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
By
H P Blavatsky
O ye Lords of Truth who are cycling in eternity . . . save me from the
annihilation in this Region of the Two Truths. Egyptian Ritual of the Dead
THAT the world moves in cycles, and events repeat themselves therein, is
an old, yet ever new truism. It is new to most, firstly, because it belongs to
a distinct group of occult aphorisms in partibus infidelium, and our
present-day Rabbis and Pharisees will accept nothing coming from that Nazareth;
secondly, because those who will swallow a camel of whatever size, provided it
hails from orthodox or accepted authorities, will strain and kick at the
smallest gnat, if only its buzz comes from theosophical regions. Yet this
proposition about the world cycles and ever-recurring events, is a very correct
one. It is one, moreover, that people could easily verify for themselves. Of
course, the people meant here are men who do their own thinking; not those
others who are satisfied to remain, from birth till death, pinned, like a
thistle fastened to the coat-tail of a country parson, to the beliefs and
thoughts of the goody-goody majority.
We cannot agree with a writer (was it Gilpin?) who said that the
grandest truths are often rejected, not so much for want of direct evidence, as
for want of inclination to search for it. This applies but to a few.
Nine-tenths of the people will reject the most overwhelming evidence, even if
it be brought to them without any trouble to themselves, only because it
happens to clash with their personal interests or prejudices; especially if it
comes from unpopular quarters. We are living in a highly moral atmosphere, high
sounding in words. Put to the test of practice, however, the morality of this
age in point of genuineness and reality is of the nature of the black skin of
the negro minstrel: assumed for show and pay, and washed off at the close of
every performance. In sober truth, our opponents advocates of official science,
defenders of orthodox religion, and the tutti quanti of the detractors of
Theosophy who claim to oppose our works on grounds of scientific evidence,
public good and truth, strongly resemble advocates in our courts of law
miscalled of justice. These in their defence of robbers and murderers, forgers
and adulterers, deem it to be their duty to browbeat, confuse and bespatter all
who bear witness against their clients, and will ignore, or if possible,
suppress, all evidence which goes to incriminate them. Let ancient Wisdom step
into the witness-box herself, and prove that the goods found in the possession
of the prisoner at the bar, were taken from her own strong-box; and she will
find herself accused of all manner of crimes, fortunate if she escape being
branded as a common fraud, and told that she is no better than she should be.
What member of our Society can wonder then, that in this our age,
pre-eminently one of shams and shows, the theosophists’
teachings so (mis-) called, seem to be the most unpopular of all the systems
now to the fore; or that materialism and theology, science and modern
philosophy, have arrayed themselves in holy alliance against theosophical
studies perhaps because all the former are based on chips and broken-up
fragments of that primordial system. Cotton complains somewhere, that the
metaphysicians have been learning their lesson for the last four (?) thousand
years, and that it is now high time that they should begin to teach something.
But, no sooner is the possibility of such studies offered, with the complete
evidence into the bargain that they belong to the oldest doctrine of the
metaphysical philosophy of mankind, than, instead of giving them a fair hearing
at least, the majority of the complainers turn away with a sneer and the cool
remark: Oh, you must have invented all you say yourself!
Dear ladies and gentlemen, has it ever occurred to you, how truly grand
and almost divine would be that man or woman, who, at this time of the life of
mankind, could invent anything, or discover that which had not been invented
and known ages before? The charge of being such an inventor would only entitle
the accused to the choicest honours. For show us, if you can, that mortal who
in the historical cycle of our human race has taught the world something
entirely new. To the proud pretensions of this age, Occultism the real Eastern
Occultism, or the so-called Esoteric Doctrine answers through its ablest
students: Indeed all your boasted knowledge is but the reflex action of the
by-gone Past. At best, you are but the modern popularisers of very ancient
ideas. Consciously and unconsciously you have pilfered from old classics and
philosophers, who were themselves but the superficial recorders cautious and
incomplete, owing to the terrible penalties for divulging the secrets of
initiation taught during the mysteries of the primæval Wisdom. Avaunt! your
modern. sciences and speculations are but the réchauffé dishes of antiquity;
the dead bones (served with a sauce piquante of crass materialism, to disguise
them) of the intellectual repasts of the gods. Ragonwas right in saying in his
Maçonnerie Occulte, that Humanity only seems to progress in achieving one
discovery after the other, a sin truth, it only finds that which it had lost.
