The Secret Doctrine

Shiva‐Rudra is the Destroyer, as Vishnu is the Preserver; and both are the Regenerators of spiritual as well as of physical Nature. To live as a plant, the seed must die. To live as a conscious entity in the Eternity, the passions and senses of man must die before his body does. “That to live is to die and to die is to live,” has been too little understood in the West. Shiva, the Destroyer, is the Creator and the Saviour of Spiritual Man, as he is the good gardener of Nature. He weeds out the plants, human and cosmic, and kills the passions of the physical, to call to life the perceptions of the spiritual, man.

The Kumâras, themselves then, being the “virgin ascetics,” refuse to create the material being Man. Well may they be suspected of a direct connection with the Christian Archangel Michael, the “virgin combatant” of the Dragon Apophis, whose victim is every Soul united too loosely to its immortal Spirit, the Angel who, as shown by the Gnostics, refused to create just as the Kumâras did. Does not that patron Angel of the Jews preside over Saturn (Shiva or Rudra), and the Sabbath, the day of Saturn? Is he not shown of the same essence with his Father (Saturn), and called the Son of Time, Cronus, or Kâla, a form of Brahmâ (Vishnu and Shiva)? And is not Old Time of the Greeks, with its scythe and sand‐glass, identical with the Ancient of Days of the Kabalists; the latter “Ancient” being one with the Hindû Ancient of Days, Brahmâ, in his triune form, whose name is also Sanat, the Ancient? Every Kumâra bears the prefix of Sanat and Sana. And Shanaishchara is Saturn, the planet Shani, the King Saturn, whose Secretary in Egypt was Thot‐Hermes the first. They are thus identified both with the planet and the God (Shiva), who are, in their turn, shown to be the prototypes of Saturn, who is the same as Bel, Baal, Shiva, and Jehovah Sabbaoth, the Angel of the Face of whom is Mikael—מיכאל, “who [is] as God.” He is the patron, and guardian Angel of the Jews, as Daniel tells us;

and, before the Kumâras were degraded, by those who were ignorant of their very name, into Demons and Fallen Angels, the Greek Ophites, the occultly inclined predecessors and precursors of the Roman Catholic Church after its secession and separation from the primitive Greek Church, had identified Michael with their Ophiomorphos, the rebellious and opposing spirit. This means nothing more than the reverse aspect, symbolically, of Ophis, the Divine Wisdom or Christos. In the Talmud, Mikael is “Prince of Water” and the chief of the Seven Spirits, for the same reason that one of his many prototypes, Sanatsujâta, the chief of the Kumâras, is called Ambhâmsi, “Waters,” according to the commentary on Vishnu Purâna. Why? Because the Waters is another name of the Great Deep, the Primordial Waters of Space, or Chaos, and also means Mother, Ambâ, meaning Aditi and Akâsha, the Celestial Virgin‐Mother of the visible Universe. Furthermore, the “Waters of the Flood” are also called the “Great Dragon,” or Ophis, Ophiomorphos.

The Rudras will be noticed in their septenary character of “Fire‐Spirits” in the “Symbolism” attached to the Stanzas in Volume II. There we shall also consider the Cross (3 + 4) under its primeval and later forms, and shall use for purposes of comparison the Pythagorean numbers side by side with Hebrew metrology. The immense importance of the number seven will thus become evident, as the root number of Nature. We shall examine it from the standpoint of the Vedas and the Chaldean Scriptures; as it existed in Egypt thousands of years B.C., and as treated in the Gnostic records; we shall show how its importance as a basic number has gained recognition in Physical Science; and we shall endeavour to prove that the importance attached to the number seven throughout all antiquity was due to no fanciful imaginings of uneducated priests, but to a profound knowledge of Natural Law.

Metaphysically and esoterically, there is but One Element in Nature, and at the root of it is the Deity; and the so‐called seven Elements, of which five have already manifested and asserted their existence, are the garment, the veil, of that Deity, direct from the essence whereof comes Man, whether considered physically, psychically, mentally or spiritually. Four Elements only are generally spoken of in later antiquity, while five only are admitted in philosophy. For the body of Ether is not fully manifested yet, and its noumenon is still the “Omnipotent Father Æther,” the synthesis of the rest. But what are these Elements, whose compound bodies have now been discovered by Chemistry and Physics to contain numberless sub‐elements, even the sixty or seventy of which no longer embrace the whole number suspected? Let us follow their evolution from the historical beginnings, at any rate.

The Four Elements were fully characterized by Plato when he said that they were that “which composes and decomposes the compound bodies.” Hence Cosmolatry was never, even in its worst aspect, the fetichism which adores or worships the passive external form and matter of any object, but looked ever to the Noumenon therein. Fire, Air, Water, Earth, were but the visible garb, the symbols of the informing, invisible Souls or Spirits, the Cosmic Gods, to whom worship was offered by the ignorant, and simple, but respectful, recognition by the wiser. In their turn, the phenomenal subdivisions of the noumenal Elements were informed by the Elementals, so‐ called, the “Nature Spirits” of lower grades. In the Theogony of Môchus, we find Ether first, and then the Air; the two principles from which Ulom, the Intelligible (νοητὸς) God, the visible Universe of Matter, is born.(763)

In the Orphic hymns, the Erôs‐Phanes evolves from the Spiritual Egg, which the Æthereal Winds impregnate, Wind being the “Spirit of God,” which is said to move in Æther, “brooding over the Chaos,” the Divine Idea. In the Hindû Kathopanishad, Purusha, the Divine Spirit, already stands before the Original Matter, and from their union springs the great Soul of the World, “Mahâ‐Âtmâ, Brahman, the Spirit of Life”;(764) these latter appellations being again identical with the Universal Soul, or Anima Mundi; the Astral Light of the Theurgists and Kabalists being its last and lowest division.

The Elements (στοιχεῖα) of Plato and Aristotle were thus the incorporeal principles attached to the four great divisions of our Cosmic World, and it is with justice that Creuzer defines these primitive beliefs as “a species of magism, a psychic paganism, and a deification of potencies; a spiritualization which placed the believers in a close community with these potencies.”(765) So close, indeed, that the Hierarchies of these Potencies, or Forces, have been classified on a graduated scale of seven from the ponderable to the imponderable. They are septenary, not as an artificial aid to facilitate their comprehension, but in their real cosmic gradation, from their chemical, or physical, to their purely spiritual composition. Gods with the ignorant masses; Gods independent and supreme; Demons with the fanatics, who, intellectual as they often may be, are unable to understand the spirit of the philosophical sentence, in pluribus unum. With the Hermetic philosopher they are Forces relatively “blind” or “intelligent,” according to which of the principles in them he deals with. It required long millenniums before they found themselves finally, in our cultured age, degraded into simple chemical elements.

At any rate, good Christians, and especially the Biblical Protestants, ought to show more reverence for the Four Elements, if they would maintain any for Moses. For the Bible manifests the consideration and mystic significance in which they were held by the Hebrew Lawgiver, on every page of the Pentateuch. The tent which contained the Holy of Holies was a Cosmic Symbol, sacred, in one of its meanings, to the Elements, the four cardinal points, and Ether. Josephus shows it built in white, the colour of Ether. And this explains also why, in the Egyptian and the Hebrew temples, according to Clemens Alexandrinus,(766) a gigantic curtain, supported by five pillars, separated the sanctum sanctorum—now represented by the altar in Christian churches—wherein the priests alone were permitted to enter, from the part accessible to the profane. By its four colours this curtain symbolized the four principal Elements, and with the five pillars signified the knowledge of the divine that the five senses can enable man to acquire with the help of the four Elements. In Cory’s Ancient Fragments, one of the “Chaldean Oracles” expresses ideas about the elements and Ether in language singularly like that of The Unseen Universe, written by two eminent Scientists of our day.

It states that from Ether have come all things, and to it all will return; that the images of all things are indelibly impressed upon it; and that it is the store‐house of the germs, or of the remains of all visible forms, and even ideas. It appears as if this case strangely corroborates our assertion that whatever discoveries may be made in our days will be found to have been anticipated by many thousand years by our “simple‐minded ancestors.”

Whence came the Four Elements and the Malachim of the Hebrews? They have been made to merge, by a theological sleight of hand on the part of the Rabbins and the later Fathers of the Church, into Jehovah, but their origin is identical with that of the Cosmic Gods of all other nations. Their symbols, whether born on the shores of the Oxus, on the burning sands of Upper Egypt, or in the wild forests, weird and glacial, which cover the slopes and peaks of the sacred snowy mountains of Thessaly, or again, in the pampas of America—their symbols, we repeat, when traced to their source, are ever one and the same. Whether Egyptian or Pelasgian, Âryan or Semitic, the Genius Loci, the Local God, embraced in its unity all Nature; but not especially the four elements any more than one of their creations, such as trees, rivers, mounts or stars. The Genius Loci, a very late afterthought of the last sub‐races of the Fifth Root‐Race, when the primitive and grandiose meaning had become nearly lost, was ever the representative, in his accumulated titles, of all his colleagues. It was the God of Fire, symbolized by thunder, as Jove or Agni; the God of Water, symbolized by the fluvial bull, or some sacred river or fountain, as Varuna, Neptune, etc.; the God of Air, manifesting in the hurricane and tempest, as Vâyu and Indra; and the God or Spirit of the Earth, who appeared in earthquakes, like Pluto, Yama, and so many others.

These were the Cosmic Gods, ever synthesizing all in one, as found in every cosmogony or mythology. Thus, the Greeks had their Dodonean Jupiter, who included in himself the four Elements and the four cardinal points, and who was recognized, therefore, in old Rome under the pantheistic title of Jupiter Mundus; and who now, in modern Rome, has become the Deus Mundus, the one Mundane God, who is made to swallow all others, in the latest theology, by the arbitrary decision of his special ministers.

As Gods of Fire, Air, and Water, they were Celestial Gods; as Gods of the Lower Region, they were Infernal Deities; the latter adjective applying simply to the Earth. They were “Spirits of the Earth” under their respective names of Yama, Pluto, Osiris, the “Lord of the Lower Kingdom,” etc., and their tellurial character sufficiently proves it. The Ancients knew of no worse abode after death than the Kâma Loka, the Limbus on this Earth.(767) If it is argued that the Dodonean Jupiter was identified with Dis, or the Roman Pluto with the Dionysus Chthonius, the Subterranean, and with Aïdoneus, the King of the Subterranean World, wherein, according to Creuzer,(768) oracles were rendered, then it will become the pleasure of the Occultists to prove that both Aïdoneus and Dionysus are the bases of Adonaï, or Iurbo‐Adonaï, as Jehovah is called in the Codex Nazaræus. “Thou shalt not worship the Sun, who is named Adonaï, whose name is also Kadush and El‐El,”(769) and also “Lord Bacchus.” Baal‐Adonis of the Sôds, or Mysteries, of the pre‐Babylonian Jews became the Adonaï by the Massorah, the later vowelled Jehovah. Hence the Roman Catholics are right. All these Jupiters are of the same family; but Jehovah has to be included therein to make it complete. The Jupiter Aërius or Pan, the Jupiter‐Ammon, and the Jupiter‐Bel‐Moloch, are all correlations and one with Iurbo‐Adonaï, because they are all one Cosmic Nature. It is that Nature and Power which creates the specific terrestrial symbol, and the physical and material fabric of the latter, which proves the Energy manifesting through it as extrinsic.

