The Beacon-Light of the Unknown

I.

It is said in an old book on occult studies:

“The Gupta-Vidyā (Secret Science) is a sea alluring, but tempestuous, and full of reefs. The navigator who ventures there, if he be not wise and rich in acquired experience,¹ will be swallowed up, shattered upon the thousand submarine rocks. Great waves—sapphire-, ruby-, and emerald-coloured—waves full of beauty and mystery, will overtake him, ready to bear the mariner toward other and many lights that shine in all directions. But they are false beacons, will-o’-the-wisps kindled by the sons of Kālya,² for the destruction of those who thirst for life. Happy are they who remain blind to the light of those lying fires; happier still they who never turn their eyes away from the one true Beacon-Light, whose eternal flame burns solitary in the midst of the abyss of the waters of Sacred Science. Many are the pilgrims who desire to plunge therein; very rare are the vigorous swimmers who reach the Beacon-Light. To reach it, one must cease to be a number, and have become all numbers. One must forget the illusion of separation and accept only the truth of collective individuality.³ One must see through hearing, hear with the eyes,⁴ read the language of the rainbow, and have concentrated one’s six senses in the seventh.⁵”

The “Beacon-Light” of Truth is Nature without the veil of the illusion of the senses. It cannot be reached before the adept has become absolute master of his personal self, capable of controlling all his physical and psychic senses by the help of his “seventh sense,” thanks to which he is endowed, thus, with the true wisdom of the gods—Theo-sophia.

Needless to say that the profane—the non-initiates, outside the temple, or pro-fanes—judge the “lights” and the “Beacon-Light” mentioned above in the reverse sense. For them, it is the Beacon-Light of Occult truth that represents the ignis fatuus, the great will-o’-the-wisp of human illusion and stupidity; and they regard all the others as beneficent reefs, which stop the exalted in time, upon the sea of madness and superstition.

Is it not enough, say our kindly critics to us, “that the world has arrived, by dint of ‘isms,’ at that of theosophism, which is but transcendental charlatanism—without its offering us, besides, warmed-over magic from the Middle Ages, with its great sabbaths and its chronic hysteria?”

Halt there, gentlemen. Do you even know, in speaking thus, what true magic is, or the Occult Sciences? You have indeed allowed your schools to stuff you full with the “diabolical Sorcery” of Simon Magus and his disciple Menander, after that good Father Irenæus, the over-zealous Theodoret, and the unknown author of the Philosophumena. You have allowed it to be said to you, on the one hand, that this magic came from the devil; on the other, that it was but the result of imposture and fraud. Very well. But what do you know of the true nature of the system practised by Apollonius of Tyana, Iamblichus, and other magi? And what do you think of the identity of the theurgy of Iamblichus with the “magic” of the Simons and the Menanders? Its true character is only half unveiled by the author of the book De Mysteriis.⁶ Nevertheless, his explanations converted Porphyry, Plotinus, and others, who—from enemies of the esoteric theory—became its most fervent adherents. The reason is very simple. True Magic, in the theurgy of Iamblichus, is in its turn identical with the Gnosis of Pythagoras—the γνῶσις τῶν ὄντῶν, the science of the things that are; and with the divine ecstasy of the Philalethes, “the lovers of Truth.” Now, one must judge the tree only by its fruits. Who are they that have borne witness to the divine character and the reality of that ecstasy called in India Samādhi?⁷ A long series of men who, had they been Christians, would have been canonized—not by the choice of the Church, which has its partialities and its predilections, but by that of whole populations and by the vox populi, which almost never deceives itself in its judgements. First there is Ammonius Saccas, surnamed the Theodidaktos, “taught by God”; the great master whose life was so chaste and so pure that Plotinus, his pupil, lost for ever the hope of ever seeing any mortal comparable to him. There is then this same Plotinus who was to Ammonius what Plato was to Socrates—that is to say, a disciple worthy of the virtues of his illustrious master. There is Porphyry again, the pupil of Plotinus,⁸ the author of the biography of Pythagoras. In the half-light of that divine Gnosis, whose beneficent influence has radiated even to our own day, there developed all the celebrated mystics of the last centuries—such as Jacob Boehme, Emmanuel Swedenborg, and so many others. Madame Guyon is the feminine double of Iamblichus. The Christian Quietists, the Muslim Sufis, and the Rosicrucians of all countries drank at the waters of that inexhaustible source—the Theosophy of the Neoplatonists of the first centuries of the Christian era. The gnosis preceded that era, for it was the direct continuation of the Gupta-Vidyā and of the Brahma-Vidyā (“secret knowledge” and “knowledge of Brahmā”) of ancient India, transmitted by way of Egypt; as the theurgy of the Philalethes is the continuation of the Egyptian mysteries. In any case, the point of departure of that diabolical magic is the Supreme Divinity; its term and final end, the union of the divine spark that animates man with the Mother-Flame, which is the Divine All.

That end is the ultima thule [highest goal] of the Theosophists who devote themselves entirely to the service of humanity. Outside of this, those who are not yet ready to sacrifice everything may occupy themselves with transcendental sciences such as Mesmerism and modern phenomena in all their forms. They have the right to do so, according to the clause which specifies, as one of the aims of the Theosophical Society, “the study of the unknown laws of nature, and of the psychic powers latent in man.”

The former are few in number—absolute altruism being a rara avis [lit. rare bird, i.e., rarity] even among modern theosophists. The other members are free to occupy themselves with what pleases them. Notwithstanding this, and in spite of their behaviour, which is frank and as devoid of mystery, we are constantly called upon to explain ourselves; to persuade the public that we hold no witches’ sabbath, that we do not manufacture broom-handles for the use of theosophists. This at times becomes grotesque. When it is not of a new “ism,” of a religion drawn from the depths of a deranged brain, or of charlatanism that we are accused of, it is of practising the arts of Circe upon men and beasts. Jeers and jests rain down upon the Theosophical Society thick as hail.Yet it still stands firm, after fourteen years of such treatment; truly, it is hard to kill!

II.

After all, the critics, who judge only by appearances, are not altogether wrong. There is theosophy and theosophy: the true theosophy of the theosophist, and that of the member of the Society which bears that name. What does the world know of true theosophy? How can it judge between that of a Plotinus and that of the false brethren? And of these, the Society possesses more than its legitimate share. The egoism, vanity, and self-sufficiency of the majority of men are incredible. There are some for whom their petty personality constitutes the whole universe, outside of which there is no salvation. Point out to one of them that the alpha and omega of wisdom are not bounded by the circumference of his brain, that his judgment could not keep pace with that of King Solomon, and immediately you are guilty in his eyes of anti-theosophy. You have committed blasphemy against the Spirit which shall not be forgiven you, neither in this age nor in that which is to come. Those people say: “I am Theosophy!” as Louis XIV said: “I am the State.” They talk of fraternity and altruism, and in reality love only that which loves no one—themselves—in other words, their little “I.” Their egoism makes them imagine that they alone represent the temple of Theosophy, and that in proclaiming themselves to the world, they proclaim Theosophy. Alas! the doors and windows of this “temple” are nothing but so many channels through which enter—but almost never depart—the vices and illusions of egoistic mediocrities.

Those are the white termites of the Theosophical Society, which gnaw at its foundations and are a perpetual menace to it. One breathes freely only when they leave it.

