Proceeded from, or was produced by, the infusion of the Spirit or Breath of Life into the quickening body of man, and was to supersede and take the place of that Spirit in the thus constituted Self, so that the Spirit passed into, was lost sight of, and disappeared in the Living Soul.The human body, he thinks, ought to be viewed as a matrix in which, and from which, the Soul, which he seems to place higher than the Spirit, is developed. Consideredfunctionallyand from the standpoint[pg 247]of activity, the Soul stands undeniably higher, in this finite and conditioned world of Mâyâ. The Soul, he says,“is ultimately produced from the animated body of man.”Thus the author identifies“Spirit”(Âtmâ) with the“Breath of Life”simply. The Eastern Occultists will demur to this statement, for it is based on the erroneous conception that Prâna and Âtmâ, or Jîvâtmâ, are one and the same thing. The author supports the argument, by showing that with the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and even Latins, Ruach, Pneuma and Spiritus meant Wind—with the Jews undeniably, and with the Greeks and Romans very probably; the Greek word Anemos (Wind) and the Latin Animus (Soul) having a suspicious relation.This is very far fetched. But a legitimate battle-field for deciding this question is hardly to be found, since Dr. Pratt seems to be a practical, matter-of-fact metaphysician, a kind of Kabalist-Positivist, whereas the Eastern metaphysicians, especially the Vedântins, are all Idealists. The Occultists also are of the extreme Esoteric Vedântin school, and though they call the One Life (Parabrahman) the Great Breath and the Whirlwind, they disconnect the seventh principle entirely from matter, and deny that it has any relation to, or connection with it.Thus the philosophy of man's psychic, spiritual and mental relations with his physical functions is in almost inextricable confusion. Neither the old Âryan nor the Egyptian psychology is now properly understood; nor can they be assimilated, without accepting the Esoteric septenary, or, at any rate, the Vedântic quinquepartite division of the human inner principles. Failing which, it will be for ever impossible to understand the metaphysical and purely psychic, and even physiological, relations between the Dhyân Chohans, or Angels, on the one plane, and Humanity on the other. No Eastern (Âryan) Esoteric works are so far published, but we possess the Egyptian papyri, which speak clearly of the seven principles, or the“Seven Souls of Man.”TheBook of the Deadgives a complete list of the“transformations”that every Defunct undergoes, while divesting himself, one by one, of all these principles—materialized for the sake of clearness into ethereal entities or bodies. We must, moreover, remind those who try to show that the Ancient Egyptians did not teach Reïncarnation, that the“Soul”(the Ego or Self) of the Defunct is said to be living in Eternity: it is immortal,“coëval with, and disappearing with, the Solar Boat,”that is, for the Cycle of Necessity. This“Soul”emergesfrom the Tiaou, the Realm of theCause of Life, and joins the living on Earth[pg 248]byday, to return to Tiaou everynight. This expresses the periodical existences of the Ego.357The Shadow, the Astral Form, is annihilated,“devoured by the Uræus,”358the Manes will be annihilated; the two Twins (the Fourth and Fifth Principles) will be scattered; but the Soul-Bird,“the Divine Swallow, and the Uræus of Flame”(Manas and Âtmâ-Buddhi) will live in the eternity, for they are their mother's husbands.Another suggestive analogy between the Âryan, or Brâhmanical, and the Egyptian Esotericism. The former call the Pitris the“Lunar Ancestors”of men, and the Egyptians make of the Moon-God, Taht-Esmun, the first human ancestor.This Moon-God“expressed the Seven nature-powers that were prior to himself, and were summed up in him as his seven souls, of which he was the manifestor as the Eighth One. [Hence the eighth sphere.]... The seven rays of the Chaldean ... Heptakis or Iao, on the Gnostic stones, indicate the same septenary of souls.... The first form of the mystical Seven was seen to be figured in heaven, by the seven large stars of the Great Bear, the constellation assigned by the Egyptians to the Mother of Time, and of the seven Elemental Powers.”359As well known to every Hindû, this same constellation represents in India the Seven Rishis, and is called Riksha, and Chitrashikandinas.Like alone produces like. The Earth gives Man his body, the Gods (Dhyânis) give him his five inner principles, the psychic Shadow, of which these Gods are often the animating principle. Spirit (Âtman) is one, and indiscrete. It is not in the Tiaou.For what is the Tiaou? The frequent allusion to it in theBook of the Deadcontains a mystery. Tiaou is the path of the Night-Sun, the inferior hemisphere, or the infernal region of the Egyptians, placed by them on theconcealed side of the Moon. The human being, in their Esotericism, came out from the Moon—a triple mystery, astronomical, physiological and psychical, at once; he crossed the whole cycle of existence, and then returned to his birth-place, before issuing from it again. Thus the Defunct is shown arriving in the West, receiving his judgment before Osiris, resurrecting as the God Horus, and circling round the sidereal heavens, which is an allegorical assimilation to Ra, the Sun; then having crossed the Noot, the Celestial Abyss, returning once more to Tiaou; an assimilation to Osiris, who, as the God of life[pg 249]and reproduction, inhabits the Moon. Plutarch360shows the Egyptians celebrating a festival called“The Ingress of Osiris into the Moon.”In theRitual,361life is promised after death; and the renovation of life is placed under the patronage of Osiris-Lunus, because the Moon was the symbol of life-renewals or reïncarnations, owing to its growth, waning, dying, and reäppearance every month. In theDankmoe,362it is said:“O Osiris-Lunus, that renews to thee thy renewal.”And Sabekh says to Seti I:363“Thou renewest thyself as the God Lunus, when a babe.”It is still better explained in a Louvre papyrus:364“Couplings and conceptions abound when he [Osiris-Lunus] is seen in heaven on that day.”Says Osiris:“O sole radiant beam of the Moon! I issue from the circulating multitudes [of stars].... Open me the Tiaou, for Osiris N. I will issue by day to do what I have to do amongst the living”365—i.e., to produce conceptions.Osiris was“God manifest in generation,”because the ancients knew, far better than the moderns, the real occult influences of the lunar body upon the mysteries of conception. In the oldest systems we find the Moon always male. Thus Soma, with the Hindûs, is a kind of sidereal Don Juan, a“King,”and the father, albeit illegitimate, of Budha—Wisdom. This relates to Occult Knowledge, a wisdom gathered through a thorough acquaintance with lunar mysteries, including those of sexual generation. And later, when the Moon became connected with the female Goddesses, with Diana, Isis, Artemis, Juno, etc., this connection was also due to a thorough knowledge of physiology and female nature, physical as much as psychic.If, instead of being taught in Sunday Schools useless lessons from theBible, the armies of the ragged and poor were taught Astrology—so far, at any rate, as the occult properties of the Moon and its hidden influences on generation are concerned—then, there would be little need to fear increase of the population, or to resort to the questionable literature of the Malthusians for its arrest. For it is the Moon and her conjunctions that regulate conceptions, and every Astrologer in India knows it. During the previous Races, and at least at the beginning of the present one, those who indulged in marital relations during certain lunar phases that made those relations sterile, were regarded as sorcerers[pg 250]and sinners. But now even these sins of old, which arose from the abuse of Occult knowledge, would appear preferable to the crimes of to-day, which are perpetrated because of the complete ignorance of such Occult influences.But, primarily, the Sun and Moon were the only visible and, by their effects, so to say,tangible, psychic and physiological deities—the Father and the Son—while Space or Air in general, or that expanse of heaven called Noot by the Egyptians, was the concealed Spirit or Breath of the two. The Father and Son were interchangeable in their functions, and worked together harmoniously in their effects upon terrestrial nature and humanity; hence they were regarded asone, thoughtwoas personified Entities. They were both males, and both had their distinct though collaborative work in the causative generation of humanity. So much from the astronomical and cosmic standpoints, viewed and expressed in symbolical language, which became in our last races theological and dogmatic. But behind this veil of cosmic and astrological symbols, there were the occult mysteries of anthropography and the primeval genesis of man. And in this, no knowledge of symbols, or even the key to the post-diluvian symbolical language of the Jews, will or can help, save only with reference to that which has been laid down in national scriptures for exoteric uses; the sum of which, however cleverly veiled, was but the smallest portion of the real primitive history of each people, and often, moreover, as in the Hebrew Scriptures, related merely to the terrestrial human, and not to the divine life of that nation. That psychic and spiritual element belonged to theMysteriesandInitiation. There were things never recorded in scrolls, but which, as in Central Asia, were engraved on rocks and in subterranean crypts.Nevertheless, there was a time when the whole world was“of one lip and of one knowledge,”and man knew more of his origin than he does now; and thus knew that the Sun and Moon, however large a part they may play in the constitution, growth and development of the human body, were not the direct causative agents of his appearance on Earth; for these agents, in truth, are the living and intelligent Powers which the Occultists call Dhyân Chohans.As to this, a very learned admirer of the Jewish Esotericism tells us that:TheKabalahsays expressly that Elohim is a“general abstraction”; what we call in mathematics“a constant coëfficient,”or a“general function,”entering into all[pg 251]construction, not particular; that is, by the general ratio 1 to 31415, the [Astro-Dhyânic and] Elohistic figures.To this the Eastern Occultist replies: Quite so; they are an abstraction to our physical senses. To our spiritual perceptions, however, and to our inner spiritual eye, the Elohim, or Dhyânis, are no more an abstraction than our soul and spirit are to us. Reject the one and you reject the other, since that which is thesurvivingEntityin us, is partly the direct emanation from, and partly those celestial Entitiesthemselves. One thing is certain; the Jews were perfectly acquainted with sorcery and various maleficent forces: but, with the exception of some of their great prophets and seers like Daniel and Ezekiel—Enoch belonging to a far distant race, as a generic character, and not to any nation but to all—they knew little of, nor would they deal with, the real divine Occultism; their national character being averse to anything which had no direct bearing upon their own ethnical, tribal and individual benefits—witness their own prophets, and the curses thundered by them against the“stiff-necked race.”But even theKabalahplainly shows the direct relation between the Sephiroth, or Elohim, and men.Therefore, when it is proved to us that the Kabalistic identification of Jehovah with Binah, a female Sephira, has still another, a sub-occult, meaning in it, then and then only will Occultists be ready to pass the palm of perfection to the Kabalist. Until then, it is asserted that, as Jehovah, in the abstract sense of a“one living God,”is a single number, a metaphysical figment, and a reality only when put in his proper place as an emanation and a Sephira—we have a right to maintain that theZohar, as witnessed by theBook of Numbers, at any rate, gave out originally, before the Christian Kabalists had disfigured it, and still gives out, the same doctrine that we do; that is, it makes Man emanate, not from one Celestial Man, but from a Septenary Group of Celestial Men, or Angels, just as inPymander, the Thought Divine.3.When the One becomes Two, the Three-fold appears(a).The Three are366One; and it is our Thread, O Lanoo, the Heart of the Man-Plant, called Saptaparna(b).(a)“When the One becomes Two, the Three-fold appears”: to wit, when the One Eternal drops its reflection into the region of Manifestation,[pg 252]that reflection, the Ray, differentiates the Water of Space; or, in the words of theBook of the Dead:“Chaos ceases, through the effulgence of the Ray of Primordial Light dissipating total darkness, by the help of the great magic power of the Word of the [Central] Sun.”Chaos becomes male-female, and Water, incubated by Light, and the Three-fold Being issues as its“First-born.”“Ra [or Osiris-Ptah] creates his own Limbs [like Brahmâ], by creating the Gods destined to personify his phases,”during the Cycle.367The Egyptian Ra, issuing from the Deep, is the Divine Universal Soul in its manifested aspect, and so is Nârâyana, the Purusha,“concealed in Âkâsha, and present in Ether.”This is the metaphysical explanation, and refers to the very beginning of Evolution, or, as we would rather say, of Theogony. The meaning of the Stanza, when explained from another standpoint in its reference to the mystery of man and his origin, is still more difficult to comprehend. In order to form a clear conception of what is meant by the One becoming Two, and then being transformed into the Three-fold, the student has to make himself thoroughly acquainted with what we call Rounds. If he refers toEsoteric Buddhism—the first attempt to sketch out an approximate outline of archaic cosmogony—he will find that by a Round is meant the serial evolution of nascent material Nature, of the seven Globes of our Chain,368with their mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms; man being included in the latter and standing at the head of it, during the whole period of a Life-Cycle, which latter would be called by the Brâhmans a“Day of Brahmâ.”It is, in short, one revolution of the“Wheel”(our Planetary Chain), which is composed of seven Globes, or seven separate“Wheels,”in another sense this time. When evolution has run[pg 253]downward into matter from Globe A to Globe G, it is one Round. In the middle of the fourth revolution, which is our present Round,“Evolution has reached its acme of physical development, crowned its work with the perfect physical man, and, from this point, begins its work spirit-ward.”All this needs little repetition, as it is well explained inEsoteric Buddhism. That which was hardly touched upon, however, and of which the little that was said has misled many, is the origin of man, and it is upon this that a little more light may now be thrown, just enough to make the Stanza more comprehensible, as the process will be fully explained only in its legitimate place, in Volume II.Now every Round, on the descending scale, is but a repetition in a more concrete form of the Round which preceded it, just as every Globe, down to our Fourth Sphere the actual Earth, is a grosser and more material copy of the more shadowy Sphere which precedes it, each in order, on the three higher planes.369On its way upwards, on the ascending arc, Evolution spiritualizes and etherealizes, so to speak, the general nature of all, bringing it on to a level with the plane on which the twin Globe on the opposite arc is placed; the result being, that when the seventh Globe is reached, in whatever Round, the nature of everything that is evolving returns to the condition it was in at its starting point—plus, every time, a new and superior degree in the states of consciousness. Thus it becomes clear that the“origin of man,”so-called, in this our present Round, or Life-Cycle, on this Planet, must occupy the same place in the same order—save details based on local conditions and time—as in the preceding Round. Again, it must be explained and remembered that, as the work of each Round is said to be apportioned to a different Group of so-called Creators, or Architects, so is that of every Globe; that is, it is under the supervision and guidance of special Builders and Watchers—the various Dhyân Chohans.“Creators”is an incorrect word to use, as no other religion, not even the sect of the Visishthadvaitîs in India, one which anthropomorphizes even Parabrahman, believes in creationex nihilo, as Christians and Jews do, but only in evolution out of preëxisting materials.The Group of the Hierarchy which is commissioned to“create”men is a special Group, then; yet it evolved shadowy man in this Cycle, just as a higher and still more spiritual Group evolved him in the Third[pg 254]Round. But as it is the Sixth, on the downward scale of Spirituality—the last and Seventh being the Terrestrial Spirits (Elementals), which gradually form, build and condense his physical body—this Sixth Group evolves no more than the future man's shadowy form, a filmy, hardly visible, transparent copy of themselves. It becomes the task of the Fifth Hierarchy—the mysterious Beings that preside over the constellation Capricornus, Makara, or“Crocodile,”in India and in Egypt—to inform the empty and ethereal animal form, and make of it the Rational Man. This is one of those subjects upon which very little may be said to the general public. It is a Mystery truly, but only to him who is prepared to reject the existence of intellectual and conscious Spiritual Beings in the Universe, and to limit full Consciousness to man alone, and that only as a“function of the brain.”Many are those among the Spiritual Entities, who have incarnated bodily in man, since his first appearance, and who, for all that, still exist as independently as they did before, in the infinitudes of Space.To put it more clearly, such an invisible Entity may be bodily present on earth without, however, abandoning its status and functions in the supersensuous regions. If this needs explanation, we can do no better than remind the reader of like cases in so-called“Spiritualism”; though such cases are very rare, at least as regards the nature of the Entity incarnating, or taking temporary possession of a medium. For the so-called“spirits”that may occasionally possess themselves of the bodies of mediums are not the Monads, or Higher Principles, of disembodied Personalities. Such“spirits”can only be either Elementaries, or—Nirmânakâyas. Just as certain persons, whether by virtue of a peculiar organization, or through the power of acquired mystic knowledge, can be seen in their“double”in one place, while their body is many miles away; so the same thing can occur in the case of superior Beings.Man, philosophically considered, is, in his outward form, simply an animal, hardly more perfect than his pithecoid-like ancestor of the Third Round. He is a living Body, not a living Being, since the realization of existence, the“Ego Sum,”necessitates self-consciousness, and an animal can only have direct consciousness, or instinct. This was so well understood by the ancients, that even the Kabalists made of soul and body two Lives, independent of each other. In theNew Aspects of Life, the author states the Kabalistic teaching:They held that, functionally, Spirit and Matter, of corresponding opacity and[pg 255]density, tended to coalesce; and that the resultant created Spirits, in the disembodied state, were constituted on a scale in which the differing opacities and transparencies of elemental or uncreated Spirit were reproduced. And that these Spirits, in the disembodied state, attracted, appropriated, digested and assimilated elemental Spirit and elemental Matter whose condition was conformed to their own.... They therefore taught that there was a wide difference in the conditions of created Spirits; and that, in the intimate association between the Spirit-world and the world of Matter, the more opaque Spirits, in the disembodied state, were drawn towards the more dense parts of the material world, and therefore tended towards the centre of the Earth, where they found the conditions most suited to their state; while the more transparent Spirits passed into the surrounding aura of the planet, the most rarefied finding their home in its satellite.370This relates exclusively to our Elemental Spirits, and has naught to do with either the Planetary, Sidereal, Cosmic or Inter-Etheric Intelligent Forces, or“Angels”as they are termed by the Roman Church. The Jewish Kabalists, especially the practical Occultists who dealt with Ceremonial Magic, busied themselves solely with the Spirits of the Planets and the“Elementals”so-called. Therefore the above covers only a portion of the Esoteric teaching.The Soul, whose body-vehicle is the astral, ethereo-substantial envelope, could die and man be still living on earth. That is to say, the Soul could free itself from and quit the tabernacle for various reasons, such as insanity, spiritual and physical depravity, etc. The possibility of the“Soul”—that is, the eternal Spiritual Ego—dwelling in the unseen worlds, while its body goes on living on Earth, is a preeminently Occult doctrine, especially in Chinese and Buddhist philosophy. Many are thesoullessmen among us, for the occurrence is found to take place in wicked materialists as well as in persons“who advance in holiness and never turn back.”Therefore, that which living men (Initiates) can do, the Dhyânis, who have no physical body to hamper them, can do still better. This was the belief of the antediluvians, and it is fast becoming that of modern intellectual society in“Spiritualism,”as well as in the Greek and Roman Churches, which teach the ubiquity of their Angels. The Zoroastrians regarded their Amshaspends as dual entities (Ferouers), applying this duality—in Esoteric philosophy, at any rate—to all the spiritual and invisible denizens of the numberless worlds in space, which are visible to our eye. In a note of Damascius (sixth century) on the Chaldean Oracles, we have ample evidence of the universality of[pg 256]this doctrine, for he says:“In these Oracles, the seven Cosmocratores of the World [‘the World-Pillars’], mentioned likewise by St. Paul, are double; one set being commissioned to rule the superior worlds, the spiritual and the sidereal, and the other to guide and watch over the worlds of matter.”Such is also the opinion of Jamblichus, who makes an evident distinction between the Archangels and the Archontes.371The above may be applied, of course, to the distinction made between the degrees or orders of Spiritual Beings, and it is in this sense that the Roman Catholic Church tries to interpret and teach the difference; for while the Archangels are in her teaching divine and holy, she denounces their“Doubles”as Devils. But the word Ferouer is not to be understood in this sense, for it means simply the reverse or the opposite side of some attribute or quality. Thus when the Occultist says that the“Demon is the inverse of God”—evil, the reverse of the medal—he does not mean two separate actualities, but two aspects or facets of the same Unity. But the best man living, side by side with an Archangel—as described in Theology—would appear a fiend. Hence a certain reason in depreciating a lower“Double,”immersed far deeper in matter than its original. But still there is as little cause to regard them as Devils, and this is precisely what the Roman Catholics maintain against all reason and logic.This identity between the Spirit and its material“Double”—in man it is the reverse—explains still better the confusion, already alluded to in this work, in the names and individualities, as well as in the numbers, of the Rishis and Prajâpatis; especially of those of the Satya Yuga and the Mahâbhâratan Period. It also throws additional light on what the Secret Doctrine teaches with regard to the Root- and the Seed-Manus. Not only these Progenitors of our mankind, but every human being, we are taught, has his prototype in the Spiritual Spheres, which prototype is the highest essence of his Seventh Principle. Thus the seven Manus become fourteen, the Root-Manu being the Prime Cause, and the Seed-Manu its Effect; and from the Satya Yuga (the first stage) to the Heroic Period, these Manus or Rishis become twenty-one in number.