For primitive religion was something better than simple preöccupation about physical phenomena, as remarked by Schelling; and principles, more elevated than we modern Sadducees know of, “were hidden under the transparent veil of such merely natural divinities as thunder, the winds, and rain.” The Ancients knew and could distinguish the corporeal from the spiritual Elements in the Forces of Nature. The four‐fold Jupiter, as the four‐faced Brahmâ, the aërial, the fulgurant, the terrestrial, and the marine God, the lord and master of the four Elements, may stand as a representative for the great Cosmic Gods of every nation. Although deputing power over the fire to Hephæstus‐Vulcan, over the sea to Poseidon‐Neptune, and over the Earth to Pluto‐Aïdoneus, the Aërial Jove was still all these; for Æther, from the first, had preëminence over, and was the synthesis of, all the Elements.

Tradition tells of a grotto, a vast cave in the deserts of Central Asia, whereinto light pours, through four seemingly natural apertures, or clefts placed crossways at the four cardinal points. From noon till an hour before sunset the light streams in, of four different colours, as averred, red, blue, orange‐gold, and white, owing to some either natural or artificially prepared conditions of vegetation and soil. The light converges in the centre round a pillar of white marble with a globe upon it, which represents our earth. It is named the “Grotto of Zarathustra.” Included under the arts and sciences of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans, the phenomenal manifestation of the Four Elements, which were justly attributed by these believers to the intelligent interference of the Cosmic Gods, assumed a scientific character. The Magic of the ancient priests consisted, in those days, in addressing their Gods in their own language. _The speech of the men of the Earth cannot reach the Lords. Each must be addressed in the language of his respective Element._ So says The Book of Rules, in a sentence which will be shown pregnant with meaning, adding as an explanation of the nature of that element‐language:

It is composed of SOUNDS, _not words; of sounds, numbers and figures. He who knows how to blend the three, will call forth the response of the superintending Power_ [the Regent‐God of the specific Element needed].

Thus this “language” is that of incantations or of mantras, as they are called in India; sound being _the most potent and effectual magic agent, and the first of the keys which opens the door of communication between Mortals and Immortals_. He who believes in the words and teachings of St. Paul, has no right to pick out from the latter those sentences only which he chooses to accept, to the rejection of others; and St. Paul teaches most undeniably the existence of Cosmic Gods and their presence among us. Paganism preached a dual and simultaneous evolution, a “creation” spiritualem ac mundanum, as the Roman Church has it, ages before the advent of that Roman Church. Exoteric phraseology has changed little with respect to Divine Hierarchies since the most palmy days of Paganism, or “Idolatry.” Names alone have changed, together with claims which have now become false pretences. For when, for instance, Plato put in the mouth of the Highest Principle (Father Æther or Jupiter) the words, “the Gods of the Gods of whom I am the maker, as I am the father of all their works,” he knew the spirit of this sentence as fully, we suspect, as St. Paul did, when saying: “For though there be that are called Gods, whether in Heaven or in Earth, as there be Gods many and Lords many....”(770) Both knew the sense and the meaning of what they put forward in such guarded terms.

We cannot be taken to task by the Protestants for interpreting the verse from the Corinthians as we do; for, if the translation in the English Bible is made ambiguous, it is not so in the original texts, and the Roman Catholic Church accepts the words of the Apostle in their true sense. For a proof see St. Dionysius, the Areopagite, who was “directly inspired by the Apostle,” and “who wrote under his dictation,” as we are assured by the Marquis de Mirville, whose works are approved by Rome, and who says, commenting on that special verse: “And, though there are (in fact) they who are called Gods, for it seems there are really several Gods, withal and for all that, the God‐Principle and the Superior God ceases not to remain essentially one and indivisible.”(771) Thus spoke the old Initiates also, knowing that the worship of minor Gods could never affect the “God Principle.” (772) Says Sir W. Grove, F.R.S., speaking of the correlation of forces:

The ancients when they witnessed a natural phenomenon, removed from ordinary analogies, and unexplained by any mechanical action known to them, referred it to a soul, a spiritual or preternatural power.... Air and gases were also at first deemed spiritual, but subsequently they became invested with a more material character; and the same words πνεῦμα, spirit, etc., were used to signify the soul or a gas; the very word gas, from geist, a ghost or spirit, affords us an instance of the gradual transmutation of a spiritual into a physical conception.(773) This, the great man of Science, in his preface to the sixth edition of his work, considers to be the only concern of exact Science, which has no business to meddle with the causes. Cause and effect are, therefore, in their abstract relation to these forces, words solely of convenience. We are totally unacquainted with the ultimate generating power of each and all of them, and probably shall ever remain so; we can only ascertain the normal of their actions; we must humbly refer their causation to one omnipresent influence, and content ourselves with studying their effects and developing, by experiment, their mutual relations.(774)

This policy once accepted, and the system virtually admitted in the above‐ quoted words, namely, the spirituality of the “ultimate generating power,” it would be more than illogical to refuse to recognize this quality which is inherent in the material elements, or rather, in their compounds, as present in the fire, air, water or earth. The Ancients knew these powers so well, that, while concealing their true nature under various allegories, for the benefit, or to the detriment, of the uneducated rabble, they never departed from the multiple object in view, while inverting them. They contrived to throw a thick veil over the nucleus of truth concealed by the symbol, but they ever tried to preserve the latter as a record for future generations, sufficiently transparent to allow their wise men to discern the truth behind the fabulous form of the glyph or allegory. These ancient sages are accused of superstition and credulity; and this too by the very nations, which, though learned in all the modern arts and sciences, and cultured and wise in their generation, accept to this day as their one living and infinite God, the anthropomorphic “Jehovah” of the Jews!

What were some of these alleged “superstitions”? Hesiod believed, for instance, that “the winds were the sons of the Giant Typhôeus,” who were chained and unchained at will by Æolus, and the polytheistic Greeks accepted it along with Hesiod. Why should they not, since the monotheistic Jews had the same beliefs, with other names for their dramatis personæ, and since Christians believe in the same to this day? The Hesiodic Æolus, Boreas, etc., were named Kedem, Tzephum, Derum, and Ruach Hayum by the “chosen people” of Israel. What is, then, the fundamental difference? While the Hellenes were taught that Æolus tied and untied the winds, the Jews believed as fervently that their Lord God, _with __“__smoke__”__ coming __“__out of his nostrils and fire out of his mouth, ... rode upon a cherub and did fly; and he was seen upon the wings of the wind__”_.(775) The expressions of the two nations are either both figures of speech, or both superstitions. We think they are neither; but only arise from a keen sense of oneness with Nature, and a perception of the mysterious and the intelligent behind every natural phenomenon, which the moderns no longer possess. Nor was it “superstitious” in the Greek Pagans to listen to the oracle of Delphi, when, at the approach of the fleet of Xerxes, that

oracle advised them to “sacrifice to the winds,” if the same has to be regarded as divine worship in the Israelites, who sacrificed as often to the wind and also especially to the fire. Do they not say that their “God is a consuming fire,”(776) who appeared generally as fire and “encompassed by fire”? and did not Elijah seek for the “Lord” in the “great strong wind, and in the earthquake”? Do not the Christians repeat the same after them? Do not they, moreover, sacrifice to this day, to the same “God of Wind and Water”? They do; because special prayers for rain, dry weather, trade‐winds and the calming of storms on the seas, exist to this hour in the prayer‐books of the three Christian Churches; and the several hundred sects of the Protestant religion offer them to their God upon every threat of calamity. The fact that they are no more answered by Jehovah, than they were, probably, by Jupiter Pluvius, does not alter the fact of these prayers being addressed to the Power, or Powers, supposed to rule over the Elements, or of these Powers being identical in Paganism and Christianity; or have we to believe that such prayers are crass idolatry and absurd “superstition” only when addressed by a Pagan to his “idol,” and that the same

superstition is suddenly transformed into “praiseworthy piety” and “religion” whenever the name of the celestial addressee is changed? But the tree is known by its fruit. And the fruit of the Christian tree being no better than that of the tree of Paganism, why should the former command more reverence than the latter?

Thus, when we are told by the Chevalier Drach, a converted Jew, and by the Marquis de Mirville, a Roman Catholic fanatic of the French aristocracy, that in Hebrew “lightning” is a synonym of “fury,” and is always handled by the “evil” Spirit; that Jupiter Fulgur or Fulgurans is also called by the Christians Elicius, and denounced as the “soul of lightning,” its Dæmon;(777) we have either to apply the same explanation and definitions to the “Lord God of Israel,” under the same circumstances, or renounce our right of abusing the Gods and creeds of other nations. The foregoing statements, emanating as they do from two ardent and learned Roman Catholics, are, to say the least, dangerous, in the presence of the Bible and its prophets. Indeed, if Jupiter, the “chief Dæmon of the Pagan Greeks,” hurled his deadly thunder‐bolts and lightnings at those who excited his wrath, so did the Lord God of Abraham and Jacob. For we read that: The Lord thundered from heaven, and the most High uttered his voice. And he sent out arrows [thunder‐bolts] and scattered them [Saul’s armies]; lightning, and discomfited them.(778)

The Athenians are accused of having sacrificed to Boreas; and this “Dæmon” is charged with having submerged and wrecked 400 ships of the Persian fleet on the rocks of Mount Pelion, and of having become so furious that all the Magi of Xerxes could hardly counteract him by offering contra‐ sacrifices to Thetis.(779) Very fortunately, no authenticated instance is on the records of Christian wars, showing a like catastrophe on the same scale happening to one Christian fleet, owing to the “prayers” of its enemy—another Christian nation. But this is from no fault of theirs, for each prays as ardently to Jehovah for the destruction of the other, as the Athenians prayed to Boreas. Both resorted to a neat little piece of black magic con amore. Such abstinence from divine interference being hardly due to lack of prayers, sent to a common Almighty God for mutual destruction, where, then, shall we draw the line between Pagan and Christian? And who can doubt that all Protestant England would rejoice and offer thanks to the Lord, if during some future war, 400 ships of the hostile fleet were to be wrecked owing to such holy prayers? What is, then, the difference, we ask again, between a Jupiter, a Boreas, and a Jehovah? No more than this: The crime of one’s own next‐of‐kin, say of one’s father, is always excused and often exalted, whereas the crime of our neighbour’s parent is ever gladly punished by hanging. Yet the crime is the same.

So far the “blessings of Christianity” do not seem to have made any appreciable advance on the morals of the converted Pagans. The above is not a defence of Pagan Gods, nor is it an attack on the Christian Deity, nor does it mean belief in either. The writer is quite impartial, and rejects the testimony in favour of both, neither praying to, believing in, nor dreading any such “personal” and anthropomorphic God. The parallels are brought forward simply as one more curious exhibition of the illogical and blind fanaticism of the civilized theologian. For, so far, there is not a very great difference between the two beliefs, and there is none in their respective effects upon morality, or spiritual nature. The “light of Christ” shines upon as hideous features of the animal man now, as the “light of Lucifer” did in days of old. Says the missionary Lavoisier, in the Journal des Colonies: These unfortunate heathens in their superstition regard even the Elements as something that has comprehension!... They still have faith in their idol Vâyu—the God or, rather, Demon of the Wind and Air ... they firmly believe in the efficacy of their prayers, and in the powers of their Brâhmans over the winds and storms.

