Article Selection by Alexander Wilder | Note by H.P.B.
. . . The body is only an incident of our individuality . . . It is the life itself, the very life, with which we have to do. This life is a one—an ocean so to speak, extending everywhere . . . It adds no weight to our bodies, no bulk, or anything of dimension; but it keeps them alive. . . .
About the time of the Christian era, this doctrine was revived in the world of scientific learning. Athenaios . . . maintained that there ws an immaterial, active principle in the body, which he denominated pneuma, or spirit; and he considered the state which it was in as the source of health or disease.
Hippocrates, four hundred years before, had taught something of a very similar character. He named the principle . . . phusis, or nature. . . . What Hippocrates means was an all-pervading principle in the body. . . .
Another theory grew out of this; that there is an animal spirit generated in the blood. Many believe it now; and it seems to be the doctrine of the Books of Moses. “The life of the flesh is in the blood,” we are told in the English version of Leviticus.1
1. This theory and belief is an echo from the Sanctuaries of the initiated hierophants. It is not “an animal spirit generated in the blood” but blood itself is one of the innumerable states of that Spirit or the One Life of Esotericism: Ether, vapour, ozone, animal electricity, etc., and finally animal blood.