(b) The concluding sentence of this shloka shows how archaic is the belief and the doctrine that man is seven-fold in his constitution. The“Thread”of Being, which animates man, and passes through all his[pg 257]Personalities, or Rebirths on this Earth—an allusion to Sûtrâtmâ—the Thread on which moreover all his“Spirits”are strung, is spun from the essence of the Three-fold, the Four-fold and the Five-fold which contain all the preceding. Panchâshikha, agreeably toPadma Purâna,372is one of the sevenKumâraswho go to Shveta Dvîpa to worship Vishnu. We shall see, further on, what connection there is between the“celibate”and chaste Sons of Brahmâ, who refuse“to multiply,”and terrestrial mortals. Meanwhile, it is evident that the“Man-Plant, Saptaparna,”thus refers to the seven principles, and that man is compared to this seven-leaved plant, which is so sacred among Buddhists. The Egyptian allegory, in theBook of the Dead, that relates to the“reward of the Soul,”is as suggestive of our septenary doctrine as it is poetical. The Deceased is allotted a piece of land in the field of Aanroo, wherein the Manes, the deified shades of the dead, glean, as the harvest they have sown by their actions in life, the corn seven cubits high, which grows in a territory divided into seven and fourteen portions. This corn is the food on which they will live and prosper, or that will kill them, in Amenti, the realm of which the Aanroo-field is a domain. For, as said in the hymn,373the Deceased is either destroyed therein, or becomes pure spirit for the Eternity, in consequence of the“seven times seventy-seven lives”passed, or to be passed, on Earth. The idea of the corn reaped as the“fruit of our actions”is very graphic.4.It is the Root that never dies, the Three-tongued Flame of the Four Wicks(a)...The Wicks are the Sparks, that draw from the Three-tongued Flame,374shot out by the Seven, their Flame; the Beams and Sparks of One Moon, reflected in the Running Waves of all the Rivers of the Earth375(b).(a) The“Three-tongued Flame that never dies”is the immortal spiritual Triad, the Âtmâ, Buddhi and Manas, or rather the fruitage of the last, assimilated by the first two after every terrestrial life. The“Four Wicks,”that go out and are extinguished, are the Quaternary, the four lower principles, including the body.“I am the Three-wicked Flame and my Wicks are immortal,”says the Defunct.“I enter into the domain of Sekhem [the God whose[pg 258]hand sows the seed of action produced by the disembodied soul], and I enter the region of the Flames who have destroyed their adversaries [i.e., got rid of the sin-creating Four Wicks].”376“The Three-tongued Flame of the Four Wicks”corresponds to the four Unities and the three Binaries of the Sephirothal tree.(b) Just as milliards of bright sparks dance on the waters of an ocean, above which one and the same moon is shining, so our evanescent Personalities—the illusive envelopes of the immortal Monad-Ego—twinkle and dance on the waves of Mâyâ. They appear and, as the thousands of sparks produced by the moon-beams, last only so long as the Queen of the Night radiates her lustre on the“Running Waves”of Life, the period of a Manvantara; and then they disappear, the“Beams”—symbols of our eternal Spiritual Egos—alone surviving, remerged in, and being, as they were before, one with the Mother-Source.5.The Spark hangs from the Flame by the finest Thread of Fohat. It journeys through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ(a).It stops in the first,377and is a Metal and a Stone; it passes into the Second,378and behold—a Plant; the Plant whirls through Seven Forms and becomes a Sacred Animal379(b).From the combined attributes of these, Manu,380the Thinker, is formed.Who forms him? The Seven Lives, and the One Life(c).Who completes him? The Five-fold Lha. And who perfects the last Body? Fish, Sin and Soma381(d).(a) The phrase,“through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ,”refers here to the seven Globes of the Planetary Chain and the seven Rounds, or the forty-nine stations of active existence that are before the“Spark,”or Monad, at the beginning of every Great Life-Cycle, or Manvantara. The“Thread of Fohat”is the Thread of Life before referred to.This relates to the greatest problem of philosophy—the physical and substantial nature of Life, the independent nature of which is denied[pg 259]by Modern Science, because that Science is unable to comprehend it. The reïncarnationists and believers in Karma alone dimly perceive, that the whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations, whether in, or apart from, the physical body. Because even if:
Proceeded from, or was produced by, the infusion of the Spirit or Breath of Life into the quickening body of man, and was to supersede and take the place of that Spirit in the thus constituted Self, so that the Spirit passed into, was lost sight of, and disappeared in the Living Soul.The human body, he thinks, ought to be viewed as a matrix in which, and from which, the Soul, which he seems to place higher than the Spirit, is developed. Consideredfunctionallyand from the standpoint[pg 247]of activity, the Soul stands undeniably higher, in this finite and conditioned world of Mâyâ. The Soul, he says,“is ultimately produced from the animated body of man.”Thus the author identifies“Spirit”(Âtmâ) with the“Breath of Life”simply. The Eastern Occultists will demur to this statement, for it is based on the erroneous conception that Prâna and Âtmâ, or Jîvâtmâ, are one and the same thing. The author supports the argument, by showing that with the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and even Latins, Ruach, Pneuma and Spiritus meant Wind—with the Jews undeniably, and with the Greeks and Romans very probably; the Greek word Anemos (Wind) and the Latin Animus (Soul) having a suspicious relation.This is very far fetched. But a legitimate battle-field for deciding this question is hardly to be found, since Dr. Pratt seems to be a practical, matter-of-fact metaphysician, a kind of Kabalist-Positivist, whereas the Eastern metaphysicians, especially the Vedântins, are all Idealists. The Occultists also are of the extreme Esoteric Vedântin school, and though they call the One Life (Parabrahman) the Great Breath and the Whirlwind, they disconnect the seventh principle entirely from matter, and deny that it has any relation to, or connection with it.Thus the philosophy of man's psychic, spiritual and mental relations with his physical functions is in almost inextricable confusion. Neither the old Âryan nor the Egyptian psychology is now properly understood; nor can they be assimilated, without accepting the Esoteric septenary, or, at any rate, the Vedântic quinquepartite division of the human inner principles. Failing which, it will be for ever impossible to understand the metaphysical and purely psychic, and even physiological, relations between the Dhyân Chohans, or Angels, on the one plane, and Humanity on the other. No Eastern (Âryan) Esoteric works are so far published, but we possess the Egyptian papyri, which speak clearly of the seven principles, or the“Seven Souls of Man.”TheBook of the Deadgives a complete list of the“transformations”that every Defunct undergoes, while divesting himself, one by one, of all these principles—materialized for the sake of clearness into ethereal entities or bodies. We must, moreover, remind those who try to show that the Ancient Egyptians did not teach Reïncarnation, that the“Soul”(the Ego or Self) of the Defunct is said to be living in Eternity: it is immortal,“coëval with, and disappearing with, the Solar Boat,”that is, for the Cycle of Necessity. This“Soul”emergesfrom the Tiaou, the Realm of theCause of Life, and joins the living on Earth[pg 248]byday, to return to Tiaou everynight. This expresses the periodical existences of the Ego.357The Shadow, the Astral Form, is annihilated,“devoured by the Uræus,”358the Manes will be annihilated; the two Twins (the Fourth and Fifth Principles) will be scattered; but the Soul-Bird,“the Divine Swallow, and the Uræus of Flame”(Manas and Âtmâ-Buddhi) will live in the eternity, for they are their mother's husbands.Another suggestive analogy between the Âryan, or Brâhmanical, and the Egyptian Esotericism. The former call the Pitris the“Lunar Ancestors”of men, and the Egyptians make of the Moon-God, Taht-Esmun, the first human ancestor.This Moon-God“expressed the Seven nature-powers that were prior to himself, and were summed up in him as his seven souls, of which he was the manifestor as the Eighth One. [Hence the eighth sphere.]... The seven rays of the Chaldean ... Heptakis or Iao, on the Gnostic stones, indicate the same septenary of souls.... The first form of the mystical Seven was seen to be figured in heaven, by the seven large stars of the Great Bear, the constellation assigned by the Egyptians to the Mother of Time, and of the seven Elemental Powers.”359As well known to every Hindû, this same constellation represents in India the Seven Rishis, and is called Riksha, and Chitrashikandinas.Like alone produces like. The Earth gives Man his body, the Gods (Dhyânis) give him his five inner principles, the psychic Shadow, of which these Gods are often the animating principle. Spirit (Âtman) is one, and indiscrete. It is not in the Tiaou.For what is the Tiaou? The frequent allusion to it in theBook of the Deadcontains a mystery. Tiaou is the path of the Night-Sun, the inferior hemisphere, or the infernal region of the Egyptians, placed by them on theconcealed side of the Moon. The human being, in their Esotericism, came out from the Moon—a triple mystery, astronomical, physiological and psychical, at once; he crossed the whole cycle of existence, and then returned to his birth-place, before issuing from it again. Thus the Defunct is shown arriving in the West, receiving his judgment before Osiris, resurrecting as the God Horus, and circling round the sidereal heavens, which is an allegorical assimilation to Ra, the Sun; then having crossed the Noot, the Celestial Abyss, returning once more to Tiaou; an assimilation to Osiris, who, as the God of life[pg 249]and reproduction, inhabits the Moon. Plutarch360shows the Egyptians celebrating a festival called“The Ingress of Osiris into the Moon.”In theRitual,361life is promised after death; and the renovation of life is placed under the patronage of Osiris-Lunus, because the Moon was the symbol of life-renewals or reïncarnations, owing to its growth, waning, dying, and reäppearance every month. In theDankmoe,362it is said:“O Osiris-Lunus, that renews to thee thy renewal.”And Sabekh says to Seti I:363“Thou renewest thyself as the God Lunus, when a babe.”It is still better explained in a Louvre papyrus:364“Couplings and conceptions abound when he [Osiris-Lunus] is seen in heaven on that day.”Says Osiris:“O sole radiant beam of the Moon! I issue from the circulating multitudes [of stars].... Open me the Tiaou, for Osiris N. I will issue by day to do what I have to do amongst the living”365—i.e., to produce conceptions.Osiris was“God manifest in generation,”because the ancients knew, far better than the moderns, the real occult influences of the lunar body upon the mysteries of conception. In the oldest systems we find the Moon always male. Thus Soma, with the Hindûs, is a kind of sidereal Don Juan, a“King,”and the father, albeit illegitimate, of Budha—Wisdom. This relates to Occult Knowledge, a wisdom gathered through a thorough acquaintance with lunar mysteries, including those of sexual generation. And later, when the Moon became connected with the female Goddesses, with Diana, Isis, Artemis, Juno, etc., this connection was also due to a thorough knowledge of physiology and female nature, physical as much as psychic.If, instead of being taught in Sunday Schools useless lessons from theBible, the armies of the ragged and poor were taught Astrology—so far, at any rate, as the occult properties of the Moon and its hidden influences on generation are concerned—then, there would be little need to fear increase of the population, or to resort to the questionable literature of the Malthusians for its arrest. For it is the Moon and her conjunctions that regulate conceptions, and every Astrologer in India knows it. During the previous Races, and at least at the beginning of the present one, those who indulged in marital relations during certain lunar phases that made those relations sterile, were regarded as sorcerers[pg 250]and sinners. But now even these sins of old, which arose from the abuse of Occult knowledge, would appear preferable to the crimes of to-day, which are perpetrated because of the complete ignorance of such Occult influences.But, primarily, the Sun and Moon were the only visible and, by their effects, so to say,tangible, psychic and physiological deities—the Father and the Son—while Space or Air in general, or that expanse of heaven called Noot by the Egyptians, was the concealed Spirit or Breath of the two. The Father and Son were interchangeable in their functions, and worked together harmoniously in their effects upon terrestrial nature and humanity; hence they were regarded asone, thoughtwoas personified Entities. They were both males, and both had their distinct though collaborative work in the causative generation of humanity. So much from the astronomical and cosmic standpoints, viewed and expressed in symbolical language, which became in our last races theological and dogmatic. But behind this veil of cosmic and astrological symbols, there were the occult mysteries of anthropography and the primeval genesis of man. And in this, no knowledge of symbols, or even the key to the post-diluvian symbolical language of the Jews, will or can help, save only with reference to that which has been laid down in national scriptures for exoteric uses; the sum of which, however cleverly veiled, was but the smallest portion of the real primitive history of each people, and often, moreover, as in the Hebrew Scriptures, related merely to the terrestrial human, and not to the divine life of that nation. That psychic and spiritual element belonged to theMysteriesandInitiation. There were things never recorded in scrolls, but which, as in Central Asia, were engraved on rocks and in subterranean crypts.Nevertheless, there was a time when the whole world was“of one lip and of one knowledge,”and man knew more of his origin than he does now; and thus knew that the Sun and Moon, however large a part they may play in the constitution, growth and development of the human body, were not the direct causative agents of his appearance on Earth; for these agents, in truth, are the living and intelligent Powers which the Occultists call Dhyân Chohans.As to this, a very learned admirer of the Jewish Esotericism tells us that:TheKabalahsays expressly that Elohim is a“general abstraction”; what we call in mathematics“a constant coëfficient,”or a“general function,”entering into all[pg 251]construction, not particular; that is, by the general ratio 1 to 31415, the [Astro-Dhyânic and] Elohistic figures.To this the Eastern Occultist replies: Quite so; they are an abstraction to our physical senses. To our spiritual perceptions, however, and to our inner spiritual eye, the Elohim, or Dhyânis, are no more an abstraction than our soul and spirit are to us. Reject the one and you reject the other, since that which is thesurvivingEntityin us, is partly the direct emanation from, and partly those celestial Entitiesthemselves. One thing is certain; the Jews were perfectly acquainted with sorcery and various maleficent forces: but, with the exception of some of their great prophets and seers like Daniel and Ezekiel—Enoch belonging to a far distant race, as a generic character, and not to any nation but to all—they knew little of, nor would they deal with, the real divine Occultism; their national character being averse to anything which had no direct bearing upon their own ethnical, tribal and individual benefits—witness their own prophets, and the curses thundered by them against the“stiff-necked race.”But even theKabalahplainly shows the direct relation between the Sephiroth, or Elohim, and men.Therefore, when it is proved to us that the Kabalistic identification of Jehovah with Binah, a female Sephira, has still another, a sub-occult, meaning in it, then and then only will Occultists be ready to pass the palm of perfection to the Kabalist. Until then, it is asserted that, as Jehovah, in the abstract sense of a“one living God,”is a single number, a metaphysical figment, and a reality only when put in his proper place as an emanation and a Sephira—we have a right to maintain that theZohar, as witnessed by theBook of Numbers, at any rate, gave out originally, before the Christian Kabalists had disfigured it, and still gives out, the same doctrine that we do; that is, it makes Man emanate, not from one Celestial Man, but from a Septenary Group of Celestial Men, or Angels, just as inPymander, the Thought Divine.3.When the One becomes Two, the Three-fold appears(a).The Three are366One; and it is our Thread, O Lanoo, the Heart of the Man-Plant, called Saptaparna(b).(a)“When the One becomes Two, the Three-fold appears”: to wit, when the One Eternal drops its reflection into the region of Manifestation,[pg 252]that reflection, the Ray, differentiates the Water of Space; or, in the words of theBook of the Dead:“Chaos ceases, through the effulgence of the Ray of Primordial Light dissipating total darkness, by the help of the great magic power of the Word of the [Central] Sun.”Chaos becomes male-female, and Water, incubated by Light, and the Three-fold Being issues as its“First-born.”“Ra [or Osiris-Ptah] creates his own Limbs [like Brahmâ], by creating the Gods destined to personify his phases,”during the Cycle.367The Egyptian Ra, issuing from the Deep, is the Divine Universal Soul in its manifested aspect, and so is Nârâyana, the Purusha,“concealed in Âkâsha, and present in Ether.”This is the metaphysical explanation, and refers to the very beginning of Evolution, or, as we would rather say, of Theogony. The meaning of the Stanza, when explained from another standpoint in its reference to the mystery of man and his origin, is still more difficult to comprehend. In order to form a clear conception of what is meant by the One becoming Two, and then being transformed into the Three-fold, the student has to make himself thoroughly acquainted with what we call Rounds. If he refers toEsoteric Buddhism—the first attempt to sketch out an approximate outline of archaic cosmogony—he will find that by a Round is meant the serial evolution of nascent material Nature, of the seven Globes of our Chain,368with their mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms; man being included in the latter and standing at the head of it, during the whole period of a Life-Cycle, which latter would be called by the Brâhmans a“Day of Brahmâ.”It is, in short, one revolution of the“Wheel”(our Planetary Chain), which is composed of seven Globes, or seven separate“Wheels,”in another sense this time. When evolution has run[pg 253]downward into matter from Globe A to Globe G, it is one Round. In the middle of the fourth revolution, which is our present Round,“Evolution has reached its acme of physical development, crowned its work with the perfect physical man, and, from this point, begins its work spirit-ward.”All this needs little repetition, as it is well explained inEsoteric Buddhism. That which was hardly touched upon, however, and of which the little that was said has misled many, is the origin of man, and it is upon this that a little more light may now be thrown, just enough to make the Stanza more comprehensible, as the process will be fully explained only in its legitimate place, in Volume II.Now every Round, on the descending scale, is but a repetition in a more concrete form of the Round which preceded it, just as every Globe, down to our Fourth Sphere the actual Earth, is a grosser and more material copy of the more shadowy Sphere which precedes it, each in order, on the three higher planes.369On its way upwards, on the ascending arc, Evolution spiritualizes and etherealizes, so to speak, the general nature of all, bringing it on to a level with the plane on which the twin Globe on the opposite arc is placed; the result being, that when the seventh Globe is reached, in whatever Round, the nature of everything that is evolving returns to the condition it was in at its starting point—plus, every time, a new and superior degree in the states of consciousness. Thus it becomes clear that the“origin of man,”so-called, in this our present Round, or Life-Cycle, on this Planet, must occupy the same place in the same order—save details based on local conditions and time—as in the preceding Round. Again, it must be explained and remembered that, as the work of each Round is said to be apportioned to a different Group of so-called Creators, or Architects, so is that of every Globe; that is, it is under the supervision and guidance of special Builders and Watchers—the various Dhyân Chohans.