In reply to this, we may quote from Luke: “And he [Jesus] arose and rebuked the wind and the raging of the water, and they ceased and there was a calm.”(780) And here is another quotation from a Prayer Book: “O Virgin of the Sea, blessed Mother and Lady of the Waters, stay thy waves.” This prayer of the Neapolitan and Provençal sailors, is copied textually from that of the Phœnician mariners to their Virgin‐Goddess Astarte. The logical and irrepressible conclusion arising from the parallels brought forward, and the denunciation of the missionary, is that the commands of the Brâhmans to their Element‐Gods not remaining “ineffectual,” the power of the Brâhmans is thus placed on a par with that of Jesus. Moreover, Astarte is shown not a whit weaker in potency than the “Virgin of the Sea” of Christian sailors. It is not enough to give a dog a bad name, and then hang him; the dog has to be proven guilty. Boreas and Astarte may be “Devils” in theological fancy, but, as just remarked, the tree has to be judged by its fruit. And once the Christians are shown to be as immoral and as wicked as the Pagans ever were, what benefit has Humanity derived from its change of Gods and Idols?

That which God and the Christian Saints are justified in doing, becomes in simple mortals a crime, if successful. Sorcery and incantations are now regarded as fables; yet from the Institutes of Justinian down to the laws of England and America against witchcraft—obsolete but not repealed to this day—such incantations, even when only suspected, were punished as criminal. Why punish a chimera? And still we read of Constantine, the Emperor, sentencing to death the philosopher Sopatrus for “unchaining the winds,” and thus preventing ships laden with grain from arriving in time to put an end to famine. Pausanias is derided when he affirms that he saw with his own eyes “men who by simple prayers and incantations” stopped a strong hail‐storm. This does not prevent modern Christian writers from advising prayer during storm and danger, and believing in its efficacy. Hoppo and Stadlein, two magicians and sorcerers, were sentenced to death for “throwing charms on fruit” and transferring a harvest by magic arts from one field to another, hardly a century ago, if we can believe Sprenger, the famous writer, who vouches for it: “Qui fruges excantassent segetem pellicentes incantando.”

Let us close by reminding the reader that, without the smallest shadow of superstition, one may believe in the dual nature of every object on Earth, in spiritual and material, in visible and invisible Nature, and that Science virtually proves this, while denying its own demonstration. For if, as Sir William Grove says, the electricity we handle is but the result of ordinary matter affected by something invisible, the “ultimate generating power” of every Force, the “one omnipresent influence,” then it only becomes natural that one should believe as the Ancients did; namely, that every Element is dual in its nature. “Ethereal Fire is the emanation of the Kabir proper; the Aërial is but the union [correlation] of the former with Terrestrial Fire, and its guidance and application on our earthly plane belongs to a Kabir of a lesser dignity”—an Elemental, perhaps, as an Occultist would call it; and the same may be said of every Cosmic Element.

No one will deny that the human being is possessed of various forces, magnetic, sympathetic, antipathetic, nervous, dynamical, occult, mechanical, mental, in fact of every kind of force; and that the physical forces are all biological in their essence, seeing that they intermingle with, and often merge into, those forces that we have named intellectual and moral, the first being the vehicles, so to say, the upâdhis, of the second. No one, who does not deny soul in man, would hesitate in saying that their presence and commingling are the very essence of our being; that they constitute the Ego in man, in fact. These potencies have their physiological, physical, mechanical, as well as their nervous, ecstatic, clairaudient, and clairvoyant phenomena, which are now regarded and recognized as perfectly natural, even by Science. Why should man be the only exception in Nature, and why cannot even the Elements have their Vehicles, their Vâhanas, in what we call the Physical Forces? And why, above all, should such beliefs be called “superstition” along with the religions of old?

Like Avalokiteshvara, Kwan‐Shi‐Yin has passed through several transformations, but it is an error to say of him that he is a modern invention of the Northern Buddhists, for under another appellation he has been known from the earliest times. The Secret Doctrine teaches that: “He who is the first to appear at Renovation will be the last to come before Reäbsorption [Pralaya]”. Thus the Logoi of all nations, from the Vedic Vishvakarman of the Mysteries down to the Saviour of the present civilized nations, are the “Word” who was in the “Beginning,” or the reäwakening of the energizing Powers of Nature, with the One ABSOLUTE. Born of Fire and Water, before these became distinct Elements, It was the “Maker,” the fashioner or modeller, of all things. “Without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men,” who finally may be called as he ever has been, the Alpha and the Omega of Manifested Nature. “The great Dragon of Wisdom is born of Fire and Water, and into Fire and Water will all be reäbsorbed with him.”(781) As this Bodhisattva is said “to assume any form he pleases,” from the beginning of a Manvantara to its end, though his special birthday, or memorial day, is celebrated according to the Kin‐kwang‐ming‐King, or “Luminous Sûtra of Golden Light,” in the second month on the nineteenth day, and that of Maitreya Buddha, in the first month on the first day, yet the two are one. He will appear as Maitreya Buddha, the last of the Avatâras and Buddhas, in the Seventh Race. This belief and expectation are universal throughout the East. Only it is not in the Kali Yuga, our present terrifically materialistic age of Darkness, the “Black Age,” that a new Saviour of Humanity can ever appear. The Kali Yuga is “l’Age d’Or” (!) only in the mystic writings of some French pseudo‐Occultists.(782)

Hence the ritual in the exoteric worship of this Deity was founded on magic. The Mantras are all taken from special books kept secret by the priests, and each is said to work a magical effect; as the reciter or reader, by simply chanting them, produces a secret causation which results in immediate effects. Kwan‐Shi‐Yin is Avalokiteshvara, and both are forms of the Seventh Universal Principle; while in its highest metaphysical character this Deity is the synthetic aggregation of all the Planetary Spirits, Dhyân Chohans. He is the “Self‐Manifested”; in short, the “Son of the Father.” Crowned with seven dragons, above his statue there appears the inscription Pu‐tsi‐k’iun‐ling, “the universal Saviour of all living beings.”

Of course the name given in the archaic volume of the Stanzas is quite different, but Kwan‐Yin is a perfect equivalent. In a temple of P’u‐to, the sacred island of the Buddhists in China, Kwan‐Shi‐Yin is represented floating on a black aquatic bird (Kâlahamsa), and pouring on the heads of mortals the elixir of life, which, as it flows, is transformed into one of the chief Dhyâni‐Buddhas, the Regent of a star called the “Star of Salvation.” In his third transformation Kwan‐Yin is the informing Spirit or Genius of Water. In China the Dalaï‐Lama is believed to be an incarnation of Kwan‐Shi‐Yin, who in his third terrestrial appearance was a Bodhisattva, while the Teshu Lama is an incarnation of Amitâbha Buddha, or Gautama.

It may be remarked en passant that a writer must indeed have a diseased imagination to discover phallic worship everywhere, as do McClatchey and Hargrave Jennings. The first discovers “the old phallic gods, represented under two evident symbols, the Kheen or Yang, which is the membrum virile, and the Khw‐an or Yin, the pudendum muliebre.”(783) Such a rendering seems the more strange as Kwan‐Shi‐Yin (Avalokiteshvara) and Kwan‐Yin, besides being now the patron Deities of the Buddhist ascetics, the Yogîs of Tibet, are the Gods of chastity, and are, in their esoteric meaning, not even that which is implied in the rendering of Mr. Rhys Davids’ Buddhism: “The name Avalokiteshvara ... means ‘the Lord who looks down from on high’.”(784) Nor is Kwan‐Shi‐Yin the “Spirit of the Buddhas present in the Church,” but, literally interpreted, it means “the Lord that is seen.” and in one sense, “the Divine Self perceived by Self”—the human Self—that is, the Âtman or Seventh Principle, merged in the Universal, perceived by, or the object of perception to, Buddhi, the Sixth Principle, or Divine Soul in man. In a still higher sense, Avalokiteshvara‐Kwan‐Shi‐Yin, referred to as the seventh Universal Principle, is the Logos perceived by the Universal Buddhi, or Soul, as the synthetic aggregate of the Dhyâni‐Buddhas; and is not the “Spirit of Buddha present in the

Church,” but the Omnipresent Universal Spirit manifested in the temple of Kosmos or Nature. This Orientalistic etymology of Kwan and Yin is on a par with that of Yoginî, which, we are told by Mr. Hargrave Jennings, is a Sanskrit word, “in the dialects pronounced Jogi or Zogee (!), and is ... equivalent with Sena, and exactly the same as Duti or Dutica,” i.e., a sacred prostitute of the temple, worshipped as Yoni or Shakti.(785) “The books of morality [in India] direct a faithful wife to shun the society of Yogini or females who have been adored as Sacti.”(786) Nothing should surprise us after this. And it is, therefore, with hardly a smile that we find another preposterous absurdity quoted about “Budh,” as being a name “which signifies not only the sun as the source of generation but also the male organ.”(787) Max Müller, in treating of “False Analogies,” says that “the most celebrated Chinese scholar of his time, Abel Rémusat ... maintains that the three syllables I Hi Wei [in the fourteenth chapter of the Tao‐te‐King] were meant for Je‐ ho‐vah”;(788) and again, Father Amyot “felt certain that the three persons of the Trinity could be recognized” in the same work. And if Abel Rémusat, why not Hargrave Jennings? Every scholar will recognize the absurdity of ever seeing in

Budh, the “enlightened” and the “awakened,” a “phallic symbol.”

Kwan‐Shi‐Yin, then, is “the Son identical with his Father,” mystically, or the Logos, the Word. He is called the “Dragon of Wisdom,” in Stanza III, for all the Logoi of all the ancient religious systems are connected with, and symbolized by, serpents. In old Egypt, the God Nahbkoon, “he who unites the doubles,” was represented as a serpent on human legs, either with or without arms. This was the Astral Light reüniting by its dual physiological and spiritual potency the Divine‐Human to its purely Divine Monad, the Prototype in “Heaven” or Nature. It was the emblem of the resurrection of Nature; of Christ with the Ophites; and of Jehovah as the brazen serpent healing those who looked at him. The serpent was also an emblem of Christ with the Templars, as is shown by the Templar degree in Masonry. The symbol of Knooph (Khnoom also), or the Soul of the World, says Champollion, “is represented among other forms under that of a huge serpent on human legs; this reptile, being the emblem of the Good Genius and the veritable Agathodæmon, is sometimes bearded.”(789) This sacred animal is thus identical with the serpent of the Ophites, and is figured on a great number of engraved stones, called Gnostic or Basilidean gems. It appears with various heads, human and animal, but its gems are always found inscribed with the name ΧΝΟΥΒΙΣ (ChNOUBIS). This symbol is identical with one which; according to Jamblichus and Champollion, was called the “First of the Celestial Gods,” the God Hermes, or Mercury, with the Greeks, to which God Hermes Trismegistus attributes the invention of, and the first initiation of men into, Magic; and Mercury is Budh, Wisdom, Enlightenment, or “Reäwakening” into the divine Science.