Most of our modern inventions for which we claim such glory, are, after all,
things people were acquainted with three and four thousand years back.1 Lost to
us through wars, floods and fire, their very existence became obliterated from
the memory of man. And now modern thinkers begin to rediscover them once more.
Allow us to recapitulate a few of such things and thus refresh your
memory.
Deny, if you can, that the most important of our present sciences were
known to the ancients. It is not Eastern literature only, and the whole cycle
of those esoteric teachings which an overzealous Christian Kabalist, in France,
has just dubbed the accursed sciences that will give you a flat denial, but
profane classical literature, as well. The proof is easy.
Are not physics and natural sciences but an amplified reproduction of
the works of Anaxagoras, of Empedocles, Democritus and others? All that is
taught now, was taught by these philosophers then. For they maintained even in
the fragments of their works still extant that the Universe is composed of
eternal atoms which, moved by a subtle internal Fire, combine in millions of
various ways. With them, this Fire was the divine Breath of the Universal Mind,
but now, it has become with the modern philosophers no better than a blind and
senseless Force. Furthermore they taught that there was neither Life nor Death,
but only a constant destruction of form, produced by perpetual physical
transformations. This has now become by intellectual transformation, that which
is known as the physical correlation of forces, conservation of energy, law of
continuity, and what not, in the vocabulary of modern Science. But what’s
in a name, or in new-fangled words and compound terms, once that the identity
of the essential ideas is established?
Was not Descartes indebted for his original theories to the old Masters,
to Leucippus and Democritus, Lucretius, Anaxagoras and Epicurus? These taught
that the celestial bodies were formed of a multitude of atoms, whose vortical
motion existed from eternity; which met, and, rotating together, the heaviest
were drawn to the centres, the lightest to the circumferences; each of these
concretions was carried away in a fluidic matter, which, receiving from this
rotation an impulse, the stronger communicated it to the weaker concretions.
This seems a tolerably close description of the Cartesian theory of Elemental
Vortices taken from Anaxagoras and some others; and it does look most
suspiciously like the vortical atoms of Sir W. Thomson!
Even Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest among the great, is found constantly
mirroring a dozen or so of old philosophers. In reading his works one sees
floating in the air the pale images of the same Anaxagoras and Democritus, of
Pythagoras, Aristotle, Timæus of Locris, Lucretius, Macrobius, and even our old
friend Plutarch. All these have maintained one or the other of these
propositions, (1) that the smallest of the particles of matter would be
sufficient owing to its infinite divisibility to fill infinite space; (2) that
there exist two Forces emanated from the Universal Soul, combined in numerical
proportions (the centripetal and centrifugal forces, of the latter day
scientific saints); (3) that there was a mutual attraction of bodies, which
attraction causes the latter to, what we now call, gravitate and keeps them
within their respective spheres; (4) they hinted most unmistakably at the
relation existing between the weight and the density, or the quantity of matter
contained in a unit of mass; and (5) taught that the attraction (gravitation)
of the planets toward the Sun is in reciprocal proportion to their distance
from that luminary.
Finally, is it not a historical fact that the rotation of the Earth and
the heliocentric system were taught by Pythagoras not to speak of Hicetas,
Heraclides, Ecphantus, &c.,--over 2,000 years before the despairing and now
famous cry of Galileo, E pur, se muove? Did not the priests of Etruria and the
Indian Rishis still earlier, know how to attract lightning, ages upon ages
before even the astral Sir B. Franklin was formed in space? Euclid is honoured
to this day perhaps, because one cannot juggle as easily with mathematics and
figures, as with symbols and words bearing on unprovable hypotheses. Archimedes
had probably forgotten more in his day, than our modern mathematicians,
astronomers, geometricians, mechanicians, hydrostaticians and opticians ever
knew. Without Archytas, the disciple of Pythagoras, the application of the
theory of mathematics to practical purposes would, perchance, remain still
unknown to our grand era of inventions and machinery. Needless to remind the
reader of that which the Aryans knew, as it is already recorded in the
Theosophist and other works obtainable in
Wise was Solomon in saying that there is no new thing under the Sun; and
that everything that is hath been already of old time, which was before us
save, perhaps, the theosophical doctrines which the humble writer of the
present is charged by some with having invented. The prime origin of this (very
complimentary) accusation is due to the kind efforts of the S. P. R. It is the
more considerate and kind of this world famous, and learned Society of
Researches, as its scribes seem utterly incapable of inventing anything
original themselves even in the way of manufacturing a commonplace
illustration. If the inquisitive reader turns to the article which follows, he
will have the satisfaction of finding a curious proof of this fact, in a
reprint from old Izaak Walton’s Lives, which our contributor has
entitled Mrs. Donne’s Astral Body. Thus even the
scientifically accurate
In short, it may be said of the scientific theories, that those which
are true are not new; and those which are new are not true, or are at least,
very dubious. It is easy to hide behind merely working hypotheses, but less
easy to maintain their plausibility in the face of logic and philosophy. To
make short work of a very big subject, we have but to institute a brief
comparison between the old and the new teachings. That which modern science
would make us believe, is this: the atoms possess innate and immutable
properties. That which Esoteric, and also exoteric, Eastern philosophy calls
divine Spirit Substance (Purusha Prakriti) or eternal Spirit-matter, one
inseparable from the other, modern Science calls Force and Matter, adding as we
do (for it is a Vedantic conception), that, the two being inseparable, matter
is but an abstraction (an illusion rather). The properties of matter are, by
the Eastern Occultists, summed up in, or brought down to, attraction and
repulsion; by the Scientists, to gravitation and affinities. According to this
teaching, the properties of complex combinations are but the necessary results
of the composition of elementary properties; the most complex existences being
the physico-chemical automata, called men. Matter from being primarily
scattered and inanimate, begets life, sensation, emotions and will, after a
whole series of consecutive gropings. The latter non-felicitous expression
(belonging to Mr. Tyndall), forced the philosophical writer, Delboeuf2, to
criticize the English Scientist in very disrespectful terms, and forces us in
our turn, to agree with the former. Matter, or anything equally conditioned,
once that it is declared to be subject to immutable laws, cannot grope. But
this is a trifle when compared with dead or inanimate matter, producing life,
and even psychic phenomena of the highest mentality! Finally, a rigid
determinism reigns over all nature. All that which has once happened to our
automatical Universe, had to happen, as the future of that Universe is traced
in the smallest of its particles or atoms. Return these atoms, they say, to the
same position and order they were in at the first moment of the evolution of
the physical Kosmos, and the same universal phenomena will be repeated in
precisely the same order, and the Universe will once more return to its present
conditions. To this, logic and philosophy answer that it cannot be so, as the
properties of the particles vary and are changeable. If the atoms are eternal
and matter indestructible, these atoms can never have been born; hence, they
can have nothing innate in them. Theirs is the one homogeneous (and we add
divine) substance, while compound molecules receive their properties, at the beginning
of the life cycles or manvantaras, from within without. Organisms cannot have
been developed from dead or inanimate matter, as, firstly, such matter does not
exist, and secondly, philosophy proving it conclusively, the Universe is not
subjected to fatality. As Occult Science teaches that the universal process of
differentiation begins anew after every period of Maha-pralaya, there is no
reason to think that it would slavishly and blindly repeat itself. Immutable
laws last only from the incipient to the last stage of the universal life,
being simply the effects of primordial, intelligent and entirely free action.
For Theosophists, as also for Dr. Pirogoff, Delboeuf and many a great
independent modern thinker, it is the Universal (and to us impersonal because
infinite) Mind, which is the true and primordial Demiurge.
What better illustrates the theory of cycles, than the following fact?
Nearly 700 years B.C., in the schools of Thales and Pythagoras, was taught the
doctrine of the true motion of the earth, its form and the whole heliocentric
system. And in 317 A.D. Lactantius, the preceptor of Crispus Cæsar, the son of
the Emperor Constantine, is found teaching his pupil that the earth was a plane
surrounded by the sky, itself composed of fire and water! Moreover, the
venerable Church Father warned his pupil against the heretical doctrine of the
earth’s globular form, as the Cambridge and
Oxford Father Dons warn their students now, against the pernicious and
superstitious doctrines of Theosophy such as Universal Mind, Re-incarnation and
so on. There is a resolution tacitly accepted by the members of the T. S. for
the adoption of a proverb of King Solomon, paraphrased for our daily use: A
scientist is wiser in his own conceit than seven Theosophists that can render a
reason. No time, therefore, should be lost in arguing with them; but no
endeavour, on the other hand, should be neglected to show up their mistakes and
blunders. The scientific conceit of the Orientalists especially of the youngest
branch of these the Assyriologists and the Egyptologists is indeed phenomenal.
Hitherto, some credit was given to the ancients to their philosophers and
Initiates, at any rate of knowing a few things that the moderns could not
rediscover. But now even the greatest Initiates are represented to the public
as fools. Here is an instance. On pages 15, 16 and 17 (Introduction) in the
Hibbert Lectures of 1887 by Prof. Sayce, on The Ancient Babylonians, the reader
is brought face to face with a conundrum that may well stagger the unsophisticated
admirer of modern learning. Complaining of the difficulties and obstacles that
meet the Assyriologist at every step of his studies; after giving the dreary
catalogue of the formidable struggles of the interpreter to make sense of the
inscriptions from broken fragments of clay tiles; the Professor goes on to
confess that the scholar who has to read these cuneiform characters, is often
likely to put a false construction upon isolated passages, the context of which
must be supplied from conjecture (p. 14). Notwithstanding all this, the learned
lecturer places the modern Assyriologist higher than the ancient Babylonian
Initiate, in the knowledge of symbols and his own religion!
The passage deserves to be quoted in toto:
It is true that many of the sacred texts were so written as to be
intelligible only to the initiated; but the initiated were provided with keys
and glosses, many of which are in our hands(?) . . . We can penetrate into the
real meaning of documents which to him (the ordinary Babylonian) were a sealed
book. Nay, more than this, the researches that have been made during the last
half-century into the creed and beliefs of the nations of the world both past
and present, have given us a clue to the interpretation of these documents which
even the initiated priests did not possess.
The above (the italics being our own) may be better appreciated when
thrown into a syllogistic form.
Major premise: The ancient Initiates had keys and glosses to their
esoteric texts, of which they were the INVENTORS.
Minor premise: Our Orientalists have many of these keys.
Conclusion: Ergo, the Orientalists have a clue which the Initiates
themselves did not possess!!
Into what were the Initiates, in such a case, initiated?--and who
invented the blinds, we ask.
Few Orientalists could answer this query. We are more generous, however;
and may show in our next that, into which our modest Orientalists have never
yet been initiated all their alleged clues to the contrary.
II
Go to,
let
us go
down and there confound their
language that
they may not understand
one another’s
speech . . . Genesis
HAVING done with modern physical Sciences we next turn to Western
philosophies and religions. Every one of these is equally based upon, and derives
its theories and doctrines from heathen, and moreover, exoteric thought. This
can easily be traced from Schopenhauer and Mr. Herbert Spencer, down to
Hypnotism and so-called Mental Science. The German philosophers modernize
Buddhism; the English are inspired by Vedantism; while the French, borrowing
from both, add to them Plato, in a Phrygian cap, and occasionally, as with
Auguste Comte, the weird sex-worship or Mariolatry of the old Roman Catholic
ecstatics and visionaries. New systems, yclept philosophical, new sects and
societies, spring up now-a-days in every corner of our civilized lands. But
even the highest among them agree on no one point, though each claims
supremacy. This, because no science, no philosophy being at best, but a
fragment broken from the WISDOM RELIGION can stand alone, or be complete in
itself. Truth, to be complete, must represent an unbroken continuity. It must
have no gaps, no missing links. And which of our modern religions, sciences or
philosophies, is free from such defects? Truth is One. Even as the palest
reflection of the Absolute, it can be no more dual than is absoluteness itself,
nor can it have two aspects. But such truth is not for the majorities, in our
world of illusion especially for those minds which are devoid of the noëtic
element. These have to substitute for the high spiritual and quasi absolute
truth the relative one, which having two sides or aspects, both conditioned by
appearances, lead our brain-minds one to intellectual scientific materialism,
the other to materialistic or anthropomorphic religiosity. But even that kind
of truth, in order to offer a coherent and complete system of something, has,
while naturally clashing with its opposite, to offer no gaps and
contradictions, no broken or missing links, in the special system or doctrine
it undertakes to represent.
And here a slight digression must come in. We are sure to be told by
some, that this is precisely the objection taken to theosophical expositions,
from
Nor has a materialist any right to the appellation, since it means a
lover of Wisdom, and Pythagoras, who was the first to coin the compound term,
never limited Wisdom to this earth. One who affirms that the Universe and Man
are objects of the senses only, and who fatally chains thought within the
region of senseless matter, as do the Darwinian evolutionists, is at best a
sophiaphobe when not a philosophaster never a philosopher.
Therefore is it that in this age of Materialism, Agnosticism,
Evolutionism, and false Idealism, there is not a system, however intellectually
expounded, that can stand on its own legs, or fail to be criticized by an
exponent from another school of thought as materialistic as itself; even Mr.
Herbert Spencer, the greatest of all, is unable to answer some criticisms. Many
are those who remember the fierce polemics that raged a few years ago in the
English and American journals between the Evolutionists on the one hand and the
Positivists on the other. The subject of the dispute was with regard to the
attitude and relation that the theory of evolution would bear to religion. Mr.
F. Harrison, the Apostle of Positivism, charged Mr. Herbert Spencer with
restricting religion to the realm of reason, forgetting that feeling and not
the cognizing faculty, played the most important part in it. The erroneousness
and insufficiency of the ideas on the Unknowable as developed in Mr. Spencer’s
works were also taken to task by Mr. Harrison. The idea was erroneous, he held,
be cause it was based on the acceptation of the metaphysical absolute. It was
insufficient, he argued, because it brought deity down to an empty abstraction,
void of any meaning.3 To this the great English writer replied, that he had
never thought of offering his Unknowable and Incognizable, as a subject for
religious worship. Then stepped into the arena, the respective admirers and
defenders of Messrs. Spencer and Harrison, some defending the material
metaphysics of the former thinker (if we may be permitted to use this
paradoxical yet correct definition of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s
philosophy), others, the arguments of the Godless and Christless Roman
Catholicism of Auguste Comte,4 both sides giving and receiving very hard blows.
Thus, Count d’Alviella of
It is not to discuss the relative merits of materialistic Evolutionism,
or of Positivism either, that the two English thinkers are brought forward; but
simply to point, as an illustration, to the Babel-like confusion of modern
thought. While the Evolutionists (of Herbert Spencer’s
school) maintain that the historical evolution of the religious feeling
consists in the constant abstraction of the attributes of Deity, and their
final separation from the primitive concrete conceptions this process rejoicing
in the easy-going triple compound of deanthropomorphization, or the
disappearance of human attributes the Comtists on their side hold to another
version. They affirm that fetishism, or the direct worship of nature, was the
primitive religion of man, a too protracted-evolution alone having landed it in
anthropomorphism. Their Deity is Humanity and the God they worship, Mankind, as
far as we understand them. The only way, therefore, of settling the dispute, is
to ascertain which of the two philosophical and scientific theories, is the
less pernicious and the more probable. Is it true to say, as d’Alviella
assures us, that Mr. Spencer’s Unknowable contains all the
elements necessary to religion; and, as that remarkable writer is alleged to
imply, that religious feeling tends to free itself from every moral element;
or, shall we accept the other extremity and agree with the Comtists, that
gradually, religion will blend itself with, merge into, and disappear in
altruism and its service to Humanity?
Useless to say that Theosophy, while rejecting the one-sided-ness and
therefore the limitation in both ideas, is alone able to reconcile the two,
i.e., the Evolutionists and the Positivists on both metaphysical and practical
lines. How to do this it is no there the place to say, as every Theosophist
acquainted with the main tenets of the Esoteric Philosophy can do it for
himself. We believe in an impersonal Unknowable and know well that the
ABSOLUTE, or Absoluteness, can have nought to do with worship on
anthropomorphic lines; Theosophy rejects the Spencerian He and substitutes the
impersonal IT for the personal pronoun, whenever speaking of the Absolute and
the Unknowable. And it teaches, as foremost of all virtues, altruism and self-sacrifice,
brotherhood and compassion for every living creature, without, for all that,
worshipping Man or Humanity. In the Positivist, more-over, who admits of no
immortal soul in men, believes in no future life or reincarnation, such a
worship becomes worse than fetishism: it is Zoolatry, the worship of the
animals. For that alone which constitutes the real Man is, in the words of
Carlyle, the essence of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself ‘I’--
. . . a breath of Heaven; the Highest Being reveals himself in man. This
denied, man is but an animal the shame and scandal of the Universe, as Pascal
puts it.
It is the old, old story, the struggle of matter and spirit, the
survival of the unfittest, because of the strongest and most material. But the
period when nascent Humanity, following the law of the natural and dual
evolution, was descending along with spirit into matter is closed. We
(Humanity) are now helping matter to ascend toward spirit; and to do that we
have to help substance to disenthral itself from the viscous grip of sense. We,
of the fifth Root Race, are the direct descendants of the primeval Humanity of
that Race; those, who on this side of the Flood tried, by commemorating it, to
save the antediluvian Truth and Wisdom, and were worsted in our efforts by the
dark genius of the Earth the spirit of matter, whom the Gnostics called
Ildabaoth and the Jews Jehovah. Think ye, that even the Bible of Moses, the
book you know so well and understand so badly, has left this claim of the Ancient
Doctrine without witness? It has not. Allow us to close with a (to you)
familiar passage, only interpreted in its true light.
In the beginning of time, or rather, in the childhood of the fifth Race,
the whole earth was of one lip and of one speech, saith chapter XI of Genesis.
Read esoterically, this means that mankind had one universal doctrine, a
philosophy, common to all; and that men were bound by one religion, whether
this term be derived from the Latin word relegere, to gather, or be united in
speech or in thought, from religens, revering the gods, or, from religare, to
be bound fast together. Take it one way or the other, it means most undeniably
and plainly that our forefathers from beyond the flood accepted in common one
truth i.e., they believed in that aggregate of subjective and objective facts
which form the consistent, logical and harmonious whole called by us the Wisdom
Religion.
Now, reading the first nine verses of chapter XI between the lines, we
get the following information. Wise in their generation, our early fathers were
evidently acquainted with the imperishable truism which teaches that in union
alone lies strength in union of thought as well as in that of nations, of
course. Therefore, lest in disunion they should be scattered upon the face of
the earth, and their Wisdom-religion should, in consequence, be broken up into
a thousand fragments; and lest they, themselves, instead of towering as
hitherto, through knowledge, heavenward, should, through blind faith begin
gravitating earthward the wise men, who journeyed from the East, devised a
plan. In those days temples were sites of learning, not of superstition;
priests taught divine Wisdom, not man-invented dogmas, and the ultima thule of
their religious activity did not centre in the contribution box, as at present.
Thus ’Go to,’ they
said, ‘let us build a city and a tower,
whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make a name.’ And
they made burnt brick and used it for stone, and built therewith a city and a
tower.
So far, this is a very old story, known as well to a Sunday school
ragamuffin as to Mr. Gladstone. Both believe very sincerely that these
descendants of the accursed Ham were proud sinners whose object was like that
of the Titans, to insult and dethrone Zeus-Jehovah, by reaching heaven, the
supposed abode of both. But since we find the story told in the revealed6
Scripts, it must, like all the rest in them, have its esoteric interpretation.
In this, Occult symbolism will help us. All the expressions that we have
italicized, when read in the original Hebrew and according to the canons of
esoteric symbolism, will yield quite a different construction. Thus:
1. And the whole earth (mankind),
was of one lip (i.e., proclaimed the same teachings) and of the same words not
of speech as in the authorized version.
Now the Kabalistic meaning of the term words and word may be found in
the Zohar and also in the Talmud. Words (Dabarim) mean powers, and word, in the
singular, is a synonym of Wisdom; e.g., By the uttering of ten words was the
world created--(Talmud Pirkey Aboth c. 5., Mish. I). Herethe words refer to the
ten Sephiroth, Builders of the Universe. Again: By the Word, (Wisdom, Logos) of
YHVH were the Heavens made (ibid.).
2-4. And the man7 (the chief leader) said to his neighbour, ‘Go
to, let us make bricks (disciples) and burn them to a burning (initiate, fill
them with sacred fire), let us build us a city (establish mysteries and teach
the Doctrine8) and a tower (Ziggurrat, a sacred temple tower) whose top may
reach unto heaven’ (the highest limit reachable in space). The
great tower of Nebo, of Nabi on the temple of Bel, was called the house of the
seven spheres of heaven and earth, and the house of the stronghold (or
strength, tagimut) and the foundation stone of heaven and earth.
Occult symbology teaches, that to burn bricks for a city means to train
disciples for magic, a hewn stone signifying a full Initiate, Petra the Greek
and Kephas the Aramaic word for stone, having the same meaning, viz.,
interpreter of the Mysteries, a Hierophant. The supreme initiation was referred
to as the burning with great burning. Thus, the bricks are fallen, but we will
build (anew) with hewn stones of Isaiah becomes clear. For the true
interpretation of the four last verses of the genetic allegory about the
supposed confusion of tongues we may turn to the legendary version of the
Yezidis and read verses 5, 6, 7, and 8 in Genesis, ch. xi, esoterically:
And Adonai (the Lord) came down and said: ‘Behold,
the people is one (the people are united in thought and deed) and they have one
lip (doctrine).’ And now they begin to spread it and ‘nothing
will be restrained from them (they will have full magic powers and get all they
want by such power, Kriyasakti,) that they have imagined’.
And now what are the Yezidis and their version and what is Ad-onai? Ad
is the Lord, their ancestral god; and the Yezidis are a heretical Mussulman
sect, scattered over
This is more logical than to attribute to one’s God,
the All-good, such ungodly tricks as are fathered upon him in the Bible.
Moreover, the legend about the
And so ought to weep all the philosophers and lovers of Ancient Wisdom;
for it is since then that the thousand and one exoteric substitutes for the one
true Doctrine or lip had their beginning, obscuring more and more the
intellects of men, and shedding innocent blood in fierce fanaticism. Had our
modern philosophers studied, instead of sneering at, the old Books of Wisdom
say the Kabala they would have found that which would have unveiled to them
many a secret of ancient Church and State. As they have not, however, the
result is evident. The dark cycle of Kali Yug has brought back a
The slack sail shifts from side to side;
The boat untrimm’d admits the tide;
Borne down adrift, at random toss’d,
The oar breaks short, . . . the rudder’s lost
Lucifer, January, February, 1891
1 The learned Belgian Mason would be nearer the mark by adding a few
more ciphers to his four thousand years.
2 In the Revue Philosophique of 1883, where he translates such gropings
by atonements successifs.
3 As the above is repeated from memory. it does not claim to be quoted
with verbal exactitude, but only to give the gist of the argument.
4 The epithet is Mr. Huxley’s. In
his lecture in Edinburgh in 1868, On the Physical Basis of Life, this great
opponent remarked that Auguste Comte’s
philosophy in practice might be compendiously described as Catholicism minus
Christianity, and antagonistic to the very essence of Science.
5 Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the
6 A curious and rather unfortunate word to use, since, as a translation
from the Latin revelare, it signifies diametrically the opposite of the now
accepted meaning in English. For the word to reveal or revealed is derived from
the Latin revelare, to reveil and rot to reveal, i.e., from re again or back
and velare to veil, or to hide something, from the word velum or a vail (or
veil), a cover. Thus, instead of unvailing, or revealing, Moses has truly only
reveiled once more the Egypto-Chaldean theological legends and allegories, into
which, as one learned in all the Wisdom of
7 This is translated from the Hebrew original. Chief-leader (Rab-Mag)
meaning literally Teacher-Magician, Master or Guru, as Daniel is shown to have
been in
8 Some Homeric heroes also when they are said, like Laomedon, Priam’s
father, to have built cities, were in reality establishing the Mysteries and
introducing the Wisdom-Religion in foreign lands.
9 It is commanded in Ecclesiasticus XXI, 30, not to curse Satan, lest
one should forfeit his own life. Why? Because in their permutations the Lord
God, Moses, and Satan are one. The name the Jews gave while in Babylon to their
exoteric God, the substitute for the true Deity of which they never spoke or
wrote, was the Assyrian Mosheh or Adar, the god of the scorching sun (the Lord
thy God is a consuming flame verily!) and therefore, Mosheh or Moses, shone
also. In
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Preface
Theosophy and the Masters General Principles
The Earth Chain Body and Astral Body Kama – Desire
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Esoteric Christianity or the Lesser Mysteries
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Nothing Ballast Open Election?
Adyar Adyar’s Slightly
International Convention
Will there be an
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the Ballot Paper A Society
Without Members
Is the 2014
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Radha Burnier
Employment Services
Don’t Just Do
Nothing Stand There Adyar, the Sole
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Save Radha’s
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Members International
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The Secrecy
Banging the Drum
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Keeping the
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Anybody There?
Now Here’s
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Something Wrong?
Control Adyar or You Control
Nothing Elected
Representation Not Representing
Publicly
Denounced
Make Way for the
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Mean Game Over
Accountable
Leadership Urgently Required
Can’t Change Won’t Change Beggars at the
Door From The Top
Down Who Owns Adyar?
New Committee?
The Royal Court
of Radha Burnier General Council
Meeting 2013 Minutes Adyar Theosophical
Society International
Rules
Disgraceful
Treatment of an Adyar Employee The Preethi
Muthiah Letters Concerns Raised General Council 2012 Meeting
Minutes
Adyar Internal
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The Headquarters? Creep On! General Council
Good Campaign
Pitch, Mr Singhal
Adyar Prepares
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Adyar Family
Appointment Another Family
Power Appointment
Triumph of the
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No Stand For
Democracy Bent election?
A Society
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Who will Believe
It? Supporting
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t’Mill
True Purpose of
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What Makes this
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Not Being at
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Adyar Theosophical Society R.I.P. 11,432 Votes
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President’s
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It’s Silence as
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President? Really? Adyar & the
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Hi-Jack Don’t Anybody Ask Me Anything
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Payments Scam CVK Maithreya
Deserved Better Treatment
Staff Treatment
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Presidential
Why was
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Adyar
Allegations Climate of Fear
Police Action
Threatened QUICK
The Prisoner of
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One Man, One
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CVK Maithreya For
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Council Should Allow Visiting Adyar
D V
Subramaniam’s Posthumous Letter of
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International Paradox Did you get an
Invite?
Serious Concerns
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Result? The Sundaram Nomination Sham Call for
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The Inauguration That Never Was Serious Concerns
Election
Committee Ignores
Misconduct Bent Election
Result
Suspend Call for Action Raise the White
Flag Staff Bullying Why Did The 2014
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Tim Boyd
A Leadership at
War Ignore the
Bullying General Council
Ignores Calls MONEY TO ADYAR? The Great Giveaway