It is not they who could ever give a correct idea of practical theosophy, still less of the transcendental theosophy which occupies the mind of a small group of elect. Each of us possesses the faculty, the inner sense, known under the name of intuition; but how rare are those who know how to develop it! And yet it is the only one that can make men and things be seen in their true colours. It is an instinct of the soul which grows in us in proportion to the use we make of it, and which helps us to perceive and to understand every real and absolute fact with more clarity than the mere exercise of our senses and our reasoning would do. What is called common sense and logic allows us to see only the appearance of things, what is evident to all. The instinct of which I speak, being like a projection of our perceptive consciousness—a projection effected from the subjective to the objective, and not vice versa—awakens in us the spiritual senses and forces them to act; those senses assimilate the essence of the object or action we are examining, and represents it to us as it is, and not as it appears to our physical senses or to our cold reason. “We begin with instinct, we end with omniscience,” says Professor A. Wilder, our oldest colleague. Iamblichus described that faculty, and certain theosophists have been able to appreciate all the truth of his description.

“There exists,” says he, “a faculty in the human mind which is immensely superior to all those which are grafted upon us or engendered. By it we can attain union with superior intelligences, find ourselves transported beyond the scenes and the life of this world, and share the higher existence and the superhuman powers of the celestial inhabitants. By this faculty we find ourselves finally freed from the domination of Destiny (Karma), and become, so to speak, the arbiters of our lot. For when the most excellent parts in us are filled with energy, and our soul is borne toward essences higher than science, it can separate itself from those conditions which hold it under the yoke of practical daily life; it exchanges its present life for another life, and renounces the conventional habits which belong to the external order of things, in order to abandon itself and blend with that other order which reigns in the highest existence . . .”

Plato expressed that idea in two lines:

“The light and spirit of the Divinity are the wings of the soul. They raise it to communion with the gods, above this earth, with which the spirit of man is too ready to soil itself . . . [Phaedrus 246d-e]

“To become like the gods is to become holy, just, and wise. Such is the end for which man was created; such must be his goal in the acquisition of science.” [Theaetetus 176b]

This is true theosophy—the inner theosophy, that of the soul. But pursued with an egoistic aim, it changes its nature and becomes demonosophy. This is why [esoteric]⁹ Eastern Wisdom teaches us that the Hindu yogi who isolates himself in an impenetrable forest, as well as the Christian hermit who withdraws, as in former times, into the desert, are both but accomplished egoists. The one acts with the sole aim of finding, in the one and nirvanic essence, a refuge against reincarnation; the other, with the aim of saving his soul—both think only of themselves. Their motive is wholly personal; for, granting that they attain their goal, are they not like the cowardly soldier who deserts the army at the moment of action in order to preserve himself from the bullets? By thus isolating themselves, neither the yogi nor the “saint” helps anyone other than himself; on the contrary, they show themselves, profoundly indifferent to the fate of the humanity which they flee and abandon. Mount Athos contains perhaps a few sincere fanatics. However, even those have unconsciously gone off the only path that can lead them to truth—the path of Calvary, where each one voluntarily bears the cross of humanity and for humanity. In reality, it is a nest of the grossest egoism. It is to their like that Adams’s remark on monasteries applies: “There are solitary creatures who seem to have fled the rest of humanity for the sole pleasure of meeting the devil face to face.”

Gautama, the Buddha, passed in solitude only just the time it took him to arrive at truth, which he afterward devoted himself to proclaiming, begging for his bread and living for humanity. Jesus withdrew into the desert only for forty days and died for that same humanity. Apollonius of Tyana, Plotinus, and Iamblichus—leading a life of singular abstinence and almost of asceticism—lived in the world and for the world. The greatest ascetics and saints of our day are not those who retire into inaccessible places, but those who, while avoiding Europe and the civilized countries where each has no ears and eyes except for himself—countries divided into two camps of Cains and Abels—pass their life travelling, doing good and striving to improve humanity.

Those who regard the human soul as the emanation of the divinity, as a particle or ray of the universal and absolute soul, understand better than Christians the parable of the talents. He who hides in the earth the talent given him by his “Lord” will lose that talent, as does the ascetic who takes it into his head to “save his soul” in an egoistic solitude. The “good and faithful servant” who doubles his capital—reaping for he who did not sow because he lacked the means, and gathering-in where the poor have not been able to scatter the seed—acts as a true altruist. He will receive his reward precisely because he has worked for another, without any idea of remuneration or recognition. That is the altruistic theosophist; whereas the first is but the egoist and the coward.

The Beacon-Light upon which the eyes of all right-thinking theosophists are fixed is that which has from all time been the point of aim of the imprisoned human soul. That Beacon-Light, whose light shines upon none of the earthly waters, but which has glimmered on the dark depth of the primordial waters of infinite space, is named for us, as for the primitive theosophists, “Divine Wisdom.” It is the final word of the esoteric doctrine; and in antiquity, which country that had the right to be called civilized did not possess its double system of Wisdom, one part for the masses and the other for the few—the exoteric and the esoteric? That name of Wisdom—or as one sometimes says, the “wisdom religion,” or theosophy—is as old as human thought. The title of sages—the great priests of that cult of truth—was its first derivative. The epithet was later transformed into that of philosophy and philosophers—the “lovers of science” or of wisdom. It is to Pythagoras that we owe that name, as well as that of gnosis, from the system of ἡ γνῶσις τῶν ὄντων, “the knowledge of things as they are are,” or of the essence hidden beneath the external appearance. Under that name, so noble and so correct in its definition, all the masters of antiquity designated the aggregate of human and divine knowledge. The sages and Brahmans of India, the magi of Chaldæa and Persia, the hierophants of Egypt and Arabia, the prophets or Nabi of Judæa and Israel, as well as the Greek and Roman philosophers, have always classified that science in two divisions—the esoteric, or the true, and the exoteric, masked under symbolism. To this day Jewish Rabbis designate under the name of Merkābāh the body or vehicle of their religious system—the one that contains the higher sciences accessible to initiates alone, and of which it is but the husk.

We are accused of mystery and reproached for keeping higher theosophy secret. We confess that the doctrine we call gupta-vidyā (secret science) is only for the few. But what masters in antiquity did not keep their teachings secret, for fear of seeing them profaned? From Orpheus and Zoroaster, Pythagoras and Plato, down to the more modern Rosicrucians and Freemasons, it was a constant rule that the disciple must win the master’s confidence before receiving from him the supreme and final word. The most ancient religions have always had their greater and their lesser mysteries. Neophytes and catechumens [those under oral instruction] took an inviolable oath before being accepted. The Essenes of Judæa and Carmel did the same. The Nabi [prophets who remain in society] and the Nazirs (the “separated” of Israel), like the lay Chelas and the Brahmacharyas of India, differed greatly among themselves. The former [the Nabi and lay Chelas] could, and can, be married and remain in the world while studying the sacred documents up to certain limits; the latter—the Nazirs and the Brahmacharyas—have always been vowed to the mysteries of initiation. The higher schools of Esotericism were international, though exclusive; witness Plato, Herodotus, and others going to be initiated in Egypt; while Pythagoras, after having visited the Brahmans in India, went to an Egyptian sanctuary and finally, according to Iamblichus, was received on Mount Carmel. Jesus followed the traditional custom, and justified his reticence by repeating the well-known precept:

Give not holy things unto dogs,
Cast not your pearls before swine,
Lest they trample them under their feet,
And the dogs, turning, tear you… (Matthew 7:6)

Certain ancient writings, moreover known to bibliophiles, personify Wisdom, represent it as emanating from Ain-Soph, the Parabrahma of the Jewish Kabbalists, and make it the associate and companion of the manifested deity. Hence its sacred character among all peoples. Wisdom is inseparable from divinity. Thus we have the Vedas emanating from the mouth of the Hindu Brahmā (the Logos); Buddha comes from budha [√budh]—“Wisdom,” divine intelligence; the Babylonian Nebo, the Thoth of Memphis, the Hermes of the Greeks were all gods of esoteric wisdom.

The Greek Athena, [the Greek] Metis or the Egyptian Neith, are the prototypes of Sophia-Achamoth, the feminine wisdom of the Gnostics. The Samaritan Pentateuch calls the book of Genesis Akamauth, or “Wisdom,” as do likewise two fragments of very ancient manuscripts, “The Wisdom of Solomon” and “The Wisdom of Iasous (Jesus [ben Sirach]).” The book called Meshalim, or “Discourses and proverbs of Solomon,” personifies wisdom, calling it “the auxiliary of the (Logos) Creator,” in these terms (I translate verbatim):

I(a) HV(e) H possessed me, from his commencement,¹⁰
But the first emanated in the eternities.
I appeared from antiquity—the primordiality—
From the first day of the earth;
I was born before the great abyss.
And when there were neither springs nor waters,
When the heaven was being built, I was there.
When he traced the circle upon the face of the abyss,
I was there with him—Amun.
I was his delights, day after day. (Proverbs 8:22–30)

This is exoteric, like all that relates to the personal gods of nations. The Infinite cannot be known by our reason, which does nothing but distinguish and define; but we can always conceive its abstract idea, thanks to that faculty superior to reason—intuition, or the spiritual instinct of which I have just spoken. The great Initiates, having the rare faculty of placing themselves in the state of Samādhi—which we can translate only imperfectly by the term ecstasy, a state wherein one ceases to be the conditioned and personal “I,” in order to become one with the All—are the only ones who can boast of having been in contact with the infinite; but no more than other mortals could they define that state by words…

These few features of true theosophy and its practices are sketched for a small number of our readers who are endowed with the requisite intuition. As for the others, either they would not understand us, or they would laugh.

III.

Do our kindly critics always know what they are mocking? Have they the slightest idea of the work that is being carried on throughout the whole world, and of the mental change produced by that theosophy which makes them smirk? The progress accomplished by our literature is evident, and thanks to certain indefatigable theosophists it becomes manifest even to the blindest. There are those who are persuaded that theosophy is the philosophy and the law, if not the religion, of the future. The reactionaries, enamoured of the dolce far niente [the sweetness of doing nothing] of conservatism, divine this; hence all these hatreds and persecutions, calling criticism to their aid. But criticism, inaugurated by Aristotle, has strayed far from its primitive programme. The ancient philosophers—those sublime ignoramuses in matters of modern civilization—when they criticised a system or a work, did so with impartiality and with the sole aim of improving and perfecting what they censured. They studied first and analysed afterward. It was a service rendered, accepted, and recognized as such by both sides. Does modern criticism still adhere to this golden rule? It is quite evident that it does not. Our judges of today are far removed even from Kant’s philosophical criticism. Criticism based on unpopularity and prejudice has replaced that of “pure reason”; and one ends by tearing to pieces with fine teeth everything one does not understand—and above all everything one has not the least wish to understand. In the last century—the golden age of the goose-quill—that instrument sometimes bit hard, while still doing justice. Caesar’s wife might be suspected; she was never condemned before being heard. In our century of Montyon prizes [awards for moral virtue] alongside public statues for whoever invents the most murderous projectile of war; today, when the steel-pen has replaced its humble predecessor [the goose-quill], the fangs of the Bengal tiger or those of the terrible corcodile of the Nile would make cuts less cruel and less deep than does the steel-beak of the modern critic, nearly always utterly ignorant of what he so skilfully tears into shreds!

It is perhaps a consolation to know that the majority of our literary critics, transatlantic or continental, are former scribblers who have made a fiasco in literature and now avenge their mediocrity upon whatever they meet along their path. Thin ‘blue’ wine—insipid and adulterated—almost always turns into very sharp vinegar. Unfortunately, the reporters of the press in general—the hungry seekers after cash emoluments, whom we should be sorry to deprive of their fees even at our own expense—are not our only nor our most dangerous critics. The bigots and materialists, the sheep and the goats of organized religions [see Matthew 25:31-46]—having in their turn placed us upon their index expurgatorius—banish our books from their libraries, boycott our journals, and consign us ourselves to the most absolute ostracism. Such a pious soul, who accepts to the letter all biblical miracles—following with emotion Jonah’s ichthyographical researches in the belly of his whale, as well as Elijah’s trans-ethereal voyage, flying off like a salamander in his chariot of fire—yet nevertheless treats theosophists as gullible fools and mischievous tricksters. Another—Haeckel’s ‘damned soul’—while showing a faith as blind as that of the bigot in his belief in the evolution of man and the gorilla from a common ancestor—given the total absence in nature of any trace whatever of such a link—falls into convulsions of laughter when he finds his neighbour believing in occult phenomena and psychic manifestations. With all this, neither the bigot nor the man of science, not even the academician admitted among the “Immortals,” could explain to us the smallest problem of life. The metaphysician who for centuries has studied the phenomenon of being in its first principles, and who smiles with condescending pity at theosophical “ravings,” would find himself sorely embarrassed if asked to explain to us even the philosophy—or the very reason for the existence—of dreams. Who among them will tell us why all mental operations—except reasoning, which alone seems suspended and paralysed—function in our dreams with a force and an activity as great as during our waking hours? The disciple of Herbert Spencer would refer the questioner bluntly to the biologist. The latter, for whom digestion is the alpha and omega of every dream, as is hysteria—that great Proteus of a thousand forms—the agent in every psychic phenomenon, would not succeed in satisfying us. Indigestion and hysteria are indeed twin sisters, two goddesses to whom the modern physiologist raises an altar in order to officiate as their high priest. That is his affair, provided he does not meddle with the gods of his neighbours.

From all this it follows that the Christian who qualifies theosophy as “accursed science” and “forbidden fruit”; the man of science who sees in metaphysics only “the domain of the mad poet” (Tyndall); the reporter who touches it only with poisoned tongs; and the missionary who associates it with the idolatry of the “stipended Hindu”—it follows, we say, that poor Theo-Sophia is as ill-treated as she was when the ancients called her Truth while relegating her to the bottom of a well. Even the “Christian” Kabbalists, who love so much to gaze at themselves in the dark waters of that deep well—though they see there only the reflection of their own faces, which they take for that of Truth—even the Kabbalists make war upon us! . . . All this, however, is no reason why Theosophy should have nothing to say in her defence and favour; why she should cease to plead her right to be heard; and why her loyal and faithful servants should neglect their duty by confessing themselves beaten.