To close, Kwan‐Shi‐Yin and Kwan‐Yin are the two aspects, male and female, of the same principle in Kosmos, Nature and Man, of Divine Wisdom and Intelligence. They are the Christos‐Sophia of the mystic Gnostics, the Logos and its Shakti. In their longing for the expression of some mysteries never to be wholly comprehended by the profane, the Ancients, knowing that nothing could be preserved in human memory without some outward symbol, have chosen the, to us, often ridiculous images of the Kwan‐Yins to remind man of his origin and inner nature. To the impartial, however, the Madonnas in crinolines and the Christs in white kid gloves must appear far more absurd than the Kwan‐Shi‐Yin and Kwan‐Yin in their dragon‐garb. The subjective can hardly be expressed by the objective. Therefore, since the symbolic formula attempts to characterize that which is above scientific reasoning, and is as often far beyond our intellects, it must needs go beyond that intellect in some shape or other, or else it will fade out from human remembrance.

The knowledge of this nether world— Say, friend, what is it, false or true? The false, what mortal cares to know? The true, what mortal ever knew?

Many of the doctrines contained in the foregoing seven Stanzas and Commentaries having been studied and critically examined by some Western Theosophists, certain of the Occult Teachings have been found wanting from the ordinary stand‐point of modern scientific knowledge. They seemed to encounter insuperable difficulties in the way of their acceptance, and to require reconsideration in view of scientific criticism. Some friends have already been tempted to regret the necessity of so often calling in question the assertions of Modern Science. It appeared to them—and I here repeat only their arguments—that “to run counter to the teachings of its most eminent exponents, was to court a premature discomfiture in the eyes of the Western World.”

It is, therefore, desirable to define, once and for all, the position which the writer, who does not in this agree with her friends, intends to maintain. So far as Science remains what in the words of Prof. Huxley it is, viz., “organized common sense”; so far as its inferences are drawn from accurate premisses, its generalizations resting on a purely inductive basis, every Theosophist and Occultist welcomes respectfully and with due admiration its contributions to the domain of cosmological law. There can be no possible conflict between the teachings of Occult and so‐called exact Science, wherever the conclusions of the latter are grounded on a substratum of unassailable fact. It is only when its more ardent exponents, over‐stepping the limits of observed phenomena in order to penetrate into the arcana of Being, attempt to wrench the formation of Kosmos and its living Forces from Spirit, and to attribute all to blind Matter, that the Occultists claim the right of disputing and calling in question their theories. Science cannot, owing to the very nature of things, unveil the mystery of the Universe around us. Science can, it is true, collect, classify, and generalize upon phenomena; but the Occultist, arguing from admitted metaphysical data, declares that the daring explorer, who would probe the inmost secrets of Nature, must transcend the narrow limitations of sense, and transfer his consciousness into the region of Noumena and the sphere of Primal Causes. To effect this, he must develop faculties which, save in a few rare and exceptional cases, are absolutely dormant, in the constitution of the off‐shoots of our present Fifth Root‐Race in Europe and America. He can in no other conceivable manner collect the facts on which to base his speculations. Is this not apparent on the principles of Inductive Logic and Metaphysics alike?

On the other hand, whatever the writer may do, she will never be able to satisfy both Truth and Science. To offer the reader a systematic and uninterrupted version of the Archaic Stanzas is impossible. A gap of 43 verses or shlokas has to be left between the 7th, already given, and the 51st, which is the subject of Book II, though the latter are made to run as from 1 onwards, for easier reading and reference. The mere appearance of man on Earth occupies an equal number of Stanzas, which minutely describe his primal evolution from the human Dhyân Chohans, the state of the Globe at that time, etc., etc. A great number of names referring to chemical substances and other compounds, which have now ceased to combine together, and are therefore unknown to the later offshoots of our Fifth Race, occupy a considerable space. As they are simply untranslatable, and would remain in every case inexplicable, they are omitted, along with those which cannot be made public. Nevertheless, even the little that is given will irritate every follower and defender of dogmatic materialistic Science who happens to read it.

In view of the criticism offered, it is proposed, before proceeding to the remaining Stanzas, to defend those already given. That they are not in perfect accord or harmony with Modern Science, we all know. But had they been as much in agreement with the views of modern knowledge as is a lecture by Sir William Thomson, they would have been rejected all the same. For they teach belief in conscious Powers and Spiritual Entities; in terrestrial, semi‐intelligent, and highly intellectual Forces on other planes;(790) and in Beings that dwell around us in spheres imperceptible, whether through telescope or microscope. Hence the necessity of examining the beliefs of materialistic Science, of comparing its views about the “Elements” with the opinions of the Ancients, and of analysing the physical Forces as they exist in modern conceptions, before the Occultists admit themselves to be in the wrong. We shall touch upon the constitution of the Sun and planets, and the Occult characteristics of what are called Devas and Genii, and are now termed by Science, Forces, or “modes of motion,” and see whether Esoteric belief is defensible or not. Notwithstanding the efforts made to the contrary, an unprejudiced mind will discover that under Newton’s “agent, material or immaterial,”(791) the agent which causes gravity, and in his personal working God, there is just as much of the metaphysical Devas and Genii, as there is in Kepler’s Angelus Rector conducting each planet, and in the species immateriata by which the celestial bodies were carried along in their courses, according to that Astronomer.

In Volume II, we shall have to openly approach dangerous subjects. We must bravely face Science and declare, in the teeth of materialistic learning, of Idealism, Hylo‐Idealism, Positivism and all‐denying modern Psychology, that the true Occultist believes in “Lords of Light”; that he believes in a Sun, which—far from being simply a “lamp of day” moving in accordance with physical law, and far from being merely one of those Suns, which, according to Richter, “are sun‐flowers of a higher light”—is, like milliards of other Suns, the dwelling or the vehicle of a God, and of a host of Gods. In this dispute, of course, it is the Occultists who will be worsted. They will be considered, on the primâ facie aspect of the question, to be ignoramuses, and will be labelled with more than one of the usual epithets given to those whom the superficially judging public, itself ignorant of the great underlying truths in Nature, accuses of believing in mediæval superstitions. Let it be so. Submitting beforehand to every criticism in order to go on with their task, they only claim the privilege of showing that the Physicists are as much at loggerheads among themselves in their speculations, as these speculations are with the teachings of Occultism.

The Sun is Matter, and the Sun is Spirit. Our ancestors, the “Heathen,” like their modern successors, the Parsîs, were, and are, wise enough in their generation to see in it the symbol of Divinity, and at the same time to sense within, concealed by the physical symbol, the bright God of Spiritual and Terrestrial Light. Such belief can be regarded as a superstition only by rank Materialism, which denies Deity, Spirit, Soul, and admits no intelligence outside the mind of man. But if too much wrong superstition bred by “Churchianity,” as Laurence Oliphant calls it, “renders a man a fool,” too much scepticism makes him mad. We prefer the charge of folly in believing too much, to that of a madness which denies everything, as do Materialism and Hylo‐Idealism. Hence, the Occultists are fully prepared to receive their dues from Materialism, and to meet the adverse criticism which will be poured on the author of this work, not for writing it, but for believing in that which it contains.

Therefore the discoveries, hypotheses, and unavoidable objections which will be brought forward by the scientific critics must be anticipated and disposed of. It has also to be shown how far the Occult Teachings depart from Modern Science, and whether the ancient or the modern theories are the more logically and philosophically correct. The unity and mutual relations of all parts of Kosmos were known to the Ancients, before they became evident to modern Astronomers and Philosophers. And even if the external and visible portions of the Universe, and their mutual relations, cannot be explained in Physical Science, in any other terms than those used by the adherents of the mechanical theory of the Universe, it does not follow that the Materialist, who denies that the Soul of Kosmos (which appertains to Metaphysical Philosophy) exists, has the right to trespass upon that metaphysical domain. That Physical Science is trying to, and actually does, encroach upon it, is only one more proof that “might is right”; it does not justify the intrusion.

Another good reason for these Addenda is this. Since only a certain portion of the Secret Teachings can be given out in the present age, the doctrines would never be understood even by Theosophists, if they were published without any explanations or commentary. Therefore they must be contrasted with the speculations of Modern Science. Archaic Axioms must be placed side by side with Modern Hypotheses, and the comparison of their value must be left to the sagacious reader.

On the question of the “Seven Governors”—as Hermes calls the “Seven Builders,” the Spirits which guide the operations of Nature, the animated atoms of which are the shadows, in their own world, of their Primaries in the Astral Realms—this work will, of course, have every Materialist against it, as well as the men of Science. But this opposition can, at most, be only temporary. People have laughed at everything unusual, and have scouted every unpopular idea at first, and have then ended by accepting it. Materialism and Scepticism are evils that must remain in the world so long as man has not quitted his present gross form to don the one he had during the First and Second Races of this Round. Unless Scepticism and our present natural ignorance are equilibrated by Intuition and a natural Spirituality, every being afflicted with such feelings will see in himself nothing better than a bundle of flesh, bones, and muscles, with an empty garret inside, which serves the purpose of storing his sensations and feelings. Sir Humphrey Davy was a great Scientist, as deeply versed in Physics as any theorist of our day, yet he loathed Materialism. He says:

I heard with disgust, in the dissecting‐rooms, the plan of the Physiologist, of the gradual secretion of matter, and its becoming endued with irritability, ripening into sensibility, and acquiring such organs as were necessary, by its own inherent forces, and at last rising into intellectual existence. Nevertheless, Physiologists are not those who should be most blamed for speaking of that only which they can see by, and estimate on the evidence of, their physical senses. Astronomers and Physicists are, we consider, far more illogical in their materialistic views than are even Physiologists, and this has to be proved. Milton’s ... Light Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure, has become with the Materialists only ... Prime cheerer, light, Of all material beings, first and best.

For the Occultists it is both Spirit and Matter. Behind the “mode of motion,” now regarded as the “property of matter” and nothing more, they perceive the radiant Noumenon. It is the “Spirit of Light,” the first‐born of the Eternal pure Element, whose energy, or emanation, is stored in the Sun, the great Life‐Giver of the Physical World, as the hidden concealed Spiritual Sun is the Light‐ and Life‐Giver of the Spiritual and Psychic Realms. Bacon was one of the first to strike the key‐note of Materialism, not only by his inductive method—renovated from ill‐digested Aristotle—but by the general tenor of his writings. He inverts the order of mental Evolution when saying: The first creation of God was the light of the sense; the last was the light of the reason; and his Sabbath work ever since is the illumination of the Spirit.

It is just the reverse. The light of Spirit is the eternal Sabbath of the Mystic or Occultist, and he pays little attention to that of mere sense. That which is meant by the allegorical sentence, “Fiat Lux,” is, when esoterically rendered, “Let there be the ‘Sons of Light’,” or the Noumena of all phenomena. Thus the Roman Catholics rightly interpret the passage as referring to Angels, but wrongly as meaning Powers created by an anthropomorphic God, whom they personify in the ever thundering and punishing Jehovah. These beings are the “Sons of Light,” because they emanate from, and are self‐generated in, that infinite Ocean of Light, whose one pole is pure Spirit lost in the absoluteness of Non‐Being, and the other pole, the Matter in which it condenses, “crystallizing” into a more and more gross type as it descends into manifestation. Therefore Matter, though it is, in one sense, but the illusive dregs of that Light whose Rays are the Creative Forces, yet has in it the full presence of the Soul thereof, of that Principle, which none—not even the “Sons of Light,” evolved from its ABSOLUTE DARKNESS—will ever know. The idea is as beautifully, as it is truthfully, expressed by Milton, who hails the holy Light, which is the

... Offspring of Heaven, first‐born, Or of th’ Eternal coëternal beam; ... Since God is Light, And never but in unapproached Light Dwelt from Eternity, dwelt then in thee, Bright effluence of bright essence increate.

And now Occultism puts to Science the question: Is light a body, or is it not? Whatever the answer of the latter, the former is prepared to show that, to this day, the most eminent Physicists have no real knowledge on the subject. To know what light is, and whether it is an actual substance or a mere undulation of the “ethereal medium,” Science has first to learn what Matter, Atom, Ether, Force, are in reality. Now, the truth is, that it knows nothing of any of these, and admits its ignorance. It has not even agreed what to believe in, as dozens of hypotheses on the same subject, emanating from various and very eminent Scientists, are antagonistic to each other and often self‐contradictory. Thus their learned speculations may, with a stretch of good‐will, be accepted as “working hypotheses” in a secondary sense, as Stallo puts it. But being radically inconsistent with each other, they must finally end by mutually destroying themselves. As declared by the author of Concepts of Modem Physics:

It must not be forgotten that the several departments of science are simply arbitrary divisions of science at large. In these several departments the same physical object may be considered under different aspects. The physicist may study its molecular relations, while the chemist determines its atomic constitution. But when they both deal with the same element or agent, it cannot have one set of properties in physics, and another set contradictory of them, in chemistry. If the physicist and chemist alike assume the existence of ultimate atoms absolutely invariable in bulk and weight, the atom cannot be a cube or oblate spheroid for physical, and a sphere for chemical purposes. A group of constant atoms cannot be an aggregate of extended and absolutely inert and impenetrable masses in a crucible or retort, and a system of mere centres of force as part of a magnet or of a Clamond battery. The universal æther cannot be soft and mobile to please the chemist, and rigid‐elastic to satisfy the physicist; it cannot be continuous at the command of Sir William Thomson and discontinuous on the suggestion of Cauchy or Fresnel.(792)

The eminent Physicist, G. A. Hirn, may likewise be quoted as saying the same thing in the 43rd Volume of the Mémoires de l’Académie Royale de Belgique, which we translate from the French, as cited:

When one sees the assurance with which to‐day are affirmed doctrines which attribute the collectivity, the universality of the phenomena to the motions alone of the atom, one has a right to expect to find likewise unanimity in the qualities assigned to this unique being, the foundation of all that exists. Now, from the first examination of the particular systems proposed, one finds the strangest deception; one perceives that the atom of the chemist, the atom of the physicist, that of the metaphysician, and that of the mathematician ... have absolutely nothing in common but the name! The inevitable result is the existing subdivision of our sciences, each of which, in its own little pigeon‐hole, constructs an atom which satisfies the requirements of the phenomena it studies, without troubling itself in the least about the requirements proper to the phenomena of the neighbouring pigeon‐hole. The metaphysician banishes the principles of attraction and repulsion as dreams; the mathematician, who analyses the laws of elasticity and those of the propagation of light, admits them implicitly, without even naming them.... The chemist cannot explain the grouping of the atoms, in his often complicated molecules, without attributing to his atoms specific distinguishing qualities; _for the physicist and the metaphysician, partisans of the modern doctrines, the atom is, on the contrary, always and everywhere the same_. What am I saying? There is no agreement even in one and the same science as to the properties of the atom. Each constructs an atom to suit his own fancy, in order to explain some special phenomenon with which he is particularly concerned.(793)

The above is the photographically correct image of Modern Science and Physics. The “pre‐requisite of that incessant play of the ’scientific imagination’,” which is so often found in Professor Tyndall’s eloquent discourses, is vivid indeed, as is shown by Stallo, and for contradictory variety it leaves far behind it any “phantasies” of Occultism. However that may be, if physical theories are confessedly “mere formal, explanatory, didactic devices,” and if, to use the words of a critic of Stallo, “atomism is only a symbolical graphic system,”(794) then the Occultist can hardly be regarded as assuming too much, when he places alongside of these “devices” and “symbolical systems” of Modern Science, the symbols and devices of Archaic Teachings. “An Lumen Sit Corpus, Nec Non?” Most decidedly light is not a body, we are told. Physical Sciences say light is a force, a vibration, the undulation of Ether. It is the property or quality of Matter, or even an affection thereof—never a body!

Just so. For this discovery, the knowledge, whatever it may be worth, that light or caloric is not a motion of material particles, Science is chiefly, if not solely indebted, to Sir William Grove. It was he who in a lecture at the London Institution, in 1842, was the first to show that “heat, light,(795) may be considered as affections of matter itself, and not of a distinct ethereal, ‘imponderable,’ fluid [a state of matter now] permeating it.”(796) Yet, perhaps, for some Physicists—as for Œrsted, a very eminent Scientist—Force and Forces were tacitly “Spirit [and hence Spirits] in Nature.” What several rather mystical Scientists taught was that light, heat, magnetism, electricity and gravity, etc., were not the final Causes of the visible phenomena, including planetary motion, but were themselves the secondary effects of other Causes, for which Science in our day cares very little, but in which Occultism believes; for the Occultists have exhibited proofs of the validity of their claims in every age. And in what age were there no Occultists and no Adepts?

Sir Isaac Newton held to the Pythagorean corpuscular theory, and was also inclined to admit its consequences; which made the Comte de Maistre hope, at one time, that Newton would ultimately lead Science back to the recognition of the fact that Forces and the Celestial Bodies were propelled and guided by Intelligences.(797) But de Maistre counted without his host. The innermost thoughts and ideas of Newton were perverted, and of his great mathematical learning only the mere physical husk was turned to account. According to one atheistic Idealist, Dr. Lewins: When Sir Isaac, in 1687 ... showed mass and atom acted upon ... by innate activity ... he effectually disposed of Spirit, Anima, or Divinity, as supererogatory. Had poor Sir Isaac foreseen to what use his successors and followers would apply his “gravity,” that pious and religious man would surely have quietly eaten his apple, and never have breathed a word about any mechanical ideas connected with its fall.

Great contempt is shown by Scientists for Metaphysics generally and for Ontological Metaphysics especially. But whenever the Occultists are bold enough to raise their diminished heads, we see that Materialistic, Physical Science is honey‐combed with Metaphysics;(798) that its most fundamental principles, while inseparably wedded to transcendentalism, are nevertheless, in order to show Modern Science divorced from such “dreams,” tortured and often ignored in the maze of contradictory theories and hypotheses. A very good corroboration of this charge lies in the fact that Science finds itself absolutely compelled to accept the “hypothetical” Ether, and to try to explain it on the materialistic grounds of atomo‐ mechanical laws. This attempt has led directly to the most fatal discrepancies and radical inconsistencies between the assumed nature of Ether and its physical behaviour. A second proof is found in the many contradictory statements made about the Atom—the most metaphysical object in creation.

Now, what does the modern science of Physics know of Ether, the first concept of which belongs undeniably to ancient Philosophers, the Greeks having borrowed it from the Âryans, and the origin of modern Ether being found in, and disfigured from, Âkâsha? This disfigurement is claimed as a modification and refinement of the idea of Lucretius. Let us then examine the modern concept, from several scientific volumes containing the admissions of the Physicists themselves. As Stallo shows, the existence of Ether is accepted in Physical Astronomy, in ordinary Physics, and in Chemistry. By the astronomers, this æther was originally regarded as a fluid of extreme tenuity and mobility, offering no sensible resistance to the motions of celestial bodies, and the question of its continuity or discontinuity was not seriously mooted. Its main function in modern astronomy has been to serve as a basis for hydro‐dynamical theories of gravitation. In physics this fluid appeared for some time in several rôles in connection with the “imponderables” [so cruelly put to death by Sir William Grove], some physicists going so far as to identify it with one or more of them.(799)

Stallo then points out the change caused by the kinetic theories; that from the date of the dynamical theory of heat, Ether was chosen in Optics as a substratum for luminous undulations. Next, in order to explain the dispersion and polarization of light, Physicists had to resort once more to their “scientific imagination,” and forthwith endowed the Ether with (a) atomic or molecular structure, and (b) with an enormous elasticity, “so that its resistance to deformation far exceeded that of the most rigid elastic bodies.” This necessitated the theory of the essential discontinuity of Matter, hence of Ether. After having accepted this discontinuity, in order to account for dispersion and polarization, theoretical impossibilities were discovered with regard to such dispersion. Cauchy’s “scientific imagination” saw in Atoms “material points without extension,” and he proposed, in order to obviate the most formidable obstacles to the undulatory theory (namely, some well‐known mechanical theorems which stood in the way), to assume that the ethereal medium of propagation, instead of being continuous, should consist of particles separated by sensible distances. Fresnel rendered the same service to the phenomena of polarization. E. B. Hunt upset the theories of both.(800) There are now men of Science who proclaim them “materially fallacious,” while others—the “atomo‐mechanicalists”—cling to them with desperate tenacity. The supposition of an atomic or molecular constitution of Ether is upset, moreover, by thermo‐dynamics, for Clerk Maxwell showed that such a medium would be simply gas.(801) The hypothesis of “finite intervals” is thus proven of no avail as a supplement to the undulatory theory. Besides, eclipses fail to reveal any such variation of colour as is supposed by Cauchy, on the assumption that the chromatic rays are propagated with different velocities. Astronomy has pointed out more than one phenomenon absolutely at variance with this doctrine.

Thus, while in one department of Physics the atomo‐molecular constitution of the Ether is accepted in order to account for one special set of phenomena, in another department such a constitution is found to be quite subversive of a number of well‐ascertained facts; and Hirn’s charges are thus justified. Chemistry deemed it Impossible to concede the enormous elasticity of the æther without depriving it of those properties, upon which its serviceableness in the construction of chemical theories mainly depended. This ended in a final transformation of Ether. The exigencies of the atomo‐mechanical theory have led distinguished mathematicians and physicists to attempt a substitution for the traditional atoms of matter, of peculiar forms of vortical motion in a universal, homogeneous, incompressible, and continuous material medium [Ether].(802)

The present writer—claiming no great scientific education, but only a tolerable acquaintance with modern theories, and a better one with Occult Sciences—picks up weapons against the detractors of the Esoteric Teaching in the very arsenal of Modern Science. The glaring contradictions, the mutually‐destructive hypotheses of world‐renowned Scientists, their disputes, their accusations and denunciations of each other, show plainly that, whether accepted or not, the Occult Theories have as much right to a hearing as any of the so‐called learned and academical hypotheses. Thus, whether the followers of the Royal Society choose to accept Ether as a continuous or as a discontinuous fluid matters little, and is indifferent for the present purpose. It simply points to one certainty: Official Science knows nothing to this day of the constitution of Ether. Let Science call it Matter, if it likes; only neither as Âkâsha, nor as the one sacred Æther of the Greeks, is it to be found in any of the states of Matter known to modern Physics. It is Matter on quite another plane of perception and being, and it can neither be analyzed by scientific apparatus, nor appreciated or even conceived by the “scientific imagination,” unless the possessors thereof study the Occult Sciences. That which follows proves this statement.