“Creators”is an incorrect word to use, as no other religion, not even the sect of the Visishthadvaitîs in India, one which anthropomorphizes even Parabrahman, believes in creationex nihilo, as Christians and Jews do, but only in evolution out of preëxisting materials.The Group of the Hierarchy which is commissioned to“create”men is a special Group, then; yet it evolved shadowy man in this Cycle, just as a higher and still more spiritual Group evolved him in the Third[pg 254]Round. But as it is the Sixth, on the downward scale of Spirituality—the last and Seventh being the Terrestrial Spirits (Elementals), which gradually form, build and condense his physical body—this Sixth Group evolves no more than the future man's shadowy form, a filmy, hardly visible, transparent copy of themselves. It becomes the task of the Fifth Hierarchy—the mysterious Beings that preside over the constellation Capricornus, Makara, or“Crocodile,”in India and in Egypt—to inform the empty and ethereal animal form, and make of it the Rational Man. This is one of those subjects upon which very little may be said to the general public. It is a Mystery truly, but only to him who is prepared to reject the existence of intellectual and conscious Spiritual Beings in the Universe, and to limit full Consciousness to man alone, and that only as a“function of the brain.”Many are those among the Spiritual Entities, who have incarnated bodily in man, since his first appearance, and who, for all that, still exist as independently as they did before, in the infinitudes of Space.To put it more clearly, such an invisible Entity may be bodily present on earth without, however, abandoning its status and functions in the supersensuous regions. If this needs explanation, we can do no better than remind the reader of like cases in so-called“Spiritualism”; though such cases are very rare, at least as regards the nature of the Entity incarnating, or taking temporary possession of a medium. For the so-called“spirits”that may occasionally possess themselves of the bodies of mediums are not the Monads, or Higher Principles, of disembodied Personalities. Such“spirits”can only be either Elementaries, or—Nirmânakâyas. Just as certain persons, whether by virtue of a peculiar organization, or through the power of acquired mystic knowledge, can be seen in their“double”in one place, while their body is many miles away; so the same thing can occur in the case of superior Beings.Man, philosophically considered, is, in his outward form, simply an animal, hardly more perfect than his pithecoid-like ancestor of the Third Round. He is a living Body, not a living Being, since the realization of existence, the“Ego Sum,”necessitates self-consciousness, and an animal can only have direct consciousness, or instinct. This was so well understood by the ancients, that even the Kabalists made of soul and body two Lives, independent of each other. In theNew Aspects of Life, the author states the Kabalistic teaching:They held that, functionally, Spirit and Matter, of corresponding opacity and[pg 255]density, tended to coalesce; and that the resultant created Spirits, in the disembodied state, were constituted on a scale in which the differing opacities and transparencies of elemental or uncreated Spirit were reproduced. And that these Spirits, in the disembodied state, attracted, appropriated, digested and assimilated elemental Spirit and elemental Matter whose condition was conformed to their own.... They therefore taught that there was a wide difference in the conditions of created Spirits; and that, in the intimate association between the Spirit-world and the world of Matter, the more opaque Spirits, in the disembodied state, were drawn towards the more dense parts of the material world, and therefore tended towards the centre of the Earth, where they found the conditions most suited to their state; while the more transparent Spirits passed into the surrounding aura of the planet, the most rarefied finding their home in its satellite.370This relates exclusively to our Elemental Spirits, and has naught to do with either the Planetary, Sidereal, Cosmic or Inter-Etheric Intelligent Forces, or“Angels”as they are termed by the Roman Church. The Jewish Kabalists, especially the practical Occultists who dealt with Ceremonial Magic, busied themselves solely with the Spirits of the Planets and the“Elementals”so-called. Therefore the above covers only a portion of the Esoteric teaching.The Soul, whose body-vehicle is the astral, ethereo-substantial envelope, could die and man be still living on earth. That is to say, the Soul could free itself from and quit the tabernacle for various reasons, such as insanity, spiritual and physical depravity, etc. The possibility of the“Soul”—that is, the eternal Spiritual Ego—dwelling in the unseen worlds, while its body goes on living on Earth, is a preeminently Occult doctrine, especially in Chinese and Buddhist philosophy. Many are thesoullessmen among us, for the occurrence is found to take place in wicked materialists as well as in persons“who advance in holiness and never turn back.”Therefore, that which living men (Initiates) can do, the Dhyânis, who have no physical body to hamper them, can do still better. This was the belief of the antediluvians, and it is fast becoming that of modern intellectual society in“Spiritualism,”as well as in the Greek and Roman Churches, which teach the ubiquity of their Angels. The Zoroastrians regarded their Amshaspends as dual entities (Ferouers), applying this duality—in Esoteric philosophy, at any rate—to all the spiritual and invisible denizens of the numberless worlds in space, which are visible to our eye. In a note of Damascius (sixth century) on the Chaldean Oracles, we have ample evidence of the universality of[pg 256]this doctrine, for he says:“In these Oracles, the seven Cosmocratores of the World [‘the World-Pillars’], mentioned likewise by St. Paul, are double; one set being commissioned to rule the superior worlds, the spiritual and the sidereal, and the other to guide and watch over the worlds of matter.”Such is also the opinion of Jamblichus, who makes an evident distinction between the Archangels and the Archontes.371The above may be applied, of course, to the distinction made between the degrees or orders of Spiritual Beings, and it is in this sense that the Roman Catholic Church tries to interpret and teach the difference; for while the Archangels are in her teaching divine and holy, she denounces their“Doubles”as Devils. But the word Ferouer is not to be understood in this sense, for it means simply the reverse or the opposite side of some attribute or quality. Thus when the Occultist says that the“Demon is the inverse of God”—evil, the reverse of the medal—he does not mean two separate actualities, but two aspects or facets of the same Unity. But the best man living, side by side with an Archangel—as described in Theology—would appear a fiend. Hence a certain reason in depreciating a lower“Double,”immersed far deeper in matter than its original. But still there is as little cause to regard them as Devils, and this is precisely what the Roman Catholics maintain against all reason and logic.This identity between the Spirit and its material“Double”—in man it is the reverse—explains still better the confusion, already alluded to in this work, in the names and individualities, as well as in the numbers, of the Rishis and Prajâpatis; especially of those of the Satya Yuga and the Mahâbhâratan Period. It also throws additional light on what the Secret Doctrine teaches with regard to the Root- and the Seed-Manus. Not only these Progenitors of our mankind, but every human being, we are taught, has his prototype in the Spiritual Spheres, which prototype is the highest essence of his Seventh Principle. Thus the seven Manus become fourteen, the Root-Manu being the Prime Cause, and the Seed-Manu its Effect; and from the Satya Yuga (the first stage) to the Heroic Period, these Manus or Rishis become twenty-one in number.(b) The concluding sentence of this shloka shows how archaic is the belief and the doctrine that man is seven-fold in his constitution. The“Thread”of Being, which animates man, and passes through all his[pg 257]Personalities, or Rebirths on this Earth—an allusion to Sûtrâtmâ—the Thread on which moreover all his“Spirits”are strung, is spun from the essence of the Three-fold, the Four-fold and the Five-fold which contain all the preceding. Panchâshikha, agreeably toPadma Purâna,372is one of the sevenKumâraswho go to Shveta Dvîpa to worship Vishnu. We shall see, further on, what connection there is between the“celibate”and chaste Sons of Brahmâ, who refuse“to multiply,”and terrestrial mortals. Meanwhile, it is evident that the“Man-Plant, Saptaparna,”thus refers to the seven principles, and that man is compared to this seven-leaved plant, which is so sacred among Buddhists. The Egyptian allegory, in theBook of the Dead, that relates to the“reward of the Soul,”is as suggestive of our septenary doctrine as it is poetical. The Deceased is allotted a piece of land in the field of Aanroo, wherein the Manes, the deified shades of the dead, glean, as the harvest they have sown by their actions in life, the corn seven cubits high, which grows in a territory divided into seven and fourteen portions. This corn is the food on which they will live and prosper, or that will kill them, in Amenti, the realm of which the Aanroo-field is a domain. For, as said in the hymn,373the Deceased is either destroyed therein, or becomes pure spirit for the Eternity, in consequence of the“seven times seventy-seven lives”passed, or to be passed, on Earth. The idea of the corn reaped as the“fruit of our actions”is very graphic.4.It is the Root that never dies, the Three-tongued Flame of the Four Wicks(a)...The Wicks are the Sparks, that draw from the Three-tongued Flame,374shot out by the Seven, their Flame; the Beams and Sparks of One Moon, reflected in the Running Waves of all the Rivers of the Earth375(b).(a) The“Three-tongued Flame that never dies”is the immortal spiritual Triad, the Âtmâ, Buddhi and Manas, or rather the fruitage of the last, assimilated by the first two after every terrestrial life. The“Four Wicks,”that go out and are extinguished, are the Quaternary, the four lower principles, including the body.“I am the Three-wicked Flame and my Wicks are immortal,”says the Defunct.“I enter into the domain of Sekhem [the God whose[pg 258]hand sows the seed of action produced by the disembodied soul], and I enter the region of the Flames who have destroyed their adversaries [i.e., got rid of the sin-creating Four Wicks].”376“The Three-tongued Flame of the Four Wicks”corresponds to the four Unities and the three Binaries of the Sephirothal tree.(b) Just as milliards of bright sparks dance on the waters of an ocean, above which one and the same moon is shining, so our evanescent Personalities—the illusive envelopes of the immortal Monad-Ego—twinkle and dance on the waves of Mâyâ. They appear and, as the thousands of sparks produced by the moon-beams, last only so long as the Queen of the Night radiates her lustre on the“Running Waves”of Life, the period of a Manvantara; and then they disappear, the“Beams”—symbols of our eternal Spiritual Egos—alone surviving, remerged in, and being, as they were before, one with the Mother-Source.5.The Spark hangs from the Flame by the finest Thread of Fohat. It journeys through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ(a).It stops in the first,377and is a Metal and a Stone; it passes into the Second,378and behold—a Plant; the Plant whirls through Seven Forms and becomes a Sacred Animal379(b).From the combined attributes of these, Manu,380the Thinker, is formed.Who forms him? The Seven Lives, and the One Life(c).Who completes him? The Five-fold Lha. And who perfects the last Body? Fish, Sin and Soma381(d).(a) The phrase,“through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ,”refers here to the seven Globes of the Planetary Chain and the seven Rounds, or the forty-nine stations of active existence that are before the“Spark,”or Monad, at the beginning of every Great Life-Cycle, or Manvantara. The“Thread of Fohat”is the Thread of Life before referred to.This relates to the greatest problem of philosophy—the physical and substantial nature of Life, the independent nature of which is denied[pg 259]by Modern Science, because that Science is unable to comprehend it. The reïncarnationists and believers in Karma alone dimly perceive, that the whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations, whether in, or apart from, the physical body. Because even if:
Proceeded from, or was produced by, the infusion of the Spirit or Breath of Life into the quickening body of man, and was to supersede and take the place of that Spirit in the thus constituted Self, so that the Spirit passed into, was lost sight of, and disappeared in the Living Soul.The human body, he thinks, ought to be viewed as a matrix in which, and from which, the Soul, which he seems to place higher than the Spirit, is developed. Consideredfunctionallyand from the standpoint[pg 247]of activity, the Soul stands undeniably higher, in this finite and conditioned world of Mâyâ. The Soul, he says,“is ultimately produced from the animated body of man.”Thus the author identifies“Spirit”(Âtmâ) with the“Breath of Life”simply. The Eastern Occultists will demur to this statement, for it is based on the erroneous conception that Prâna and Âtmâ, or Jîvâtmâ, are one and the same thing. The author supports the argument, by showing that with the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and even Latins, Ruach, Pneuma and Spiritus meant Wind—with the Jews undeniably, and with the Greeks and Romans very probably; the Greek word Anemos (Wind) and the Latin Animus (Soul) having a suspicious relation.This is very far fetched. But a legitimate battle-field for deciding this question is hardly to be found, since Dr. Pratt seems to be a practical, matter-of-fact metaphysician, a kind of Kabalist-Positivist, whereas the Eastern metaphysicians, especially the Vedântins, are all Idealists. The Occultists also are of the extreme Esoteric Vedântin school, and though they call the One Life (Parabrahman) the Great Breath and the Whirlwind, they disconnect the seventh principle entirely from matter, and deny that it has any relation to, or connection with it.Thus the philosophy of man's psychic, spiritual and mental relations with his physical functions is in almost inextricable confusion. Neither the old Âryan nor the Egyptian psychology is now properly understood; nor can they be assimilated, without accepting the Esoteric septenary, or, at any rate, the Vedântic quinquepartite division of the human inner principles. Failing which, it will be for ever impossible to understand the metaphysical and purely psychic, and even physiological, relations between the Dhyân Chohans, or Angels, on the one plane, and Humanity on the other. No Eastern (Âryan) Esoteric works are so far published, but we possess the Egyptian papyri, which speak clearly of the seven principles, or the“Seven Souls of Man.”TheBook of the Deadgives a complete list of the“transformations”that every Defunct undergoes, while divesting himself, one by one, of all these principles—materialized for the sake of clearness into ethereal entities or bodies. We must, moreover, remind those who try to show that the Ancient Egyptians did not teach Reïncarnation, that the“Soul”(the Ego or Self) of the Defunct is said to be living in Eternity: it is immortal,“coëval with, and disappearing with, the Solar Boat,”that is, for the Cycle of Necessity. This“Soul”emergesfrom the Tiaou, the Realm of theCause of Life, and joins the living on Earth[pg 248]byday, to return to Tiaou everynight. This expresses the periodical existences of the Ego.357The Shadow, the Astral Form, is annihilated,“devoured by the Uræus,”358the Manes will be annihilated; the two Twins (the Fourth and Fifth Principles) will be scattered; but the Soul-Bird,“the Divine Swallow, and the Uræus of Flame”(Manas and Âtmâ-Buddhi) will live in the eternity, for they are their mother's husbands.Another suggestive analogy between the Âryan, or Brâhmanical, and the Egyptian Esotericism. The former call the Pitris the“Lunar Ancestors”of men, and the Egyptians make of the Moon-God, Taht-Esmun, the first human ancestor.This Moon-God“expressed the Seven nature-powers that were prior to himself, and were summed up in him as his seven souls, of which he was the manifestor as the Eighth One. [Hence the eighth sphere.]... The seven rays of the Chaldean ... Heptakis or Iao, on the Gnostic stones, indicate the same septenary of souls.... The first form of the mystical Seven was seen to be figured in heaven, by the seven large stars of the Great Bear, the constellation assigned by the Egyptians to the Mother of Time, and of the seven Elemental Powers.”359As well known to every Hindû, this same constellation represents in India the Seven Rishis, and is called Riksha, and Chitrashikandinas.Like alone produces like. The Earth gives Man his body, the Gods (Dhyânis) give him his five inner principles, the psychic Shadow, of which these Gods are often the animating principle. Spirit (Âtman) is one, and indiscrete. It is not in the Tiaou.For what is the Tiaou? The frequent allusion to it in theBook of the Deadcontains a mystery. Tiaou is the path of the Night-Sun, the inferior hemisphere, or the infernal region of the Egyptians, placed by them on theconcealed side of the Moon. The human being, in their Esotericism, came out from the Moon—a triple mystery, astronomical, physiological and psychical, at once; he crossed the whole cycle of existence, and then returned to his birth-place, before issuing from it again. Thus the Defunct is shown arriving in the West, receiving his judgment before Osiris, resurrecting as the God Horus, and circling round the sidereal heavens, which is an allegorical assimilation to Ra, the Sun; then having crossed the Noot, the Celestial Abyss, returning once more to Tiaou; an assimilation to Osiris, who, as the God of life[pg 249]and reproduction, inhabits the Moon. Plutarch360shows the Egyptians celebrating a festival called“The Ingress of Osiris into the Moon.”In theRitual,361life is promised after death; and the renovation of life is placed under the patronage of Osiris-Lunus, because the Moon was the symbol of life-renewals or reïncarnations, owing to its growth, waning, dying, and reäppearance every month. In theDankmoe,362it is said:“O Osiris-Lunus, that renews to thee thy renewal.”And Sabekh says to Seti I:363“Thou renewest thyself as the God Lunus, when a babe.”It is still better explained in a Louvre papyrus:364“Couplings and conceptions abound when he [Osiris-Lunus] is seen in heaven on that day.”Says Osiris:“O sole radiant beam of the Moon! I issue from the circulating multitudes [of stars].... Open me the Tiaou, for Osiris N. I will issue by day to do what I have to do amongst the living”365—i.e., to produce conceptions.Osiris was“God manifest in generation,”because the ancients knew, far better than the moderns, the real occult influences of the lunar body upon the mysteries of conception. In the oldest systems we find the Moon always male. Thus Soma, with the Hindûs, is a kind of sidereal Don Juan, a“King,”and the father, albeit illegitimate, of Budha—Wisdom. This relates to Occult Knowledge, a wisdom gathered through a thorough acquaintance with lunar mysteries, including those of sexual generation. And later, when the Moon became connected with the female Goddesses, with Diana, Isis, Artemis, Juno, etc., this connection was also due to a thorough knowledge of physiology and female nature, physical as much as psychic.If, instead of being taught in Sunday Schools useless lessons from theBible, the armies of the ragged and poor were taught Astrology—so far, at any rate, as the occult properties of the Moon and its hidden influences on generation are concerned—then, there would be little need to fear increase of the population, or to resort to the questionable literature of the Malthusians for its arrest. For it is the Moon and her conjunctions that regulate conceptions, and every Astrologer in India knows it. During the previous Races, and at least at the beginning of the present one, those who indulged in marital relations during certain lunar phases that made those relations sterile, were regarded as sorcerers[pg 250]and sinners. But now even these sins of old, which arose from the abuse of Occult knowledge, would appear preferable to the crimes of