“The accursed science,” you say, gentlemen Ultramontanes? You should nevertheless remember that the tree of knowledge is grafted upon the tree of life; that the fruit which you qualify as “forbidden,” and which for eighteen centuries you have proclaimed the cause of original sin that brought death into the world—that fruit, whose flower blossoms upon an immortal stock, was nourished by that same trunk, and is thus the only one that can assure us immortality. You forget, moreover, gentlemen Kabbalists—or perhaps you desire to forget—that the allegory of the earthly paradise is as old as the world, and that the tree, the fruit, and the sin had a meaning far more philosophical and profound than that which is assigned to them today, now that the secrets of initiation are lost . . .

Protestantism and Ultramontanism oppose Theosophy, just as they have opposed everything that did not come from themselves; as Calvinism opposed the replacement of its two fetishes—the Jewish Bible and Sabbath—by the Gospel and Sunday of the Christians; as Rome opposed secular education and Freemasonry. The dead letter and theocracy have had their time. The world must march and move, under pain of stagnation and death. Mental evolution proceeds pari passu with physical evolution, and both advance toward the One Truth—which is the heart of Humanity’s system, as evolution is its blood. Let the circulation stop for a moment and the heart stops with it, and that is the end of the human machine! And these are the servants of Christ who would kill, or at least paralyze, the Truth with blows from the club called:—the dead letter that killeth! But the end is near. What Coleridge said of political despotism applies still more to religious despotism. The Church, unless it withdraws its heavy hand, weighing like a nightmare upon the oppressed breast of millions of believers nolens volens [willing or unwilling], and whose thought remains paralysed in the vice of superstition—the ritualistic Church is condemned to yield its place to religion and—to perish. Soon it will have no other choice. For once the people become enlightened as to the Truth which she so carefully veils, one of two things will occur: either she will perish by the people; or else—if the masses are left in ignorance and slavery to the dead letter—she will perish with the people. Will the “servants of eternal Truth,” whom the Church has reduced to a hamster turning on its ecclesiastical wheel, prove altruistic enough to choose, of the two necessities, the first? Who knows!

I repeat: only theosophy rightly understood can save the world from despair, by reproducing the social and religious reform once already accomplished in history by Gautama, the Buddha—a peaceful reform, without a single drop of blood shed, each allowed to remain in the belief of his fathers if he so desires. To do so, theosophy would need only to reject the parasitic growths of human fabrication which at present stifle all religions as well as all ritual systems throughout the world. Let it accept only that essence which is one and the same in all—that is to say, the spirit which vivifies and renders immortal the man in whom it dwells. Let every man inclined toward the good find his ideal, a star before him to guide him. Let him follow it and never deviate from his path, and he is almost certain to arrive at the “Beacon-Light” of life, the Truth, whether he sought and found it at the bottom of a manger or of a well . . .

IV.

Mock, then, at the science of sciences before knowing the first word of it. We shall be told that this is the literary right of our critics. I grant it. It is true that if one spoke only of what one knows, one would say only what is true—and that would not always be so amusing. When I read the criticisms written about theosophy—the platitudes and tasteless jests aimed at the grandest and most sublime philosophy in the world, of which but one aspect is reflected in the noble ethics of the Philalēthes—I ask myself whether the Academies of any country have ever understood the theosophy of the Alexandrian philosophers any better than they understand us. What does one know—what can one know—of universal theosophy, unless one has studied with the Masters of Wisdom? And understanding Iamblichus, Plotinus, even Proclus—that is to say, the theosophy of the third and fourth centuries—so little, people nevertheless presume to judge the neo-theosophy of the nineteenth century!

Theosophy, we say, comes to us from the Far East, just as did the theosophy of Plotinus and Iamblichus, and even the mysteries of ancient Egypt. Do not Homer and Herodotus tell us that the ancient Egyptians were “Eastern Ethiopians,” who came from Lanka or Ceylon, according to the description? For it is now well recognized that those whom the two classics call Eastern Ethiopians were nothing but a colony of dark-skinned Aryans—the Dravidians of Southern India—who brought with them into Egypt a fully formed civilization. This took place in prehistoric ages, which Baron Bunsen calls pre-Menitic (before Menes), but which have a history of their own in the ancient annals of Kālukā-Batta. Apart from, and outside of, esoteric teachings—which do not reveal themselves to the mocking public—the historical researches of Colonel Vans Kennedy, the great rival in India of Dr. Wilson as a Sanskritist, show us that pre-Assyrian Babylonia was the cradle of Brahmanism and of Sanskrit as a sacerdotal language. We also know, if the Exodus is to be believed, that Egypt possessed, long before the time of Moses, its diviners, its hierophants, and its magicians—that is to say, before the nineteenth dynasty. Finally, Brugsch-Bey sees in many of the gods of Egypt emigrants from beyond the Red Sea and from the great waters of the Indian Ocean.

Be it thus or otherwise, theosophy descends in a direct line from the great tree of universal Gnosis—a tree whose luxuriant branches, spreading like a vault over the entire globe, overshadowed at one time, in an epoch which biblical chronology delights in calling antediluvian, all temples and all nations. That gnosis represents the aggregate of all the sciences, the accumulated knowledge of all the gods and demi-gods once incarnated upon the earth. There are people who wish to see in these beings fallen angels or enemies of man—those sons of God who, seeing that the daughters of men were fair, took them for wives and communicated to them all the secrets of heaven and earth. Let them. We believe in Avatars and divine dynasties, in an epoch when there were indeed “giants upon the earth”; but we utterly repudiate the idea of “fallen angels,” or of Satan and his host.

“What then is your religious system or belief?” we are asked. “What do your preferred study?”

“The Truth,” we reply. Truth wherever we find it. For like Ammonius Saccas, our highest ambition would be to reconcile all religious systems—helping each to find truth in its own belief, while compelling it to recognize that truth in the belief of its neighbour. What matters the name, if the essence is the same? Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Apollonius of Tyana are all said to have possessed the marvellous gifts of prophecy, clairvoyance, and healing, though belonging to three different schools. Prophecy was an art cultivated as much among the Essenes and the Bənē Nəvīʾīm [sons of the prophets] of the Jews as among the pagan priests of the oracles. The disciples of Plotinus attributed miraculous powers to their master; Philostratus did the same for Apollonius; while Iamblichus was reputed to have surpassed all other Eclectics in theurgical powers. Ammonius declared that all moral and practical Wisdom was contained in the books of Thoth, or Hermes Trismegistus. But “Thoth” signifies a college, a school, an assembly; and the works bearing that name were, according to the theodidaktos, identical with the doctrines of the Sages of the Far East. If Pythagoras drew his knowledge from India (where to this day he is mentioned in ancient manuscripts under the name Yavanāchārya, “the Greek master”¹¹) Plato acquired his from the books of Thoth-Hermes. How it came about that the youthful Hermes, the god of shepherds, surnamed “the Good Shepherd,” presiding over divination and clairvoyance, became identified with Thoth, the deified Sage and author of the Book of the Dead, is a secret which esoteric doctrine alone could reveal to Orientalists.

Every country has had its saviours. He who dispels the darkness of ignorance with the torch of knowledge, revealing truth to us, deserves as much gratitude as he who saves us from death by healing our bodies. He awakens in our benumbed soul the faculty of distinguishing true from false by lighting within it a divine flame hitherto absent, and he has a right to our reverent gratitude, for he has become our creator. What matters the name or symbol that personifies the abstract idea, if that idea is always the same and always true? Whether that concrete symbol bears one name or another, whether the saviour in whom one believes is called Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, or Asclepius, also surnamed Σώτηρ [Sōtēr], the “Saviour,” we have but one thing to remember: the symbols of divine truths were not invented for the amusement of the ignorant; they are the alpha and omega of philosophical thought.

Theosophy being the path that leads to truth in every religion as in every science, occultism is, so to speak, the universal touchstone and solvent. It is Ariadne’s thread given by the master to the disciple who ventures into the labyrinth of the mysteries of Being; the torch that lights his way in the dangerous maze of life; the riddle of the Sphinx, ever present. But the light poured forth by that torch can be discerned only by the eye of the awakened soul, or by spiritual senses; it blinds the eye of the materialist as the sun blinds the owl.

Having neither dogma nor ritual—both being but fetters, material bodies that stifle the soul—we never employ the “ceremonial magic” of Western Kabbalists; we know its dangers too well ever to accept it. In the Theosophical Society every member is free to study what he pleases, provided he does not venture into unknown regions that would surely lead him toward black magic, the sorcery against which Éliphas Lévi so frankly warns his readers. Occult sciences are dangerous for those who understand them only imperfectly. Anyone who would devote himself to their practice on his own, without guidance, would run the risk of becoming insane. Those who study them would therefore do well to unite in small groups of three to seven. Groups should be odd in number to possess greater strength. A group with even a little solidarity, forming a single united body, in which the senses and perceptions of the individual members complement and support one another—that is to say, each supplying to the other the quality that is lacking—will always end by forming a perfect and invincible body. “Union makes strength.” The moral of the fable of the old man bequeathing to his sons a bundle of sticks that must never be separated remains eternally axiomatic.

V.

“The disciples (Lanoos) of the Law of the Diamond-Heart (magic) shall help one another in their lessons. The grammarian shall place himself at the service of him who seeks the soul of metals (the chemist),” etc. (Catechism of the Gupta-Vidyā)

The profane would laugh if they were told that, in the Occult Sciences, an alchemist may be useful to a philologist, and vice versa. They would perhaps understand better if it were explained to them that by “grammarian” or “philologist” we mean one who studies the universal language of correspondences and symbols—although only the members of the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society can fully grasp what is meant by “philologist” in this sense. Everything in nature corresponds and is mutually bound together. In its abstract meaning, Theosophy is the white ray from which are born the seven colours of the solar prism, each human being assimilating one of these rays more than the other six. Hence seven persons, each endowed with his special ray, may mutually aid one another. Having the septenary bundle at their service, they would thus possess the seven forces of nature. But it follows equally that, in order to reach this end, the choice of the seven persons forming such a group must be left to an expert—an Initiate in the science of occult rays.

Here we tread upon dangerous ground, where the esoteric Sphinx runs the risk of being accused of mystification. And yet official science itself furnishes proofs of what we advance, and even physical and materialistic astronomy corroborates us. The sun is one, and its light shines for all; it warms the ignorant as well as the adept in astronomy. But hypotheses as to that sun’s nature and constitution are legion. Not one is the complete truth, hardly even an approximation to it. Each is often but a fiction, soon replaced by another. Scientific theory, more than anything else in this lower world, answers to Malherbe’s verse:

“And rose, she lived the life of roses,
The space of a morning.”

Yet whether they adorn the altar of Science or not, each hypothesis may contain a fragment of truth. Sorted, compared, analysed, and combined, these hypotheses may one day yield an astronomical axiom, a fact of nature, instead of a chimera born in a scientific brain.

This in no way means that we accept as even a particle of truth every axiom recognized as such by the Academies. Proof of this is furnished by the so-called evolution and the phantasmagorical transformations of the sun-spots—Nasmyth’s theory, for example, at the present moment. Sir John Herschel began by seeing in them solar inhabitants, magnificent gigantic angels. William Herschel, maintaining a prudent silence regarding these divine salamanders, nevertheless shared the opinion of the elder Herschel that the solar globe was but a beautiful metaphor, a māyā—thus enunciating an occult axiom. The spots have found their Darwin in every astronomer of any eminence. They have been successively taken for planetary spirits, solar mortals, columns of volcanic smoke (engendered, it must be supposed, by academic brains), opaque clouds, and finally shadows shaped like willow leaves (the “willow-leaf theory”). At present the god Sol is degraded: to hear them speak, he is now nothing but a gigantic mass of coal, still glowing, but ready to go out in the hearth of our little system!

Thus it is also with the speculations published by members of the T.S., when the authors, though belonging to the Theosophical fraternity, have never studied the true esoteric doctrines. They can never be anything more than hypotheses, barely tinged with a ray of truth, drowned in a fanciful and often baroque chaos. By sorting them according to their relative value and placing them side by side, one may nevertheless succeed in extracting from them a philosophical truth. For let us say it at once: theosophy has this advantage over ordinary Science, that it examines the reverse side of every apparent truth. It probes and analyzes every fact presented by physical Science, seeking therein only the essence and the final and occult constitution of every cosmic and physical manifestation, whether it belongs to the moral, intellectual, or material domain. In a word, theosophy begins its investigations where those of the materialists come to an end.

“So then—is it metaphysics that you offer us? Why not say so at once?” we shall be told.

No, it is not metaphysics, as this word is generally understood, although metaphysics plays its part in it. Kant, Leibnitz, Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer—all belong to metaphysics. Yet when one studies these, one cannot prevent oneself from imagining Lady Metaphysics entering the masquerade ball of academic sciences wearing a false nose. The metaphysics of Kant and of Leibniz—as proof, his monads—soars above modern metaphysics as a balloon in the clouds soars above a hollow pumpkin in a field; and yet even that balloon, however superior it may be to the pumpkin, is too artificial to serve as the vehicle of occult truth. This latter is a goddess perhaps too provocatively unveiled to be to the taste of our very modest savants. Kantian metaphysics made its author discover, without the slightest assistance from current methods or perfected instruments, the identity of the constitution and the essence of the sun and the planets; and Kant affirmed it, when the best astronomers, even in the first half of this century, still denied it. But this same metaphysics did not succeed in demonstrating to him—any more than it has helped modern physics to discover it (despite its noisy hypotheses)—the true nature of this essence.

Thus, Theosophy—or rather the occult sciences which it studies—is something more than simple metaphysics. It is, if I may be permitted to use this double term, a meta‑metaphysics, a meta‑geometry, etc., etc., or a universal transcendentalism. Theosophy entirely rejects the testimony of the physical senses when this testimony has not as its basis that of spiritual and psychic perception. Whether it be a question of the most highly developed clairvoyance and clairaudience, the final testimony of both will be rejected, unless these terms signify the φωτός [phōtós; phōs] of Iamblichus, or ecstatic illumination—the ἀγωγή μαντεία [agōgḗ manteía] of Plotinus and of Porphyry. The same holds true for the physical sciences: the evidence of reason on the terrestrial plane, like that of our five senses, must receive the imprimatur of the sixth and seventh sense of the divine Ego, before a fact is accepted by a true occultist.

Official science hears us say this, and . . . laughs. We read its reports, we see the apotheoses of its so‑called progress, its great discoveries, more than one of which, while enriching the small number of the rich, has plunged millions of the poor into a misery still more frightful—and we let it do so. But, finding that, in the knowledge of primordial matter, physical science has not taken a single step forward since Anaximenes and the Ionian school—we in turn laugh.

In this direction, the finest works and the most beautiful scientific discoveries of this century belong without contradiction to the great scholar‑chemist, Mr. William Crookes.¹²

In his particular case, his intuition—so remarkable where occult truths are concerned—has rendered him greater service than his erudition in physical science. It is certainly neither scientific methods nor official routine that have greatly assisted him in his discovery of radiant matter, nor in his researches on protyle, or primordial matter.¹³

VI.

That which the Theosophists who belong to official and orthodox science strive to accomplish within their own domain, the occultists—or the Theosophists of the “inner group”—study according to the method of the esoteric school. If, up to the present, this method has proved its superiority only to its own pupils—that is, to those who have bound themselves by oath never to reveal it—this does not yet constitute an argument against it. Not only have the words magic and theurgy never been even approximately understood, but even the term Theosophy itself has been distorted beyond recognition. The definitions given in encyclopedias and dictionaries are as absurd as they are grotesque. Let us take Webster, for example, who explains Theosophy by assuring his readers that it is “intercourse with God and superior spirits,” and then adds that it is the “attainment of superhuman and supernatural knowledge and powers by physical processes (!?), as by the theurgic operations of some ancient Platonists, or by the chemical processes of the German fire philosophers.” This is sheer nonsense—no better than saying that one could transform a cracked skull into a brain like Newton’s, and develop mathematical genius in it, by riding five leagues a day on a wooden horse.

Theosophy is synonymous with the Jñāna-Vidya and Brahma-Vidya¹⁴ of the Hindus, and with the Dzyan of the trans-Himalayan Adepts—the science of the true Rāja-Yogis, who are far more accessible than is generally believed. It has numerous schools in the East. Its branches are still more numerous, each having gradually detached itself from the parent trunk—the Archaic Wisdom—and assumed a distinct form. Yet while the forms varied, diverging farther from the Truth-Light with each successive generation, the substance of initiatic truth has always remained the same. The symbols chosen to express the same idea may differ, but in their hidden meaning they all convey that one identical idea. Ragon, the most erudite Mason among the “Sons of the Widow,” has clearly stated this fact. There exists a sacerdotal language—the “Mystery Language”—and unless one knows it thoroughly, one cannot go far in the occult sciences. According to him, “to build or found a city” had the same meaning as “to found a religion”; hence that phrase in Homer is equivalent to the one in the Brāhmaṇas which speaks of distributing the juice of Soma. It signifies the founding of an esoteric school, not of a religion, as Ragon believed. Was he mistaken? We do not think so. But just as a Theosophist of the esoteric circle would not dare to reveal what he has sworn to keep silent to a mere member of the Theosophical Society, so Ragon was obliged to disclose only relative truths to his trinosophes. Nevertheless, it is more than certain that he had studied—at least in an elementary way—the Mystery Language.

“How is one to learn this language?” we are asked. We reply: study and compare all religions. To learn it thoroughly, one needs a master, a guru; to reach it unaided requires more than genius—it requires inspiration, such as that of Ammonius Saccas. Encouraged within the Church by Clement of Alexandria and Athenagoras, protected by the scholars of the Synagogue and the Academy, and revered by the Gentiles, “he learned the Mystery Language by teaching the common origin of all religious systems, and a common religion.” To do this, he had only to teach in his school according to the ancient canons of Hermes, so well studied by Plato and Pythagoras, and from which they drew their two philosophies. Should we be surprised that, finding in the opening verses of the Gospel of Saint John the same doctrines as in the three philosophies just mentioned, he concluded, most reasonably, that the aim of the great Nazarene was to restore the sublime science of ancient Wisdom in all its primitive integrity? We think as Ammonius did. Biblical narratives and the histories of the gods admit only two explanations: either they are vast and profound allegories illustrating universal truths, or else they are fables fit only to lull the ignorant to sleep.

Thus the allegories—Jewish as well as pagan—all contain truths and can be understood only by one who knows the mystic language of antiquity. Let us see what one of our most distinguished Theosophists—a fervent Platonist and a Hebraist thoroughly versed in Greek and Latin—Professor Alexander Wilder¹⁵ of New York, says on this subject:

“The anterior idea of the New Platonists was that of a single Supreme Essence. This is the Diu, or “Lord of Heaven,” of the Aryan nations, identical with the Iao of the Chaldeans and Hebrews, the Iabe [or Iave, YHVH] of the Samaritans, the Tiu or Tuisco of the Northmen, the Duw of the Britons, the Zeus of the Thracians, and Jupiter of the Romans. He was the Being, the Facit, one and supreme. From him all other beings proceeded by emanation. The moderns appear to have substituted for this theory of evolution. Perhaps a wiser sage will combine the two hypotheses. These deity-names often seem to have been invented with little or no reference to etymological signification, but principally because of some mystical meaning attached to the numerical signification of the specific letters employed in their orthography.” [see “New Platonism and Alchemy”]

This numerical meaning is one branch of the Mystery Language, or the ancient sacerdotal tongue. It was taught in the Lesser Mysteries, but the language itself was reserved for the higher Initiates alone. The candidate had to emerge victorious from the terrible ordeals of the Greater Mysteries before receiving instruction in it. This is why Ammonius Saccas, like Pythagoras, required his disciples to swear never to divulge the higher doctrines to anyone not already instructed in the preliminary teachings and ready for initiation. Another Sage, who preceded him by three centuries, did the same with his disciples, telling them that he spoke to them “in parables”, “because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given . . . because seeing they see not, and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.”

Thus the “parables” employed by Jesus formed part of the Mystery Language, the sacerdotal speech of the Initiates. Rome has lost its key; in rejecting Theosophy and pronouncing its anathema upon the occult sciences, it has lost it forever.

“Love one another,” said that great Master¹⁶ to those who were studying the mysteries “of the kingdom of God.”

“Profess altruism, preserve union, concord, and harmony within your groups, all you who place yourselves in the ranks of the neophytes and seekers of the One Truth,” say other Masters to us. Without union and intellectual and psychic sympathy, you will achieve nothing. He who sows discord reaps the hurricane…”¹⁷

Learned Kabbalists, thoroughly versed in the Zohar and its numerous commentaries, are not lacking among our members, either in Europe or, above all, in America. But where has this led us, and what good have they done up to this day for the Society for which they pledged themselves to work from the moment of their admission? The majority of them, instead of uniting and helping one another, look askance at each other; its members are always ready to mock one another and to criticize each other in turn. Envy, jealousy, and a most deplorable sense of rivalry reign supreme in a Society whose principal aim is brotherhood!

“See how these Christians love one another!” said the pagans in the first centuries of the Fathers of the Church, of those who slew one another in the name of the Master who had bequeathed to them peace and love. Critics and the indifferent are beginning to say the same of the Theosophists, and they are right. Look at what our journals are becoming—all of them, except The Path of New York; even The Theosophist, the oldest of our monthly publications, has done nothing for the past five months, since the Founding President departed for Japan, but snap here and there at the legs of its colleagues and contemporaries. In what way are we better than the Christians of the first Councils?

“Union makes strength.” Here, then, is one of the reasons for our weakness. We are advised not to air our dirty laundry in public? I think the opposite. It is better to confess one’s imperfections before the world, in other words, to air one’s own dirty laundry, than to soil the laundry of one’s brothers in theosophy, as some delight in doing. Let us speak in general terms, confess our faults, denounce everything that is not theosophical, and leave every person in peace; that is a matter for each one’s karma, and the Theosophical journals have nothing to do with it.

Those who wish to succeed in theosophy—whether abstract or practical—must remember that disunion is the first condition of failure. But let a dozen determined and united Theosophists group themselves together. Let them work together, each according to his inclination, if he prefers, in this or that branch of universal science, but let each feel sympathy with his neighbor. This would do nothing but good, even within the ranks of the simple members who are not devoted to philosophical research. If such a group, chosen according to esoteric rules, were to form among mystics alone, if they were to set themselves to the pursuit of truth by helping one another with their reciprocal lights, we affirm that each member of this group would make more progress in sacred science in one year than he could in ten years on his own. In Theosophy, what is needed is emulation and not rivalry; otherwise, he who boasts of being the first will arrive last. In true theosophy, it is always the smallest who becomes the greatest.

Nevertheless, the Theosophical Society counts more victorious disciples than is generally supposed. But these keep themselves apart and work instead of grandstanding. They are our most zealous as well as our most devoted theosophists. When publishing an article, they set aside their personal identity in order to maintain the impersonality of the pseudonym. There are some who know the language of the Mysteries to perfection, and many an ancient book or manuscript—indecipherable to our scholars, or appearing to them as nothing but a heap of errors against modern science—is an open book for them.

These few devoted men and women are the pillars of our temple. They alone paralyze the incessant labor of our theosophical “termites.”

VII.

And now we believe that, in these pages, we have sufficiently refuted several grave errors concerning our doctrines and beliefs, among others the charge that would see in the theosophists—at least in those who founded the Society—either polytheists or atheists. We are neither, no more than were certain gnostics who, while believing in the existence of planetary, solar, and lunar gods, offered them neither prayers nor altars. Not believing in a personal God outside of man, who is its temple according to Saint Paul and other Initiates—we believe in an impersonal and absolute Principle,¹⁸ so far beyond human conceptions that we see nothing less than a blasphemer and a presumptuous madman in anyone who would seek to define this great universal mystery. All that is taught to us concerning this eternal and incomparable Principle is that it is neither spirit nor matter, nor substance nor thought, but the container of all these, the absolute container. In a word, it is the “Non-Being God” [οὐκ ὤν θεός] of Basilides, so poorly understood even by learned chroniclers of the Musée Guimet (vol. XIV), who define the term rather mockingly when they speak of this “Non-Being God who ordered everything, foresaw everything, although he had neither reason nor will.”

Yes, indeed, and this “Non-Being God,” being identical with the Parabrahma of the Vedāntins—the most philosophical and most sublime conception possible—is also identical with the Ain-Soph of the Jewish Kabbalists. This is likewise “the God who is not,” Ain meaning non-being or the Absolute, the Nothing, the “οὐ τὸ οὐδέν ἕν,” of Basilides; that is to say, human intelligence, being limited on this material plane, cannot conceive something which is, but which exists under no form whatsoever. The idea of being is necessarily limited to something that exists, whether in substance—actual or potential—whether in the nature of things, or at least in our ideas. That which cannot be perceived by the senses nor conceived by the intellect, which conditions all things, does not exist for us.

“Where then do you place Nirvāṇa, O great Arhat?” asks a king of a venerable Buddhist ascetic whom he is questioning about the Good Law.
“Nowhere, O great king,” is the answer.
“Then Nirvāṇa does not exist?”
“Nirvāṇa is, but it does not exist.”

The same holds true for the God “who is not,” a poor literal translation, for it should be read esoterically as the god who does not exist, but who is. The root of οὐδέν is οὐδ‑εἷς, meaning “and not someone,” that is to say, that of which one speaks is not at all a person or a thing, but the negative of both (οὐδέν, neuter, is employed as an adverb: in nothing) Thus the τὸ οὐδέν ἕν of Basilides is absolutely identical with the En or Ain-Soph of the Kabbalists. In Hebrew religious metaphysics, the Absolute is an abstraction, “without form and without existence,” “without any likeness to anything else” (see Franck, La Kabbale, p. 126). Therefore God is Nothing, without name and without qualities; hence He is called Ain-Soph, for Ain signifies nothing.

It is not from this immutable and absolute Principle, which is only the potentiality of being, that gods or active principles of the manifested world emanate. The Absolute can have no relation with the conditioned or the finite; that from which emanations proceed is the “God who speaks” [ὁ λαλῶν θεός] of Basilides, that is, the Logos, whom Philo calls “the second God,” [δεύτερος θεός] and the Creator of forms. “The second God is the Wisdom of the One God” (Philo, Questions and Answers on Genesis). “But this logos, this “Wisdom” is still an emanation, is it not?” one will object. “Now, to make something emanate from Nothing is absurd!” Not in the least. First, this “nothing” is nothing only because it is the Absolute, and therefore the All. Next, this “second God” is no more an emanation than the shadow cast by our body upon a white wall is an emanation of that body. In any case, this God is not the effect of a cause, of a conscious and deliberate will. It is the periodic effect¹⁹ of an eternal and immutable law, outside of time and space, and of which the Logos, or the creative intelligence, is but the shadow or reflection.

“But this is an absurd idea!” we hear said to us by every believer in a personal and anthropomorphic God. “Of the two, the man and his shadow, it is the latter that is nothing, an optical illusion, and the man who casts it who is the intelligence, although passive in this case!”

Perfectly so—on our plane, where everything is illusion, where all appears reversed, as in a mirror. Now, since the domain of the truly real appears to our materially distorted perceptions as the unreal, and since, from the standpoint of absolute reality, the universe with its conscious and intelligent beings is itself but a poor phantasmagoria—it follows that it is the shadow of the Real, on the latter plane, which is endowed with intelligence and attributes; whereas the Absolute—from our point of view—is deprived of every conditional quality precisely because it is Absolute. One need not be deeply versed in Eastern metaphysics to understand this; nor is it necessary to be a distinguished paleographer or palaeologist to see that the system of Basilides is that of the Vedāntins, however distorted it may have been by the author of the Philosophumena. Even the fragmentary summary of the Gnostic systems given in that work proves it. Only the esoteric doctrine can explain all that is incomprehensible and chaotic in this misunderstood system of Basilides, as transmitted to us by the Fathers of the Church, those executioners of Heresies. The Pater innatus [lit. “innate father”] or unbegotten God, the great Archon (Ἄρχων), the two demiurges, even the three hundred and sixty-five heavens, the number contained in the name of their ruler Abraxas, all derive from Indian systems. But everything is denied in our pessimistic century, where everything runs on steam, even life itself, where nothing abstract either—and nothing else is eternal—interests anyone except a few rare eccentrics; and where man dies without ever having lived a single moment face‑to‑face with his soul, swept along as he is by the whirlwind of selfish and earthly affairs.

Apart from metaphysics, however, everyone who enters the Theosophical Society may find therein a science or occupation suited to his tastes. An astronomer would make more scientific discoveries by studying the allegories and symbols relating to each star²⁰ in the ancient Sanskrit books than he ever will with the aid of the Academies alone. An intuitive physician would learn more from the works of Charaka²¹—translated into Arabic in the eighth century, or from the dusty manuscripts preserved in the library of Adyar—than from modern physiological textbooks. Theosophists inclined toward medicine or the healing art would do better to consult the legends and symbols relating to Asclepius or Æsculapius. For, just as formerly Hippocrates, consulting at Cos²² the votive stelae of the rotunda of Epidaurus (surnamed the Tholos), they could find there prescriptions for remedies unknown to the modern pharmacopoeia.²³ For then, they could perhaps heal instead of kill.

Let us repeat it for the hundredth time: Truth is One! The moment it is presented not in all its aspects but according to the thousand and one opinions formed of it by its servants, we no longer have divine Truth, but the confused echoes of human voices. Where is it to be sought in its integral whole, even approximately? Among Christian Kabbalists or among modern European occultists? Among contemporary Spiritists or the primitive spiritualists?

“In France,” a friend once told us, “so many Kabbalists, so many systems. Among us, they all claim to be Christians. Some are for the Pope, to the point of dreaming for him a universal crown, that of a Pontiff-Cæsar. Others are against the papacy, but for a Christ—not even a historical one, but one created by their imagination—a politicizing and anti-Cæsarian Christ, etc., etc. Each Kabbalist believes he has recovered the lost Truth. It is always his own science that is the eternal Truth, and that of everyone else is nothing but a mirage . . . and he is always ready to defend it with the point of his pen.”

“But the Israelite Kabbalists,” I asked him, “are they also for Christ?”

“Ah yes, those are for their Messiah. It is only a matter of date!”

Indeed, in eternity there can be no anachronism. But since all these variations of terms and systems, all these contradictory teachings, cannot contain the true Truth, I do not see how the French Kabbalists can claim knowledge of the occult Sciences. They possess the Kabbalah of Moses de León,²⁴ compiled in the thirteenth century; but his Zohar, compared with the Chaldean Book of Numbers, is no more the work of Rabbi Simeon ben Yochai than the Pimander of the Christian Greeks is the genuine book of the Egyptian Thoth. The ease with which Rosenroth’s Kabbalah and its medieval Latin manuscripts—read through the system of Notarion—are transformed into Christian and Trinitarian texts, resembles a kind of magical illusion. Between the Marquis de Mirville and his friend the Chevalier Drach, a converted Rabbi, the “good Kabbalah” has become a catechism of the Roman Church. Let these gentlemen Kabbalists be content with it; we prefer to adhere to the Chaldean Kabbalah, the “Book of Numbers.” Whoever is satisfied with the dead letter may wrap himself in the mantle of the Tanaïm (the ancient initiates of Israel); he will nevertheless be, in the eyes of the experienced occultist, nothing but the wolf disguised with the grandmother’s nightcap of Little Red Riding Hood.. But the wolf will not devour the occultist as he devours Little Red Riding Hood, the symbol of the profane thirsting for mysticism, who falls beneath his teeth. It is rather the “wolf” himself who will perish, caught in his own trap . . .

Like the Bible, the Kabbalistic books have their dead letter, the exoteric sense, and their true meaning, the esoteric. The key to true symbolism lies today beyond the gigantic peaks of the Himalayas, even the key to the Hindu systems. No other key can open the sepulchres in which lie buried, for thousands of years, the intellectual treasures deposited there by the primordial interpreters of divine Wisdom. But the great cycle, the first of the Kali-Yuga, is at its end; the day of resurrection of all that is dead may not be far off. The great Swedish seer Emanuel Swedenborg said it: “Seek the lost word among the hierophants, in great Tartary and Tibet.”

Whatever the public perceptions may be against the Theosophical Society, whatever its unpopularity may be among those who regard with holy horror anything that seems to them an innovation, one thing is certain: what you, our gentlemen enemies, regard as an invention of the nineteenth century is as old as the world. Our Society is the tree of Brotherhood, grown from a seed planted in the earth by the angel of Charity and Justice on the day when the first Cain slew the first Abel. During the long centuries of the enslavement of woman and the suffering of the poor, that seed was watered by all the bitter tears shed by the weak and the oppressed. Blessed hands replanted it from one corner of the earth to another, under different skies and at epochs far removed from one another. “Do not do unto others what you would not wish done unto yourself,” said Confucius to his disciples. “Love one another, and love every living creature,” preached Gautama the Buddha to his Arhats. “Love one another” was echoed faithfully in the streets of Jerusalem. It is to the Christian nations that belongs the honor of having obeyed this supreme commandment of their master in all its paradoxical force! Caligula, the pagan, wished that humanity had but one head, so that he might strike it off with a single blow. Christian powers went further than this wish left in theory: they sought and finally found the means of putting it into practice. Let them therefore prepare to cut one another’s throats; let them continue to exterminate in a single day more men in war than the Cæsars slew in a year. Let them depopulate entire countries and provinces in the name of their paradoxical religion, and let those who take the sword perish by the sword. What have we to do with any of this?

Theosophists are powerless to stop them. So be it. But it is in their power to save as many survivors as possible. As the nucleus of a true Brotherhood, it rests with them to make their Society the ark destined, in a near future, to carry humanity of the new cycle beyond the muddy waters of the deluge of hopeless materialism. Those waters are ever rising and at present inundate all civilized countries. Shall we let the good perish with the evil, frightened by the jeers and mockery of the latter, whether directed against the Theosophical Society or against ourselves? Shall we see them perish one after the other—one through weariness, another vainly seeking a ray of sunlight that shines for all—without even offering them a plank of salvation? Never!

It may be that the beautiful utopia—the philanthropist’s dream, seeing in a vision the triple aim of the Theosophical Society fulfilled—is still far off. Full freedom of human conscience for all; brotherhood reigning between rich and poor; equality between aristocrat and commoner recognized in theory and in practice—these are still so many castles built in the air, and for a good reason. All this must be accomplished naturally and voluntarily, on both sides; and the time has not yet come for the lion and the lamb to sleep in one another’s arms. The great reform must take place without social convulsions, without a drop of blood shed—solely in the name of that axiomatic truth of Eastern philosophy which teaches that the great diversity of fortune, social rank, and intellect is due only to the effects of the personal karma of each human being. We reap only what we have sown. If the physical man, as a personality, differs from every other man, the immaterial being within him, the immortal individuality, emanates from the same divine essence as that of his neighbor. He who is thoroughly impressed with the philosophical truth that every Ego begins and ends by being the indivisible All, cannot love his neighbor less than himself. But until this becomes a religious truth, no such reform can take place. The selfish maxim—“charity begins at home,” or that other “every man for himself, God for all the rest”—will always lead the so-called “superior” and Christian races to oppose the practical application of those noble pagan proverbs: “every poor man is a son of the rich,” and still more that which tells us, “feed first the one who is hungry, and eat what is left yourself.”

But the time will come when this “barbarous” wisdom of the “inferior” races will be better appreciated. Meanwhile, what we must seek is to bring a little peace on earth into the hearts of those who suffer, by lifting for them a corner of the veil that hides divine truth. Let the stronger show the way to the weaker, and help them to climb the steep ascent of existence. Let them fix their gaze upon the Beacon-Light shining on the horizon, beyond the mysterious and unknown sea of theosophical Science—like a new star of Bethlehem—that the disinherited of life may regain hope . . .

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This content is part of the Writings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

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