It is clearly demonstrated by Stallo as regards the crucial problems of modern Physics, as was done by De Quatrefages and several others in those of Anthropology, Biology, etc., that, in their efforts to support their individual hypotheses and systems, most of the eminent and learned Materialists very often utter the greatest fallacies. Let us take the following case. Most of them reject actio in distans—one of the fundamental principles in the question of Æther or Âkâsha in Occultism—while, as Stallo justly observes, there is no physical action “which, on close examination, does not resolve itself into actio in distans”; and he proves it. Now, metaphysical arguments, according to Professor Lodge,(803) are “unconscious appeals to experience.” And he adds that if such an experience is not conceivable, then it does not exist. In his own words: If a highly‐developed mind or set of minds, find a doctrine about some comparatively simple and fundamental matter absolutely unthinkable, it is an evidence ... that the unthinkable state of things has no existence. And thereupon, toward the end of his lecture, the Professor indicates that the explanation of cohesion, as well as of gravity, “is to be looked for in the vortex‐atom theory of Sir William Thomson.”

It is needless to stop to inquire whether it is to this vortex‐atom theory, also, that we have to look for the dropping down on earth of the first life‐germ by a passing meteor or comet—Sir William Thomson’s hypothesis. But Prof. Lodge might be reminded of the wise criticism on his lecture in Stallo’s Concepts of Modem Physics. Noticing the above‐quoted declaration by the Professor, the author asks Whether ... the elements of the vortex‐atom theory are familiar, or even possible, facts of experience? For, if they are not, clearly that theory is obnoxious to the same criticism which is said to invalidate the assumption of actio in distans.(804) And then the able critic shows clearly what the Ether is not, nor can ever be, notwithstanding all scientific claims to the contrary. And thus he opens widely, if unconsciously, the entrance door to our Occult Teachings. For, as he says:

The medium in which the vortex‐movements arise is, according to Professor Lodge’s own express statement (Nature, vol. xxvii. p. 305), “a perfectly homogeneous, incompressible, continuous body, incapable of being resolved into simple elements or atoms; it is, in fact, continuous, not molecular.” And after making this statement Professor Lodge adds: “_There is no other body of which we can say this, and hence the properties of the æther must be somewhat different from those of ordinary matter_.” It appears, then, that the whole vortex‐atom theory, which is offered to us as a substitute for the “metaphysical theory” of actio in distans, rests upon the hypothesis of the existence of a material medium which is utterly unknown to experience, and which has properties somewhat different(805) from those of ordinary matter. Hence this theory, instead of being, as is claimed, a reduction of an unfamiliar fact of experience to a familiar fact, is, on the contrary, a reduction of a fact which is perfectly familiar, to a fact which is not only unfamiliar, but wholly unknown, unobserved and unobservable. Furthermore, the alleged vortical motion of, or rather in, the assumed ethereal medium is ... impossible, because “motion in a perfectly homogeneous, incompressible, and therefore continuous fluid, is not sensible motion.”... It is manifest, therefore ... that, wherever the vortex‐atom theory may land us, it certainly does not land us anywhere in the region of physics, or in the domain of veræ causæ.(806) And I may add that, inasmuch as the hypothetical undifferentiated(807) and undifferentiable medium is clearly an involuntary reïfication of the old ontological concept pure being, the theory under discussion has all the attributes of an inapprehensible metaphysical phantom.(808)

A “phantom,” indeed, which can be made apprehensible only by Occultism. From such scientific Metaphysics to Occultism there is hardly one step. Those Physicists who hold the view that the atomic constitution of Matter is consistent with its penetrability, need not go far out of their way to be able to account for the greatest phenomena of Occultism, now so derided by Physical Scientists and Materialists. Cauchy’s “material points without extension” are Leibnitz’s Monads, and at the same time are the materials out of which the “Gods” and other invisible Powers clothe themselves in bodies. The disintegration and reïntegration of “material” particles without extension, as a chief factor in phenomenal manifestations, ought to suggest themselves very easily as a clear possibility, at any rate to those few scientific minds which accept M. Cauchy’s views. For, disposing of that property of Matter which they call impenetrability, by simply regarding the Atoms as “material points exerting on each other attractions and repulsions which vary with the distances that separate them,” the French theorist explains that:

From this it follows that, if it pleased the author of nature simply to modify the laws according to which the atoms attract or repel each other, we might instantly see the hardest bodies penetrating each other, the smallest particles of matter occupying immense spaces, or the largest masses reducing themselves to the smallest volumes, the entire universe concentrating itself, as it were, in a single point.(809) And that “point,” invisible on our plane of perception and matter, is quite visible to the eye of the Adept who can follow and see it present on other planes. For the Occultists, who say that the author of Nature is Nature itself, something indistinct and inseparable from the Deity, it follows that those who are conversant with the Occult laws of Nature, and know how to change and provoke new conditions in Ether, may—not modify the laws, but work and do the same in accordance with these immutable laws.

The corpuscular theory has been unceremoniously put aside; but gravitation—the principle that all bodies attract each other with a force proportional directly to their masses, and inversely to the squares of the distances between them—survives to this day and reigns, supreme as ever, in the alleged ethereal waves of Space. As a hypothesis, it had been threatened with death for its inadequacy to embrace all the facts presented to it; as a physical law, it is the King of the late and once all‐potent “Imponderables.” “It is little short of blasphemy ... an insult to Newton’s grand memory to doubt it!”—is the exclamation of an American reviewer of Isis Unveiled. Well; what is finally that invisible and intangible God in whom we should believe on blind faith? Astronomers who see in gravitation an easy‐going solution for many things, and a universal force which allows them to calculate planetary motions, care little about the Cause of Attraction. They call Gravity a law, a cause in itself. We call the forces acting under that name effects, and very secondary effects, too. One day it will be found that the scientific hypothesis does not answer after all; and then it will follow the corpuscular theory of light, and be consigned to rest for many scientific æons in the archives of all exploded speculations. Has not Newton himself expressed grave doubts about the nature of Force and the corporeality of the “Agents,” as they were then called?

So has Cuvier, another scientific light shining in the night of research. He warns his readers, in the Révolution du Globe, about the doubtful nature of the so‐called Forces, saying that “it is not so sure whether those agents were not after all Spiritual Powers [des agents spirituels].” At the outset of his Principia, Sir Isaac Newton took the greatest care to impress upon his school that he did not use the word “attraction,” with regard to the mutual action of bodies in a physical sense. To him it was, he said, a purely mathematical conception, involving no consideration of real and primary physical causes. In a passage of his Principia,(810) he tells us plainly that, physically considered, attractions are rather impulses. In Section xi (Introduction), he expresses the opinion that “there is some subtle spirit by the force and action of which all movements of matter are determined”;(811) and in his Third Letter to Bentley he says:

It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter, without mutual contact, as it must do if gravitation, in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and inherent in it.... That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else by and through which their action may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man, who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my readers.

At this, even Newton’s contemporaries got frightened—at the apparent return of Occult Causes into the domain of Physics. Leibnitz called his principle of attraction “an incorporeal and inexplicable power.” The supposition of an attractive faculty and a perfect void was characterized by Bernoulli as “revolting,” the principle of actio in distans finding then no more favour than it does now. Euler, on the other hand, thought the action of gravity was due to either a Spirit or some subtle medium. And yet Newton knew of, if he did not accept, the Ether of the Ancients. He regarded the intermediate space between the sidereal bodies as vacuum. Therefore he believed in “subtle Spirit” and Spirits as we do, guiding the so‐called attraction. The above‐quoted words of the great man have produced poor results. The “absurdity” has now become a dogma in the case of pure Materialism, which repeats: “No Matter without Force, no Force without Matter; Matter and Force are inseparable, eternal and indestructible [true]; there can be no independent Force, since all Force is an inherent and necessary property of Matter [false]; consequently, there is no immaterial Creative Power.” Oh, poor Sir Isaac!

If, leaving aside all the other eminent men of Science who agreed in opinion with Euler and Leibnitz, the Occultists claim as their authorities and supporters Sir Isaac Newton and Cuvier only, as above cited, they need fear little from Modern Science, and may loudly and proudly proclaim their beliefs. But the hesitation and doubts of the above cited authorities, and of many others, too, whom we could name, did not in the least prevent scientific speculation from wool‐gathering in the fields of brute matter just as before. First it was matter and an imponderable fluid distinct from it; then came the imponderable fluid so much criticized by Grove; then Ether, which was at first discontinuous and then became continuous; after which came the “mechanical” Forces. These have now settled in life as “modes of motion,” and the Ether has become more mysterious and problematical than ever. More than one man of Science objects to such crude materialistic views. But then, from the days of Plato, who repeatedly asks his readers not to confuse incorporeal Elements with their Principles—the transcendental or spiritual Elements; from those of the great Alchemists, who, like Paracelsus, made a great difference between a phenomenon and its cause, or the Noumenon; to Grove, who, though he sees “no reason to divest universally diffused matter of the functions common to all matter,” yet uses the term Forces where his critics, “who do not attach to the word any idea of a specific action,” say Force; from those days to this, nothing has proved competent to stem the tide of brutal Materialism. Gravitation is the sole cause, the acting God, and Matter is its prophet, said the men of Science only a few years ago.