to-day, which are perpetrated because of the complete ignorance of such Occult influences.But, primarily, the Sun and Moon were the only visible and, by their effects, so to say,tangible, psychic and physiological deities—the Father and the Son—while Space or Air in general, or that expanse of heaven called Noot by the Egyptians, was the concealed Spirit or Breath of the two. The Father and Son were interchangeable in their functions, and worked together harmoniously in their effects upon terrestrial nature and humanity; hence they were regarded asone, thoughtwoas personified Entities. They were both males, and both had their distinct though collaborative work in the causative generation of humanity. So much from the astronomical and cosmic standpoints, viewed and expressed in symbolical language, which became in our last races theological and dogmatic. But behind this veil of cosmic and astrological symbols, there were the occult mysteries of anthropography and the primeval genesis of man. And in this, no knowledge of symbols, or even the key to the post-diluvian symbolical language of the Jews, will or can help, save only with reference to that which has been laid down in national scriptures for exoteric uses; the sum of which, however cleverly veiled, was but the smallest portion of the real primitive history of each people, and often, moreover, as in the Hebrew Scriptures, related merely to the terrestrial human, and not to the divine life of that nation. That psychic and spiritual element belonged to theMysteriesandInitiation. There were things never recorded in scrolls, but which, as in Central Asia, were engraved on rocks and in subterranean crypts.Nevertheless, there was a time when the whole world was“of one lip and of one knowledge,”and man knew more of his origin than he does now; and thus knew that the Sun and Moon, however large a part they may play in the constitution, growth and development of the human body, were not the direct causative agents of his appearance on Earth; for these agents, in truth, are the living and intelligent Powers which the Occultists call Dhyân Chohans.As to this, a very learned admirer of the Jewish Esotericism tells us that:TheKabalahsays expressly that Elohim is a“general abstraction”; what we call in mathematics“a constant coëfficient,”or a“general function,”entering into all[pg 251]construction, not particular; that is, by the general ratio 1 to 31415, the [Astro-Dhyânic and] Elohistic figures.To this the Eastern Occultist replies: Quite so; they are an abstraction to our physical senses. To our spiritual perceptions, however, and to our inner spiritual eye, the Elohim, or Dhyânis, are no more an abstraction than our soul and spirit are to us. Reject the one and you reject the other, since that which is thesurvivingEntityin us, is partly the direct emanation from, and partly those celestial Entitiesthemselves. One thing is certain; the Jews were perfectly acquainted with sorcery and various maleficent forces: but, with the exception of some of their great prophets and seers like Daniel and Ezekiel—Enoch belonging to a far distant race, as a generic character, and not to any nation but to all—they knew little of, nor would they deal with, the real divine Occultism; their national character being averse to anything which had no direct bearing upon their own ethnical, tribal and individual benefits—witness their own prophets, and the curses thundered by them against the“stiff-necked race.”But even theKabalahplainly shows the direct relation between the Sephiroth, or Elohim, and men.Therefore, when it is proved to us that the Kabalistic identification of Jehovah with Binah, a female Sephira, has still another, a sub-occult, meaning in it, then and then only will Occultists be ready to pass the palm of perfection to the Kabalist. Until then, it is asserted that, as Jehovah, in the abstract sense of a“one living God,”is a single number, a metaphysical figment, and a reality only when put in his proper place as an emanation and a Sephira—we have a right to maintain that theZohar, as witnessed by theBook of Numbers, at any rate, gave out originally, before the Christian Kabalists had disfigured it, and still gives out, the same doctrine that we do; that is, it makes Man emanate, not from one Celestial Man, but from a Septenary Group of Celestial Men, or Angels, just as inPymander, the Thought Divine.3.When the One becomes Two, the Three-fold appears(a).The Three are366One; and it is our Thread, O Lanoo, the Heart of the Man-Plant, called Saptaparna(b).(a)“When the One becomes Two, the Three-fold appears”: to wit, when the One Eternal drops its reflection into the region of Manifestation,[pg 252]that reflection, the Ray, differentiates the Water of Space; or, in the words of theBook of the Dead:“Chaos ceases, through the effulgence of the Ray of Primordial Light dissipating total darkness, by the help of the great magic power of the Word of the [Central] Sun.”Chaos becomes male-female, and Water, incubated by Light, and the Three-fold Being issues as its“First-born.”“Ra [or Osiris-Ptah] creates his own Limbs [like Brahmâ], by creating the Gods destined to personify his phases,”during the Cycle.367The Egyptian Ra, issuing from the Deep, is the Divine Universal Soul in its manifested aspect, and so is Nârâyana, the Purusha,“concealed in Âkâsha, and present in Ether.”This is the metaphysical explanation, and refers to the very beginning of Evolution, or, as we would rather say, of Theogony. The meaning of the Stanza, when explained from another standpoint in its reference to the mystery of man and his origin, is still more difficult to comprehend. In order to form a clear conception of what is meant by the One becoming Two, and then being transformed into the Three-fold, the student has to make himself thoroughly acquainted with what we call Rounds. If he refers toEsoteric Buddhism—the first attempt to sketch out an approximate outline of archaic cosmogony—he will find that by a Round is meant the serial evolution of nascent material Nature, of the seven Globes of our Chain,368with their mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms; man being included in the latter and standing at the head of it, during the whole period of a Life-Cycle, which latter would be called by the Brâhmans a“Day of Brahmâ.”It is, in short, one revolution of the“Wheel”(our Planetary Chain), which is composed of seven Globes, or seven separate“Wheels,”in another sense this time. When evolution has run[pg 253]downward into matter from Globe A to Globe G, it is one Round. In the middle of the fourth revolution, which is our present Round,“Evolution has reached its acme of physical development, crowned its work with the perfect physical man, and, from this point, begins its work spirit-ward.”All this needs little repetition, as it is well explained inEsoteric Buddhism. That which was hardly touched upon, however, and of which the little that was said has misled many, is the origin of man, and it is upon this that a little more light may now be thrown, just enough to make the Stanza more comprehensible, as the process will be fully explained only in its legitimate place, in Volume II.Now every Round, on the descending scale, is but a repetition in a more concrete form of the Round which preceded it, just as every Globe, down to our Fourth Sphere the actual Earth, is a grosser and more material copy of the more shadowy Sphere which precedes it, each in order, on the three higher planes.369On its way upwards, on the ascending arc, Evolution spiritualizes and etherealizes, so to speak, the general nature of all, bringing it on to a level with the plane on which the twin Globe on the opposite arc is placed; the result being, that when the seventh Globe is reached, in whatever Round, the nature of everything that is evolving returns to the condition it was in at its starting point—plus, every time, a new and superior degree in the states of consciousness. Thus it becomes clear that the“origin of man,”so-called, in this our present Round, or Life-Cycle, on this Planet, must occupy the same place in the same order—save details based on local conditions and time—as in the preceding Round. Again, it must be explained and remembered that, as the work of each Round is said to be apportioned to a different Group of so-called Creators, or Architects, so is that of every Globe; that is, it is under the supervision and guidance of special Builders and Watchers—the various Dhyân Chohans.“Creators”is an incorrect word to use, as no other religion, not even the sect of the Visishthadvaitîs in India, one which anthropomorphizes even Parabrahman, believes in creationex nihilo, as Christians and Jews do, but only in evolution out of preëxisting materials.The Group of the Hierarchy which is commissioned to“create”men is a special Group, then; yet it evolved shadowy man in this Cycle, just as a higher and still more spiritual Group evolved him in the Third[pg 254]Round. But as it is the Sixth, on the downward scale of Spirituality—the last and Seventh being the Terrestrial Spirits (Elementals), which gradually form, build and condense his physical body—this Sixth Group evolves no more than the future man's shadowy form, a filmy, hardly visible, transparent copy of themselves. It becomes the task of the Fifth Hierarchy—the mysterious Beings that preside over the constellation Capricornus, Makara, or“Crocodile,”in India and in Egypt—to inform the empty and ethereal animal form, and make of it the Rational Man. This is one of those subjects upon which very little may be said to the general public. It is a Mystery truly, but only to him who is prepared to reject the existence of intellectual and conscious Spiritual Beings in the Universe, and to limit full Consciousness to man alone, and that only as a“function of the brain.”Many are those among the Spiritual Entities, who have incarnated bodily in man, since his first appearance, and who, for all that, still exist as independently as they did before, in the infinitudes of Space.To put it more clearly, such an invisible Entity may be bodily present on earth without, however, abandoning its status and functions in the supersensuous regions. If this needs explanation, we can do no better than remind the reader of like cases in so-called“Spiritualism”; though such cases are very rare, at least as regards the nature of the Entity incarnating, or taking temporary possession of a medium. For the so-called“spirits”that may occasionally possess themselves of the bodies of mediums are not the Monads, or Higher Principles, of disembodied Personalities. Such“spirits”can only be either Elementaries, or—Nirmânakâyas. Just as certain persons, whether by virtue of a peculiar organization, or through the power of acquired mystic knowledge, can be seen in their“double”in one place, while their body is many miles away; so the same thing can occur in the case of superior Beings.Man, philosophically considered, is, in his outward form, simply an animal, hardly more perfect than his pithecoid-like ancestor of the Third Round. He is a living Body, not a living Being, since the realization of existence, the“Ego Sum,”necessitates self-consciousness, and an animal can only have direct consciousness, or instinct. This was so well understood by the ancients, that even the Kabalists made of soul and body two Lives, independent of each other. In theNew Aspects of Life, the author states the Kabalistic teaching:They held that, functionally, Spirit and Matter, of corresponding opacity and[pg 255]density, tended to coalesce; and that the resultant created Spirits, in the disembodied state, were constituted on a scale in which the differing opacities and transparencies of elemental or uncreated Spirit were reproduced. And that these Spirits, in the disembodied state, attracted, appropriated, digested and assimilated elemental Spirit and elemental Matter whose condition was conformed to their own.... They therefore taught that there was a wide difference in the conditions of created Spirits; and that, in the intimate association between the Spirit-world and the world of Matter, the more opaque Spirits, in the disembodied state, were drawn towards the more dense parts of the material world, and therefore tended towards the centre of the Earth, where they found the conditions most suited to their state; while the more transparent Spirits passed into the surrounding aura of the planet, the most rarefied finding their home in its satellite.370This relates exclusively to our Elemental Spirits, and has naught to do with either the Planetary, Sidereal, Cosmic or Inter-Etheric Intelligent Forces, or“Angels”as they are termed by the Roman Church. The Jewish Kabalists, especially the practical Occultists who dealt with Ceremonial Magic, busied themselves solely with the Spirits of the Planets and the“Elementals”so-called. Therefore the above covers only a portion of the Esoteric teaching.The Soul, whose body-vehicle is the astral, ethereo-substantial envelope, could die and man be still living on earth. That is to say, the Soul could free itself from and quit the tabernacle for various reasons, such as insanity, spiritual and physical depravity, etc. The possibility of the“Soul”—that is, the eternal Spiritual Ego—dwelling in the unseen worlds, while its body goes on living on Earth, is a preeminently Occult doctrine, especially in Chinese and Buddhist philosophy. Many are thesoullessmen among us, for the occurrence is found to take place in wicked materialists as well as in persons“who advance in holiness and never turn back.”Therefore, that which living men (Initiates) can do, the Dhyânis, who have no physical body to hamper them, can do still better. This was the belief of the antediluvians, and it is fast becoming that of modern intellectual society in“Spiritualism,”as well as in the Greek and Roman Churches, which teach the ubiquity of their Angels. The Zoroastrians regarded their Amshaspends as dual entities (Ferouers), applying this duality—in Esoteric philosophy, at any rate—to all the spiritual and invisible denizens of the numberless worlds in space, which are visible to our eye. In a note of Damascius (sixth century) on the Chaldean Oracles, we have ample evidence of the universality of[pg 256]this doctrine, for he says:“In these Oracles, the seven Cosmocratores of the World [‘the World-Pillars’], mentioned likewise by St. Paul, are double; one set being commissioned to rule the superior worlds, the spiritual and the sidereal, and the other to guide and watch over the worlds of matter.”Such is also the opinion of Jamblichus, who makes an evident distinction between the Archangels and the Archontes.371The above may be applied, of course, to the distinction made between the degrees or orders of Spiritual Beings, and it is in this sense that the Roman Catholic Church tries to interpret and teach the difference; for while the Archangels are in her teaching divine and holy, she denounces their“Doubles”as Devils. But the word Ferouer is not to be understood in this sense, for it means simply the reverse or the opposite side of some attribute or quality. Thus when the Occultist says that the“Demon is the inverse of God”—evil, the reverse of the medal—he does not mean two separate actualities, but two aspects or facets of the same Unity. But the best man living, side by side with an Archangel—as described in Theology—would appear a fiend. Hence a certain reason in depreciating a lower“Double,”immersed far deeper in matter than its original. But still there is as little cause to regard them as Devils, and this is precisely what the Roman Catholics maintain against all reason and logic.This identity between the Spirit and its material“Double”—in man it is the reverse—explains still better the confusion, already alluded to in this work, in the names and individualities, as well as in the numbers, of the Rishis and Prajâpatis; especially of those of the Satya Yuga and the Mahâbhâratan Period. It also throws additional light on what the Secret Doctrine teaches with regard to the Root- and the Seed-Manus. Not only these Progenitors of our mankind, but every human being, we are taught, has his prototype in the Spiritual Spheres, which prototype is the highest essence of his Seventh Principle. Thus the seven Manus become fourteen, the Root-Manu being the Prime Cause, and the Seed-Manu its Effect; and from the Satya Yuga (the first stage) to the Heroic Period, these Manus or Rishis become twenty-one in number.(b) The concluding sentence of this shloka shows how archaic is the belief and the doctrine that man is seven-fold in his constitution. The“Thread”of Being, which animates man, and passes through all his[pg 257]Personalities, or Rebirths on this Earth—an allusion to Sûtrâtmâ—the Thread on which moreover all his“Spirits”are strung, is spun from the essence of the Three-fold, the Four-fold and the Five-fold which contain all the preceding. Panchâshikha, agreeably toPadma Purâna,372is one of the sevenKumâraswho go to Shveta Dvîpa to worship Vishnu. We shall see, further on, what connection there is between the“celibate”and chaste Sons of Brahmâ, who refuse“to multiply,”and terrestrial mortals. Meanwhile, it is evident that the“Man-Plant, Saptaparna,”thus refers to the seven principles, and that man is compared to this seven-leaved plant, which is so sacred among Buddhists. The Egyptian allegory, in theBook of the Dead, that relates to the“reward of the Soul,”is as suggestive of our septenary doctrine as it is poetical. The Deceased is allotted a piece of land in the field of Aanroo, wherein the Manes, the deified shades of the dead, glean, as the harvest they have sown by their actions in life, the corn seven cubits high, which grows in a territory divided into seven and fourteen portions. This corn is the food on which they will live and prosper, or that will kill them, in Amenti, the realm of which the Aanroo-field is a domain. For, as said in the hymn,373the Deceased is either destroyed therein, or becomes pure spirit for the Eternity, in consequence of the“seven times seventy-seven lives”passed, or to be passed, on Earth. The idea of the corn reaped as the“fruit of our actions”is very graphic.4.It is the Root that never dies, the Three-tongued Flame of the Four Wicks(a)...The Wicks are the Sparks, that draw from the Three-tongued Flame,374shot out by the Seven, their Flame; the Beams and Sparks of One Moon, reflected in the Running Waves of all the Rivers of the Earth375(b).(a) The“Three-tongued Flame that never dies”is the immortal spiritual Triad, the Âtmâ, Buddhi and Manas, or rather the fruitage of the last, assimilated by the first two after every terrestrial life. The“Four Wicks,”that go out and are extinguished, are the Quaternary, the four lower principles, including the body.“I am the Three-wicked Flame and my Wicks are immortal,”says the Defunct.“I enter into the domain of Sekhem [the God whose[pg 258]hand sows the seed of action produced by the disembodied soul], and I enter the region of the Flames who have destroyed their adversaries [i.e., got rid of the sin-creating Four Wicks].”376“The Three-tongued Flame of the Four Wicks”corresponds to the four Unities and the three Binaries of the Sephirothal tree.(b) Just as milliards of bright sparks dance on the waters of an ocean, above which one and the same moon is shining, so our evanescent Personalities—the illusive envelopes of the immortal Monad-Ego—twinkle and dance on the waves of Mâyâ. They appear and, as the thousands of sparks produced by the moon-beams, last only so long as the Queen of the Night radiates her lustre on the“Running Waves”of Life, the period of a Manvantara; and then they disappear, the“Beams”—symbols of our eternal Spiritual Egos—alone surviving, remerged in, and being, as they were before, one with the Mother-Source.5.The Spark hangs from the Flame by the finest Thread of Fohat. It journeys through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ(a).It stops in the first,377and is a Metal and a Stone; it passes into the Second,378and behold—a Plant; the Plant whirls through Seven Forms and becomes a Sacred Animal379(b).From the combined attributes of these, Manu,380the Thinker, is formed.Who forms him? The Seven Lives, and the One Life(c).Who completes him? The Five-fold Lha. And who perfects the last Body? Fish, Sin and Soma381(d).(a) The phrase,“through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ,”refers here to the seven Globes of the Planetary Chain and the seven Rounds, or the forty-nine stations of active existence that are before the“Spark,”or Monad, at the beginning of every Great Life-Cycle, or Manvantara. The“Thread of Fohat”is the Thread of Life before referred to.This relates to the greatest problem of philosophy—the physical and substantial nature of Life, the independent nature of which is denied[pg 259]by Modern Science, because that Science is unable to comprehend it. The reïncarnationists and believers in Karma alone dimly perceive, that the whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations, whether in, or apart from, the physical body. Because even if:
Proceeded from, or was produced by, the infusion of the Spirit or Breath of Life into the quickening body of man, and was to supersede and take the place of that Spirit in the thus constituted Self, so that the Spirit passed into, was lost sight of, and disappeared in the Living Soul.The human body, he thinks, ought to be viewed as a matrix in which, and from which, the Soul, which he seems to place higher than the Spirit, is developed. Consideredfunctionallyand from the standpoint[pg 247]of activity, the Soul stands undeniably higher, in this finite and conditioned world of Mâyâ. The Soul, he says,“is ultimately produced from the animated body of man.”Thus the author identifies“Spirit”(Âtmâ) with the“Breath of Life”simply. The Eastern Occultists will demur to this statement, for it is based on the erroneous conception that Prâna and Âtmâ, or Jîvâtmâ, are one and the same thing. The author supports the argument, by showing that with the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and even Latins, Ruach, Pneuma and Spiritus meant Wind—with the Jews undeniably, and with the Greeks and Romans very probably; the Greek word Anemos (Wind) and the Latin Animus (Soul) having a suspicious relation.This is very far fetched. But a legitimate battle-field for deciding this question is hardly to be found, since Dr. Pratt seems to be a practical, matter-of-fact metaphysician, a kind of Kabalist-Positivist, whereas the Eastern metaphysicians, especially the Vedântins, are all Idealists. The Occultists also are of the extreme Esoteric Vedântin school, and though they call the One Life (Parabrahman) the Great Breath and the Whirlwind, they disconnect the seventh principle entirely from matter, and deny that it has any relation to, or connection with it.Thus the philosophy of man's psychic, spiritual and mental relations with his physical functions is in almost inextricable confusion. Neither the old Âryan nor the Egyptian psychology is now properly understood; nor can they be assimilated, without accepting the Esoteric septenary, or, at any rate, the Vedântic quinquepartite division of the human inner principles. Failing which, it will be for ever impossible to understand the metaphysical and purely psychic, and even physiological, relations between the Dhyân Chohans, or Angels, on the one plane, and Humanity on the other. No Eastern (Âryan) Esoteric works are so far published, but we possess the Egyptian papyri, which speak clearly of the seven principles, or the“Seven Souls of Man.”TheBook of the Deadgives a complete list of the“transformations”that every Defunct undergoes, while divesting himself, one by one, of all these principles—materialized for the sake of clearness into ethereal entities or bodies. We must, moreover, remind those who try to show that the Ancient Egyptians did not teach Reïncarnation, that the“Soul”(the Ego or Self) of the Defunct is said to be living in Eternity: it is immortal,“coëval with, and disappearing with, the Solar Boat,”that is, for the Cycle of Necessity. This“Soul”emergesfrom the Tiaou, the Realm of theCause of Life, and joins the living on Earth[pg 248]byday, to return to Tiaou everynight. This expresses the periodical existences of the Ego.357The Shadow, the Astral Form, is annihilated,“devoured by the Uræus,”358the Manes will be annihilated; the two Twins (the Fourth and Fifth Principles) will be scattered; but the Soul-Bird,“the Divine Swallow, and the Uræus of Flame”(Manas and Âtmâ-Buddhi) will live in the eternity, for they are their mother's husbands.Another suggestive analogy between the Âryan, or Brâhmanical, and the Egyptian Esotericism. The former call the Pitris the“Lunar Ancestors”of men, and the Egyptians make of the Moon-God, Taht-Esmun, the first human ancestor.This Moon-God“expressed the Seven nature-powers that were prior to himself, and were summed up in him as his seven souls, of which he was the manifestor as the Eighth One. [Hence the eighth sphere.]... The seven rays of the Chaldean ... Heptakis or Iao, on the Gnostic stones, indicate the same septenary of souls.... The first form of the mystical Seven was seen to be figured in heaven, by the seven large stars of the Great Bear, the constellation assigned by the Egyptians to the Mother of Time, and of the seven Elemental Powers.”359As well known to every Hindû, this same constellation represents in India the Seven Rishis, and is called Riksha, and Chitrashikandinas.Like alone produces like. The Earth gives Man his body, the Gods (Dhyânis) give him his five inner principles, the psychic Shadow, of which these Gods are often the animating principle. Spirit (Âtman) is one, and indiscrete. It is not in the Tiaou.For what is the Tiaou? The frequent allusion to it in theBook of the Deadcontains a mystery. Tiaou is the path of the Night-Sun, the inferior hemisphere, or the infernal region of the Egyptians, placed by them on theconcealed side of the Moon. The human being, in their Esotericism, came out from the Moon—a triple mystery, astronomical, physiological and psychical, at once; he crossed the whole cycle of existence, and then returned to his birth-place, before issuing from it again. Thus the Defunct is shown arriving in the West, receiving his judgment before Osiris, resurrecting as the God Horus, and circling round the sidereal heavens, which is an allegorical assimilation to Ra, the Sun; then having crossed the Noot, the Celestial Abyss, returning once more to Tiaou; an assimilation to Osiris, who, as the God of life[pg 249]and reproduction, inhabits the Moon. Plutarch360shows the Egyptians celebrating a festival called“The Ingress of Osiris into the Moon.”In theRitual,361life is promised after death; and the renovation of life is placed under the patronage of Osiris-Lunus, because the Moon was the symbol of life-renewals or reïncarnations, owing to its growth, waning, dying, and reäppearance every month. In theDankmoe,362it is said:“O Osiris-Lunus, that renews to thee thy renewal.”And Sabekh says to Seti I:363“Thou renewest thyself as the God Lunus, when a babe.”It is still better explained in a Louvre papyrus:364“Couplings and conceptions abound when he [Osiris-Lunus] is seen in heaven on that day.”Says Osiris:“O sole radiant beam of the Moon! I issue from the circulating multitudes [of stars].... Open me the Tiaou, for Osiris N. I will issue by day to do what I have to do amongst the living”365—i.e., to produce conceptions.Osiris was“God manifest in generation,”because the ancients knew, far better than the moderns, the real occult influences of the lunar body upon the mysteries of conception. In the oldest systems we find the Moon always male. Thus Soma, with the Hindûs, is a kind of sidereal Don Juan, a“King,”and the father, albeit illegitimate, of Budha—Wisdom. This relates to Occult Knowledge, a wisdom gathered through a thorough acquaintance with lunar mysteries, including those of sexual generation. And later, when the Moon became connected with the female Goddesses, with Diana, Isis, Artemis, Juno, etc., this connection was also due to a thorough knowledge of physiology and female nature, physical as much as psychic.If, instead of being taught in Sunday Schools useless lessons from theBible, the armies of the ragged and poor were taught Astrology—so far, at any rate, as the occult properties of the Moon and its hidden influences on generation are concerned—then, there would be little need to fear increase of the population, or to resort to the questionable literature of the Malthusians for its arrest. For it is the Moon and her conjunctions that regulate conceptions, and every Astrologer in India knows it. During the previous Races, and at least at the beginning of the present one, those who indulged in marital relations during certain lunar phases that made those relations sterile, were regarded as sorcerers[pg 250]and sinners. But now even these sins of old, which arose from the abuse of Occult knowledge, would appear preferable to the crimes of to-day, which are perpetrated because of the complete ignorance of such Occult influences.But, primarily, the Sun and Moon were the only visible and, by their effects, so to say,tangible, psychic and physiological deities—the Father and the Son—while Space or Air in general, or that expanse of heaven called Noot by the Egyptians, was the concealed Spirit or Breath of the two. The Father and Son were interchangeable in their functions, and worked together harmoniously in their effects upon terrestrial nature and humanity; hence they were regarded asone, thoughtwoas personified Entities. They were both males, and both had their distinct though collaborative work in the causative generation of humanity. So much from the astronomical and cosmic standpoints, viewed and expressed in symbolical language, which became in our last races theological and dogmatic. But behind this veil of cosmic and astrological symbols, there were the occult mysteries of anthropography and the primeval genesis of man. And in this, no knowledge of symbols, or even the key to the post-diluvian symbolical language of the Jews, will or can help, save only with reference to that which has been laid down in national scriptures for exoteric uses; the sum of which, however cleverly veiled, was but the smallest portion of the real primitive history of each people, and often, moreover, as in the Hebrew Scriptures, related merely to the terrestrial human, and not to the divine life of that nation. That psychic and spiritual element belonged to theMysteriesandInitiation. There were things never recorded in scrolls, but which, as in Central Asia, were engraved on rocks and in subterranean crypts.Nevertheless, there was a time when the whole world was“of one lip and of one knowledge,”and man knew more of his origin than he does now; and thus knew that the Sun and Moon, however large a part they may play in the constitution, growth and development of the human body, were not the direct causative agents of his appearance on Earth; for these agents, in truth, are the living and intelligent Powers which the Occultists call Dhyân Chohans.As to this, a very learned admirer of the Jewish Esotericism tells us that:TheKabalahsays expressly that Elohim is a“general abstraction”; what we call in mathematics“a constant coëfficient,”or a“general function,”entering into all[pg 251]construction, not particular; that is, by the general ratio 1 to 31415, the [Astro-Dhyânic and] Elohistic figures.To this the Eastern Occultist replies: Quite so; they are an abstraction to our physical senses. To our spiritual perceptions, however, and to our inner spiritual eye, the Elohim, or Dhyânis, are no more an abstraction than our soul and spirit are to us. Reject the one and you reject the other, since that which is thesurvivingEntityin us, is partly the direct emanation from, and partly those celestial Entitiesthemselves. One thing is certain; the Jews were perfectly acquainted with sorcery and various maleficent forces: but, with the exception of some of their great prophets and seers like Daniel and Ezekiel—Enoch belonging to a far distant race, as a generic character, and not to any nation but to all—they knew little of, nor would they deal with, the real divine Occultism; their national character being averse to anything which had no direct bearing upon their own ethnical, tribal and individual benefits—witness their own prophets, and the curses thundered by them against the“stiff-necked race.”But even theKabalahplainly shows the direct relation between the Sephiroth, or Elohim, and men.Therefore, when it is proved to us that the Kabalistic identification of Jehovah with Binah, a female Sephira, has still another, a sub-occult, meaning in it, then and then only will Occultists be ready to pass the palm of perfection to the Kabalist. Until then, it is asserted that, as Jehovah, in the abstract sense of a“one living God,”is a single number, a metaphysical figment, and a reality only when put in his proper place as an emanation and a Sephira—we have a right to maintain that theZohar, as witnessed by theBook of Numbers, at any rate, gave out originally, before the Christian Kabalists had disfigured it, and still gives out, the same doctrine that we do; that is, it makes Man emanate, not from one Celestial Man, but from a Septenary Group of Celestial Men, or Angels, just as inPymander, the Thought Divine.3.When the One becomes Two, the Three-fold appears(a).The Three are366One; and it is our Thread, O Lanoo, the Heart of the Man-Plant, called Saptaparna(b).(a)“When the One becomes Two, the Three-fold appears”: to wit, when the One Eternal drops its reflection into the region of Manifestation,[pg 252]that reflection, the Ray, differentiates the Water of Space; or, in the words of theBook of the Dead:“Chaos ceases, through the effulgence of the Ray of Primordial Light dissipating total darkness, by the help of the great magic power of the Word of the [Central] Sun.”Chaos becomes male-female, and Water, incubated by Light, and the Three-fold Being issues as its“First-born.”“Ra [or Osiris-Ptah] creates his own Limbs [like Brahmâ], by creating the Gods destined to personify his phases,”during the Cycle.367The Egyptian Ra, issuing from the Deep, is the Divine Universal Soul in its manifested aspect, and so is Nârâyana, the Purusha,“concealed in Âkâsha, and present in Ether.”This is the metaphysical explanation, and refers to the very beginning of Evolution, or, as we would rather say, of Theogony. The meaning of the Stanza, when explained from another standpoint in its reference to the mystery of man and his origin, is still more difficult to comprehend. In order to form a clear conception of what is meant by the One becoming Two, and then being transformed into the Three-fold, the student has to make himself thoroughly acquainted with what we call Rounds. If he refers toEsoteric Buddhism—the first attempt to sketch out an approximate outline of archaic cosmogony—he will find that by a Round is meant the serial evolution of nascent material Nature, of the seven Globes of our Chain,368with their mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms; man being included in the latter and standing at the head of it, during the whole period of a Life-Cycle, which latter would be called by the Brâhmans a“Day of Brahmâ.”It is, in short, one revolution of the“Wheel”(our Planetary Chain), which is composed of seven Globes, or seven separate“Wheels,”in another sense this time. When evolution has run[pg 253]downward into matter from Globe A to Globe G, it is one Round. In the middle of the fourth revolution, which is our present Round,“Evolution has reached its acme of physical development, crowned its work with the perfect physical man, and, from this point, begins its work spirit-ward.”All this needs little repetition, as it is well explained inEsoteric Buddhism. That which was hardly touched upon, however, and of which the little that was said has misled many, is the origin of man, and it is upon this that a little more light may now be thrown, just enough to make the Stanza more comprehensible, as the process will be fully explained only in its legitimate place, in Volume II.Now every Round, on the descending scale, is but a repetition in a more concrete form of the Round which preceded it, just as every Globe, down to our Fourth Sphere the actual Earth, is a grosser and more material copy of the more shadowy Sphere which precedes it, each in order, on the three higher planes.369On its way upwards, on the ascending arc, Evolution spiritualizes and etherealizes, so to speak, the general nature of all, bringing it on to a level with the plane on which the twin Globe on the opposite arc is placed; the result being, that when the seventh Globe is reached, in whatever Round, the nature of everything that is evolving returns to the condition it was in at its starting point—plus, every time, a new and superior degree in the states of consciousness. Thus it becomes clear that the“origin of man,”so-called, in this our present Round, or Life-Cycle, on this Planet, must occupy the same place in the same order—save details based on local conditions and time—as in the preceding Round. Again, it must be explained and remembered that, as the work of each Round is said to be apportioned to a different Group of so-called Creators, or Architects, so is that of every Globe; that is, it is under the supervision and guidance of special Builders and Watchers—the various Dhyân Chohans.“Creators”is an incorrect word to use, as no other religion, not even the sect of the Visishthadvaitîs in India, one which anthropomorphizes even Parabrahman, believes in creationex nihilo, as Christians and Jews do, but only in evolution out of preëxisting materials.The Group of the Hierarchy which is commissioned to“create”men is a special Group, then; yet it evolved shadowy man in this Cycle, just as a higher and still more spiritual Group evolved him in the Third[pg 254]Round. But as it is the Sixth, on the downward scale of Spirituality—the last and Seventh being the Terrestrial Spirits (Elementals), which gradually form, build and condense his physical body—this Sixth Group evolves no more than the future man's shadowy form, a filmy, hardly visible, transparent copy of themselves. It becomes the task of the Fifth Hierarchy—the mysterious Beings that preside over the constellation Capricornus, Makara, or“Crocodile,”in India and in Egypt—to inform the empty and ethereal animal form, and make of it the Rational Man. This is one of those subjects upon which very little may be said to the general public. It is a Mystery truly, but only to him who is prepared to reject the existence of intellectual and conscious Spiritual Beings in the Universe, and to limit full Consciousness to man alone, and that only as a“function of the brain.”Many are those among the Spiritual Entities, who have incarnated bodily in man, since his first appearance, and who, for all that, still exist as independently as they did before, in the infinitudes of Space.To put it more clearly, such an invisible Entity may be bodily present on earth without, however, abandoning its status and functions in the supersensuous regions. If this needs explanation, we can do no better than remind the reader of like cases in so-called“Spiritualism”; though such cases are very rare, at least as regards the nature of the Entity incarnating, or taking temporary possession of a medium. For the so-called“spirits”that may occasionally possess themselves of the bodies of mediums are not the Monads, or Higher Principles, of disembodied Personalities. Such“spirits”can only be either Elementaries, or—Nirmânakâyas. Just as certain persons, whether by virtue of a peculiar organization, or through the power of acquired mystic knowledge, can be seen in their“double”in one place, while their body is many miles away; so the same thing can occur in the case of superior Beings.Man, philosophically considered, is, in his outward form, simply an animal, hardly more perfect than his pithecoid-like ancestor of the Third Round. He is a living Body, not a living Being, since the realization of existence, the“Ego Sum,”necessitates self-consciousness, and an animal can only have direct consciousness, or instinct. This was so well understood by the ancients, that even the Kabalists made of soul and body two Lives, independent of each other. In theNew Aspects of Life, the author states the Kabalistic teaching:They held that, functionally, Spirit and Matter, of corresponding opacity and[pg 255]density, tended to coalesce; and that the resultant created Spirits, in the disembodied state, were constituted on a scale in which the differing opacities and transparencies of elemental or uncreated Spirit were reproduced. And that these Spirits, in the disembodied state, attracted, appropriated, digested and assimilated elemental Spirit and elemental Matter whose condition was conformed to their own.... They therefore taught that there was a wide difference in the conditions of created Spirits; and that, in the intimate association between the Spirit-world and the world of Matter, the more opaque Spirits, in the disembodied state, were drawn towards the more dense parts of the material world, and therefore tended towards the centre of the Earth, where they found the conditions most suited to their state; while the more transparent Spirits passed into the surrounding aura of the planet, the most rarefied finding their home in its satellite.370This relates exclusively to our Elemental Spirits, and has naught to do with either the Planetary, Sidereal, Cosmic or Inter-Etheric Intelligent Forces, or“Angels”as they are termed by the Roman Church. The Jewish Kabalists, especially the practical Occultists who dealt with Ceremonial Magic, busied themselves solely with the Spirits of the Planets and the“Elementals”so-called. Therefore the above covers only a portion of the Esoteric teaching.The Soul, whose body-vehicle is the astral, ethereo-substantial envelope, could die and man be still living on earth. That is to say, the Soul could free itself from and quit the tabernacle for various reasons, such as insanity, spiritual and physical depravity, etc. The possibility of the“Soul”—that is, the eternal Spiritual Ego—dwelling in the unseen worlds, while its body goes on living on Earth, is a preeminently Occult doctrine, especially in Chinese and Buddhist philosophy. Many are thesoullessmen among us, for the occurrence is found to take place in wicked materialists as well as in persons“who advance in holiness and never turn back.”Therefore, that which living men (Initiates) can do, the Dhyânis, who have no physical body to hamper them, can do still better. This was the belief of the antediluvians, and it is fast becoming that of modern intellectual society in“Spiritualism,”as well as in the Greek and Roman Churches, which teach the ubiquity of their Angels. The Zoroastrians regarded their Amshaspends as dual entities (Ferouers), applying this duality—in Esoteric philosophy, at any rate—to all the spiritual and invisible denizens of the numberless worlds in space, which are visible to our eye. In a note of Damascius (sixth century) on the Chaldean Oracles, we have ample evidence of the universality of[pg 256]this doctrine, for he says:“In these Oracles, the seven Cosmocratores of the World [‘the World-Pillars’], mentioned likewise by St. Paul, are double; one set being commissioned to rule the superior worlds, the spiritual and the sidereal, and the other to guide and watch over the worlds of matter.”Such is also the opinion of Jamblichus, who makes an evident distinction between the Archangels and the Archontes.371The above may be applied, of course, to the distinction made between the degrees or orders of Spiritual Beings, and it is in this sense that the Roman Catholic Church tries to interpret and teach the difference; for while the Archangels are in her teaching divine and holy, she denounces their“Doubles”as Devils. But the word Ferouer is not to be understood in this sense, for it means simply the reverse or the opposite side of some attribute or quality. Thus when the Occultist says that the“Demon is the inverse of God”—evil, the reverse of the medal—he does not mean two separate actualities, but two aspects or facets of the same Unity. But the best man living, side by side with an Archangel—as described in Theology—would appear a fiend. Hence a certain reason in depreciating a lower“Double,”immersed far deeper in matter than its original. But still there is as little cause to regard them as Devils, and this is precisely what the Roman Catholics maintain against all reason and logic.This identity between the Spirit and its material“Double”—in man it is the reverse—explains still better the confusion, already alluded to in this work, in the names and individualities, as well as in the numbers, of the Rishis and Prajâpatis; especially of those of the Satya Yuga and the Mahâbhâratan Period. It also throws additional light on what the Secret Doctrine teaches with regard to the Root- and the Seed-Manus. Not only these Progenitors of our mankind, but every human being, we are taught, has his prototype in the Spiritual Spheres, which prototype is the highest essence of his Seventh Principle. Thus the seven Manus become fourteen, the Root-Manu being the Prime Cause, and the Seed-Manu its Effect; and from the Satya Yuga (the first stage) to the Heroic Period, these Manus or Rishis become twenty-one in number.(b) The concluding sentence of this shloka shows how archaic is the belief and the doctrine that man is seven-fold in his constitution. The“Thread”of Being, which animates man, and passes through all his[pg 257]Personalities, or Rebirths on this Earth—an allusion to Sûtrâtmâ—the Thread on which moreover all his“Spirits”are strung, is spun from the essence of the Three-fold, the Four-fold and the Five-fold which contain all the preceding. Panchâshikha, agreeably toPadma Purâna,372is one of the sevenKumâraswho go to Shveta Dvîpa to worship Vishnu. We shall see, further on, what connection there is between the“celibate”and chaste Sons of Brahmâ, who refuse“to multiply,”and terrestrial mortals. Meanwhile, it is evident that the“Man-Plant, Saptaparna,”thus refers to the seven principles, and that man is compared to this seven-leaved plant, which is so sacred among Buddhists. The Egyptian allegory, in theBook of the Dead, that relates to the“reward of the Soul,”is as suggestive of our septenary doctrine as it is poetical. The Deceased is allotted a piece of land in the field of Aanroo, wherein the Manes, the deified shades of the dead, glean, as the harvest they have sown by their actions in life, the corn seven cubits high, which grows in a territory divided into seven and fourteen portions. This corn is the food on which they will live and prosper, or that will kill them, in Amenti, the realm of which the Aanroo-field is a domain. For, as said in the hymn,373the Deceased is either destroyed therein, or becomes pure spirit for the Eternity, in consequence of the“seven times seventy-seven lives”passed, or to be passed, on Earth. The idea of the corn reaped as the“fruit of our actions”is very graphic.4.It is the Root that never dies, the Three-tongued Flame of the Four Wicks(a)...The Wicks are the Sparks, that draw from the Three-tongued Flame,374shot out by the Seven, their Flame; the Beams and Sparks of One Moon, reflected in the Running Waves of all the Rivers of the Earth375(b).(a) The“Three-tongued Flame that never dies”is the immortal spiritual Triad, the Âtmâ, Buddhi and Manas, or rather the fruitage of the last, assimilated by the first two after every terrestrial life. The“Four Wicks,”that go out and are extinguished, are the Quaternary, the four lower principles, including the body.“I am the Three-wicked Flame and my Wicks are immortal,”says the Defunct.“I enter into the domain of Sekhem [the God whose[pg 258]hand sows the seed of action produced by the disembodied soul], and I enter the region of the Flames who have destroyed their adversaries [i.e., got rid of the sin-creating Four Wicks].”376“The Three-tongued Flame of the Four Wicks”corresponds to the four Unities and the three Binaries of the Sephirothal tree.(b) Just as milliards of bright sparks dance on the waters of an ocean, above which one and the same moon is shining, so our evanescent Personalities—the illusive envelopes of the immortal Monad-Ego—twinkle and dance on the waves of Mâyâ. They appear and, as the thousands of sparks produced by the moon-beams, last only so long as the Queen of the Night radiates her lustre on the“Running Waves”of Life, the period of a Manvantara; and then they disappear, the“Beams”—symbols of our eternal Spiritual Egos—alone surviving, remerged in, and being, as they were before, one with the Mother-Source.5.The Spark hangs from the Flame by the finest Thread of Fohat. It journeys through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ(a).It stops in the first,377and is a Metal and a Stone; it passes into the Second,378and behold—a Plant; the Plant whirls through Seven Forms and becomes a Sacred Animal379(b).From the combined attributes of these, Manu,380the Thinker, is formed.Who forms him? The Seven Lives, and the One Life(c).Who completes him? The Five-fold Lha. And who perfects the last Body? Fish, Sin and Soma381(d).(a) The phrase,“through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ,”refers here to the seven Globes of the Planetary Chain and the seven Rounds, or the forty-nine stations of active existence that are before the“Spark,”or Monad, at the beginning of every Great Life-Cycle, or Manvantara. The“Thread of Fohat”is the Thread of Life before referred to.This relates to the greatest problem of philosophy—the physical and substantial nature of Life, the independent nature of which is denied[pg 259]by Modern Science, because that Science is unable to comprehend it. The reïncarnationists and believers in Karma alone dimly perceive, that the whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations, whether in, or apart from, the physical body. Because even if:
Proceeded from, or was produced by, the infusion of the Spirit or Breath of Life into the quickening body of man, and was to supersede and take the place of that Spirit in the thus constituted Self, so that the Spirit passed into, was lost sight of, and disappeared in the Living Soul.The human body, he thinks, ought to be viewed as a matrix in which, and from which, the Soul, which he seems to place higher than the Spirit, is developed. Consideredfunctionallyand from the standpoint[pg 247]of activity, the Soul stands undeniably higher, in this finite and conditioned world of Mâyâ. The Soul, he says,“is ultimately produced from the animated body of man.”Thus the author identifies“Spirit”(Âtmâ) with the“Breath of Life”simply. The Eastern Occultists will demur to this statement, for it is based on the erroneous conception that Prâna and Âtmâ, or Jîvâtmâ, are one and the same thing. The author supports the argument, by showing that with the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and even Latins, Ruach, Pneuma and Spiritus meant Wind—with the Jews undeniably, and with the Greeks and Romans very probably; the Greek word Anemos (Wind) and the Latin Animus (Soul) having a suspicious relation.This is very far fetched. But a legitimate battle-field for deciding this question is hardly to be found, since Dr. Pratt seems to be a practical, matter-of-fact metaphysician, a kind of Kabalist-Positivist, whereas the Eastern metaphysicians, especially the Vedântins, are all Idealists. The Occultists also are of the extreme Esoteric Vedântin school, and though they call the One Life (Parabrahman) the Great Breath and the Whirlwind, they disconnect the seventh principle entirely from matter, and deny that it has any relation to, or connection with it.Thus the philosophy of man's psychic, spiritual and mental relations with his physical functions is in almost inextricable confusion. Neither the old Âryan nor the Egyptian psychology is now properly understood; nor can they be assimilated, without accepting the Esoteric septenary, or, at any rate, the Vedântic quinquepartite division of the human inner principles. Failing which, it will be for ever impossible to understand the metaphysical and purely psychic, and even physiological, relations between the Dhyân Chohans, or Angels, on the one plane, and Humanity on the other. No Eastern (Âryan) Esoteric works are so far published, but we possess the Egyptian papyri, which speak clearly of the seven principles, or the“Seven Souls of Man.”TheBook of the Deadgives a complete list of the“transformations”that every Defunct undergoes, while divesting himself, one by one, of all these principles—materialized for the sake of clearness into ethereal entities or bodies. We must, moreover, remind those who try to show that the Ancient Egyptians did not teach Reïncarnation, that the“Soul”(the Ego or Self) of the Defunct is said to be living in Eternity: it is immortal,“coëval with, and disappearing with, the Solar Boat,”that is, for the Cycle of Necessity. This“Soul”emergesfrom the Tiaou, the Realm of theCause of Life, and joins the living on Earth[pg 248]byday, to return to Tiaou everynight. This expresses the periodical existences of the Ego.357The Shadow, the Astral Form, is annihilated,“devoured by the Uræus,”358the Manes will be annihilated; the two Twins (the Fourth and Fifth Principles) will be scattered; but the Soul-Bird,“the Divine Swallow, and the Uræus of Flame”(Manas and Âtmâ-Buddhi) will live in the eternity, for they are their mother's husbands.Another suggestive analogy between the Âryan, or Brâhmanical, and the Egyptian Esotericism. The former call the Pitris the“Lunar Ancestors”of men, and the Egyptians make of the Moon-God, Taht-Esmun, the first human ancestor.This Moon-God“expressed the Seven nature-powers that were prior to himself, and were summed up in him as his seven souls, of which he was the manifestor as the Eighth One. [Hence the eighth sphere.]... The seven rays of the Chaldean ... Heptakis or Iao, on the Gnostic stones, indicate the same septenary of souls.... The first form of the mystical Seven was seen to be figured in heaven, by the seven large stars of the Great Bear, the constellation assigned by the Egyptians to the Mother of Time, and of the seven Elemental Powers.”359As well known to every Hindû, this same constellation represents in India the Seven Rishis, and is called Riksha, and Chitrashikandinas.Like alone produces like. The Earth gives Man his body, the Gods (Dhyânis) give him his five inner principles, the psychic Shadow, of which these Gods are often the animating principle. Spirit (Âtman) is one, and indiscrete. It is not in the Tiaou.For what is the Tiaou? The frequent allusion to it in theBook of the Deadcontains a mystery. Tiaou is the path of the Night-Sun, the inferior hemisphere, or the infernal region of the Egyptians, placed by them on theconcealed side of the Moon. The human being, in their Esotericism, came out from the Moon—a triple mystery, astronomical, physiological and psychical, at once; he crossed the whole cycle of existence, and then returned to his birth-place, before issuing from it again. Thus the Defunct is shown arriving in the West, receiving his judgment before Osiris, resurrecting as the God Horus, and circling round the sidereal heavens, which is an allegorical assimilation to Ra, the Sun; then having crossed the Noot, the Celestial Abyss, returning once more to Tiaou; an assimilation to Osiris, who, as the God of life[pg 249]and reproduction, inhabits the Moon. Plutarch360shows the Egyptians celebrating a festival called“The Ingress of Osiris into the Moon.”In theRitual,361life is promised after death; and the renovation of life is placed under the patronage of Osiris-Lunus, because the Moon was the symbol of life-renewals or reïncarnations, owing to its growth, waning, dying, and reäppearance every month. In theDankmoe,362it is said:“O Osiris-Lunus, that renews to thee thy renewal.”And Sabekh says to Seti I:363“Thou renewest thyself as the God Lunus, when a babe.”It is still better explained in a Louvre papyrus:364“Couplings and conceptions abound when he [Osiris-Lunus] is seen in heaven on that day.”Says Osiris:“O sole radiant beam of the Moon! I issue from the circulating multitudes [of stars].... Open me the Tiaou, for Osiris N. I will issue by day to do what I have to do amongst the living”365—i.e., to produce conceptions.Osiris was“God manifest in generation,”because the ancients knew, far better than the moderns, the real occult influences of the lunar body upon the mysteries of conception. In the oldest systems we find the Moon always male. Thus Soma, with the Hindûs, is a kind of sidereal Don Juan, a“King,”and the father, albeit illegitimate, of Budha—Wisdom. This relates to Occult Knowledge, a wisdom gathered through a thorough acquaintance with lunar mysteries, including those of sexual generation. And later, when the Moon became connected with the female Goddesses, with Diana, Isis, Artemis, Juno, etc., this connection was also due to a thorough knowledge of physiology and female nature, physical as much as psychic.If, instead of being taught in Sunday Schools useless lessons from theBible, the armies of the ragged and poor were taught Astrology—so far, at any rate, as the occult properties of the Moon and its hidden influences on generation are concerned—then, there would be little need to fear increase of the population, or to resort to the questionable literature of the Malthusians for its arrest. For it is the Moon and her conjunctions that regulate conceptions, and every Astrologer in India knows it. During the previous Races, and at least at the beginning of the present one, those who indulged in marital relations during certain lunar phases that made those relations sterile, were regarded as sorcerers[pg 250]and sinners. But now even these sins of old, which arose from the abuse of Occult knowledge, would appear preferable to the crimes of to-day, which are perpetrated because of the complete ignorance of such Occult influences.But, primarily, the Sun and Moon were the only visible and, by their effects, so to say,tangible, psychic and physiological deities—the Father and the Son—while Space or Air in general, or that expanse of heaven called Noot by the Egyptians, was the concealed Spirit or Breath of the two. The Father and Son were interchangeable in their functions, and worked together harmoniously in their effects upon terrestrial nature and humanity; hence they were regarded asone, thoughtwoas personified Entities. They were both males, and both had their distinct though collaborative work in the causative generation of humanity. So much from the astronomical and cosmic standpoints, viewed and expressed in symbolical language, which became in our last races theological and dogmatic. But behind this veil of cosmic and astrological symbols, there were the occult mysteries of anthropography and the primeval genesis of man. And in this, no knowledge of symbols, or even the key to the post-diluvian symbolical language of the Jews, will or can help, save only with reference to that which has been laid down in national scriptures for exoteric uses; the sum of which, however cleverly veiled, was but the smallest portion of the real primitive history of each people, and often, moreover, as in the Hebrew Scriptures, related merely to the terrestrial human, and not to the divine life of that nation. That psychic and spiritual element belonged to theMysteriesandInitiation. There were things never recorded in scrolls, but which, as in Central Asia, were engraved on rocks and in subterranean crypts.Nevertheless, there was a time when the whole world was“of one lip and of one knowledge,”and man knew more of his origin than he does now; and thus knew that the Sun and Moon, however large a part they may play in the constitution, growth and development of the human body, were not the direct causative agents of his appearance on Earth; for these agents, in truth, are the living and intelligent Powers which the Occultists call Dhyân Chohans.As to this, a very learned admirer of the Jewish Esotericism tells us that:TheKabalahsays expressly that Elohim is a“general abstraction”; what we call in mathematics“a constant coëfficient,”or a“general function,”entering into all[pg 251]construction, not particular; that is, by the general ratio 1 to 31415, the [Astro-Dhyânic and] Elohistic figures.To this the Eastern Occultist replies: Quite so; they are an abstraction to our physical senses. To our spiritual perceptions, however, and to our inner spiritual eye, the Elohim, or Dhyânis, are no more an abstraction than our soul and spirit are to us. Reject the one and you reject the other, since that which is thesurvivingEntityin us, is partly the direct emanation from, and partly those celestial Entitiesthemselves. One thing is certain; the Jews were perfectly acquainted with sorcery and various maleficent forces: but, with the exception of some of their great prophets and seers like Daniel and Ezekiel—Enoch belonging to a far distant race, as a generic character, and not to any nation but to all—they knew little of, nor would they deal with, the real divine Occultism; their national character being averse to anything which had no direct bearing upon their own ethnical, tribal and individual benefits—witness their own prophets, and the curses thundered by them against the“stiff-necked race.”But even theKabalahplainly shows the direct relation between the Sephiroth, or Elohim, and men.Therefore, when it is proved to us that the Kabalistic identification of Jehovah with Binah, a female Sephira, has still another, a sub-occult, meaning in it, then and then only will Occultists be ready to pass the palm of perfection to the Kabalist. Until then, it is asserted that, as Jehovah, in the abstract sense of a“one living God,”is a single number, a metaphysical figment, and a reality only when put in his proper place as an emanation and a Sephira—we have a right to maintain that theZohar, as witnessed by theBook of Numbers, at any rate, gave out originally, before the Christian Kabalists had disfigured it, and still gives out, the same doctrine that we do; that is, it makes Man emanate, not from one Celestial Man, but from a Septenary Group of Celestial Men, or Angels, just as inPymander, the Thought Divine.3.When the One becomes Two, the Three-fold appears(a).The Three are366One; and it is our Thread, O Lanoo, the Heart of the Man-Plant, called Saptaparna(b).(a)“When the One becomes Two, the Three-fold appears”: to wit, when the One Eternal drops its reflection into the region of Manifestation,[pg 252]that reflection, the Ray, differentiates the Water of Space; or, in the words of theBook of the Dead:“Chaos ceases, through the effulgence of the Ray of Primordial Light dissipating total darkness, by the help of the great magic power of the Word of the [Central] Sun.”Chaos becomes male-female, and Water, incubated by Light, and the Three-fold Being issues as its“First-born.”“Ra [or Osiris-Ptah] creates his own Limbs [like Brahmâ], by creating the Gods destined to personify his phases,”during the Cycle.367The Egyptian Ra, issuing from the Deep, is the Divine Universal Soul in its manifested aspect, and so is Nârâyana, the Purusha,“concealed in Âkâsha, and present in Ether.”This is the metaphysical explanation, and refers to the very beginning of Evolution, or, as we would rather say, of Theogony. The meaning of the Stanza, when explained from another standpoint in its reference to the mystery of man and his origin, is still more difficult to comprehend. In order to form a clear conception of what is meant by the One becoming Two, and then being transformed into the Three-fold, the student has to make himself thoroughly acquainted with what we call Rounds. If he refers toEsoteric Buddhism—the first attempt to sketch out an approximate outline of archaic cosmogony—he will find that by a Round is meant the serial evolution of nascent material Nature, of the seven Globes of our Chain,368with their mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms; man being included in the latter and standing at the head of it, during the whole period of a Life-Cycle, which latter would be called by the Brâhmans a“Day of Brahmâ.”It is, in short, one revolution of the“Wheel”(our Planetary Chain), which is composed of seven Globes, or seven separate“Wheels,”in another sense this time. When evolution has run[pg 253]downward into matter from Globe A to Globe G, it is one Round. In the middle of the fourth revolution, which is our present Round,“Evolution has reached its acme of physical development, crowned its work with the perfect physical man, and, from this point, begins its work spirit-ward.”All this needs little repetition, as it is well explained inEsoteric Buddhism. That which was hardly touched upon, however, and of which the little that was said has misled many, is the origin of man, and it is upon this that a little more light may now be thrown, just enough to make the Stanza more comprehensible, as the process will be fully explained only in its legitimate place, in Volume II.Now every Round, on the descending scale, is but a repetition in a more concrete form of the Round which preceded it, just as every Globe, down to our Fourth Sphere the actual Earth, is a grosser and more material copy of the more shadowy Sphere which precedes it, each in order, on the three higher planes.369On its way upwards, on the ascending arc, Evolution spiritualizes and etherealizes, so to speak, the general nature of all, bringing it on to a level with the plane on which the twin Globe on the opposite arc is placed; the result being, that when the seventh Globe is reached, in whatever Round, the nature of everything that is evolving returns to the condition it was in at its starting point—plus, every time, a new and superior degree in the states of consciousness. Thus it becomes clear that the“origin of man,”so-called, in this our present Round, or Life-Cycle, on this Planet, must occupy the same place in the same order—save details based on local conditions and time—as in the preceding Round. Again, it must be explained and remembered that, as the work of each Round is said to be apportioned to a different Group of so-called Creators, or Architects, so is that of every Globe; that is, it is under the supervision and guidance of special Builders and Watchers—the various Dhyân Chohans.“Creators”is an incorrect word to use, as no other religion, not even the sect of the Visishthadvaitîs in India, one which anthropomorphizes even Parabrahman, believes in creationex nihilo, as Christians and Jews do, but only in evolution out of preëxisting materials.The Group of the Hierarchy which is commissioned to“create”men is a special Group, then; yet it evolved shadowy man in this Cycle, just as a higher and still more spiritual Group evolved him in the Third[pg 254]Round. But as it is the Sixth, on the downward scale of Spirituality—the last and Seventh being the Terrestrial Spirits (Elementals), which gradually form, build and condense his physical body—this Sixth Group evolves no more than the future man's shadowy form, a filmy, hardly visible, transparent copy of themselves. It becomes the task of the Fifth Hierarchy—the mysterious Beings that preside over the constellation Capricornus, Makara, or“Crocodile,”in India and in Egypt—to inform the empty and ethereal animal form, and make of it the Rational Man. This is one of those subjects upon which very little may be said to the general public. It is a Mystery truly, but only to him who is prepared to reject the existence of intellectual and conscious Spiritual Beings in the Universe, and to limit full Consciousness to man alone, and that only as a“function of the brain.”Many are those among the Spiritual Entities, who have incarnated bodily in man, since his first appearance, and who, for all that, still exist as independently as they did before, in the infinitudes of Space.To put it more clearly, such an invisible Entity may be bodily present on earth without, however, abandoning its status and functions in the supersensuous regions. If this needs explanation, we can do no better than remind the reader of like cases in so-called“Spiritualism”; though such cases are very rare, at least as regards the nature of the Entity incarnating, or taking temporary possession of a medium. For the so-called“spirits”that may occasionally possess themselves of the bodies of mediums are not the Monads, or Higher Principles, of disembodied Personalities. Such“spirits”can only be either Elementaries, or—Nirmânakâyas. Just as certain persons, whether by virtue of a peculiar organization, or through the power of acquired mystic knowledge, can be seen in their“double”in one place, while their body is many miles away; so the same thing can occur in the case of superior Beings.Man, philosophically considered, is, in his outward form, simply an animal, hardly more perfect than his pithecoid-like ancestor of the Third Round. He is a living Body, not a living Being, since the realization of existence, the“Ego Sum,”necessitates self-consciousness, and an animal can only have direct consciousness, or instinct. This was so well understood by the ancients, that even the Kabalists made of soul and body two Lives, independent of each other. In theNew Aspects of Life, the author states the Kabalistic teaching:They held that, functionally, Spirit and Matter, of corresponding opacity and[pg 255]density, tended to coalesce; and that the resultant created Spirits, in the disembodied state, were constituted on a scale in which the differing opacities and transparencies of elemental or uncreated Spirit were reproduced. And that these Spirits, in the disembodied state, attracted, appropriated, digested and assimilated elemental Spirit and elemental Matter whose condition was conformed to their own.... They therefore taught that there was a wide difference in the conditions of created Spirits; and that, in the intimate association between the Spirit-world and the world of Matter, the more opaque Spirits, in the disembodied state, were drawn towards the more dense parts of the material world, and therefore tended towards the centre of the Earth, where they found the conditions most suited to their state; while the more transparent Spirits passed into the surrounding aura of the planet, the most rarefied finding their home in its satellite.370This relates exclusively to our Elemental Spirits, and has naught to do with either the Planetary, Sidereal, Cosmic or Inter-Etheric Intelligent Forces, or“Angels”as they are termed by the Roman Church. The Jewish Kabalists, especially the practical Occultists who dealt with Ceremonial Magic, busied themselves solely with the Spirits of the Planets and the“Elementals”so-called. Therefore the above covers only a portion of the Esoteric teaching.The Soul, whose body-vehicle is the astral, ethereo-substantial envelope, could die and man be still living on earth. That is to say, the Soul could free itself from and quit the tabernacle for various reasons, such as insanity, spiritual and physical depravity, etc. The possibility of the“Soul”—that is, the eternal Spiritual Ego—dwelling in the unseen worlds, while its body goes on living on Earth, is a preeminently Occult doctrine, especially in Chinese and Buddhist philosophy. Many are thesoullessmen among us, for the occurrence is found to take place in wicked materialists as well as in persons“who advance in holiness and never turn back.”Therefore, that which living men (Initiates) can do, the Dhyânis, who have no physical body to hamper them, can do still better. This was the belief of the antediluvians, and it is fast becoming that of modern intellectual society in“Spiritualism,”as well as in the Greek and Roman Churches, which teach the ubiquity of their Angels. The Zoroastrians regarded their Amshaspends as dual entities (Ferouers), applying this duality—in Esoteric philosophy, at any rate—to all the spiritual and invisible denizens of the numberless worlds in space, which are visible to our eye. In a note of Damascius (sixth century) on the Chaldean Oracles, we have ample evidence of the universality of[pg 256]this doctrine, for he says:“In these Oracles, the seven Cosmocratores of the World [‘the World-Pillars’], mentioned likewise by St. Paul, are double; one set being commissioned to rule the superior worlds, the spiritual and the sidereal, and the other to guide and watch over the worlds of matter.”Such is also the opinion of Jamblichus, who makes an evident distinction between the Archangels and the Archontes.371The above may be applied, of course, to the distinction made between the degrees or orders of Spiritual Beings, and it is in this sense that the Roman Catholic Church tries to interpret and teach the difference; for while the Archangels are in her teaching divine and holy, she denounces their“Doubles”as Devils. But the word Ferouer is not to be understood in this sense, for it means simply the reverse or the opposite side of some attribute or quality. Thus when the Occultist says that the“Demon is the inverse of God”—evil, the reverse of the medal—he does not mean two separate actualities, but two aspects or facets of the same Unity. But the best man living, side by side with an Archangel—as described in Theology—would appear a fiend. Hence a certain reason in depreciating a lower“Double,”immersed far deeper in matter than its original. But still there is as little cause to regard them as Devils, and this is precisely what the Roman Catholics maintain against all reason and logic.This identity between the Spirit and its material“Double”—in man it is the reverse—explains still better the confusion, already alluded to in this work, in the names and individualities, as well as in the numbers, of the Rishis and Prajâpatis; especially of those of the Satya Yuga and the Mahâbhâratan Period. It also throws additional light on what the Secret Doctrine teaches with regard to the Root- and the Seed-Manus. Not only these Progenitors of our mankind, but every human being, we are taught, has his prototype in the Spiritual Spheres, which prototype is the highest essence of his Seventh Principle. Thus the seven Manus become fourteen, the Root-Manu being the Prime Cause, and the Seed-Manu its Effect; and from the Satya Yuga (the first stage) to the Heroic Period, these Manus or Rishis become twenty-one in number.(b) The concluding sentence of this shloka shows how archaic is the belief and the doctrine that man is seven-fold in his constitution. The“Thread”of Being, which animates man, and passes through all his[pg 257]Personalities, or Rebirths on this Earth—an allusion to Sûtrâtmâ—the Thread on which moreover all his“Spirits”are strung, is spun from the essence of the Three-fold, the Four-fold and the Five-fold which contain all the preceding. Panchâshikha, agreeably toPadma Purâna,372is one of the sevenKumâraswho go to Shveta Dvîpa to worship Vishnu. We shall see, further on, what connection there is between the“celibate”and chaste Sons of Brahmâ, who refuse“to multiply,”and terrestrial mortals. Meanwhile, it is evident that the“Man-Plant, Saptaparna,”thus refers to the seven principles, and that man is compared to this seven-leaved plant, which is so sacred among Buddhists. The Egyptian allegory, in theBook of the Dead, that relates to the“reward of the Soul,”is as suggestive of our septenary doctrine as it is poetical. The Deceased is allotted a piece of land in the field of Aanroo, wherein the Manes, the deified shades of the dead, glean, as the harvest they have sown by their actions in life, the corn seven cubits high, which grows in a territory divided into seven and fourteen portions. This corn is the food on which they will live and prosper, or that will kill them, in Amenti, the realm of which the Aanroo-field is a domain. For, as said in the hymn,373the Deceased is either destroyed therein, or becomes pure spirit for the Eternity, in consequence of the“seven times seventy-seven lives”passed, or to be passed, on Earth. The idea of the corn reaped as the“fruit of our actions”is very graphic.4.It is the Root that never dies, the Three-tongued Flame of the Four Wicks(a)...The Wicks are the Sparks, that draw from the Three-tongued Flame,374shot out by the Seven, their Flame; the Beams and Sparks of One Moon, reflected in the Running Waves of all the Rivers of the Earth375(b).(a) The“Three-tongued Flame that never dies”is the immortal spiritual Triad, the Âtmâ, Buddhi and Manas, or rather the fruitage of the last, assimilated by the first two after every terrestrial life. The“Four Wicks,”that go out and are extinguished, are the Quaternary, the four lower principles, including the body.“I am the Three-wicked Flame and my Wicks are immortal,”says the Defunct.“I enter into the domain of Sekhem [the God whose[pg 258]hand sows the seed of action produced by the disembodied soul], and I enter the region of the Flames who have destroyed their adversaries [i.e., got rid of the sin-creating Four Wicks].”376“The Three-tongued Flame of the Four Wicks”corresponds to the four Unities and the three Binaries of the Sephirothal tree.(b) Just as milliards of bright sparks dance on the waters of an ocean, above which one and the same moon is shining, so our evanescent Personalities—the illusive envelopes of the immortal Monad-Ego—twinkle and dance on the waves of Mâyâ. They appear and, as the thousands of sparks produced by the moon-beams, last only so long as the Queen of the Night radiates her lustre on the“Running Waves”of Life, the period of a Manvantara; and then they disappear, the“Beams”—symbols of our eternal Spiritual Egos—alone surviving, remerged in, and being, as they were before, one with the Mother-Source.5.The Spark hangs from the Flame by the finest Thread of Fohat. It journeys through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ(a).It stops in the first,377and is a Metal and a Stone; it passes into the Second,378and behold—a Plant; the Plant whirls through Seven Forms and becomes a Sacred Animal379(b).From the combined attributes of these, Manu,380the Thinker, is formed.Who forms him? The Seven Lives, and the One Life(c).Who completes him? The Five-fold Lha. And who perfects the last Body? Fish, Sin and Soma381(d).(a) The phrase,“through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ,”refers here to the seven Globes of the Planetary Chain and the seven Rounds, or the forty-nine stations of active existence that are before the“Spark,”or Monad, at the beginning of every Great Life-Cycle, or Manvantara. The“Thread of Fohat”is the Thread of Life before referred to.This relates to the greatest problem of philosophy—the physical and substantial nature of Life, the independent nature of which is denied[pg 259]by Modern Science, because that Science is unable to comprehend it. The reïncarnationists and believers in Karma alone dimly perceive, that the whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations, whether in, or apart from, the physical body. Because even if:
Proceeded from, or was produced by, the infusion of the Spirit or Breath of Life into the quickening body of man, and was to supersede and take the place of that Spirit in the thus constituted Self, so that the Spirit passed into, was lost sight of, and disappeared in the Living Soul.
Proceeded from, or was produced by, the infusion of the Spirit or Breath of Life into the quickening body of man, and was to supersede and take the place of that Spirit in the thus constituted Self, so that the Spirit passed into, was lost sight of, and disappeared in the Living Soul.
The human body, he thinks, ought to be viewed as a matrix in which, and from which, the Soul, which he seems to place higher than the Spirit, is developed. Consideredfunctionallyand from the standpoint[pg 247]of activity, the Soul stands undeniably higher, in this finite and conditioned world of Mâyâ. The Soul, he says,“is ultimately produced from the animated body of man.”Thus the author identifies“Spirit”(Âtmâ) with the“Breath of Life”simply. The Eastern Occultists will demur to this statement, for it is based on the erroneous conception that Prâna and Âtmâ, or Jîvâtmâ, are one and the same thing. The author supports the argument, by showing that with the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and even Latins, Ruach, Pneuma and Spiritus meant Wind—with the Jews undeniably, and with the Greeks and Romans very probably; the Greek word Anemos (Wind) and the Latin Animus (Soul) having a suspicious relation.
This is very far fetched. But a legitimate battle-field for deciding this question is hardly to be found, since Dr. Pratt seems to be a practical, matter-of-fact metaphysician, a kind of Kabalist-Positivist, whereas the Eastern metaphysicians, especially the Vedântins, are all Idealists. The Occultists also are of the extreme Esoteric Vedântin school, and though they call the One Life (Parabrahman) the Great Breath and the Whirlwind, they disconnect the seventh principle entirely from matter, and deny that it has any relation to, or connection with it.
Thus the philosophy of man's psychic, spiritual and mental relations with his physical functions is in almost inextricable confusion. Neither the old Âryan nor the Egyptian psychology is now properly understood; nor can they be assimilated, without accepting the Esoteric septenary, or, at any rate, the Vedântic quinquepartite division of the human inner principles. Failing which, it will be for ever impossible to understand the metaphysical and purely psychic, and even physiological, relations between the Dhyân Chohans, or Angels, on the one plane, and Humanity on the other. No Eastern (Âryan) Esoteric works are so far published, but we possess the Egyptian papyri, which speak clearly of the seven principles, or the“Seven Souls of Man.”TheBook of the Deadgives a complete list of the“transformations”that every Defunct undergoes, while divesting himself, one by one, of all these principles—materialized for the sake of clearness into ethereal entities or bodies. We must, moreover, remind those who try to show that the Ancient Egyptians did not teach Reïncarnation, that the“Soul”(the Ego or Self) of the Defunct is said to be living in Eternity: it is immortal,“coëval with, and disappearing with, the Solar Boat,”that is, for the Cycle of Necessity. This“Soul”emergesfrom the Tiaou, the Realm of theCause of Life, and joins the living on Earth[pg 248]byday, to return to Tiaou everynight. This expresses the periodical existences of the Ego.357
The Shadow, the Astral Form, is annihilated,“devoured by the Uræus,”358the Manes will be annihilated; the two Twins (the Fourth and Fifth Principles) will be scattered; but the Soul-Bird,“the Divine Swallow, and the Uræus of Flame”(Manas and Âtmâ-Buddhi) will live in the eternity, for they are their mother's husbands.
Another suggestive analogy between the Âryan, or Brâhmanical, and the Egyptian Esotericism. The former call the Pitris the“Lunar Ancestors”of men, and the Egyptians make of the Moon-God, Taht-Esmun, the first human ancestor.
This Moon-God“expressed the Seven nature-powers that were prior to himself, and were summed up in him as his seven souls, of which he was the manifestor as the Eighth One. [Hence the eighth sphere.]... The seven rays of the Chaldean ... Heptakis or Iao, on the Gnostic stones, indicate the same septenary of souls.... The first form of the mystical Seven was seen to be figured in heaven, by the seven large stars of the Great Bear, the constellation assigned by the Egyptians to the Mother of Time, and of the seven Elemental Powers.”359
This Moon-God“expressed the Seven nature-powers that were prior to himself, and were summed up in him as his seven souls, of which he was the manifestor as the Eighth One. [Hence the eighth sphere.]... The seven rays of the Chaldean ... Heptakis or Iao, on the Gnostic stones, indicate the same septenary of souls.... The first form of the mystical Seven was seen to be figured in heaven, by the seven large stars of the Great Bear, the constellation assigned by the Egyptians to the Mother of Time, and of the seven Elemental Powers.”359
As well known to every Hindû, this same constellation represents in India the Seven Rishis, and is called Riksha, and Chitrashikandinas.
Like alone produces like. The Earth gives Man his body, the Gods (Dhyânis) give him his five inner principles, the psychic Shadow, of which these Gods are often the animating principle. Spirit (Âtman) is one, and indiscrete. It is not in the Tiaou.
For what is the Tiaou? The frequent allusion to it in theBook of the Deadcontains a mystery. Tiaou is the path of the Night-Sun, the inferior hemisphere, or the infernal region of the Egyptians, placed by them on theconcealed side of the Moon. The human being, in their Esotericism, came out from the Moon—a triple mystery, astronomical, physiological and psychical, at once; he crossed the whole cycle of existence, and then returned to his birth-place, before issuing from it again. Thus the Defunct is shown arriving in the West, receiving his judgment before Osiris, resurrecting as the God Horus, and circling round the sidereal heavens, which is an allegorical assimilation to Ra, the Sun; then having crossed the Noot, the Celestial Abyss, returning once more to Tiaou; an assimilation to Osiris, who, as the God of life[pg 249]and reproduction, inhabits the Moon. Plutarch360shows the Egyptians celebrating a festival called“The Ingress of Osiris into the Moon.”In theRitual,361life is promised after death; and the renovation of life is placed under the patronage of Osiris-Lunus, because the Moon was the symbol of life-renewals or reïncarnations, owing to its growth, waning, dying, and reäppearance every month. In theDankmoe,362it is said:“O Osiris-Lunus, that renews to thee thy renewal.”And Sabekh says to Seti I:363“Thou renewest thyself as the God Lunus, when a babe.”It is still better explained in a Louvre papyrus:364“Couplings and conceptions abound when he [Osiris-Lunus] is seen in heaven on that day.”Says Osiris:“O sole radiant beam of the Moon! I issue from the circulating multitudes [of stars].... Open me the Tiaou, for Osiris N. I will issue by day to do what I have to do amongst the living”365—i.e., to produce conceptions.
Osiris was“God manifest in generation,”because the ancients knew, far better than the moderns, the real occult influences of the lunar body upon the mysteries of conception. In the oldest systems we find the Moon always male. Thus Soma, with the Hindûs, is a kind of sidereal Don Juan, a“King,”and the father, albeit illegitimate, of Budha—Wisdom. This relates to Occult Knowledge, a wisdom gathered through a thorough acquaintance with lunar mysteries, including those of sexual generation. And later, when the Moon became connected with the female Goddesses, with Diana, Isis, Artemis, Juno, etc., this connection was also due to a thorough knowledge of physiology and female nature, physical as much as psychic.
If, instead of being taught in Sunday Schools useless lessons from theBible, the armies of the ragged and poor were taught Astrology—so far, at any rate, as the occult properties of the Moon and its hidden influences on generation are concerned—then, there would be little need to fear increase of the population, or to resort to the questionable literature of the Malthusians for its arrest. For it is the Moon and her conjunctions that regulate conceptions, and every Astrologer in India knows it. During the previous Races, and at least at the beginning of the present one, those who indulged in marital relations during certain lunar phases that made those relations sterile, were regarded as sorcerers[pg 250]and sinners. But now even these sins of old, which arose from the abuse of Occult knowledge, would appear preferable to the crimes of to-day, which are perpetrated because of the complete ignorance of such Occult influences.
But, primarily, the Sun and Moon were the only visible and, by their effects, so to say,tangible, psychic and physiological deities—the Father and the Son—while Space or Air in general, or that expanse of heaven called Noot by the Egyptians, was the concealed Spirit or Breath of the two. The Father and Son were interchangeable in their functions, and worked together harmoniously in their effects upon terrestrial nature and humanity; hence they were regarded asone, thoughtwoas personified Entities. They were both males, and both had their distinct though collaborative work in the causative generation of humanity. So much from the astronomical and cosmic standpoints, viewed and expressed in symbolical language, which became in our last races theological and dogmatic. But behind this veil of cosmic and astrological symbols, there were the occult mysteries of anthropography and the primeval genesis of man. And in this, no knowledge of symbols, or even the key to the post-diluvian symbolical language of the Jews, will or can help, save only with reference to that which has been laid down in national scriptures for exoteric uses; the sum of which, however cleverly veiled, was but the smallest portion of the real primitive history of each people, and often, moreover, as in the Hebrew Scriptures, related merely to the terrestrial human, and not to the divine life of that nation. That psychic and spiritual element belonged to theMysteriesandInitiation. There were things never recorded in scrolls, but which, as in Central Asia, were engraved on rocks and in subterranean crypts.
Nevertheless, there was a time when the whole world was“of one lip and of one knowledge,”and man knew more of his origin than he does now; and thus knew that the Sun and Moon, however large a part they may play in the constitution, growth and development of the human body, were not the direct causative agents of his appearance on Earth; for these agents, in truth, are the living and intelligent Powers which the Occultists call Dhyân Chohans.
As to this, a very learned admirer of the Jewish Esotericism tells us that:
TheKabalahsays expressly that Elohim is a“general abstraction”; what we call in mathematics“a constant coëfficient,”or a“general function,”entering into all[pg 251]construction, not particular; that is, by the general ratio 1 to 31415, the [Astro-Dhyânic and] Elohistic figures.
TheKabalahsays expressly that Elohim is a“general abstraction”; what we call in mathematics“a constant coëfficient,”or a“general function,”entering into all[pg 251]construction, not particular; that is, by the general ratio 1 to 31415, the [Astro-Dhyânic and] Elohistic figures.
To this the Eastern Occultist replies: Quite so; they are an abstraction to our physical senses. To our spiritual perceptions, however, and to our inner spiritual eye, the Elohim, or Dhyânis, are no more an abstraction than our soul and spirit are to us. Reject the one and you reject the other, since that which is thesurvivingEntityin us, is partly the direct emanation from, and partly those celestial Entitiesthemselves. One thing is certain; the Jews were perfectly acquainted with sorcery and various maleficent forces: but, with the exception of some of their great prophets and seers like Daniel and Ezekiel—Enoch belonging to a far distant race, as a generic character, and not to any nation but to all—they knew little of, nor would they deal with, the real divine Occultism; their national character being averse to anything which had no direct bearing upon their own ethnical, tribal and individual benefits—witness their own prophets, and the curses thundered by them against the“stiff-necked race.”But even theKabalahplainly shows the direct relation between the Sephiroth, or Elohim, and men.
Therefore, when it is proved to us that the Kabalistic identification of Jehovah with Binah, a female Sephira, has still another, a sub-occult, meaning in it, then and then only will Occultists be ready to pass the palm of perfection to the Kabalist. Until then, it is asserted that, as Jehovah, in the abstract sense of a“one living God,”is a single number, a metaphysical figment, and a reality only when put in his proper place as an emanation and a Sephira—we have a right to maintain that theZohar, as witnessed by theBook of Numbers, at any rate, gave out originally, before the Christian Kabalists had disfigured it, and still gives out, the same doctrine that we do; that is, it makes Man emanate, not from one Celestial Man, but from a Septenary Group of Celestial Men, or Angels, just as inPymander, the Thought Divine.
3.When the One becomes Two, the Three-fold appears(a).The Three are366One; and it is our Thread, O Lanoo, the Heart of the Man-Plant, called Saptaparna(b).
(a)“When the One becomes Two, the Three-fold appears”: to wit, when the One Eternal drops its reflection into the region of Manifestation,[pg 252]that reflection, the Ray, differentiates the Water of Space; or, in the words of theBook of the Dead:“Chaos ceases, through the effulgence of the Ray of Primordial Light dissipating total darkness, by the help of the great magic power of the Word of the [Central] Sun.”Chaos becomes male-female, and Water, incubated by Light, and the Three-fold Being issues as its“First-born.”“Ra [or Osiris-Ptah] creates his own Limbs [like Brahmâ], by creating the Gods destined to personify his phases,”during the Cycle.367The Egyptian Ra, issuing from the Deep, is the Divine Universal Soul in its manifested aspect, and so is Nârâyana, the Purusha,“concealed in Âkâsha, and present in Ether.”
This is the metaphysical explanation, and refers to the very beginning of Evolution, or, as we would rather say, of Theogony. The meaning of the Stanza, when explained from another standpoint in its reference to the mystery of man and his origin, is still more difficult to comprehend. In order to form a clear conception of what is meant by the One becoming Two, and then being transformed into the Three-fold, the student has to make himself thoroughly acquainted with what we call Rounds. If he refers toEsoteric Buddhism—the first attempt to sketch out an approximate outline of archaic cosmogony—he will find that by a Round is meant the serial evolution of nascent material Nature, of the seven Globes of our Chain,368with their mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms; man being included in the latter and standing at the head of it, during the whole period of a Life-Cycle, which latter would be called by the Brâhmans a“Day of Brahmâ.”It is, in short, one revolution of the“Wheel”(our Planetary Chain), which is composed of seven Globes, or seven separate“Wheels,”in another sense this time. When evolution has run[pg 253]downward into matter from Globe A to Globe G, it is one Round. In the middle of the fourth revolution, which is our present Round,“Evolution has reached its acme of physical development, crowned its work with the perfect physical man, and, from this point, begins its work spirit-ward.”All this needs little repetition, as it is well explained inEsoteric Buddhism. That which was hardly touched upon, however, and of which the little that was said has misled many, is the origin of man, and it is upon this that a little more light may now be thrown, just enough to make the Stanza more comprehensible, as the process will be fully explained only in its legitimate place, in Volume II.
Now every Round, on the descending scale, is but a repetition in a more concrete form of the Round which preceded it, just as every Globe, down to our Fourth Sphere the actual Earth, is a grosser and more material copy of the more shadowy Sphere which precedes it, each in order, on the three higher planes.369On its way upwards, on the ascending arc, Evolution spiritualizes and etherealizes, so to speak, the general nature of all, bringing it on to a level with the plane on which the twin Globe on the opposite arc is placed; the result being, that when the seventh Globe is reached, in whatever Round, the nature of everything that is evolving returns to the condition it was in at its starting point—plus, every time, a new and superior degree in the states of consciousness. Thus it becomes clear that the“origin of man,”so-called, in this our present Round, or Life-Cycle, on this Planet, must occupy the same place in the same order—save details based on local conditions and time—as in the preceding Round. Again, it must be explained and remembered that, as the work of each Round is said to be apportioned to a different Group of so-called Creators, or Architects, so is that of every Globe; that is, it is under the supervision and guidance of special Builders and Watchers—the various Dhyân Chohans.
“Creators”is an incorrect word to use, as no other religion, not even the sect of the Visishthadvaitîs in India, one which anthropomorphizes even Parabrahman, believes in creationex nihilo, as Christians and Jews do, but only in evolution out of preëxisting materials.
The Group of the Hierarchy which is commissioned to“create”men is a special Group, then; yet it evolved shadowy man in this Cycle, just as a higher and still more spiritual Group evolved him in the Third[pg 254]Round. But as it is the Sixth, on the downward scale of Spirituality—the last and Seventh being the Terrestrial Spirits (Elementals), which gradually form, build and condense his physical body—this Sixth Group evolves no more than the future man's shadowy form, a filmy, hardly visible, transparent copy of themselves. It becomes the task of the Fifth Hierarchy—the mysterious Beings that preside over the constellation Capricornus, Makara, or“Crocodile,”in India and in Egypt—to inform the empty and ethereal animal form, and make of it the Rational Man. This is one of those subjects upon which very little may be said to the general public. It is a Mystery truly, but only to him who is prepared to reject the existence of intellectual and conscious Spiritual Beings in the Universe, and to limit full Consciousness to man alone, and that only as a“function of the brain.”Many are those among the Spiritual Entities, who have incarnated bodily in man, since his first appearance, and who, for all that, still exist as independently as they did before, in the infinitudes of Space.
To put it more clearly, such an invisible Entity may be bodily present on earth without, however, abandoning its status and functions in the supersensuous regions. If this needs explanation, we can do no better than remind the reader of like cases in so-called“Spiritualism”; though such cases are very rare, at least as regards the nature of the Entity incarnating, or taking temporary possession of a medium. For the so-called“spirits”that may occasionally possess themselves of the bodies of mediums are not the Monads, or Higher Principles, of disembodied Personalities. Such“spirits”can only be either Elementaries, or—Nirmânakâyas. Just as certain persons, whether by virtue of a peculiar organization, or through the power of acquired mystic knowledge, can be seen in their“double”in one place, while their body is many miles away; so the same thing can occur in the case of superior Beings.
Man, philosophically considered, is, in his outward form, simply an animal, hardly more perfect than his pithecoid-like ancestor of the Third Round. He is a living Body, not a living Being, since the realization of existence, the“Ego Sum,”necessitates self-consciousness, and an animal can only have direct consciousness, or instinct. This was so well understood by the ancients, that even the Kabalists made of soul and body two Lives, independent of each other. In theNew Aspects of Life, the author states the Kabalistic teaching:
They held that, functionally, Spirit and Matter, of corresponding opacity and[pg 255]density, tended to coalesce; and that the resultant created Spirits, in the disembodied state, were constituted on a scale in which the differing opacities and transparencies of elemental or uncreated Spirit were reproduced. And that these Spirits, in the disembodied state, attracted, appropriated, digested and assimilated elemental Spirit and elemental Matter whose condition was conformed to their own.... They therefore taught that there was a wide difference in the conditions of created Spirits; and that, in the intimate association between the Spirit-world and the world of Matter, the more opaque Spirits, in the disembodied state, were drawn towards the more dense parts of the material world, and therefore tended towards the centre of the Earth, where they found the conditions most suited to their state; while the more transparent Spirits passed into the surrounding aura of the planet, the most rarefied finding their home in its satellite.370
They held that, functionally, Spirit and Matter, of corresponding opacity and[pg 255]density, tended to coalesce; and that the resultant created Spirits, in the disembodied state, were constituted on a scale in which the differing opacities and transparencies of elemental or uncreated Spirit were reproduced. And that these Spirits, in the disembodied state, attracted, appropriated, digested and assimilated elemental Spirit and elemental Matter whose condition was conformed to their own.... They therefore taught that there was a wide difference in the conditions of created Spirits; and that, in the intimate association between the Spirit-world and the world of Matter, the more opaque Spirits, in the disembodied state, were drawn towards the more dense parts of the material world, and therefore tended towards the centre of the Earth, where they found the conditions most suited to their state; while the more transparent Spirits passed into the surrounding aura of the planet, the most rarefied finding their home in its satellite.370
This relates exclusively to our Elemental Spirits, and has naught to do with either the Planetary, Sidereal, Cosmic or Inter-Etheric Intelligent Forces, or“Angels”as they are termed by the Roman Church. The Jewish Kabalists, especially the practical Occultists who dealt with Ceremonial Magic, busied themselves solely with the Spirits of the Planets and the“Elementals”so-called. Therefore the above covers only a portion of the Esoteric teaching.
The Soul, whose body-vehicle is the astral, ethereo-substantial envelope, could die and man be still living on earth. That is to say, the Soul could free itself from and quit the tabernacle for various reasons, such as insanity, spiritual and physical depravity, etc. The possibility of the“Soul”—that is, the eternal Spiritual Ego—dwelling in the unseen worlds, while its body goes on living on Earth, is a preeminently Occult doctrine, especially in Chinese and Buddhist philosophy. Many are thesoullessmen among us, for the occurrence is found to take place in wicked materialists as well as in persons“who advance in holiness and never turn back.”
Therefore, that which living men (Initiates) can do, the Dhyânis, who have no physical body to hamper them, can do still better. This was the belief of the antediluvians, and it is fast becoming that of modern intellectual society in“Spiritualism,”as well as in the Greek and Roman Churches, which teach the ubiquity of their Angels. The Zoroastrians regarded their Amshaspends as dual entities (Ferouers), applying this duality—in Esoteric philosophy, at any rate—to all the spiritual and invisible denizens of the numberless worlds in space, which are visible to our eye. In a note of Damascius (sixth century) on the Chaldean Oracles, we have ample evidence of the universality of[pg 256]this doctrine, for he says:“In these Oracles, the seven Cosmocratores of the World [‘the World-Pillars’], mentioned likewise by St. Paul, are double; one set being commissioned to rule the superior worlds, the spiritual and the sidereal, and the other to guide and watch over the worlds of matter.”Such is also the opinion of Jamblichus, who makes an evident distinction between the Archangels and the Archontes.371
The above may be applied, of course, to the distinction made between the degrees or orders of Spiritual Beings, and it is in this sense that the Roman Catholic Church tries to interpret and teach the difference; for while the Archangels are in her teaching divine and holy, she denounces their“Doubles”as Devils. But the word Ferouer is not to be understood in this sense, for it means simply the reverse or the opposite side of some attribute or quality. Thus when the Occultist says that the“Demon is the inverse of God”—evil, the reverse of the medal—he does not mean two separate actualities, but two aspects or facets of the same Unity. But the best man living, side by side with an Archangel—as described in Theology—would appear a fiend. Hence a certain reason in depreciating a lower“Double,”immersed far deeper in matter than its original. But still there is as little cause to regard them as Devils, and this is precisely what the Roman Catholics maintain against all reason and logic.
This identity between the Spirit and its material“Double”—in man it is the reverse—explains still better the confusion, already alluded to in this work, in the names and individualities, as well as in the numbers, of the Rishis and Prajâpatis; especially of those of the Satya Yuga and the Mahâbhâratan Period. It also throws additional light on what the Secret Doctrine teaches with regard to the Root- and the Seed-Manus. Not only these Progenitors of our mankind, but every human being, we are taught, has his prototype in the Spiritual Spheres, which prototype is the highest essence of his Seventh Principle. Thus the seven Manus become fourteen, the Root-Manu being the Prime Cause, and the Seed-Manu its Effect; and from the Satya Yuga (the first stage) to the Heroic Period, these Manus or Rishis become twenty-one in number.
(b) The concluding sentence of this shloka shows how archaic is the belief and the doctrine that man is seven-fold in his constitution. The“Thread”of Being, which animates man, and passes through all his[pg 257]Personalities, or Rebirths on this Earth—an allusion to Sûtrâtmâ—the Thread on which moreover all his“Spirits”are strung, is spun from the essence of the Three-fold, the Four-fold and the Five-fold which contain all the preceding. Panchâshikha, agreeably toPadma Purâna,372is one of the sevenKumâraswho go to Shveta Dvîpa to worship Vishnu. We shall see, further on, what connection there is between the“celibate”and chaste Sons of Brahmâ, who refuse“to multiply,”and terrestrial mortals. Meanwhile, it is evident that the“Man-Plant, Saptaparna,”thus refers to the seven principles, and that man is compared to this seven-leaved plant, which is so sacred among Buddhists. The Egyptian allegory, in theBook of the Dead, that relates to the“reward of the Soul,”is as suggestive of our septenary doctrine as it is poetical. The Deceased is allotted a piece of land in the field of Aanroo, wherein the Manes, the deified shades of the dead, glean, as the harvest they have sown by their actions in life, the corn seven cubits high, which grows in a territory divided into seven and fourteen portions. This corn is the food on which they will live and prosper, or that will kill them, in Amenti, the realm of which the Aanroo-field is a domain. For, as said in the hymn,373the Deceased is either destroyed therein, or becomes pure spirit for the Eternity, in consequence of the“seven times seventy-seven lives”passed, or to be passed, on Earth. The idea of the corn reaped as the“fruit of our actions”is very graphic.
4.It is the Root that never dies, the Three-tongued Flame of the Four Wicks(a)...The Wicks are the Sparks, that draw from the Three-tongued Flame,374shot out by the Seven, their Flame; the Beams and Sparks of One Moon, reflected in the Running Waves of all the Rivers of the Earth375(b).
(a) The“Three-tongued Flame that never dies”is the immortal spiritual Triad, the Âtmâ, Buddhi and Manas, or rather the fruitage of the last, assimilated by the first two after every terrestrial life. The“Four Wicks,”that go out and are extinguished, are the Quaternary, the four lower principles, including the body.
“I am the Three-wicked Flame and my Wicks are immortal,”says the Defunct.“I enter into the domain of Sekhem [the God whose[pg 258]hand sows the seed of action produced by the disembodied soul], and I enter the region of the Flames who have destroyed their adversaries [i.e., got rid of the sin-creating Four Wicks].”376
“The Three-tongued Flame of the Four Wicks”corresponds to the four Unities and the three Binaries of the Sephirothal tree.
(b) Just as milliards of bright sparks dance on the waters of an ocean, above which one and the same moon is shining, so our evanescent Personalities—the illusive envelopes of the immortal Monad-Ego—twinkle and dance on the waves of Mâyâ. They appear and, as the thousands of sparks produced by the moon-beams, last only so long as the Queen of the Night radiates her lustre on the“Running Waves”of Life, the period of a Manvantara; and then they disappear, the“Beams”—symbols of our eternal Spiritual Egos—alone surviving, remerged in, and being, as they were before, one with the Mother-Source.
5.The Spark hangs from the Flame by the finest Thread of Fohat. It journeys through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ(a).It stops in the first,377and is a Metal and a Stone; it passes into the Second,378and behold—a Plant; the Plant whirls through Seven Forms and becomes a Sacred Animal379(b).
From the combined attributes of these, Manu,380the Thinker, is formed.
Who forms him? The Seven Lives, and the One Life(c).Who completes him? The Five-fold Lha. And who perfects the last Body? Fish, Sin and Soma381(d).
(a) The phrase,“through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ,”refers here to the seven Globes of the Planetary Chain and the seven Rounds, or the forty-nine stations of active existence that are before the“Spark,”or Monad, at the beginning of every Great Life-Cycle, or Manvantara. The“Thread of Fohat”is the Thread of Life before referred to.
This relates to the greatest problem of philosophy—the physical and substantial nature of Life, the independent nature of which is denied[pg 259]by Modern Science, because that Science is unable to comprehend it. The reïncarnationists and believers in Karma alone dimly perceive, that the whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations, whether in, or apart from, the physical body. Because even if: