Writings
of H P Blavatsky
Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24 -1DL
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831 – 1891)
The Founder of Modern Theosophy
Have Animals Souls
By
H
P Blavatsky
Continually
soaked with blood, the whole earth is but an immense altar upon which all that
lives has to be immolated--endlessly, incessantly. . . .
--COMTE JOSEPH
DE MAISTRE (
MANY are the
"antiquated religious superstitions" of the East which Western
nations often and unwisely deride: but none is so laughed at and practically
set at defiance as the great respect of Oriental people for animal life.
Flesh-eaters cannot sympathize with total abstainers from meat. We Europeans
are nations of civilized barbarians with but a few millenniums between
ourselves and our cave-dwelling forefathers who sucked the blood and marrow
from uncooked bones. Thus, it is only natural that those who hold human life so
cheaply in their frequent and often iniquitous wars, should entirely disregard
the death-agonies of the brute creation, and daily sacrifice millions of
innocent, harmless lives; for we are too epicurean to devour tiger steaks or
crocodile cutlets, but must have tender lambs and golden feathered pheasants.
All this is only as it should be in our era of Krupp
cannons and scientific vivisectors. Nor is it a
matter of great wonder that the hardy European should laugh at the mild Hindu,
who shudders at the bare thought of killing a cow, or that he should refuse to
sympathize with the Buddhist and Jain, in their respect for the life of every
sentient creature--from the elephant to the gnat.
But, if
meat-eating has indeed become a vital necessity--"the tyrant's
plea!"--among Western nations; if hosts of victims in every city, borough
and village of the civilized world must needs be daily slaughtered in temples
dedicated to the deity, denounced by St. Paul and worshipped by men "whose
God is their belly":--if all this and much more cannot be avoided in our
"age of Iron," who can urge the same excuse for sport? Fishing,
shooting, and hunting, the most fascinating of all the "amusements"
of civilized life--are certainly the most objectionable from the standpoint of
occult philosophy, the most sinful in the eyes of the followers of these
religious systems which are the direct outcome of the Esoteric
Doctrine--Hinduism and Buddhism. Is it altogether without any good reason that
the adherents of these two religions, now the oldest in the world, regard the
animal world--from the huge quadruped down to the infinitesimally small
insect--as their "younger brothers," however ludicrous the idea to a
European? This question shall receive due consideration further on.
Nevertheless,
exaggerated as the notion may seem, it is certain that few of us are able to
picture to ourselves without shuddering the scenes which take place early every
morning in the innumerable shambles of the so-called civilized world, or even
those daily enacted during the "shooting season." The first sun-beam
has not yet awakened slumbering nature, when from all points of the compass
myriads of hecatombs are being prepared--to salute the rising luminary. Never
was heathen Moloch gladdened by such a cry of agony from his victims as the
pitiful wail that in all Christian countries rings like a long hymn of
suffering throughout nature, all day and every day from morning until evening.
In ancient
A wretched lot
is that of poor brute creatures, hardened as it is into implacable fatality by
the hand of man. The rational soul of the human being seems born to become the
murderer of the irrational soul of the animal--in the full sense of the word,
since the Christian doctrine teaches that the soul of the animal dies with its
body. Might not the legend of Cain and Abel have had a dual signification? Look
at that other disgrace of our cultured age--the scientific slaughter-houses
called "vivisection rooms." Enter one of those halls in
"Vivisection"--he
says--"is a specialty in which torture, scientifically economised
by our butcher-academicians, is applied during whole days, weeks, and even
months to the fibres and muscles of one and the same
victim. It (torture) makes use of every and any kind of weapon, performs its
analysis before a pitiless audience, divides the task every morning between ten
apprentices at once, of whom one works on the eye, another one on the leg, the
third on the brain, a fourth on the marrow; and whose inexperienced hands
succeed, nevertheless, towards night after a hard day's work, in laying bare
the whole of the living carcass they had been ordered to chisel out, and that
in the evening, is carefully stored away in the cellar, in order that early
next morning it may be worked upon again if only there is a breath of life and
sensibility left in the victim! We know that the trustees of the Grammont law (loi) have tried to
rebel against this abomination; but Pans showed herself more inexorable than
And yet these
gentlemen boast of the grand object pursued, and of the grand secrets
discovered by them. "Horror and lies!"--exclaims
the same author. "In the matter of secrets--a few localizations of
faculties and cerebral motions excepted--we know but of one secret that belongs
to them by rights: it is the secret of torture eternalized, beside which the
terrible natural law of autophagy (mutual manducation), the horrors of war, the merry massacres of
sport, and the sufferings of the animal under the butcher's knife--are as
nothing! Glory to our men of science! They have surpassed every former kind of
torture, and remain now and for ever, without any possible contestation, the
kings of artificial anguish and despair!"2
The usual plea
for butchering, killing, and even for legally torturing animals--as in
vivisection--is a verse or two in the Bible, and its ill-digested meaning,
disfigured by the so-called scholasticism represented by Thomas Aquinas. Even
De Mirville, that ardent defender of the rights of
the church, calls such texts--"Biblical tolerances, forced from God after
the deluge, as so many others, and based upon the decadence of our
strength." However this may be, such texts are
amply contradicted by others in the same Bible. The meat-eater, the sportsman
and even the vivisector--if there are among the last
named those who believe in special creation and the Bible--generally quote for
their justification that verse in Genesis, in which God gives dual
Adam--"dominion over the fish, fowl, cattle, and over every living thing
that moveth upon the earth"--(Ch. I., v. 28);
hence--as the Christian understands it--power of life and death over every
animal on the globe. To this the far more philosophical Brahman and Buddhist
might answer; "Not so. Evolution starts to mould future humanities within
the lowest scales of being. Therefore, by killing an animal, or even an insect,
we arrest the progress of an entity towards its final goal in
nature--MAN"; and to this the student of occult philosophy may say
"Amen," and add that it not only retards the evolution of that
entity, but arrests that of the next succeeding human and more perfect race to
come.
Which of the
opponents is right, which of them the more logical? The answer depends mainly,
of course, on the personal belief of the intermediary chosen to decide the
questions. If he believes in special creation--so-called--then in answer to the
plain question--"Why should homicide be viewed as a most ghastly sin against
God and nature, and the murder of millions of living creatures be regarded as
mere sport?"--he will reply:--"Because man is created in God's own
image and looks upward to his Creator and to his birth-place--heaven (os homini sublime dedit); and that the gaze of the animal is fixed downward
on its birth-place--the earth; for God said--'Let the earth bring forth the
living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the
earth after his kind'." (Genesis I, 24.) Again,
"because man is endowed with an immortal soul, and the dumb brute has no
immortality, not even a short survival after death."
Now to this an
unsophisticated reasoner might reply that if the
Bible is to be our authority upon this delicate question, there is not the
slightest proof in it that man's birth-place is in heaven anymore than that of
the last of creeping things--quite the contrary; for we find in Genesis that if
God created "man" and blessed "them," (
Were the object
of these lines to preach vegetarianism on the authority of Bible or Veda, it
would be a very easy task to do so. For, if it is quite true that God gave dual
Adam--the "male and female" of Chapter I of Genesis--who has little
to do with our henpecked ancestor of Chapter II--"dominion over every
living thing," yet we nowhere find that the "Lord God" commanded
that Adam or the other to devour animal creation or destroy it for sport. Quite the reverse. For pointing to the vegetable kingdom and
the "fruit of a tree yielding seed"--God says very plainly: "to
you (men) it shall be for meat." (I, 29.)
So keen was the
perception of this truth among the early Christians that during the first
centuries they never touched meat. In Octavio Tertullian writes to Minutius
Felix: "we are not permitted either to witness, or even hear narrated (novere) a homicide, we Christians, who refuse to taste
dishes in which animal blood may have been mixed."
But the writer
does not preach vegetarianism, simply defending "animal rights" and
attempting to show the fallacy of disregarding such rights on Biblical
authority. Moreover, to argue with those who would reason upon the lines of
erroneous interpretations would be quite useless. One who rejects the doctrine
of evolution will ever find his way paved with difficulties; hence, he will
never admit that it is far more consistent with fact and logic to regard
physical man merely as the recognized paragon of animals, and the spiritual Ego
that informs him as a principle midway between the soul of the animal and the
deity. It would be vain to tell him that unless he accepts not only the verses
quoted for his justification but the whole Bible in the light of esoteric
philosophy, which reconciles the whole mass of contradictions and seeming
absurdities in it--he will never obtain the key to the truth;--for he will not
believe it. Yet the whole Bible teems with charity to men and with mercy and
love to animals. The original Hebrew text of Chapter XXIV of Leviticus is full
of it. Instead of the verses 17 and 18 as translated in the Bible: "And he
that killeth a beast shall make it good, beast for
beast" in the original it stands:--"life for life," or rather
"soul for soul," nephesh tachat nephesh.3 And if the rigour
of the law did not go to the extent of killing, as in Sparta, a man's
"soul" for a beast's "soul"--still, even though he replaced
the slaughtered soul by a living one, a heavy additional punishment was
inflicted on the culprit.
But this was
not all. In Exodus (Ch. XX. 10, and Ch. XXIII. 2 et seq.) rest on the Sabbath
day extended to cattle and every other animal. "The seventh day is the sabbath . . . thou shalt not do
any work, thou nor thy . . . cattle"; and the Sabbath year . . . "the
seventh year thou shalt let it (the land) rest and
lie still . . . that thine ox and thine
ass may rest"--which commandment, if it means anything, shows that even
the brute creation was not excluded by the ancient Hebrews from a participation
in the worship of their deity, and that it was placed upon many occasions on a
par with man himself. The whole question rests upon the misconception that
"soul," nephesh, is entirely distinct from
"spirit"--ruach. And yet it is clearly
stated that "God breathed into the nostrils (of man) the breath of life
and man became a living soul," nephesh, neither more or less than an animal, for the soul of an
animal is also called nephesh. It is by development
that the soul becomes spirit, both being the lower and the higher rungs of one
and the same ladder whose basis is the UNIVERSAL SOUL or spirit.
This statement
will startle those good men and women who, however much they may love their cats
and dogs, are yet too much devoted to the teachings of their respective
churches ever to admit such a heresy. "The irrational soul
of a dog or a frog divine and immortal as our own souls are?"--they
are sure to exclaim but so they are. It is not the humble writer of the present
article who says so, but no less an authority for every good Christian than
that king of the preachers--
The fact that
so many interpreters--Fathers of the Church and scholastics,--tried to evade
the real meaning of St. Paul is no proof against its inner sense, but rather
against the fairness of the theologians whose inconsistency will be shown in
this particular. But some people will support their propositions, however
erroneous, to the last. Others, recognizing their earlier mistake, will, like
Cornelius a Lapide, offer the poor animal amende honorable. Speculating upon the part assigned by
nature to the brute creation in the great drama of life, he says: "The aim
of all creatures is the service of man. Hence, together with him (their master)
they are waiting for their renovation"--cum homine
renovationem suam
expectant.4 "Serving" man, surely cannot mean being tortured, killed,
uselessly shot and otherwise misused; while it is almost needless to explain
the word "renovation." Christians understand by it the renovation of
bodies after the second coming of Christ; and limit it to man, to the exclusion
of animals. The students of the Secret Doctrine explain it by the successive
renovation and perfection of forms on the scale of objective and subjective
being, and in a long series of evolutionary transformations from animal to man,
and upward. . . .
This will, of
course, be again rejected by Christians with indignation. We shall be told that
it is not thus that the Bible was explained to them, nor can it ever mean that.
It is useless to insist upon it. Many and sad in their results were the
erroneous interpretations of that which people are pleased to call the
"Word of God." The sentence "cursed be
God gave us
only over beast,
fish, fowl,
Dominion absolute; that right we hold
By his donation; but man over man
He made not lord; such title to himself
Reserving, human left from human free
--says
But, like murder,
error "will out," and incongruity must unavoidably occur whenever
erroneous conclusions are supported either against or in favour of a prejudged
question. The opponents of Eastern philozoism thus
offer their critics a formidable weapon to upset their ablest arguments by such
incongruity between premises and conclusions, facts postulated and deductions
made.
It is the purpose of the present Essay to throw a ray of light upon
this most serious and interesting subject. Roman Catholic writers in order to
support the genuineness of the many miraculous resurrections of animals
produced by their saints, have made them the subject
of endless debates. The "soul in animals" is, in the opinion of Bossuet, "the most difficult as the most important of
all philosophical questions."
Confronted with
the doctrine of the Church that animals, though not soulless, have no permanent
or immortal soul in them, and that the principle which animates them dies with
the body, it becomes interesting to learn how the school-men and the Church
divines reconcile this statement with that other claim that animals may be and
have been frequently and miraculously resurrected
Though but a
feeble attempt--one more elaborate would require volumes--the present Essay, by
showing the inconsistency of the scholastic and theological interpretations of
the Bible, aims at convincing people of the great criminality of
taking--especially in sport and vivisection--animal life. Its object, at any
rate, is to show that however absurd the notion that either man or brute can be
resurrected after the life-principle has fled from the body forever, such
resurrections--if they were true--would not be more impossible in the case of a
dumb brute than in that of a man; for either both are endowed by nature with
what is so loosely called by us "soul," or neither the one nor the
other is so endowed.
II
What a chimera
is man! what a confused chaos, what a subject of
contradiction! a professed judge of all things, and
yet a feeble worm of the earth! the great depository
and guardian of truth, and yet ad mere huddle of uncertainty! the glory and the scandal of the universe!
--PASCAL
We shall now
proceed to see what are the views of the Christian Church as to the nature of
the soul in the brute, to examine how she reconciles the discrepancy between
the resurrection of a dead animal and the assumption that its soul dies with
it, and to notice some miracles in connection with animals. Before the final
and decisive blow is dealt to that selfish doctrine, which has become so
pregnant with cruel and merciless practices toward the poor animal world, the
reader must be made acquainted with the early hesitations of the Fathers of the
Patristic age themselves, as to the right interpretation of the words spoken
with reference to that question by St. Paul.
It is amusing
to note how the Karma of two of the most indefatigable defenders of the Latin
Church--Messrs. Des. Mousseaux
and De Mirville, in whose works the record of the few
miracles here noted are found--led both of them to furnish the weapons now used
against their own sincere but very erroneous views.5
The great
battle of the Future having to be fought out between the
"Creationists" or the Christians, as all the believers in a special
creation and a personal god, and the Evolutionists or the Hindus, Buddhists,
all the Free-thinkers and last, though not least, most of the men of science, a
recapitulation of their respective positions is advisable.
1. The
Christian world postulates its right over animal life: (a) on the afore-quoted
Biblical texts and the later scholastic interpretations; (b) on the assumed
absence of anything like divine or human soul in animals. Man survives death,
the brute does not.
2. The Eastern Evolutionists, basing their deductions upon
their great philosophical systems, maintain it is a sin against nature's work
and progress to kill any living being--for reasons given in the preceding
pages.
3. The Western Evolutionists, armed with the latest discoveries
of science, heed neither Christians nor Heathens. Some scientific men believe
in Evolution, others do not. They agree, nevertheless, upon one point: namely,
that physical, exact research offers no grounds for the presumption that man is
endowed with an immortal, divine soul, any more than his dog.
Thus, while the
Asiatic Evolutionists behave toward animals consistently with their scientific
and religious views, neither the church nor the materialistic school of science
is logical in the practical applications of their respective theories. The
former, teaching that every living thing is created singly and specially by
God, as any human babe may be, and that it finds itself from birth to death
under the watchful care of a wise and kind Providence, allows the inferior creation
at the same time only a temporary soul. The latter, regarding both man and
animal as the soulless production of some hitherto undiscovered forces in
nature, yet practically creates an abyss between the two. A man of science, the
most determined materialist, one who proceeds to vivisect a living animal with
the utmost coolness, would yet shudder at the thought of laming--not to speak
of torturing to death--his fellow man. Nor does one find among those great
materialists who were religiously inclined men any who have shown themselves
consistent and logical in defining the true moral status of the animal on this
earth and the rights of man over it.
Some instances
must now be brought to prove the charges stated. Appealing to serious and
cultured minds it must be postulated that the views of the various authorities
here cited are not unfamiliar to the reader. It will suffice therefore simply
to give short epitomes of some of the conclusions they have arrived
at--beginning with the Churchmen.
As already stated,
the Church exacts belief in the miracles performed by her great Saints. Among
the various prodigies accomplished we shall choose for the present only those
that bear directly upon our subject--namely, the miraculous resurrections of
dead animals. Now one who credits man with an immortal soul independent of the
body it animates can easily believe that by some divine miracle the soul can be
recalled and forced back into the tabernacle it deserts apparently for ever.
But how can one accept the same possibility in the case of an animal, since his
faith teaches him that the animal has no independent soul, since it is
annihilated with the body? For over two hundred years, ever since Thomas of
Aquinas, the Church has authoritatively taught that the soul of the brute dies
with its organism. What then is recalled back into the clay to reanimate it? It
is at this juncture that scholasticism steps in, and--taking the difficulty in
hand--reconciles the irreconcilable.
It premises by
saying that the miracles of the Resurrection of animals are numberless and as
well authenticated as "the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ."6
The Bollandists give instances without number. As
Father Burigny, a hagiographer of the 17th century,
pleasantly remarks concerning the bustards resuscitated by St. Remi--"I may be told, no doubt, that I am a goose
myself to give credence to such 'blue bird' tales. I shall answer the joker, in
such a case, by saying that, if he disputes this point, then must he also
strike out from the life of St. Isidore of Spain the
statement that he resuscitated from death his master's horse; from the
biography of St. Nicolas of Tolentino--that he
brought back to life a partridge, instead of eating it; from that of St.
Francis--that he recovered from the blazing coals of an oven, where it was
baking, the body of a lamb, which he forthwith resurrected; and that he also
made boiled fishes, which he resuscitated, swim in their sauce; etc., etc.
Above all he, the sceptic, will have to charge more
than 100,000 eye-witnesses--among whom at least a few ought to be allowed some
common sense--with being either liars or dupes."
A far higher
authority than Father Burigny, namely, Pope Benedict
(Benoit) XIV, corroborates and affirms the above evidence. The names, moreover,
as eye-witnesses to the resurrections, of Saint Sylvestrus,
Francois de Paule, Severin
of
Now this looks
terribly like one of the mayas of magic. However,
although the difficulty is not absolutely explained, the following is made
clear: the principle, that animated the animal during its life,. and which is termed soul, being dead or dissipated after
the death of the body, another soul--"a kind of an informal soul"--as
the Pope and the Cardinal tell us--is created for the purpose of miracle by
God; a soul, moreover, which is distinct from that of man, which is "an
independent, ethereal and ever lasting entity."
Besides the
natural objection to such a proceeding being called a "miracle"
produced by the saint, for it is simply God behind his back who
"creates" for the purpose of his glorification an entirely new soul
as well as a new body, the whole of the Thomasian
doctrine is open to objection. For, as Descartes very reasonably remarks:
"if the soul of the animal is so distinct (in its immateriality) from its
body, we believe it hardly possible to avoid recognizing it as a spiritual
principle, hence--an intelligent one."
The reader need
hardly be reminded that Descartes held the living animal as being simply an
automaton, a "well wound up clock-work," according to Malebranche. One, therefore, who adopts the Cartesian
theory about the animal would do as well to accept at
once the views of the modern materialists. For, since that automaton is capable
of feelings, such as love, gratitude, etc., and is endowed as undeniably with
memory, all such attributes must be as materialism teaches us "properties
of matter." But if the animal is an "automaton," why not Man?
Exact science-- anatomy, physiology, etc.,--finds not the smallest difference
between the bodies of the two; and who knows justly enquires Solomon--whether
the spirit of man "goeth upward" any more
than that of the beast? Thus we find metaphysical Descartes as inconsistent as
any one.
But what does
The great Bossuet in his Traité de la Connaissance de Dieu et de soi même
analyses and compares the system of Descartes with that of
This sentence
is commented upon and confirmed in the annotation by the Abbé
Drioux, his translator. "No," he
remarks--"nothing is annihilated; it is a principle that has become with
modern science a kind of axiom."
And, if so, why
should there be an exception made to this invariable rule in nature, recognized
both by science and theology,--only in the case of the soul of the animal? Even
though it had no intelligence, an assumption from which every impartial thinker
will ever and very strongly demur.
Let us see,
however, turning from scholastic philosophy to natural sciences, what are the naturalist's objections to the animal having an
intelligent and therefore an independent soul in him.
"Whatever
that be, which thinks, which understands, which acts, it is something celestial
and divine; and upon that account must necessarily be eternal," wrote
Cicero, nearly two millenniums ago. We should understand well, Mr. Huxley
contradicting the conclusion,--
Really, when
such tremendous claims as the said miracles are put forward and enforced by the
Church upon the faithful, her theologians should take more care that their
highest authorities at least should not contradict themselves, thus showing
ignorance upon questions raised nevertheless to a doctrine.
The animal,
then, is debarred from progress and immortality, because he is an automaton.
According to Descartes, he has no intelligence, agreeably to mediæval scholasticism; nothing but instinct, the latter
signifying involuntary impulses, as affirmed by the materialists and denied by
the Church.
Both Frederic
and George Cuvier have discussed amply, however, on
the intelligence and the instinct in animals.l2 Their
ideas upon the subject have been collected and edited by Flourens,
the learned Secretary of the
A more
magnificent series of contradictory statements could hardly have been expected
from a great man of science.
The illustrious
Cuvier is right therefore in remarking in his turn,
that "this new mechanism of Buffon is still less
intelligible than Descartes' automaton."l3
As remarked by
the critic, a line of demarcation ought to be traced between instinct and
intelligence. The construction of beehives by the bees, the raising of dams by
the beaver in the middle of the naturalist's dry floor as much as in the river,
are all the deeds and effects of instinct forever unmodifiable
and changeless, whereas the acts of intelligence are to be found in actions
evidently thought out by the animal, where not instinct but reason comes into
play, such as its education and training calls forth and renders susceptible of
perfection and development. Man is endowed with reason, the infant with
instinct; and the young animal shows more of both than the child.
Indeed, every
one of the disputants knows as well as we do that it is so. If any materialist avoid confessing it, it is through pride.
Refusing a soul to both man and beast, he is unwilling to admit that the latter
is endowed with intelligence as well as himself, even
though in an infinitely lesser degree. In their turn the churchman, the
religiously inclined naturalist, the modern metaphysician, shrink from avowing
that man and animal are both endowed with soul and faculties, if not equal in
development and perfection, at least the same in name and essence. Each of them
knows, or ought to know that instinct and intelligence are two faculties
completely opposed in their nature, two enemies confronting each other in
constant conflict; and that, if they will not admit of two souls or principles,
they have to recognize, at any rate, the presence of two potencies in the soul,
each having a different seat in the brain, the localization of each of which is
well known to them, since they can isolate and temporarily destroy them in turn--according
to the organ or part of the organs they happen to be torturing during their
terrible vivisections. What is it but human pride that prompted Pope to say:
Ask for whose end the heavenly bodies
shine;
Earth for whose use?
Pride answers, 'Tis for mine.
For me kind nature wakes her genial power,
Suckles each herb, and spreads out every
flower.
****
*
For me the mine a thousand treasures brings;
For me health gushes from a thousand
springs;
Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me
rise;
My footstool earth, my canopy the skies!
And it is the
same unconscious pride that made Buffon utter his paradoxical remarks with reference to the
difference between man and animal. That difference consisted in the
"absence of reflection, for the animal," he says, "does not feel
that he feels." How does Buffon know? "It
does not think that it thinks," he adds, after having told the audience
that the animal remembered, often deliberated, compared and chose!l4 Who ever
pretended that a cow or a dog could be an idealogist?
But the animal may think and know it thinks, the more keenly that it cannot
speak, and express its thoughts. How can Buffon or
any one else know? One thing is shown however by the exact observations of
naturalists and that is, that the animal is endowed with intelligence; and once
this is settled, we have but to repeat Thomas Aquinas' definition of
intelligence--the prerogative of man's immortal soul--to see that the same is
due to the animal.
But in justice
to real Christian philosophy, we are able to show that primitive Christianity
has never preached such atrocious doctrines--the true cause of the falling off
of so many of the best men as of the highest intellects from the teachings of
Christ and his disciples.
III
O Philosophy,
thou guide of life, and discoverer of virtue!
--
Philosophy is a
modest profession, it is all reality and plain dealing; I hate solemnity and
pretence, with nothing but pride at the bottom.
--PLINY
THE destiny of
man--of the most brutal, animal-like, as well as of the most saintly--being
immortality, according to theological teaching; what is the future destiny of
the countless hosts of the animal kingdom? We are told by various Roman
Catholic writers--Cardinal Ventura, Count de Maistre
and many others--that "animal soul is a Force."
"It is
well established that the soul of the animal," says their echo De Mirville,--"was produced by the earth, for this is
Biblical. All the living and moving souls (nephesh or
life principle) come from the earth; but, let me be understood, not solely from
the dust, of which their bodies as well as our own were made, but from the
power or potency of the earth; i.e., from its immaterial force, as all forces
are . . . those of the sea, of the air, etc., all of which are those Elementary
Principalities (principautés élementaires)
of which we have spoken elsewhere."l5
What the
Marquis de Mirville understands by the term is, that every "Element" in nature is a domain
filled and governed by its respective invisible spirits. The Western Kabalists and the Rosicrucians
named them Sylphs, Undines, Salamanders and Gnomes; christian
mystics, like De Mirville, give them Hebrew names and
class each among the various kinds of Demons under the sway of Satan--with
God's permission, of course.
He too rebels
against the decision of
He had just
called it an immaterial force, and now it is named by him "the most substantial
thing on earth."l7
But what is
this Force? George Cuvier and Flourens
the academician tell us its secret.
"The form
or the force of the bodies," (form means soul in this case, let us
remember,) the former writes,--"is far more essential to them than matter
is, as (without being destroyed in its essence) the latter changes constantly,
whereas the form prevails eternally.' To this Flourens
observes: "In everything that has life, the form is more persistent than
matter; for, that which constitutes the BEING of the living body, its identity
and its sameness, is its form."l8
"Being,"
as De Mirville remarks in his turn, "a
magisterial principle. a philosophical pledge of our immortality,"l9 it must
be inferred that soul--human and animal--is meant under this misleading term.
It is rather what we call the ONE LIFE I suspect.
However this
may be, philosophy, both profane and religious, corroborates this statement
that the two "souls" are identical in man and beast. Leibnitz, the philosopher beloved by Bossuet,
appeared to credit "Animal Resurrection" to a certain extent. Death
being for him "simply the temporary enveloping of the personality" he
likens it to the preservation of ideas in sleep, or to the butterfly within its
caterpillar. "For him," says De Mirville,
"resurrection20 is a general law in nature, which becomes a grand miracle,
when performed by a thaumaturgist, only in virtue of
its prematurity, of the surrounding circumstances,
and of the mode in which he operates." In this Leibnitz
is a true Occultist without suspecting it. The growth and blossoming of a
flower or a plant in five minutes instead of several days and weeks, the forced
germination and development of plant, animal or man, are facts preserved in the
records of the Occultists. They are only seeming miracles; the natural
productive forces hurried and a thousand-fold intensified by the induced
conditions under occult laws known to the Initiate. The abnormally rapid growth
is effected by the forces of nature, whether blind or attached to minor
intelligences subjected to man's occult power, being brought to bear
collectively on the development of the thing to be called forth out of its
chaotic elements. But why call one a divine miracle, the other a satanic
subterfuge or simply a fraudulent performance?
Still as a true
philosopher Leibnitz finds himself forced, even in
this dangerous question of the resurrection of the dead, to include in it the
whole of the animal kingdom in its great synthesis, and to say: "I believe
that the souls of the animals are imperishable, . . . and I find that nothing
is better fitted to prove our own immortal nature."2l
Supporting Leibnitz, Dean, the Vicar of Middleton, published in 1748
two small volumes upon this subject. To sum up his ideas, he says that
"the holy scriptures hint in various passages that the brutes shall live
in a future life. This doctrine has been supported by several Fathers of the
Church. Reason teaching us that the animals have a soul,
teaches us at the same time that they shall exist in a future state. The
system of those who believe that God annihilates the soul of the animal is
nowhere supported, and has no solid foundation to it," etc. etc.22
Many of the men
of science of the last century defended Dean's hypothesis, declaring it
extremely probable, one of them especially--the learned Protestant theologian
Charles Bonnet of
"The
animals," he writes, "are admirable books, in which the creator
gathered the most striking features of his sovereign intelligence. The
anatomist has to study them with respect, and, if in the least endowed with
that delicate and reasoning feeling that characterises
the moral man, he will never imagine, while turning over the pages, that he is
handling slates or breaking pebbles. He will never forget that all that lives
and feels is entitled to his mercy and pity. Man would run the risk of
compromising his ethical feeling were he to become familiarised
with the suffering and the blood of animals. This truth is so evident that
Governments should never lose sight of it. . . . as to the hypothesis of
automatism I should feel inclined to regard it as a philosophical heresy, very dangerousfor society, if it did not so strongly violate
good sense and feeling as to become harmless, for it can never be generally
adopted."
"As to the
destiny of the animal, if my hypothesis be right, Providence holds in reserve
for them the greatest compensations in future states.25 . . . And for me, their
resurrection is the consequence of that soul or form we are necessarily obliged
to allow them, for a soul being a simple substance, can neither be divided, nor
decomposed, nor yet annihilated. One cannot escape such an inference without
falling back into Descartes' automatism; and then from animal automatism one
would soon and forcibly arrive at that of man" . . .
Our modern
school of biologists has arrived at the theory of "automaton-man,"
but its disciples may be left to their own devices and conclusions. That with
which I am at present concerned, is the final and absolute proof that neither
the Bible, nor its most philosophical interpreters--however much they may have
lacked a clearer insight into other questions--have ever denied, on Biblical
authority, an immortal soul to any animal, more than they have found in it
conclusive evidence as to the existence of such a soul in man--in the old
Testament. One has but to read certain verses in Job and the Ecclesiastes (iii.
17 et seq. 22) to arrive at this conclusion. The truth
of the matter is, that the future state of neither of
the two is therein referred to by one single word. But if, on the other hand,
only negative evidence is found in the Old Testament concerning the immortal
soul in animals, in the New it is as plainly asserted as that of man himself,
and it is for the benefit of those who deride Hindu philozoism,
who assert their right to kill animals at their will and pleasure, and deny
them an immortal soul, that a final and definite proof is now being given.
The apostle
premises by saying (Romans viii. 16, 17) that "The spirit itself" (Paramatma) "beareth witness
with our spirit" (atman) "that we are the children of God," and
"if children, then heirs"--heirs of course to the eternity and indestructibility
of the eternal or divine essence in us. Then he tells us that:
"The
sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory
which shall be revealed." (v. 18.)
The
"glory" we maintain, is no "new Jerusalem," the symbolical
representation of the future in St. John's kabalistical
Revelations--but the Devachanic periods and the series of births in the
succeeding races when, after every new incarnation we shall find ourselves
higher and more perfect, physically as well as spiritually; and when finally we
shall all become truly the "sons" and "the children of God"
at the "last Resurrection"--whether people call it Christian, Nirvanic or Parabrahmic; as all
these are one and the same. For truly--
"The
earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the
manifestation of the sons of God." (v. 19.)
By creature,
animal is here meant, as will be shown further on upon the authority of
"The
creature itself (ipsa) also shall be delivered from
the bondage of corruption," which is to say that the seed or the
indestructible animal soul, which does not reach Devachan while in its
elementary or animal state, will get into a higher form and go on, together
with man, progressing into still higher states and forms, to end, animal as
well as man, "in the glorious liberty of the children of God" (v.
21).
And this
"glorious liberty" can be reached only through the evolution or the
Karmic progress of all creatures. The dumb brute having evoluted
from the half sentient plant, is itself transformed by degrees into man,
spirit, God--et seq. and ad infinitum! For says
"We know
("we," the Initiates) that the whole creation, (omnis
creatura or creature, in the Vulgate) groaneth and travaileth (in
child-birth) in pain until now."29 (v. 22.)
This is plainly
saying that man and animal are on a par on earth, as to suffering, in their
evolutionary efforts toward the goal and in accordance with Karmic law. By
"until now," is meant up to the fifth race. To make it still plainer,
the great Christian Initiate explains by saying:
"Not only
they (the animals) but ourselves also, which have the first-fruits of the
Spirit, we groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the
redemption of our body." (v. 23.) Yes, it is we,
men, who have the "first-fruits of the Spirit," or the direct Parabrahmic light, our Atma or seventh principle, owing to
the perfection of our fifth principle (Manas), which is far less
developed in the animal. As a compensation, however,
their Karma is far less heavy than ours. But that is no reason why they too
should not reach one day that perfection that gives the fully evoluted man the Dhyanchohanic
form.
Nothing could
be clearer--even to a profane, non-initiated critic--than those words of the
great Apostle, whether we interpret them by the light of esoteric philosophy,
or that of mediæval scholasticism. The hope of
redemption, or, of the survival of the spiritual entity, delivered "from
the bondage of corruption," or the series of temporary material forms, is
for all living creatures, not for man alone.
But the
"paragon" of animals, proverbially unfair even to his fellow-beings,
could not be expected to give easy consent to sharing his expectations with his
cattle and domestic poultry. The famous Bible commentator, Cornelius a Lapide, was the first to point out and charge his
predecessors with the conscious and deliberate intention of doing all they
could to avoid the application of the word creatura
to the inferior creatures of this world. We learn from him that St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Origen and St. Cyril
(the one, most likely, who refused to see a human creature in Hypatia, and dealt with her as though she were a wild
animal) insisted that the word creatura, in the
verses above quoted, was applied by the Apostle simply to the angels! But, as
remarks Cornelius, who appeals to
Unfortunately
for the holy speculators and scholastics, and very fortunately for the
animals--if these are ever to profit by polemics--they are over-ruled by a
still greater authority than themselves. It is St. John Chrysostomus,
already mentioned, whom the Roman Catholic Church, on the testimony given by
Bishop Proclus, at one time his secretary, holds in
the highest veneration. In fact
"We must
always groan about the delay made for our emigration(death);
for if, as saith the Apostle, the creature deprived
of reason (mente, not anima, "Soul")--and
speech (nam si hæc creatura mente
et verbo carens) groans and
expects, the more the shame that we ourselves should fail to do so."3l
Unfortunately
we do, and fail most ingloriously in this desire for "emigration" to
countries unknown. Were people to study the scriptures of all nations and
interpret their meaning by the light of esoteric philosophy, no one would fail
to become, if not anxious to die, at least indifferent to death. We should then
make profitable use of the time we pass on this earth by quietly preparing in
each birth for the next by accumulating good Karma. But man is a sophist by
nature. And, even after reading this opinion of St. John Chrysostom--one
that settles the question of the immortal soul in animals forever, or ought to
do so at any rate, in the mind of every Christian,--we fear the poor dumb
brutes may not benefit much by the lesson after all. Indeed, the subtle
casuist, condemned out of his own mouth, might tell us, that whatever the
nature of the soul in the animal, he is still doing it a favour, and himself a
meritorious action, by killing the poor brute, as thus he puts an end to its
"groans about the delay made for its emigration" into eternal glory.
The writer is
not simple enough to imagine, that a whole
H.P. BLAVATSKY
Theosophist,
January, February,
and March, 1886
l De la Resurrection et du
Miracle. E. de Mirville.
2 De la
Resurrection et du Miracle.
E. de Mirville.
3 Compare
also the difference between the translation of the same verse in the Vulgata, and the texts of Luther and De Wette.
4 Commen.
Apocal.,
ch. v. 137.
5 It is but
justice to acknowledge here that De Mirville is the
first to recognize the error of the Church in this particular, and to defend
animal life, as far as he dares do so.
6 De Beatificatione, etc., by Pope Benedict XIV.
7 In scholastic philosophy, the word "form" applies
to the immaterial principle which informs or animates the body.
8 De Beautificatione.
etc. I, IV, c. Xl, Art. 6.
9 Quoted by
Cardinal de Ventura in his Philosophie Chretienne, Vol. 11, p. 386. See also De Mirville,
Résurrections animales.
10 Summa--Drioux edition in 8 vols.
11 St.
Patrick, it is claimed, has Christianized "the most Satanized
country of the globe--Ireland, ignorant in all save magic"--into the
"Island of Saints," by resurrecting "sixty men dead years
before." Suscitavit sexaginta mortuos
(
12 More
recently Dr. Romanes and Dr. Butler have thrown great
light upon the subject.
13 Biographie Universelle, Art. by Cuvier
on Buffon's Life.
14 Discours sur la nature des Animaux.
15 Esprits, 2m.
mem. Ch. XII, Cosmolatrie.
16 Ibid.
17 Esprits--p.
158.
18
Longevity, pp. 49 and 52.
19 Resurrections. p. 621.
20 The
occultists call it "transformation" during a series of lives and the
final, nirvanic Resurrection.
2l Leibnitz.
Opera philos., etc.
22 See vol.
XXIX of the Bibliothéque des sciences, 1st Trimester
of the year 1768.
23 From two
Greek words--to be born and reborn again.
24 See Vol.
II Palingenesis. Also, De Mirville's Resurrections.
25 We too
believe in "future states" for the animal from the highest down to
the infusoria--but in a series of rebirths, each in a
higher form, up to man and then beyond --in short, we believe in evolution in
the fullest sense of the word.
26 See
27 What was
really meant by the "sons of God" in antiquity is now demonstrated
fully in the SECRET DOCTRINE in its Part I (on the Archaic Period)--now nearly
ready.
28 This is
the orthodox Hindu as much as the esoteric version. In his
This is the
orthodox version. The secret one speaks of seven Initiates having attained Dhyanchohanship toward the end of the seventh Race on this
earth, who are left on earth during its "obscuration" with the seed
of every mineral, plant, and animal that had not time to evolute
into man for the next Round or world-period. See Esoteric Buddhism, by A. P.
Sinnett, Fifth Edition, Annotations, pp. 146, 147.
29 . . . ingemiscit et parturit
usque adhuc in the original
Latin translation.
30
Cornelius, edit. Pelagaud, I. IX, p.114.
31 Homélie XIV.
Sur l'Epitre aux Romains.
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