They have changed their views several times since then. But do the men of Science understand the innermost thought of Newton, one of the most spiritual‐minded and religious men of his day, any better now than they did then? It is certainly to be doubted. Newton is credited with having given the death‐blow to the Elemental Vortices of Descartes—the idea of Anaxagoras, resurrected, by the bye—though the last modern “vortical atoms” of Sir William Thomson do not, in truth, differ much from the former. Nevertheless, when his disciple Forbes wrote in the Preface to the chief work of his master a sentence declaring that “attraction was the cause of the system,” Newton was the first to solemnly protest. That which in the mind of the great mathematician assumed the shadowy, but firmly rooted image of God, as the Noumenon of all,(812) was called more philosophically by ancient and modern Philosophers and Occultists—“Gods,” or the creative fashioning Powers. The modes of expression may have been different, and the ideas more or less philosophically enunciated by all sacred and profane Antiquity; but the fundamental thought was the same.(813) For Pythagoras the Forces were Spiritual Entities, Gods, independent of planets and Matter as we see and know them on Earth, who are the rulers of the Sidereal Heaven. Plato represented the planets as moved by an intrinsic Rector, one with his dwelling, like “a boatman in his boat.” As for Aristotle, he called those rulers “immaterial substances”;(814) though as one who had never been initiated, he rejected the Gods as Entities.(815) But this did not prevent him from recognizing the fact that the stars and planets “were not inanimate masses but acting and living bodies indeed.” As if sidereal spirits were the “diviner portions of their phenomena (τὰ θειότερα τῶν φανερῶν).”(816)

If we look for corroboration in more modern and scientific times, we find Tycho Brahe recognizing in the stars a triple force, divine, spiritual and vital. Kepler, putting together the Pythagorean sentence, “the Sun, guardian of Jupiter,” and the verses of David, “He placed his throne in the Sun,” and “the Lord is the Sun,” etc., said that he understood perfectly how the Pythagoreans could believe that all the Globes disseminated through Space were rational Intelligences (facultates ratiocinativæ), circulating round the Sun, “in which resides a pure spirit of fire; the source of the general harmony.”(817)

When an Occultist speaks of Fohat, the energizing and guiding Intelligence in the Universal Electric or Vital Fluid, he is laughed at. Withal, as now shown, the nature neither of electricity, nor of life, nor even of light, is to this day understood. The Occultist sees in the manifestation of every force in Nature, the action of the quality, or the special characteristic of its Noumenon; which Noumenon is a distinct and intelligent Individuality on the other side of the manifested mechanical Universe. Now the Occultist does not deny—on the contrary he will support the view—that light, heat, electricity and so on are affections, not properties or qualities, of Matter. To put it more clearly: Matter is the condition, the necessary basis or vehicle, a sine quâ non, for the manifestation of these Forces, or Agents, on this plane. But in order to gain the point, the Occultists have to examine the credentials of the law of gravity, first of all, of “Gravitation, the King and Ruler of Matter,” under every form. To do so effectually, the hypothesis, in its earliest appearance, has to be recalled to mind. To begin with, is it Newton who was the first to discover it? The Athenæum of Jan. 26, 1867, has some curious information upon this subject. It says:

Positive evidence can be adduced that Newton derived all his knowledge of Gravitation and its laws from Bœhme, with whom Gravitation or Attraction is the first property of Nature.... For with him, his [Bœhme’s] system shows us the inside of things, while modern physical science is content with looking at the outside. Then again: The science of electricity, which was not yet in existence when he [Bœhme] wrote, is there anticipated [in his writings]; and not only does Bœhme describe all the now known phenomena of that force, but he even gives us the origin, generation, and birth of electricity, itself. Thus Newton, whose profound mind easily read between the lines, and fathomed the spiritual thought of the great Seer, in its mystic rendering, owes his great discovery to Jacob Bœhme, the nursling of the Genii, Nirmânakâyas who watched over and guided him, of whom the author of the article in question so truly remarks: Every new scientific discovery goes to prove his profound and intuitive insight into the most secret workings of Nature.

And having discovered gravity, Newton, in order to render possible the action of attraction in space, had, so to speak, to annihilate every physical obstacle capable of impeding its free action; Ether among others, though he had more than a presentiment of its existence. Advocating the corpuscular theory, he made an absolute vacuum between the heavenly bodies. Whatever may have been his suspicions and inner convictions about Ether; however many friends he may have unbosomed himself to—as in the case of his correspondence with Bentley—his teachings never showed that he had any such belief. If he was “persuaded that the power of attraction could not be exerted by matter across a vacuum,”(818) how is it that so late as 1860, French astronomers, Le Couturier, for instance, combated “the disastrous results of the theory of vacuum established by the great man”? Le Couturier says: Il n’est plus possible aujourd’hui, de soutenir comme Newton, que les corps célestes se mouvent au milieu du vide immense des espaces.... Parmi les conséquences de la théorie du vide établie par Newton, il ne reste plus debout que le mot “attraction.”... Nous voyous venir le jour ou le mot attraction disparaîtra du vocabulaire scientifique.(819) Professor Winchell writes:

These passages [Letter to Bentley] show what were his views respecting the nature of the interplanetary medium of communication. Though declaring that the heavens “are void of sensible matter,” he elsewhere excepted “perhaps some very thin vapours, steams, and effluvia, arising from the atmospheres of the earth, planets, and comets, and from such an exceedingly rare ethereal medium as we have elsewhere described.”(820) This only shows that even such great men as Newton have not always the courage of their opinions. Dr. T. S. Hunt Called attention to some long‐neglected passages in Newton’s works, from which it appears that a belief in such universal, intercosmical medium gradually took root in his mind.(821) But such attention was never called to the said passages before Nov. 28, 1881, when Dr. Hunt read his “Celestial Chemistry, from the time of Newton.” As Le Couturier says: Till then the idea was universal, even among the men of Science, that Newton had, while advocating the corpuscular theory, preached a void. The passages had been “long neglected,” no doubt because they contradicted and clashed with the preconceived pet theories of the day, till finally the undulatory theory imperiously required the presence of an “ethereal medium” to explain it. This is the whole secret.

Anyhow, it is from this theory of Newton of a universal void, taught, if not believed in by himself, that dates the immense scorn now shown by modern Physics for ancient. The old sages had maintained that “Nature abhorred a vacuum,” and the greatest mathematicians of the world—read of the Western races—had discovered the antiquated “fallacy” and exposed it. And now Modern Science, however ungracefully, vindicates Archaic Knowledge, and has, moreover, to vindicate Newton’s character and powers of observation at this late hour, after having neglected, for one century and a half, to pay any attention to such very important passages—perchance, because it was wiser not to attract any notice to them. Better late than never! And now Father Æther is re‐welcomed with open arms and wedded to gravitation, linked to it for weal or woe, until the day when it, or both, shall be replaced by something else. Three hundred years ago it was plenum everywhere, then it became one dismal vacuity; later still the sidereal ocean‐beds, dried up by Science, rolled onward once more their ethereal waves. Recede ut procedas must become the motto of exact Science—“exact,” chiefly, in finding itself inexact every leap‐year.

But we will not quarrel with the great men. They had to go back to the earliest “Gods of Pythagoras and old Kanâda” for the very backbone and marrow of their correlations and “newest” discoveries, and this may well afford good hope to the Occultists for their minor Gods. For we believe in Le Couturier’s prophecy about gravitation. We know the day is approaching when an absolute reform will be demanded in the present modes of Science by the Scientists themselves, as was done by Sir William Grove, F.R.S. Till that day there is nothing to be done. For if gravitation were dethroned to‐morrow, the Scientists would discover some other new mode of mechanical motion the day after.(822) Rough and up‐hill is the path of true Science, and its days are full of vexation of spirit. But in the face of its “thousand” contradictory hypotheses offered as explanations of physical phenomena, there has been no better hypothesis than “motion”—however paradoxically interpreted by Materialism. As may be found in the first pages of this Volume, Occultists have nothing to say against Motion,(823) the Great Breath of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s “Unknowable.” But, believing that everything on Earth is the shadow of something in Space, they believe in smaller “Breaths,” which, living, intelligent and independent of all but Law, blow in every direction during manvantaric periods. These Science will reject. But whatever may be made to replace attraction, alias gravitation, the result will be the same. Science will be as far then from the solution of its difficulties as it is now, unless it comes to some compromise with Occultism, and even with Alchemy—a supposition which will be regarded as an impertinence, but remains, nevertheless, a fact. As Faye says:

Il manque quelque chose aux géologues pour faire la géologie de la Lune; c’est d’être astronomes. À la vérité, il manque aussi quelque chose aux astronomes pour aborder avec fruit cette étude, c’est d’être géologues.(824) But he might have added, with still more pointedness: Ce qui manque à tous les deux, c’est l’intuition du mystique. Let us remember Sir William Grove’s wise “concluding remarks,” on the ultimate structure of Matter, or the minutiæ of molecular actions, which, he thought, man will never know.

Much harm has already been done by attempting hypothetically to dissect matter and to discuss the shapes, sizes, and numbers of atoms, and their atmospheres of heat, ether, or electricity. Whether the regarding electricity, light, magnetism, etc., as simply motions of ordinary matter, be or be not admissible, certain it is that all past theories have resolved, and all existing theories do resolve, the action of these forces into motion. Whether it be that, on account of our familiarity with motion, we refer other affections to it, as to a language which is most easily construed, and most capable of explaining them, or whether it be that it is in reality the only mode in which our minds, as contra‐distinguished from our senses, are able to conceive material agencies, certain it is that since the period at which the mystic notions of spiritual or preternatural powers were applied to account for physical phenomena, all hypotheses framed to explain them have resolved them into motion. And then the learned gentleman states a purely Occult tenet:

The term perpetual motion, which I have not infrequently used in these pages, is itself equivocal. If the doctrines here advanced be well founded, all motion is, in one sense, perpetual. In masses, whose motion is stopped by mutual concussion, heat or motion of the particles is generated; and thus the motion continues, so that if we could venture to extend such thoughts to the universe, we should assume the same amount of motion affecting the same amount of matter for ever.(825) This is precisely what Occultism maintains, and on the same principle, that: Where force is made to oppose force, and produce static equilibrium, the balance of preëxisting equilibrium is affected, and fresh motion is started equivalent to that which is withdrawn into a state of abeyance. This process finds intervals in the Pralaya, but is eternal and ceaseless as the “Breath,” even when the manifested Kosmos rests.

Thus, supposing attraction or gravitation should be given up in favour of the Sun being a huge magnet—a theory already accepted by some Physicists—a magnet that acts on the planets as attraction is now supposed to do, whereto, or how much farther, would it lead the Astronomers from where they are now? Not an inch farther. Kepler came to this “curious hypothesis” nearly 300 years ago. He had not discovered the theory of attraction and repulsion in Kosmos, for it was known from the days of Empedocles, by whom the two opposite forces were called “love” and “hate”—words implying the same idea. But Kepler gave a pretty fair description of cosmic magnetism. That such magnetism exists in Nature, is as certain as that gravitation does not; not at any rate, in the way in which it is taught by Science, which has never taken into consideration the different modes in which the dual Force, that Occultism calls attraction and repulsion, may act within our Solar System, the Earth’s atmosphere and beyond in the Kosmos. As the great Humboldt writes:

Trans‐solar space has not hitherto shown any phenomenon analogous to our solar system. It is a peculiarity of our system, that matter should have condensed within it in nebulous rings, the nuclei of which condense into earths and moons. I say again, heretofore, nothing of the kind has ever been observed beyond our planetary system.(826) True, that since 1860 the Nebular Theory has sprung up, and being better known, a few identical phenomena were supposed to be observed beyond the Solar System. Yet the great man is quite right; and no earths or moons can be found, except in appearance, beyond, or of the same order of Matter as found in, our System. Such is the Occult Teaching.

This was proven by Newton himself; for there are many phenomena in our Solar System, which he confessed his inability to explain by the law of gravitation; “such were the uniformity in the directions of planetary movements, the nearly circular forms of the orbits, and their remarkable conformity to one plane.”(827) And if there is one single exception, then the law of gravitation has no right to be referred to as a universal law. “These adjustments,” we are told, “Newton, in his general Scholium, pronounces to be ‘the work of an intelligent and all‐powerful Being’.” Intelligent that “Being” may be; as to “all‐powerful,” there would be every reason to doubt the claim. A poor “God” he, who would work upon minor details and leave the most important to secondary forces! The poverty of this argument and logic is surpassed only by that of Laplace, who, seeking very correctly to substitute Motion for Newton’s “all‐ powerful Being,” and ignorant of the true nature of that Eternal Motion, saw in it a blind physical law. “Might not those arrangements be an effect of the laws of motion?” he asks, forgetting, as do all our modern Scientists, that this law and this motion are a vicious circle, so long as the nature of both remains unexplained. His famous answer to Napoleon: “Dieu est devenu une hypothèse inutile,” could be correctly made only by one who adhered to the philosophy of the Vedântins. It becomes a pure fallacy, if we exclude the interference of operating, intelligent, powerful (never “all‐powerful”) Beings, who are called “Gods.”

But we would ask the critics of the mediæval Astronomers, why should Kepler be denounced as most unscientific, for offering just the same solution as did Newton, only showing himself more sincere, more consistent and even more logical? Where may be the difference between Newton’s “all‐ powerful Being” and Kepler’s Rectores, his Sidereal and Cosmic Forces, or Angels? Kepler again is criticized for his “curious hypothesis which made use of a vortical movement within the solar system,” for his theories in general, and for favouring Empedocles’ idea of attraction and repulsion, and “solar magnetism” in particular. Yet several modern men of Science, as will be shown—Hunt, if Metcalfe is to be excluded, Dr. Richardson, etc.—very strongly favour the same idea. He is half excused, however, on the plea that: To the time of Kepler no interaction between masses of matter had been distinctly recognized which was generically different from magnetism.(828) Is it distinctly recognized now? Does Professor Winchell claim for Science any serious knowledge whatever of the nature of either electricity or magnetism—except that both seem to be the effects of some result arising from an undetermined cause. The ideas of Kepler, when their theological tendencies are weeded out, are purely Occult. He saw that:

(I) The Sun is a great Magnet.(829) This is what some eminent modern Scientists and also the Occultists believe in. (II) The Solar substance is immaterial.(830) In the sense, of course, of Matter existing in states unknown to Science. (III) For the constant motion and restoration of the Sun’s energy and planetary motion, he provided the perpetual care of a Spirit, or Spirits. The whole of Antiquity believed in this idea. The Occultists do not use the word Spirit, but say Creative Forces, which they endow with intelligence. But we may call them Spirits also. We shall be taken to task for contradiction. It will be said that while we deny God, we admit Souls and operative Spirits, and quote from bigoted Roman Catholic writers in support of our argument. To this we reply: We deny the anthropomorphic God of the Monotheists, but never the Divine Principle in Nature. We combat Protestants and Roman Catholics on a number of dogmatic theological beliefs of human and sectarian origin. We agree with them in their belief in Spirits and intelligent operative Powers, though we do not worship “Angels” as the Roman Latinists do.

This theory is tabooed a great deal more on account of the “Spirit” that is given room in it, than of anything else. Herschell, the elder, believed in it likewise, and so do several modern Scientists. Nevertheless Professor Winchell declares that “a hypothesis more fanciful, and less in accord with the requirements of physical principles, has not been offered in ancient or modern times.”(831) The same was said, once upon a time, of the universal Ether, and now it is not only accepted perforce, but is advocated as the only possible theory to explain certain mysteries.

Grove’s ideas, when he first enunciated them in London about 1840, were denounced as unscientific; nevertheless, his views on the Correlation of Forces are now universally accepted. It would, very likely, require one more conversant with Science than is the writer, to combat with any success some of the now prevailing ideas about gravitation and other similar “solutions” of cosmic mysteries. But, let us recall a few objections that came from recognized men of Science; from Astronomers and Physicists of eminence, who rejected the theory of rotation, as well as that of gravitation. Thus one reads in the French Encyclopædia that “Science agrees, in the face of all its representatives, that it is impossible to explain the physical origin of the rotatory motion of the solar system.” If the question is asked: “What causes rotation?” We are answered: “It is the centrifugal force.” “And this force, what is it that produces it?” “The force of rotation,” is the grave answer.(832) It will be well, perhaps, to examine both these theories as being directly or indirectly connected.

Considering that “final cause is pronounced a chimera, and the First Great Cause is remanded to the sphere of the Unknown,” as a reverend gentleman justly complains, the number of hypotheses put forward, a nebula of them, is most remarkable. The profane student is perplexed, and does not know in which of the theories of exact Science he has to believe. We give below hypotheses enough for every taste and power of brain. They are all extracted from a number of scientific volumes. Current Hypotheses explaining the Origin of Rotation. Rotation has originated: (a) By the collision of nebular masses wandering aimlessly in Space; or by attraction, “in cases where no actual impact takes place.” (b) By the tangential action of currents of nebulous matter (in the case of an amorphous nebula) descending from higher to lower levels,(833) or simply by the action of the central gravity of the mass.(834) “It is a fundamental principle in physics that no rotation could be generated in such a mass by the action of its own parts. As well attempt to change the course of a steamer by pulling at the deck railing,” remarks on this Prof. Winchell in World‐Life.(835) Hypotheses of the Origin of Planets and Comets.

(a) We owe the birth of the planets (1) to an explosion of the Sun—a parturition of its central mass;(836) or (2) to some kind of disruption of the nebular rings. (b) “The comets are strangers to the planetary system.”(837) “The comets are undeniably generated in our solar system.”(838) (c) The “fixed stars are motionless,” says one authority. “All the stars are actually in motion,” answers another authority. “Undoubtedly every star is in motion.”(839) (d) “For over 350,000,000 years, the slow and majestic movement of the sun around its axis has never for a moment ceased.”(840) (e) “Maedler believes that ... our sun has Alcyone in the Pleiades for the centre of its orbit, and consumes 180,000,000 of years in completing a single revolution.”(841) (f) “The sun has existed no more than 15,000,000 of years, and will emit heat for no longer than 10,000,000 years more.”(842) A few years ago this eminent Scientist was telling the world that the time required for the Earth to cool from incipient incrustation to its present state, could not exceed 80,000,000 years.(843) the encrusted age of the world is only 40,000,000, or half the duration once allowed, and the Sun’s age is only 15,000,000, have we to understand that the Earth was at one time independent of the Sun?

Since the ages of the Sun, of the planets, and of the Earth, as they are stated in the various scientific hypotheses of the Astronomers and Physicists, are given elsewhere below, we have said enough to show the disagreement between the ministers of Modern Science. Whether we accept the fifteen million years of Sir William Thomson or the thousand millions of Mr. Huxley, for the rotational evolution of our Solar System, it will always come to this; that by accepting self‐generated rotation for the heavenly bodies composed of inert Matter and yet moved by their own internal motion, for millions of years, this teaching of Science amounts to: (a) An evident denial of that fundamental physical law, which states that “a body in motion tends constantly to inertia, i.e., to continue in the same state of motion or rest, unless it is stimulated into further action by a superior active force.” (b) An original impulse, which culminates in an unalterable motion, within a resisting Ether that Newton had declared incompatible with that motion. (c) Universal gravity, which, we are taught, always tends to a centre in rectilinear descent—alone the cause of the revolution of the whole Solar System, which is performing an eternal double gyration, each body around its axis and orbit. Another occasional version is:

(d) A magnet in the Sun; or, that the said revolution is due to a magnetic force, which acts, just as gravitation does, in a straight line, and varies inversely as the square of the distance.(844) (e) The whole acting under invariable and changeless laws, which are, nevertheless, often shown variable, as during some well‐known freaks of planets and other bodies, as also when the comets approach or recede from the Sun. (f) A Motor Force always proportionate to the mass it is acting upon; but independent of the specific nature of that mass, to which it is proportionate; which amounts to saying, as Le Couturier does, that: Without that force independent from, and of quite another nature than, the said mass, the latter, were it as huge as Saturn, or as tiny as Ceres, would always fall with the same rapidity.(845) A mass, furthermore, which derives its weight from the body on which it weighs.

Thus neither Laplace’s perceptions of a solar atmospheric fluid, which would extend beyond the orbits of the planets, nor Le Couturier’s electricity, nor Foucault’s heat,(846) nor this, nor the other, can ever help any of the numerous hypotheses about the origin and permanency of rotation to escape from this squirrel’s wheel, any more than can the theory of gravity itself. This mystery is the Procrustean bed of Physical Science. If Matter is passive, as we are now taught, the simplest movement cannot be said to be an essential property of Matter—the latter being considered simply as an inert mass. How, then, can such a complicated movement, compound and multiple, harmonious and equilibrated, lasting in the eternities for millions and millions of years, be attributed simply to its own inherent force, unless the latter is an Intelligence? A physical will is something new—a conception that the Ancients would never have entertained, indeed! For over a century all distinction between body and force has been made away with. “Force is but the property of a body in motion,” say the Physicists; “life—the property of our animal organs—is but the result of their molecular arrangement,” answer the Physiologists. As Littré teaches:

In the bosom of that aggregate which is named planet, are developed all the forces immanent in matter ... i.e., that matter possesses in itself and through itself the forces that are proper to it ... and which are primary, not secondary. Such forces are the property of weight, the property of electricity, of terrestrial magnetism, the property of life.... Every planet can develop life ... as earth, for instance, which had not always mankind on it, and now bears (produit) men.(847) An Astronomer says: We talk of the weight of the heavenly bodies, but since it is recognized that weight decreases in proportion to the distance from the centre, it becomes evident that, at a certain distance, that weight must be forcibly reduced to zero. Were there any attraction there would be equilibrium.... And since the modern school recognizes neither a beneath nor an above in universal space, it is not clear what should cause the earth to fall, were there even no gravitation, nor attraction.(848)

Methinks the Count de Maistre was right in solving the question in his own theological way. He cuts the Gordian knot by saying:—“The planets rotate because they are made to rotate ... and the modern physical system of the universe is a physical impossibility.”(849) For did not Herschell say the same thing when he remarked that there is a Will needed to impart a circular motion, and another Will to restrain it?(850) This shows and explains how a retarded planet is cunning enough to calculate its time so well as to hit off its arrival at the fixed minute. For, if Science sometimes succeeds, with great ingenuity, in explaining some of such stoppages, retrograde motions, angles outside the orbits, etc., by appearances resulting from the inequality of their progress and ours in the course of our mutual and respective orbits, we still know that there are others, and “very real and considerable deviations,” according to Herschell, “which cannot be explained except by the mutual and irregular action of those planets and by the perturbing influence of the sun.”

We understand, however, that there are, besides those little and accidental perturbations, continuous perturbations called “secular”—because of the extreme slowness with which the irregularity increases and affects the relations of the elliptic movement—and that these perturbations can be corrected. From Newton, who found that this world needed repairing very often, down to Reynaud, all say the same. In his Ciel et Terre, the latter says: The orbits described by the planets are far from immutable, and are, on the contrary, subject to a perpetual mutation in their position and form.(851) Proving gravitation and the peripatetic laws to be as negligent as they are quick to repair their mistakes. The charge as it stands seems to be that: These orbits are alternately widening and narrowing, their great axis lengthens and diminishes, or oscillates at the same time from right to left around the sun, the plane itself, in which they are situated, raising and lowering itself periodically while pivoting around itself with a kind of tremor. To this, De Mirville, who believes in intelligent “workmen” invisibly ruling the Solar System—as we do—observes very wittily: