Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,Stains the white radiance of Eternity—yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity; for Life alone can understand Life.What is that“Spark”which“hangs from the Flame”? It is Jîva, the Monad in conjunction with Manas, or rather its aroma—that which remains from each Personality, when worthy, and hangs from Âtmâ-Buddhi, the Flame, by the Thread of Life. In whatever way it is interpreted, and into whatever number of principles the human being is divided, it may be easily shown that this doctrine is supported by all the ancient religions, from the Vedic to the Egyptian, from the Zoroastrian to the Jewish. In the case of the last-mentioned, the Kabalistic works offer abundant proof of this statement. The entire system of the Kabalistic numerals is based on the divine Septenary hanging from the Triad, thus forming the Decad, and its permutations 7, 5, 4, and 3, which, finally, all merge into theOneitself; an endless and boundless Circle.As says theZohar:The Deity [the ever invisible Presence] manifests itself through thetenSephiroth, which are its radiating witnesses. The Deity is like the sea from which outflows a stream called Wisdom, the waters of which fall into a lake named Intelligence. From the basin, like seven channels, issue the Seven Sephiroth.... Fortenequalseven: the Decad containsfourUnities andthreeBinaries.The Ten Sephiroth correspond to the Limbs of Man.When I [the Elohim] framed Adam Kadmon, the Spirit of the Eternal shot out of his Body, like a sheet of lightning that radiated at once on the billows of thesevenmillions of skies, and mytenSplendours were his Limbs.But neither the Head nor the Shoulders of Adam Kadmon can be seen; therefore we read in theSiphra Dtzenioutha, the“Book of the Concealed Mystery”:In the beginning of Time, after the Elohim [the“Sons of Light and Life,”or the Builders] had shaped out of the eternal Essence the Heavens and the Earth, they formed the worlds six by six.The seventh being Malkuth, which is our Earth382on its plane, and[pg 260]the lowest on all the other planes of conscious existence. The ChaldeanBook of Numberscontains a detailed explanation of all this.The first triad of the Body of Adam Kadmon [the three upper planes of the seven383] cannot be seen before the Soul stands in the presence of the Ancient of Days.The Sephiroth of this upper Triad are:“1. Kether (the Crown), represented by the brow of Macroprosopus; 2. Chokmah (Wisdom, a male Principle), by his right shoulder; and 3. Binah (Intelligence, a female Principle), by the left shoulder.”Then come thesevenLimbs, or Sephiroth, on the planes of manifestation; the totality of these four planes being represented by Microprosopus, the Lesser Face, or Tetragrammaton, the“four-lettered”Mystery.“Thesevenmanifested and thethreeconcealed Limbs are the Body of the Deity.”Thus our Earth, Malkuth, is both theseventhand thefourthWorld; the former when counting from the first Globe above, the latter if reckoned by the planes. It is generated by the sixth Globe or Sephira, called Yezud,“Foundation,”or, as said in theBook of Numbers,“by Yezud, He [Adam Kadmon] fecundates the primitive Heva [Eve or our Earth].”Rendered in mystic language, this is the explanation why Malkuth, called the Inferior Mother, Matrona, Queen, and the Kingdom of the Foundation, is shown as the Bride of Tetragrammaton, or Microprosopus (the Second Logos), the Heavenly Man. When free from all impurity, she will become united with the Spiritual Logos,i.e., in the Seventh Race of the Seventh Round—after the regeneration, on the day of“Sabbath.”For the“SeventhDay”again has an occult significance undreamed of by our theologians.When Matronitha, the Mother, is separated and brought face to face with the King, in the excellence of the Sabbath, all things become one body.384“Become one body”means, that all is reäbsorbed once more into the One Element, the spirits of men becoming Nirvânîs, and the elements of everything else becoming again what they were before—Protyle or Undifferentiated Substance.“Sabbath”means Rest, or Nirvâna. It is not the“seventhday”aftersixdays, but a period the duration of which equals that of the seven“days,”or any period made up of seven parts. Thus a Pralaya is equal in duration to a Manvantara, or a Night of Brahmâ is equal to his Day. If the Christians will follow Jewish customs, they ought to adopt the spirit and not the dead letter thereof.[pg 261]They should work one week of seven days andrestseven days. That the word“Sabbath”had a mystic significance, is disclosed in the contempt shown by Jesus for the Sabbath day, and by what is said inLuke.385Sabbath is there taken for thewhole week. See the Greek text where the week is called“Sabbath.”Literally,“I fast twice in the Sabbath.”Paul, an Initiate, knew it well when referring to the eternal rest and felicity in Heaven, as Sabbath:386“and their happiness will be eternal, for they will ever be [one] with the Lord, and will enjoyan eternal Sabbath.”387The difference between the Kabalah and the archaic Esoteric Vidyâ—taking the Kabalah as contained in the ChaldeanBook of Numbers, not as misrepresented by its now disfigured copy, theKabalahof the Christian Mystics—is very small indeed, being confined to unimportant divergences of form and expression. Thus Eastern Occultism refers to our Earth as the Fourth World, the lowest of the Chain, above which run upward on both curves the six Globes, three on each side. TheZohar, on the other hand, calls the Earth the lower, or theseventh, adding that upon the six depend all things which are in it (Microprosopus). The“Smaller Face [smaller because manifested and finite] is formed ofsixSephiroth,”says the same work.“Seven Kings come anddie in the thrice-destroyed World[Malkuth, our Earth, destroyed after each of the Three Rounds which it has gone through]. And their reign [that of the Seven Kings] will be broken up.”388This relates to the Seven Races,fiveof which have already appeared, andtwomore have still to appear in this Round.The Shinto allegorical accounts of cosmogony and the origin of man, in Japan, hint at the same belief.Captain C. Pfoundes, who studied the religion underlying the various sects of the land, for nearly nine years in the monasteries of Japan, says:The Shinto idea of creation is as follows: Out of Chaos (Konton) the Earth (In) was the sediment precipitated, and the Heavens (Yo) the ethereal essences which ascended: Man (Jin) appeared between the two. The first man was called Kuni-to ko tatchino-mikoto, andfive other names were given to him, and then the human race appeared, male and female. Isanagi and Isanami begat Tenshoko doijin, the first of the five Gods of the Earth.These“Gods”are simply our Five Races, Isanagi and Isanami being the two kinds of“Ancestors,”the two preceding Races which give birth to animal and to rational man.[pg 262]It will be shown in Volume II, that the number seven, as well as the doctrine of the septenary constitution of man, was preëminent in all the secret systems. It plays as important a part in Western Kabalah as in Eastern Occultism. Éliphas Lévi calls the number seven“the key to the Mosaic creation and the symbols of every religion.”He shows the Kabalah faithfully following even the septenary division of man, for the diagram he gives in hisClef des Grands Mystères389is septenary. This may be seen at a glance, however cleverly the correct thought is veiled. One needs also only to look at the diagram, the“Formation of the Soul,”in Mathers'Kabbalah Unveiled,390from the above mentioned, work of Lévi, to find the same, though with a different interpretation.Thus it stands with both the Kabalistic and Occult names attached:Diagram IVLévi calls Nephesh that which we name Manas, andvice versâ. Nephesh is the Breath of (animal) Life in man—the Breath of Life,[pg 263]instinctualin the animal; and Manas is the Third Soul—the human in its light side, and animal, in its connection with Samaël or Kâma. Nephesh is really the“Breath of (animal) Life”breathed into Adam, the Man of Dust; it is consequently the Vital Spark, the informing Element. Without Manas, the“Reasoning Soul,”or Mind, which in Lévi's diagram is miscalled Nephesh, Âtmâ-Buddhi is irrational on this plane and cannot act. It is Buddhi which is the Plastic Mediator; not Manas, the intelligent medium between the upper Triad and the lower Quaternary. But there are many such strange and curious transformations to be found in the Kabalistic works—a convincing proof that this literature has become a sad jumble. We do not accept the classification, except in this one particular, in order to show the points of agreement.We will now give in tabular form what the very cautious Éliphas Lévi says in explanation of his diagram, and what the Esoteric Doctrine teaches—and compare the two. Lévi, too, makes a distinction between Kabalistic and Occult Pneumatics.Says Éliphas Lévi, the Kabalist:Say the Theosophists:Kabalistic Pneumatics.Esoteric Pneumatics.1. The Soul (or Ego) is a clothed light; and this light is triple.1. The same; for it is Âtmâ-Buddhi-Manas.2. Neshamah—pure Spirit.2. The same391.3. Ruach—the Soul or Spirit.3. Spiritual Soul.4. Nephesh—Plastic Mediator.3924. Mediator between Spirit and Man, the Seat of Reason, the Mind, in man.5. The garment of the Soul is the rind [body] of the Image [Astral Soul].5. Correct.6. The Image is double, because it reflects the good and the bad.6. Too uselessly apocalyptic. Why not say that the Astral reflects the good as well as the bad man; man, who is ever tending to the upper Triad, or else disappears with the Quaternary.7. [Image—Body.]7. The Earthly Image.[pg 264]Occult Pneumatics.Occult Pneumatics.(As given by Éliphas Lévi.)(As given by the Occultists.)1. Nephesh is immortal, because it renews its life by the destruction of forms. [But Nephesh, the“Breath of Life,”is a misnomer, and a useless puzzle to the student.]1. Manas is immortal, because after every new incarnation it adds to Âtmâ-Buddhi something of itself; and thus, assimilating itself to the Monad, shares its immortality.2. Ruach progresses by the evolution of ideas (!?).2. Buddhi becomes conscious by the accretions it gets from Manas, on the death of man after every new incarnation.3. Neshamah is progressive, without oblivion and destruction.3. Âtmâ neither progresses, forgets, nor remembers. It does not belong to this plane; it is but the Ray of Light eternal which shines upon, and through, the darkness of matter—when the latter is willing.4. The Soul has three dwellings.4. The Soul—collectively, as the Upper Triad—liveson three planes, besides its fourth, the terrestrial sphere; and itiseternally on the highest of the three.5. These dwellings are: the Plane of Mortals; the Superior Eden; and the Inferior Eden.5. These dwellings are: Earth for the physical man, or Animal Soul; Kâma Loka (Hades, the Limbo) for the disembodied man, or his Shell; Devachan for the Higher Triad.[pg 265]6. The Image [man] is a sphinx that offers the riddle of birth.6. Correct.7. The fatal Image [the Astral] endows Nephesh with its aptitudes; but Ruach is able to substitute for it the Image conquered in accordance with the inspirations of Neshamah.7. The Astral, through Kâma (Desire), is ever drawing Manas down into the sphere of material passions and desires. But if thebetterMan, or Manas, tries to escape the fatal attraction, and turns its aspirations to Âtmâ (Neshamah), then Buddhi (Ruach) conquers, and carries Manas with it to the realm of eternal Spirit.It is very evident that the French Kabalist either did not sufficiently know the real tenet, or distorted it to suit himself and his objects. Thus he says again, treating upon the same subject, as follows; and we Occultists answer the late Kabalist and his admirers also as follows:1. The Body is the mould of Nephesh; Nephesh the mould of Ruach; Ruach the mould of thegarmentof Neshamah.1. The Body follows the whims, good or bad, of Manas; Manas tries to follow the Light of Buddhi, but often fails. Buddhi is the mould of the“garments”of Âtmâ; for Âtmâ is no body, or shape, or anything, and because Buddhi is onlyfigurativelyits Vehicle.2. Light [the Soul] personifies itself in clothing itself [with a Body]; and personality endures only when the garment is perfect.2. The Monad becomes a personal Ego when it incarnates; and something remains of that Personality through Manas, when the latter is perfect enough to assimilate Buddhi.3. The Angels aspire to become men; a Perfect Man, a Man-God, is above all the Angels.3. Correct.4. Every 14,000 years the soul rejuvenates, and rests in the jubilean sleep of oblivion.4. Within a period, a Great Age, or a Day of Brahmâ, 14 Manus reign; after which comes Pralaya, when all the Souls (Egos) rest in Nirvâna.[pg 266]Such are the distorted copies of the Esoteric Doctrine in theKabalah.But to return to Shloka 5 of Stanza VII.(b) The well-known Kabalistic aphorism runs:“A stone becomes a plant; a plant, a beast; the beast, a man; a man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.”The“Spark”animates all the kingdoms, in turn, before it enters into and informs Divine Man, between whom and his predecessor animal man, there is all the difference in the world.Genesisbegins its anthropology at the wrong end—evidently for a blind—and lands nowhere. The introductory chapters ofGenesiswere never meant to represent even a remote allegory of the creation ofourEarth. They embrace a metaphysical conception of some indefinite period, in eternity, when successive attempts were being made by the law of evolution at the formation of universes. The idea is plainly stated in theZohar:There were old Worlds, which perished as soon as they came into existence, were formless, and were called Sparks. Thus, the smith, when hammering the iron, lets the sparks fly in all directions. The Sparks are the primordial Worlds, which could not continue because the Sacred Aged (Sephira) had not as yet assumed its form (of androgyne, or opposite sexes) of King and Queen (Sephira and Kadmon), and the Master was not yet at his work.393HadGenesisbegun as it ought, one would have found in it, first, the Celestial Logos, the“Heavenly Man,”which evolves as a Compound Unit of Logoi, out of which, after their pralayic sleep—a sleep that gathers the Numbers scattered on the mâyâvic plane into One, as the separate globules of quicksilver on a plate blend into one mass—the Logoi appear in their totality as the first“Male and Female,”or Adam Kadmon, the“Fiat Lux”of theBible, as we have already seen. But this transformation did not take place on our Earth, nor on any material plane, but in the Spacial Depths of the first differentiation of the eternal Root-Matter. On our nascent Globe, things proceed differently. The Monad or Jîva, as said inIsis Unveiled,394is, first of all, shot down by the Law of Evolution into the lowest form of matter—the mineral. After a sevenfold gyration encased in the stone,[pg 267]or that which will become mineral and stone in the Fourth Round, it creeps out of it, say, as a lichen. Passing thence, through all the forms of vegetable matter, into what is termed animal matter, it has now reached the point at which it has become the germ, so to speak, of the animal, that will become the physical man. All this, up to the Third Round, is formless, as matter, and senseless, as consciousness. For the Monad, or Jîva,per se, cannot be called even Spirit: it is a Ray, a Breath of the Absolute, or theAbsolutenessrather; and the Absolute Homogeneity, having no relations with the conditioned and relative finiteness, is unconscious on our plane. Therefore, besides the material which will be needed for its future human form, the Monad requires (a) a spiritual model, or prototype, for that material to shape itself into; and (b) an intelligent consciousness, to guide its evolution and progress, neither of which is possessed by the homogeneous Monad, or by senseless though living matter. The Adam of dust requires the Soul of Life to be breathed into him: the two middle Principles, which are thesentientLife of the irrational animal and the Human Soul, for the former is irrational without the latter. It is only when, from a potential androgyne, man has become separated into male and female, that he will be endowed with this conscious, rational, individual Soul (Manas),“the principle, or the intelligence, of the Elohim,”to receive which, he has to eat of the fruit of Knowledge from the Tree of Good and Evil. How is he to obtain all this? The Occult Doctrine teaches that while the Monad is cycling on downward into matter, these very Elohim, or Pitris—the lower Dhyân Chohans—are evolving,pari passuwith it, on a higher and more spiritual plane, descending also relatively into matter, on their own plane of consciousness, when, after having reached a certain point, they will meet the incarnating senseless Monad, encased in the lowest matter, and blending the two potencies, Spirit and Matter, the union will produce that terrestrial symbol of the“Heavenly Man”in space—Perfect Man. In the Sânkhya Philosophy, Purusha (Spirit) is spoken of as something impotent unless it mounts on the shoulders of Prakriti (Matter), which, left alone, is—senseless. But in the Secret Philosophy they are viewed as graduated. Spirit and Matter, though one and the same thing in their origin, when once they are on the plane of differentiation, begin each of them their evolutionary progress in contrary directions—Spirit falling gradually into Matter, and the latter ascending to its original condition, that of a pure spiritual Substance.[pg 268]Both are inseparable, yet ever separated. On the physical plane, two like poles will always repel each other, while the negative and the positive are mutually attracted; so do Spirit and Matter stand to each other—the two poles of the same homogeneous Substance, the Root-Principle of the Universe.Therefore, when the hour strikes for Purusha to mount on Prakriti's shoulders for the formation of the Perfect Man—rudimentary man of the first Two and a Half Races being only thefirst, gradually evolving into themost perfect, of mammals—the Celestial Ancestors (Entities from preceding Worlds, called in India the Shishta) step in on this our plane, and incarnate in the physical or animal man, as the Pitris had stepped in before them for the formation of the latter. Thus the two processes for the two“creations”—the animal and the divine man—differ greatly. The Pitris shoot out from their ethereal bodies still more ethereal and shadowy similitudes of themselves, or what we should now call“doubles,”or“astral forms,”in their own likeness.395This furnishes the Monad with its first dwelling, and blind matter with a model around and upon which to build henceforth. ButMan is still incomplete. From Svâyambhuva Manu,396from whom descended the seven primitive Manus, or Prajâpatis, each of whom gave birth to a primitive Race of men, down to theCodex Nazaræus, in which Karabtanos, or Fetahil, blind concupiscent Matter, begets on his Mother, Spiritus, seven Figures, each of which stands as the progenitor of one of the primeval seven Races—this doctrine has left its impress on every archaic scripture.“Who forms Manu [the Man] and who forms his body? The Life and the Lives. Sin397and the Moon.”Here Manu stands for the spiritual, heavenly Man, the real and non-dying Ego in us, which is the direct emanation of the“One Life,”or the Absolute Deity. As to our outward physical bodies, the house of the tabernacle of the Soul, the Doctrine teaches a strange lesson; so strange that unless thoroughly explained, and as thoroughly comprehended, it is only the exact science of the future that is destined to fully vindicate the theory.It has been stated before now that Occultism does not accept anything inorganic in the Kosmos. The expression employed by Science,[pg 269]“inorganic substance,”means simply that the latent life, slumbering in the molecules of so-called“inert matter,”is incognizable.All is Life, and every atom of even mineral dust is aLife, though beyond our comprehension and perception, because it is outside the range of the laws known to those who reject Occultism.“The very atoms,”says Tyndall,“seem instinct with a desire for life.”Whence, then, we would ask, comes the tendency“to run into organic form”? Is it in any way explicable except according to the teachings of Occult Science?The Worlds, to the profane, are built up of the known Elements. To the conception of an Arhat, these Elements are themselves, collectively, a Divine Life; distributively, on the plane of manifestations, the numberless and countless crores of Lives. Fire alone isOne,on the plane of the One Reality: on that of manifested, hence illusive, Being, its particles are fiery Lives which live and have their being at the expense of every other Life that they consume. Therefore they are named the“Devourers.”...Every visible thing in this Universe was built by suchLives,from conscious and divine primordial man down to the unconscious agents that construct matter.... From theOne Life,formless and uncreate, proceeds the Universe of Lives. First was manifested from the Deep [Chaos] cold luminous Fire [gaseous light?], which formed the Curds in Space [irresolvable nebulæ, perhaps?] ... These fought, and a great heat was developed by the encountering and collision, which produced rotation. Then came the first manifestedMaterialFire, the hot Flames, the Wanderers in Heaven [Comets]. Heat generates moist vapour; that forms solid water [?]; then dry mist, then liquid mist, watery, that puts out the luminous brightness of the Pilgrims [Comets?], and forms solid watery Wheels[MatterGlobes]. Bhümi [the Earth] appears with six sisters. These produce by their continuous motion the inferior fire, heat, and an aqueous mist, which yields the third World-Element—Water;and from the breath of all [atmospheric]Airis born. These four are the four Lives of the first four Periods [Rounds] of Manvantara. The three last will follow.The Commentary first speaks of the“numberless and countless crores of Lives.”Is Pasteur, then, unconsciously taking the first step toward Occult Science, in declaring that, if he dared express his ideas fully upon this subject, he would say, that the organic cells are endowed with a vital potency that does not cease its activity with the cessation of a current of oxygen towards them, and does not, on that account, break off its relations with life itself, which is supported by the influence[pg 270]of that gas?“I would add,”continues Pasteur,“that the evolution of the germ is accomplished by means of complicated phenomena, among which we must class processes of fermentation”; and life, according to Claude Bernard and Pasteur, is nothing else than a process of fermentation. That there exist in Nature Beings, or Lives, that can live and thrive without air, even on our Globe, has been demonstrated by the same Scientists. Pasteur found that many of the lower lives, such as vibriones, and other microbes and bacteria, could exist without air, which, on the contrary, killed them. They derived the oxygen necessary for their multiplication from the various substances that surrounded them. He calls themærobes, living on the tissues of our matter, when the latter has ceased to form a part of an integral and living whole (then called very unscientifically by Science“dead matter”), andanærobes. The one kind binds oxygen, and contributes greatly to the destruction of animal life and vegetable tissues, furnishing to the atmosphere materials which enter, later on, into the constitution of other organisms; the other finally destroys, or rather annihilates, the so-called organic substance; ultimate decay being impossible without their participation. Certain germ-cells, such as those of yeast, develop and multiply in air, but when deprived of it, they will adapt themselves to life without air and become ferments, absorbing oxygen from substances coming in contact with them, and thereby ruining the latter. The cells in fruit, when lacking free oxygen, act as ferments and stimulate fermentation.“Therefore the vegetable cell, in this case, manifests its life as an anærobic being. Why, then, should an organic cell form, in this case, an exception?”asks Professor Bogolubof. Pasteur shows that in the substance of our tissues and organs, the cell, not finding sufficient oxygen for itself, stimulates fermentation in the same way as the fruit-cell, and Claude Bernard thought that Pasteur's idea of the formation of ferments found its application and corroboration in the fact that urea increases in the blood during strangulation.Lifetherefore is everywhere in the Universe, and, Occultism teaches us, it is also in the atom.“Bhûmi appears with six sisters,”says the Commentary. It is a Vedic teaching that“there are three Earths, corresponding to three Heavens, and our Earth [the fourth] is called Bhûmi.”This is the explanation given by our exoteric Western Orientalists. But the esoteric meaning, and allusion to it in theVedas, is that it refers to our Planetary Chain;“three Earths”on the descending arc, and“three[pg 271]Heavens,”which are three Earths or Globes also, only far more ethereal, on the ascending or spiritual arc. By the first three we descend into Matter, by the other three we ascend into Spirit; the lowest one, Bhûmi, our Earth, forming the turning point, so to say, and containing,potentially, as much of Spirit as it does of Matter. But we shall treat of this hereafter.The general teaching of the Commentary, then, is that every new Round develops one of the Compound Elements, as now known to Science, which rejects the primitive nomenclature, preferring to subdivide them into constituents. If Nature is the“Ever-Becoming”on the manifested plane, then these Elements are to be regarded in the same light: they have to evolve, progress, and increase to the manvantaric end.Thus the First Round, we are taught, developed but one Element, and a nature and humanity in what may be spoken of as one aspect of Nature—called by some, very unscientifically, though it may be sode facto,“one-dimensional space.”The Second Round brought forth and developed two Elements, Fire and Earth; anditshumanity, adapted to this condition of Nature, if we can give the name humanity to beings living under conditions now unknown to men, was—to use again a familiar phrase in a strictly figurative sense, the only way in which it can be used correctly—a“two-dimensional”species.The processes of natural development which we are now considering will at once elucidate and discredit the fashion of speculating on the attributes oftwo,three, andfouror moredimensionalspace; but, in passing, it is worth while to point out the real significance of the sound, but incomplete, intuition that has prompted—among Spiritualists and Theosophists, and several great men of Science, for the matter of that398—the use of the modern expression, the“fourth dimension of space.”To begin with, the superficial absurdity of assuming that Space itself is measurable in any direction is of little consequence. The familiar phrase can only be an abbreviation of the fuller form—the“fourth dimension of matter, in Space.”399But even thus expanded, it is an unhappy phrase, because while it is perfectly true that the progress of[pg 272]evolution may be destined to introduce us to new characteristics of matter, those with which we are already familiar are really more numerous than the three dimensions. The qualities, or what is perhaps the best available term, the characteristics of matter, must clearly bear a direct relation always to the senses of man. Matter has extension, colour, motion (molecular motion), taste and smell, corresponding to the existing senses of man, and the next characteristic it develops—let us call it for the moment“Permeability”—will correspond to the next sense of man, which we may call“Normal Clairvoyance.”Thus, when some bold thinkers have been thirsting for a fourth dimension, to explain the passage of matter through matter, and the production of knots upon an endless cord, they have been in want of asixth characteristicof matter. The three dimensions belong really to only one attribute, or characteristic, of matter—extension; and popular common sense justly rebels against the idea that, under any condition of things, there can be more than three of such dimensions as length, breadth and thickness. These terms, and the term“dimension”itself, all belong to one plane of thought, to one stage of evolution, to one characteristic of matter. So long as there are foot-rules within the resources of cosmos, to apply to matter, so long will they be able to measure it three ways and no more; just as, from the time the idea of measurement first occupied a place in the human understanding, it has been possible to apply measurement in three directions and no more. But these considerations do not in any way militate against the certainty that, in the progress of time, as the faculties of humanity are multiplied, so will the characteristics of matter be multiplied also. Meanwhile, the expression is far more incorrect than even the familiar phrase of the sun's“rising”or“setting.”We now return to the consideration of material evolution through the Rounds. Matter in the Second Round, it has been stated, may be figuratively referred to as two-dimensional. But here anothercaveatmust be entered. This loose and figurative expression may be regarded—on one plane of thought, as we have just seen—as equivalent to the second characteristic of matter, corresponding to the second perceptive faculty or sense of man. But these two linked scales of evolution are concerned with the processes going on within the limits of a single Round. The succession of primary aspects of Nature, with which the succession of Rounds is concerned, has to do, as already indicated, with the development of the Elements—in the Occult sense—Fire,[pg 273]Air, Water, Earth. We are only in the Fourth Round, and our catalogue so far stops short. The order in which these Elements are mentioned, in the last sentence but one, is the correct one for Esoteric purposes and in the Secret Teachings. Milton was right when he spoke of the“Powers of Fire, Air, Water, Earth”; the Earth, such as we know it now, had no existence before the Fourth Round, hundreds of millions of years ago, the commencement of our geological Earth. The Globe, says the Commentary, was“fiery, cool and radiant, as its ethereal men and animals, during the First Round”—a contradiction or paradox in the opinion of our present Science—“luminous and more dense and heavy, during the Second Round; watery during the Third.”Thus are the Elements reversed.The centres of consciousness of the Third Round, destined to develop into humanity as we know it, arrived at a perception of the third Element, Water. If we had to frame our conclusions according to thedatafurnished us by Geologists, then we would say that there was no real water, even during the Carboniferous Period. We are told that gigantic masses of carbon, which existed formerly spread in the atmosphere, as carbonic acid, were absorbed by plants, while a large proportion of that gas was mixed in the water. Now, if this be so, and we have to believe that all the carbonic acid which went to compose those plants that formed bituminous coal, lignite, etc., and went towards the formation of lime-stone, and so on, that all this was at that period in the atmosphere in gaseous form, then, there must have been seas and oceans of liquid carbonic acid! But how then could the Carboniferous Period be preceded by the Devonian and Silurian Ages—those of fishes and molluscs—on that assumption? Barometric pressure, moreover, must have exceeded several hundred times the pressure of our present atmosphere. How could organisms, even so simple as those of certain fishes and molluscs, stand that? There is a curious work by Blanchard, on the Origin of Life, wherein he shows some strange contradictions and confusions in the theories of his colleagues, and which we recommend to the reader's attention.Those of the Fourth Round have added Earth as a state of matter to their stock, as well as the three other Elements in their present transformation.In short, none of the so-called Elements were, in the three preceding Rounds, as they are now. For all we know,Firemay have beenpureÂkâsha, the First Matter of the“Magnum Opus”of the Creators and[pg 274]Builders, that Astral Light which the paradoxical Éliphas Lévi calls in one breath the“Body of the Holy Ghost,”and in the next“Baphomet,”the“Androgyne Goat of Mendes”;Air, simply Nitrogen, the“Breath of the Supporters of the Heavenly Dome,”as the Mahometan Mystics call it;Water, that primordial fluid which was required, according to Moses, to make a“Living Soul.”And this may account for the flagrant discrepancies and unscientific statements found inGenesis. Separate the first from the second chapter; read the former as a scripture of the Elohists, and the latter as that of the far later Jehovists; still one finds, if one reads between the lines, the same order in which created things appear; namely, Fire (Light), Air, Water, and Man (or Earth). For the sentence of the first chapter (the Elohistic),“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,”is a mistranslation; it is not“the heaven and the earth,”but the duplex, or dual, Heaven, theupperand thelowerHeavens, or the separation of Primordial Substance that was light in its upper, and dark in its lower portions (the manifested Universe), in its duality of theinvisible(to the senses), and thevisibleto our perceptions.“God divided the light from the darkness”; and then made the firmament (Air).“Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters,”i.e.,“the waters which were under the firmament [our manifested visible Universe] from the waters which wereabovethe firmament [the (to us) invisible planes of being].”In the second chapter (the Jehovistic), plants and herbs are created before water, just as in the first,lightis produced before thesun.“God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the fieldbefore it was in the earth, and every herb of the fieldbefore it grew; for the Lord God [Elohim] had not caused it to rain upon the earth, etc.”—an absurdity unless the esoteric explanation is accepted. The plantswerecreated before they were in the earth—for there was no earth then such as it is now; and the herb of the field was in existence before it grew as it does now, in the Fourth Round.Discussing and explaining the nature of the invisible Elements and the“Primordial Fire”mentioned above, Éliphas Lévi invariably calls it the“Astral Light”: with him it is the“Grand Agent Magique.”Undeniably it is so, but—only so far asBlackMagic is concerned, and on the lowest planes of what we call Ether, the noumenon of which is Âkâsha; and even this would be held incorrect by orthodox Occultists. The“Astral Light”is simply the older“Sidereal Light”of Paracelsus; and to say that“everything which exists has been evolved from it, and[pg 275]it preserves and reproduces all forms,”as he does, is to enunciate truth only in the second proposition. The first is erroneous; for if all that exists was evolvedthrough(orviâ) it, this is not the Astral Light, since the latter is not the container ofallthings but, at best, only the reflector of thisall. Éliphas Lévi very truly shows it“a force in Nature,”by means of which“a single man who can master it ... might throw the world into confusion and transform its face”; for it is the“Great Arcanum of transcendent Magic.”Quoting the words of the great Western Kabalist in their translated form,400we may, perhaps, the better explain them by the occasional addition of a word or two, to show the difference between Western and Eastern explanations of the same subject. The author says of the great Magic Agent:
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,Stains the white radiance of Eternity—yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity; for Life alone can understand Life.What is that“Spark”which“hangs from the Flame”? It is Jîva, the Monad in conjunction with Manas, or rather its aroma—that which remains from each Personality, when worthy, and hangs from Âtmâ-Buddhi, the Flame, by the Thread of Life. In whatever way it is interpreted, and into whatever number of principles the human being is divided, it may be easily shown that this doctrine is supported by all the ancient religions, from the Vedic to the Egyptian, from the Zoroastrian to the Jewish. In the case of the last-mentioned, the Kabalistic works offer abundant proof of this statement. The entire system of the Kabalistic numerals is based on the divine Septenary hanging from the Triad, thus forming the Decad, and its permutations 7, 5, 4, and 3, which, finally, all merge into theOneitself; an endless and boundless Circle.As says theZohar:The Deity [the ever invisible Presence] manifests itself through thetenSephiroth, which are its radiating witnesses. The Deity is like the sea from which outflows a stream called Wisdom, the waters of which fall into a lake named Intelligence. From the basin, like seven channels, issue the Seven Sephiroth.... Fortenequalseven: the Decad containsfourUnities andthreeBinaries.The Ten Sephiroth correspond to the Limbs of Man.When I [the Elohim] framed Adam Kadmon, the Spirit of the Eternal shot out of his Body, like a sheet of lightning that radiated at once on the billows of thesevenmillions of skies, and mytenSplendours were his Limbs.But neither the Head nor the Shoulders of Adam Kadmon can be seen; therefore we read in theSiphra Dtzenioutha, the“Book of the Concealed Mystery”:In the beginning of Time, after the Elohim [the“Sons of Light and Life,”or the Builders] had shaped out of the eternal Essence the Heavens and the Earth, they formed the worlds six by six.The seventh being Malkuth, which is our Earth382on its plane, and[pg 260]the lowest on all the other planes of conscious existence. The ChaldeanBook of Numberscontains a detailed explanation of all this.The first triad of the Body of Adam Kadmon [the three upper planes of the seven383] cannot be seen before the Soul stands in the presence of the Ancient of Days.The Sephiroth of this upper Triad are:“1. Kether (the Crown), represented by the brow of Macroprosopus; 2. Chokmah (Wisdom, a male Principle), by his right shoulder; and 3. Binah (Intelligence, a female Principle), by the left shoulder.”Then come thesevenLimbs, or Sephiroth, on the planes of manifestation; the totality of these four planes being represented by Microprosopus, the Lesser Face, or Tetragrammaton, the“four-lettered”Mystery.“Thesevenmanifested and thethreeconcealed Limbs are the Body of the Deity.”Thus our Earth, Malkuth, is both theseventhand thefourthWorld; the former when counting from the first Globe above, the latter if reckoned by the planes. It is generated by the sixth Globe or Sephira, called Yezud,“Foundation,”or, as said in theBook of Numbers,“by Yezud, He [Adam Kadmon] fecundates the primitive Heva [Eve or our Earth].”Rendered in mystic language, this is the explanation why Malkuth, called the Inferior Mother, Matrona, Queen, and the Kingdom of the Foundation, is shown as the Bride of Tetragrammaton, or Microprosopus (the Second Logos), the Heavenly Man. When free from all impurity, she will become united with the Spiritual Logos,i.e., in the Seventh Race of the Seventh Round—after the regeneration, on the day of“Sabbath.”For the“SeventhDay”again has an occult significance undreamed of by our theologians.When Matronitha, the Mother, is separated and brought face to face with the King, in the excellence of the Sabbath, all things become one body.384“Become one body”means, that all is reäbsorbed once more into the One Element, the spirits of men becoming Nirvânîs, and the elements of everything else becoming again what they were before—Protyle or Undifferentiated Substance.“Sabbath”means Rest, or Nirvâna. It is not the“seventhday”aftersixdays, but a period the duration of which equals that of the seven“days,”or any period made up of seven parts. Thus a Pralaya is equal in duration to a Manvantara, or a Night of Brahmâ is equal to his Day. If the Christians will follow Jewish customs, they ought to adopt the spirit and not the dead letter thereof.[pg 261]They should work one week of seven days andrestseven days. That the word“Sabbath”had a mystic significance, is disclosed in the contempt shown by Jesus for the Sabbath day, and by what is said inLuke.385Sabbath is there taken for thewhole week. See the Greek text where the week is called“Sabbath.”Literally,“I fast twice in the Sabbath.”Paul, an Initiate, knew it well when referring to the eternal rest and felicity in Heaven, as Sabbath:386“and their happiness will be eternal, for they will ever be [one] with the Lord, and will enjoyan eternal Sabbath.”387The difference between the Kabalah and the archaic Esoteric Vidyâ—taking the Kabalah as contained in the ChaldeanBook of Numbers, not as misrepresented by its now disfigured copy, theKabalahof the Christian Mystics—is very small indeed, being confined to unimportant divergences of form and expression. Thus Eastern Occultism refers to our Earth as the Fourth World, the lowest of the Chain, above which run upward on both curves the six Globes, three on each side. TheZohar, on the other hand, calls the Earth the lower, or theseventh, adding that upon the six depend all things which are in it (Microprosopus). The“Smaller Face [smaller because manifested and finite] is formed ofsixSephiroth,”says the same work.“Seven Kings come anddie in the thrice-destroyed World[Malkuth, our Earth, destroyed after each of the Three Rounds which it has gone through]. And their reign [that of the Seven Kings] will be broken up.”388This relates to the Seven Races,fiveof which have already appeared, andtwomore have still to appear in this Round.The Shinto allegorical accounts of cosmogony and the origin of man, in Japan, hint at the same belief.Captain C. Pfoundes, who studied the religion underlying the various sects of the land, for nearly nine years in the monasteries of Japan, says:The Shinto idea of creation is as follows: Out of Chaos (Konton) the Earth (In) was the sediment precipitated, and the Heavens (Yo) the ethereal essences which ascended: Man (Jin) appeared between the two. The first man was called Kuni-to ko tatchino-mikoto, andfive other names were given to him, and then the human race appeared, male and female. Isanagi and Isanami begat Tenshoko doijin, the first of the five Gods of the Earth.These“Gods”are simply our Five Races, Isanagi and Isanami being the two kinds of“Ancestors,”the two preceding Races which give birth to animal and to rational man.[pg 262]It will be shown in Volume II, that the number seven, as well as the doctrine of the septenary constitution of man, was preëminent in all the secret systems. It plays as important a part in Western Kabalah as in Eastern Occultism. Éliphas Lévi calls the number seven“the key to the Mosaic creation and the symbols of every religion.”He shows the Kabalah faithfully following even the septenary division of man, for the diagram he gives in hisClef des Grands Mystères389is septenary. This may be seen at a glance, however cleverly the correct thought is veiled. One needs also only to look at the diagram, the“Formation of the Soul,”in Mathers'Kabbalah Unveiled,390from the above mentioned, work of Lévi, to find the same, though with a different interpretation.Thus it stands with both the Kabalistic and Occult names attached:Diagram IVLévi calls Nephesh that which we name Manas, andvice versâ. Nephesh is the Breath of (animal) Life in man—the Breath of Life,[pg 263]instinctualin the animal; and Manas is the Third Soul—the human in its light side, and animal, in its connection with Samaël or Kâma. Nephesh is really the“Breath of (animal) Life”breathed into Adam, the Man of Dust; it is consequently the Vital Spark, the informing Element. Without Manas, the“Reasoning Soul,”or Mind, which in Lévi's diagram is miscalled Nephesh, Âtmâ-Buddhi is irrational on this plane and cannot act. It is Buddhi which is the Plastic Mediator; not Manas, the intelligent medium between the upper Triad and the lower Quaternary. But there are many such strange and curious transformations to be found in the Kabalistic works—a convincing proof that this literature has become a sad jumble. We do not accept the classification, except in this one particular, in order to show the points of agreement.We will now give in tabular form what the very cautious Éliphas Lévi says in explanation of his diagram, and what the Esoteric Doctrine teaches—and compare the two. Lévi, too, makes a distinction between Kabalistic and Occult Pneumatics.Says Éliphas Lévi, the Kabalist:Say the Theosophists:Kabalistic Pneumatics.Esoteric Pneumatics.1. The Soul (or Ego) is a clothed light; and this light is triple.1. The same; for it is Âtmâ-Buddhi-Manas.2. Neshamah—pure Spirit.2. The same391.3. Ruach—the Soul or Spirit.3. Spiritual Soul.4. Nephesh—Plastic Mediator.3924. Mediator between Spirit and Man, the Seat of Reason, the Mind, in man.5. The garment of the Soul is the rind [body] of the Image [Astral Soul].5. Correct.6. The Image is double, because it reflects the good and the bad.6. Too uselessly apocalyptic. Why not say that the Astral reflects the good as well as the bad man; man, who is ever tending to the upper Triad, or else disappears with the Quaternary.7. [Image—Body.]7. The Earthly Image.[pg 264]Occult Pneumatics.Occult Pneumatics.(As given by Éliphas Lévi.)(As given by the Occultists.)1. Nephesh is immortal, because it renews its life by the destruction of forms. [But Nephesh, the“Breath of Life,”is a misnomer, and a useless puzzle to the student.]1. Manas is immortal, because after every new incarnation it adds to Âtmâ-Buddhi something of itself; and thus, assimilating itself to the Monad, shares its immortality.2. Ruach progresses by the evolution of ideas (!?).2. Buddhi becomes conscious by the accretions it gets from Manas, on the death of man after every new incarnation.3. Neshamah is progressive, without oblivion and destruction.3. Âtmâ neither progresses, forgets, nor remembers. It does not belong to this plane; it is but the Ray of Light eternal which shines upon, and through, the darkness of matter—when the latter is willing.4. The Soul has three dwellings.4. The Soul—collectively, as the Upper Triad—liveson three planes, besides its fourth, the terrestrial sphere; and itiseternally on the highest of the three.5. These dwellings are: the Plane of Mortals; the Superior Eden; and the Inferior Eden.5. These dwellings are: Earth for the physical man, or Animal Soul; Kâma Loka (Hades, the Limbo) for the disembodied man, or his Shell; Devachan for the Higher Triad.[pg 265]6. The Image [man] is a sphinx that offers the riddle of birth.6. Correct.7. The fatal Image [the Astral] endows Nephesh with its aptitudes; but Ruach is able to substitute for it the Image conquered in accordance with the inspirations of Neshamah.7. The Astral, through Kâma (Desire), is ever drawing Manas down into the sphere of material passions and desires. But if thebetterMan, or Manas, tries to escape the fatal attraction, and turns its aspirations to Âtmâ (Neshamah), then Buddhi (Ruach) conquers, and carries Manas with it to the realm of eternal Spirit.It is very evident that the French Kabalist either did not sufficiently know the real tenet, or distorted it to suit himself and his objects. Thus he says again, treating upon the same subject, as follows; and we Occultists answer the late Kabalist and his admirers also as follows:1. The Body is the mould of Nephesh; Nephesh the mould of Ruach; Ruach the mould of thegarmentof Neshamah.1. The Body follows the whims, good or bad, of Manas; Manas tries to follow the Light of Buddhi, but often fails. Buddhi is the mould of the“garments”of Âtmâ; for Âtmâ is no body, or shape, or anything, and because Buddhi is onlyfigurativelyits Vehicle.2. Light [the Soul] personifies itself in clothing itself [with a Body]; and personality endures only when the garment is perfect.2. The Monad becomes a personal Ego when it incarnates; and something remains of that Personality through Manas, when the latter is perfect enough to assimilate Buddhi.3. The Angels aspire to become men; a Perfect Man, a Man-God, is above all the Angels.3. Correct.4. Every 14,000 years the soul rejuvenates, and rests in the jubilean sleep of oblivion.4. Within a period, a Great Age, or a Day of Brahmâ, 14 Manus reign; after which comes Pralaya, when all the Souls (Egos) rest in Nirvâna.[pg 266]Such are the distorted copies of the Esoteric Doctrine in theKabalah.But to return to Shloka 5 of Stanza VII.(b) The well-known Kabalistic aphorism runs:“A stone becomes a plant; a plant, a beast; the beast, a man; a man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.”The“Spark”animates all the kingdoms, in turn, before it enters into and informs Divine Man, between whom and his predecessor animal man, there is all the difference in the world.Genesisbegins its anthropology at the wrong end—evidently for a blind—and lands nowhere. The introductory chapters ofGenesiswere never meant to represent even a remote allegory of the creation ofourEarth. They embrace a metaphysical conception of some indefinite period, in eternity, when successive attempts were being made by the law of evolution at the formation of universes. The idea is plainly stated in theZohar:There were old Worlds, which perished as soon as they came into existence, were formless, and were called Sparks. Thus, the smith, when hammering the iron, lets the sparks fly in all directions. The Sparks are the primordial Worlds, which could not continue because the Sacred Aged (Sephira) had not as yet assumed its form (of androgyne, or opposite sexes) of King and Queen (Sephira and Kadmon), and the Master was not yet at his work.393HadGenesisbegun as it ought, one would have found in it, first, the Celestial Logos, the“Heavenly Man,”which evolves as a Compound Unit of Logoi, out of which, after their pralayic sleep—a sleep that gathers the Numbers scattered on the mâyâvic plane into One, as the separate globules of quicksilver on a plate blend into one mass—the Logoi appear in their totality as the first“Male and Female,”or Adam Kadmon, the“Fiat Lux”of theBible, as we have already seen. But this transformation did not take place on our Earth, nor on any material plane, but in the Spacial Depths of the first differentiation of the eternal Root-Matter. On our nascent Globe, things proceed differently. The Monad or Jîva, as said inIsis Unveiled,394is, first of all, shot down by the Law of Evolution into the lowest form of matter—the mineral. After a sevenfold gyration encased in the stone,[pg 267]or that which will become mineral and stone in the Fourth Round, it creeps out of it, say, as a lichen. Passing thence, through all the forms of vegetable matter, into what is termed animal matter, it has now reached the point at which it has become the germ, so to speak, of the animal, that will become the physical man. All this, up to the Third Round, is formless, as matter, and senseless, as consciousness. For the Monad, or Jîva,per se, cannot be called even Spirit: it is a Ray, a Breath of the Absolute, or theAbsolutenessrather; and the Absolute Homogeneity, having no relations with the conditioned and relative finiteness, is unconscious on our plane. Therefore, besides the material which will be needed for its future human form, the Monad requires (a) a spiritual model, or prototype, for that material to shape itself into; and (b) an intelligent consciousness, to guide its evolution and progress, neither of which is possessed by the homogeneous Monad, or by senseless though living matter. The Adam of dust requires the Soul of Life to be breathed into him: the two middle Principles, which are thesentientLife of the irrational animal and the Human Soul, for the former is irrational without the latter. It is only when, from a potential androgyne, man has become separated into male and female, that he will be endowed with this conscious, rational, individual Soul (Manas),“the principle, or the intelligence, of the Elohim,”to receive which, he has to eat of the fruit of Knowledge from the Tree of Good and Evil. How is he to obtain all this? The Occult Doctrine teaches that while the Monad is cycling on downward into matter, these very Elohim, or Pitris—the lower Dhyân Chohans—are evolving,pari passuwith it, on a higher and more spiritual plane, descending also relatively into matter, on their own plane of consciousness, when, after having reached a certain point, they will meet the incarnating senseless Monad, encased in the lowest matter, and blending the two potencies, Spirit and Matter, the union will produce that terrestrial symbol of the“Heavenly Man”in space—Perfect Man. In the Sânkhya Philosophy, Purusha (Spirit) is spoken of as something impotent unless it mounts on the shoulders of Prakriti (Matter), which, left alone, is—senseless. But in the Secret Philosophy they are viewed as graduated. Spirit and Matter, though one and the same thing in their origin, when once they are on the plane of differentiation, begin each of them their evolutionary progress in contrary directions—Spirit falling gradually into Matter, and the latter ascending to its original condition, that of a pure spiritual Substance.[pg 268]Both are inseparable, yet ever separated. On the physical plane, two like poles will always repel each other, while the negative and the positive are mutually attracted; so do Spirit and Matter stand to each other—the two poles of the same homogeneous Substance, the Root-Principle of the Universe.Therefore, when the hour strikes for Purusha to mount on Prakriti's shoulders for the formation of the Perfect Man—rudimentary man of the first Two and a Half Races being only thefirst, gradually evolving into themost perfect, of mammals—the Celestial Ancestors (Entities from preceding Worlds, called in India the Shishta) step in on this our plane, and incarnate in the physical or animal man, as the Pitris had stepped in before them for the formation of the latter. Thus the two processes for the two“creations”—the animal and the divine man—differ greatly. The Pitris shoot out from their ethereal bodies still more ethereal and shadowy similitudes of themselves, or what we should now call“doubles,”or“astral forms,”in their own likeness.395This furnishes the Monad with its first dwelling, and blind matter with a model around and upon which to build henceforth. ButMan is still incomplete. From Svâyambhuva Manu,396from whom descended the seven primitive Manus, or Prajâpatis, each of whom gave birth to a primitive Race of men, down to theCodex Nazaræus, in which Karabtanos, or Fetahil, blind concupiscent Matter, begets on his Mother, Spiritus, seven Figures, each of which stands as the progenitor of one of the primeval seven Races—this doctrine has left its impress on every archaic scripture.“Who forms Manu [the Man] and who forms his body? The Life and the Lives. Sin397and the Moon.”Here Manu stands for the spiritual, heavenly Man, the real and non-dying Ego in us, which is the direct emanation of the“One Life,”or the Absolute Deity. As to our outward physical bodies, the house of the tabernacle of the Soul, the Doctrine teaches a strange lesson; so strange that unless thoroughly explained, and as thoroughly comprehended, it is only the exact science of the future that is destined to fully vindicate the theory.It has been stated before now that Occultism does not accept anything inorganic in the Kosmos. The expression employed by Science,[pg 269]“inorganic substance,”means simply that the latent life, slumbering in the molecules of so-called“inert matter,”is incognizable.All is Life, and every atom of even mineral dust is aLife, though beyond our comprehension and perception, because it is outside the range of the laws known to those who reject Occultism.“The very atoms,”says Tyndall,“seem instinct with a desire for life.”Whence, then, we would ask, comes the tendency“to run into organic form”? Is it in any way explicable except according to the teachings of Occult Science?The Worlds, to the profane, are built up of the known Elements. To the conception of an Arhat, these Elements are themselves, collectively, a Divine Life; distributively, on the plane of manifestations, the numberless and countless crores of Lives. Fire alone isOne,on the plane of the One Reality: on that of manifested, hence illusive, Being, its particles are fiery Lives which live and have their being at the expense of every other Life that they consume. Therefore they are named the“Devourers.”...Every visible thing in this Universe was built by suchLives,from conscious and divine primordial man down to the unconscious agents that construct matter.... From theOne Life,formless and uncreate, proceeds the Universe of Lives. First was manifested from the Deep [Chaos] cold luminous Fire [gaseous light?], which formed the Curds in Space [irresolvable nebulæ, perhaps?] ... These fought, and a great heat was developed by the encountering and collision, which produced rotation. Then came the first manifestedMaterialFire, the hot Flames, the Wanderers in Heaven [Comets]. Heat generates moist vapour; that forms solid water [?]; then dry mist, then liquid mist, watery, that puts out the luminous brightness of the Pilgrims [Comets?], and forms solid watery Wheels[MatterGlobes]. Bhümi [the Earth] appears with six sisters. These produce by their continuous motion the inferior fire, heat, and an aqueous mist, which yields the third World-Element—Water;and from the breath of all [atmospheric]Airis born. These four are the four Lives of the first four Periods [Rounds] of Manvantara. The three last will follow.The Commentary first speaks of the“numberless and countless crores of Lives.”Is Pasteur, then, unconsciously taking the first step toward Occult Science, in declaring that, if he dared express his ideas fully upon this subject, he would say, that the organic cells are endowed with a vital potency that does not cease its activity with the cessation of a current of oxygen towards them, and does not, on that account, break off its relations with life itself, which is supported by the influence[pg 270]of that gas?“I would add,”continues Pasteur,“that the evolution of the germ is accomplished by means of complicated phenomena, among which we must class processes of fermentation”; and life, according to Claude Bernard and Pasteur, is nothing else than a process of fermentation. That there exist in Nature Beings, or Lives, that can live and thrive without air, even on our Globe, has been demonstrated by the same Scientists. Pasteur found that many of the lower lives, such as vibriones, and other microbes and bacteria, could exist without air, which, on the contrary, killed them. They derived the oxygen necessary for their multiplication from the various substances that surrounded them. He calls themærobes, living on the tissues of our matter, when the latter has ceased to form a part of an integral and living whole (then called very unscientifically by Science“dead matter”), andanærobes. The one kind binds oxygen, and contributes greatly to the destruction of animal life and vegetable tissues, furnishing to the atmosphere materials which enter, later on, into the constitution of other organisms; the other finally destroys, or rather annihilates, the so-called organic substance; ultimate decay being impossible without their participation. Certain germ-cells, such as those of yeast, develop and multiply in air, but when deprived of it, they will adapt themselves to life without air and become ferments, absorbing oxygen from substances coming in contact with them, and thereby ruining the latter. The cells in fruit, when lacking free oxygen, act as ferments and stimulate fermentation.“Therefore the vegetable cell, in this case, manifests its life as an anærobic being. Why, then, should an organic cell form, in this case, an exception?”asks Professor Bogolubof. Pasteur shows that in the substance of our tissues and organs, the cell, not finding sufficient oxygen for itself, stimulates fermentation in the same way as the fruit-cell, and Claude Bernard thought that Pasteur's idea of the formation of ferments found its application and corroboration in the fact that urea increases in the blood during strangulation.Lifetherefore is everywhere in the Universe, and, Occultism teaches us, it is also in the atom.“Bhûmi appears with six sisters,”says the Commentary. It is a Vedic teaching that“there are three Earths, corresponding to three Heavens, and our Earth [the fourth] is called Bhûmi.”This is the explanation given by our exoteric Western Orientalists. But the esoteric meaning, and allusion to it in theVedas, is that it refers to our Planetary Chain;“three Earths”on the descending arc, and“three[pg 271]Heavens,”which are three Earths or Globes also, only far more ethereal, on the ascending or spiritual arc. By the first three we descend into Matter, by the other three we ascend into Spirit; the lowest one, Bhûmi, our Earth, forming the turning point, so to say, and containing,potentially, as much of Spirit as it does of Matter. But we shall treat of this hereafter.The general teaching of the Commentary, then, is that every new Round develops one of the Compound Elements, as now known to Science, which rejects the primitive nomenclature, preferring to subdivide them into constituents. If Nature is the“Ever-Becoming”on the manifested plane, then these Elements are to be regarded in the same light: they have to evolve, progress, and increase to the manvantaric end.Thus the First Round, we are taught, developed but one Element, and a nature and humanity in what may be spoken of as one aspect of Nature—called by some, very unscientifically, though it may be sode facto,“one-dimensional space.”The Second Round brought forth and developed two Elements, Fire and Earth; anditshumanity, adapted to this condition of Nature, if we can give the name humanity to beings living under conditions now unknown to men, was—to use again a familiar phrase in a strictly figurative sense, the only way in which it can be used correctly—a“two-dimensional”species.The processes of natural development which we are now considering will at once elucidate and discredit the fashion of speculating on the attributes oftwo,three, andfouror moredimensionalspace; but, in passing, it is worth while to point out the real significance of the sound, but incomplete, intuition that has prompted—among Spiritualists and Theosophists, and several great men of Science, for the matter of that398—the use of the modern expression, the“fourth dimension of space.”To begin with, the superficial absurdity of assuming that Space itself is measurable in any direction is of little consequence. The familiar phrase can only be an abbreviation of the fuller form—the“fourth dimension of matter, in Space.”399But even thus expanded, it is an unhappy phrase, because while it is perfectly true that the progress of[pg 272]evolution may be destined to introduce us to new characteristics of matter, those with which we are already familiar are really more numerous than the three dimensions. The qualities, or what is perhaps the best available term, the characteristics of matter, must clearly bear a direct relation always to the senses of man. Matter has extension, colour, motion (molecular motion), taste and smell, corresponding to the existing senses of man, and the next characteristic it develops—let us call it for the moment“Permeability”—will correspond to the next sense of man, which we may call“Normal Clairvoyance.”Thus, when some bold thinkers have been thirsting for a fourth dimension, to explain the passage of matter through matter, and the production of knots upon an endless cord, they have been in want of asixth characteristicof matter. The three dimensions belong really to only one attribute, or characteristic, of matter—extension; and popular common sense justly rebels against the idea that, under any condition of things, there can be more than three of such dimensions as length, breadth and thickness. These terms, and the term“dimension”itself, all belong to one plane of thought, to one stage of evolution, to one characteristic of matter. So long as there are foot-rules within the resources of cosmos, to apply to matter, so long will they be able to measure it three ways and no more; just as, from the time the idea of measurement first occupied a place in the human understanding, it has been possible to apply measurement in three directions and no more. But these considerations do not in any way militate against the certainty that, in the progress of time, as the faculties of humanity are multiplied, so will the characteristics of matter be multiplied also. Meanwhile, the expression is far more incorrect than even the familiar phrase of the sun's“rising”or“setting.”We now return to the consideration of material evolution through the Rounds. Matter in the Second Round, it has been stated, may be figuratively referred to as two-dimensional. But here anothercaveatmust be entered. This loose and figurative expression may be regarded—on one plane of thought, as we have just seen—as equivalent to the second characteristic of matter, corresponding to the second perceptive faculty or sense of man. But these two linked scales of evolution are concerned with the processes going on within the limits of a single Round. The succession of primary aspects of Nature, with which the succession of Rounds is concerned, has to do, as already indicated, with the development of the Elements—in the Occult sense—Fire,[pg 273]Air, Water, Earth. We are only in the Fourth Round, and our catalogue so far stops short. The order in which these Elements are mentioned, in the last sentence but one, is the correct one for Esoteric purposes and in the Secret Teachings. Milton was right when he spoke of the“Powers of Fire, Air, Water, Earth”; the Earth, such as we know it now, had no existence before the Fourth Round, hundreds of millions of years ago, the commencement of our geological Earth. The Globe, says the Commentary, was“fiery, cool and radiant, as its ethereal men and animals, during the First Round”—a contradiction or paradox in the opinion of our present Science—“luminous and more dense and heavy, during the Second Round; watery during the Third.”Thus are the Elements reversed.The centres of consciousness of the Third Round, destined to develop into humanity as we know it, arrived at a perception of the third Element, Water. If we had to frame our conclusions according to thedatafurnished us by Geologists, then we would say that there was no real water, even during the Carboniferous Period. We are told that gigantic masses of carbon, which existed formerly spread in the atmosphere, as carbonic acid, were absorbed by plants, while a large proportion of that gas was mixed in the water. Now, if this be so, and we have to believe that all the carbonic acid which went to compose those plants that formed bituminous coal, lignite, etc., and went towards the formation of lime-stone, and so on, that all this was at that period in the atmosphere in gaseous form, then, there must have been seas and oceans of liquid carbonic acid! But how then could the Carboniferous Period be preceded by the Devonian and Silurian Ages—those of fishes and molluscs—on that assumption? Barometric pressure, moreover, must have exceeded several hundred times the pressure of our present atmosphere. How could organisms, even so simple as those of certain fishes and molluscs, stand that? There is a curious work by Blanchard, on the Origin of Life, wherein he shows some strange contradictions and confusions in the theories of his colleagues, and which we recommend to the reader's attention.Those of the Fourth Round have added Earth as a state of matter to their stock, as well as the three other Elements in their present transformation.In short, none of the so-called Elements were, in the three preceding Rounds, as they are now. For all we know,Firemay have beenpureÂkâsha, the First Matter of the“Magnum Opus”of the Creators and[pg 274]Builders, that Astral Light which the paradoxical Éliphas Lévi calls in one breath the“Body of the Holy Ghost,”and in the next“Baphomet,”the“Androgyne Goat of Mendes”;Air, simply Nitrogen, the“Breath of the Supporters of the Heavenly Dome,”as the Mahometan Mystics call it;Water, that primordial fluid which was required, according to Moses, to make a“Living Soul.”And this may account for the flagrant discrepancies and unscientific statements found inGenesis. Separate the first from the second chapter; read the former as a scripture of the Elohists, and the latter as that of the far later Jehovists; still one finds, if one reads between the lines, the same order in which created things appear; namely, Fire (Light), Air, Water, and Man (or Earth). For the sentence of the first chapter (the Elohistic),“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,”is a mistranslation; it is not“the heaven and the earth,”but the duplex, or dual, Heaven, theupperand thelowerHeavens, or the separation of Primordial Substance that was light in its upper, and dark in its lower portions (the manifested Universe), in its duality of theinvisible(to the senses), and thevisibleto our perceptions.“God divided the light from the darkness”; and then made the firmament (Air).“Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters,”i.e.,“the waters which were under the firmament [our manifested visible Universe] from the waters which wereabovethe firmament [the (to us) invisible planes of being].”In the second chapter (the Jehovistic), plants and herbs are created before water, just as in the first,lightis produced before thesun.“God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the fieldbefore it was in the earth, and every herb of the fieldbefore it grew; for the Lord God [Elohim] had not caused it to rain upon the earth, etc.”—an absurdity unless the esoteric explanation is accepted. The plantswerecreated before they were in the earth—for there was no earth then such as it is now; and the herb of the field was in existence before it grew as it does now, in the Fourth Round.Discussing and explaining the nature of the invisible Elements and the“Primordial Fire”mentioned above, Éliphas Lévi invariably calls it the“Astral Light”: with him it is the“Grand Agent Magique.”Undeniably it is so, but—only so far asBlackMagic is concerned, and on the lowest planes of what we call Ether, the noumenon of which is Âkâsha; and even this would be held incorrect by orthodox Occultists. The“Astral Light”is simply the older“Sidereal Light”of Paracelsus; and to say that“everything which exists has been evolved from it, and[pg 275]it preserves and reproduces all forms,”as he does, is to enunciate truth only in the second proposition. The first is erroneous; for if all that exists was evolvedthrough(orviâ) it, this is not the Astral Light, since the latter is not the container ofallthings but, at best, only the reflector of thisall. Éliphas Lévi very truly shows it“a force in Nature,”by means of which“a single man who can master it ... might throw the world into confusion and transform its face”; for it is the“Great Arcanum of transcendent Magic.”Quoting the words of the great Western Kabalist in their translated form,400we may, perhaps, the better explain them by the occasional addition of a word or two, to show the difference between Western and Eastern explanations of the same subject. The author says of the great Magic Agent:
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,Stains the white radiance of Eternity—yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity; for Life alone can understand Life.What is that“Spark”which“hangs from the Flame”? It is Jîva, the Monad in conjunction with Manas, or rather its aroma—that which remains from each Personality, when worthy, and hangs from Âtmâ-Buddhi, the Flame, by the Thread of Life. In whatever way it is interpreted, and into whatever number of principles the human being is divided, it may be easily shown that this doctrine is supported by all the ancient religions, from the Vedic to the Egyptian, from the Zoroastrian to the Jewish. In the case of the last-mentioned, the Kabalistic works offer abundant proof of this statement. The entire system of the Kabalistic numerals is based on the divine Septenary hanging from the Triad, thus forming the Decad, and its permutations 7, 5, 4, and 3, which, finally, all merge into theOneitself; an endless and boundless Circle.As says theZohar:The Deity [the ever invisible Presence] manifests itself through thetenSephiroth, which are its radiating witnesses. The Deity is like the sea from which outflows a stream called Wisdom, the waters of which fall into a lake named Intelligence. From the basin, like seven channels, issue the Seven Sephiroth.... Fortenequalseven: the Decad containsfourUnities andthreeBinaries.The Ten Sephiroth correspond to the Limbs of Man.When I [the Elohim] framed Adam Kadmon, the Spirit of the Eternal shot out of his Body, like a sheet of lightning that radiated at once on the billows of thesevenmillions of skies, and mytenSplendours were his Limbs.But neither the Head nor the Shoulders of Adam Kadmon can be seen; therefore we read in theSiphra Dtzenioutha, the“Book of the Concealed Mystery”:In the beginning of Time, after the Elohim [the“Sons of Light and Life,”or the Builders] had shaped out of the eternal Essence the Heavens and the Earth, they formed the worlds six by six.The seventh being Malkuth, which is our Earth382on its plane, and[pg 260]the lowest on all the other planes of conscious existence. The ChaldeanBook of Numberscontains a detailed explanation of all this.The first triad of the Body of Adam Kadmon [the three upper planes of the seven383] cannot be seen before the Soul stands in the presence of the Ancient of Days.The Sephiroth of this upper Triad are:“1. Kether (the Crown), represented by the brow of Macroprosopus; 2. Chokmah (Wisdom, a male Principle), by his right shoulder; and 3. Binah (Intelligence, a female Principle), by the left shoulder.”Then come thesevenLimbs, or Sephiroth, on the planes of manifestation; the totality of these four planes being represented by Microprosopus, the Lesser Face, or Tetragrammaton, the“four-lettered”Mystery.“Thesevenmanifested and thethreeconcealed Limbs are the Body of the Deity.”Thus our Earth, Malkuth, is both theseventhand thefourthWorld; the former when counting from the first Globe above, the latter if reckoned by the planes. It is generated by the sixth Globe or Sephira, called Yezud,“Foundation,”or, as said in theBook of Numbers,“by Yezud, He [Adam Kadmon] fecundates the primitive Heva [Eve or our Earth].”Rendered in mystic language, this is the explanation why Malkuth, called the Inferior Mother, Matrona, Queen, and the Kingdom of the Foundation, is shown as the Bride of Tetragrammaton, or Microprosopus (the Second Logos), the Heavenly Man. When free from all impurity, she will become united with the Spiritual Logos,i.e., in the Seventh Race of the Seventh Round—after the regeneration, on the day of“Sabbath.”For the“SeventhDay”again has an occult significance undreamed of by our theologians.When Matronitha, the Mother, is separated and brought face to face with the King, in the excellence of the Sabbath, all things become one body.384“Become one body”means, that all is reäbsorbed once more into the One Element, the spirits of men becoming Nirvânîs, and the elements of everything else becoming again what they were before—Protyle or Undifferentiated Substance.“Sabbath”means Rest, or Nirvâna. It is not the“seventhday”aftersixdays, but a period the duration of which equals that of the seven“days,”or any period made up of seven parts. Thus a Pralaya is equal in duration to a Manvantara, or a Night of Brahmâ is equal to his Day. If the Christians will follow Jewish customs, they ought to adopt the spirit and not the dead letter thereof.[pg 261]They should work one week of seven days andrestseven days. That the word“Sabbath”had a mystic significance, is disclosed in the contempt shown by Jesus for the Sabbath day, and by what is said inLuke.385Sabbath is there taken for thewhole week. See the Greek text where the week is called“Sabbath.”Literally,“I fast twice in the Sabbath.”Paul, an Initiate, knew it well when referring to the eternal rest and felicity in Heaven, as Sabbath:386“and their happiness will be eternal, for they will ever be [one] with the Lord, and will enjoyan eternal Sabbath.”387The difference between the Kabalah and the archaic Esoteric Vidyâ—taking the Kabalah as contained in the ChaldeanBook of Numbers, not as misrepresented by its now disfigured copy, theKabalahof the Christian Mystics—is very small indeed, being confined to unimportant divergences of form and expression. Thus Eastern Occultism refers to our Earth as the Fourth World, the lowest of the Chain, above which run upward on both curves the six Globes, three on each side. TheZohar, on the other hand, calls the Earth the lower, or theseventh, adding that upon the six depend all things which are in it (Microprosopus). The“Smaller Face [smaller because manifested and finite] is formed ofsixSephiroth,”says the same work.“Seven Kings come anddie in the thrice-destroyed World[Malkuth, our Earth, destroyed after each of the Three Rounds which it has gone through]. And their reign [that of the Seven Kings] will be broken up.”388This relates to the Seven Races,fiveof which have already appeared, andtwomore have still to appear in this Round.The Shinto allegorical accounts of cosmogony and the origin of man, in Japan, hint at the same belief.Captain C. Pfoundes, who studied the religion underlying the various sects of the land, for nearly nine years in the monasteries of Japan, says:The Shinto idea of creation is as follows: Out of Chaos (Konton) the Earth (In) was the sediment precipitated, and the Heavens (Yo) the ethereal essences which ascended: Man (Jin) appeared between the two. The first man was called Kuni-to ko tatchino-mikoto, andfive other names were given to him, and then the human race appeared, male and female. Isanagi and Isanami begat Tenshoko doijin, the first of the five Gods of the Earth.These“Gods”are simply our Five Races, Isanagi and Isanami being the two kinds of“Ancestors,”the two preceding Races which give birth to animal and to rational man.[pg 262]It will be shown in Volume II, that the number seven, as well as the doctrine of the septenary constitution of man, was preëminent in all the secret systems. It plays as important a part in Western Kabalah as in Eastern Occultism. Éliphas Lévi calls the number seven“the key to the Mosaic creation and the symbols of every religion.”He shows the Kabalah faithfully following even the septenary division of man, for the diagram he gives in hisClef des Grands Mystères389is septenary. This may be seen at a glance, however cleverly the correct thought is veiled. One needs also only to look at the diagram, the“Formation of the Soul,”in Mathers'Kabbalah Unveiled,390from the above mentioned, work of Lévi, to find the same, though with a different interpretation.Thus it stands with both the Kabalistic and Occult names attached:Diagram IVLévi calls Nephesh that which we name Manas, andvice versâ. Nephesh is the Breath of (animal) Life in man—the Breath of Life,[pg 263]instinctualin the animal; and Manas is the Third Soul—the human in its light side, and animal, in its connection with Samaël or Kâma. Nephesh is really the“Breath of (animal) Life”breathed into Adam, the Man of Dust; it is consequently the Vital Spark, the informing Element. Without Manas, the“Reasoning Soul,”or Mind, which in Lévi's diagram is miscalled Nephesh, Âtmâ-Buddhi is irrational on this plane and cannot act. It is Buddhi which is the Plastic Mediator; not Manas, the intelligent medium between the upper Triad and the lower Quaternary. But there are many such strange and curious transformations to be found in the Kabalistic works—a convincing proof that this literature has become a sad jumble. We do not accept the classification, except in this one particular, in order to show the points of agreement.We will now give in tabular form what the very cautious Éliphas Lévi says in explanation of his diagram, and what the Esoteric Doctrine teaches—and compare the two. Lévi, too, makes a distinction between Kabalistic and Occult Pneumatics.Says Éliphas Lévi, the Kabalist:Say the Theosophists:Kabalistic Pneumatics.Esoteric Pneumatics.1. The Soul (or Ego) is a clothed light; and this light is triple.1. The same; for it is Âtmâ-Buddhi-Manas.2. Neshamah—pure Spirit.2. The same391.3. Ruach—the Soul or Spirit.3. Spiritual Soul.4. Nephesh—Plastic Mediator.3924. Mediator between Spirit and Man, the Seat of Reason, the Mind, in man.5. The garment of the Soul is the rind [body] of the Image [Astral Soul].5. Correct.6. The Image is double, because it reflects the good and the bad.6. Too uselessly apocalyptic. Why not say that the Astral reflects the good as well as the bad man; man, who is ever tending to the upper Triad, or else disappears with the Quaternary.7. [Image—Body.]7. The Earthly Image.[pg 264]Occult Pneumatics.Occult Pneumatics.(As given by Éliphas Lévi.)(As given by the Occultists.)1. Nephesh is immortal, because it renews its life by the destruction of forms. [But Nephesh, the“Breath of Life,”is a misnomer, and a useless puzzle to the student.]1. Manas is immortal, because after every new incarnation it adds to Âtmâ-Buddhi something of itself; and thus, assimilating itself to the Monad, shares its immortality.2. Ruach progresses by the evolution of ideas (!?).2. Buddhi becomes conscious by the accretions it gets from Manas, on the death of man after every new incarnation.3. Neshamah is progressive, without oblivion and destruction.3. Âtmâ neither progresses, forgets, nor remembers. It does not belong to this plane; it is but the Ray of Light eternal which shines upon, and through, the darkness of matter—when the latter is willing.4. The Soul has three dwellings.4. The Soul—collectively, as the Upper Triad—liveson three planes, besides its fourth, the terrestrial sphere; and itiseternally on the highest of the three.5. These dwellings are: the Plane of Mortals; the Superior Eden; and the Inferior Eden.5. These dwellings are: Earth for the physical man, or Animal Soul; Kâma Loka (Hades, the Limbo) for the disembodied man, or his Shell; Devachan for the Higher Triad.[pg 265]6. The Image [man] is a sphinx that offers the riddle of birth.6. Correct.7. The fatal Image [the Astral] endows Nephesh with its aptitudes; but Ruach is able to substitute for it the Image conquered in accordance with the inspirations of Neshamah.7. The Astral, through Kâma (Desire), is ever drawing Manas down into the sphere of material passions and desires. But if thebetterMan, or Manas, tries to escape the fatal attraction, and turns its aspirations to Âtmâ (Neshamah), then Buddhi (Ruach) conquers, and carries Manas with it to the realm of eternal Spirit.It is very evident that the French Kabalist either did not sufficiently know the real tenet, or distorted it to suit himself and his objects. Thus he says again, treating upon the same subject, as follows; and we Occultists answer the late Kabalist and his admirers also as follows:1. The Body is the mould of Nephesh; Nephesh the mould of Ruach; Ruach the mould of thegarmentof Neshamah.1. The Body follows the whims, good or bad, of Manas; Manas tries to follow the Light of Buddhi, but often fails. Buddhi is the mould of the“garments”of Âtmâ; for Âtmâ is no body, or shape, or anything, and because Buddhi is onlyfigurativelyits Vehicle.2. Light [the Soul] personifies itself in clothing itself [with a Body]; and personality endures only when the garment is perfect.2. The Monad becomes a personal Ego when it incarnates; and something remains of that Personality through Manas, when the latter is perfect enough to assimilate Buddhi.3. The Angels aspire to become men; a Perfect Man, a Man-God, is above all the Angels.3. Correct.4. Every 14,000 years the soul rejuvenates, and rests in the jubilean sleep of oblivion.4. Within a period, a Great Age, or a Day of Brahmâ, 14 Manus reign; after which comes Pralaya, when all the Souls (Egos) rest in Nirvâna.[pg 266]Such are the distorted copies of the Esoteric Doctrine in theKabalah.But to return to Shloka 5 of Stanza VII.(b) The well-known Kabalistic aphorism runs:“A stone becomes a plant; a plant, a beast; the beast, a man; a man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.”The“Spark”animates all the kingdoms, in turn, before it enters into and informs Divine Man, between whom and his predecessor animal man, there is all the difference in the world.Genesisbegins its anthropology at the wrong end—evidently for a blind—and lands nowhere. The introductory chapters ofGenesiswere never meant to represent even a remote allegory of the creation ofourEarth. They embrace a metaphysical conception of some indefinite period, in eternity, when successive attempts were being made by the law of evolution at the formation of universes. The idea is plainly stated in theZohar:There were old Worlds, which perished as soon as they came into existence, were formless, and were called Sparks. Thus, the smith, when hammering the iron, lets the sparks fly in all directions. The Sparks are the primordial Worlds, which could not continue because the Sacred Aged (Sephira) had not as yet assumed its form (of androgyne, or opposite sexes) of King and Queen (Sephira and Kadmon), and the Master was not yet at his work.393HadGenesisbegun as it ought, one would have found in it, first, the Celestial Logos, the“Heavenly Man,”which evolves as a Compound Unit of Logoi, out of which, after their pralayic sleep—a sleep that gathers the Numbers scattered on the mâyâvic plane into One, as the separate globules of quicksilver on a plate blend into one mass—the Logoi appear in their totality as the first“Male and Female,”or Adam Kadmon, the“Fiat Lux”of theBible, as we have already seen. But this transformation did not take place on our Earth, nor on any material plane, but in the Spacial Depths of the first differentiation of the eternal Root-Matter. On our nascent Globe, things proceed differently. The Monad or Jîva, as said inIsis Unveiled,394is, first of all, shot down by the Law of Evolution into the lowest form of matter—the mineral. After a sevenfold gyration encased in the stone,[pg 267]or that which will become mineral and stone in the Fourth Round, it creeps out of it, say, as a lichen. Passing thence, through all the forms of vegetable matter, into what is termed animal matter, it has now reached the point at which it has become the germ, so to speak, of the animal, that will become the physical man. All this, up to the Third Round, is formless, as matter, and senseless, as consciousness. For the Monad, or Jîva,per se, cannot be called even Spirit: it is a Ray, a Breath of the Absolute, or theAbsolutenessrather; and the Absolute Homogeneity, having no relations with the conditioned and relative finiteness, is unconscious on our plane. Therefore, besides the material which will be needed for its future human form, the Monad requires (a) a spiritual model, or prototype, for that material to shape itself into; and (b) an intelligent consciousness, to guide its evolution and progress, neither of which is possessed by the homogeneous Monad, or by senseless though living matter. The Adam of dust requires the Soul of Life to be breathed into him: the two middle Principles, which are thesentientLife of the irrational animal and the Human Soul, for the former is irrational without the latter. It is only when, from a potential androgyne, man has become separated into male and female, that he will be endowed with this conscious, rational, individual Soul (Manas),“the principle, or the intelligence, of the Elohim,”to receive which, he has to eat of the fruit of Knowledge from the Tree of Good and Evil. How is he to obtain all this? The Occult Doctrine teaches that while the Monad is cycling on downward into matter, these very Elohim, or Pitris—the lower Dhyân Chohans—are evolving,pari passuwith it, on a higher and more spiritual plane, descending also relatively into matter, on their own plane of consciousness, when, after having reached a certain point, they will meet the incarnating senseless Monad, encased in the lowest matter, and blending the two potencies, Spirit and Matter, the union will produce that terrestrial symbol of the“Heavenly Man”in space—Perfect Man. In the Sânkhya Philosophy, Purusha (Spirit) is spoken of as something impotent unless it mounts on the shoulders of Prakriti (Matter), which, left alone, is—senseless. But in the Secret Philosophy they are viewed as graduated. Spirit and Matter, though one and the same thing in their origin, when once they are on the plane of differentiation, begin each of them their evolutionary progress in contrary directions—Spirit falling gradually into Matter, and the latter ascending to its original condition, that of a pure spiritual Substance.[pg 268]Both are inseparable, yet ever separated. On the physical plane, two like poles will always repel each other, while the negative and the positive are mutually attracted; so do Spirit and Matter stand to each other—the two poles of the same homogeneous Substance, the Root-Principle of the Universe.Therefore, when the hour strikes for Purusha to mount on Prakriti's shoulders for the formation of the Perfect Man—rudimentary man of the first Two and a Half Races being only thefirst, gradually evolving into themost perfect, of mammals—the Celestial Ancestors (Entities from preceding Worlds, called in India the Shishta) step in on this our plane, and incarnate in the physical or animal man, as the Pitris had stepped in before them for the formation of the latter. Thus the two processes for the two“creations”—the animal and the divine man—differ greatly. The Pitris shoot out from their ethereal bodies still more ethereal and shadowy similitudes of themselves, or what we should now call“doubles,”or“astral forms,”in their own likeness.395This furnishes the Monad with its first dwelling, and blind matter with a model around and upon which to build henceforth. ButMan is still incomplete. From Svâyambhuva Manu,396from whom descended the seven primitive Manus, or Prajâpatis, each of whom gave birth to a primitive Race of men, down to theCodex Nazaræus, in which Karabtanos, or Fetahil, blind concupiscent Matter, begets on his Mother, Spiritus, seven Figures, each of which stands as the progenitor of one of the primeval seven Races—this doctrine has left its impress on every archaic scripture.“Who forms Manu [the Man] and who forms his body? The Life and the Lives. Sin397and the Moon.”Here Manu stands for the spiritual, heavenly Man, the real and non-dying Ego in us, which is the direct emanation of the“One Life,”or the Absolute Deity. As to our outward physical bodies, the house of the tabernacle of the Soul, the Doctrine teaches a strange lesson; so strange that unless thoroughly explained, and as thoroughly comprehended, it is only the exact science of the future that is destined to fully vindicate the theory.It has been stated before now that Occultism does not accept anything inorganic in the Kosmos. The expression employed by Science,[pg 269]“inorganic substance,”means simply that the latent life, slumbering in the molecules of so-called“inert matter,”is incognizable.All is Life, and every atom of even mineral dust is aLife, though beyond our comprehension and perception, because it is outside the range of the laws known to those who reject Occultism.“The very atoms,”says Tyndall,“seem instinct with a desire for life.”Whence, then, we would ask, comes the tendency“to run into organic form”? Is it in any way explicable except according to the teachings of Occult Science?The Worlds, to the profane, are built up of the known Elements. To the conception of an Arhat, these Elements are themselves, collectively, a Divine Life; distributively, on the plane of manifestations, the numberless and countless crores of Lives. Fire alone isOne,on the plane of the One Reality: on that of manifested, hence illusive, Being, its particles are fiery Lives which live and have their being at the expense of every other Life that they consume. Therefore they are named the“Devourers.”...Every visible thing in this Universe was built by suchLives,from conscious and divine primordial man down to the unconscious agents that construct matter.... From theOne Life,formless and uncreate, proceeds the Universe of Lives. First was manifested from the Deep [Chaos] cold luminous Fire [gaseous light?], which formed the Curds in Space [irresolvable nebulæ, perhaps?] ... These fought, and a great heat was developed by the encountering and collision, which produced rotation. Then came the first manifestedMaterialFire, the hot Flames, the Wanderers in Heaven [Comets]. Heat generates moist vapour; that forms solid water [?]; then dry mist, then liquid mist, watery, that puts out the luminous brightness of the Pilgrims [Comets?], and forms solid watery Wheels[MatterGlobes]. Bhümi [the Earth] appears with six sisters. These produce by their continuous motion the inferior fire, heat, and an aqueous mist, which yields the third World-Element—Water;and from the breath of all [atmospheric]Airis born. These four are the four Lives of the first four Periods [Rounds] of Manvantara. The three last will follow.The Commentary first speaks of the“numberless and countless crores of Lives.”Is Pasteur, then, unconsciously taking the first step toward Occult Science, in declaring that, if he dared express his ideas fully upon this subject, he would say, that the organic cells are endowed with a vital potency that does not cease its activity with the cessation of a current of oxygen towards them, and does not, on that account, break off its relations with life itself, which is supported by the influence[pg 270]of that gas?“I would add,”continues Pasteur,“that the evolution of the germ is accomplished by means of complicated phenomena, among which we must class processes of fermentation”; and life, according to Claude Bernard and Pasteur, is nothing else than a process of fermentation. That there exist in Nature Beings, or Lives, that can live and thrive without air, even on our Globe, has been demonstrated by the same Scientists. Pasteur found that many of the lower lives, such as vibriones, and other microbes and bacteria, could exist without air, which, on the contrary, killed them. They derived the oxygen necessary for their multiplication from the various substances that surrounded them. He calls themærobes, living on the tissues of our matter, when the latter has ceased to form a part of an integral and living whole (then called very unscientifically by Science“dead matter”), andanærobes. The one kind binds oxygen, and contributes greatly to the destruction of animal life and vegetable tissues, furnishing to the atmosphere materials which enter, later on, into the constitution of other organisms; the other finally destroys, or rather annihilates, the so-called organic substance; ultimate decay being impossible without their participation. Certain germ-cells, such as those of yeast, develop and multiply in air, but when deprived of it, they will adapt themselves to life without air and become ferments, absorbing oxygen from substances coming in contact with them, and thereby ruining the latter. The cells in fruit, when lacking free oxygen, act as ferments and stimulate fermentation.“Therefore the vegetable cell, in this case, manifests its life as an anærobic being. Why, then, should an organic cell form, in this case, an exception?”asks Professor Bogolubof. Pasteur shows that in the substance of our tissues and organs, the cell, not finding sufficient oxygen for itself, stimulates fermentation in the same way as the fruit-cell, and Claude Bernard thought that Pasteur's idea of the formation of ferments found its application and corroboration in the fact that urea increases in the blood during strangulation.Lifetherefore is everywhere in the Universe, and, Occultism teaches us, it is also in the atom.“Bhûmi appears with six sisters,”says the Commentary. It is a Vedic teaching that“there are three Earths, corresponding to three Heavens, and our Earth [the fourth] is called Bhûmi.”This is the explanation given by our exoteric Western Orientalists. But the esoteric meaning, and allusion to it in theVedas, is that it refers to our Planetary Chain;“three Earths”on the descending arc, and“three[pg 271]Heavens,”which are three Earths or Globes also, only far more ethereal, on the ascending or spiritual arc. By the first three we descend into Matter, by the other three we ascend into Spirit; the lowest one, Bhûmi, our Earth, forming the turning point, so to say, and containing,potentially, as much of Spirit as it does of Matter. But we shall treat of this hereafter.The general teaching of the Commentary, then, is that every new Round develops one of the Compound Elements, as now known to Science, which rejects the primitive nomenclature, preferring to subdivide them into constituents. If Nature is the“Ever-Becoming”on the manifested plane, then these Elements are to be regarded in the same light: they have to evolve, progress, and increase to the manvantaric end.Thus the First Round, we are taught, developed but one Element, and a nature and humanity in what may be spoken of as one aspect of Nature—called by some, very unscientifically, though it may be sode facto,“one-dimensional space.”The Second Round brought forth and developed two Elements, Fire and Earth; anditshumanity, adapted to this condition of Nature, if we can give the name humanity to beings living under conditions now unknown to men, was—to use again a familiar phrase in a strictly figurative sense, the only way in which it can be used correctly—a“two-dimensional”species.The processes of natural development which we are now considering will at once elucidate and discredit the fashion of speculating on the attributes oftwo,three, andfouror moredimensionalspace; but, in passing, it is worth while to point out the real significance of the sound, but incomplete, intuition that has prompted—among Spiritualists and Theosophists, and several great men of Science, for the matter of that398—the use of the modern expression, the“fourth dimension of space.”To begin with, the superficial absurdity of assuming that Space itself is measurable in any direction is of little consequence. The familiar phrase can only be an abbreviation of the fuller form—the“fourth dimension of matter, in Space.”399But even thus expanded, it is an unhappy phrase, because while it is perfectly true that the progress of[pg 272]evolution may be destined to introduce us to new characteristics of matter, those with which we are already familiar are really more numerous than the three dimensions. The qualities, or what is perhaps the best available term, the characteristics of matter, must clearly bear a direct relation always to the senses of man. Matter has extension, colour, motion (molecular motion), taste and smell, corresponding to the existing senses of man, and the next characteristic it develops—let us call it for the moment“Permeability”—will correspond to the next sense of man, which we may call“Normal Clairvoyance.”Thus, when some bold thinkers have been thirsting for a fourth dimension, to explain the passage of matter through matter, and the production of knots upon an endless cord, they have been in want of asixth characteristicof matter. The three dimensions belong really to only one attribute, or characteristic, of matter—extension; and popular common sense justly rebels against the idea that, under any condition of things, there can be more than three of such dimensions as length, breadth and thickness. These terms, and the term“dimension”itself, all belong to one plane of thought, to one stage of evolution, to one characteristic of matter. So long as there are foot-rules within the resources of cosmos, to apply to matter, so long will they be able to measure it three ways and no more; just as, from the time the idea of measurement first occupied a place in the human understanding, it has been possible to apply measurement in three directions and no more. But these considerations do not in any way militate against the certainty that, in the progress of time, as the faculties of humanity are multiplied, so will the characteristics of matter be multiplied also. Meanwhile, the expression is far more incorrect than even the familiar phrase of the sun's“rising”or“setting.”We now return to the consideration of material evolution through the Rounds. Matter in the Second Round, it has been stated, may be figuratively referred to as two-dimensional. But here anothercaveatmust be entered. This loose and figurative expression may be regarded—on one plane of thought, as we have just seen—as equivalent to the second characteristic of matter, corresponding to the second perceptive faculty or sense of man. But these two linked scales of evolution are concerned with the processes going on within the limits of a single Round. The succession of primary aspects of Nature, with which the succession of Rounds is concerned, has to do, as already indicated, with the development of the Elements—in the Occult sense—Fire,[pg 273]Air, Water, Earth. We are only in the Fourth Round, and our catalogue so far stops short. The order in which these Elements are mentioned, in the last sentence but one, is the correct one for Esoteric purposes and in the Secret Teachings. Milton was right when he spoke of the“Powers of Fire, Air, Water, Earth”; the Earth, such as we know it now, had no existence before the Fourth Round, hundreds of millions of years ago, the commencement of our geological Earth. The Globe, says the Commentary, was“fiery, cool and radiant, as its ethereal men and animals, during the First Round”—a contradiction or paradox in the opinion of our present Science—“luminous and more dense and heavy, during the Second Round; watery during the Third.”Thus are the Elements reversed.The centres of consciousness of the Third Round, destined to develop into humanity as we know it, arrived at a perception of the third Element, Water. If we had to frame our conclusions according to thedatafurnished us by Geologists, then we would say that there was no real water, even during the Carboniferous Period. We are told that gigantic masses of carbon, which existed formerly spread in the atmosphere, as carbonic acid, were absorbed by plants, while a large proportion of that gas was mixed in the water. Now, if this be so, and we have to believe that all the carbonic acid which went to compose those plants that formed bituminous coal, lignite, etc., and went towards the formation of lime-stone, and so on, that all this was at that period in the atmosphere in gaseous form, then, there must have been seas and oceans of liquid carbonic acid! But how then could the Carboniferous Period be preceded by the Devonian and Silurian Ages—those of fishes and molluscs—on that assumption? Barometric pressure, moreover, must have exceeded several hundred times the pressure of our present atmosphere. How could organisms, even so simple as those of certain fishes and molluscs, stand that? There is a curious work by Blanchard, on the Origin of Life, wherein he shows some strange contradictions and confusions in the theories of his colleagues, and which we recommend to the reader's attention.Those of the Fourth Round have added Earth as a state of matter to their stock, as well as the three other Elements in their present transformation.In short, none of the so-called Elements were, in the three preceding Rounds, as they are now. For all we know,Firemay have beenpureÂkâsha, the First Matter of the“Magnum Opus”of the Creators and[pg 274]Builders, that Astral Light which the paradoxical Éliphas Lévi calls in one breath the“Body of the Holy Ghost,”and in the next“Baphomet,”the“Androgyne Goat of Mendes”;Air, simply Nitrogen, the“Breath of the Supporters of the Heavenly Dome,”as the Mahometan Mystics call it;Water, that primordial fluid which was required, according to Moses, to make a“Living Soul.”And this may account for the flagrant discrepancies and unscientific statements found inGenesis. Separate the first from the second chapter; read the former as a scripture of the Elohists, and the latter as that of the far later Jehovists; still one finds, if one reads between the lines, the same order in which created things appear; namely, Fire (Light), Air, Water, and Man (or Earth). For the sentence of the first chapter (the Elohistic),“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,”is a mistranslation; it is not“the heaven and the earth,”but the duplex, or dual, Heaven, theupperand thelowerHeavens, or the separation of Primordial Substance that was light in its upper, and dark in its lower portions (the manifested Universe), in its duality of theinvisible(to the senses), and thevisibleto our perceptions.“God divided the light from the darkness”; and then made the firmament (Air).“Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters,”i.e.,“the waters which were under the firmament [our manifested visible Universe] from the waters which wereabovethe firmament [the (to us) invisible planes of being].”In the second chapter (the Jehovistic), plants and herbs are created before water, just as in the first,lightis produced before thesun.“God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the fieldbefore it was in the earth, and every herb of the fieldbefore it grew; for the Lord God [Elohim] had not caused it to rain upon the earth, etc.”—an absurdity unless the esoteric explanation is accepted. The plantswerecreated before they were in the earth—for there was no earth then such as it is now; and the herb of the field was in existence before it grew as it does now, in the Fourth Round.Discussing and explaining the nature of the invisible Elements and the“Primordial Fire”mentioned above, Éliphas Lévi invariably calls it the“Astral Light”: with him it is the“Grand Agent Magique.”Undeniably it is so, but—only so far asBlackMagic is concerned, and on the lowest planes of what we call Ether, the noumenon of which is Âkâsha; and even this would be held incorrect by orthodox Occultists. The“Astral Light”is simply the older“Sidereal Light”of Paracelsus; and to say that“everything which exists has been evolved from it, and[pg 275]it preserves and reproduces all forms,”as he does, is to enunciate truth only in the second proposition. The first is erroneous; for if all that exists was evolvedthrough(orviâ) it, this is not the Astral Light, since the latter is not the container ofallthings but, at best, only the reflector of thisall. Éliphas Lévi very truly shows it“a force in Nature,”by means of which“a single man who can master it ... might throw the world into confusion and transform its face”; for it is the“Great Arcanum of transcendent Magic.”Quoting the words of the great Western Kabalist in their translated form,400we may, perhaps, the better explain them by the occasional addition of a word or two, to show the difference between Western and Eastern explanations of the same subject. The author says of the great Magic Agent:
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,Stains the white radiance of Eternity—yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity; for Life alone can understand Life.What is that“Spark”which“hangs from the Flame”? It is Jîva, the Monad in conjunction with Manas, or rather its aroma—that which remains from each Personality, when worthy, and hangs from Âtmâ-Buddhi, the Flame, by the Thread of Life. In whatever way it is interpreted, and into whatever number of principles the human being is divided, it may be easily shown that this doctrine is supported by all the ancient religions, from the Vedic to the Egyptian, from the Zoroastrian to the Jewish. In the case of the last-mentioned, the Kabalistic works offer abundant proof of this statement. The entire system of the Kabalistic numerals is based on the divine Septenary hanging from the Triad, thus forming the Decad, and its permutations 7, 5, 4, and 3, which, finally, all merge into theOneitself; an endless and boundless Circle.As says theZohar:The Deity [the ever invisible Presence] manifests itself through thetenSephiroth, which are its radiating witnesses. The Deity is like the sea from which outflows a stream called Wisdom, the waters of which fall into a lake named Intelligence. From the basin, like seven channels, issue the Seven Sephiroth.... Fortenequalseven: the Decad containsfourUnities andthreeBinaries.The Ten Sephiroth correspond to the Limbs of Man.When I [the Elohim] framed Adam Kadmon, the Spirit of the Eternal shot out of his Body, like a sheet of lightning that radiated at once on the billows of thesevenmillions of skies, and mytenSplendours were his Limbs.But neither the Head nor the Shoulders of Adam Kadmon can be seen; therefore we read in theSiphra Dtzenioutha, the“Book of the Concealed Mystery”:In the beginning of Time, after the Elohim [the“Sons of Light and Life,”or the Builders] had shaped out of the eternal Essence the Heavens and the Earth, they formed the worlds six by six.The seventh being Malkuth, which is our Earth382on its plane, and[pg 260]the lowest on all the other planes of conscious existence. The ChaldeanBook of Numberscontains a detailed explanation of all this.The first triad of the Body of Adam Kadmon [the three upper planes of the seven383] cannot be seen before the Soul stands in the presence of the Ancient of Days.The Sephiroth of this upper Triad are:“1. Kether (the Crown), represented by the brow of Macroprosopus; 2. Chokmah (Wisdom, a male Principle), by his right shoulder; and 3. Binah (Intelligence, a female Principle), by the left shoulder.”Then come thesevenLimbs, or Sephiroth, on the planes of manifestation; the totality of these four planes being represented by Microprosopus, the Lesser Face, or Tetragrammaton, the“four-lettered”Mystery.“Thesevenmanifested and thethreeconcealed Limbs are the Body of the Deity.”Thus our Earth, Malkuth, is both theseventhand thefourthWorld; the former when counting from the first Globe above, the latter if reckoned by the planes. It is generated by the sixth Globe or Sephira, called Yezud,“Foundation,”or, as said in theBook of Numbers,“by Yezud, He [Adam Kadmon] fecundates the primitive Heva [Eve or our Earth].”Rendered in mystic language, this is the explanation why Malkuth, called the Inferior Mother, Matrona, Queen, and the Kingdom of the Foundation, is shown as the Bride of Tetragrammaton, or Microprosopus (the Second Logos), the Heavenly Man. When free from all impurity, she will become united with the Spiritual Logos,i.e., in the Seventh Race of the Seventh Round—after the regeneration, on the day of“Sabbath.”For the“SeventhDay”again has an occult significance undreamed of by our theologians.When Matronitha, the Mother, is separated and brought face to face with the King, in the excellence of the Sabbath, all things become one body.384“Become one body”means, that all is reäbsorbed once more into the One Element, the spirits of men becoming Nirvânîs, and the elements of everything else becoming again what they were before—Protyle or Undifferentiated Substance.“Sabbath”means Rest, or Nirvâna. It is not the“seventhday”aftersixdays, but a period the duration of which equals that of the seven“days,”or any period made up of seven parts. Thus a Pralaya is equal in duration to a Manvantara, or a Night of Brahmâ is equal to his Day. If the Christians will follow Jewish customs, they ought to adopt the spirit and not the dead letter thereof.[pg 261]They should work one week of seven days andrestseven days. That the word“Sabbath”had a mystic significance, is disclosed in the contempt shown by Jesus for the Sabbath day, and by what is said inLuke.385Sabbath is there taken for thewhole week. See the Greek text where the week is called“Sabbath.”Literally,“I fast twice in the Sabbath.”Paul, an Initiate, knew it well when referring to the eternal rest and felicity in Heaven, as Sabbath:386“and their happiness will be eternal, for they will ever be [one] with the Lord, and will enjoyan eternal Sabbath.”387The difference between the Kabalah and the archaic Esoteric Vidyâ—taking the Kabalah as contained in the ChaldeanBook of Numbers, not as misrepresented by its now disfigured copy, theKabalahof the Christian Mystics—is very small indeed, being confined to unimportant divergences of form and expression. Thus Eastern Occultism refers to our Earth as the Fourth World, the lowest of the Chain, above which run upward on both curves the six Globes, three on each side. TheZohar, on the other hand, calls the Earth the lower, or theseventh, adding that upon the six depend all things which are in it (Microprosopus). The“Smaller Face [smaller because manifested and finite] is formed ofsixSephiroth,”says the same work.“Seven Kings come anddie in the thrice-destroyed World[Malkuth, our Earth, destroyed after each of the Three Rounds which it has gone through]. And their reign [that of the Seven Kings] will be broken up.”388This relates to the Seven Races,fiveof which have already appeared, andtwomore have still to appear in this Round.The Shinto allegorical accounts of cosmogony and the origin of man, in Japan, hint at the same belief.Captain C. Pfoundes, who studied the religion underlying the various sects of the land, for nearly nine years in the monasteries of Japan, says:The Shinto idea of creation is as follows: Out of Chaos (Konton) the Earth (In) was the sediment precipitated, and the Heavens (Yo) the ethereal essences which ascended: Man (Jin) appeared between the two. The first man was called Kuni-to ko tatchino-mikoto, andfive other names were given to him, and then the human race appeared, male and female. Isanagi and Isanami begat Tenshoko doijin, the first of the five Gods of the Earth.These“Gods”are simply our Five Races, Isanagi and Isanami being the two kinds of“Ancestors,”the two preceding Races which give birth to animal and to rational man.[pg 262]It will be shown in Volume II, that the number seven, as well as the doctrine of the septenary constitution of man, was preëminent in all the secret systems. It plays as important a part in Western Kabalah as in Eastern Occultism. Éliphas Lévi calls the number seven“the key to the Mosaic creation and the symbols of every religion.”He shows the Kabalah faithfully following even the septenary division of man, for the diagram he gives in hisClef des Grands Mystères389is septenary. This may be seen at a glance, however cleverly the correct thought is veiled. One needs also only to look at the diagram, the“Formation of the Soul,”in Mathers'Kabbalah Unveiled,390from the above mentioned, work of Lévi, to find the same, though with a different interpretation.Thus it stands with both the Kabalistic and Occult names attached:Diagram IVLévi calls Nephesh that which we name Manas, andvice versâ. Nephesh is the Breath of (animal) Life in man—the Breath of Life,[pg 263]instinctualin the animal; and Manas is the Third Soul—the human in its light side, and animal, in its connection with Samaël or Kâma. Nephesh is really the“Breath of (animal) Life”breathed into Adam, the Man of Dust; it is consequently the Vital Spark, the informing Element. Without Manas, the“Reasoning Soul,”or Mind, which in Lévi's diagram is miscalled Nephesh, Âtmâ-Buddhi is irrational on this plane and cannot act. It is Buddhi which is the Plastic Mediator; not Manas, the intelligent medium between the upper Triad and the lower Quaternary. But there are many such strange and curious transformations to be found in the Kabalistic works—a convincing proof that this literature has become a sad jumble. We do not accept the classification, except in this one particular, in order to show the points of agreement.We will now give in tabular form what the very cautious Éliphas Lévi says in explanation of his diagram, and what the Esoteric Doctrine teaches—and compare the two. Lévi, too, makes a distinction between Kabalistic and Occult Pneumatics.Says Éliphas Lévi, the Kabalist:Say the Theosophists:Kabalistic Pneumatics.Esoteric Pneumatics.1. The Soul (or Ego) is a clothed light; and this light is triple.1. The same; for it is Âtmâ-Buddhi-Manas.2. Neshamah—pure Spirit.2. The same391.3. Ruach—the Soul or Spirit.3. Spiritual Soul.4. Nephesh—Plastic Mediator.3924. Mediator between Spirit and Man, the Seat of Reason, the Mind, in man.5. The garment of the Soul is the rind [body] of the Image [Astral Soul].5. Correct.6. The Image is double, because it reflects the good and the bad.6. Too uselessly apocalyptic. Why not say that the Astral reflects the good as well as the bad man; man, who is ever tending to the upper Triad, or else disappears with the Quaternary.7. [Image—Body.]7. The Earthly Image.[pg 264]Occult Pneumatics.Occult Pneumatics.(As given by Éliphas Lévi.)(As given by the Occultists.)1. Nephesh is immortal, because it renews its life by the destruction of forms. [But Nephesh, the“Breath of Life,”is a misnomer, and a useless puzzle to the student.]1. Manas is immortal, because after every new incarnation it adds to Âtmâ-Buddhi something of itself; and thus, assimilating itself to the Monad, shares its immortality.2. Ruach progresses by the evolution of ideas (!?).2. Buddhi becomes conscious by the accretions it gets from Manas, on the death of man after every new incarnation.3. Neshamah is progressive, without oblivion and destruction.3. Âtmâ neither progresses, forgets, nor remembers. It does not belong to this plane; it is but the Ray of Light eternal which shines upon, and through, the darkness of matter—when the latter is willing.4. The Soul has three dwellings.4. The Soul—collectively, as the Upper Triad—liveson three planes, besides its fourth, the terrestrial sphere; and itiseternally on the highest of the three.5. These dwellings are: the Plane of Mortals; the Superior Eden; and the Inferior Eden.5. These dwellings are: Earth for the physical man, or Animal Soul; Kâma Loka (Hades, the Limbo) for the disembodied man, or his Shell; Devachan for the Higher Triad.[pg 265]6. The Image [man] is a sphinx that offers the riddle of birth.6. Correct.7. The fatal Image [the Astral] endows Nephesh with its aptitudes; but Ruach is able to substitute for it the Image conquered in accordance with the inspirations of Neshamah.7. The Astral, through Kâma (Desire), is ever drawing Manas down into the sphere of material passions and desires. But if thebetterMan, or Manas, tries to escape the fatal attraction, and turns its aspirations to Âtmâ (Neshamah), then Buddhi (Ruach) conquers, and carries Manas with it to the realm of eternal Spirit.It is very evident that the French Kabalist either did not sufficiently know the real tenet, or distorted it to suit himself and his objects. Thus he says again, treating upon the same subject, as follows; and we Occultists answer the late Kabalist and his admirers also as follows:1. The Body is the mould of Nephesh; Nephesh the mould of Ruach; Ruach the mould of thegarmentof Neshamah.1. The Body follows the whims, good or bad, of Manas; Manas tries to follow the Light of Buddhi, but often fails. Buddhi is the mould of the“garments”of Âtmâ; for Âtmâ is no body, or shape, or anything, and because Buddhi is onlyfigurativelyits Vehicle.2. Light [the Soul] personifies itself in clothing itself [with a Body]; and personality endures only when the garment is perfect.2. The Monad becomes a personal Ego when it incarnates; and something remains of that Personality through Manas, when the latter is perfect enough to assimilate Buddhi.3. The Angels aspire to become men; a Perfect Man, a Man-God, is above all the Angels.3. Correct.4. Every 14,000 years the soul rejuvenates, and rests in the jubilean sleep of oblivion.4. Within a period, a Great Age, or a Day of Brahmâ, 14 Manus reign; after which comes Pralaya, when all the Souls (Egos) rest in Nirvâna.[pg 266]Such are the distorted copies of the Esoteric Doctrine in theKabalah.But to return to Shloka 5 of Stanza VII.(b) The well-known Kabalistic aphorism runs:“A stone becomes a plant; a plant, a beast; the beast, a man; a man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.”The“Spark”animates all the kingdoms, in turn, before it enters into and informs Divine Man, between whom and his predecessor animal man, there is all the difference in the world.Genesisbegins its anthropology at the wrong end—evidently for a blind—and lands nowhere. The introductory chapters ofGenesiswere never meant to represent even a remote allegory of the creation ofourEarth. They embrace a metaphysical conception of some indefinite period, in eternity, when successive attempts were being made by the law of evolution at the formation of universes. The idea is plainly stated in theZohar:There were old Worlds, which perished as soon as they came into existence, were formless, and were called Sparks. Thus, the smith, when hammering the iron, lets the sparks fly in all directions. The Sparks are the primordial Worlds, which could not continue because the Sacred Aged (Sephira) had not as yet assumed its form (of androgyne, or opposite sexes) of King and Queen (Sephira and Kadmon), and the Master was not yet at his work.393HadGenesisbegun as it ought, one would have found in it, first, the Celestial Logos, the“Heavenly Man,”which evolves as a Compound Unit of Logoi, out of which, after their pralayic sleep—a sleep that gathers the Numbers scattered on the mâyâvic plane into One, as the separate globules of quicksilver on a plate blend into one mass—the Logoi appear in their totality as the first“Male and Female,”or Adam Kadmon, the“Fiat Lux”of theBible, as we have already seen. But this transformation did not take place on our Earth, nor on any material plane, but in the Spacial Depths of the first differentiation of the eternal Root-Matter. On our nascent Globe, things proceed differently. The Monad or Jîva, as said inIsis Unveiled,394is, first of all, shot down by the Law of Evolution into the lowest form of matter—the mineral. After a sevenfold gyration encased in the stone,[pg 267]or that which will become mineral and stone in the Fourth Round, it creeps out of it, say, as a lichen. Passing thence, through all the forms of vegetable matter, into what is termed animal matter, it has now reached the point at which it has become the germ, so to speak, of the animal, that will become the physical man. All this, up to the Third Round, is formless, as matter, and senseless, as consciousness. For the Monad, or Jîva,per se, cannot be called even Spirit: it is a Ray, a Breath of the Absolute, or theAbsolutenessrather; and the Absolute Homogeneity, having no relations with the conditioned and relative finiteness, is unconscious on our plane. Therefore, besides the material which will be needed for its future human form, the Monad requires (a) a spiritual model, or prototype, for that material to shape itself into; and (b) an intelligent consciousness, to guide its evolution and progress, neither of which is possessed by the homogeneous Monad, or by senseless though living matter. The Adam of dust requires the Soul of Life to be breathed into him: the two middle Principles, which are thesentientLife of the irrational animal and the Human Soul, for the former is irrational without the latter. It is only when, from a potential androgyne, man has become separated into male and female, that he will be endowed with this conscious, rational, individual Soul (Manas),“the principle, or the intelligence, of the Elohim,”to receive which, he has to eat of the fruit of Knowledge from the Tree of Good and Evil. How is he to obtain all this? The Occult Doctrine teaches that while the Monad is cycling on downward into matter, these very Elohim, or Pitris—the lower Dhyân Chohans—are evolving,pari passuwith it, on a higher and more spiritual plane, descending also relatively into matter, on their own plane of consciousness, when, after having reached a certain point, they will meet the incarnating senseless Monad, encased in the lowest matter, and blending the two potencies, Spirit and Matter, the union will produce that terrestrial symbol of the“Heavenly Man”in space—Perfect Man. In the Sânkhya Philosophy, Purusha (Spirit) is spoken of as something impotent unless it mounts on the shoulders of Prakriti (Matter), which, left alone, is—senseless. But in the Secret Philosophy they are viewed as graduated. Spirit and Matter, though one and the same thing in their origin, when once they are on the plane of differentiation, begin each of them their evolutionary progress in contrary directions—Spirit falling gradually into Matter, and the latter ascending to its original condition, that of a pure spiritual Substance.[pg 268]Both are inseparable, yet ever separated. On the physical plane, two like poles will always repel each other, while the negative and the positive are mutually attracted; so do Spirit and Matter stand to each other—the two poles of the same homogeneous Substance, the Root-Principle of the Universe.Therefore, when the hour strikes for Purusha to mount on Prakriti's shoulders for the formation of the Perfect Man—rudimentary man of the first Two and a Half Races being only thefirst, gradually evolving into themost perfect, of mammals—the Celestial Ancestors (Entities from preceding Worlds, called in India the Shishta) step in on this our plane, and incarnate in the physical or animal man, as the Pitris had stepped in before them for the formation of the latter. Thus the two processes for the two“creations”—the animal and the divine man—differ greatly. The Pitris shoot out from their ethereal bodies still more ethereal and shadowy similitudes of themselves, or what we should now call“doubles,”or“astral forms,”in their own likeness.395This furnishes the Monad with its first dwelling, and blind matter with a model around and upon which to build henceforth. ButMan is still incomplete. From Svâyambhuva Manu,396from whom descended the seven primitive Manus, or Prajâpatis, each of whom gave birth to a primitive Race of men, down to theCodex Nazaræus, in which Karabtanos, or Fetahil, blind concupiscent Matter, begets on his Mother, Spiritus, seven Figures, each of which stands as the progenitor of one of the primeval seven Races—this doctrine has left its impress on every archaic scripture.“Who forms Manu [the Man] and who forms his body? The Life and the Lives. Sin397and the Moon.”Here Manu stands for the spiritual, heavenly Man, the real and non-dying Ego in us, which is the direct emanation of the“One Life,”or the Absolute Deity. As to our outward physical bodies, the house of the tabernacle of the Soul, the Doctrine teaches a strange lesson; so strange that unless thoroughly explained, and as thoroughly comprehended, it is only the exact science of the future that is destined to fully vindicate the theory.It has been stated before now that Occultism does not accept anything inorganic in the Kosmos. The expression employed by Science,[pg 269]“inorganic substance,”means simply that the latent life, slumbering in the molecules of so-called“inert matter,”is incognizable.All is Life, and every atom of even mineral dust is aLife, though beyond our comprehension and perception, because it is outside the range of the laws known to those who reject Occultism.“The very atoms,”says Tyndall,“seem instinct with a desire for life.”Whence, then, we would ask, comes the tendency“to run into organic form”? Is it in any way explicable except according to the teachings of Occult Science?The Worlds, to the profane, are built up of the known Elements. To the conception of an Arhat, these Elements are themselves, collectively, a Divine Life; distributively, on the plane of manifestations, the numberless and countless crores of Lives. Fire alone isOne,on the plane of the One Reality: on that of manifested, hence illusive, Being, its particles are fiery Lives which live and have their being at the expense of every other Life that they consume. Therefore they are named the“Devourers.”...Every visible thing in this Universe was built by suchLives,from conscious and divine primordial man down to the unconscious agents that construct matter.... From theOne Life,formless and uncreate, proceeds the Universe of Lives. First was manifested from the Deep [Chaos] cold luminous Fire [gaseous light?], which formed the Curds in Space [irresolvable nebulæ, perhaps?] ... These fought, and a great heat was developed by the encountering and collision, which produced rotation. Then came the first manifestedMaterialFire, the hot Flames, the Wanderers in Heaven [Comets]. Heat generates moist vapour; that forms solid water [?]; then dry mist, then liquid mist, watery, that puts out the luminous brightness of the Pilgrims [Comets?], and forms solid watery Wheels[MatterGlobes]. Bhümi [the Earth] appears with six sisters. These produce by their continuous motion the inferior fire, heat, and an aqueous mist, which yields the third World-Element—Water;and from the breath of all [atmospheric]Airis born. These four are the four Lives of the first four Periods [Rounds] of Manvantara. The three last will follow.The Commentary first speaks of the“numberless and countless crores of Lives.”Is Pasteur, then, unconsciously taking the first step toward Occult Science, in declaring that, if he dared express his ideas fully upon this subject, he would say, that the organic cells are endowed with a vital potency that does not cease its activity with the cessation of a current of oxygen towards them, and does not, on that account, break off its relations with life itself, which is supported by the influence[pg 270]of that gas?“I would add,”continues Pasteur,“that the evolution of the germ is accomplished by means of complicated phenomena, among which we must class processes of fermentation”; and life, according to Claude Bernard and Pasteur, is nothing else than a process of fermentation. That there exist in Nature Beings, or Lives, that can live and thrive without air, even on our Globe, has been demonstrated by the same Scientists. Pasteur found that many of the lower lives, such as vibriones, and other microbes and bacteria, could exist without air, which, on the contrary, killed them. They derived the oxygen necessary for their multiplication from the various substances that surrounded them. He calls themærobes, living on the tissues of our matter, when the latter has ceased to form a part of an integral and living whole (then called very unscientifically by Science“dead matter”), andanærobes. The one kind binds oxygen, and contributes greatly to the destruction of animal life and vegetable tissues, furnishing to the atmosphere materials which enter, later on, into the constitution of other organisms; the other finally destroys, or rather annihilates, the so-called organic substance; ultimate decay being impossible without their participation. Certain germ-cells, such as those of yeast, develop and multiply in air, but when deprived of it, they will adapt themselves to life without air and become ferments, absorbing oxygen from substances coming in contact with them, and thereby ruining the latter. The cells in fruit, when lacking free oxygen, act as ferments and stimulate fermentation.“Therefore the vegetable cell, in this case, manifests its life as an anærobic being. Why, then, should an organic cell form, in this case, an exception?”asks Professor Bogolubof. Pasteur shows that in the substance of our tissues and organs, the cell, not finding sufficient oxygen for itself, stimulates fermentation in the same way as the fruit-cell, and Claude Bernard thought that Pasteur's idea of the formation of ferments found its application and corroboration in the fact that urea increases in the blood during strangulation.Lifetherefore is everywhere in the Universe, and, Occultism teaches us, it is also in the atom.“Bhûmi appears with six sisters,”says the Commentary. It is a Vedic teaching that“there are three Earths, corresponding to three Heavens, and our Earth [the fourth] is called Bhûmi.”This is the explanation given by our exoteric Western Orientalists. But the esoteric meaning, and allusion to it in theVedas, is that it refers to our Planetary Chain;“three Earths”on the descending arc, and“three[pg 271]Heavens,”which are three Earths or Globes also, only far more ethereal, on the ascending or spiritual arc. By the first three we descend into Matter, by the other three we ascend into Spirit; the lowest one, Bhûmi, our Earth, forming the turning point, so to say, and containing,potentially, as much of Spirit as it does of Matter. But we shall treat of this hereafter.The general teaching of the Commentary, then, is that every new Round develops one of the Compound Elements, as now known to Science, which rejects the primitive nomenclature, preferring to subdivide them into constituents. If Nature is the“Ever-Becoming”on the manifested plane, then these Elements are to be regarded in the same light: they have to evolve, progress, and increase to the manvantaric end.Thus the First Round, we are taught, developed but one Element, and a nature and humanity in what may be spoken of as one aspect of Nature—called by some, very unscientifically, though it may be sode facto,“one-dimensional space.”The Second Round brought forth and developed two Elements, Fire and Earth; anditshumanity, adapted to this condition of Nature, if we can give the name humanity to beings living under conditions now unknown to men, was—to use again a familiar phrase in a strictly figurative sense, the only way in which it can be used correctly—a“two-dimensional”species.The processes of natural development which we are now considering will at once elucidate and discredit the fashion of speculating on the attributes oftwo,three, andfouror moredimensionalspace; but, in passing, it is worth while to point out the real significance of the sound, but incomplete, intuition that has prompted—among Spiritualists and Theosophists, and several great men of Science, for the matter of that398—the use of the modern expression, the“fourth dimension of space.”To begin with, the superficial absurdity of assuming that Space itself is measurable in any direction is of little consequence. The familiar phrase can only be an abbreviation of the fuller form—the“fourth dimension of matter, in Space.”399But even thus expanded, it is an unhappy phrase, because while it is perfectly true that the progress of[pg 272]evolution may be destined to introduce us to new characteristics of matter, those with which we are already familiar are really more numerous than the three dimensions. The qualities, or what is perhaps the best available term, the characteristics of matter, must clearly bear a direct relation always to the senses of man. Matter has extension, colour, motion (molecular motion), taste and smell, corresponding to the existing senses of man, and the next characteristic it develops—let us call it for the moment“Permeability”—will correspond to the next sense of man, which we may call“Normal Clairvoyance.”Thus, when some bold thinkers have been thirsting for a fourth dimension, to explain the passage of matter through matter, and the production of knots upon an endless cord, they have been in want of asixth characteristicof matter. The three dimensions belong really to only one attribute, or characteristic, of matter—extension; and popular common sense justly rebels against the idea that, under any condition of things, there can be more than three of such dimensions as length, breadth and thickness. These terms, and the term“dimension”itself, all belong to one plane of thought, to one stage of evolution, to one characteristic of matter. So long as there are foot-rules within the resources of cosmos, to apply to matter, so long will they be able to measure it three ways and no more; just as, from the time the idea of measurement first occupied a place in the human understanding, it has been possible to apply measurement in three directions and no more. But these considerations do not in any way militate against the certainty that, in the progress of time, as the faculties of humanity are multiplied, so will the characteristics of matter be multiplied also. Meanwhile, the expression is far more incorrect than even the familiar phrase of the sun's“rising”or“setting.”We now return to the consideration of material evolution through the Rounds. Matter in the Second Round, it has been stated, may be figuratively referred to as two-dimensional. But here anothercaveatmust be entered. This loose and figurative expression may be regarded—on one plane of thought, as we have just seen—as equivalent to the second characteristic of matter, corresponding to the second perceptive faculty or sense of man. But these two linked scales of evolution are concerned with the processes going on within the limits of a single Round. The succession of primary aspects of Nature, with which the succession of Rounds is concerned, has to do, as already indicated, with the development of the Elements—in the Occult sense—Fire,[pg 273]Air, Water, Earth. We are only in the Fourth Round, and our catalogue so far stops short. The order in which these Elements are mentioned, in the last sentence but one, is the correct one for Esoteric purposes and in the Secret Teachings. Milton was right when he spoke of the“Powers of Fire, Air, Water, Earth”; the Earth, such as we know it now, had no existence before the Fourth Round, hundreds of millions of years ago, the commencement of our geological Earth. The Globe, says the Commentary, was“fiery, cool and radiant, as its ethereal men and animals, during the First Round”—a contradiction or paradox in the opinion of our present Science—“luminous and more dense and heavy, during the Second Round; watery during the Third.”Thus are the Elements reversed.The centres of consciousness of the Third Round, destined to develop into humanity as we know it, arrived at a perception of the third Element, Water. If we had to frame our conclusions according to thedatafurnished us by Geologists, then we would say that there was no real water, even during the Carboniferous Period. We are told that gigantic masses of carbon, which existed formerly spread in the atmosphere, as carbonic acid, were absorbed by plants, while a large proportion of that gas was mixed in the water. Now, if this be so, and we have to believe that all the carbonic acid which went to compose those plants that formed bituminous coal, lignite, etc., and went towards the formation of lime-stone, and so on, that all this was at that period in the atmosphere in gaseous form, then, there must have been seas and oceans of liquid carbonic acid! But how then could the Carboniferous Period be preceded by the Devonian and Silurian Ages—those of fishes and molluscs—on that assumption? Barometric pressure, moreover, must have exceeded several hundred times the pressure of our present atmosphere. How could organisms, even so simple as those of certain fishes and molluscs, stand that? There is a curious work by Blanchard, on the Origin of Life, wherein he shows some strange contradictions and confusions in the theories of his colleagues, and which we recommend to the reader's attention.Those of the Fourth Round have added Earth as a state of matter to their stock, as well as the three other Elements in their present transformation.In short, none of the so-called Elements were, in the three preceding Rounds, as they are now. For all we know,Firemay have beenpureÂkâsha, the First Matter of the“Magnum Opus”of the Creators and[pg 274]Builders, that Astral Light which the paradoxical Éliphas Lévi calls in one breath the“Body of the Holy Ghost,”and in the next“Baphomet,”the“Androgyne Goat of Mendes”;Air, simply Nitrogen, the“Breath of the Supporters of the Heavenly Dome,”as the Mahometan Mystics call it;Water, that primordial fluid which was required, according to Moses, to make a“Living Soul.”And this may account for the flagrant discrepancies and unscientific statements found inGenesis. Separate the first from the second chapter; read the former as a scripture of the Elohists, and the latter as that of the far later Jehovists; still one finds, if one reads between the lines, the same order in which created things appear; namely, Fire (Light), Air, Water, and Man (or Earth). For the sentence of the first chapter (the Elohistic),“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,”is a mistranslation; it is not“the heaven and the earth,”but the duplex, or dual, Heaven, theupperand thelowerHeavens, or the separation of Primordial Substance that was light in its upper, and dark in its lower portions (the manifested Universe), in its duality of theinvisible(to the senses), and thevisibleto our perceptions.“God divided the light from the darkness”; and then made the firmament (Air).“Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters,”i.e.,“the waters which were under the firmament [our manifested visible Universe] from the waters which wereabovethe firmament [the (to us) invisible planes of being].”In the second chapter (the Jehovistic), plants and herbs are created before water, just as in the first,lightis produced before thesun.“God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the fieldbefore it was in the earth, and every herb of the fieldbefore it grew; for the Lord God [Elohim] had not caused it to rain upon the earth, etc.”—an absurdity unless the esoteric explanation is accepted. The plantswerecreated before they were in the earth—for there was no earth then such as it is now; and the herb of the field was in existence before it grew as it does now, in the Fourth Round.Discussing and explaining the nature of the invisible Elements and the“Primordial Fire”mentioned above, Éliphas Lévi invariably calls it the“Astral Light”: with him it is the“Grand Agent Magique.”Undeniably it is so, but—only so far asBlackMagic is concerned, and on the lowest planes of what we call Ether, the noumenon of which is Âkâsha; and even this would be held incorrect by orthodox Occultists. The“Astral Light”is simply the older“Sidereal Light”of Paracelsus; and to say that“everything which exists has been evolved from it, and[pg 275]it preserves and reproduces all forms,”as he does, is to enunciate truth only in the second proposition. The first is erroneous; for if all that exists was evolvedthrough(orviâ) it, this is not the Astral Light, since the latter is not the container ofallthings but, at best, only the reflector of thisall. Éliphas Lévi very truly shows it“a force in Nature,”by means of which“a single man who can master it ... might throw the world into confusion and transform its face”; for it is the“Great Arcanum of transcendent Magic.”Quoting the words of the great Western Kabalist in their translated form,400we may, perhaps, the better explain them by the occasional addition of a word or two, to show the difference between Western and Eastern explanations of the same subject. The author says of the great Magic Agent:
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,Stains the white radiance of Eternity—yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity; for Life alone can understand Life.What is that“Spark”which“hangs from the Flame”? It is Jîva, the Monad in conjunction with Manas, or rather its aroma—that which remains from each Personality, when worthy, and hangs from Âtmâ-Buddhi, the Flame, by the Thread of Life. In whatever way it is interpreted, and into whatever number of principles the human being is divided, it may be easily shown that this doctrine is supported by all the ancient religions, from the Vedic to the Egyptian, from the Zoroastrian to the Jewish. In the case of the last-mentioned, the Kabalistic works offer abundant proof of this statement. The entire system of the Kabalistic numerals is based on the divine Septenary hanging from the Triad, thus forming the Decad, and its permutations 7, 5, 4, and 3, which, finally, all merge into theOneitself; an endless and boundless Circle.As says theZohar:The Deity [the ever invisible Presence] manifests itself through thetenSephiroth, which are its radiating witnesses. The Deity is like the sea from which outflows a stream called Wisdom, the waters of which fall into a lake named Intelligence. From the basin, like seven channels, issue the Seven Sephiroth.... Fortenequalseven: the Decad containsfourUnities andthreeBinaries.The Ten Sephiroth correspond to the Limbs of Man.When I [the Elohim] framed Adam Kadmon, the Spirit of the Eternal shot out of his Body, like a sheet of lightning that radiated at once on the billows of thesevenmillions of skies, and mytenSplendours were his Limbs.But neither the Head nor the Shoulders of Adam Kadmon can be seen; therefore we read in theSiphra Dtzenioutha, the“Book of the Concealed Mystery”:In the beginning of Time, after the Elohim [the“Sons of Light and Life,”or the Builders] had shaped out of the eternal Essence the Heavens and the Earth, they formed the worlds six by six.The seventh being Malkuth, which is our Earth382on its plane, and[pg 260]the lowest on all the other planes of conscious existence. The ChaldeanBook of Numberscontains a detailed explanation of all this.The first triad of the Body of Adam Kadmon [the three upper planes of the seven383] cannot be seen before the Soul stands in the presence of the Ancient of Days.The Sephiroth of this upper Triad are:“1. Kether (the Crown), represented by the brow of Macroprosopus; 2. Chokmah (Wisdom, a male Principle), by his right shoulder; and 3. Binah (Intelligence, a female Principle), by the left shoulder.”Then come thesevenLimbs, or Sephiroth, on the planes of manifestation; the totality of these four planes being represented by Microprosopus, the Lesser Face, or Tetragrammaton, the“four-lettered”Mystery.“Thesevenmanifested and thethreeconcealed Limbs are the Body of the Deity.”Thus our Earth, Malkuth, is both theseventhand thefourthWorld; the former when counting from the first Globe above, the latter if reckoned by the planes. It is generated by the sixth Globe or Sephira, called Yezud,“Foundation,”or, as said in theBook of Numbers,“by Yezud, He [Adam Kadmon] fecundates the primitive Heva [Eve or our Earth].”Rendered in mystic language, this is the explanation why Malkuth, called the Inferior Mother, Matrona, Queen, and the Kingdom of the Foundation, is shown as the Bride of Tetragrammaton, or Microprosopus (the Second Logos), the Heavenly Man. When free from all impurity, she will become united with the Spiritual Logos,i.e., in the Seventh Race of the Seventh Round—after the regeneration, on the day of“Sabbath.”For the“SeventhDay”again has an occult significance undreamed of by our theologians.When Matronitha, the Mother, is separated and brought face to face with the King, in the excellence of the Sabbath, all things become one body.384“Become one body”means, that all is reäbsorbed once more into the One Element, the spirits of men becoming Nirvânîs, and the elements of everything else becoming again what they were before—Protyle or Undifferentiated Substance.“Sabbath”means Rest, or Nirvâna. It is not the“seventhday”aftersixdays, but a period the duration of which equals that of the seven“days,”or any period made up of seven parts. Thus a Pralaya is equal in duration to a Manvantara, or a Night of Brahmâ is equal to his Day. If the Christians will follow Jewish customs, they ought to adopt the spirit and not the dead letter thereof.[pg 261]They should work one week of seven days andrestseven days. That the word“Sabbath”had a mystic significance, is disclosed in the contempt shown by Jesus for the Sabbath day, and by what is said inLuke.385Sabbath is there taken for thewhole week. See the Greek text where the week is called“Sabbath.”Literally,“I fast twice in the Sabbath.”Paul, an Initiate, knew it well when referring to the eternal rest and felicity in Heaven, as Sabbath:386“and their happiness will be eternal, for they will ever be [one] with the Lord, and will enjoyan eternal Sabbath.”387The difference between the Kabalah and the archaic Esoteric Vidyâ—taking the Kabalah as contained in the ChaldeanBook of Numbers, not as misrepresented by its now disfigured copy, theKabalahof the Christian Mystics—is very small indeed, being confined to unimportant divergences of form and expression. Thus Eastern Occultism refers to our Earth as the Fourth World, the lowest of the Chain, above which run upward on both curves the six Globes, three on each side. TheZohar, on the other hand, calls the Earth the lower, or theseventh, adding that upon the six depend all things which are in it (Microprosopus). The“Smaller Face [smaller because manifested and finite] is formed ofsixSephiroth,”says the same work.“Seven Kings come anddie in the thrice-destroyed World[Malkuth, our Earth, destroyed after each of the Three Rounds which it has gone through]. And their reign [that of the Seven Kings] will be broken up.”388This relates to the Seven Races,fiveof which have already appeared, andtwomore have still to appear in this Round.The Shinto allegorical accounts of cosmogony and the origin of man, in Japan, hint at the same belief.Captain C. Pfoundes, who studied the religion underlying the various sects of the land, for nearly nine years in the monasteries of Japan, says:The Shinto idea of creation is as follows: Out of Chaos (Konton) the Earth (In) was the sediment precipitated, and the Heavens (Yo) the ethereal essences which ascended: Man (Jin) appeared between the two. The first man was called Kuni-to ko tatchino-mikoto, andfive other names were given to him, and then the human race appeared, male and female. Isanagi and Isanami begat Tenshoko doijin, the first of the five Gods of the Earth.These“Gods”are simply our Five Races, Isanagi and Isanami being the two kinds of“Ancestors,”the two preceding Races which give birth to animal and to rational man.[pg 262]It will be shown in Volume II, that the number seven, as well as the doctrine of the septenary constitution of man, was preëminent in all the secret systems. It plays as important a part in Western Kabalah as in Eastern Occultism. Éliphas Lévi calls the number seven“the key to the Mosaic creation and the symbols of every religion.”He shows the Kabalah faithfully following even the septenary division of man, for the diagram he gives in hisClef des Grands Mystères389is septenary. This may be seen at a glance, however cleverly the correct thought is veiled. One needs also only to look at the diagram, the“Formation of the Soul,”in Mathers'Kabbalah Unveiled,390from the above mentioned, work of Lévi, to find the same, though with a different interpretation.Thus it stands with both the Kabalistic and Occult names attached:Diagram IVLévi calls Nephesh that which we name Manas, andvice versâ. Nephesh is the Breath of (animal) Life in man—the Breath of Life,[pg 263]instinctualin the animal; and Manas is the Third Soul—the human in its light side, and animal, in its connection with Samaël or Kâma. Nephesh is really the“Breath of (animal) Life”breathed into Adam, the Man of Dust; it is consequently the Vital Spark, the informing Element. Without Manas, the“Reasoning Soul,”or Mind, which in Lévi's diagram is miscalled Nephesh, Âtmâ-Buddhi is irrational on this plane and cannot act. It is Buddhi which is the Plastic Mediator; not Manas, the intelligent medium between the upper Triad and the lower Quaternary. But there are many such strange and curious transformations to be found in the Kabalistic works—a convincing proof that this literature has become a sad jumble. We do not accept the classification, except in this one particular, in order to show the points of agreement.We will now give in tabular form what the very cautious Éliphas Lévi says in explanation of his diagram, and what the Esoteric Doctrine teaches—and compare the two. Lévi, too, makes a distinction between Kabalistic and Occult Pneumatics.Says Éliphas Lévi, the Kabalist:Say the Theosophists:Kabalistic Pneumatics.Esoteric Pneumatics.1. The Soul (or Ego) is a clothed light; and this light is triple.1. The same; for it is Âtmâ-Buddhi-Manas.2. Neshamah—pure Spirit.2. The same391.3. Ruach—the Soul or Spirit.3. Spiritual Soul.4. Nephesh—Plastic Mediator.3924. Mediator between Spirit and Man, the Seat of Reason, the Mind, in man.5. The garment of the Soul is the rind [body] of the Image [Astral Soul].5. Correct.6. The Image is double, because it reflects the good and the bad.6. Too uselessly apocalyptic. Why not say that the Astral reflects the good as well as the bad man; man, who is ever tending to the upper Triad, or else disappears with the Quaternary.7. [Image—Body.]7. The Earthly Image.[pg 264]Occult Pneumatics.Occult Pneumatics.(As given by Éliphas Lévi.)(As given by the Occultists.)1. Nephesh is immortal, because it renews its life by the destruction of forms. [But Nephesh, the“Breath of Life,”is a misnomer, and a useless puzzle to the student.]1. Manas is immortal, because after every new incarnation it adds to Âtmâ-Buddhi something of itself; and thus, assimilating itself to the Monad, shares its immortality.2. Ruach progresses by the evolution of ideas (!?).2. Buddhi becomes conscious by the accretions it gets from Manas, on the death of man after every new incarnation.3. Neshamah is progressive, without oblivion and destruction.3. Âtmâ neither progresses, forgets, nor remembers. It does not belong to this plane; it is but the Ray of Light eternal which shines upon, and through, the darkness of matter—when the latter is willing.4. The Soul has three dwellings.4. The Soul—collectively, as the Upper Triad—liveson three planes, besides its fourth, the terrestrial sphere; and itiseternally on the highest of the three.5. These dwellings are: the Plane of Mortals; the Superior Eden; and the Inferior Eden.5. These dwellings are: Earth for the physical man, or Animal Soul; Kâma Loka (Hades, the Limbo) for the disembodied man, or his Shell; Devachan for the Higher Triad.[pg 265]6. The Image [man] is a sphinx that offers the riddle of birth.6. Correct.7. The fatal Image [the Astral] endows Nephesh with its aptitudes; but Ruach is able to substitute for it the Image conquered in accordance with the inspirations of Neshamah.7. The Astral, through Kâma (Desire), is ever drawing Manas down into the sphere of material passions and desires. But if thebetterMan, or Manas, tries to escape the fatal attraction, and turns its aspirations to Âtmâ (Neshamah), then Buddhi (Ruach) conquers, and carries Manas with it to the realm of eternal Spirit.It is very evident that the French Kabalist either did not sufficiently know the real tenet, or distorted it to suit himself and his objects. Thus he says again, treating upon the same subject, as follows; and we Occultists answer the late Kabalist and his admirers also as follows:1. The Body is the mould of Nephesh; Nephesh the mould of Ruach; Ruach the mould of thegarmentof Neshamah.1. The Body follows the whims, good or bad, of Manas; Manas tries to follow the Light of Buddhi, but often fails. Buddhi is the mould of the“garments”of Âtmâ; for Âtmâ is no body, or shape, or anything, and because Buddhi is onlyfigurativelyits Vehicle.2. Light [the Soul] personifies itself in clothing itself [with a Body]; and personality endures only when the garment is perfect.2. The Monad becomes a personal Ego when it incarnates; and something remains of that Personality through Manas, when the latter is perfect enough to assimilate Buddhi.3. The Angels aspire to become men; a Perfect Man, a Man-God, is above all the Angels.3. Correct.4. Every 14,000 years the soul rejuvenates, and rests in the jubilean sleep of oblivion.4. Within a period, a Great Age, or a Day of Brahmâ, 14 Manus reign; after which comes Pralaya, when all the Souls (Egos) rest in Nirvâna.[pg 266]Such are the distorted copies of the Esoteric Doctrine in theKabalah.But to return to Shloka 5 of Stanza VII.(b) The well-known Kabalistic aphorism runs:“A stone becomes a plant; a plant, a beast; the beast, a man; a man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.”The“Spark”animates all the kingdoms, in turn, before it enters into and informs Divine Man, between whom and his predecessor animal man, there is all the difference in the world.Genesisbegins its anthropology at the wrong end—evidently for a blind—and lands nowhere. The introductory chapters ofGenesiswere never meant to represent even a remote allegory of the creation ofourEarth. They embrace a metaphysical conception of some indefinite period, in eternity, when successive attempts were being made by the law of evolution at the formation of universes. The idea is plainly stated in theZohar:There were old Worlds, which perished as soon as they came into existence, were formless, and were called Sparks. Thus, the smith, when hammering the iron, lets the sparks fly in all directions. The Sparks are the primordial Worlds, which could not continue because the Sacred Aged (Sephira) had not as yet assumed its form (of androgyne, or opposite sexes) of King and Queen (Sephira and Kadmon), and the Master was not yet at his work.393HadGenesisbegun as it ought, one would have found in it, first, the Celestial Logos, the“Heavenly Man,”which evolves as a Compound Unit of Logoi, out of which, after their pralayic sleep—a sleep that gathers the Numbers scattered on the mâyâvic plane into One, as the separate globules of quicksilver on a plate blend into one mass—the Logoi appear in their totality as the first“Male and Female,”or Adam Kadmon, the“Fiat Lux”of theBible, as we have already seen. But this transformation did not take place on our Earth, nor on any material plane, but in the Spacial Depths of the first differentiation of the eternal Root-Matter. On our nascent Globe, things proceed differently. The Monad or Jîva, as said inIsis Unveiled,394is, first of all, shot down by the Law of Evolution into the lowest form of matter—the mineral. After a sevenfold gyration encased in the stone,[pg 267]or that which will become mineral and stone in the Fourth Round, it creeps out of it, say, as a lichen. Passing thence, through all the forms of vegetable matter, into what is termed animal matter, it has now reached the point at which it has become the germ, so to speak, of the animal, that will become the physical man. All this, up to the Third Round, is formless, as matter, and senseless, as consciousness. For the Monad, or Jîva,per se, cannot be called even Spirit: it is a Ray, a Breath of the Absolute, or theAbsolutenessrather; and the Absolute Homogeneity, having no relations with the conditioned and relative finiteness, is unconscious on our plane. Therefore, besides the material which will be needed for its future human form, the Monad requires (a) a spiritual model, or prototype, for that material to shape itself into; and (b) an intelligent consciousness, to guide its evolution and progress, neither of which is possessed by the homogeneous Monad, or by senseless though living matter. The Adam of dust requires the Soul of Life to be breathed into him: the two middle Principles, which are thesentientLife of the irrational animal and the Human Soul, for the former is irrational without the latter. It is only when, from a potential androgyne, man has become separated into male and female, that he will be endowed with this conscious, rational, individual Soul (Manas),“the principle, or the intelligence, of the Elohim,”to receive which, he has to eat of the fruit of Knowledge from the Tree of Good and Evil. How is he to obtain all this? The Occult Doctrine teaches that while the Monad is cycling on downward into matter, these very Elohim, or Pitris—the lower Dhyân Chohans—are evolving,pari passuwith it, on a higher and more spiritual plane, descending also relatively into matter, on their own plane of consciousness, when, after having reached a certain point, they will meet the incarnating senseless Monad, encased in the lowest matter, and blending the two potencies, Spirit and Matter, the union will produce that terrestrial symbol of the“Heavenly Man”in space—Perfect Man. In the Sânkhya Philosophy, Purusha (Spirit) is spoken of as something impotent unless it mounts on the shoulders of Prakriti (Matter), which, left alone, is—senseless. But in the Secret Philosophy they are viewed as graduated. Spirit and Matter, though one and the same thing in their origin, when once they are on the plane of differentiation, begin each of them their evolutionary progress in contrary directions—Spirit falling gradually into Matter, and the latter ascending to its original condition, that of a pure spiritual Substance.[pg 268]Both are inseparable, yet ever separated. On the physical plane, two like poles will always repel each other, while the negative and the positive are mutually attracted; so do Spirit and Matter stand to each other—the two poles of the same homogeneous Substance, the Root-Principle of the Universe.Therefore, when the hour strikes for Purusha to mount on Prakriti's shoulders for the formation of the Perfect Man—rudimentary man of the first Two and a Half Races being only thefirst, gradually evolving into themost perfect, of mammals—the Celestial Ancestors (Entities from preceding Worlds, called in India the Shishta) step in on this our plane, and incarnate in the physical or animal man, as the Pitris had stepped in before them for the formation of the latter. Thus the two processes for the two“creations”—the animal and the divine man—differ greatly. The Pitris shoot out from their ethereal bodies still more ethereal and shadowy similitudes of themselves, or what we should now call“doubles,”or“astral forms,”in their own likeness.395This furnishes the Monad with its first dwelling, and blind matter with a model around and upon which to build henceforth. ButMan is still incomplete. From Svâyambhuva Manu,396from whom descended the seven primitive Manus, or Prajâpatis, each of whom gave birth to a primitive Race of men, down to theCodex Nazaræus, in which Karabtanos, or Fetahil, blind concupiscent Matter, begets on his Mother, Spiritus, seven Figures, each of which stands as the progenitor of one of the primeval seven Races—this doctrine has left its impress on every archaic scripture.“Who forms Manu [the Man] and who forms his body? The Life and the Lives. Sin397and the Moon.”Here Manu stands for the spiritual, heavenly Man, the real and non-dying Ego in us, which is the direct emanation of the“One Life,”or the Absolute Deity. As to our outward physical bodies, the house of the tabernacle of the Soul, the Doctrine teaches a strange lesson; so strange that unless thoroughly explained, and as thoroughly comprehended, it is only the exact science of the future that is destined to fully vindicate the theory.It has been stated before now that Occultism does not accept anything inorganic in the Kosmos. The expression employed by Science,[pg 269]“inorganic substance,”means simply that the latent life, slumbering in the molecules of so-called“inert matter,”is incognizable.All is Life, and every atom of even mineral dust is aLife, though beyond our comprehension and perception, because it is outside the range of the laws known to those who reject Occultism.“The very atoms,”says Tyndall,“seem instinct with a desire for life.”Whence, then, we would ask, comes the tendency“to run into organic form”? Is it in any way explicable except according to the teachings of Occult Science?The Worlds, to the profane, are built up of the known Elements. To the conception of an Arhat, these Elements are themselves, collectively, a Divine Life; distributively, on the plane of manifestations, the numberless and countless crores of Lives. Fire alone isOne,on the plane of the One Reality: on that of manifested, hence illusive, Being, its particles are fiery Lives which live and have their being at the expense of every other Life that they consume. Therefore they are named the“Devourers.”...Every visible thing in this Universe was built by suchLives,from conscious and divine primordial man down to the unconscious agents that construct matter.... From theOne Life,formless and uncreate, proceeds the Universe of Lives. First was manifested from the Deep [Chaos] cold luminous Fire [gaseous light?], which formed the Curds in Space [irresolvable nebulæ, perhaps?] ... These fought, and a great heat was developed by the encountering and collision, which produced rotation. Then came the first manifestedMaterialFire, the hot Flames, the Wanderers in Heaven [Comets]. Heat generates moist vapour; that forms solid water [?]; then dry mist, then liquid mist, watery, that puts out the luminous brightness of the Pilgrims [Comets?], and forms solid watery Wheels[MatterGlobes]. Bhümi [the Earth] appears with six sisters. These produce by their continuous motion the inferior fire, heat, and an aqueous mist, which yields the third World-Element—Water;and from the breath of all [atmospheric]Airis born. These four are the four Lives of the first four Periods [Rounds] of Manvantara. The three last will follow.The Commentary first speaks of the“numberless and countless crores of Lives.”Is Pasteur, then, unconsciously taking the first step toward Occult Science, in declaring that, if he dared express his ideas fully upon this subject, he would say, that the organic cells are endowed with a vital potency that does not cease its activity with the cessation of a current of oxygen towards them, and does not, on that account, break off its relations with life itself, which is supported by the influence[pg 270]of that gas?“I would add,”continues Pasteur,“that the evolution of the germ is accomplished by means of complicated phenomena, among which we must class processes of fermentation”; and life, according to Claude Bernard and Pasteur, is nothing else than a process of fermentation. That there exist in Nature Beings, or Lives, that can live and thrive without air, even on our Globe, has been demonstrated by the same Scientists. Pasteur found that many of the lower lives, such as vibriones, and other microbes and bacteria, could exist without air, which, on the contrary, killed them. They derived the oxygen necessary for their multiplication from the various substances that surrounded them. He calls themærobes, living on the tissues of our matter, when the latter has ceased to form a part of an integral and living whole (then called very unscientifically by Science“dead matter”), andanærobes. The one kind binds oxygen, and contributes greatly to the destruction of animal life and vegetable tissues, furnishing to the atmosphere materials which enter, later on, into the constitution of other organisms; the other finally destroys, or rather annihilates, the so-called organic substance; ultimate decay being impossible without their participation. Certain germ-cells, such as those of yeast, develop and multiply in air, but when deprived of it, they will adapt themselves to life without air and become ferments, absorbing oxygen from substances coming in contact with them, and thereby ruining the latter. The cells in fruit, when lacking free oxygen, act as ferments and stimulate fermentation.“Therefore the vegetable cell, in this case, manifests its life as an anærobic being. Why, then, should an organic cell form, in this case, an exception?”asks Professor Bogolubof. Pasteur shows that in the substance of our tissues and organs, the cell, not finding sufficient oxygen for itself, stimulates fermentation in the same way as the fruit-cell, and Claude Bernard thought that Pasteur's idea of the formation of ferments found its application and corroboration in the fact that urea increases in the blood during strangulation.Lifetherefore is everywhere in the Universe, and, Occultism teaches us, it is also in the atom.“Bhûmi appears with six sisters,”says the Commentary. It is a Vedic teaching that“there are three Earths, corresponding to three Heavens, and our Earth [the fourth] is called Bhûmi.”This is the explanation given by our exoteric Western Orientalists. But the esoteric meaning, and allusion to it in theVedas, is that it refers to our Planetary Chain;“three Earths”on the descending arc, and“three[pg 271]Heavens,”which are three Earths or Globes also, only far more ethereal, on the ascending or spiritual arc. By the first three we descend into Matter, by the other three we ascend into Spirit; the lowest one, Bhûmi, our Earth, forming the turning point, so to say, and containing,potentially, as much of Spirit as it does of Matter. But we shall treat of this hereafter.The general teaching of the Commentary, then, is that every new Round develops one of the Compound Elements, as now known to Science, which rejects the primitive nomenclature, preferring to subdivide them into constituents. If Nature is the“Ever-Becoming”on the manifested plane, then these Elements are to be regarded in the same light: they have to evolve, progress, and increase to the manvantaric end.Thus the First Round, we are taught, developed but one Element, and a nature and humanity in what may be spoken of as one aspect of Nature—called by some, very unscientifically, though it may be sode facto,“one-dimensional space.”The Second Round brought forth and developed two Elements, Fire and Earth; anditshumanity, adapted to this condition of Nature, if we can give the name humanity to beings living under conditions now unknown to men, was—to use again a familiar phrase in a strictly figurative sense, the only way in which it can be used correctly—a“two-dimensional”species.The processes of natural development which we are now considering will at once elucidate and discredit the fashion of speculating on the attributes oftwo,three, andfouror moredimensionalspace; but, in passing, it is worth while to point out the real significance of the sound, but incomplete, intuition that has prompted—among Spiritualists and Theosophists, and several great men of Science, for the matter of that398—the use of the modern expression, the“fourth dimension of space.”To begin with, the superficial absurdity of assuming that Space itself is measurable in any direction is of little consequence. The familiar phrase can only be an abbreviation of the fuller form—the“fourth dimension of matter, in Space.”399But even thus expanded, it is an unhappy phrase, because while it is perfectly true that the progress of[pg 272]evolution may be destined to introduce us to new characteristics of matter, those with which we are already familiar are really more numerous than the three dimensions. The qualities, or what is perhaps the best available term, the characteristics of matter, must clearly bear a direct relation always to the senses of man. Matter has extension, colour, motion (molecular motion), taste and smell, corresponding to the existing senses of man, and the next characteristic it develops—let us call it for the moment“Permeability”—will correspond to the next sense of man, which we may call“Normal Clairvoyance.”Thus, when some bold thinkers have been thirsting for a fourth dimension, to explain the passage of matter through matter, and the production of knots upon an endless cord, they have been in want of asixth characteristicof matter. The three dimensions belong really to only one attribute, or characteristic, of matter—extension; and popular common sense justly rebels against the idea that, under any condition of things, there can be more than three of such dimensions as length, breadth and thickness. These terms, and the term“dimension”itself, all belong to one plane of thought, to one stage of evolution, to one characteristic of matter. So long as there are foot-rules within the resources of cosmos, to apply to matter, so long will they be able to measure it three ways and no more; just as, from the time the idea of measurement first occupied a place in the human understanding, it has been possible to apply measurement in three directions and no more. But these considerations do not in any way militate against the certainty that, in the progress of time, as the faculties of humanity are multiplied, so will the characteristics of matter be multiplied also. Meanwhile, the expression is far more incorrect than even the familiar phrase of the sun's“rising”or“setting.”We now return to the consideration of material evolution through the Rounds. Matter in the Second Round, it has been stated, may be figuratively referred to as two-dimensional. But here anothercaveatmust be entered. This loose and figurative expression may be regarded—on one plane of thought, as we have just seen—as equivalent to the second characteristic of matter, corresponding to the second perceptive faculty or sense of man. But these two linked scales of evolution are concerned with the processes going on within the limits of a single Round. The succession of primary aspects of Nature, with which the succession of Rounds is concerned, has to do, as already indicated, with the development of the Elements—in the Occult sense—Fire,[pg 273]Air, Water, Earth. We are only in the Fourth Round, and our catalogue so far stops short. The order in which these Elements are mentioned, in the last sentence but one, is the correct one for Esoteric purposes and in the Secret Teachings. Milton was right when he spoke of the“Powers of Fire, Air, Water, Earth”; the Earth, such as we know it now, had no existence before the Fourth Round, hundreds of millions of years ago, the commencement of our geological Earth. The Globe, says the Commentary, was“fiery, cool and radiant, as its ethereal men and animals, during the First Round”—a contradiction or paradox in the opinion of our present Science—“luminous and more dense and heavy, during the Second Round; watery during the Third.”Thus are the Elements reversed.The centres of consciousness of the Third Round, destined to develop into humanity as we know it, arrived at a perception of the third Element, Water. If we had to frame our conclusions according to thedatafurnished us by Geologists, then we would say that there was no real water, even during the Carboniferous Period. We are told that gigantic masses of carbon, which existed formerly spread in the atmosphere, as carbonic acid, were absorbed by plants, while a large proportion of that gas was mixed in the water. Now, if this be so, and we have to believe that all the carbonic acid which went to compose those plants that formed bituminous coal, lignite, etc., and went towards the formation of lime-stone, and so on, that all this was at that period in the atmosphere in gaseous form, then, there must have been seas and oceans of liquid carbonic acid! But how then could the Carboniferous Period be preceded by the Devonian and Silurian Ages—those of fishes and molluscs—on that assumption? Barometric pressure, moreover, must have exceeded several hundred times the pressure of our present atmosphere. How could organisms, even so simple as those of certain fishes and molluscs, stand that? There is a curious work by Blanchard, on the Origin of Life, wherein he shows some strange contradictions and confusions in the theories of his colleagues, and which we recommend to the reader's attention.Those of the Fourth Round have added Earth as a state of matter to their stock, as well as the three other Elements in their present transformation.In short, none of the so-called Elements were, in the three preceding Rounds, as they are now. For all we know,Firemay have beenpureÂkâsha, the First Matter of the“Magnum Opus”of the Creators and[pg 274]Builders, that Astral Light which the paradoxical Éliphas Lévi calls in one breath the“Body of the Holy Ghost,”and in the next“Baphomet,”the“Androgyne Goat of Mendes”;Air, simply Nitrogen, the“Breath of the Supporters of the Heavenly Dome,”as the Mahometan Mystics call it;Water, that primordial fluid which was required, according to Moses, to make a“Living Soul.”And this may account for the flagrant discrepancies and unscientific statements found inGenesis. Separate the first from the second chapter; read the former as a scripture of the Elohists, and the latter as that of the far later Jehovists; still one finds, if one reads between the lines, the same order in which created things appear; namely, Fire (Light), Air, Water, and Man (or Earth). For the sentence of the first chapter (the Elohistic),“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,”is a mistranslation; it is not“the heaven and the earth,”but the duplex, or dual, Heaven, theupperand thelowerHeavens, or the separation of Primordial Substance that was light in its upper, and dark in its lower portions (the manifested Universe), in its duality of theinvisible(to the senses), and thevisibleto our perceptions.“God divided the light from the darkness”; and then made the firmament (Air).“Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters,”i.e.,“the waters which were under the firmament [our manifested visible Universe] from the waters which wereabovethe firmament [the (to us) invisible planes of being].”In the second chapter (the Jehovistic), plants and herbs are created before water, just as in the first,lightis produced before thesun.“God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the fieldbefore it was in the earth, and every herb of the fieldbefore it grew; for the Lord God [Elohim] had not caused it to rain upon the earth, etc.”—an absurdity unless the esoteric explanation is accepted. The plantswerecreated before they were in the earth—for there was no earth then such as it is now; and the herb of the field was in existence before it grew as it does now, in the Fourth Round.Discussing and explaining the nature of the invisible Elements and the“Primordial Fire”mentioned above, Éliphas Lévi invariably calls it the“Astral Light”: with him it is the“Grand Agent Magique.”Undeniably it is so, but—only so far asBlackMagic is concerned, and on the lowest planes of what we call Ether, the noumenon of which is Âkâsha; and even this would be held incorrect by orthodox Occultists. The“Astral Light”is simply the older“Sidereal Light”of Paracelsus; and to say that“everything which exists has been evolved from it, and[pg 275]it preserves and reproduces all forms,”as he does, is to enunciate truth only in the second proposition. The first is erroneous; for if all that exists was evolvedthrough(orviâ) it, this is not the Astral Light, since the latter is not the container ofallthings but, at best, only the reflector of thisall. Éliphas Lévi very truly shows it“a force in Nature,”by means of which“a single man who can master it ... might throw the world into confusion and transform its face”; for it is the“Great Arcanum of transcendent Magic.”Quoting the words of the great Western Kabalist in their translated form,400we may, perhaps, the better explain them by the occasional addition of a word or two, to show the difference between Western and Eastern explanations of the same subject. The author says of the great Magic Agent:
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,Stains the white radiance of Eternity—
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,Stains the white radiance of Eternity—
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity—
yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity; for Life alone can understand Life.
What is that“Spark”which“hangs from the Flame”? It is Jîva, the Monad in conjunction with Manas, or rather its aroma—that which remains from each Personality, when worthy, and hangs from Âtmâ-Buddhi, the Flame, by the Thread of Life. In whatever way it is interpreted, and into whatever number of principles the human being is divided, it may be easily shown that this doctrine is supported by all the ancient religions, from the Vedic to the Egyptian, from the Zoroastrian to the Jewish. In the case of the last-mentioned, the Kabalistic works offer abundant proof of this statement. The entire system of the Kabalistic numerals is based on the divine Septenary hanging from the Triad, thus forming the Decad, and its permutations 7, 5, 4, and 3, which, finally, all merge into theOneitself; an endless and boundless Circle.
As says theZohar:
The Deity [the ever invisible Presence] manifests itself through thetenSephiroth, which are its radiating witnesses. The Deity is like the sea from which outflows a stream called Wisdom, the waters of which fall into a lake named Intelligence. From the basin, like seven channels, issue the Seven Sephiroth.... Fortenequalseven: the Decad containsfourUnities andthreeBinaries.
The Deity [the ever invisible Presence] manifests itself through thetenSephiroth, which are its radiating witnesses. The Deity is like the sea from which outflows a stream called Wisdom, the waters of which fall into a lake named Intelligence. From the basin, like seven channels, issue the Seven Sephiroth.... Fortenequalseven: the Decad containsfourUnities andthreeBinaries.
The Ten Sephiroth correspond to the Limbs of Man.
When I [the Elohim] framed Adam Kadmon, the Spirit of the Eternal shot out of his Body, like a sheet of lightning that radiated at once on the billows of thesevenmillions of skies, and mytenSplendours were his Limbs.
When I [the Elohim] framed Adam Kadmon, the Spirit of the Eternal shot out of his Body, like a sheet of lightning that radiated at once on the billows of thesevenmillions of skies, and mytenSplendours were his Limbs.
But neither the Head nor the Shoulders of Adam Kadmon can be seen; therefore we read in theSiphra Dtzenioutha, the“Book of the Concealed Mystery”:
In the beginning of Time, after the Elohim [the“Sons of Light and Life,”or the Builders] had shaped out of the eternal Essence the Heavens and the Earth, they formed the worlds six by six.
In the beginning of Time, after the Elohim [the“Sons of Light and Life,”or the Builders] had shaped out of the eternal Essence the Heavens and the Earth, they formed the worlds six by six.
The seventh being Malkuth, which is our Earth382on its plane, and[pg 260]the lowest on all the other planes of conscious existence. The ChaldeanBook of Numberscontains a detailed explanation of all this.
The first triad of the Body of Adam Kadmon [the three upper planes of the seven383] cannot be seen before the Soul stands in the presence of the Ancient of Days.
The first triad of the Body of Adam Kadmon [the three upper planes of the seven383] cannot be seen before the Soul stands in the presence of the Ancient of Days.
The Sephiroth of this upper Triad are:“1. Kether (the Crown), represented by the brow of Macroprosopus; 2. Chokmah (Wisdom, a male Principle), by his right shoulder; and 3. Binah (Intelligence, a female Principle), by the left shoulder.”Then come thesevenLimbs, or Sephiroth, on the planes of manifestation; the totality of these four planes being represented by Microprosopus, the Lesser Face, or Tetragrammaton, the“four-lettered”Mystery.“Thesevenmanifested and thethreeconcealed Limbs are the Body of the Deity.”
Thus our Earth, Malkuth, is both theseventhand thefourthWorld; the former when counting from the first Globe above, the latter if reckoned by the planes. It is generated by the sixth Globe or Sephira, called Yezud,“Foundation,”or, as said in theBook of Numbers,“by Yezud, He [Adam Kadmon] fecundates the primitive Heva [Eve or our Earth].”Rendered in mystic language, this is the explanation why Malkuth, called the Inferior Mother, Matrona, Queen, and the Kingdom of the Foundation, is shown as the Bride of Tetragrammaton, or Microprosopus (the Second Logos), the Heavenly Man. When free from all impurity, she will become united with the Spiritual Logos,i.e., in the Seventh Race of the Seventh Round—after the regeneration, on the day of“Sabbath.”For the“SeventhDay”again has an occult significance undreamed of by our theologians.
When Matronitha, the Mother, is separated and brought face to face with the King, in the excellence of the Sabbath, all things become one body.384
When Matronitha, the Mother, is separated and brought face to face with the King, in the excellence of the Sabbath, all things become one body.384
“Become one body”means, that all is reäbsorbed once more into the One Element, the spirits of men becoming Nirvânîs, and the elements of everything else becoming again what they were before—Protyle or Undifferentiated Substance.“Sabbath”means Rest, or Nirvâna. It is not the“seventhday”aftersixdays, but a period the duration of which equals that of the seven“days,”or any period made up of seven parts. Thus a Pralaya is equal in duration to a Manvantara, or a Night of Brahmâ is equal to his Day. If the Christians will follow Jewish customs, they ought to adopt the spirit and not the dead letter thereof.[pg 261]They should work one week of seven days andrestseven days. That the word“Sabbath”had a mystic significance, is disclosed in the contempt shown by Jesus for the Sabbath day, and by what is said inLuke.385Sabbath is there taken for thewhole week. See the Greek text where the week is called“Sabbath.”Literally,“I fast twice in the Sabbath.”Paul, an Initiate, knew it well when referring to the eternal rest and felicity in Heaven, as Sabbath:386“and their happiness will be eternal, for they will ever be [one] with the Lord, and will enjoyan eternal Sabbath.”387
The difference between the Kabalah and the archaic Esoteric Vidyâ—taking the Kabalah as contained in the ChaldeanBook of Numbers, not as misrepresented by its now disfigured copy, theKabalahof the Christian Mystics—is very small indeed, being confined to unimportant divergences of form and expression. Thus Eastern Occultism refers to our Earth as the Fourth World, the lowest of the Chain, above which run upward on both curves the six Globes, three on each side. TheZohar, on the other hand, calls the Earth the lower, or theseventh, adding that upon the six depend all things which are in it (Microprosopus). The“Smaller Face [smaller because manifested and finite] is formed ofsixSephiroth,”says the same work.“Seven Kings come anddie in the thrice-destroyed World[Malkuth, our Earth, destroyed after each of the Three Rounds which it has gone through]. And their reign [that of the Seven Kings] will be broken up.”388This relates to the Seven Races,fiveof which have already appeared, andtwomore have still to appear in this Round.
The Shinto allegorical accounts of cosmogony and the origin of man, in Japan, hint at the same belief.
Captain C. Pfoundes, who studied the religion underlying the various sects of the land, for nearly nine years in the monasteries of Japan, says:
The Shinto idea of creation is as follows: Out of Chaos (Konton) the Earth (In) was the sediment precipitated, and the Heavens (Yo) the ethereal essences which ascended: Man (Jin) appeared between the two. The first man was called Kuni-to ko tatchino-mikoto, andfive other names were given to him, and then the human race appeared, male and female. Isanagi and Isanami begat Tenshoko doijin, the first of the five Gods of the Earth.
The Shinto idea of creation is as follows: Out of Chaos (Konton) the Earth (In) was the sediment precipitated, and the Heavens (Yo) the ethereal essences which ascended: Man (Jin) appeared between the two. The first man was called Kuni-to ko tatchino-mikoto, andfive other names were given to him, and then the human race appeared, male and female. Isanagi and Isanami begat Tenshoko doijin, the first of the five Gods of the Earth.
These“Gods”are simply our Five Races, Isanagi and Isanami being the two kinds of“Ancestors,”the two preceding Races which give birth to animal and to rational man.
It will be shown in Volume II, that the number seven, as well as the doctrine of the septenary constitution of man, was preëminent in all the secret systems. It plays as important a part in Western Kabalah as in Eastern Occultism. Éliphas Lévi calls the number seven“the key to the Mosaic creation and the symbols of every religion.”He shows the Kabalah faithfully following even the septenary division of man, for the diagram he gives in hisClef des Grands Mystères389is septenary. This may be seen at a glance, however cleverly the correct thought is veiled. One needs also only to look at the diagram, the“Formation of the Soul,”in Mathers'Kabbalah Unveiled,390from the above mentioned, work of Lévi, to find the same, though with a different interpretation.
Thus it stands with both the Kabalistic and Occult names attached:
Diagram IV
Lévi calls Nephesh that which we name Manas, andvice versâ. Nephesh is the Breath of (animal) Life in man—the Breath of Life,[pg 263]instinctualin the animal; and Manas is the Third Soul—the human in its light side, and animal, in its connection with Samaël or Kâma. Nephesh is really the“Breath of (animal) Life”breathed into Adam, the Man of Dust; it is consequently the Vital Spark, the informing Element. Without Manas, the“Reasoning Soul,”or Mind, which in Lévi's diagram is miscalled Nephesh, Âtmâ-Buddhi is irrational on this plane and cannot act. It is Buddhi which is the Plastic Mediator; not Manas, the intelligent medium between the upper Triad and the lower Quaternary. But there are many such strange and curious transformations to be found in the Kabalistic works—a convincing proof that this literature has become a sad jumble. We do not accept the classification, except in this one particular, in order to show the points of agreement.
We will now give in tabular form what the very cautious Éliphas Lévi says in explanation of his diagram, and what the Esoteric Doctrine teaches—and compare the two. Lévi, too, makes a distinction between Kabalistic and Occult Pneumatics.
It is very evident that the French Kabalist either did not sufficiently know the real tenet, or distorted it to suit himself and his objects. Thus he says again, treating upon the same subject, as follows; and we Occultists answer the late Kabalist and his admirers also as follows:
Such are the distorted copies of the Esoteric Doctrine in theKabalah.
But to return to Shloka 5 of Stanza VII.
(b) The well-known Kabalistic aphorism runs:“A stone becomes a plant; a plant, a beast; the beast, a man; a man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.”The“Spark”animates all the kingdoms, in turn, before it enters into and informs Divine Man, between whom and his predecessor animal man, there is all the difference in the world.Genesisbegins its anthropology at the wrong end—evidently for a blind—and lands nowhere. The introductory chapters ofGenesiswere never meant to represent even a remote allegory of the creation ofourEarth. They embrace a metaphysical conception of some indefinite period, in eternity, when successive attempts were being made by the law of evolution at the formation of universes. The idea is plainly stated in theZohar:
There were old Worlds, which perished as soon as they came into existence, were formless, and were called Sparks. Thus, the smith, when hammering the iron, lets the sparks fly in all directions. The Sparks are the primordial Worlds, which could not continue because the Sacred Aged (Sephira) had not as yet assumed its form (of androgyne, or opposite sexes) of King and Queen (Sephira and Kadmon), and the Master was not yet at his work.393
There were old Worlds, which perished as soon as they came into existence, were formless, and were called Sparks. Thus, the smith, when hammering the iron, lets the sparks fly in all directions. The Sparks are the primordial Worlds, which could not continue because the Sacred Aged (Sephira) had not as yet assumed its form (of androgyne, or opposite sexes) of King and Queen (Sephira and Kadmon), and the Master was not yet at his work.393
HadGenesisbegun as it ought, one would have found in it, first, the Celestial Logos, the“Heavenly Man,”which evolves as a Compound Unit of Logoi, out of which, after their pralayic sleep—a sleep that gathers the Numbers scattered on the mâyâvic plane into One, as the separate globules of quicksilver on a plate blend into one mass—the Logoi appear in their totality as the first“Male and Female,”or Adam Kadmon, the“Fiat Lux”of theBible, as we have already seen. But this transformation did not take place on our Earth, nor on any material plane, but in the Spacial Depths of the first differentiation of the eternal Root-Matter. On our nascent Globe, things proceed differently. The Monad or Jîva, as said inIsis Unveiled,394is, first of all, shot down by the Law of Evolution into the lowest form of matter—the mineral. After a sevenfold gyration encased in the stone,[pg 267]or that which will become mineral and stone in the Fourth Round, it creeps out of it, say, as a lichen. Passing thence, through all the forms of vegetable matter, into what is termed animal matter, it has now reached the point at which it has become the germ, so to speak, of the animal, that will become the physical man. All this, up to the Third Round, is formless, as matter, and senseless, as consciousness. For the Monad, or Jîva,per se, cannot be called even Spirit: it is a Ray, a Breath of the Absolute, or theAbsolutenessrather; and the Absolute Homogeneity, having no relations with the conditioned and relative finiteness, is unconscious on our plane. Therefore, besides the material which will be needed for its future human form, the Monad requires (a) a spiritual model, or prototype, for that material to shape itself into; and (b) an intelligent consciousness, to guide its evolution and progress, neither of which is possessed by the homogeneous Monad, or by senseless though living matter. The Adam of dust requires the Soul of Life to be breathed into him: the two middle Principles, which are thesentientLife of the irrational animal and the Human Soul, for the former is irrational without the latter. It is only when, from a potential androgyne, man has become separated into male and female, that he will be endowed with this conscious, rational, individual Soul (Manas),“the principle, or the intelligence, of the Elohim,”to receive which, he has to eat of the fruit of Knowledge from the Tree of Good and Evil. How is he to obtain all this? The Occult Doctrine teaches that while the Monad is cycling on downward into matter, these very Elohim, or Pitris—the lower Dhyân Chohans—are evolving,pari passuwith it, on a higher and more spiritual plane, descending also relatively into matter, on their own plane of consciousness, when, after having reached a certain point, they will meet the incarnating senseless Monad, encased in the lowest matter, and blending the two potencies, Spirit and Matter, the union will produce that terrestrial symbol of the“Heavenly Man”in space—Perfect Man. In the Sânkhya Philosophy, Purusha (Spirit) is spoken of as something impotent unless it mounts on the shoulders of Prakriti (Matter), which, left alone, is—senseless. But in the Secret Philosophy they are viewed as graduated. Spirit and Matter, though one and the same thing in their origin, when once they are on the plane of differentiation, begin each of them their evolutionary progress in contrary directions—Spirit falling gradually into Matter, and the latter ascending to its original condition, that of a pure spiritual Substance.[pg 268]Both are inseparable, yet ever separated. On the physical plane, two like poles will always repel each other, while the negative and the positive are mutually attracted; so do Spirit and Matter stand to each other—the two poles of the same homogeneous Substance, the Root-Principle of the Universe.
Therefore, when the hour strikes for Purusha to mount on Prakriti's shoulders for the formation of the Perfect Man—rudimentary man of the first Two and a Half Races being only thefirst, gradually evolving into themost perfect, of mammals—the Celestial Ancestors (Entities from preceding Worlds, called in India the Shishta) step in on this our plane, and incarnate in the physical or animal man, as the Pitris had stepped in before them for the formation of the latter. Thus the two processes for the two“creations”—the animal and the divine man—differ greatly. The Pitris shoot out from their ethereal bodies still more ethereal and shadowy similitudes of themselves, or what we should now call“doubles,”or“astral forms,”in their own likeness.395This furnishes the Monad with its first dwelling, and blind matter with a model around and upon which to build henceforth. ButMan is still incomplete. From Svâyambhuva Manu,396from whom descended the seven primitive Manus, or Prajâpatis, each of whom gave birth to a primitive Race of men, down to theCodex Nazaræus, in which Karabtanos, or Fetahil, blind concupiscent Matter, begets on his Mother, Spiritus, seven Figures, each of which stands as the progenitor of one of the primeval seven Races—this doctrine has left its impress on every archaic scripture.
“Who forms Manu [the Man] and who forms his body? The Life and the Lives. Sin397and the Moon.”Here Manu stands for the spiritual, heavenly Man, the real and non-dying Ego in us, which is the direct emanation of the“One Life,”or the Absolute Deity. As to our outward physical bodies, the house of the tabernacle of the Soul, the Doctrine teaches a strange lesson; so strange that unless thoroughly explained, and as thoroughly comprehended, it is only the exact science of the future that is destined to fully vindicate the theory.
It has been stated before now that Occultism does not accept anything inorganic in the Kosmos. The expression employed by Science,[pg 269]“inorganic substance,”means simply that the latent life, slumbering in the molecules of so-called“inert matter,”is incognizable.All is Life, and every atom of even mineral dust is aLife, though beyond our comprehension and perception, because it is outside the range of the laws known to those who reject Occultism.“The very atoms,”says Tyndall,“seem instinct with a desire for life.”Whence, then, we would ask, comes the tendency“to run into organic form”? Is it in any way explicable except according to the teachings of Occult Science?
The Worlds, to the profane, are built up of the known Elements. To the conception of an Arhat, these Elements are themselves, collectively, a Divine Life; distributively, on the plane of manifestations, the numberless and countless crores of Lives. Fire alone isOne,on the plane of the One Reality: on that of manifested, hence illusive, Being, its particles are fiery Lives which live and have their being at the expense of every other Life that they consume. Therefore they are named the“Devourers.”...Every visible thing in this Universe was built by suchLives,from conscious and divine primordial man down to the unconscious agents that construct matter.... From theOne Life,formless and uncreate, proceeds the Universe of Lives. First was manifested from the Deep [Chaos] cold luminous Fire [gaseous light?], which formed the Curds in Space [irresolvable nebulæ, perhaps?] ... These fought, and a great heat was developed by the encountering and collision, which produced rotation. Then came the first manifestedMaterialFire, the hot Flames, the Wanderers in Heaven [Comets]. Heat generates moist vapour; that forms solid water [?]; then dry mist, then liquid mist, watery, that puts out the luminous brightness of the Pilgrims [Comets?], and forms solid watery Wheels[MatterGlobes]. Bhümi [the Earth] appears with six sisters. These produce by their continuous motion the inferior fire, heat, and an aqueous mist, which yields the third World-Element—Water;and from the breath of all [atmospheric]Airis born. These four are the four Lives of the first four Periods [Rounds] of Manvantara. The three last will follow.
The Commentary first speaks of the“numberless and countless crores of Lives.”Is Pasteur, then, unconsciously taking the first step toward Occult Science, in declaring that, if he dared express his ideas fully upon this subject, he would say, that the organic cells are endowed with a vital potency that does not cease its activity with the cessation of a current of oxygen towards them, and does not, on that account, break off its relations with life itself, which is supported by the influence[pg 270]of that gas?“I would add,”continues Pasteur,“that the evolution of the germ is accomplished by means of complicated phenomena, among which we must class processes of fermentation”; and life, according to Claude Bernard and Pasteur, is nothing else than a process of fermentation. That there exist in Nature Beings, or Lives, that can live and thrive without air, even on our Globe, has been demonstrated by the same Scientists. Pasteur found that many of the lower lives, such as vibriones, and other microbes and bacteria, could exist without air, which, on the contrary, killed them. They derived the oxygen necessary for their multiplication from the various substances that surrounded them. He calls themærobes, living on the tissues of our matter, when the latter has ceased to form a part of an integral and living whole (then called very unscientifically by Science“dead matter”), andanærobes. The one kind binds oxygen, and contributes greatly to the destruction of animal life and vegetable tissues, furnishing to the atmosphere materials which enter, later on, into the constitution of other organisms; the other finally destroys, or rather annihilates, the so-called organic substance; ultimate decay being impossible without their participation. Certain germ-cells, such as those of yeast, develop and multiply in air, but when deprived of it, they will adapt themselves to life without air and become ferments, absorbing oxygen from substances coming in contact with them, and thereby ruining the latter. The cells in fruit, when lacking free oxygen, act as ferments and stimulate fermentation.“Therefore the vegetable cell, in this case, manifests its life as an anærobic being. Why, then, should an organic cell form, in this case, an exception?”asks Professor Bogolubof. Pasteur shows that in the substance of our tissues and organs, the cell, not finding sufficient oxygen for itself, stimulates fermentation in the same way as the fruit-cell, and Claude Bernard thought that Pasteur's idea of the formation of ferments found its application and corroboration in the fact that urea increases in the blood during strangulation.Lifetherefore is everywhere in the Universe, and, Occultism teaches us, it is also in the atom.
“Bhûmi appears with six sisters,”says the Commentary. It is a Vedic teaching that“there are three Earths, corresponding to three Heavens, and our Earth [the fourth] is called Bhûmi.”This is the explanation given by our exoteric Western Orientalists. But the esoteric meaning, and allusion to it in theVedas, is that it refers to our Planetary Chain;“three Earths”on the descending arc, and“three[pg 271]Heavens,”which are three Earths or Globes also, only far more ethereal, on the ascending or spiritual arc. By the first three we descend into Matter, by the other three we ascend into Spirit; the lowest one, Bhûmi, our Earth, forming the turning point, so to say, and containing,potentially, as much of Spirit as it does of Matter. But we shall treat of this hereafter.
The general teaching of the Commentary, then, is that every new Round develops one of the Compound Elements, as now known to Science, which rejects the primitive nomenclature, preferring to subdivide them into constituents. If Nature is the“Ever-Becoming”on the manifested plane, then these Elements are to be regarded in the same light: they have to evolve, progress, and increase to the manvantaric end.
Thus the First Round, we are taught, developed but one Element, and a nature and humanity in what may be spoken of as one aspect of Nature—called by some, very unscientifically, though it may be sode facto,“one-dimensional space.”
The Second Round brought forth and developed two Elements, Fire and Earth; anditshumanity, adapted to this condition of Nature, if we can give the name humanity to beings living under conditions now unknown to men, was—to use again a familiar phrase in a strictly figurative sense, the only way in which it can be used correctly—a“two-dimensional”species.
The processes of natural development which we are now considering will at once elucidate and discredit the fashion of speculating on the attributes oftwo,three, andfouror moredimensionalspace; but, in passing, it is worth while to point out the real significance of the sound, but incomplete, intuition that has prompted—among Spiritualists and Theosophists, and several great men of Science, for the matter of that398—the use of the modern expression, the“fourth dimension of space.”To begin with, the superficial absurdity of assuming that Space itself is measurable in any direction is of little consequence. The familiar phrase can only be an abbreviation of the fuller form—the“fourth dimension of matter, in Space.”399But even thus expanded, it is an unhappy phrase, because while it is perfectly true that the progress of[pg 272]evolution may be destined to introduce us to new characteristics of matter, those with which we are already familiar are really more numerous than the three dimensions. The qualities, or what is perhaps the best available term, the characteristics of matter, must clearly bear a direct relation always to the senses of man. Matter has extension, colour, motion (molecular motion), taste and smell, corresponding to the existing senses of man, and the next characteristic it develops—let us call it for the moment“Permeability”—will correspond to the next sense of man, which we may call“Normal Clairvoyance.”Thus, when some bold thinkers have been thirsting for a fourth dimension, to explain the passage of matter through matter, and the production of knots upon an endless cord, they have been in want of asixth characteristicof matter. The three dimensions belong really to only one attribute, or characteristic, of matter—extension; and popular common sense justly rebels against the idea that, under any condition of things, there can be more than three of such dimensions as length, breadth and thickness. These terms, and the term“dimension”itself, all belong to one plane of thought, to one stage of evolution, to one characteristic of matter. So long as there are foot-rules within the resources of cosmos, to apply to matter, so long will they be able to measure it three ways and no more; just as, from the time the idea of measurement first occupied a place in the human understanding, it has been possible to apply measurement in three directions and no more. But these considerations do not in any way militate against the certainty that, in the progress of time, as the faculties of humanity are multiplied, so will the characteristics of matter be multiplied also. Meanwhile, the expression is far more incorrect than even the familiar phrase of the sun's“rising”or“setting.”
We now return to the consideration of material evolution through the Rounds. Matter in the Second Round, it has been stated, may be figuratively referred to as two-dimensional. But here anothercaveatmust be entered. This loose and figurative expression may be regarded—on one plane of thought, as we have just seen—as equivalent to the second characteristic of matter, corresponding to the second perceptive faculty or sense of man. But these two linked scales of evolution are concerned with the processes going on within the limits of a single Round. The succession of primary aspects of Nature, with which the succession of Rounds is concerned, has to do, as already indicated, with the development of the Elements—in the Occult sense—Fire,[pg 273]Air, Water, Earth. We are only in the Fourth Round, and our catalogue so far stops short. The order in which these Elements are mentioned, in the last sentence but one, is the correct one for Esoteric purposes and in the Secret Teachings. Milton was right when he spoke of the“Powers of Fire, Air, Water, Earth”; the Earth, such as we know it now, had no existence before the Fourth Round, hundreds of millions of years ago, the commencement of our geological Earth. The Globe, says the Commentary, was“fiery, cool and radiant, as its ethereal men and animals, during the First Round”—a contradiction or paradox in the opinion of our present Science—“luminous and more dense and heavy, during the Second Round; watery during the Third.”Thus are the Elements reversed.
The centres of consciousness of the Third Round, destined to develop into humanity as we know it, arrived at a perception of the third Element, Water. If we had to frame our conclusions according to thedatafurnished us by Geologists, then we would say that there was no real water, even during the Carboniferous Period. We are told that gigantic masses of carbon, which existed formerly spread in the atmosphere, as carbonic acid, were absorbed by plants, while a large proportion of that gas was mixed in the water. Now, if this be so, and we have to believe that all the carbonic acid which went to compose those plants that formed bituminous coal, lignite, etc., and went towards the formation of lime-stone, and so on, that all this was at that period in the atmosphere in gaseous form, then, there must have been seas and oceans of liquid carbonic acid! But how then could the Carboniferous Period be preceded by the Devonian and Silurian Ages—those of fishes and molluscs—on that assumption? Barometric pressure, moreover, must have exceeded several hundred times the pressure of our present atmosphere. How could organisms, even so simple as those of certain fishes and molluscs, stand that? There is a curious work by Blanchard, on the Origin of Life, wherein he shows some strange contradictions and confusions in the theories of his colleagues, and which we recommend to the reader's attention.
Those of the Fourth Round have added Earth as a state of matter to their stock, as well as the three other Elements in their present transformation.
In short, none of the so-called Elements were, in the three preceding Rounds, as they are now. For all we know,Firemay have beenpureÂkâsha, the First Matter of the“Magnum Opus”of the Creators and[pg 274]Builders, that Astral Light which the paradoxical Éliphas Lévi calls in one breath the“Body of the Holy Ghost,”and in the next“Baphomet,”the“Androgyne Goat of Mendes”;Air, simply Nitrogen, the“Breath of the Supporters of the Heavenly Dome,”as the Mahometan Mystics call it;Water, that primordial fluid which was required, according to Moses, to make a“Living Soul.”And this may account for the flagrant discrepancies and unscientific statements found inGenesis. Separate the first from the second chapter; read the former as a scripture of the Elohists, and the latter as that of the far later Jehovists; still one finds, if one reads between the lines, the same order in which created things appear; namely, Fire (Light), Air, Water, and Man (or Earth). For the sentence of the first chapter (the Elohistic),“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,”is a mistranslation; it is not“the heaven and the earth,”but the duplex, or dual, Heaven, theupperand thelowerHeavens, or the separation of Primordial Substance that was light in its upper, and dark in its lower portions (the manifested Universe), in its duality of theinvisible(to the senses), and thevisibleto our perceptions.“God divided the light from the darkness”; and then made the firmament (Air).“Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters,”i.e.,“the waters which were under the firmament [our manifested visible Universe] from the waters which wereabovethe firmament [the (to us) invisible planes of being].”In the second chapter (the Jehovistic), plants and herbs are created before water, just as in the first,lightis produced before thesun.“God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the fieldbefore it was in the earth, and every herb of the fieldbefore it grew; for the Lord God [Elohim] had not caused it to rain upon the earth, etc.”—an absurdity unless the esoteric explanation is accepted. The plantswerecreated before they were in the earth—for there was no earth then such as it is now; and the herb of the field was in existence before it grew as it does now, in the Fourth Round.
Discussing and explaining the nature of the invisible Elements and the“Primordial Fire”mentioned above, Éliphas Lévi invariably calls it the“Astral Light”: with him it is the“Grand Agent Magique.”Undeniably it is so, but—only so far asBlackMagic is concerned, and on the lowest planes of what we call Ether, the noumenon of which is Âkâsha; and even this would be held incorrect by orthodox Occultists. The“Astral Light”is simply the older“Sidereal Light”of Paracelsus; and to say that“everything which exists has been evolved from it, and[pg 275]it preserves and reproduces all forms,”as he does, is to enunciate truth only in the second proposition. The first is erroneous; for if all that exists was evolvedthrough(orviâ) it, this is not the Astral Light, since the latter is not the container ofallthings but, at best, only the reflector of thisall. Éliphas Lévi very truly shows it“a force in Nature,”by means of which“a single man who can master it ... might throw the world into confusion and transform its face”; for it is the“Great Arcanum of transcendent Magic.”Quoting the words of the great Western Kabalist in their translated form,400we may, perhaps, the better explain them by the occasional addition of a word or two, to show the difference between Western and Eastern explanations of the same subject. The author says of the great Magic Agent: