present living men, but those of the human kind or
primitive race; the spirits of human races which, on the great scale of
descending evolution, preceded our races of men, and were physically, as well
as spiritually, far superior to our modern pigmies. In Mânava-Dharma-Shâstra
they are called the Lunar Ancestors. The Hindû--least of all the proud
Brâhman--has no such great longing to return to this land of exile after he has
shaken off his mortal coil, as has the average
Spiritualist; nor has death for him any of the great terrors it has
for the Christian. Thus, the most highly developed minds in India will always
take care to declare, while in the act of leaving their tenements of clay,
"Nachapunarâvarti," "I shall not come back," and by this
very declaration is placed beyond the reach of any living man or medium. But,
it may be asked, what then is meant by the Pitris? They are Devas, lunar and
solar, closely connected with human evolution, for the Lunar Pitris are they
who gave their Chhâyâs as the models of the First Race in the Fourth Round,
while the Solar Pitris endowed mankind with intellect. Not only so, but these
Lunar Devas passed through all
the kingdoms of the terrestrial Chain in the First Round, and
during the Second and Third Rounds "lead and represent the human
element."4
A brief examination of the part they play will prevent all future
confusion in the student's mind between the Pitris and the Elementals. In the
Rig Veda, Vishnu (or the pervading Fire, Æther) is shown first striding through
the seven regions of the World in three steps, being a manifestation of the
Central Sun. Later on, he becomes a manifestation of our solar energy, and is
connected with the septenary form and with the Gods, Agni, Indra and other
solar deities.
Therefore, while the "Sons of Fire," the primeval Seven
of our System, emanate from the primordial Flame, the "Seven
Builders" of our Planetary Chain are the "Mind-born Sons" of the
latter, and--their instructors likewise. For, though in one sense they are all
Gods and are all called Pitris (Pitara, Patres, Fathers), a great though very
subtle distinction (quite Occult) is made which must be noticed. In the Rig
Veda they are divided into two classes--the Pitris Agni-dagdha
("Fire-givers"), and the pitris Anagni-dagdha
("non-Fire-givers") i.e., as explained exoterically--Pitris who sacrificed
to the Gods and those who
refused to do so at the "fire-sacrifice." But the
Esoteric and true meaning is the following. The first or primordial Pitris, the
"Seven Sons of Fire" or of the Flame, are distinguished or divided
into seven classes (like the Seven Sephiroth, and others, see Vâyu Purâna and
Harivamsha, also Rig Veda); three of which classes are Arûpa, formless,
"composed of intellectual not elementary substance," and four are
corporeal. The first are pure Agni (fire) or Sapta-jiva ("seven
lives," now become Sapta-jihva, seven-tongued, as Agni is represented with
seven tongues and seven winds as the wheels of his car). As a formless, purely
spiritual essence, in the first degree of evolution, they could not create
that, the prototypical form of which was not in their minds, as this is
the first requisite. They could only give birth to
"mind-born" beings, their "Sons," the second class of
Pitris (or Prajâpati, or Rishis, etc.), one degree more material; these, to the
third--the last of the Arûpa class. It is only this last class that was enabled
with the help of the Fourth principle of the Universal Soul (Aditi, Âkâsha) to
produce beings that became objective and having a form.6 But when these came to
existence, they were found to possess such a small proportion of the divine
immortal Soul or Fire in them, that they were considered failures. "The
third appealed to the second, the second to the first, and the Three had to
become Four (the perfect square or cube representing
the 'Circle Squared' or immersion of pure Spirit), before the first
could be instructed" (Sansk. Comment.). Then only, could perfect
Beings--intellectually and physically--be shaped. This, though more
philosophical, is still an allegory. But its meaning is plain, however absurd
may seem the explanation from a scientific standpoint. The Doctrine teaches the
Presence of a Universal Life (or motion) within which all is, and nothing
outside of it can be. This is pure Spirit. Its manifested aspect is cosmic
primordial Matter coeval with, since it is, itself. Semi-spiritual in
comparison to the first, this vehicle of the Spirit-Life is what Science calls
Ether, which fills the boundless space, and it is in this substance, the
world-stuff, that germinates all the atoms and molecules of what is called
matter. However homogeneous in its eternal origin, this Universal Element, once
that its radiations were thrown into the space of
the (to be) manifested Universe, the centripetal and centrifugal
forces of perpetual motion, of attraction and repulsion, would soon polarize
its scattered particles, endowing them with peculiar properties now regarded by
Science as various elements distinct from each other. As a homogeneous whole,
the world-stuff in its primordial state is perfect; disintegrated, it loses its
property of conditionless creative power; it has to associate with its
contraries. Thus, the first worlds and Cosmic Beings, save the
"Self-Existent"--a mystery no one could attempt to touch upon
seriously, as it is a mystery perceived by the divine eye of the highest
Initiates, but one that no human language could explain to the children of our
age--the first worlds and
Beings were failures; inasmuch as the former lacked that inherent
creative force in them necessary for their further and independent evolution,
and that the first orders of Beings lacked the immortal soul. Part and parcel
of Anima Mundi in its Prâkritic aspect, the Purusha element in them was too
weak to allow of any consciousness in the intervals (entr' actes) between their
existences during the evolutionary period and the cycle of Life. The three
orders of Beings, the Pitri-Rishis, the Sons of Flame, had to merge and blend
together their three
higher principles with the Fourth (the Circle), and the Fifth (the
microcosmic) principle before the necessary union could be obtained and result
therefrom achieved. "There were old worlds, which perished as soon as they
came into existence; were formless, as they were called sparks. These sparks
are the primordial worlds which could not continue because the Sacred Aged had
not as yet assumed the form" (of perfect contraries not only in opposite
sexes but of cosmical polarity). "Why were these primordial worlds
destroyed? Because," answers the Zohar, "the man represented by the
ten Sephiroth was not as yet. The human form contains everything {spirit, soul
and body}, and as it did not as yet
exist the worlds were destroyed."
Far removed from the Pitris, then, it will readily be seen are all
the various feats of Indian fakirs, jugglers and others, phenomena a hundred
times more various and astounding than are ever seen in civilized Europe and
America. The Pitris have naught to do with such public exhibitions, nor are the
"spirits of the departed" concerned in them. We have but to consult
the lists of the principal Daimons or Elemental Spirits to find that their very
names indicate their professions, or, to express it clearly, the tricks for
which each variety is best adapted. So we have the Mâdan, a generic name
indicating wicked elemental spirits, half brutes, half monsters, for Mâdan
signifies one that looks like a cow. He is the friend of the malicious
sorcerers and helps them to effect their evil purposes of revenge by striking
men and cattle with sudden
illness and death.
The Shudâla-Mâdan, or graveyard fiend, answers to our ghouls. He
delights where crime and murder were committed, near burial-spots and places of
execution. He helps the juggler in all the fire phenomena as well as Kutti
Shâttan, the little juggling imps. Shudâla, they say, is a half-fire,
half-water demon, for he received from Shiva permission to assume any shape he
chose, to transform one thing into another; and when he is not in fire, he is
in water. It is he who blinds people "to see that which they do not see."
Shûla Mâdan is another mischievous spook. He is the furnace-demon, skilled in
pottery and baking. If you keep friends with him, he will not injure you; but
woe to him who incurs his
wrath. Shûla likes compliments and flattery, and as he generally
keeps
underground it is to him that a juggler must look to help him raise
a tree from a seed in a quarter of an hour and ripen its fruit. Kumil-Mâdan, is
the undine proper. He is an Elemental Spirit of the water, and his name means
blowing like a bubble. He is a very merry imp, and will help a
friend in anything relative to his department; he will shower rain
and show the future and the present to those who will resort to hydromancy or
divination by water. Poruthû Mâdan is the "wrestling" demon; he is
the strongest of all; and whenever there are feats shown in which physical
force is required, such as levitations, or taming of wild animals, he will help
the performer by keeping him above the soil, or will over-power a wild beast
before the tamer has time to utter his incantation. So, every "physical
manifestation" has its own class of Elemental Spirits to superintend it.
Besides these there are in India the Pisâchas, Daimons of the races of the
gnomes, the giants and the vampires; the Gandharvas,
good Daimons, celestial seraphs, singers; and Asuras and Nâgas, the
Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
These must not be confused with Elementaries, the souls and shells
of departed human beings; and here again we have to distinguish between what
has been called the astral soul, i.e., the lower part of the dual Fifth
Principle, joined to the animal, and the true Ego. For the doctrine of the
Initiates is that no astral soul, even that of a pure, good, and virtuous man,
is immortal in the strictest sense, "from elements it was formed--to
elements it must return." We may stop here and say no more: every learned
Brâhman, every Chelâ and thoughtful Theosophist will understand why. For he
knows that while the soul of the wicked
vanishes, and is absorbed without redemption, that of every other
person, even moderately pure, simply changes its ethereal particles for still
more ethereal ones; and, while there remains in it a spark of the Divine, the
god-like man, or rather, his individual Ego, cannot die. Says Proclus:
After death, the soul (the spirit) continueth to linger in the
aërial body
(astral form), till it is
entirely purified from all angry and voluptuous
passions . . . then doth it put off by a second dying the aërial body
as it did the earthly one. Whereupon, the ancients say that there is a
celestial body always joined with the soul, which is immortal, luminous, and
star-like--while the purely human soul or the lower part of the Fifth Principle
is not. The above explanations and the meaning and the real attributes and
mission of the Pitris, may help to better understand this passage of Plutarch:
And of these souls the moon is the element, because souls resolve
into her, as the bodies of the deceased do into earth. Those, indeed, who have
been virtuous and honest, living a quiet and philosophical life, without
embroiling themselves in troublesome affairs, are quickly resolved; being left
by the nous (understanding) and no longer using the corporeal passions, they incontinently
vanish away.8The ancient Egyptians, who derived their knowledge
from the Âryans of India, pushed their researches far into the
kingdoms of the "elemental" and "elementary" beings. Modern
archæologists have decided that the figures found depicted on the various
papyri of The Book of the Dead, or other symbols relating to other subjects
painted upon their mummy cases, the walls of their subterranean temples and
sculptured on their buildings, are merely fanciful representations of their
Gods on the one hand, and on the other, a proof of the worship by the Egyptians
of cats, dogs, and all manner of creeping things. This modern idea is wholly
wrong, and arises from ignorance of the astral world and its strange denizens.
There are many distinct classes of "Elementaries" and
"E1ementals." The highest of the former in intelligence and cunning
are the so-called "terrestrial spirits." Of these it must suffice to
say, for the present, that they are the Larvæ, or shadows of those who have
lived on earth, alike of the good and of the bad. They are the lower principles
of all disembodied beings, and may be divided into three general groups. The
first are they who having refused all spiritual light, have died deeply
immersed in the mire of matter, and from whose sinful Souls the immortal Spirit
has gradually separated itself. These are, properly,
the disembodied Souls of the depraved; these Souls having at some
time prior to death separated themselves from their divine Spirits, and so lost
their chance of immortality. Eliphas Levi and some other Kabalists make little,
if any, distinction between Elementary Spirits who have been men, and those
beings which people the elements, and are the blind forces of nature. Once
divorced from their bodies, these Souls (also called "astral
bodies"), especially those of purely materialistic persons, are
irresistibly attracted to the earth, where they live a temporary and finite
life amid elements congenial to their gross natures. From having never, during
their natural lives, cultivated their spirituality, but subordinated it to the
material and gross, they are now unfitted for the lofty career of the pure,
disembodied being, for whom the atmosphere of earth is stifling and mephitic.
Its attractions are not only away
from earth, but it cannot, even if it would, owing to its
Devachanic condition, have aught to do with earth and its denizens consciously.
Exceptions to this rule will be pointed out later on. After a more or less
prolonged period of time these material souls will begin to disintegrate, and
finally, like a column of mist, be dissolved, atom by atom, in the surrounding
elements.
These are the "shells" which remain the longest period in
the Kâma Loka; all saturated with terrestrial effluvia, their Kâma Rûpa (body
of desire) thick with sensuality and made impenetrable to the spiritualizing
influence of their higher principles, endures longer and fades out with
difficulty. We are taught that these remain for centuries sometimes, before the
final disintegration into their respective elements.
The second group includes all those, who, having had their common
share of spirituality, have yet been more or less attached to things earthly
and
terrestrial life, having their aspirations and affections more
centred on earth than in heaven; the stay in Kâma Loka of the reliquiæ of this
class or group of men, who belonged to the average human being, is of a far
shorter duration, yet long in itself and proportionate to the intensity of
their desire for life. Remains, as a third class, the disembodied souls of
those whose bodies have perished by violence, and these are men in all save the
physical body, till their life-span is complete.
Among Elementaries are also reckoned by Kabalists what we have
called psychic embryos, the "privation" of the form of the child that
is to be. According to Aristotle's doctrine there are three principles of
natural bodies: privation, matter, and form. These principles may be applied in
this particular case. The "privation" of the child which is to be, we
locate in the invisible mind of the Universal Soul, in which all types and
forms exist from eternity--privation not being considered in the Aristotelic
philosophy as a principle in the composition of bodies, but as an external
property in their production; for the production is a change by which the
matter passes from the shape it has not to that which
it assumes. Though the privation of the unborn child's form, as
well as of the future form of the unmade watch, is that which is neither
substance nor extension nor quality as
yet, nor any kind of existence, it is still something which is, though its
outlines, in order to be, must acquire an objective form--the abstract must
become concrete, in short. Thus, as soon as this privation of matter is transmitted
by energy to universal Æther, it becomes a material form, however sublimated.
If modern Science teaches that human thought "affects the matter of
another universe simultaneously with this," how can he who believes in a
Universal Mind deny that the divine thought is equally transmitted, by the same
law of energy, to our common mediator, the universal
Æther--the lower World-Soul? Very true, Occult Philosophy denies it
intelligence and consciousness in relation to the finite and conditioned
manifestations of this phenomenal world of matter. But the Vedântin and
Buddhist Philosophies alike, speaking of it as of Absolute Consciousness, show
thereby that the form and progress of every atom of the conditioned universe
must have existed in it throughout the infinite cycles of Eternity. And, if so,
then it must follow that once there, the Divine Thought manifests itself
objectively, energy faithfully reproducing the outlines of that whose
"privation" is already in the divine mind. Only it must not be understood
that this Thought creates matter, or even
the privations. No; it develops from its latent outline but the
design for the future form; the matter which serves to make this design having
always been in existence, and having been prepared to form a human body,
through a series of progressive transformations, as the result of evolution.
Forms pass; ideas that created them and the material which gave them
objectiveness, remain.
These models, as yet devoid of immortal spirits, are
"Elementals"--better yet, psychic embryos--which, when their time
arrives, die out of the invisible world, and are born into this visible one as
human infants, receiving in transitu that Divine Breath called Spirit which
completes the perfect man. This class cannot communicate, either subjectively
or objectively, with men.
The essential difference between the body of such an embryo and an
Elemental proper is that the embryo--the future man--contains in himself a
portion of each of the four great kingdoms, to wit: fire, air, earth and water;
while the Elemental has but a portion of one of such kingdoms. As for instance,
the salamander, or the fire Elemental, which has but a portion of the
primordial fire and none other. Man, being higher than they, the law of
evolution finds its illustration of all four in him. It results therefore, that
the Elementals of the fire are not found in water, nor those of air in the fire
kingdom. And yet, inasmuch as a portion
of water is found not only in man but also in other bodies, Elementals exist
really in and among each other in every substance just
as the spiritual world exists and is in the material. But the last
are the
Elementals in their most primordial and latent state.
Another class are those elemental beings which will never evolve
into human beings in the present Manvantara, but occupy, as it were, a specific
step of the ladder of being, and, by comparison with the others, may properly
be called nature-spirits, or cosmic agents of nature, each being confined to
its own element and never transgressing the bounds of others. These are what
Tertullian called the "princes of the powers of the air."
In the teachings of Eastern Kabalists, and of the Western
Rosicrucians and Alchemists, they are spoken of as the creatures evolved in and
from the four kingdoms of earth, air, fire and water, and are respectively
called gnomes, sylphs, salamanders and undines. Forces of nature, they will
either operate effects as the servile agents of general law, or may be
employed, as shown above, by the disembodied spirits--whether pure or
impure--and by living adepts of magic and sorcery, to produce desired
phenomenal results. Such beings never become men.
Under the general designation of fairies, and fays, these spirits
of the
elements appear in the myths, fables, traditions, or poetry of all
nations, ancient and modern. Their names are legion--peris, devs, djins,
sylvans, satyrs, fauns, elves, dwarfs, trolls, norns, nisses, kobolds,
brownies, necks, stromkarls, undines, nixies, goblins, ponkes, banshees,
kelpies, pixies, moss people, good people, good neighbours, wild women, men of
peace, white ladies--and many more. They have been seen, feared, blessed,
banned, and invoked in every quarter of the globe and in every age. Shall we
then concede that all who have met them were hallucinated?
These Elementals are the principal agents of disembodied but never
visible "shells" taken for spirits at séances, and are, as shown
above, the producers of all the phenomena except the subjective.
In the course of this article we will adopt the term
"Elemental" to designate only these nature-spirits, attaching it to
no other spirit or monad that has been embodied in human form. Elementals, as
said already, have no form, and in trying to describe what they are, it is better
to say that they are "centres of force" having instinctive desires,
but no consciousness, as we understand it. Hence their acts may be good or bad
indifferently.
This class is believed to possess but one of the three chief
attributes of man. They have neither immortal spirits nor tangible bodies; only
astral forms, which partake, to a distinguishing degree, of the element to
which they belong and also of the ether. They are a combination of sublimated
matter and a rudimental mind. Some remain throughout several cycles changeless,
but still have no separate individuality, acting collectively, so to say.
Others, of certain elements and species, change form under a fixed law which
Kabalists explain. The most solid of their bodies is ordinarily just immaterial
enough to escape perception by our physical eyesight, but not so unsubstantial
but that they can be perfectly recognized by the inner or clairvoyant vision.
They not only exist and can all live in ether, but can handle and direct it for
the production of physical effects, as readily as we can compress air or water
for the same purpose by pneumatic and hydraulic apparatus; in which occupation
they are readily helped by the "human elementaries," or the
"shells." More than this; they can so condense it as to make for
themselves tangible bodies, which by their Protean powers they can cause to
assume such likeness as they choose, by taking as their models the portraits
they find stamped in the memory of the persons present.
It is not necessary that the sitter should be thinking at the
moment of the one represented. His image may have faded many years
before. The mind receives indelible impression even from chance acquaintances
or persons encountered but once. As a few seconds' exposure of the sensitized
photograph plate is all that is requisite to preserve indefinitely the image of
the sitter, so is it with the mind.
According to the doctrine of Proclus, the uppermost regions from
the Zenith of the Universe to the Moon belonged to the Gods or Planetary
Spirits, according to their hierarchies and classes. The highest among them
were the twelve Huper-ouranioi, or Super-celestial Gods, with whole legions of
subordinate Daimons at their command. They are followed next in rank and power
by the Egkosmioi, the Inter-cosmic Gods, each of these presiding over a great
number of Daimons, to whom they impart their power and change it from one to
another at will. These are evidently the personified forces of nature in their
mutual
correlation, the latter being represented by the third class, or
the Elementals we have just described.
Further on he shows, on the principle of the Hermetic axiom--of
types, and prototypes--that the lower spheres have their subdivisions and
classes of beings as well as the upper celestial ones, the former being always
subordinate to the higher ones. He held that the four elements are all filled
with Daimons, maintaining with Aristotle that the universe is full, and that
there is no void in nature. The Daimons of the earth, air, fire, and water are
of an elastic, ethereal, semi-corporeal essence.
It is these classes which officiate as intermediate agents between
the Gods and men. Although lower in intelligence than the sixth order of the
higher Daimons, these beings preside directly over the elements and organic
life. They direct the growth, the inflorescence, the properties, and various
changes of plants. They are the personified ideas or
virtues shed from the heavenly Hylê into the inorganic matter; and,
as the vegetable kingdom is one remove higher than the mineral, these
emanations from the celestial Gods take form and being in the plant, they
become its soul. It is that which Aristotle's doctrine terms the form in the
three principles of natural bodies, classified by him as privation, matter, and
form. His philosophy teaches that besides the original matter, another
principle is necessary to complete the triune nature of every particle, and
this is form; an invisible, but still, in an ontological sense of the word, a
substantial being, really distinct from matter proper. Thus, in an animal or a
plant--besides the bones,
the flesh, the nerves, the brains, and the blood, in the former;
and besides the pulpy matter, tissues, fibres, and juice in the latter, which
blood and juice, by circulating' through the veins and fibres, nourishes all
parts of both animal and plant; and besides the animal spirits, which are the
principles of motion, and the chemical energy which is transformed into vital
force in the green leaf--there must be a substantial form, which Aristotle
called in the horse, the
horse's soul; Proclus, the daimon of every mineral, plant, or
animal, and the mediæval philosophers, the elementary spirits of the four
kingdoms.
All this is held in our century as "poetical metaphysics"
and gross
superstition. Still on strictly ontological principles, there is,
in these old
hypotheses, some shadow of probability, some clue to the perplexing
missing links of exact science. The latter has become so dogmatic of late, that
all that lies beyond the ken of inductive science is termed imaginary; and we
find Professor Joseph Le Conte stating that some of the best scientists
"ridicule the use of the term 'vital force,' or vitality, as a remnant of
superstition.''10 De Candolle suggests the term "vital movement,"
instead of vital force;11 thus preparing for a final scientific leap which will
transform the immortal, thinking man, into an automaton with clock-work inside
him. "But," objects Le Conte, "can we conceive of movement
without force? And if the movement is peculiar, so also is the form of
force."
In the Jewish Kabalah, the nature-spirits were known under the
general name of Shedim, and divided into four classes. The Hindûs call them
Bhûtas and Devas, and the Persians called them all Devs; the Greeks
indistinctly designated them as Daimons; the Egyptians knew them as Afrites.
The ancient Mexicans, says Kaiser, believed in numerous spirit-abodes, into one
of which the shades of innocent children were placed until final disposal; into
another, situated in the sun, ascended the valiant souls of heroes; while the
hideous spectres of incorrigible sinner were sentenced to wander and despair in
subterranean caves, held in the bonds of the earth-atmosphere, unwilling and
unable to liberate
themselves. This proves pretty clearly that the "ancient"
Mexicans knew
something of the doctrines of Kâma Loka. These passed their time in
communicating with mortals, and frightening those who could see
them.
Some of the African tribes know them as Yowahoos. In the Indian
Pantheon, as we have often remarked, there are no less than 330,000,000 of
various kinds of spirits, including Elementals, some of which were termed by
the Brâhmans, Daityas. These beings are known by the adepts to be attracted
toward certain quarters of the heavens by something of the same mysterious
property which makes the magnetic
needle turn toward the north, and certain plants to obey the same
attraction If we will only bear in mind the fact that the rushing of planets
through space must create as absolute a disturbance in the plastic and
attenuated medium of the ether, as the passage of a cannon shot does in the
air, or that of a steamer in the water, and on a cosmic scale, we can
understand that certain planetary aspects, admitting our premises to be true,
may produce much more violent agitation and cause much stronger currents to
flow in a given direction than others.
We can also see why, by such various aspects of the stars, shoals
of
friendly or hostile Elementals might be poured in upon our
atmosphere, or some particular portion of it, and make the fact appreciable by
the effects which ensue. If our royal astronomers are able, at times, to
predict cataclysms, such as earthquakes and inundations, the Indian astrologers
and mathematicians can do so, and have so done, with far more precision and
correctness, though they act on lines which to the modern sceptic appear
ridiculously absurd. The various races of spirits are also believed to have a
special sympathy with certain human
temperaments, and to more readily exert power over such than
others.
Thus, a bilious, lymphatic, nervous, or sanguine person would be
affected favourably or otherwise by conditions of the astral light, resulting
from the different aspects of the planetary bodies. Having reached this general
principle, after recorded observations extending over an indefinite series of
years, or ages, the adept astrologer would require only to know what the
planetary aspects were at a given anterior date, and to apply his knowledge of
the succeeding changes in the heavenly bodies, to be able to trace, with
approximate accuracy, the varying
fortunes of the personage whose horoscope was required, and even to
predict the future. The accuracy of the horoscope would depend, of course, no
less upon the astrologer's astronomical erudition than upon his knowledge of
the occult forces and races of nature.
Pythagoras taught that the entire universe is one vast series of
mathematically correct combinations. Plato shows the Deity geometrizing. The
world is sustained by the same law of equilibrium and harmony upon which it was
built. The centripetal force could not manifest itself without the centrifugal
in the harmonious revolutions of the spheres; all forms are the product of this
dual force in nature. Thus, to illustrate our case, we may designate the spirit
as the centrifugal, and the soul as the centripetal, spiritual energies. When
in perfect harmony, both forces produce one result; break or damage the
centripetal motion of the earthly soul tending toward the center which attracts
it; arrest
its progress by clogging it with a heavier weight of matter than it
can bear, and the harmony of the whole, which was its life, is destroyed.
Individual life can only be continued if sustained by this two-fold
force. The least deviation from harmony damages it; when it is destroyed beyond
redemption, the forces separate and the form is gradually annihilated. After
the death of the depraved and the wicked, arrives the critical moment. If during
life the ultimate and desperate effort of the inner self to reunite itself with
the faintly-glimmering ray of its divine monad is neglected; if this ray is
allowed to be more and more
shut out by the thickening crust of matter, the soul, once freed from
the body, follows its earthly attractions, and is magnetically drawn into and
held within the dense fogs of the material atmosphere of the Kâma Loka. Then it
begins to sink lower and lower, until it finds itself, when returned to
consciousness, in what the ancients termed Hades, and we--Avichî. The
annihilation of such a soul is never instantaneous; it may last centuries,
perhaps; for nature never proceeds by jumps and starts, and the astral soul of
the personality being formed of elements, the law of evolution must bide its
time. Then begins the fearful law of compensation, the Yin-youan of the
Buddhist initiates.
This class of spirits are called the "terrestrial," or
"earthly elementaries," in contradistinction to the other classes, as
we have shown in the beginning.
But there is another and still more dangerous class. In the East,
they are known as the "Brothers of the Shadow," living men possessed
by the earth-bound elementaries; at times--their masters, but ever in the long
run falling victims to these terrible beings. In Sikkhim and Tibet they are
called Dugpas (red-caps), in contradistinction to the Geluk-pas (yellow-caps),
to which latter most of the adepts belong. And here we must beg the reader not
to misunderstand us. For though the whole of Bûtan and Sikkhim belongs to the
old religion of the Bhons, now known generally as the Dug-pas, we do not mean
to have it understood
that the whole of the population is possessed, en masse, or that
they are all sorcerers. Among them are found as good men as anywhere else, and
we speak above only of the élite of their Lamaseries, of a nucleus of priests,
"devil-dancers," and fetish worshippers, whose dreadful and
mysterious rites are utterly unknown to the greater part of the population.
Thus there are two classes of these terrible "Brothers of the
Shadow"--the living and the dead. Both cunning, low, vindictive, and
seeking to retaliate their sufferings upon humanity, they become, until final
annihilation, vampires, ghouls, and prominent actors at séances. These are the
leading "stars," on the great spiritual stage of
"materialization," which phenomenon they perform with the
help of the more intelligent of the genuine-born "elemental"
creatures, which hover around and welcome them with delight in their own spheres.
Henry Kunrath, the great German Kabalist, in his rare work, Amphitheatrum
Sapientæ Æternæ has a plate with representations of the four classes of these
human "elementary spirits." Once past the threshold of the sanctuary
of initiation, once that an adept has lifted the "Veil of Isis," the
mysterious and jealous Goddess, he has nothing to fear;
but till then he is in constant danger.
Magi and theurgic philosophers objected most severely to the
"evocation of souls." "Bring her (the soul) not forth, lest in
departing she retain
something," says Psellus. "It becomes you not to behold
them before your body is initiated, since, by always alluring, they seduce the
souls of the uninitiated"--says the same philosopher, in another passage.
They objected to it for several good reasons. 1. "It is
extremely difficult to distinguish a good Daimon from a bad one," says
Iamblichus.
If the shell of a good man succeeds in penetrating the density of
the earth's atmosphere--always oppressive to it, Often hateful--still there is
a danger that it cannot avoid; the soul is unable to come into proximity with
the material world without that on "departing, she retains
something," that is to say, she contaminates her purity, for which she has
to suffer more or less after her departure. Therefore, the true theurgist will
avoid causing any more suffering to this pure denizen of
the higher sphere than is absolutely required by the interests of
humanity. It is only the practitioners of black magic--such as the Dugpas of
Bhûtan and Sikkhim--who compel the presence, by the powerful incantations of
necromancy, of the tainted souls of such as have lived bad lives, and are ready
to aid their selfish designs.
Of intercourse with the Augœides, through the mediumistic powers of
subjective mediums, we elsewhere speak. The theurgists employed chemicals and
mineral substances to chase away evil spirits. Of the latter, a stone called
Mnizurin was one of the most powerful agents. "When you shall see a
terrestrial Daimon approaching, exclaim, and
sacrifice the stone Mnizurin"--exclaims a Zoroastrian Oracle
(Psel., 40).
These "Daimons" seek to introduce themselves into the
bodies of the
simple-minded and idiots, and remain there until dislodged
therefrom by a powerful and pure will. Jesus, Apollonius, and some of the
apostles, had the power to cast out "devils," by purifying the
atmosphere within and without the patient, so as to force the unwelcome tenant
to flight. Certain volatile salts are particularly obnoxious to them; Zoroaster
is corroborated in this by Mr. C. F. Varley, and ancient science is justified
by modern. The effect of some chemicals used in a saucer and placed under the
bed, by Mr. Varley of London, for the purpose of keeping away some disagreeable
physical phenomena at night, are corroborative of this great truth. Pure or
even simply inoffensive human spirits fear nothing, for having rid themselves
of terrestrial matter, terrestrial compounds can affect them in no wise; such
spirits are like a
breath. Not so with the earth-bound souls and the nature-spirits.
It is for these carnal terrestrial Larvæ, degraded human spirits,
that the ancient Kabalists entertained a hope of reïncarnation. But when, or
how? At a fitting moment, and if helped by a sincere desire for his amendment
and repentance by some strong, sympathizing person, or the will of an adept, or
even a desire emanating from the erring spirit himself, provided it is powerful
enough to make him throw off the burden of sinful matter. Losing all consciousness,
the once bright monad is caught once more into the vortex of our terrestrial
evolution, and repasses the subordinate kingdoms, and again breathes as a
living child.
To compute the time necessary for the completion of this process
would be impossible. Since there is no perception of time in eternity,
the attempt would be a mere waste of labour.
Speaking of the elementary, Porphyry says:
These invisible beings have been receiving from men honours as
gods; . . . a universal belief makes them capable of becoming very malevolent;
it proves that their wrath is kindled against those who neglect to offer them a
legitimate worship.13Homer describes them in the following terms: Our gods
appear to us when we offer them sacrifice . . . sitting themselves at our
tables, they partake of our festival meals. Whenever they meet on his travels a
solitary Phœnician, they serve to him as guides, and otherwise manifest their
presence. We can say that our piety approaches us to them as much as crime and
bloodshed unite the Cyclopes and the ferocious race of Giants. The latter
proves that these Gods were kind and beneficent Daimons, and that, whether they
were disembodied spirits or elemental beings, they were no "devils."
The language of Porphyry, who was himself a direct disciple of
Plotinus, is still more explicit as to the nature of these spirits.
Daimons are invisible; but they know how to clothe themselves with
forms and configurations subjected to numerous variations, which can be
explained by their nature having much of the corporeal in itself. Their abode
is in the neighbourhood of the earth . . . and when they can escape the
vigilance of the good Daimons, there is no mischief they win not tare commit.
One day they will employ brute force; another, cunning. Further, he says:
It is a child's play for them to arouse in us vile passions, to
impart to
societies and nations turbulent doctrines, provoking wars,
seditions, and
other public calamities, and then tell you "that all of these
are the work of the gods." . . . These spirits pass their time in cheating
and deceiving
mortals, creating around them illusions and prodigies; their
greatest ambition is to pass as gods and souls (disembodied
spirits).16Iamblichus, the great theurgist of the Neoplatonic school, a man
skilled in sacred magic, teaches that:
Good Daimons appear to us in reality, while the bad ones can
manifest
themselves but under the shadowy forms of phantoms.Further, he
corroborates Porphyry, and tells how that:
The good ones fear not the light, while the wicked ones require
darkness . . .
The sensations they excite in us make us believe in the presence
and reality of things they show, though these things be absent.17Even the most
practised theurgists sometimes found danger in their dealings with certain
elementaries, and we have Iamblichus stating that:
The gods, the angels, and the Daimons, as well as the souls, may be
summoned through evocation and prayer . . . But when, during theurgic
operations, a mistake is made, beware! Do not imagine that you are
communicating with beneficent divinities, who have answered your earnest
prayer; no, for they are bad Daimons, only under the guise of good ones!
For the elementaries often clothe themselves with the similitude of
the good, and assume a rank very much superior to that they really occupy.
Their boasting betrays them.18The ancients,
who named but four elements, made of ether a fifth. On account of
its essence being made divine by the unseen presence, it was considered as a
medium between this world and the next. They held that when the directing
intelligences retired from any portion of ether, one of the four kingdoms which
they are bound to superintend, the space was left in possession of evil. An
adept who prepared to converse with the "invisibles," had to know his
ritual well, and be perfectly acquainted with the conditions required for the
perfect equilibrium of the four elements in the astral light. First of all, he
must purify the essence, and
within the circle in which he sought to attract the pure
spirits,equilibrize
the elements, so as to prevent the ingress of the Elementals into
their
respective spheres. But woe to the imprudent enquirer who
ignorantly trespasses upon forbidden ground; danger will beset him at every
step. He evokes powers that he cannot control; he arouses sentries which allow
only their masters to pass. For, in the words of the immortalRosicrucian:
Once that thou hast resolved to become a coöperator with the spirit
of the living God, take care not to hinder Him in His work; for, if thy heat
exceeds the natural proportion, thou hast stirr'd the wrath of the moyst
natures, and they will stand up against the central fire, and the central fire
against them, and there will be a terrible division in the chaos.20The spirit
of harmony and union will depart from the elements, disturbed by the imprudent
hand; and the currents of blind forces will become immediately infested by
numberless creatures of matter and instinct--the bad demons of the theurgists,
the devils of theology; the gnomes, salamanders, sylphs, and undines will
assail he rash performer under multifarious aërial forms. Unable to invent
anything, they will
search your memory to its very depths; hence the nervous exhaustion
and mental oppression of certain sensitive natures at spiritual circles.
The Elementals will bring to light long-forgotten remembrances of
the past; forms, images, sweet mementoes, and familiar sentences, long since
faded from our own remembrance, but vividly preserved in the inscrutable depths
of our memory and on the astral tablets of the imperishable "Book of
Life."
The author of the Homoiomerian system of philosophy, Anaxagoras of
Clazomene, firmly believed that the spiritual prototypes of all things, as well
as their elements, were to be found in the boundless ether, where they were
generated, whence they evolved, and whither they returned from earth. In common
with the Hindûs who had personified their Âkâsha, and made of it a deific
entity, the Greeks and Latins had deified Æther. Virgil calls Zeus, Pater
Omnipotens Æther, Magnus, the Great God, Ether. These beings, the elemental
spirits of the Kabalists, are those whom the Christian clergy denounce as
"devils," the enemies of mankind!
Every organized thing in this world, visible as well as invisible,
has an
element appropriate to itself. The fish lives and breathes in the
water; the plant consumes carbonic acid, which for animals and men produces
death; some beings are fitted for rarefied strata of air, others exist only in
the densest.
Life to some is dependent on sunlight, to others, upon darkness;
and so the wise economy of nature adapts to each existing condition some living
form. These analogies warrant the conclusion that, not only is there no unoccupied
portion of universal nature, but also that for each thing that has life,
special conditions are furnished, and, being furnished, they are necessary.
Now, assuming that there is an invisible side to the universe, the fixed habit
of nature warrants the conclusion that this half is occupied, like the other
half; and that each group of its occupants is supplied with the indispensable
conditions of existence. It is as illogical to imagine that identical
conditions are furnished to all, as it would be to maintain such a theory
respecting the inhabitants of the domain of visible nature. That there are
"spirits" implies that there is a diversity of "spirits";
for men differ, and human "spirits" are but disembodied men.
To say that all "spirits" are alike, or fitted to the
same atmosphere, or
possessed of like powers, or governed by the same
attractions--electric,
magnetic, odic, astral, it matters not which--is as absurd as
though one should say that all planets have the same nature, or that all animals
are amphibious, or that all men can be nourished on the same food. To begin
with, neither the elementals, nor the elementaries themselves, can be called
"spirits" at all. It accords with reason to suppose that the grossest
natures among them will sink to the lowest depths of the spiritual
atmosphere--in other words, be found nearest to the earth. Inversely, the
purest will be farthest away. In what, were we to
coin a word, we should call the "psychomatics" of
Occultism, it is as
unwarrantable to assume that either of these grades of ethereal
beings can occupy the place, or subsist in the conditions, of the other, as it
would be in hydraulics to expect that two liquids of different densities could
exchange their markings on the scale of Beaume's hydrometer.
Görres, describing a conversation he had with some Hindûs of the
Malabar coast, reports that upon asking them whether they had ghosts among
them, they replied:
Yes, but we know them to be bad bhûts [spirits, or rather, the
"empty" ones, the "shells", . . . good ones can hardly ever
appear at all. They are principally the spirits of suicides and murderers, or
of those who die violent deaths. They constantly flutter about and appear as
phantoms. Night-time is favourable to them, they seduce the feeble-minded and
tempt others in a thousand different ways.23Porphyry presents to us some
hideous facts whose verity is substantiated in the experience of every student
of magic. He writes:
The soul,24 having even after death a certain affection for its
body, art affinity proportioned to the violence with which their union was
broken, we see many spirits hovering in despair about their earthly remains; we
even see them eagerly seeking the putrid remains of other bodies, but above all
freshly-spilled blood, which seems to impart to them for the moment some of the
faculties of life. Though spiritualists discredit them ever so much, these
nature-spirits--as much as the "elementaries," the "empty
shells," as the Hindus call them--are realities. If the gnomes, sylphs,
salamanders and undines of the
Rosicrucians existed in their days, they must exist now. Bulwer
Lytton's
"Dweller on the Threshold" is a modern conception,
modelled on the ancient type of the Sulanuth of the Hebrews and Egyptians,
which is mentioned in the Book of Jasher.26
The Christians are very wrong to treat them indiscriminately, as
"devils," "imps of Satan," and to give them like
characteristics names. The elementals are nothing of the kind, but simply
creatures of ethereal matter, irresponsible, and neither good nor bad, unless
influenced by a superior intelligence. It is very extraordinary to hear devout
Catholics abuse and misrepresent the nature-spirits, when one of their greatest
authorities, Clement the Alexandrian, has described these creatures as they
really are. Clement, who perhaps had been a theurgist as well as an
Neoplatonist, and thus argued upon good authority, remarks, that it is absurd
to call them devils, for they are only inferior angels, "the powers which
inhabit elements, move the winds and distribute showers, and assuch are agents
and subject to God."28 Origen, who before he
became a Christian also belonged to the Platonic school, is of the
same opinion. Porphyry, as we have seen, describes these daimons more carefully
than any one else.
The Secret Doctrine teaches that man, if he wins immortality, will
remain for ever the septenary trinity that he is in life, and will continue so
throughout all the spheres. The astral body, which in this life is covered by a
gross physical envelope, becomes--when relieved of that covering by the process
of corporeal death--in its turn the shell of another and more ethereal body.
This begins developing from the moment of death, and becomes perfected when the
astral body of the earthly form finally separates from it. This process, they
say, is repeated at every new transition from sphere to sphere of life. But the
immortal soul, the "silvery spark," observed by Dr. Fenwick in
Margrave's brain
(in Bulwer Lytton's Strange Story), and not found by him in the
animals, never changes, but remains indestructible "by aught that shatters
its tabernacle." The descriptions by Porphyry and Iamblichus and others,
of the spirits of animals, which inhabit the astral light, are corroborated by
those of many of the most trustworthy and intelligent clairvoyants. Sometimes
the animal forms are even made visible to every person at a spiritual circle,
by being materialized. In his People from the Other World, Colonel H. S. Olcott
describes a materialized squirrel which followed a spirit-woman into the view
of the spectators, disappeared and reappeared before their eyes several times,
and finally followed
the spirit into the cabinet. The facts given in modern
spiritualistic literature are numerous and many of them are trustworthy.
As to the human spirit, the notions of the older philosophers and
mediæval Kabalists while differing in some particulars, agreed on the whole; so
that the doctrine of one may be viewed as the doctrine of the other. The most
substantial difference consisted in the location of the immortal or divine
spirit of man.
While the ancient Neoplatonists held that the Augœides never
descends
hypostatically into the living man, but only more or less sheds its
radiance on the inner man--the astral soul--the Kabalists of the middle ages
maintained that the spirit, detaching itself from the ocean of light and
spirit, entered into man's soul, where it remained through life imprisoned in
the astral capsule. This difference was the result of the belief of Christian
Kabalists, more or less, in the dead letter of the allegory of the fall of man.
The soul, they said, became, through the "fall of Adam," contaminated
with the world of matter, or Satan. Before it could appear with its enclosed
divine spirit in the presence
of the Eternal, it had to purify itself of the impurities of
darkness. They compared--
The spirit imprisoned within the soul to a drop of water enclosed
within a
capsule of gelatine and thrown in the ocean; so long as the 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. As long as it is enclosed in its plastic mediator, or soul, it
has an individual existence. Destroy the capsule, a result which may occur from
the agonies of withered conscience, crime, and moral disease, and the spirit
returns back to its original abode. Its individuality is gone.
On the other hand, the philosophers who explained the "fall
into generation" in their own way, viewed spirit as something wholly
distinct from the soul. They allowed its presence in the astral capsule only so
far as the spiritual emanations or rays of the "shining one" were
concerned. Man and his spiritual soul or the monad--i.e., spirit and its
vehicle--had to conquer their immortality by ascending toward the unity with
which, if successful, they were finally linked, and into which they were
absorbed, so to say. The individualization of man after death depended on the
spirit, not on his astral or human soul--Manas and its
vehicle Kâma Rûpa--and body. Although the word
"personality," in the sense in which it is usually understood, is an
absurdity, if applied literally to our immortal essence, still the latter is a
distinct entity, immortal and eternal, per se; and when (as in the case of
criminals beyond redemption) the shining thread which links the spirit to the
soul, from the moment of the birth of a child, is violently snapped, and the
disembodied personal entity is left to share the fate of the lower animals, to
gradually dissolve into ether, fall into the terrible state of Âvîchi, or
disappear entirely in the eighth sphere and have its complete personality
annihilated--even then the spirit remains a distinct being. It becomes a
planetary spirit, an angel; for the gods of the Pagan or the archangels of the
Christian, the direct emanations of the One Cause, notwithstanding the
hazardous statement of Swedenborg, never were nor
will they be men, on our planet, at least.
This specialization has been in all ages the stumbling-block of
metaphysicians. The whole esotericism of the Buddhistic philosophy is based on
this mysterious teaching, understood by so few persons, and so totally misrepresented
by many of the most learned scholars. Even metaphysicians are too inclined to
confound the effect with the cause. A person may have won his immortal life,
and remain the same inner self he was on earth, throughout eternity; but this
does not imply
necessarily that he must either remain the Mr. Smith or Brown he
was on earth, or lose his individuality. Therefore, the astral soul, i.e., the
personality, like the terrestrial body and the lower portion of the human soul
of man, may, in the dark hereafter, be absorbed into the cosmical ocean of
sublimated elements, and cease to feel its personal individuality, if it did
not deserve to soar higher, and the divine spirit, or spiritual individuality,
still remain an unchanged entity, though this terrestrial experience of his
emanations may be totally obliterated at the instant of separation from the
unworthy vehicle.
If the "spirit," or the divine portion of the soul, is
preëxistent as a distinct being from all eternity, as Origen, Synesius, and other
Christian fathers and philosophers taught, and if it is the same, and nothing
more than the metaphysically-objective soul, how can it be otherwise than
eternal? And what matters it in such a case, whether man leads an animal or a
pure life, if, do what he may, he can never lose his personality? This doctrine
is as pernicious in its consequences as that of vicarious atonement. Had the
latter dogma, in company with the false idea that we are all personally
immortal, been demonstrated to the world in its true light, humanity would have
been bettered by its propagation. Crime and sin would be avoided, not for fear
of earthly punishment, or of a ridiculous hell, but for the sake of that which
lies the most deeply rooted in our nature--the desire of a personal and
distinct life in
the hereafter, the positive assurance that we cannot win it unless
we "take the kingdom of heaven by violence," and the conviction that
neither human prayers nor the blood of another man will save us from personal
destruction after death, unless we firmly link ourselves during our terrestrial
life with our own immortal spirit--our only personal God. Pythagoras, Plato,
Timæus of Locris, and the whole Alexandrian School derived the soul from the
universal World-Soul; and a portion of the latter was, according to their own
teachings--ether; something of such a fine nature as to be perceived only by
our inner sight. Therefore, it cannot be the essence of the Monas, or Cause,29
because the Anima Mundi is but the effect, the objective emanation of the
former. Both the divine spiritual soul and the human soul are preëxistent. But,
while the former exists as a distinct entity, an individualization, the soul
(the vehicle of the former) exists only as preëxisting matter, an unscient
portion of an intelligent whole. Both were originally formed from the Eternal
Ocean of Light; but as the Theosophists expressed it, there is a visible as
well as invisible spirit in fire. They made a difference between the Anima
Bruta and the Anima Divina. Empedocles firmly believed all men and animals to
possess two souls; and in Aristotle we find that
he calls one the reasoning soul, Nous, and the other, the animal
soul, Psuche. According to these philosophers, the reasoning soul comes from
without the Universal Soul (i.e., from a source higher than the Universal
Soul--in its cosmic sense; it is the Universal Spirit, the seventh principle of
the Universe in its totality), and the other from within. This divine and
superior region, in which they located the invisible and supreme deity, was
considered by them (by Aristotle himself, who was not an initiate) as a fifth
element--whereas it is the seventh in the Esoteric Philosophy, or
Mûlaprakriti--purely spiritual and divine, whereas the Anima Mundi proper was
considered as composed of a fine, igneous, and ethereal nature spread
throughout the Universe, in short--Ether.30
The Stoics, the greatest materialists of ancient days, excepted the
Divine Principle and Divine Soul from any such a corporeal nature. Their modern
commentators and admirers, greedily seizing the opportunity, built on this
ground the supposition that the Stoics believed in neither God nor soul, the
essence of matter. Most certainly Epicurus did not believe in God or soul as
understood by either ancient or modern theists. But Epicurus, whose doctrine
(militating directly against the agency of a Supreme Being and Gods, in the
formation or government of the world) placed him far above the Stoics in
atheism and materialism, nevertheless taught that the soul is of a fine, tender
essence formed from the smoothest, roundest, and finest atoms--which
description still brings us to the same sublimated ether. He further believed
in the Gods.
Arnobius, Tertullian, Irenæus, and Origen, notwithstanding their
Christianity, believed, with the more modern Spinoza and Hobbes, that the soul
was corporeal, though of a very fine nature—an
anthropomorphic and personal something, i.e., corporeal, finite and
conditioned. Can it under such conditions become immortal? Can the mutable become
the immutable?
This doctrine of the possibility of losing one's soul and, hence,
individuality, militates with the ideal theories and progressive ideas of some
spiritualists, though Swedenborg fully adopts it. They will never accept the
kabalistic doctrine which teaches that it is only through observing the law of
harmony that individual life hereafter can be obtained; and that the farther
the inner and outer man deviate from this fount of harmony, whose source lies
in our divine spirit, the more
difficult it is to regain the ground.
But while the spiritualists and other adherents of Christianity
have little, if any, perception of this fact of the possible death and
obliteration of the human personality by the separation of the immortal part
from the perishable, some Swedenborgians--those, at least, who follow the
spirit of a philosophy, not merely the dead letter of a teaching--fully
comprehend it. One of the most respected ministers of the New Church, the Rev.
Chauncey Giles, D.D., of New York, recently elucidated the subject in a public
discourse as follows. Physical
death, or the death of the body, was a provision of the divine
economy for the benefit of man, a provision by means of which he attained the
higher ends of his being. But there is another death which is the interruption
of the divine order and the destruction of every human element in man's nature,
and every possibility of human happiness. This is the spiritual death which
takes place before the dissolution of the body. "There may be a vast
development of man's natural mind without that development being accompanied by
a particle of the
divine love, or of unselfish love of man." When one falls into
a love of self and love of the world, with its pleasures, losing the divine
love of God and of the neighbour, he falls from life to death. The higher
principles which constitute the essential elements of his humanity perish, and
he lives only on the natural plane of his faculties. Physically he exists,
spiritually he is dead. To all that pertains to the higher and the only
enduring phase of existence he is as much dead as his body becomes dead to all
the activities, delights, and sensations of the world when the spirit has left
it. This spiritual death results from disobedience of the laws of spiritual
life, which is followed by the same penalty as the disobedience of the laws of
the natural life. But the spiritually dead have still their delights; they have
their intellectual endowments, and power, and intense activities. All the
animal delights are theirs, and to multitudes of men and women these constitute
the highest ideal of human happiness. The tireless pursuit of riches, of the
amusements and entertainments of social life; the cultivation of graces of
manner, of taste in dress, of social preferment, of scientific distinction,
intoxicate and enrapture these dead-alive; but, the eloquent
preacher remarks, "these creatures, with all their graces, rich attire,
and brilliant accomplishments, are dead in the eye of the Lord and the angels,
and when measured by the only true and immutable standard have no more genuine
life than skeletons whose flesh has turned to dust."
Although we do not believe in "the Lord and the
angels"--not, at any rate, in the sense given to these terms by Swedenborg
and his followers, we nevertheless admire these feelings and fully agree with
the reverend gentleman's opinions. A high development of the intellectual
faculties does not imply spiritual and true life. The presence in one of a
highly developed human, intellectual soul (the fifth principle, or Manas), is
quite compatible with the absence of Buddhi, or the spiritual soul. Unless the
former evolves from and develops under the beneficent and vivifying rays of the
latter, it will remain for ever but a direct progeny of the terrestrial, lower
principles, sterile in spiritual perceptions; a magnificent, luxurious
sepulchre, full of the dry bones of decaying matter within. Many of our
greatest scientists are but animate
corpses--they have no spiritual sight because their spirits have
left them, or, rather, cannot reach them. So we might go through all ages,
examine all occupations, weigh all human attainments, and investigate all forms
of society, and we would find these spiritually dead everywhere.
Although Aristotle himself, anticipating the modern physiologists,
regarded the human mind as a material substance, and ridiculed the hylozoïsts,
nevertheless he fully believed in the existence of a "double" soul,
or soul plus spirit, as one can see in his De Generat. et Corrupt. (Lib. ii.).
He laughed at Strabo for believing that any particles of matter, per se, could
have life and intellect in themselves sufficient to fashion by degrees such a
multiform world as ours.31 Aristotle is indebted for the sublime morality of his
Nichomachean Ethics to a
thorough study of the Pythagorean Ethical Fragments; for the latter
can be easily shown to have been the source at which he gathered his ideas,
though he might not have sworn "by him who the Tetraktys found."32
But indeed our men of
science know nothing certain about Aristotle. His philosophy is so
abtruse that he constantly leaves his reader to supply by the imagination the
missing links of his logical deductions. Moreover, we know that before his
works ever reached our scholars, who delight in his seemingly atheistical
arguments in support of his doctrine of fate, they passed through too many
hands to have remained immaculate. From Theophrastus, his legator, they passed
to Neleus, whose heirs kept them mouldering in subterranean caves for nearly
150 years; after which, we learn that his manuscripts were copied and much
augmented by Appelicon of Theos,
who supplied such paragraphs as had become illegible, by
conjectures of his own, probably many of these drawn from the depths of his
inner consciousness. Our scholars of the nineteenth as anxious to imitate him
practically as they are to throw his inductive method and materialistic
theories at the heads of the Platonists. We invite them to collect facts as
carefully as he did, instead of denying those they know nothing about.
What we have said here and elsewhere of the variety of
"spirits" and other invisible beings evolved in the astral light, and
what we now mean to say of mediums and the tendency of their mediumship, is not
based upon conjecture, but upon actual experience and observation. There is
scarcely one phase of mediumship, of either kind, that we have not seen
exemplified during the past thirty-five years, in various countries. India,
Tibet, Borneo, Siam, Egypt, Asia Minor, America (North and South), and other
parts of the world, have each displayed to us its peculiar phase of mediumistic
phenomena and magical power.
Our varied experience has fully corroborated the teachings of our Masters
and of The Secret Doctrine, and has taught us two important truths, viz., that
for the exercise of "mediumship" personal purity and the exercise of
a trained and indomitable will-power are indispensable; and that spiritualists
can never assure themselves of the genuineness of mediumistic manifestations
unless they occur in the light and under such reasonable test conditions as
would make an attempted fraud instantly noticed.
For fear of being misunderstood, we would remark that while, as a
rule, physical phenomena are produced by the nature-spirits, of their own
motion and under the impulse of the elementaries, still genuine disembodied
human spirits, may, under exceptional circumstances--such as the aspiration of
a pure, loving heart, or under the influence of some intense thought or
unsatisfied desire, at the moment of death--manifest their presence, either in
dream, or vision, or even bring about their objective appearance--if very soon
after physical death. Direct writing may be produced in the genuine handwriting
of the "spirit," the medium
being influenced by a process unknown as much to himself as to the
modern spiritualists, we fear. But what we maintain and shall maintain to the
last is, that no genuine human spirit can materialize, i.e., clothe his monad
with an objective form. Even for the rest it must be a mighty attraction indeed
to draw a pure, disembodied spirit from its radiant, Devachanic state--its
home--into the foul atmosphere from which it escaped upon leaving its earthly
body.
When the possible nature of the manifesting intelligences, which
science
believes to be a "psychic force," and spiritualists the
identical "spirits of
the dead," is better known, then will academicians and
believers turn to the old philosophers for information. They may in their
indomitable pride, that becomes so often stubbornness and arrogance, do as Dr.
Charcot, of the Salpêtrière of Paris, has done: deny for years the existence of
Mesmerism and its phenomena, to accept and finally preach it in public
lectures--only under the assumed name, Hypnotism. We have found in
spiritualistic journals many instances where apparitions of
departed pet dogs and other animals have been seen. Therefore, upon
spiritualistic testimony, we must think that such animal "spirits"
do appear although we reserve the right of concurring with the ancients that
the forms are but tricks of the elementals. Notwithstanding every proof and
probability the spiritualists will, nevertheless, maintain that it is the
"spirits" of the departed human beings that are at work even in the
"materialization" of animals.
We will now examine with their permission the pro and con of the
mooted
question. Let us for a moment imagine an intelligent orang-outang
or some African anthropoid ape disembodied, i.e., deprived of its physical and
in possession of an astral, if not an immortal body. Once open the door of
communication between the terrestrial and the spiritual world, what prevents
the ape from producing physical phenomena such as he sees human spirits
produce? And why may not these excel in cleverness and ingenuity many of those
which have been witnessed in spiritualistic circles? Let spiritualists answer.
The orang-outang of Borneo is little, if any, inferior to the savage man in
intelligence. Mr. Wallace and other great naturalists give instances of its
wonderful acuteness, although its brains are inferior in cubic capacity to the
most undeveloped of savages. These apes lack but speech to be men of low grade.
The sentinels placed by monkeys; the sleeping chambers selected and
built by orang-outangs; their prevision of danger and calculations, which show
more than instinct; their choice of leaders whom they obey; and the exercise of
many of their faculties, certainly entitle them to a place at least on a level
with many a flat-headed Australian. Says Mr. Wallace, "The mental
requirements of savages, and the faculties actually exercised by them, are very
little above those of the
animals."
Now, people assume that there can be no apes in the other world,
because apes have no "souls." But apes have as much intelligence, it
appears, as some men; why, then, should these men, in no way superior to the
apes, have immortal spirits, and the apes none? The materialists will answer
that neither the one nor the other has a spirit, but that annihilation
overtakes each at physical death. But the spiritual philosophers of all times
have agreed that man occupies a step one degree higher than the animal, and is
possessed of that something
which it lacks, be he the most untutored of savages or the wisest
of
philosophers. The ancients, as we have seen, taught that while man
is a
septenary trinity of body, astral spirit, and immortal soul, the
animal is but a duality--i.e., having but five instead of seven principles in
him, a being having a physical body with its astral body and life-principle,
and its animal soul and vehicle animating it. Scientists can distinguish no
difference in the elements composing the bodies of men and brutes; and the
Kabalists agree with them so far as to say that the astral bodies (or, as the
physicists would call it, the "life-principle") of animals and men
are identical in essence. Physical man is but the highest development of animal
life. If, as the scientists tell us, even thought is matter, and every
sensation of pain or pleasure, every transient desire is accompanied by a
disturbance of ether; and those bold speculators, the authors of the Unseen
Universe believe that thought is conceived "to affect the matter of
another universe simultaneously with this";
why, then, should not the gross, brutish thought of an
orang-outang, or a dog, impressing itself on the ethereal waves of the astral
light, as well as that of man, assure the animal a continuity of life after
death, or a "future state"?
The Kabalists held, and now hold, that it is unphilosophical to
admit that the astral body of man can survive corporeal death, and at the same
time assert that the astral body of the ape is resolved into independent
molecules. That which survives as an individuality after the death of the body
is the astral soul, which Plato, in the Timæus and Gorgias, calls the mortal
soul, for, according to the Hermetic doctrine, it throws off its more material
particles at every progressive change into a higher sphere.
Let us advance another step in our argument. If there is such a
thing as
existence in the spiritual world after corporeal death, then it
must occur in accordance with the law of evolution. It takes man from his place
at the apex of the pyramid of matter, and lifts him into a sphere of existence
where the same inexorable law follows him. And if it follows him, why not
everything else in nature? Why not animals and plants, which have all a
life-principle, and whose gross forms decay like his, when that life-principle
leaves them? If his astral body becomes more ethereal upon attaining the other
sphere, why not theirs?*
1 Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni.
2 Plutarch, De Isid., ch. xxv, p. 360.
3 De Natura Deorum, lib. i. Cap. xviii.
4 Let the student consult The Secret Doctrine on this matter,
and he will there find full explanations.
5 In order to create a blind, or throw a veil upon the mystery
of primordial evolution, the later Brâhmans, with a view also to serve
orthodoxy, explained the two, by an invented fable; the first Pitris were
"sons of God" and offended Brahmâ by refusing to sacrifice to him,
for which crime, the Creator cursed them to become fools, a curse they could
escape only by accepting their own sons as instructors and addressing them as
their Fathers--Pitris. This is the exoteric
version.
6 We find an echo of this in the Codex Nazaræus. Bahak-Zivo, the
"father of Genii" (the seven) is ordered to construct creatures. But,
as he is "ignorant of Orcus" and unacquainted with "the
consuming fire which is wanting in light," he fails to do so and calls in
Fetahil, a still purer spirit, to his aid, who fails still worse and sits in
the mud (Ilus, Chaos, Matter) and wonders why the living fire is so changed. It
is only when the "Spirit" (Soul) steps on the stage of creation (the
feminine Anima Mundi of the Nazarenes and Gnostics) and awakens Karabtanos--the
spirit of matter and concupiscence--who consents to help his
mother, that the "Spiritus" conceives and bring forth
"Seven Figures," and again "Seven" and once more
"Seven" (the Seven Virtues, Seven Sins and Seven Worlds). Then
Fetahil dips his hand in the Chaos and creates our planet. (See Isis Unveiled,
vol. i. 298-300 et seq.)
7 Idra Suta, Zohar, iii. 292b.
8Of late, some narrow-minded critics--unable to understand the
high philosophy of the above doctrine, the Esoteric meaning of which reveals
when solved the widest horizons in astro-physical as well as in psychological
sciences--chuckled over and pooh-poohed the idea of the eighth sphere, that
could discover to their minds, befogged with old and mouldy dogmas of an
unscientific faith, nothing better than our "moon in the shape of a
dust-bin to collect the sins of men!"
9Persons who believe in clairvoyant power, but are disposed to
discredit the existing of any other spirits in nature than disembodied human
spirits, will be interested in an account of certain clairvoyant observations
which appeared in the London Spiritualist of June 29th, 1877. A thunderstorm
approaching, the seeress saw "a bright spirit emerge from a dark cloud and
pass with lightning speed across the sky, and, a few minutes after, a diagonal
line of dark spirits in the clouds." These are the Maruts of the Vedas. The
well-known lecturer, author,and clairvoyant, Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten, has
published accounts of her frequent experiences with these elemental spirits.
If Spiritualists will accept her "spiritual"
experience they can hardly reject her evidence in favour of the occult
theories.
10 Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces, by J.
Le Conte.
11Archives des Sciences, xiv. 345, December, 1872.
12 Mr. Cromwell F. Varley, the well-known electrician of the
Atlantic Cable Company, communicates the result of his observations, in the
course of a debate at the Psychological Society of Great Britain, which is
reported in the Spiritualist (London, April 14th, 1876, pp. l74, 175). He
thought that the effect of free nitric acid in the atmosphere was able to drive
away what he calls "unpleasant spirits." He thought that those who
were troubled by unpleasant spirits at home, would find relief by pouring one
ounce of vitriol upon two ounces of finely-powdered nitre in a saucer and
putting the mixture under the bed. Here is a scientist, whose reputation
extends over two continents, who gives a recipe to drive away bad spirits! And
yet the general public mocks at as a "superstition" the herbs and
incenses employed by Hindus, Chinese, Africans, and other races to accomplish
the self-same purpose!
13 "Of Sacrifices to Gods and Daimons," chap. ii.
14 Odyssey, vii.
15 Porphyry, "Of Sacrifices to Gods and Daimons,"
chap. ii.
16 Ibid.
17 Iamblichus, De Mysteriis Egyptorum.
18 Ibid., "On the Difference between the Daimons, the
Souls," etc.
19 We give the spelling and words of this Kabalist, who lived
and published his works in the seventeenth century. Generally he is considered
as one of the most famous alchemists among the Hermetic philosophers.
20 The most positive of materialistic philosophers agree that
all that exists was evolved from ether; hence, air, water, earth, and fire, the
four primordial elements must also proceed from ether and chaos the first duad;
all the imponderables, whether now known or unknown, proceed from the same
source. Now, if there is a spiritual essence in matter, and that essence forces
it to shape itself into millions of individual forms, why is it illogical to
assert that each of these spiritual kingdoms in nature is peopled with beings
evolved out of its own material? Chemistry teaches us that in man's body there
are air, water,
earth, and heat, or fire--air is present in its components;
water in the
secretions; earth in the inorganic constituents; and fire in the
animal heat.
The Kabalist knows by experience that an elemental spirit
contains only one of these, and that each one of the four kingdoms has its own
peculiar elemental spirits; man being higher than they, the law of evolution
finds its illustration in the combination of all four in him.
21 Virgil, Georgica. book ii.
22 Porphyry and other philosophers explain the nature of the
dwellers They are mischievous and deceitful, though some of them are perfectly
gentle and harmless, but so weak as to have the greatest difficulty in
communicating with mortals whose company they seek incessantly. The former are
not wicked through intelligent malice. The law of spiritual evolution not
having yet developed their instinct into intelligence, whose highest light
belongs but to immortal spirits, their powers of reasoning are in a latent
state, and, therefore, they themselves, irresponsible.
But the Latin Church contradicts the Kabalists. St. Augustine
has even a
discussion on that account with Porphyry, the Neoplatonist.
"These spirits," he says, "are deceitful, not by their nature,
as Porphyry, the theurgist, will have it, but through malice. They pass
themselves off for gods and for the souls of
the defunct" (Civit. Det, x. 2). So far Porphyry agrees
with him; "but they do not claim to be demons [read devils], for they are
such in reality!"--adds the Bishop of Hippo. So far, so good, and he is
right there, But then, under what class should we place the men without heads,
whom Augustine wishes us to believe he saw himself; or the satyrs of St.
Jerome, which he asserts were exhibited for a considerable length of time at
Alexandria? They were, he tells us, "men with the legs and tails of
goats"; and, if we may believe him, one of these satyrs was actually
pickled and sent in a cask to the Emperor Constantine!!!
23 Görres, Mystique, iii; 63.
24 The ancients called the spirits of bad people
"souls"; the soul was the
"larva" and "lemure." Good human spirits
became "gods."
25 Porphyry, De Sacrificiis. Chapter on the true Cultus.
26 Chap. lxxx. vv. 19, 20. "And when the Egyptians hid
themselves on account of the swarm [one of the plagues alleged to have been
brought on by Moses] . . . they locked their doors after them, and God ordered
the Sulanuth . . . [a sea-monster, naively explains the translator, in a
foot-note] which was then in the sea, to come up and go into Egypt . . . and
she had long arms, ten cubits in length . . . and she went upon the roofs and uncovered
the rafting and cut them . . . and stretched forth her arm into the house and
removed the lock and the bolt and opened the houses of Egypt . . . and the
swarm of animals destroyed the
Egyptians, and it grieved them exceedingly."
27 Strom., vi. 17, § 159.
28 Ibid., vi. 3, §30.
29As says Krishna--who is at the same time Purusha and Prakriti
in its totality, and the seventh principle, the divine spirit in man--in the
Bhagavad Gita: "I arn the Cause. I am the production and dissolution of
the whole of Nature. On me is all the Universe suspended as pearls upon a
string." (Ch. vii.) "Even though myself unborn, of changeless
essence, and the Lord of all existence, yet in presiding over Nature (Prakriti)
which is mine, I am born but through my own Mâyâ [the mystic power of
Self-ideation, the Eternal Thought in the Eternal Mind]." (Ch. iv.)
30 Ether is the Âkâsha of the Hindus. Âkâsha is Prakriti, or the
totality of the manifested Universe, while Purusha is the Universal Spirit,
higher than the Universal Soul.
31 De Part., i. 1.
32 A Pythagorean oath. The Pythagoreans swore by their Master.
*The article here comes to an abrupt termination--whether it was
ever finished or whether some of the MS. was lost, it is impossible to say.--EDS.
[Lucifer].
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